Stupid Question

The Public Editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, is doing the public a great disservice, not only by calling for Ethan Bronner's reassignment, but for asserting a reason, apparently supported by Harvard's Alex Jones, that makes a nonsense of reason itself.

Let me be clear: Ethan Bronner is a friend, and I have followed his writing about Israel and the Middle for 20 years, that is, since before I knew him. If you think my friendship with him means that everything I am about to say is not to be trusted, then you have pretty much bought in to the standard Hoyt is proposing, and you might as well not read on.

The (sublime) problem of truth is not just for journalists, of course. Every scholar, every judge, every scientist, struggles with it. The best answer we have is something like this: Ask a good question. Then hold yourself stringently to rules of evidence. To be sure, how you get to good questions is not a predictable matter: ask, say, Thomas Kuhn. And how you hold yourself to rules of evidence is not a simple matter: ask, say, Karl Popper. But if your question is stupid or you violate the rules of evidence, then you should not be trusted.

Which brings me back to Ethan Bronner. A good journalist knows questions most readers do not and then works diligently to answer them with data, witnesses, and obvious experts. A very good journalist knows questions most journalists do not, and then works tirelessly to answer them with unimpeachable data, by becoming an eye witnesses himself or herself, and finding experts who are not obvious. I have not agreed with the thrust of everything Bronner has written over the past couple of years, but he is very good journalist.

If Bronner had been found to be ignoring compelling questions, or cooking the evidence in some sly way, you would have the right to explore his state of mind: whether some pay-off or family loyalty explains his lapses. But what if there are no obvious lapses? Why go ad hominem when there is no rationale for this? The sophomoric revelation that "we all have biases"--worse, that biases come from determined psychological states, explicable by families, or class, or tribe, etc.--is not enough to discredit arguments or the person who makes them. One son of a factory owner turns out Richard Arkwright; another turns out Fredrick Engels. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but transferring Bronner from Jerusalem for his son's decisions borrows from the same grotesque epistemology with which people were transferred to the Gulag for their son's decisions.

WHAT, IN THIS context, is Hoyt's specific claim? He writes:

[E]ven the best and most honorable journalists can find themselves in awkward circumstances that can affect their credibility — and the newspaper’s — with a public that has little trust in journalists. In this case, the guidelines stop far short of dictating what should be done. They say that if a family member’s activities create even the appearance of a conflict of interest, it should be disclosed to editors, who must then decide whether the staffer should avoid certain stories or even be reassigned to a different beat.

In other words--or so we are to surmise--if Bronner's son is in the Israeli Army, most will assume his arguments are biased toward the Israeli Army, and the Times's integrity will suffer. After all, who trusts journalists to begin with? But if he took his job seriously, the Public Editor would not avoid the question of whether most should think this. He would educate, well, the public. I mean to the classical liberal assumptions about how we reasonably get at the truth, assumptions underlying the Constitution, and the freedom of newspapers, for that matter. Hell, the public might even trust journalists more if actually stood for something this important, and held themselves to this standard. (Bill Keller's answer to Hoyt comes close.)

Instead, Hoyt is valorizing crude behaviorist ideas masquerading as liberal ones, that we are, really, nothing but bundles of "socialized preferences." What we think is the product of our "demographic." Our claims of fact (about history, society, etc.) are, by extension, an expression of our material "interests," or if we are deeply socialized, "values." The only truth, as Chuck Todd would say, is "the perception out there." The only game is "shaping the narrative." Perceptions, presumably, can be polled. How scientific of him.

I have written about this problem with the press before. It makes you weep with missing William Shirer and Edward R. Murrow and Alexander Kendrick and the generation of reporters who covered the war of liberal societies over European tyrannies and could smell totalitarian ideas a mile away. Bronner can. Anyway, just because this behaviorism is false doesn't mean it can't win. Moving Bronner would be a small victory. Sarah Palin's demographic--abetted not by a sympathetic press, but a hopelessly cynical one--is waiting in the wings.

Corporate Citizens? Not Quite.

Suppose you were coming up to bat in the bottom of the ninth: man on first, nobody out. Suppose the game were tied, you were a solid bunter, and the pitcher got behind 2-0. But then, suppose your manager knew the pitcher was 37 years old and one loss away from being put on waivers; that the old southpaw has a disabled child, whose expenses were enormous. If your manager were thinking like a citizen, would he take off the bunt sign?

