tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22758245579996622612024-03-18T05:47:41.265-04:00Informed Comment: Global Affairs<br>Group blog on Current EventsJuan Colehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05794922740548563607noreply@blogger.comBlogger448125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-54800089592321141482018-05-14T17:03:00.000-04:002018-05-14T17:17:30.156-04:00First glimpses of Israel/Palestine, including Jerusalem, August 1967<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This is a draft chapter from an unpublished manuscript. It recounts my visit to Israel (and Palestine, I would now say) in August 1967, using the proceeds of my first professional job, translating historian Jacob Katz's text book, <u>Israel among the Nations</u>, from Hebrew to English. This was before the Birthright program, and I was not part of any program. Hard as I now find it to believe, at the age of 17, having never traveled anywhere, I went on my own, and perhaps a sign of now thoroughly I had intimidated them, my parents let me do so.I would now say I did not understand a lot of what I saw, but I wrote it down in a tiny notebook. Here it is as it looked at the time, with comments from what was then a distant future.<br />
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Chapter Four. In the Land of Israel<o:p></o:p></div>
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I left Josh White and Arlo Guthrie behind on Monday, August 7, 1967, when my El Al flight took off from John F. Kennedy airport, renamed for the president assassinated three months after the March on Washington. We stopped en route in Orly, then Paris’s only international airport, where I bought myself an espresso. Back on board, my fellow passengers included a group of Hasidim, one of whom prevailed on me to pray in the aisle as we crossed the Alps, thereby, in his view, helping to hasten the coming of the messiah by enabling a Jew to fulfill one of the commandments, much to the annoyance of the flight crew, who butted against us as they tried to go about their duties. <o:p></o:p></div>
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A few hours later we landed at Lod (today Ben Gurion) International Airport, and the passengers burst into applause. The British founded the airport in 1936, just outside the Palestinian city of Lydda, which had a population of 50,000 Arabs until their expulsion by the Israeli Army in July 1948. On July 11 a regiment led by Moshe Dayan sped “into the city of Lydda, firing at all in its way. In forty-seven minutes of blitz, more than a hundred Arab civilians are shot dead—women, children, old people.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[1]</span></span></span></a> The next day the troops came under light fire, though there are no Arab military units nearby: “The soldiers shoot in every direction. Some throw hand grenades into homes. One fires an antitank PIAT shell into the small mosque. In thirty minutes, at high noon, more than two hundred civilians are killed. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[2]</span></span></span></a>Then:<o:p></o:p></div>
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When news of the bloodshed reaches the headquarters of Operation Larlar in the conquered Palestinian village of Yazzur, Yigal Allon asks Ben Gurion what to do with the Arabs. Ben Gurion waves his hand: Deport them. Hours after the fall of Lydda, operations officer Yitzhak Rabin issues a written order to the Yiftach Brigade: “The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly, without regard to age.” <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[3]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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On July 13, the Arab population of Lydda was left with no choice but to leave the city with whatever they could carry. An Israeli brigade commander told Shavit what he saw:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Standing by his command car, he watches the people of Lydda walking, carrying on their backs heavy sacks made of blankets and sheets. Gradually, they cast aside the sacks they cannot carry any farther. In the heavy heat, suffering from terrible thirst, old men and women collapse. Like the ancient Jews, the people of Lydda go into exile.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[4]</span></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></div>
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The Israeli soldiers looted the entire town as well as the fleeing people. This was the largest single expulsion of population in the 1948 war.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[5]</span></span></span></a>A former brigade commander at Lydda explained to Shavit why it had to happen: “Ben Gurion and [Yigal] Allon knew it was impossible to allow an Arab Lydda to remain by the international airport, not far from Tel Aviv. If we did so there would be no victory and there would be no state. “ <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[6]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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I came down the ramp into the August heat of that international airport attired in the madras sports jacket my parents had insisted I wear on the first transcontinental flight anyone in our family had ever taken, not counting the Army Air Corps transport that took my father to Guam in 1944. I at least had resisted their demand that I wear a tie. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I called my former classmate from Akiba, Michael Ashkenazi, to tell him I had arrived. I had the impression that the Ashkenazis had agreed to host me in Israel, but, in retrospect, I am not sure that they fully shared that impression. Michael seemed a bit surprised to hear from me but told me to get in a bus to Beersheba, the capital of the southern (Negev) desert, where his family would pick me up. They lived in that city’s suburb, Omer, where Michael’s father was stationed as a judge for the Bedouin tribes of the Negev. I found a bus to the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station and boarded another for Beersheba.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Northeast of Beersheba, Omer today is invariably described as an “upscale” suburb, but that is not how it looked to a teenager from suburban Philadelphia in 1967. It consisted of modest bungalows laid out on small streets branching off a main street connecting to Highway 60, the “Route of the Patriarchs,” a road that had only recently been reopened, connecting Beersheba to Hebron, Jerusalem, Jenin, and Nazareth. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The Ashkenazis had a maid who came daily to help with the housekeeping and cooking in their three-bedroom bungalow. She was a Libyan who had moved to Omer from the nearby “ma’abarot” or transfer camps that housed immigrants from the Arab world and were closed in 1962. Over 30,000 of Libya’s estimated 40,000 Jews had moved to Israel after a series of pogroms and anti-Jewish riots in 1948-1951. The Libyan Jewish community was legally dissolved in 1958, and the State deprived almost all Jews of citizenship in 1961. Similar persecutions occurred in much of the Arab world in response to the founding of Israel and the wars of 1956 and 1967, just as Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi had warned Herzl they would. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Despite the maid, the Ashkenazis’ life style in their government-assigned bungalow was modest by American middle-class standards. That evening, on a cot next to Michael’s bed, I learned for the first time that it was possible to sleep without a special outfit called pajamas and to wash one’s face without a special item called a washcloth. The next morning, I learned that the Israel was not flowing with milk -- I quickly exhausted the family’s supply. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In Beersheba the next day I saw my first mosque (I don’t know if there were any in Philadelphia in those days) – and then went to a movie with some of Michael’s friends. Michael’s friends played backgammon (sheshbesh) in the street. One of them, a chronic loser, responded to every defeat by declaring, “nitzahon musari” (a moral victory) -- a joke that reminded us of the <u>real</u>victory Israel had just won, as compared to the Jews’ long history of winning only moral victories.<o:p></o:p></div>
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On Thursday I made a foray with Michael into the Negev. I was surprised to see black-skinned, African looking Bedouin in the market (suq) in Beersheba. We visited the kibbutz of Sdeh Boker, where former Prime Minister David Ben Gurion was living. Just before the war, on May 22, Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin had paid a secret visit to Ben Gurion, who told him the government was committing a serious mistake by going to war.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[7]</span></span></span></a>We went on to Dimona, site of the reactor where Israel was about to start full-scale production of nuclear weapons. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Back in Omer that evening, we went to the community center to watch “Shisha Yamim la-Netzach” (Six Days to Victory), a film that ended with images of Israel’s soldiers arriving at the Wailing Wall, listening to IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren blow the shofar, and then singing Naomi Shemmer’s “Jerusalem of Gold.” The song, which had won the Israel song contest the day Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, included a verse reminiscent of the Book of Lamentations, as if nothing had happened in Jerusalem since the destruction of the Second Temple:<o:p></o:p></div>
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How the cisterns have dried, the marketplace is empty, <o:p></o:p></div>
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And no one frequents the Temple Mount in the Old City. <o:p></o:p></div>
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And in the caves in the mountain winds are howling <o:p></o:p></div>
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And no one descends to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Now it was constantly on the radio with a new final verse:<o:p></o:p></div>
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We have returned to the cisterns, to the market and to the marketplace -- <o:p></o:p></div>
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A ram's horn (shofar) calls out on the Temple Mount in the Old City. <o:p></o:p></div>
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And in the caves in the mountain thousands of suns shine --<o:p></o:p></div>
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We will once again descend to the Dead Sea by way of Jericho!<o:p></o:p></div>
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As the novelist Amos Oz pointed out at the time, before June 1967 East Jerusalem’s marketplaces, Harm al-Sharif, and the road to Jericho had been full of people for centuries – Palestinians, travelers, and Christian, Muslim, and (until 1948) Jewish pilgrims. The only gold I saw in Jerusalem was the gilt on the Dome of the Rock (Kipat ha-Sela’ in Hebrew) over the Mosque of Omar on Harm al-Sharif.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[8]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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The next night, Sabbath Eve, I hung out with friends of Michael and his younger sister Tamar. Between songs by Los Paraguayos, a Latin American group popular in Israel, I flirted with one of Tamar’s friends over a game of Ping-Pong. We amused ourselves listening to recordings of broadcasts from the opening days of the war by the Egypt-based Hebrew radio station, “Kol ha-Ra’am mi-Kahir” (the Voice of Thunder from Cairo), warning Israelis in heavily accented Hebrew, “Our valiant fedayin are circulating in the streets of Tel Aviv.” I found it so hilarious that I brought a copy home. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On the Sabbath Michael’s parents took us on an archeological hike. In a thorny desert grove, we explored cisterns hewn from stone in Ottoman times to capture the overflow of periodic rains from the nearby wadi. Michael and I got on a bus to Tel Aviv, where we stayed at his parents’ permanent home in the genuinely upscale residential neighborhood of Tzahala. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I spent the next day in Tel Aviv with Michael and a friend of his named Ilan Carmel. They spoke constantly of the Army they were about to join. I was six months away from registering for the draft in the U.S., where the war in Vietnam was escalating, but I knew that attending Yale would entitle me to a 2-S student deferment. We met another friend, Yoram Sharett. Michael told me his family members were like the “Kennedys of Israel” – his grandfather had been prime minister and Ben Gurion’s deputy. We walked down Dizengoff Street, where we saw some of those things that marked Tel Aviv apart from the rest of Israel – Philippine workers, multi-lingual pornography, street prostitutes, and the California Café of peace activist Abie Nathan, an Iranian-born Israeli pilot who in 1966 had flown to Egypt in his plane, Shalom 1, to present a petition for peace to Nasser. He was sent back to Israel from Port Said, where his plane landed, without delivering the petition, and arrested on his return. We stopped in front of the Ministry of Defense, where I was admonished to take no photos. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We spent that evening, Monday, August 14, at the Carmels’ house, where I was bombarded with questions like whether all of America was like Texas. Texas, Shmexas, it was the eve of Tisha be-Av, and the radio broadcast services live from the Wailing Wall. This was the first Tisha Be<span lang="FR">’</span>Av after Israel<span lang="FR">’</span>s capture of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif to Muslims), including the Wailing (Western) Wall. That wall includes remnants of the second temple as rebuilt by Herod the Great in 19 B.C.E., though most of it was rebuilt by Muslim rulers since the seventh century. Tisha Be<span lang="FR">’</span>av commemorates the day that the First and Second Temples fell to the Babylonians and Romans respectively, as well as the day of the Roman massacre of the city of Betar, which wiped out the Bar Kochba uprising in 135 C.E. This was the first Tisha Be-Av that the Wall and the Temple Mount were under Jewish control since 70 C.E., when the Roman General Titus completed the work of his father, the Emperor Vespasian, by crushing the Great Revolt of the Jews and destroying the Second Temple. The Book of Lamentations, by tradition the lament of the Prophet Jeremiah over the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE was chanted in several different traditional cantellations, or nushaot. The announcer provided a history lesson: the wall we see today was built by Herod the Great. Now we are back again. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The next morning, Michael, Ilan and I took the train to Jerusalem. The first stop outside Tel Aviv was Lod. Then came Ramla, which the UN partition plan had awarded to the Arab state of Palestine, but which Ben Gurion had ordered the army to capture. It was during the battles in that area, on April 9, 1948, that the right-wing Irgun Zevai Leumi (Etzel or National Military Organization) led by Menahem Begin carried out the massacre of over a hundred villagers in Deir Yassin, an Arab village between Ramla and Jerusalem that had signed a truce with the Haganah. This was the only 1948 act of massacre and ethnic cleansing acknowledged and apologized for by the Haganah, though Etzel always claimed that nothing happened in Deir Yassin that did not happen in many other places, such as Lod/Lydda. Deir Yassin eventually became the Har Nof neighborhood of an expanding Jerusalem, where on November 18, 2014, two Arab men from East Jerusalem killed four worshippers and a Druze policeman trying to protect them at Kehilath Bnei Torah synagogue.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We passed groves of oranges and olives – “the most protected trees in Israel,” Ilan told me – at least some of which must once have belonged to the Palestinians driven out nearly twenty years before. It was against the law to cut down olive trees, Ilan said, though in later years Israeli settlers on the West Bank often cut down the olive trees of their Palestinian neighbors. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In 1988 I had another experience with Israeli olive trees. After attending a conference in Herzliya, another upscale suburb of Tel Aviv, I traveled north to Kibbutz Kabri, east of Nahariya on the Lebanese border. There I stayed with Anna Farkas, the sister of a friend from the University of Chicago and Yale, and her husband, Yosi. The Farkases were Hungarian-speaking Jews from Romanian Transylvania who left Romania when emigration opened up after 1968. One evening they served me olives from the kibbutz with some wine. The olives came from very old trees, Yosi told me. It seemed, in fact, that the trees were older than the kibbutz, founded in 1949. They had belonged to the Arabs who had lived in the village of al-Kabri since the time of the Crusaders. And where are they? I asked. Over there, Yosi said, nodding toward the Lebanese border. And what happened to them? I asked. Yosi started to explain but stopped himself. “Pashut nitgarshu,” he said. They were simply expelled. On March 27, 1948, armed Palestinian villagers attacked a Jewish convoy, killing 49 people. In reprisal, the Haganah ordered al-Kabri destroyed. Most of the villagers fled. Those men who remained were lined up and executed into a ditch.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref9" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[9]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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Michael, Ilan, and I passed long trains making their way to Tel Aviv laden with Soviet-made military equipment -- tanks, artillery, and trucks – captured from Egypt in the Sinai or Syria on the Golan Heights. Ilan explained how Israel kept “Persia” in line with agricultural, chemical, and industrial assistance. As for the holiday, he said – on Tisha be-Av we say “she-hecheyanu.” [The prayer thanking God for keeping us alive till this day.] “That’s enough until we reach Jerusalem.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref10" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[10]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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After Ramla the train climbed, winding around the hillsides, approaching Jerusalem through the northern edge of what was later designated as the Judean Hills wine region, an appellation I learned of in Oslo in June 2011. Together with the Norwegian government, we at the Center on International Cooperation of NYU had organized a track 1.5 meeting (official participants in an unofficial setting) for representatives of Afghanistan and its major neighbors – Pakistan, Iran, India, Russia, and Turkey (China declined to participate in these meetings after the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident), as well as the U.S. and the UN. A special feature of this meeting was a briefing by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense David Sedney, whom we had invited to speak about U.S. construction of airfields and other military infrastructure in Afghanistan. In previous meetings Iran and, most vocally, Russia (in the person of its outspoken special envoy Zamir Kabulov) had said that such construction contradicted claims that the U.S. had no intention to establish permanent military bases in Afghanistan. At the first meeting in this series, Kabulov had responded to my presentation of the U.S. position by saying, “The trouble is, we don’t believe you.” Sedney explained how willing the U.S. Department of Defense was to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on first-rate infrastructure that it would abandon or destroy in a few years. Kabulov shared a late-night bottle of whiskey with Sedney, but I don’t think he was convinced. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Tehran’s ambassador to Norway and his deputy represented Iran. Over the dinner where Sedney spoke, the Norwegian hosts tried to show their cultural sensitivity by offering the Iranians “non-alcoholic” wine, which upon closer inspection turned out to be low-alcohol wine (about two percent) produced in the Judean Hills region of Israel. The Iranians, no longer kept in line by Israeli assistance, declined, as did the Turkish representative, Burak Akçapar, who insisted on drinking Rioja like the rest of us. <o:p></o:p></div>
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After dropping off our bags at the apartment where we were staying, Michael and I headed for the Old City, which Michael, like me, had never visited. As the first site I noted in my diary was Gehennom, I imagine we entered the city by David’s Tomb and Mount Zion through the Zion Gate. Gehennom (Gei Ben-Hinnom in Hebrew), a valley where in ancient time the Canaanites to whom Elie Wiesel compared Hamas were said to sacrifice their children to the God Moloch, lies just south of Mount Zion. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Walking north, we soon found ourselves in the covered market close to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, between the Jaffa Gate and Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. We were not the only first-time visitors: an Israeli girl marveled: “There’s everything! We thought they had nothing!”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref11" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[11]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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In this market I had my first conversation with a Palestinian. A shopkeeper whose goods I examined unburdened himself, becoming bitterer the longer he spoke. While we were talking, Radio Amman played in the background. Since the crisis and war, Christian tourists had stopped coming, he said. The merchants had to buy new stamps. Packages sent to fill orders with the old (Jordanian) stamps were returned. He joked that he was now a stamp collector, as I had been a few years earlier. “It is not good on heart,” he said. He hoped for no more wars. The Israeli government should have asked the merchants about their problems. <o:p></o:p></div>
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His family had property on Yafo (Jaffa) Street in West Jerusalem, not more than a half-hour’s stroll from where we were talking, but it had been confiscated, and he could not visit it since 1948. What he wanted from Israel, he said, was to be considered a native of the land. His brother, who he claimed knew eighteen languages, had moved to, of all places, Zion, Illinois, after studying in Chicago. The shopkeeper summed up his views on human rights: “I think that is shit. A grave 180 by 140 centimeters is the end of everyone.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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Michael and I made the short walk to the “Kotel,” the Wailing or Western Wall. I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t there. Whatever we had heard on the radio the night before was the sole commemoration. Today it was business as usual. The area did not even seem particularly busy. We had to leave quickly to be on time to see Professor Jacob Katz.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Since Michael and I were not observing the fast, we had a quick shashlik on the street and took a bus to the Kiryat Noar neighborhood on the southeastern edge of the city, where Katz lived with his wife. The neighborhood was full of green and gardens. Katz, a kippah-wearing scholar who had completed his PhD in Nazi Germany in 1936, reminded me of Dr. Gundesheimer, the German refugee Talmud and ancient history teacher at Akiba. Although Katz and his wife were observing the Tisha be-Av fast, they offered us water, tea, cookies, and, eventually a light supper. Katz thanked me for translating his book, and we talked of hitchhiking in Israel, the Holocaust, and the meaning of prayer. <o:p></o:p></div>
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As evening fell, Michael and I got back on a bus back to the center of town, where my classmate Avi Katz and Pnina Rosenberg, Rabbi Yaakov Rosenberg’s daughter, who had been a year behind Michael and me at Akiba, was enrolled in some summer program. We surprised Avi and Pnina at the hostel where she and the others in the program were staying. We went out on some excursion, and I left my camera under a bunk. That was the last I saw of my camera or the pictures I had taken during my first week in Israel.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We spent the next couple of days with some relatives of Michael’s in Jerusalem, some of whom mocked the euphoria over the Kotel/Wall by calling it a “Diskotel” or “Discotheque Shechinah,” Shechinah being the Kabbalistic term for the immanent, feminine presence of God that had been exiled from this world, as the people of Israel were exiled from their land, when the Temple was destroyed. At their home I met a soldier who had received a battlefield commission as lieutenant for his service in the Golani Brigade during the war. He spoke of a brother-in-law who was lauded as a war hero in the battle for Jerusalem but now awoke suddenly at night shouting, “Eysh! Eysh!” – fire, or “incoming” in U.S. military slang. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The next day, August 17, we took the train back to Tel Aviv. I ended up seated next to a Yemenite yeshiva student concerned about my secular life style. I would have liked to talk to him, but, alas, I could not understand his Hebrew well enough. The Yemenite pronunciation of Hebrew is considered the closest to Biblical Hebrew. Jews lived in Yemen for at least two thousand years, possibly since Biblical times, as the Bible speaks of close ties, including marriage, between King Solomon and the Yemenite kingdom of Sheba (Sab’a). In the century before Islam Yemeni tribes that had converted to Judaism established a Jewish kingdom in southern Arabia (Yemen means “south”) and massacred thousands of Christians. During over 1,300 years of Muslim rule, the position of the Jews oscillated between being tolerated second-class subjects under Sunni rulers, and being harshly persecuted when power fell into the hands of the Shi’a Zaidi sect, today represented by the Houthis. Jewish responses to persecution included several Yemenite pseudo-messiahs, one of whom inspired an epistle from Maimonides, the <u>Igeret Taiman</u>(Epistle to Yemen). A tenth of the Yemenite Jewish population emigrated to Palestine in the early twentieth century, when Yemen was briefly under Ottoman rule. As Ottoman subjects, Yemenite Jews could move anywhere in the empire, and, following their religious inclination, many moved to Palestine. As elsewhere in the Arab world, the founding of Israel set off anti-Jewish riots and pogroms in Yemen in 1948. Eighty-two Jews were killed. Most of the community was airlifted to Israel in 1949-1950 in <i>Operation Magic Carpet</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Michael and I intended to visit the Jezreel Valley and northern Israel. Since we had no magic carpet, after arriving in Tel Aviv we started to hitchhike north along the Haifa Highway. It was tough competing for rides with all the hitchhiking soldiers, especially girls, but one guy finally picked us up. We drove with the sparkling Mediterranean on our left and got out on the western outskirts of Hadera. Hadera, gateway to Jezreel and the site of the largest Zionist land purchase in Palestine, in 1891, was the scene of one of early Zionism’s greatest successes: the draining of the malarial swamps and the founding of a self-sustaining agricultural settlement. But the purchase of the land from a Christian Arab absentee landlord living in Beirut led to conflict with the local bedouin whose customary grazing rights the Jewish settlers did not recognize. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Walking through town on the way to the home of yet another Ashkenazi relative, Michael and I bought “dumbbell” hats – kova’ tembel -- for our upcoming hike. Our host kept an enormous collection of birds. After a lunch of fried eggs and tomato-cucumber salad, we rested on a veranda overlooking the thirty-five dunams our host farmed in Hadera. After lunch, he drove us to Moshav ha-Yogev (Cooperative Settlement “The Farmer”), 40 kilometers up the Valley, half of the way to Mount Tabor, where I discovered an agrarian paradise. There he had forty dunams with grazing milk cows, pear orchards, vineyards, and olive groves, all watered from a nearby reservoir. Through the clear dry summer air we gazed at Mount Tabor and the hill of Nazareth in the distance. Ahead of us the Valley stretched to Afula and beyond, where the Ottoman cavalry had been camped on April 16, 1799. The night before, Napoleon’s general Kléber marched his men south from Nazareth around the eastern slopes of Mt. Tabor to surprise the Ottoman force at daybreak and join up with Napoleon himself. The emancipator of the Jews had just arrived at Mt. Tabor from the siege of Acre, while a captive Rebbe Nahman had managed to escape before the battles started and sailed on toward Rhodes and his personal emancipation.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref12" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[12]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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Our host showed us Ha-Yogev’s public services: a public hall, a tractor shed, cold storage for produce, a mill to produce fodder and silage, a cooperative store (tzorchaniya) – and an arsenal. The village was on guard for attacks by al-Fatah, coming from the West Bank – Jenin was only 21 kilometers away. There must have been a synagogue, but we didn’t see it. Here the milk was flowing -- we drank that morning’s directly from the dairy truck. As we walked, our host asked me about events in the U.S. It was the “long hot summer” of 1967. The struggle for racial justice in the U.S. had been transmuted from the peaceful March on Washington into a series of violent uprisings. That summer, there were 159 “riots” in American cities, including major clashes in July in Newark (26 dead) and Detroit (43 dead). In both cases the National Guard was called up, and President Johnson deployed the U.S. Army to Detroit. Our host said of the black rioters, “I don’t blame them.” We watched the sun set behind Mount Tabor through the high hedge that bordered his house.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Michael and I rose at 6:30 the next morning and started to hike. We passed the Hill of Megiddo, Har Megiddo in Hebrew, transliterated into Greek as “Armageddon,” where, according to the Book of Revelation, Satan would muster the armies of Gog and Magog in the final battle against the messiah and his followers, and where so many historical battles had taken place. Here an ancient town bestrode the pass linking the Egypt of the Pharaohs to Mesopotamia. In the fifteenth century BC, Pharaoh Thutmose III defeated a Canaanite army at Megiddo, extending the Egyptian empire into Syria. Alexander the Great marched this way from Egypt to Babylon and on to Persia and India. Had Napoleon been able to consolidate his position in the Galilee after defeating the Ottoman cavalry, he too could have proceeded east in the footsteps of Alexander, toward Damascus, Mesopotamia, Persia, and India, but the British Navy cut off his supply lines.<o:p></o:p></div>
