Realists

I understand the desire of New York Times columnists to appear realist. Writers who advocate for US intervention to induce Israeli-Palestinian peace, in column after column, month after month, can get to look, well, idealist. Writers are assumed to be wimps anyway.

Still, something strange is happening. On two occasions in as many weeks, columnists who have written passionately about the US pushing peace have argued, in effect, that the Obama administration should just disengage. Last week, Tom Friedman wrote that it’s "time to call a halt to this dysfunctional 'peace process,' which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility." Today, Roger Cohen sees Tom Friedman's bid, and raises him, quoting Israel's most widely respected political scientist to boot:

Obama, who has his Nobel already, should ratchet expectations downward. Stop talking about peace. Banish the word. Start talking about détente. That’s what Lieberman wants; that’s what Hamas says it wants; that’s the end point of Netanyahu’s evasions.

It’s not what Abbas wants but he’s powerless. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, told me, “A nonviolent status quo is far from satisfactory but it’s not bad. Cyprus is not bad.”

I have abiding admiration for Shlomo Avineri (and Friedman and Cohen as well), but there is something in this realism that lacks common sense. For it assumes that the status quo can remain peaceful, especially if "we stop talking about peace." That Palestinians can pursue some under-the-radar economic evolution, or that Israelis and their "security wall" can force things to remain quiet when they have to; that Obama and America are better off letting the sides pursue detente, not peace--as if "some non-violent status quo" will hold; as if only idealists like Obama are making the great the enemy of the good.

LOOK, THIS IS all dangerously wrong--and familiar. Moshe Dayan, too, had proposed an "open bridges" policy--in effect, the status quo occupation, in which Palestinians accommodate to economic peace, while Israel does its thing in Jerusalem and with settlements--and the 1973 War blew it up. This has happened again and again since. And today, too, the status quo is a powder keg, and the blasting caps are, among other things, "what Lieberman wants" and "what Hamas says it wants." Is a realist someone whose purchase on reality is so great there is nothing to learn from experience?

• The wall has made a pathetic ghetto of the nearly 300,000 Arabs of Jerusalem. A couple of nights ago, a gang of youths from East Jerusalem had some fun--so my young friend, the journalist Benjamin Joffe-Walt, told me--attacking night-clubbers in Nachalat Shiva, right in front of his apartment, with electric cattle prods. The last two terror attacks against Jews in Jerusalem came from neighborhoods within the wall. South Central LA anyone? Do we even need more disturbances on the Temple Mount to get things to blow?
  
• Nor, as I've argued again and again, can the Palestinian economy grow at nearly the rate it needs to--certainly not "like Cyprus"--if the occupation is not ended. IDF presence is largely meant to secure settlements in Area B and C--belts of land that surround Palestinian towns. So the occupation is a kind of antibiotic against Palestinian entrepreneurship. The Palestine Authority is much more likely to just collapse, or fold up, than engage in some "detente" with an ongoing occupation, with its closure regime. Read Shaul Arieli's urgent piece in today's Haaretz, which argues that the status quo, leading to the PA's "disintegration," would open the door to Hamas; or read Steven Cook's thoughtful piece in, of all places, The New Republic.
• IDF units sympathetic to Greater Israel are already showing an unwillingness to follow any orders to evacuate settlements. This tendency will only grow.
• If the West Bank blows, so will the Arab towns of Israel's little triangle, which Lieberman has already defined as alien to Israel (unless its residents, who have committed to Hebrew, also swear to uphold Israel as a "Zionist-Jewish" state). And when these towns blow, we will be in a Balkan-like civil war, with all the trappings: sniping, ethnic cleansing, terror on all sides.
• Oh, and remember Hezbollah's and Hamas's missiles? If the Mubarak regime in Egypt falls to Islamist rioters, will that be good for America, let alone Israel? No doubt, such riots will have a formal cause in Islamist attitudes toward the West; but will not the efficient cause likely be yet more pictures on Al-Jazeera of Israeli bombs dropping on civilian buildings where missiles are launched? Will Mubarak protect the Israeli embassy yet again?
  