This is a stupid question, of course (and, please, spare me the virtues of the hit-and-run), because citizens expect managers to play to win. A baseball team can appear as if it were a kind of person with (what Adam Smith called) "moral sentiments": the Red Sox might, together, show up for the Jimmy Fund night. But a baseball team is not a social good. It is the competition among baseball teams that yields a social good. A baseball team is nothing but an artificial creation, a kind of Frankenstein community chartered to pursue more runs. It occupies the negative space created by the league's rules and regulations. I need not add, I suppose, that if your neighbor treated the neighborhood with the self-centeredness of a baseball team, you probably wouldn't have much to do with him.

You can see where this is going. There have been a great many articles and blog posts excoriating the Supreme Court for pushing an old (and, from the start, rather shaky) legal metaphor--that a corporation is a person or citizen--to where it has become stupid and dangerous. (My favorite is this comment by my old friend David Boghossian, suggesting that if corporations are citizens, then Google should run for president.)

Still, the most imminent danger of supposing corporations are citizens seems lost in the conversation. I mean the danger to American corporate renewal and to the economy as a whole:

SURE, LET'S THINK about how Congress might put restrictions on corporate contributions to campaigns. But I wonder if the danger isn't exaggerated, at least as compared with established kinds of lobbying. Most corporations sell to customers half of whom vote "the other" party; they generally can't afford to alienate people by identifying closely with any candidate. With bloggers in every quarter of commerce and politics, it is hard to believe any corporate contributions might be kept discreet. Candidates don't need their bribes pushed in voters' faces.

Besides, companies need to recruit the best talent they can. Genius comes in many political wrappings, as any baseball team can tell you. Google has threatened to pull out of China, I suspect, more because it wants to continue to attract and inspire brilliant employees than because of any other long term calculation. If corporations were persons, then open networks and "slash and burn media" have forced on them what Harvard's Lynn Sharp Paine calls (too glibly, perhaps) "moral personality." This means, usually, moral cowardice.

NO, THE REAL problem is American CEOs using shareholder money to buy their way into public conversations: auto execs on global warming, bankers on macroeconomic imperatives, software companies on education. Meanwhile, who is watching their businesses? Again, a corporation is not a social good; it is a creature of rules, legal and strategic. We presuppose corporate megalomania because we assume that competition brings a social benefit: technological refinements, economic growth, management innovations of all kinds. And in case you haven't noticed, competition is really serious these days. (As I wrote here a few weeks ago, Fortune 500 companies are three times more likely to be selected out--fail of be acquired--than 20 years ago.)

There isn't a scarcer resource in any business today than CEO attention. There isn't a business in the world that hasn't been roiled by magical technologies and global assaults. Do we really want senior managers thinking about how to rewrite the legal rules in America while, in the rest of the world, managers are rewriting strategic ones?

Nor are managers of major companies less lazy or risk averse than ordinary citizens. Recently, Malcolm Gladwell had a great piece about flocking behavior on Wall Street. But 20 years ago, the Harvard Business School's Michael Jensen defended the leveraged buyout wave precisely because he thought this would be the only way to keep managers from being, well, business administrators: incurious, subject to inertia, self-important. Better to have Henry Kravis breathing down your neck, Jensen implied, than Korea Inc. stabbing at your back.

The point is, the more CEOs are distracted, the worse their businesses become. No taxation without representation, a CEO might say. I say, it would be better for the commonwealth to forgo corporate taxes entirely--which are only about 12% of the US government's income, and generally passed on to customers as a cost of doing business--in return for a strict ban on companies lobbying or acting politically in any way. We could recapture lost tax revenue by levying a more heavily progressive income tax on big salaries and on the top 10% of the population that own 80-90% of stock. We could put a value-added tax on consumption, excluding such necessities as food, clothes, etc.

And just who is "we"? Ordinary citizens. Which is where my argument falls to the ground.

Triumph Of The Will

Imagine a state in Palestine to which the Jews of the world are gathered, but in which they have individual rights no greater than its Arab inhabitants. Imagine a country with no privileged religion: everyone goes to his or her house of prayer in freedom and peace. Imagine a state in which individual human rights are paramount; a state that is full of different languages, reflecting the cultural richness of its many immigrants. Imagine that such a state would have no army, but would depend for its peace and order on the Western powers. Imagine that this state called itself merely the "new society." A hydroelectric canal would join the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean.