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At Megiddo the British General Edmund Allenby had defeated the Ottoman army, allied with the Central Powers, in August 1918, commanding imperial troops newly reinforced from India, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. This battle opened the same road to Damascus Napoleon had tried to control, assuring that Palestine would come under the authority of a British Empire committed as ever to securing transit routes to India. Britain also sought control of Palestine to guard pipelines carrying petroleum, the new black gold of the internal combustion engine, from fields in Syria and northern Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean via the port of Haifa, and to enhance control of the Suez Canal. Britain’s ally, Russia, beset by internal conflict, was doing poorly on the eastern front, where the Jews of Galicia and Ukraine lived. This population, the reserve manpower of Zionism, inhabited strategic territory between the Central Powers (Germany and Austria), where Jews were treated better than in Britain’s virulently anti-Semitic ally, Russia. A struggle was underway to gain their loyalty. I saw that struggle chronicled in a special exhibit on the role of Jews in Marshal Pilsudski’s Polish Legion in Warsaw’s Museum of Jewish life in Poland, <u>Polin</u>, in September 2014, the day after I returned from my visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. These considerations provided a strategic rationale for whatever religious beliefs and humanitarian concerns may have led some in “His Majesty’s Government” to “view with favour the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine,” in the words of the Balfour Declaration. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Allenby’s victory effectively ended German efforts to undermine the Allied rear. For several years before, a German mission had tarried in Kabul, seeking the support of Amir Habibullah Khan to pressure the British to divert forces to India by launching a campaign for the full independence of Afghanistan and the freedom of India. Since the 1879 Treaty of Gandamak, the British had permitted Afghanistan to host no foreign legation other than one from British India; the British controlled Afghanistan’s foreign affairs. The German mission, whose presence arguably violated that treaty, won the support of Habibullah’s brother, Prince Nasrullah and his son, Prince (later Amir and King) Amanullah, but the Amir ultimately maintained Afghanistan’s neutrality. His refusal to move against the British was the main reason for his assassination in 1919, after which his son and successor, Amanullah Khan, launched the Third Anglo-Afghan War, resulting in Afghanistan’s full independence, just as Palestine fell under the British mandate. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Michael and I left the small road we had been taking and followed a wadi south between some fields. An elderly Palestinian man with a grey moustache dressed in a robe and kafiya walked towards us in the middle distance. While in 1948 most of the Palestinian population had been expelled from or fled the villages and towns in the plains, we were entering the hills of Galilee, where a substantial Arab population had remained. Since 1949, when Ha-Yogev was established, the government of Israel had pursued a policy of “Judaization of the Galilee” (Yehud ha-Galil). Israel established an exclusively Jewish “Upper Nazareth” over the Arab town in 1954 and in 1964 founded a new Jewish regional development town, Karmiel, on land confiscated from the Arab villages of Deir al-Asad, Bi'ina and Nahf. <o:p></o:p></div>
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As we and the Arab approached each other, I walked to the side of the path to give him a wide berth. Michael looked at me as if I were insane and exchanged Arabic greetings with the man (al-salaam ‘aleikum). After the man had passed, Michael asked me, “Why did you do that?” I don’t know what answer I came up with, but the reason was fear of the other, to be generous. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We continued on till we reached the main road and got a lift to the Afula crossroads (Tzomet Afula), where Highway 65, the road up the Jezreel Valley, meets Highway 60, the same road that ran from Nazareth to Beersheba, passing Omer along the way. Michael suggested we hitchhike through the West Bank, via Jenin and Shechem (Nablus) to Jerusalem, but we did not have the special permits required, and none of the drivers was willing to extend his permit to us. Michael attributed this to our lack of “protektsia,” the Russian word used in Israel to denote connections that get you favors, like “guanxi” in China or “wasita” in Afghanistan. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We took a bus back to Tel Aviv and then to the suburb of Ramat ha-Sharon, where family friends of the Ashkenazis named Green lived. On the bus from Tel Aviv to Ramat ha-Sharon we met a South African Jewish volunteer, who said that Ramat ha-Sharon was “crawling” with South Africans. He was reading <u>The October Country</u>, a collection of eerie stories by Ray Bradbury, He said that his grandmother in South Africa had said, “Give the blacks what they want.” He also advised us Americans to end the war in Vietnam, which was so far from the U.S. <o:p></o:p></div>
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At the Greens’ in Ramat ha-Sharon I was happy to find Michael’s sister, Tamar. We compared notes on shopping. We dropped in to visit some of the Ashkenazis’ South African relatives whose “gorgeous” ultra-modern house impressed me. I even learned how much it cost to build it: IL 250,000. I was shocked when our host disparaged the religio-nationalist euphoria over the capture of East Jerusalem. The Wailing Wall, he said, was “just stones.” Michael, meanwhile, was mocking the Chinese Red Guards who were still rampaging through the Cultural Revolution. He performed his best imitation of American gang slang to show how the Red guards used the “exchange of revolutionary experiences” to tell their rivals, “Hey, man, you’re on my turf.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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We ran into Yoram Sharett again. He described a recent trip to Europe. There were no showers in Paris, he said, and the Germans still claimed their lands across the Oder-Neisse line (the Polish border), up to Königsberg, now a Soviet enclave known as Kaliningrad. Yoram shocked me by showing me his German knife and praising the engineering of German products, which many Jews were still reluctant to buy. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It was Friday night. People were singing and dancing in the streets, doing the Horah to “Der Rebbe Elimelech,” a Yiddish dancing tune modeled on “Old King Cole” written by a Jewish communist in New York in 1927. (“Und der Rebbe Elimelech iz gevorden seyer frailich, iz gevorden seyer frailich, Elimelech!”)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref13" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[13]</span></span></span></a>Then they switched to army songs, including a jazzy version of the “Song of the Palmach”:<o:p></o:p></div>
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Though the storm is ever mounting <o:p></o:p></div>
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Still our heads remain unbowed.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We are ready for our orders, <o:p></o:p></div>
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We, we, The Palmach. <o:p></o:p></div>
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From Metulla to the Negev, <o:p></o:p></div>
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From the sea to the desert, <o:p></o:p></div>
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All our youth are under arms, <o:p></o:p></div>
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All the youth are on the guard.<o:p></o:p></div>
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On the eagle’s path in the sky,<o:p></o:p></div>
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On the wild ass’s trail in the mountains, <o:p></o:p></div>
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Through stony heights and caverns,<o:p></o:p></div>
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We are tracking down the enemy.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We are always in the vanguard, <o:p></o:p></div>
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By light of day and in the dark,<o:p></o:p></div>
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Always ready for our orders, <o:p></o:p></div>
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We, we, the Palmach.<span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref14" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[14]</span></span></a></span><o:p></o:p></div>
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We went back to the Ashkenazis’ house, where Michael, Tamar, and I sat outside, talking on the curb late in the night. Without pressure from outside, we concluded, there would never have been a Jewish state. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We slept in the next day, despite being temporarily awakened at 6 A.M. by the congregation of a Sephardic synagogue marching through the streets of Tzahala chanting the Sabbath morning service. That evening I caught the bus to Jerusalem by myself. Avi and Pnina’s group was having some kind of party with Yemenite drummers. Avi and I took over the drums to try to prove that the African diaspora culture we had absorbed growing up in Philadelphia gave us a special sense of swing. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Now that I was on my own, I became a full-fledged tourist. I saw the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Palace of the Book (Heichal ha-Sefer). At the Knesset I saw the Chagall murals. At the President’s official residence (Beit ha-Nasi) I saw his official gifts including elephant tusks, miniature golden temples from Nepal, and some books from Lyndon Johnson. I climbed Mount Herzl to see the military cemetery with those who had fallen in 1948, 1956, and now 1967. There I found the graves of Herzl and the right-wing Zionist leader Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky. I don’t think I had any idea who Jabotinsky was or what he stood for, but as a hard-line nationalist he understood the Palestinians’ challenge to Zionism better than most liberal or leftist Zionists. In 1923 he compared the Palestinian people to other vanquished nations that had lost their homeland:<o:p></o:p></div>
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They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center and basis of their own national existence.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref15" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[15]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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Below the slope of Har Herzl was Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial and Museum, where I had an incongruous encounter with the Harvard-Radcliffe glee club. Only six years had passed since the trial of Adolf Eichmann, before which the Holocaust had not played the huge role in public discourse about Israel that it did later. As a sixth and seventh-grade student I had followed Eichmann’s trial in 1961-62. I particularly remember one incident from the testimony against him – when the trains arrived in one of the extermination camps, and the prisoners had been gathered on the quay for selection, an SS guard quieted a wailing baby by smashing his? her? head against a wall. I read Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” when it was published in two installments in <u>The New Yorker</u>in February 1963, one month after my bar mitzvah. At Akiba one afternoon we assembled in the library to watch a movie – the Germans’ internal raw footage of the starvation, humiliation, and, finally, extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto. One night I had sat on the lawn of a classmate’s parents’ ranch house in Wynnefield – both of his parents had tattooed numbers from Auschwitz on their forearms – as my friend asked his father a question he never tired of -- what was it like to be whipped? As his father, a jeweler, demonstrated to his son’s clumsy friend the right way to string pearls on a wire, watching intently the delicate and deliberate motions of the fingers of his two hands, he recited words he seemed to have repeated often – being whipped was like having your back sliced by a knife, over and over again. Yet he was one of the lucky ones – he had been selected for labor rather than immediate extermination. He had been sent to the barracks at Auschwitz rather than the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau, and he had survived to raise a family in Philadelphia. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I went back to the apartment of Ruth Rigby, a friend of the Ashkenazis where I was staying. Ruth had lived in London during the Blitz. I read some essays by George Orwell and went to sleep.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I spent three more days by myself in Jerusalem before returning to Omer on the evening of August 23. I visited the shrines of the three monotheistic religions. I left God a note (petek) at the Wailing Wall and visited the Hurva Synagogue. The main Ashkenazi synagogue in the Old City, it was first built in the early eighteenth century, destroyed soon after, rebuilt in 1864 by the followers of the Vilna Gaon, the leading opponent of Hasidism, and destroyed again by the Arab Legion in 1948. It was still in ruins when I saw it, but a commemorative arch was dedicated in 1977 and a new synagogue in the old style consecrated in 2010. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I visited the Dome of the Rock, where I saw the stone on which Abraham had started to sacrifice Isaac, or from which Muhammad’s steed had ascended to heaven, depending on which unverifiable story one favors. For the first time in my life I heard the call to prayer of the muezzin, simultaneously from Haram al-Sharif and another mosque from a nearby valley. I walked down the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, encompassing the site of the crucifixion, burial, and, reportedly, resurrection of perhaps the most successful Jewish messianic claimant to date. Katz described Jesus’s career as part of the political turmoil leading up the Great Revolt and destruction of the Temple:<o:p></o:p></div>
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The expectation of redemption kept growing among the people. . . . It is no wonder that men arose from among the nation calling themselves messiahs. . . . Most of the false messiahs were isolated among the people and have disappeared from memory. Only one of them managed to attract many believers and establish a name for himself for generations to come. That man was Jesus of Nazareth.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref16" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[16]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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I marveled at the complex arrangements among the various Christian sects. As Mark Twain noted, remarking on the need for Turkish guards at the site, “All sects of Christians (except Protestants) have chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and each must keep to itself and not venture upon another’s ground. It has been proven conclusively that they cannot worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the world in peace.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref17" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[17]</span></span></span></a>In a monastery on Mount Olive I saw a pavement lined with Jewish tombstones uprooted from the ancient cemetery there. I visited the Hebrew University on Mt. Scopus. On the way I saw the plaque commemorating the killing of seventy-eight Jewish medical personnel and Haganah fighters and one British soldier in an ambush by Arab forces on April 13, 1948. The convoy was transporting medical supplies to Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus, which the Arabs claimed was being used as a base to attack them. They were also taking revenge for the massacre of Deir Yassin four days before. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I toured Gethsemane and the tomb of Mary, many other tombs (of kings, Absalom, David, and the Ben Hazir priestly family). I visited the tunnel supposedly dug by King Hezekiah to bring the water of the spring of Siloam inside the city walls in preparation for the siege by the Assyrian ruler, Sennacherib, a Jordanian bunker, and the underground ruins of the pre-Israelite Jebusite settlement.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The dirt and disorder bothered me almost as much as it had Mark Twain and Herzl. I found the Jewish quarter a “mess.” The Via Dolorosa, I noted, was “narrow and dirty.” The Muslim quarter was the “dirtiest,” a jarring contrast to the magnificent dome of the Mosque of Omar. <o:p></o:p></div>