I could go on, but enough is enough. Leave this monster alone, and its violence will destroy the people who live here; and, meanwhile, the things Israelis do to avoid destruction will destroy everything Obama is trying to achieve in the Islamic world.

And as for Shlomo Avineri's sense of things, a little history. When I first got to know him, as a grateful graduate student in 1972, he chastised the peace movement that advocated for a Palestinian state. No, he said, Dayan's "open bridges," preserving the status quo, was the only realistic way to go. When Avineri was Director General of the Foreign Ministry under Yigal Allon in 1976, President Sadat sent Israel his first direct message that he was interested pursuing a comprehensive deal. The foreign ministry (among others in Prime Minister Rabin's government) rejected the overtures, since the National Religious Party, which was part of the coalition, had threatened to bolt if the West Bank would become a focus for any negotiation. Avineri, among others, supposed Sadat's initiative was unrealistic.

There is, in other words, a kind of realism that you can never look stupid peddling. It basically assumes the present exercise of force is always better than the prospect of making peace with political enemies, because the other side can never be trusted; that, Hobbes or no Hobbes, it is vain to try to conceive of institutions in which trust is hedged about by policing, clear commitments and simple justice. I am not sure why we need "political scientists" who do not help us conceive these very institutions, especially in the face of violence and threats. In any case, the only psychological force more powerful than realism seems to be repetition compulsion.

Holy, Holy, Holy

Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon, and Cornell West.

For those of you who think you've heard the last of God, listen to these three at the Boston Public Library, interviewed by the indispensable Chris Lydon, and broadcast on his Open Source webcast.

What Can Obama Do About Palestine, Meanwhile?

My old friend Danny Rubinstein, who has covered the West Bank pretty much since the occupation began, came over Friday afternoon. He had covered this week's expulsion of Palestinian residents from their disputed home in Sheikh Jarrah. He had just come from conversations with Palestinian journalists in East Jerusalem, and was not in a cheerful frame of mind.

One gets the feeling that things are coming to a head, he says, what with Mahmoud Abbas' announcement that he would not seek reelection, and Netanyahu headed to a Washington whose Congress had just denounced the Goldstone Report. The Israeli government is doing what it can to defend the status quo. But the status quo engenders a disaster, and the Obama administration is understandably distracted.

The question is not whether time is running out on a two-state solution, as if one state, like South Africa, could ever happen here. The real question is whether we are going to prevent the kind of general violence that will turn Israel and Palestine into a Balkans-style conflict, with Jerusalem a kind of Sarajevo, and the Israeli Arab villages of the Little Triangle a kind of Bosnia. Without palpable outside action to move Israel off the status quo, especially from the Obama administration, the streets of the West Bank will blow. But Obama has no desire to pick a fight with any senators just now, not until 60 of them vote to end the inevitable Republican filibuster.

ABBAS, YOU SEE, is not the point. He has been a force for reconciliation, perhaps the best partner Israel could ever have (or so former Labor minister Ephraim Sneh writes in today's Haaretz), but his personal prestige was never very great. That he is threatening to withdraw from politics is a symptom of danger, not a danger in itself. For Abbas has always been a kind of national working hypothesis: that Ramallah's secular bourgeoisie was a natural leadership to bring forth a state, and that its power to create the rule of law, and its prospects in the regional economy, justified patience; that the continuing flow of money from the international community justified having a person in the (albeit diminished) Palestinian Authority that outsiders could trust.

But when ordinary people in the streets of the West Bank start to believe that this leadership cannot be trusted to deliver--that donor money is meant to palliate them during a silent ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem and the annexation of their land by settlers--Hamas will appear the only game in town. We seem to be in a race between the vote on healthcare in the Senate and the outbreak of riots around Al-Aqsa.