Imagine that, in such a society, an Arab citizen could say something like this: "Would you call a man or a robber who takes nothing from you but brings you something instead? The Jews have enriched us, why should we be angry with them? They dwell among us like brothers, why should we not love them? Our houses of worship stand side by side...our prayers, when they rise, mingle somewhere up above, and then continue on their way together until they appeared before our Father."

Imagine a Jew adding: "Nothing on earth is perfect, not even our new society. But we are merely a society of citizens seeking to enjoy life through work and culture."

A leftist fantasy? Bound to undermine Israel? Actually, this is more or less exactly the vision of the Jewish state set out in Theodore Herzl's novel Old-New Land. (The dialogue is taken from the book verbatim; Herzl also wanted "athletic and rifle clubs" for once "pale, weak and timid" Jewish children.) Old-New Land's famous epigraph, "Im tirzu, ein zu agaddah," "If you will it, it is no dream," almost immediately entered Zionist lore, though few Zionists at the time were so liberal and cosmopolitan that they were prepared for a vision in which Hebrew had been effaced. Nevertheless, when people invoke the phrase "Im tirzu, etc.," this is the dream Herzl supposed Jewish will would attach to.

I AM THINKING about the origin of that phrase today because of a surreal ad recently taken out in the Jerusalem Post by an organization called Im Tirzu, which gives the will's triumph a rather different cast. The ad attacks the New Israel Fund, and its current president, former Member of Knesset (and dear friend) Naomi Chazan, for supporting various human rights organizations whose meticulous data and reporting contributed to the Goldstone Report.

Now that Alan Dershowitz has exposed that report as tantamount to reissuing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, presumably all contributions to it, like the stringently liberal principles animating them, must be thought "anti-Zionist." (This morning, on Israeli radio, there was another attack on the New Israel Fund for supporting an organization, "Breaking The Silence," which documented over 70 anonymous reports by soldiers of harassment of Palestinians at checkpoints.)

Anyone with a sense of history knows where this is going. Israel can't have an increasingly repressive and brazen occupation without eventually getting around to repressing Israeli voices who oppose it. Anyway, if he were alive, and were solicited by the New Israel Fund and Im Tirzu, who would the witness to the Dreyfus case write his check to?

Sheikh Jarrah: 'Ground Zero'

Yesterday's vigil did not grow in numbers, but it was clear from the people who turned out that it is growing in moral prestige. During the week, J Street issued a statement of support. The world press has begun to take notice. CNN put it well, calling Sheikh Jarrah "ground zero." More important, perhaps, this week's demonstration drew two new supporters, the novelist David Grossman and the head of the Peres Center (and Oslo negotiator) Ron Pundak. Larger scale mobilization is at hand.

And how could it not be? Throwing out Jerusalem Arab families from their homes of more than 50 years, and making way for Jews affiliated with Ateret Kohanim, could not be more revealing of the ethical autism Israelis in Jerusalem have suffered from and the political dangers we are sliding toward. The demonstrations against this are the most perfect way to oxygenate the embers of the peace process.

What other issue so exposes how the security rhetoric justifying military occupation of Palestinian territory since June, 1967 eventually came to cover for a romantic scheme, whose signal event was the annexation of Jerusalem in June, 1967, and the quadrupling of its municipal boundaries? What other stand focuses on the collusion between the Jerusalem and national police and settlement organizations? What stand so dramatizes the importance of East Jerusalem, Palestine's largest city, and its historic commercial hub, as the capital of a Palestinian state? What stand so reveals the pathos of refugees losing property on both sides during this awful century of war, and the importance of moving forward with a sense of reciprocal fairness--the importance of not opening up pre-1948 land claims on either side of the green line? The demonstrators may be a minority in Jewish Jerusalem, but their views still command a majority in Israel as a whole, and they have the world at their back.

EARLIER IN THE week, another event in Jerusalem reinforced the urgency of mobilization. About 100 people came out to the Van Leer Institute to hear a panel of Palestinian entrepreneurs and managers, who explained their frustrations trying to build sustainable businesses under the strictures of occupation. But perhaps the most chilling thing said in an otherwise engaging and cordial exchange between panelists and audience was the point made by both Basim Khoury, the CEO of Pharmacare, and Sami Abu Dayyeh, the CEO of Net Tours: that East Jerusalem is slowly being reduced to another Gaza.