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One afternoon I took a tour to the nearby parts of the West Bank. Our bus stopped at Rachel’s Tomb, Bethlehem (where I tasted tamar hindi, tamarind juice), and Hebron, where I bought fresh almond milk from a street vender. We visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs in the Cave of Machpelah, supposedly the burial plot that Abraham bought when his wife Sarah died. Since the Mamelukes constructed a mosque on the site in the thirteenth century, Jews were permitted only up to the seventh step of the entrance and completely barred after 1948. Our tour group entered the mosque less than two months after IDF Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the first Jew to enter the premises in seven centuries, who came to Hebron after blowing the shofar at the Wall. Skirmishes leading to injuries and the destruction of Torah scrolls continued in Hebron for a decade after that as Israel used its occupation to establish the right of Jews to pray there. In February 1994, Purim, Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli settler, massacred twenty-nine worshippers in the mosque, leading to a rare joint demonstration of solidarity by the Muslim and Jewish student associations at Columbia University, where I was teaching at the time. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This shrine exemplifies the intimacy of the conflict. In June 2011 at the Oslo Forum, I spoke to the former foreign minister of the Taliban, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil in the lobby of the Bristol Hotel. I had first met Mutawakkil when he led a delegation to New York in January 1997, asking the U.N. to grant the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” the country’s seat in the General Assembly. I chaired a gathering where he spoke at Columbia University. He promised that the Taliban would cooperate with the U.S. in the fight against international terrorism, which led a religious leader of the Muslim community of Columbia University (a Pakistani, I believe) to criticize him harshly for accepting America’s definition of “terrorism.” I met him again in Kandahar in June 1998, when UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi asked me to go to Afghanistan to give my impressions of how the UN was carrying out its various missions. Mutawakkil’s interpreter was a young man named Tayyib Agha, later the lead negotiator for the Taliban in their unofficial office in Qatar. <o:p></o:p></div>
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After the post-9/11 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, Mutawakkil surrendered and was placed under house arrest in Kandahar. He expressed willingness to bring a group of Taliban into the new system, but Vice President Dick Cheney reversed CIA attempts to integrate the Taliban into the new order and ordered him detained –he was kept in Bagram for five years. I met him again in Kabul shortly after his release in 2006: he lived there as a “reconciled” Talib, supporting efforts for a negotiated solution. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Somewhere during all this I told Mutawakkil that I was Jewish, which apparently piqued his curiosity. During a lull in our conversation in Oslo, he asked me if I knew why Jews and Arabs were fighting. I said I had my own ideas, but I would like to hear his. “Tarburwali,” he said. “Tarburwali” is Pashto for rivalry between cousins or other agnates (patrilineal relatives). In Pashto lore, tarburwali can develop into the most intense and violent hatred, as cousins fight over the legacy of their common male ancestor – in this case, Abraham. It is a myth that Jews and Arabs can trace their lineage to a common ancestor who lived about four thousand years ago, a myth to which Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi referred in his letter, but regardless of the distribution of genetic material, the two groups are cultural and religious cousins. Otherwise they would not be fighting over the same land and holy places. As Mutawakkil recognized, the hostility is political, not religious – tarburwali derives from the secular tribal code of Pashtunwali, not the Islamic shari’a. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Because of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the religious, pre-Zionist Jewish community considered Hebron one of the land’s four holy cities, along with Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias. In August 1929 Arab rioters killed sixty-seven Jews from the traditional community. Tensions had been building since the British established their mandate. They not only destroyed the Ottoman Empire (with the help of Turkish and Arab nationalists), but reneged on their commitments to the Arabs. The British, through T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) had supported the Arab uprising against the Turks, and many Arabs expected Palestine to be incorporated into a Hashemite kingdom based in Damascus. Instead the Arabs got colonial rule: the British mandate for Palestine and the Sykes-Picot Agreement for the rest of the Levant. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The British rulers, carrying out their mandate to support the establishment of a Jewish National Home, relaxed the constraints on Jewish immigration and land purchase imposed, if ineffectively, by the Ottomans. Jews fleeing rising anti-Semitism in Europe arrived in increasing numbers. The Palestinians no longer had any access to sovereignty with which to regulate immigration, unlike the U.S., which. under the influence of racist and anti-Semitic ideologies, had enacted restrictive legislation intended to preserve the predominance of Northern European “races” in the population. The lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia in 1915 demonstrated the intensity of U.S. anti-Semitism at the time. In 1929, the same year as the riots in Palestine, the U.S. Congress made the exclusionary immigration quotas enacted in 1921 and 1924 permanent. Jews were largely barred from immigrating to the U.S., but they could come to Palestine, where they no longer faced the obstacle of indigenous sovereignty that had confronted Rebbe Nahman and Theodore Herzl in the port of Jaffa. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Simmering resentment boiled over in August 1929, when right-wing Zionists demonstrated at the Wailing Wall, claiming the Temple Mount for the Jewish people. Rumors spread that Jews were attacking Arabs and the Muslim holy places – in Jerusalem one Jew was stabbed to death and three Arabs shot and killed. Rioters killed sixty-seven Jews in Hebron, and Jewish residence in Hebron came to an end till it was re-established by conquest in 1967. The 1929 wave of violence also claimed the lives of 18-20 Jews from the traditional community in Safed. <o:p></o:p></div>
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While I was in Jerusalem, something started that has not stopped yet: people asked me for directions wherever I go: Kabul, Moscow, Paris, Beijing, Istanbul…. One day late in the morning just outside the Old City an Arab boy, who was about the same size as my ten-year old cousin Michael Buckman but said he was thirteen, asked me in English how to get to Rachel’s Tomb. He must have missed it on the way to Jerusalem, because he had fled from Bethlehem when his father beat him that morning. Rachel’s Tomb is between the two towns, just east of Highway 60. I took him to the YMCA across from the King David Hotel, where in July 1946 the Irgun Zeva’i Le’umi led by Menahem Begin had bombed the headquarters of the British mandatory and military authorities, killing ninety-one people. The hotel staff had shrugged off the telephoned warning of this terrorist attack amid a proliferation of fake bomb scares. In 1967 the hotel staff likewise shrugged off my inquiry and directed me to the police. I kept asking directions to the station – it look so long that I offered the boy some kabab for lunch, but he said he only wanted a roll. Eventually the police took him in. <o:p></o:p></div>
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After a three-day break in Omer with Michael and Tamar’s friends, there were only ten days left until Labor Day, September 4, when I would fly back to the U.S. in time to drive up to New Haven the next day and start Yale. On August 27 I took a bus to Haifa, which I made the center of my tour of northern Israel and the occupied territories, both the West Bank and the Golan Heights. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Haifa was the closest thing I saw to Herzl’s Altneuland. It surprised me with its unexpected combination of German/Austrian and Palestinian Arab café cultures. I bought wurst from a cart while Arabs smoked in a cafe with Lebanese TV playing in the background. From one street vendor I ordered “Eine Ganze (German for ‘a whole’) Mana (Hebrew for ‘portion’) von Falafel.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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On a tour of the Galilee as we drove up the Valley of Jezreel, I heard the Israeli account – how the Baron de Rothschild brought eucalyptus from Australian to drain the swamps, how Jews from around the world had financed the development of the valley, the breadbasket of Israel, which the Arabs had called the Dead Valley. Wherever we traveled in northern Israel the guide told the tourists on the bus which Israelite tribe – Asher, Naftali, Efraim -- had been allocated which territory by Joshua according to the Bible, but he remained largely mute about what changes in settlement or property rights might have occurred in the subsequent three thousand years, except to mention that before Zionist colonization the plots of land were too small to introduce modern farming methods. In 1910 Afula, or al-Fula, as the town was known in Arabic, was the site of a major land purchase by the Jewish National Fund, which bought 233,000 dunams from the Sursuq family in Damascus. They encountered resistance from both the peasants and the local Ottoman administration when they took possession of the land and expelled the peasants.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref18" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[18]</span></span></span></a>In graduate school a few years later I learned how empires commercialized rural areas and raised cash in the nineteenth century by turning traditional rights to tribute into full private property in land. In return for cash purchase from the state, the landlords could then sell all rights to the land in a single bundle called “property.” Peasants lost their land as a result in India as well as Palestine. I also learned how the claim that landholdings were too small for modern commercial farming was used to justify expropriation of peasant land in many colonial countries.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The guide took us through the familiar historical narrative from ancient times to the present, calling the roll of all those leaders and empires that had passed through, with emphasis on the Hebrew, Israelite, and Jewish ones: Abraham, Joshua, Deborah, Saul, David, Solomon, Josiah, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Alexander, Antiochos, the Romans, the Byzantines, Caliph Umar, the Crusaders, Salahuddin, Richard the Lion-Hearted, the Turks, the English, and then, again, the Jews. Unless my note taking was faulty, he omitted Napoleon. <o:p></o:p></div>
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We stopped in Nazareth. It looked to seventeen-year-old me that that Arabs in Nazareth, citizens of Israel, were “very loyal” with “sweet Arab faces,” not like the wary ones I had seen in Hebron. We went on to Tiberias, overlooking the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret), where Rabbi Nahman jumped over the wall to escape the plague quarantine. Along the lake I saw holes left by shells fired by Syria from the Golan Heights before the war. In Tiberias and Merun we visited the graves of some rabbis, including the tomb of Simeon bar Yohai. Elijah had left the premises. We went on to the restored fourth or fifth-century synagogue of Capernaum, perhaps the site where Jesus had taught, according to the Gospels. We saw the River Jordan where it flowed into the Sea of Galilee – it looked to me about a third of the size of the Schuylkill river that bisected Philadelphia, not much like the one Joan Baez sang about at the March on Washington: “The River Jordan is chilly and cold, it chills the body but warms the soul – all your trials, Lord, soon be over.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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On a tour of the Upper Galillee the guide told us that a year and a half earlier, the Knesset had decided to “fortify the north for seven years,” part of the plan to Judaize the Galilee. We visited the new all-Jewish town of Karmiel, founded in 1964 as the regional capital. When local Palestinians whose land had been expropriated to build the town applied for permission to live there, the Minister of Housing turned them down, saying "Karmiel was not built to solve the problems for the people in the surrounding area."<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref19" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[19]</span></span></span></a>Unlike the neighboring Arab villages, Karmiel had a new Town Council building, walled residential areas, and many supermarkets and cinemas. Many immigrants from the former Soviet Union have settled there.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We drove north to visit the reconstructed remains of the third-century Synagogue of Bar’am, on the Lebanese border. Tradition long held that this was the synagogue of Simeon bar Yohai, though he lived a century before the synagogue was built. The residents of the nearby Arab Christian village were expelled by the Israeli army in 1948 and replaced by a Kibbutz composed of demobilized Palmach soldiers. After lunch at Kibbtz Ayelet ha-Shahar, we drove through Meron, where Agnon’s goat emerged from Simeon bar Yohai’s cave, and took a brief look at the “entirely Jewish” town of Safed, where I noted the many art galleries. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Another day we crossed the Upper Galilee to the Golan Heights. We traversed the three lines of Israeli defenses below it. The guide led us into a stone bunker, where we tried to imagine the terror of being shut up underground shielding oneself from Syrian rockets. We crossed the bridge of Jacob’s Daughters and climbed the Golan. Druze villagers were threshing wheat in the fields beneath snow-covered Mt. Hermon. I swam in the chilly water of Baniyas at the source of the Jordan – here its water was indeed “chilly and cold” -- with an assortment of other foreigners – a girl from New Jersey, a Jewish boy named Raphael Rubben from Egypt with a French passport and an Italian mother, who had been in Kinshasa (Leopoldville until the previous year) during the fighting a few years earlier, an Iranian Israeli from Ramat Gan, and Rivka Beilin, a biologist from New York.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I toured Haifa, visiting the world center of the Bahai faith with its luxuriant gardens on Mount Carmel. One day I went north to Acre. Here the succession of populations was inescapable, with Roman ruins recycled into Crusader monuments, reused as Ottoman and British prisons. My notes do not mention the Napoleonic siege or Haim Farhi. I went south to Caesarea, where I saw the hippodrome and a Roman temple of Aswan stone from Egypt. This was the town established by the Emperor Augustus as the seat of the Roman provincial administration of Judea. The Great Revolt broke out there in 66 C.E., when the Roman emperor Nero ruled in favor of the Greco-Syrian inhabitants, who demanded that the Jews of Caesarea be denied rights of citizenship, as befits those whose country has been occupied by others. <o:p></o:p></div>
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One long day – a Saturday – I took a tour of the West Bank. The bus drove again from Haifa up the Jezreel Valley to Afula to the crossroads and turned south on Highway 60, where Michael and I had failed to hitch a ride. In Jenin I bought lemonade and flattered myself that I was getting along all right with my pidgin Arabic. As we drove from Jenin to Nablus (Shechem) the guide explained that “Samaria,” the ancient name for this region, was derived from Shemer, from whom Omri, the ninth century B.C. founder of the Omrid dynasty of the northern kingdom of Israel, the father of King Ahab, purchased the site for his capital. I did not visit the Samaritan holy sites on Mt. Gerizim on that visit, but I saw them when I returned in 1999 for a meeting with the Palestinian analyst and pollster Khalil Shikaki. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In 1967 the tension in the market was palpable as our busload of mostly Israeli tourists dismounted. The guide explained that less than three months earlier the Israeli army had entered Nablus from the east. The Army drove south from Bait She’an to secure the Jordan Valley and cut off the West Bank from Jordan, where the government had stationed two brigades of the Arab Legion and an Iraqi brigade across the Damia Bridge, with three more brigades on the way from Baghdad. The soldiers had removed their insignia, and the population, which mistook them for the Arab Legion, lined the streets shouting “Ya’ish,” tossing flowers on the soldiers, and asking for arms to fight Israel. “Ma pitom, anahnu Yisrael” – “Hold on, we are Israel,” the troops answered. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I bought a Pepsi from a vender in the marketplace, who, to my surprise, spoke Hebrew. I asked him where he was from. He answered, “From near Nahal Yarkon,” the river that empties into the port of Tel Aviv after running through a park two blocks south of Shmuel Yosef Agnon Street. When I didn’t know where the Yarkon was, he laughed with a kind of ironic resentment, thinking that I was an immigrant who didn’t even know the country’s basic geography, while he, a native-born Palestinian, could no longer visit his childhood home. I tried to mollify him by explaining I was an American tourist. I wandered off and lost my way in the market. I felt people staring at me. A group of boys pointed at me and shouted, “Yahud!” – a Jew!<o:p></o:p></div>