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION cannot just sit on its hands, and seems to know what it needs to do in the long run. But what exactly can it do in the short-run to reassure Palestinians without inciting a public backlash among senators eager to prove their "friendship" to Israel. The dispute over a "settlements freeze" has proven a dead end, since everybody (including leaders of the PA) have been working on the assumption that at least some of the citified settlements will be annexed to Israel, while Palestine would be compensated with a land swap. Neither could the Obama administration endorse the Goldstone report, which Palestinians justifiably regard as a touchstone of others' empathy for them, without laying itself open to charges that it is cavalier about missiles falling on Israel.

Somehow, then, the administration has to signal that it is not only serious about pursuing a Palestinian state but that it has a pretty clear understanding of what that state would look like, where its borders will be, and so forth--and that it is not simply a cheerleader for negotiations that will, under present circumstances, prove fruitless. But how do you buy time without appearing to endorse the status quo? How do you signal the outlines of the state without presenting the whole plan for a state?

ALL OF WHICH brings me back to Rubinstein. Perhaps the most depressing thing he told me confirms apprehensions I wrote about in Harper's last month, that while the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad is trying to build out the foundations of a Palestinian state--say, through massive construction projects in and around Ramallah--he is being thwarted in all kinds of ways by the occupation authorities and the IDF. Almost no developments in Area A (the cores of Palestinian cities), for example, can fail to encroach on Areas B and C where the IDF controls the roads and airspace--more than 60% of the West Bank. "He is trying to break ground on the Al-Ersal project and he is suddenly up against a road the settlers use only for themselves in Area C. This is so called 'state land,' the Israeli government has taken from Jordan and calls its own."

But here, precisely, is an opportunity for the American government, is it not? Suppose the Obama administration were to commit, say, $50 million to this project and use its public influence to seek its construction. If the Israeli government gets in the way, then it is obstructing a joint Palestinian-American project. If the question comes up whether parts of Area B or C around the project are ultimately going to be part of the Palestinian state, then the American administration can signal--that is, in advance of any negotiation--that it is siding with the Palestine authority over the interests of the settlers.

The point is, we have to move away from statements of principle to manifest demonstrations of intention. America has to become Palestine's partner not only in training police, but in expanding the foundations of commerce and statehood. Just as important, the Obama administration needs to prove that, unlike its predecessor, it will not become an inadvertent tool of the settlers.

And if while it's focussed on its domestic priorities the administration can't avoid a fight with AIPAC's favorite politicians, let it be over something the vast majority of Israelis, let alone Americans, would support. I mean the peaceful development of Palestinian civil society in parts of the West Bank where cities are growing and, border or no border, settlers have crossed all bounds.

Connected Cars: The 'Killer App' For The Smart Grid--And The New Driver of Growth

Job figures are lagging indicators but nobody feels reassured right now. It is hard to imagine Americans returning to something like the full employment of the 1980s and 1990s without new industries like telecom and computers engendering a vast new ecosystem of entrepreneurial businesses; companies in which American technological talent can distinguish itself; companies that either require local workers for infrastructure projects, or, design and manufacture products and components whose labor content is too small for managers to consider outsourcing to the Far East.

The good news is that the electric car is around the corner. The bad news--which is the best news of all for the economy, ironically--is that the electric grid cannot begin to cope with the electric car's demands and possibilities. Layering in all the network technology that will smarten the grid, and preparing electric cars to communicate with it (and each other), will transform our economic and physical landscape. These changes will require a new role for government--something the Obama administration seems to understand. I explore the new ecosystem and its implication in the current Inc. Magazine:

At ground level, electric cars like GM's Chevrolet Volt -- due to be launched in November 2010 -- are pretty much everything the U.S. economy is banking on. The cars promise innovative engineering and a resurgence of the American auto industry. They mean an America that is manufacturing things rather than just bundling financial instruments. Cosmically, electric cars mean green technologies that will migrate to China, India, and Brazil, where they will allow for Western styles of personal freedom yet not threaten to overheat the earth.