Half the city is under the poverty line, unemployment is unimaginably high among young people, who are dropping out of school in large numbers; street gangs are forming on Mount of Olives neighborhoods; educated people, the sons and daughters of the traditional merchant class, or leaving for Jordan and Dubai. Little by little, Israel is turning the 230,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem into an unexploded bomb looking for a blasting cap. And the explosion, when it comes, will quickly spread to the Israeli Arabs of the Little Triangle, and sweep away the people who were talking to us, by providing Hamas the perfect conditions to grow.

So the demonstrations at Sheikh Jarrah are about many things. First and foremost, they are calling for sanity.

Talking Heads: Israel Television

For those interested, I debated (if that's the word for it) a number of contentious issues on Israeli English television last night (click, and then click "IBA CLOSEUP," to the left). Nobody interrupted anyone; this was in English after all. My thanks to the program's producer, Lea Zinder, for her invitation and generosity.

Sheikh Jarrah: Mr. Speaker Speaks

Above, coffee is served to demonstrators by evacuated families

The former speaker of the Knesset, Avrum Burg, on Galie Tzahal's (IDF Radio), morning show, Ma Boer, with Razi Bakai, 24 January, 2010:

Anchor Razi Barkai: Good morning, former Knesset Speaker Avraham (Avrum) Burg.

Burg: Good morning.

Barkai: How long has it been since you last took part in a demonstration?

Burg: Many, very many years.

Barkai: The last famous demonstration you attended was the one in which you marched alongside Emil Grunzweig, who was killed then by a hand grenade.

Burg: That is possible. I do not remember, but it must have been decades since I last attended such a demonstration.

Barkai: What made you show up last weekend?

Burg: I came because I felt something was evolving here in Jerusalem that is of much greater significance than a single building and a few tenants. This is a huge symbol of Jerusalem as a powder keg that is about to explode right in everyone's faces here. A man cannot stay at home when this is happening.

Barkai: There are two formalistic arguments that you have to deal with. First, the fact that this demonstration was staged without a permit and you, who have observed the law for many years and as former Knesset speaker, must be aware of that. Second, the buildings you were protesting against were bought by Jews in a completely legal deal.

Burg: Regarding the legality or illegality of this demonstration, the way I understand the law, when people stand around and no speeches are made, it is a rally and people may assemble and rally all they want. Still, I would not want to debate this question because a normal, reasonable state should know that when such a burning issue is on the agenda, it cannot silence it with technicalities. This issue is too urgent, too troubling to be swept under the rug with formalistic arguments.

Barkai: Who do you think made the call and decided that the demonstration was illegal -- the Israel Police or, as Yosi Sarid wrote in Haaretz this morning, the Israel Beitenu police?

Burg: The police did. The police officers, whether they are simple cops or the police commissioner, are not my enemies. The person on the other side is actually the Israeli prime minister. I feel that two systems failed here. First, the legal system, the justice system. There are rules in Israel and the citizens have citizens' rights.

Barkai: Just a second. I still want you, Avrum Burg, to address the second argument too.

Burg: The Jewish property issue?

Barkai: That's right.

Burg: I will address it very briefly. There are open cases of Jewish property that was in Arab hands and Arab property that was in Jewish hands. When Jerusalem one-sidedly contains the return of Jewish property to Jewish hands, and having a normal justice system and courts, it would be impossible to reject Arab claims to their houses in Talbiya, Katamon, and Tel Aviv.

Barkai: Are you saying that, actually, the right-wing arguments actually uphold the [Palestinian] right of return?

Burg: Of course they do. With his flaccidity, escapism, and keeping away from the issue, Benjamin Netanyahu is actually absent from it, even though it is a burning issue from both the humanitarian and political perspectives. He dumped the concept of two states for two nations on our heads, but by promoting Jerusalem, Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah, and Shimon Hatzadik, he is actually promoting the Arab claims that we want our property where the Palestinians want to return. We cannot allow an anecdotal situation where a single house and a few settlers, or a judge who fails to see the big picture, or who is trapped because, when applied to East Jerusalem, the law is distorted, discriminating, and aggressive. I cannot accept a situation in which an incident that comes from below dictates the strategic policy of the State of Israel.

Barkai: Listen, you mentioned the fact that a court had handed out a ruling in this matter, which makes the remarks you are making a bit problematic. You were there with Yosi Sarid and Uri Avneri, veteran warriors and demonstrators who have always fought for the rule of law and for the independence of the courts, but only up to the point, only until court rulings conflict with your worldviews. Suddenly, you make different arguments.