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I found my way back to the bus, which took off toward Jericho. We stopped at Gilgal, overlooking the site where, the guide said, Joshua, the Israelites, and the Ark of the Covenant had crossed over Jordan to the Promised Land. The wind buffeted us, sweeping down the Great Rift Valley extending from Eastern Anatolia to Kenya. (Geographic studies since then have determined that the Great Rift Valley is in fact several separate though contiguous rifts, but that did not shield us from the wind.) Over the River Jordan near the ancient crossing point were the remains of Damia Bridge to Jordan, which the Israeli Army had blown up in June to block the advance of Jordanian and Iraqi troops into the West Bank. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The Haganah had blown up the old bridge on night of June 16-17, 1946, in an operation (“Night of the Bridges”) targeting eight bridges used by the British Army. The Yishuv turned against the British toward the end of World War II, as Britain’s half-hearted attempts to mollify Arab protests against Jewish immigration clashed with the revelations about the Holocaust and the rising tide of refugees, who fled toward Palestine some out of sincere Zionism and many for lack of an alternative in a world where most sovereign states, including the U.S., enforced tight restrictions on immigration. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The guide, however, offered a different explanation for blowing up the bridge: the Haganah, he said, dynamited the bridge to prevent the Palestinian leader al-Hajji Amin al-Husayni, the mufti of Jerusalem, from returning to Palestine after spending much of the war in Berlin under Hitler’s protection. Husayni, for many years the best known Palestinian leader, gave Zionism one of its major propaganda victories. Like some Arab nationalists and other anti-colonial activists at the time, he saw Germany as a potential ally against Britain – and, in Husayni’s case, the Jews. A few weeks before writing this, in January 2015, I saw a picture of Husayni having tea with Hitler over the entrance to the downtown 1 subway at Lincoln Center. It was an ad by some organization dedicated to depicting opposition to Israel as anti-Semitism. According to Rashid Khalidi, the mufti believed that he could “play on great power rivalries with little cost to himself or to the cause of Palestine. The falsity of this notion,” Khalidi went on, “was to be proved when he fled to Germany during World War II, becoming a pariah, and gravely harming the Palestinian cause with which he had become identified.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref20" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[20]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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I recognized Husayni’s name when the guide mentioned it – his collaboration with the Nazis was part of the narrative I had learned. Later in my life I even got into an argument about it. I spent the summer of 1974 in Jaipur, India, doing research for my M.A. thesis at the University of Chicago. At the University Guest House where I was staying, I met four Palestinian refugees from Lebanon who were enrolled in a medical residency program. At first we chatted about anodyne subjects such as the similarities of the Arabic and Hebrew languages – unlike the Pepsi vender in Nablus, they were unfamiliar with Hebrew. I got to know one of them better, and we both became slightly obsessed with trying to argue with and understand each other. One evening the conversation stumbled down a rathole: he said that Palestinians were not responsible for the Holocaust, and I brought up al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni’s collaboration with the Nazis. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Husayni fled from a British warrant to arrest him for his leadership of the 1936-39 uprising. After staying some time in Damascus and Tehran, Mussolini’s intelligence service smuggled him to Rome, and he soon established himself in Berlin. He acted out the choice that faced many leaders of anti-colonial movements in the British Empire during World War II. Like others, he hoped that Britain’s war with Germany and Japan would weaken the colonial rulers, though few took their action to as high a level of open collaboration with the Nazis as Husayni. <o:p></o:p></div>
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One leader of the Indian National Congress, Subhas Chandra Bose, made the same choice as Husayni, though with more success. Husayni asked Hitler to enable him to lead an Arab Legion to free the Arab world from colonialism. Wary of his allies in Italy and Vichy France, both of whom had colonial possessions in the Arab world, Hitler never made such a commitment.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref21" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[21]</span></span></span></a> Bose fled from an Indian prison to Berlin, where he gained Hitler’s support. The Germans eventually transferred him by submarine to the Japanese in Sumatra. With Japanese support he organized the Indian National Army, which fought the British with some initial success alongside the Japanese in Southeast Asia and Burma. After the war, the Congress praised Bose’s patriotism but distanced itself from his collaboration with fascism. Bose died in a plane crash in 1945 while trying to flee to the USSR. The Congress and the Muslim League joined forces to oppose the court martial of British Indian Army officers who had joined the INA, whom the Indian public perceived as patriots.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The mainstream leadership of the Indian National Congress took a different path. In the letter I received from Indira Gandhi’s aide in June 1967, he mentioned that Mrs. Gandhi’s father, Jawarharlal Nehru, “was in the forefront of the world’s protest against Nazis.” From the prison cell where the British held him during World War II, he wrote: <o:p></o:p></div>
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It was not merely the physical acts of aggression which fascism and nazism indulged in, not only the vulgarity and brutality that accompanied them, terrible as they were, that affected us. But the principles on which they stood and which they proclaimed to loudly and blatantly, the theories of life on which they tried to fashion themselves. For these went counter to what we believed in the present and what we had held from ages past.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref22" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[22]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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In the 1930s Nehru refused invitations from both Hitler and Mussolini, preferring instead to show his solidarity with Czechoslovakia by visiting Prague before Munich. He “wanted India to take her full share in the war against fascism and Nazism, but “only as a free country and an equal.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref23" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[23]</span></span></span></a>When Germany attacked Poland in 1939, the British Viceroy declared that India was a party to the war as part of the British Empire. The leadership of the Indian National Congress passed a resolution expressing principled opposition to German aggression but offering India’s support to the war only as a sovereign country. Gandhi called the British insistence that independence could be negotiated only after the war was won “a post dated cheque on a crashing bank" and launched the Quit India movement. Most of the leaders of the Congress spent the war in prison in Agra, where Nehru wrote <u>The Discovery of India</u>.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftnref24" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[24]</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
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Palestinians paid the price both for having no anti-colonial leader with the vision of Jawaharlal Nehru and for wanting to save their land and homes from the Nazis’ worst victims. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Our bus passed the white mesas on the road to Jericho and kept going down Highway 90 until we reached Ein al-Feshkha for a dip in the Dead Sea – the warm, viscous water was the antithesis of the spring water of Baniyas. We stopped in Qumran, where Bedouin found the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we had lunch in the oasis of Ein Dik, where again I remarked on the presence of what I called “Negro Arabs.” Returning toward Jericho, we took route 1 west toward Jerusalem. In Ramallah, which I found clean and prosperous, I bought falafel, softer and larger than what I was accustomed to, and washed it down with some tamar hindi. We drove back via Nablus, where a muezzin was calling acoustically from the mosque – according to some boys I met, the electricity was out, so he couldn’t use the loudspeaker. We returned to Haifa via Hadera. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On Shabbat September 2, I hitchhiked to Ramla, where I caught a bus to Jerusalem. After dinner at the Rigbys I returned to Omer. I had only one more full day to visit Israel. On Monday September 4, Labor Day in the U.S., I had to take the bus to Lod and get on the plane. I decided to leave Omer that evening to pay a visit to Masada. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn1" title="">[1]</a>Shavit, Ari (2013-11-19). My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Kindle Locations 1780-1781). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn2" title="">[2]</a>Shavit, Ari (2013-11-19). My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Kindle Locations 1788-1790). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn3" title="">[3]</a>Shavit, Ari (2013-11-19). My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Kindle Locations 1790-1793). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn4" title="">[4]</a>Shavit, Ari (2013-11-19). My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Kindle Locations 2054-2056). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn5" title="">[5]</a>Ari Shavit, <u>My Israel</u>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn6" title="">[6]</a>Shavit, Ari (2013-11-19). My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Kindle Locations 2068-2070). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn7" title="">[7]</a>Rabin, <u>Memoirs</u>, pp. 75-76.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn8" title="">[8]</a>I have since learned that the term “Yerushalayim shel Zahav” (Jerusalem of Gold) refers to a promise Rabbi Akiba gave to his wife, when her father cast her out of the house for marrying such a good-for-nothing against the family’s wishes, but to me and many other listeners the phrase evoked the view of the Old City from the surrounding hills, centered on the shining Dome of the Rock. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn9" title="">[9]</a>Morris, <u>Origin of the Palestine Refugee Problem</u>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn10" title="">[10]</a>Be- tisha be-av mevarchim she-hecheyanu. Ze maspik ad Yerushalayim. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn11" title="">[11]</a>“Yesh ha-kol! Hashavnu she-ain lahem kelum!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn12" title="">[12]</a>http://www.napoleon-series.org/ins/scholarship98/c_palestine.html.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn13" title="">[13]</a>A recording can be found at http://www.folkways.si.edu/mark-olf/der-rebbe-elimelech-the-rabbi-elimelech/judaica/music/track/smithsonian.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn14" title="">[14]</a>http://www.hebrewsongs.com/?song=shirhapalmach<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn15" title="">[15]</a>Mordechai Bar-On, <u>In Pursuit of Peace: A History of the Israeli Peace Movement</u>(Washington, DC: USIP, 1996), 12, cited by Morris, Righteous Victims, Kindle version, location 948.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn16" title="">[16]</a>JK, YA 1:113.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn17" title="">[17]</a>Twain, Innocents Abroad, p. 405.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn18" title="">[18]</a>Khalidi, <u>Identity</u>, 106-110.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn19" title="">[19]</a>Knesset debate, 2 Dec. 1964, page 486, cited in Jiryis, Ṣabrĭ (1976). <i>The Arabs in Israel</i>. New York : Monthly Review Press. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn20" title="">[20]</a>Khalidi, <u>The Iron Cage</u>, pp. 113-114.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn21" title="">[21]</a>Philip Mattar, <u>The Mufti of Jerusalem</u>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn22" title="">[22]</a>Nehru, <u>Discovery of India</u>, p. 3.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn23" title="">[23]</a>Ibid., p. 5.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_ftn24" title="">[24]</a>Ibid., pp. 339-381.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Barnett R. Rubinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01022148691890851391noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-26403442445852521022018-04-30T21:39:00.004-04:002018-04-30T21:39:22.510-04:00David Scott Palmer, RIP<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: #f5f8fa; color: #14171a; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">It saddens me to note the passing of <a href="http://it%20saddens%20me%20to%20note%20the%20passing%20of%20david%20scott%20palmer%2C%20my%20colleague%20for%2025%20yrs.%20scott%20was%20a%20skilled%20latin%20americanist%2C%20a%20fine%20teacher%20%26%20a%20remarkably%20generous%20person.%20scott%27s%20contributions%20to%20boston%20university%20are%20just%20part%20of%20his%20legacy.%20i%20will%20miss%20him./">David Scott Palmer</a>, my colleague for 25 yrs. Scott was a skilled Latin Americanist, a fine teacher & a remarkably generous person. Scott's contributions to Boston University are just part of his legacy. I will miss him. It saddens me to note the passing of David Scott Palmer, my colleague for 25 yrs. Scott was a skilled Latin Americanist, a fine teacher & a remarkably generous person. Scott's contributions to Boston University are just part of his legacy. I will miss him.</span></div>
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https://www.bu.edu/pardeeschool/2018/04/30/rip-prof-david-scott-palmer/<span class="fullpost">
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arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com63tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-30205001419056468982018-01-15T11:49:00.001-05:002018-01-15T12:38:47.120-05:00Memoir of MLK and the March on Washington, with reflections on the Jewish histories of liberalism and Zionism<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span class="fullpost">This is a draft chapter of an uncompleted work that needs editing and much more. Some of the references are unclear as they are to the previous chapter. Apologies. I am posting in honor of MLK day. It starts with a memoir of Dr. King at the March on Washington and then veers into historical stream of consciousness on the history of Jews, liberalism, imperialism, and Zionism. Comments welcome.</span><br />
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<span class="fullpost"></span>Chapter Two: The Emancipation of the Jews </div>
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On August 27, 1963, my mother, Shirley Cooperman Rubin, and I got up early to board a bus chartered by the Philadelphia chapter of the American Jewish Congress to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. AJC’s leader in Philadelphia, Rabbi Yaakov Rosenberg, barely sat down during the whole trip, leading us in singing Hebrew songs, civil rights anthems, and what were then known as “Negro spirituals.” On the way back from the rally our chorus joined with the many buses chartered by black churches travelling beside us along the highways, with people singing and shouting, “Freedom!” through the open windows in those days before air conditioning.