And you don't have to be George Clooney to want one. Electric cars may be vaguely cool, but GM executives are counting on drivers with nothing more than a householder's logic, something like the good sense to refinance a mortgage when the 30-year-fixed drops more than 2 percent. Jon Lauckner, GM's vice president of global product planning, tells me that his team set out to trump gas-powered cars as a matter of straightforward economics, especially as economic recovery pushes the price of gas back over $3 a gallon. "At that level," Lauckner says, "the cost of running a Volt in full electric mode will be about one-sixth that of a gas-driven car of the same size, 2 or 3 cents a mile rather than 12 to 15 cents a mile. We figured that, for most people, this means a savings of about $1,500 a year." Sticker prices will be high; the suggested price of the Volt will be about $40,000. But federal tax rebates are anticipated to be as much as $7,500, not to mention various state incentives. So the actual price will probably be closer to $30,000 -- not a bad deal, given that borrowing costs will be low for some time.

When he speaks of "full electric mode," Lauckner is acknowledging another barrier he expects the Volt to take down, namely range anxiety, the fear of getting stuck with rundown batteries while driving in a snowstorm, bumper to bumper, on a 150-mile trip to the in-laws'. The Volt will come equipped with a small gas engine, unlike its forthcoming competitors: the smaller Nissan Leaf, BMW's plug-in Mini Cooper E, and Ford's electric Focus. This engine will not drive the wheels, as with the hybrids now on the market (actually, GM likes to call the Volt an "extended range electric car," not a hybrid), but will act as a dynamo to supply the electricity for the car after 40 miles of running on stored power.

The Volt's designers assumed, per Department of Transportation data, that nearly 80 percent of Americans drive 20 miles or less to work. This is why GM was able to make the technically true but sly announcement that the Volt earned a 230-mpg rating for city driving from the EPA. "Most drivers will hardly ever use this engine," says Tony Posawatz, the Volt's line director. "We may have to educate people to change their oil because it hasn't been used for a year! Anyway, when the range-extending engine kicks in, drivers can go up to 300 miles, like a conventional car. In a pinch, they can make use of the existing gas-station infrastructure."

And so, assuming these cars prove safe and reliable, American consumers will almost certainly consume them. U.S. auto companies will make them, and that's good for the planet, right? Yes, but.

Continue with the article here.

Palestine Economy: Update

I spent the day in Ramallah yesterday, attending a meeting of information technology and telecom entrepreneurs, and catching up with some of the folks I reported on in last month's Harper's: Palestinian business leaders who are, slowly but surely, laying the ground for Palestinian civil society; people fighting the limitations of occupation at every turn just to keep their businesses afloat, while the Netanyahu government boasts about "economic peace."

I reported, for example, on the stalled efforts to launch Wataniya, the Palestine Investment Fund-backed cell phone provider, which had been promised 4.8 megahertz of spectrum by the Israeli government. (Wataniya was conceived by the PIF to compete with Jawal, in effect, the monopoly provider that had been started by the dominant PALTEL, and which now has a million and a half subscribers.) It is important to understand that Wataniya would be stiffening the spine of the Palestinian economy as a whole by inducing competition, and bringing down prices, for services every emerging business desperately needs.

Wataniya--so its Chairman, the PIF's head, Mohamed Mustafa, told me--was organized to offer Palestine's first 3G network. When I wrote my piece, Israel had released only 3.8 megahertz but kept the rest without explanation, suggesting Jawal share what it had. Mustafa was threatening to bury the entire deal, rather than launch Wataniya with one arm tied behind its back. Anyway, Wataniya finally launched a couple of days ago, a "soft-launch" Mustafa told me, not without good cheer, practicing his elevator speech. The company would not be able to offer all the services it had prepared for; it would focus instead "on customer service" while offering 2.5G services like text and messaging.