Burg: My struggle is against the law -- [I'd explain this] if we had time, which we don’t -- because this is the nature of a plan that introduces wrongs that the law allows in Jerusalem. In de jure terms, the very legislation would have shocked us and we would cry against such discrimination among us, but we will address the judicial system too. The judicial and law-enforcement systems are so selective. Jonathan House in Silwan will never be evacuated, but a house in Sheikh Jarrah was evacuated immediately, and its residents, who are now second-time refugees, live in a tent outside their home. When settlers move in and are not evacuated, it means that the law or its application is discriminatory. The law cannot be applied this way. This is wrongdoing.

Barkai: As one of the tribe elders -- and forgive me for giving you this title -- I would say that you are experiencing a second wind. I wish to address the cynical remarks that Yosi Sarid made in his Haaretz article this morning. He spoke about the absence of MKs, those who were supposed to pick up your struggle. He even mentioned names of MKs who are mainly involved in social struggles, which he cynically qualified, and are not involved in the Palestinians' struggle. What do you think about that absence?

Burg: Yosi Sarid is 100% right. His Haaretz article expressed what many people feel. All that was once the Israeli left, the peace camp, from Haim Oron down, the three Meretz MKs and the Labor leftover MKs who fail to stand up and show up there and in other places that the civil society has taken upon itself, are practically making themselves redundant. Presently, these parties represent none of us. If they returned to the streets, rejoined the struggle, stopped fearing of making a stand wherever it is needed, and start backing up the detainees, the people on the streets, my children, my family members who have been demonstrating there for many weeks, and all of us who go there and are not protected by immunity or anything else -- then they would be parties that represent us. Otherwise, they have no meaning.

Barkai: Avraham Burg, thank you very much.

Burg: Shalom.

Perfect Symmetry

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Late last year, in early October, Sidra and I visited Poland for the first time, and among our stops, inevitably, we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. Walking the pathway, smack down the middle of the camp, I decided not to write about the experience until today, not out of any sense of decorum, but because I knew I would need some time to see what faded and what stuck. Four months seemed about the minimum one needed to let first impressions ripen.

And now, having let time pass, I feel nearly as dumbstruck as I did then. For the overwhelming first impression I had in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which I still fear bringing to consciousness, was the terrible beauty of the place. And this, of all things, has stuck. I don't mean the beauty of the meadow and forest, about which much has been written: the pathos of the birdsong, the mocking of the seasons. I have enough imagination to assume that the sounds of captivity and stench of murder would put the idyll of any countryside into a dark eclipse. I mean the perfect symmetry and elegant architectural touches of the camp itself: the deco curves in the pylons holding the electrified wires, the broad-shouldered grandeur of the masonry walls, the angular roof-lines over the receiving gates. Now, 60 years later, it looked to me like a flattened, transplanted Brooklyn Bridge gone to seed.

All of which put another thought in my head: what I am seeing now in my mind's eye is very nearly how the camp must have looked to the architect, one Lothar Hartjenstein, before any structure actually went up. I can see him fussing over his blue-prints at 3 AM, perhaps tamping out his last cigarette, finally putting down his pencil. "Ya...," I can hear him whispering to himself, the goose-flesh rising on his arms. It dawned on me that, perhaps, the most devilish Nazis after all were the Speers and the Hartjensteins, the purveyors of perfect symmetry. How magnificent was the world they dreamed up, which so many young Germans could only fall in love with; a world as beautiful as an F-16 in flight or a Victoria Secret model after Photoshop.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made," Immanuel Kant, once remarked. But would he have bothered issuing this supreme warning had he not known that a big part of what made us so crooked was our yearning for straight things? And what of the inmates themselves? Did they not, too, yearn? The thing that pains me the most is the thought that any number of Birkenau's victims might have disembarked and, in spite of their terror and hatred, been struck by its grandeur, too; that among the burdens they had to bear, having lost their lives even before they were killed, was the thought, however fleeting, that the camp architecture was somehow proof of their being dispatched by what could only be thought civilization.

My dear friend, the late Ilona Karmel, survived the Plashow camp a few miles away. Sidra and I visited that site, too, and walked its gentle hill. Ila never told me this, but it was clear from the camp's vantage point that she could see the low-slung, stately buildings of downtown Krakow in the distance, the way one sees downtown Boston from Farlow Hill in Newton Corner. She told me once that she strangely missed the camp now and then, because it was the only moment in her life when she knew, exactly, right from wrong. Another symmetry Nazis--but not only Nazis--achieved.