Rabbi Rosenberg, who was then the leader of congregation Adath Jeshurun in Elkins Park, died in Jerusalem in 2000 while visiting his daughter Pnina, who was a year behind me at Akiba. I last saw her in Jerusalem during my 1967 visit, when I dropped in on a summer program in which she was participating.<br />
<br />
In a chapter about the U.S., Jacob Katz’s text taught about slavery in the South and explained the conflict over the doctrine of states’ rights, but it did not mention the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Some slave owners treated their slaves humanely, Katz wrote, but others subjected them to oppression (“parekh,” a Hebrew word applied in the Bible to the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt). The original edition, written before Brown vs. Board of Education and the growth of the civil rights movement in the U.S., did not discuss race relations after abolition. Later editions stated:
<br />
<br />
Negroes were equal citizens before the law, but they continued to be considered as an inferior race by the majority of whites, and suffered discrimination even in the North.<br />
<br />
Katz did not mention legally imposed segregation, the deprivation of voting rights, or the use of terrorism, including lynching, against the black community.
At Passover seders in my family we often compared the liberation from Egyptian slavery to the blessings of coming to the U.S. Starting sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, we also reminded ourselves that we were obligated to continue progress toward an incomplete freedom by supporting the civil rights movement in the U.S., and we sang the spiritual “Go Down Moses” at every Seder. That was part of our version of Luria’s tikkun ‘olam.<br />
<br />
My parents collected signatures on petitions for “open housing” for the American Jewish Congress, though I don’t recall ever discussing the civil rights movement in my all-white public elementary school in Lower Merion Township outside Philadelphia, where I studied through the spring of 1960. At Akiba, which I entered in the fall of 1960, all the students were Jewish and Ashkenazi. We had a Haitian French teacher of aristocratic demeanor (the only faculty member who always wore a suit and tie and whom we later – much later -- learned was a closeted gay jazz piano player) and a Moroccan Hebrew teacher, who had composed a Hebrew poem about racism, which he read at the school Seders: “’Ad ana, Eli, ‘ad matai, yad levana ta’oz ‘alai?” – For how long, my God, until when, will the white hand oppress me?<br />
<br />
Our Jewish contingent at the March on Washington got off the bus somewhere near the Mall and gradually made our way toward the Lincoln Memorial. We arrived too late to hear Josh White, the black folksinger whom my mother had seen perform in the 1940s, when she was a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate with leftist friends from New York. I finally saw Josh White myself on August 5, 1967, when I took my then girlfriend, now wife, Susan Blum, to hear him the Saturday night before my departure for Israel, at a coffeehouse called the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. The opening act was a unknown singer with a well-known name, Arlo Guthrie, who performed the “Multi-Colored Rainbow Roaches” variant of his as-yet unrecorded song about draft resistance, “Alice’s Restaurant.”<br />
<br />
Our AJC group arrived at the Mall during the “folk music” segment of the March’s program. Joan Baez sang “Oh Freedom,“ “All My Trials” (which she changed to “All Your Trials,” addressing the crowd), and We Shall Overcome.” Bob Dylan performed “Only a Pawn in their Game,” about how one group of oppressed people, poor whites, were used against another, black people. Then Baez joined him for the first public performance of Dylan’s messianic hymn, “When the Ship Comes In,” which Dylan had written earlier that month as a prophecy of doom for a hotel clerk who refused to register him because of his ratty clothes:<br />
<br />
Then the sands will roll
Out a carpet of gold<br />
For your weary toes to be a-touchin’<br />
And the ship’s wise men
Will remind you once again<br />
That the whole wide world is watchin’<br />
Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes<br />
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’<br />
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real<br />
The hour when the ship comes in<br />
<br />
Then they’ll raise their hands
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands<br />
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered<br />
And like Pharoah’s tribe
They’ll be drownded in the tide<br />
And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered<br />
<br />
As we got closer to the front, Peter, Paul, and Mary were singing Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which they had released a few months earlier. Dylan didn’t release a recording till 1964. I had never heard it before:<br />
<br />
How many roads must a man walk down<br />
Before you call him a man?<br />
Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail<br />
Before she sleeps in the sand?<br />
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly<br />
Before they’re forever banned?<br />
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind<br />
The answer is blowin’ in the wind<br />
<br />
How many years can a mountain exist<br />
Before it’s washed to the sea?<br />
Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist<br />
Before they’re allowed to be free?<br />
Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head<br />
Pretending he just doesn’t see?<br />
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind<br />
The answer is blowin’ in the wind<br />
<br />
How many times must a man look up<br />
Before he can see the sky?<br />
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have<br />
Before he can hear people cry?<br />
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows<br />
That too many people have died?<br />
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind<br />
The answer is blowin’ in the wind<br />
<br />
I saw Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul, and Mary one more time -- at about 3 A.M. on August 29, 1968, when he calmed a beaten and tear-gassed crowd of antiwar protesters at the Democratic National Convention, including me, in Chicago’s Grant Park by singing Dylan’s as yet unrecorded, “I Shall be Released,” accompanying himself on the guitar:<br />
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They say ev’ry man needs protection<br />
They say ev’ry man must fall<br />
Yet I swear I see my reflection<br />
Some place so high above this wall<br />
I see my light come shining<br />
From the west unto the east<br />
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released<br />
<br />
Standing next to me in this lonely crowd<br />
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame<br />
All day long I hear him shout so loud<br />
Crying out that he was framed<br />
<br />
I see my light come shining<br />
From the west unto the east<br />
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released<br />
<br />
About an hour earlier, along with my fellow student from Yale, Josh Javits, son of Jacob Javits, the (liberal Jewish) Republican senator from New York, I had run into Norman Mailer behind the Hilton Hotel. Mailer was another Jewish participant in (and chronicler of) the 1963 march, but we didn’t see him at the time – by his own account the rhetoric wore him down, and he wandered off, missing King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. President Kennedy was assassinated a few months after the March. While I was a freshman at Yale, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and Bobby Kennedy just a month later, on June 5.<br />
<br />
I had read Mailer’s “On the Steps of the Pentagon” in Harper’s magazine, an account of the October 1967 march on the Pentagon that would late be published as the book Armies of the Night. On June 6, the day after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination I wrote Mailer:<br />
<br />
When Martin Luther King was shot, I didn't quite understand what it meant. I had seen Kennedy during the campaign in 1960 and I heard King at Washington in 1963, and I could see that there was something similar in these men, some specific strength or knowledge that the slagheap left after the industrial production of men could not tolerate. At the time, in April, I wanted to write you to ask you to write something that would clarify things to me as The Steps of the Pentagon had clarified them. Now that Bobby Kennedy is dead, the need seems more pressing. So my request is that you write something now which would at least begin to explain what the mystery at the center of these events was.<br />
<br />
Mailer replied on August 2: “Well, I’ll be covering the Republican and Democratic conventions. Let’s see if anything comes out of that.”<br />
<br />
I reminded him of our correspondence when we met behind the Hilton, scene of the first clash of police and protesters the day before. The protesters, or, should I say, we were chanting a version of a line from “When the Ship Comes In”: “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” The world was listening too: the crack of police batons on skulls was louder than I had anticipated. Mailer grinned, and we shook hands.<br />
<br />
In the adrenalin-fueled insomnia of that early morning in late August 1968, that sublime, hope-filled morning in late August 1963 seemed a long time past. As the music ended and the speeches began, my mother and I and the rest of the AJC group made our way from our starting point down the reflecting pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and ended up slightly behind stage left of the podium. We had a pretty clear view of the speakers’ left profiles.<br />
<br />
Mahalia Jackson opened the final section of the program with “I’ve Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned”: “There’s trouble all over the world, children, ain’t gonna lay my religion down.” She followed with “How I Got Over”:<br />
<br />
Tell me how I got over Lord,
Had a mighty hard time coming on over<br />
You know my soul look back and wonder
How did I make it over?<br />
<br />
The final verse of the spiritual, which she did not sing that day, told where she was going – the same destination to which Isaac Luria intended to lead his students:<br />
<br />
In that new Jerusalem
I'm gonna walk the streets of gold<br />
It's the homeland of the soul<br />
I'm gonna view the host in white<br />
They've been traveling day and night<br />
Coming up from every nation<br />
They're on their way to the great Cognation<br />
Coming from the north, south, east, and west<br />
They're on their way to a land of rest.<br />
<br />
Jackson took a seat directly behind the podium. King had not decided how much he would preach that day. As he reached the end of his prepared text with a somewhat stiff paragraph starting “I am not unmindful that,” Jackson called out to him, “Tell them about the Dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!” And he did, in language I recognized:<br />
<br />
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together."<br />
<br />
But before Dr. King gave his new testimony, we heard some of that old testimony from Rabbi Joachim Prinz, President of the American Jewish Congress and one of the leading rabbinical supporters of the civil rights movement. He was so well known for his activism that Philip Roth made him a character in his 2004 novel, The Plot against America, in which Prinz organizes the Jews of Newark into a self-defense force against anti-Semites inspired by Hitler’s ally, U.S. President Charles Lindbergh.<br />
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Prinz was AJC’s contribution to the day, and my mother always resented that King’s speech got all the attention, while everyone forgot Rabbi Prinz’s. But I never forgot it. This is what he said:<br />
<br />
I speak to you as an American Jew.
As Americans we share the profound concern of millions of people about the shame and disgrace of inequality and injustice, which make a mockery of the great American idea.
As Jews we bring to this great demonstration, in which thousands of us proudly participate, a two-fold experience -- one of the spirit and one of our history.
In the realm of the spirit, our fathers taught us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody's neighbor.<br />
<br />
Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man's dignity and integrity.
From our Jewish historic experience of three and a half thousand years we say:
Our ancient history began with slavery and the yearning for freedom. During the Middle Ages my people lived for a thousand years in the ghettos of Europe. Our modern history begins with a proclamation of emancipation.
It is for these reasons that it is not merely sympathy and compassion for the black people of America that motivates us. It is above all and beyond all such sympathies and emotions a sense of complete identification and solidarity born of our own painful historic experience.<br />
<br />
When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem is silence.
A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality, and in the face of mass murder.