It is hard to imagine a management more persistent or forward-looking. The conference was buzzing with hopes engendered by the PIF's various investments, not only in telecom, but in commercial office parks and micro-lending. Yet PIF investments are hamstrung by, among other things, its being shut out of Jerusalem. One feature of competition in Palestine's telecom industry is customer poaching by Israeli providers. (Palestinian companies have exclusive rights in Area A, the centers of Palestinian towns and cities where the Israel Defense forces tend to stay out; but in Areas B and C, where the army and settlers operate freely, and in East Jerusalem--altogether, in two-thirds of the Palestinian territories--Israeli cell phone companies operate illegally but with impunity.) In East Jerusalem, Palestinian providers have no access whatsoever.

WHICH BRINGS ME to increasingly ominous economic trends in East Jerusalem, the once and historic hub of all West Bank cities, including Ramallah. The former economics minister of the Palestinian Authority, Bassim Khoury, recently sent me his summary of depressing data ferreted out of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. The conclusions suggest why Ramallah's business class may well lose the race to preempt a Bosnia-type violence that may engulf them and Jerusalem both:

Per capita income of Arabs in Jerusalem is less than half of Jews, who are on average the poorest in Israel. Unemployment among Arabs is 25%, 10% higher than in the West Bank as a whole. Infant mortality is almost double that of Jews, though the birthrate is about the same. About 85% of the municipal education budget goes to Jews, 15% to Arabs, though Arabs are about 30% of the grade school population. 50% of Arabs live under the poverty line, while 25% of Jews do so. This means both Arabs and Jews have about 125,000 people officially defined as "impoverished," but the Jews get 88% of the welfare budget. The city of Jerusalem spends about five times more on Jews than on Arabs per capita for municipal services of all kinds (sewage, garbage collection, etc.). Jews get 98% of the "cultural" budget.

Remember, East Jerusalem is now separated from the other West Bank cities by a wall. The idea was to fence out deadly violence. But the trajectory of social relations in the city suggests violence is only being fenced in. (This was predictable.) Last week's disturbances at Al-Aqsa suggest how it will start, which is pretty much the way violence has started in Jerusalem since 1920. Considering the Jewish people's past, it would be rude to call East Jerusalem a kind of ghetto. So let's just call it a walled-in, patrolled, increasingly impoverished enclave for people with diminishing political rights and unlimited encouragement to leave.

Yasir Barakat, among the most established merchants in the Old City, tells me he knows "nobody whose educated children are not planning to leave Jerusalem if they can." Yasir is one of my oldest friends in Jerusalem. He is not sleeping well. His daughter is now in Dubai, a son is studying in England, and another son, with a degree in network security from England, is working (for now) in Ramallah. “Let’s be honest. There is no give-and-take anymore. The Jews think this all belongs to them and that’s that.”

Peacemakers: Palestine's Business Class

For those of you who wanted to read my piece in the October Harper's on Palestine's business class, but were deterred by having to buy a Harper's subscription to access current articles, you may now download the pdf. here.

The Law Of Return: 'Oh Learned Judge!'

Undaunted in his campaign to ferret out “anti-Zionists,” yet apparently wondering if his own powers may be faltering, Jeffrey Goldberg has called in his Balthazar, “the erudite Yaacov Lozowick,” to deal with a hard case:

"My impression of The Hebrew Republic thesis is that [Avishai is] talking about medinat kol exrachai'ah, the country of its citizens. This idea was formulated and mostly promoted by folks who were not only non-Zionist, they were anti-Zionist; it was a ploy to weaken the Jewish aspect of Israel until eventually the Jewish state would be submerged into its Arab environment. Yet Avishai isn't Azmi Bishara. I get the impression he's a caring Jew who is attracted to the medinat kol exrachai'ah idea because it fits so nicely into his broader Weltanschauung, the one that praises the European Union as the way of the future, the goal of human history and so on. On that level, he's non-Zionist because he's joining forces with a particular group of enemies of Zionism, even though he and they are using the same concepts for very different goals."