America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent. Not merely black America, but all of America. It must speak up and act, from the President down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community but for the sake of the image, the idea and the aspiration of America itself.<br />
<br />
<u>Enlightenment and Pseudo-Messiahs</u><br />
<br />
This was the Jewish narrative that brought us to the March on Washington: a people born in slavery, freed by a lawgiver, exiled by an empire, oppressed in ghettos – and emancipated by the movements that followed the Enlightenment, starting with the revolutionary French National Assembly’s proclamation of September 27, 1791, to which Prinz referred, granting full and equal rights of citizenship to the Jews of France. Commitment to those full and equal rights – for everyone – brought us to Washington.<br />
<br />
In his book, Wir Juden, written when he was a rabbi in Berlin under Hitler, Prinz described Jewish life before the French Revolution as being like life in a cell, where the prisoner counts the days by drawing lines on the wall. And then, in Katz’s words:
Half a year after the outbreak of the French Revolution the Sephardim [who lived in areas long under the rule of France] were recognized as citizens of France with equal rights. The deliberations on the Ashkenazim [who lived mostly in Alsace, which had distinct anti-Semitic regulations] continued contentiously throughout the session of the first National Assembly. But before the dissolution of the Assembly the sympathizers of the Jews gained the upper hand. In September 1791 a declaration was issued granting the Jews equality of rights with all other citizens of the state.
Prinz recounted how the revolutionary armies under Napoleon took emancipation farther afield. “When Napoleon marched though the Rhineland shining like a Roman Emperor, the Jewish youth cheered him as the liberator, the warrior, the stormer of the ghetto.”<br />
<br />
Katz taught a generation of Israeli Jewish youth:<br />
<br />
When the French armed forces entered the Rhineland and Northern Italy, the residents of the ghettos welcomed them with open arms. The report of the equality of rights of French Jews spread everywhere quickly, and the Jews of the conquered cities saw with their own eyes that Jews were serving in the French armed forces like the rest of the citizens. Everywhere that a republic was founded under the influence of the French conquerors, a law was enacted that there should be no difference in rights between Jew and non-Jew. Thus were emancipated the Jews of Holland, the cities of the Rhineland, and Northern Italy. It was as if the walls of the ghetto had fallen in one night.<br />
<br />
This is the history that led French Prime Minister Manuel Valls to say, after the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher massacres of January 2015, that the departure of France’s Jews would mean the “failure of the republic.” Though Napoleon later backtracked on some of his reforms and always considered the Jews with some suspicion, his acts led Tsar Alexander I to call him the “Anti-Christ.” Austrian Chancellor Metternich feared that the Jews might greet Bonaparte as “the promised Messiah,” as did some followers of Jacob Frank, an eighteenth-century pseudo-messiah born in Buczacz, the same town as Agnon.<br />
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Napoleon did not only emancipate the Jews and spread the republican doctrine of the revolution (at least until he crowned himself Emperor) – his 1798 invasion of Egypt and Palestine also made him the first liberal imperialist. During that campaign Napoleon may have contemplated harnessing the messianic longings of the Jews to his imperial ambition. He may have been the first European ruler to take up, if unwittingly, a proposal made in the sixteenth century by the pseudo-messiah David Reubeni.<br />
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I wrote a paper on David Reubeni in the fall of 1967, my first semester at Yale, in a class taught by David Price, then a history PhD student and now a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from North Carolina whom I met again in the course of my duties at the State Department. Reubeni claimed to come from a Jewish kingdom called Khaibar, possibly in Arabia, Cochin (India), or Afghanistan. Arriving in Venice in 1524, he offered European rulers an alliance with his kingdom’s Jewish army against the Ottomans, who had captured Palestine only seven years earlier. He proposed to the papal court in Avignon, King João III of Portugal, and the Emperor Charles V that they join with this army to establish a Jewish kingdom on the territory of the Ottoman Empire. Diego Pires, a forcibly converted Jew serving at the Portuguese court, reverted to Judaism and took the name Shlomo Molcho to serve as Reubeni’s herald and propagandist. It was in this role that he met Joseph Karo in Salonika. Nothing came of the plan at that time. The Inquisition burned Molcho at the stake, and Reubeni disappeared into its dungeons.<br />
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Reubeni and his followers saw themselves as actors in the Jewish drama of exile, persecution, and redemption, but another history was going on around them. Reubeni met Charles V in 1530, thirty-eight years after the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain, when Christopher Columbus, possibly a secret Jew, sailed from Seville looking for a western passage to India. He undertook that voyage using a mariner’s astrolabe and techniques of open-sea (blue-water) navigation developed in the previous century. Columbus’s wrong-way journey led to the conquest and colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade, which powered the global industries of first sugar and then cotton -- but Asia remained the prize. China and India produced over half of global GDP before the industrial revolution. Five years after Columbus, in 1497, Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the Cape of Good Hope, opening the sea route from Europe to India. In 1521, four years after the Ottomans captured Palestine, Magellan circumnavigated the globe. By the time Reubeni reached the courts of Europe, their rulers were already thinking of how to expand their reach into Asia despite Ottoman control of the land routes.<br />
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Two hundred and fifty years later, by the time of Napoleon, the struggle for trade routes and military access to those lands affected the entire globe – including the Jews with their hope for redemption.
The original version of Katz's Israel and the Nations omitted any mention of colonialism. Later editions, written after the start of decolonization, included a chapter on “European Imperialism”:<br />
<br />
By the last third of the nineteenth century the western states that had reached the stage of industrial development dominated large parts of the continents of Asia and Africa. Thus the dominant states established their rule over areas outside of their own countries, as the Romans did in ancient times. Such an extensive state was called “imperium,” from which derives the modern term “imperialism.” This form of domination started with England, Holland, and France, which had established settlements for trade there as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They called these settlements “colonies,” and rule over colonies was called “colonialism.”<br />
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Katz drew no connection between the European imperialism he described and the British mandate in Palestine under which he was living when he wrote the first edition of the textbook. Nor did he connect it to an episode he recounted involving Napoleon and the Jews.<br />
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As part of his invasion of Egypt and then Palestine, Katz wrote, Napoleon launched an appeal to the Jews of Asia and Africa to ally with France against the Ottoman Empire, as Reubeni had offered to do several centuries earlier.
As a general of revolutionary France, Napoleon faced a Britain that was not only leading the reactionary powers of Europe against the revolution, but was also competing with France on the seas and in the scramble for Asia. The British East India Company ousted the French from North India in 1757, when it defeated their ally, the Nawab of Bengal, in the Battle of Plassey. By 1793, two years after the French National Assembly offered full rights of citizenship to the Jews of France, the British East India Company established its capital in Calcutta (Kolkata). Its expansion temporarily blocked to the northwest by the rising powers of the Sikhs in Punjab and the Durrani empire in Afghanistan, the Company turned to the conquest of France’s holdings in South India, with its ports on the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean. By 1798 the Company’s army was on the way to defeating France’s ally in the South, Tipu Sultan, in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. Among the commanders of that war was Colonel Arthur Wellesley, who as the first Duke of Wellington eventually defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.<br />
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Unable to attack Britain’s island redoubt directly, Napoleon riposted to Britain’s offensive in India by establishing a beachhead between London and Calcutta, astride the land route from the Mediterranean to the British rear in India, the same route that Alexander the Great had followed. In 1798 he shocked the world by occupying Egypt, and in March he followed in Alexander’s footsteps toward Palestine and Syria. He captured Jaffa and Haifa and besieged the port of Acre in March 1799. Napoleon marched through Galilee toward Tiberias on the road to Damascus, destroying an Ottoman relief force at Mt. Tabor on April 16.
But before Napoleon could reach Damascus, the British blocked him on both fronts. The Royal Navy, which had landed in Acre on March 16, 1799, imposed a successful blockade on Napoleon’s forces in Jaffa and Haifa. On May 4, 1799, Tipu Sultan fell in battle against the Company’s forces at Srirangapatna, in today’s Indian state of Karnataka. Wellesley (Wellington) was the first to confirm his death.<br />
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In the summer of 1973, during my first trip to South Asia, I viewed murals depicting the resistance of Tipu Sultan at his palace in Mysore, which I visited together with the Hillel rabbi of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. I had met him at Sabbath services in the seventeenth-century Portuguese synagogue in Cochin, Kerala, established by the descendants of Portuguese conversos who declared themselves Jews when the Netherlands captured Cochin in 1662.<br />
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Unable to resupply his troops in Jaffa and Haifa, and facing defeat in India, Napoleon lifted the siege of Acre and withdrew from Palestine on May 21, 1799. Before receiving news of Napoleon’s retreat, however, the French official newspaper Le Moniteur Universel published a dispatch from the front on May 22:<br />
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Bonaparte has published a proclamation in which he invites all the Jews of Asia and Africa to gather under his flag in order to re-establish ancient Jerusalem. He has already given arms to a great number, and their battalions threaten Aleppo.<br />
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Katz devoted a paragraph to what he called “The Great Hope [ha-Tikvah – the Israeli national anthem] in the Days of Napoleon”:<br />
<br />
When Napoleon sent his military expedition to Egypt, it aroused hopes that good things would come to all the people of Israel from his success. They believed that Napoleon intended to conquer the Land of Israel from the Turks and give it to the Jewish people as its ancient homeland. When Napoleon penetrated from Egypt into the Land of Israel, rumors spread that he had issued a proclamation to the Jews of Asia and Africa to gather under his flag and capture control of the Land of Israel. These rumors even reached Jerusalem, where the Jews awaited the events with beating hearts. The Turkish rulers of Jerusalem had already started to assess that the Jews secretly favored the foreign enemy who had entered the country. But none of Napoleon’s plans were implemented.<br />
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This account seems to be based on a 1940 book by Franz Kobler, which included the only document purporting to include the full text of the proclamation. Kobler claimed that the document was a contemporaneous German translation of the proclamation brought by Napoleon’s emissaries to followers of the pseudo-messiah Jacob Frank in the Jewish community of Prague. Most now consider the document a forgery.
Whatever Napoleon intended, no Jewish battalions came to his rescue. Some Jews did participate in the events precipitated by Napoleon’s incursion into Palestine, but their involvement shows how different the Jewish relationship to great-power geo-politics was then compared to a century later, when Theodore Herzl founded political Zionism.<br />
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The nineteenth-century German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz conjectured that Napoleon’s proclamation might have been aimed at winning over Haim Farhi, a Jewish Ottoman official who was organizing Acre’s defenses, something Katz did not mention, and which clashed with his contention that the Turks suspected the Jews’ loyalty. Katz’s initial work contained no account of the Jews living in the Muslim world except for the mystics in Safed and a chapter on the 1840 blood libel instigated against the Jews by Christians in Damascus. Later editions included chapters on the Jewish communities of the Muslim world that largely emigrated to Israel after 1948. Katz highlighted the response by leading Jews of Western Europe to the Damascus blood libel, but he did not mention the Farhi family, one of whose members defended his co-religionists as a member of the Damascus city council. The Farhis were the Rothschilds of the Levant, In the eighteenth century they controlled much of the Ottoman finances.<br />
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When Napoleon launched his attack on Palestine, Haim Farhi, respected by the Jews of Syria and Palestine for his religious learning, was advisor to the Ottoman governor of Galilee, Ahmad al-Jazzar (the butcher).
Jazzar Pasha, as he was known, was a former Christian from Herzegovina (what we would now call a Bosnian Croat) who sold himself as a slave to escape a murder charge, converted to Islam, and rose in the Ottoman ranks thanks to a felicitous combination of brains and brutality. He once put out one of Haim Farhi’s eyes while in a pique: drawings of Farhi show him wearing an eye patch. In 1820, Farhi was killed by his Muslim stepson, whom Jazzar Pasha had made his successor. In response to an appeal from Farhi’s three brothers in Damascus, the grand mufti of Istanbul issued a firman authorizing Ottoman governors to supply troops to Farhi’s brothers to lay siege to Acre and take revenge. This Jewish-led Islamically mandated army, however, did not try to establish a Jewish state.<br />
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Besides Farhi and the non-existent battalions menacing Aleppo, another Jewish participant in events surrounding the siege of Acre was the Jewish mystic and sage, Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav, a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. In his chapter on the rise of Hasidism in eighteenth-century Poland and Ukraine, Katz summarized Nahman’s teaching in one Zen-like quotation: “The greatest wisdom of all wisdom is to abandon all wisdom, but instead to be plain and direct in simplicity.”
Katz did not mention Nahman’s journey to Palestine. In his book of Hasidic Tales, Souls on Fire, however, Elie Wiesel described that voyage as:
[T]he journey of a visionary, a pilgrimage worthy of the teller and of his tales. Abounding in unpredictable, incredible adventures that succeed one another at dazzling speed, it is a race toward the unknown, toward nothingness.