There is more to his letter. You cannot really understand the surreal quality of intellectual life in Israel today—the rhetoric you hear from talk shows to academic conferences—unless you take a moment to digest it whole.

Yet beyond the glib “impressions” of books unread, the illogic (“non” = “anti”), the cozy appeal to dogma (“the Zionist way”), the guilt by association, the condescending tone, the last-minute finessing of obvious contradictions (viz., “the Zionist way” that takes Israeli Arabs as a “constituency and responsibility”), even the yanking-in of hackneyed German to sound, well, “erudite”—beyond all of this transparent demagogy—is a common claim that requires a moment’s thought.

It is that people who argue Israel should be a state of its citizens cannot believe Israel should be a “Jewish state.” Presumably, “state of its citizens,” medinat kol exrachai'ah (actually, this should be ezrakheha), is an idea that originated with “enemies of Zionism” such as Azmi Bishara.

And here I thought the principle that a democratic state’s legitimacy derives from the just consent of the governed was older than that. I also thought it was the counterpart to an argument about human nature and human limitations, you know, a moral argument reasonable people since Kant have had some trouble refuting. Wow, it is actually only a Weltanschauung our kids and other “poor, deluded dears” pick up along with a Eurail pass.

Had Lozowick actually read The Hebrew Republic, rather than merely forming an impression of its thesis, he would know that its point was to clarify just how a democratic state could retain a Jewish national character; how to protect its cultural distinction without violating ordinary standards of human rights. I am no Emile Zola, God knows. But imagine someone saying that Zola's case for equal treatment for Jews in the Republic was discredited by the fact that Jews had demanded it before him; that the case "originated" with enemies of the French nation. (Come to think of it, it is not so hard to imagine such people, is it?)

By the way, I interviewed Azmi Bishara at length in the book, and though I took issue with him on many points, Bishara shared with me his abiding respect for the work of Achad Haam, Zionism’s most influential early writer, who was trying to explain how the “Hebrew national atmosphere” created by Zionism was the only way, really, to create a state of its citizens that was also a Jewish state. The replacement of the Law of Return with an immigration law that gives preference to refugees from anti-Semitism, but conditions citizenship on naturalization to Israeli identity, not J-positive blood, is just one reform that is overdue.

A FINAL WORD to Goldberg. Look, Jeffrey, people we know in common tell me you are “good company,” and given your delight in identifying yourself as a teenage acolyte of Shomer Hatzair, I suspect that, had we met under different circumstances, and though you are closer to my son’s age than mine, we would probably have become what writers call “friends.” Hell, we might have traded nostalgic, knowing glosses on why Borochov’s slavish borrowing from Plekhanov actually caused him to misunderstand how Jewish workers in the Pale would suffer from the rise in the “organic composition” of capital—or was it just that the Shomer Hatazir shaliach in your hometown served better pizza than USY?

In any case, I am humbly asking that you stop. The claims you continue to make about me—that is, “anti-Zionists” like me—are too silly to be worth anyone’s time, but the reach of the Atlantic website is too important to ignore. If I do not respond, it may seem that your take-away is true, or plausible, or at least worth repeating.

Nor is this 1909, when calling someone anti-Zionist meant you were merely a part of a fascinating debate on how Jews survive “modernity.” It is 2009, and calling someone anti-Zionist tends to type him as opposed to the very existence of Israel or a Jewish national home of any kind. Given the constellation that runs from Hamas to the Oxford Debating Union, the epithet can do a person harm.

And I write from the gate at JFK, returning (legally, but warily) to Jerusalem, embattled enough by the fear that Sidra’s and my home will soon be swept up in a kind of Balkan tragedy, with bloody-minded fanatics on both sides demanding allegiance, and "experts" like Lozowick only too eager to choose sides. My deeds upon my head! I crave the law, if not that law. I have enough on my mind.