Wiesel mentions the context: “The Egyptian campaign is at its height. Napoleon wants Jerusalem,” but, like Katz, he did not mention the struggle over imperial access to Asia that explained why Napoleon wanted Jerusalem. Like Rebbe Nahman, Wiesel depicts the events as part of Jewish spiritual history rather than secular world history.<br />
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Nahman never fully divulged what holy mission drew him to the Land of Israel, but he seems to have believed or hoped that the messiah would come soon. Some scholars hold that he believed he was the messiah. He identified with Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, who was taught by the Prophet Elijah, as the messiah would be. Just as David Reubeni emerged to catalyze apocalyptic longings after the expulsions of the Jews from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1496), waves of messianic fervor had swept over the Jews of Ukraine and Poland after the 1648-49 massacres of tens of thousands of Jews by the Ukrainian revolutionary leader Bohdan Chmielnicki. In those days of horror, many survivors placed their hopes in the false messiahs Shabbatai Zevi of Izmir (1626-1676) and Jacob Frank of Podolia (1726-1791), who claimed to be Zevi’s reincarnation.<br />
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Before leaving for Palestine Nahman traveled to Kamenets, a town with a long history of anti-Jewish regulations, and the center of Podolia, the region where the Baal Shem Tov, Jacob Frank, Rebbe Nahman, Agnon, and my wife’s grandmother were born. Susan Blum’s paternal grandmother, Rose Blum, born in Kamenets, told us of a pogrom in 1905 when the rioters cut off a Jewish baker’s fingers and threw them in the oven so he could never knead dough again. The town’s bishop expelled the Jews in 1757 (about the same time as the Battle of Plassey) after orchestrating a public debate between some rabbis and the Frankists, many of whom eventually converted to Christianity, a religion founded by an earlier claimant to the messianic title.<br />
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Though in 1798 Jews other than converted Frankists were forbidden to spend the night in Kamenets, Nahman stayed there secretly and never revealed how he evaded the police or what he did there. The implication was that he had secretly contacted the Frankists about his messianic mission.
Nahman sailed from Odessa across the Black Sea and down the Bosporus to Istanbul, where he knew no one. He tried to hide his identity and suffered from bouts of depression and aggressive childish behavior, all interpreted by his followers as manifestations of his doctrine of simplicity and means of avoiding the great dangers in wait for him on his messianic pilgrimage.<br />
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When Nahman sought to leave for Palestine, he learned that “France had entered the land of the Sultan, Egypt and the Land of Israel, … and France was moving to and fro on the sea.” The Jewish community of Istanbul, far from trying to use Napoleon’s advances for political purposes, tried to stay out of the war. It forbade all Jews to leave the city. But the community arranged one ship for a Sephardic scholar from Jerusalem who had collected the traditional Halukah, or portion, for the Jews of the Holy Land, and Nahman, among others, was allowed to board.
After calming a storm that terrified his shipmates, apparently through spiritual prowess, Nahman arrived in the port of Jaffa.<br />
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When he tried to debark with the Jerusalem sage, however, “The Ishmaelites [Arabs, Turks, or Muslims] did not allow him to enter, because they saw his clothes and the form of his face, with long sidelocks (peyot), as is the custom in our country, and also saw he did not know their language. They therefore concluded that he was certainly one of the spies” sent by France. “No request or supplication sufficed,” and Rabbi Nahman remained on the ship.<br />
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The Ottomans were right to be alert. Napoleon, already occupying the former Ottoman territory of Egypt, was planning a land invasion via Sinai and Gaza, which he launched within six months, on March 3, 1799. As any reader of Kipling will recognize, it was common for states to send spies disguised as pilgrims or traders to collect data of military importance.<br />
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Bad weather and high waves in a spot that Sephardic passengers identified as the location where Jonah had been thrown into the sea forced the captain to leave Jaffa for Haifa, where there seemed to be no Ottoman customs house. Nahman debarked without hindrance on September 8, 1798, in time to celebrate Rosh ha-Shanah the following day. But after services, Nahman again fell into depression: “Anxiety and a broken heart awoke within him, and he uttered nothing to anyone.”<br />
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Messages started to arrive from Safed and Tiberias, where Hasidim from Ukraine had started to settle since 1768 in order to be close to the tomb of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, asking the Baal Shem’s great-grandson to honor them with a visit, especially as his paternal grandfather, Nahman of Horodenka, a disciple of the Baal Shem, was buried there. But Nahman refused. His depression persisted, and during an otherwise joyful pilgrimage to the cave of Elijah on Mt. Carmel during Sukkot, Rebbe Nahman remained quiet, refusing to dance or celebrate. After Simhat Torah, a week later, he told his companion he wanted to return home.<br />
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After Sukkot, Rabbi Nahman finally agreed to travel on to Tiberias. He visited the tomb of his grandfather and proceeded to the cave of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, where he suddenly rejoiced, singing Hasidic melodies to himself all night. He put on his tallit and tefilin and prayed for several hours.
Plague struck Tiberias, which was placed under quarantine, and Nahman escaped only by climbing the city wall overlooking the Sea of Galilee. He made his way to Safed. In Safed he heard that “the French would soon come to Acre,” presumably that Napoleon had captured Jaffa on March 7. In Jaffa the representative of the Enlightenment and emancipator of the Jews massacred about two thousand Ottoman prisoners (mostly Albanians) who had surrendered under promise of safety.<br />
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A frightened Nahman immediately sent a messenger to Acre with instructions to book him passage on a ship flying the flag of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), a neutral city that had managed to become a trading superpower in the Mediterranean. Ragusan ships sailed freely through the war zone. Nahman arrived in Acre on the eve of Shabbat Zachor (March 16, 1799), but people fleeing the city had booked all the Ragusan ships.
Nahman was terrified as 50,000 heavily armed “Ishmaelite” soldiers took over the city and locked the gates. He did not know they were carrying out the orders of his fellow Jew, Haim Farhi, who was personally supervising the city’s defenses.<br />
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The agent who was trying to find a ship for Nahman told him on the Sabbath (March 16) that the only one available was an “Ishmaelite” merchant vessel taking goods to Istanbul. The danger of capture and piracy seemed less than the danger of remaining in a city about to go to war, which the agent guessed would start in two or three days. The siege started on March 20, when Napoleon’s infantry arrived from Jaffa. Nahman authorized the agent to hire a ship on the Sabbath, because pikuah nefesh (saving a life) has priority over the Sabbath.<br />
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And then, the Rabbi’s chronicler recounts: “Many ships with men of war from England also arrived in Acre, and panic spread more and more, for there was great crowding in the city, for there was little space to hold so much population.” This was the Royal Navy flotilla led by Commodore Sidney Smith, a rival of Lord Nelson, arriving in time to secure the route to India from France. Then came the announcement that the government had decreed that all civilians who did not evacuate the city by sea (the gates were closed on the land side) within two hours would be executed to clear the ground for the battle.<br />
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Though this order too probably came from Farhi, Nahman did not appeal to his fellow Jew, of whom he was apparently unaware; nor did he approach the British, as this was before the Balfour Declaration. Instead he and his companion with great difficulty made their way to the shore, where they took a “bark” to a large ship, thinking or hoping it was the one on which they had booked passage. When they saw it bristling with cannon, they tried to convince themselves that it was a merchant ship armed in self-defense, but it turned out to be a Turkish warship filled with “savage Ishmaelite warriors” who they feared would sell them into slavery. But they had no alternative and boarded.<br />
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The battle started, the French Navy bombarded the ship, and the cannons roared. Nahman and his companion were confined to a small cabin with no food or water. One crewmember spoke a little Russian to them. The cook brought them black coffee twice a day. Battered by French artillery and storms, the ship took on water. The pumps broke, and the crew tried to bail by hand. They threw all the cargo overboard, but nothing helped. Nahman feared that the crew would sell him and his companion into slavery in a country with no Jews, an anxiety he coped with by working out how he would observe all 613 commandments alone, even if he had no books or texts and did not know whether it was the Sabbath or a holiday.<br />
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The ship docked on the Isle of Rhodes, part of the Ottoman Empire, the day before Passover, April 18. Knowing that there were Jews in Rhodes, the captain let Nahman’s companion enter the city under guard to buy kosher food. The companion feared that the city’s security forces would arrest him as a foreign spy in time of war, but finally “they did nothing at all to him,” and he met the community’s chief rabbi (hakham, the Sephardic term) and told him what had happened. The hakham told him not to worry.<br />
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The companion was in a hurry to buy matzah and wine, but first he played a little Jewish geography.
It came to his mind that when he was in the inn in Tiberias he heard from Rabbi Zvi Horker that the latter’s wife, who was from an important Sephardic family, had a brother in Rhodes, a great and righteous hakham. He couldn’t remember his name, but he asked the hakham if he had a sister in Tiberias married to Rabbi Zvi.
He didn’t, but he knew the hakham who did, so he invited both of them to the seder and again told them not to worry.<br />
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Rabbi Horker’s brother-in-law told him that the community had already convinced the captain not to leave until they had ransomed the captives, and they would pay whatever was necessary. The captain, he said, was a notorious thief, deeply rooted in evil, related to the five lords of the Philistines, which was how he signed his name. (The Philistine polity was composed of five city-states, named in Joshua 13:3 and I Samuel 6:17.) After sending the companion to the hammam and serving him coffee, they asked who the other captive was. They knew of the Baal Shem and were thrilled and honored to redeem his descendant.<br />
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The next day, the first day of Passover, having returning to the ship to tell Nahman of what had happened, the companion came back to the city. He attended services and was invited to the afternoon holiday meal, during which he was plied with so much wine that when he returned to the ship laden with delicacies for Nahman, he passed out before he could say a word.<br />
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The next day, the first of the intermediate days of Passover, the hakham and two wealthy members of the community called on the captain and asked him to release the two passengers.
The captain may have been a Palestinian, since the only sense I can make of the claim that he signed his name as a descendant of the Philistines is that he called himself so-and-so (his name is not recorded) al-Filastini, the Palestinian, using a geographic surname.<br />
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While the Jews of Rhodes considered him a thief, he presented a different narrative of his actions, which Rabbi Nahman’s companion passed on to the chronicler:<br />
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What do you have to do with these two? I saved them from chaos. . . . Not just that, let me tell you, during this whole trip there was hardly a moment without an accident (rega’ be-lo pega’) and we could have tossed these two into the sea or sold them to the Ishmaelites (slave traders). We could have taken all their money and belongings without anyone so much as whistling or saying a word. But what could we do? They had lucky stars in heaven, and what’s more, God (may He be blessed) performed a miracle for them: this ship quickly arrived here, and, miracle within a miracle, God has unburdened my heart and enlightened my mind, so that I took one of them into the city. Even now it would be within my rights to take their money, but all I ask is that, to prevent my sailors from complaining to me, you give me two hundred thalers, and take them off the ship.<br />
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The Jews of Rhodes paid the ransom, equal to about the price of one African in the New York slave market on Wall Street at that time.<br />
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Nahman and his companion were freed from the ship on May 21, the same day that Le Moniteur Universel announced Napoleon’s plan to recruit a Jewish army against the Ottomans, whose authorities in Rhodes immediately accused the two Hasidim of spying. Much to their chagrin, they had to remove their black Hasidic garb and peyot and dress like the Sephardim to disguise themselves. The Jews of Rhodes got Nahman on a ship to Istanbul.<br />
<br />
In Istanbul the Ottoman authorities found that Nahman and his companion had not shown their passports when they had passed through before. They confiscated their passports and tried to impose an enormous fine (evidently larger than the ransom demanded by the captain). A member of the Istanbul Jewish community bribed someone in the Ottoman administration and the two rushed off to Galati, Romania, where they were put in quarantine. They each had to pay four gold ducats to be released. They got back to Ukraine with no further incidents.<br />
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In 1805 the British Navy terminated Bonaparte’s oriental ambitions at Trafalgar, where Lord Nelson fell, and Britain ruled the waves. Five years later Rabbi Nahman died of tuberculosis at the age of 38 in Uman, Ukraine, two years before Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia, without ever benefitting from either the emancipation of the Jews or Napoleon’s transient Middle Eastern conquests. Those of his followers who survived after their community was nearly extinguished in the Holocaust gather at Rebbe Nahman’s tomb every Rosh ha-Shanah. A formula containing his name now appears on many bumper stickers in Israel, as protection against the many dangers of travel that Nahman surmounted.<br />
<br />
In July 1944 the German forces occupying Greece deported the entire Jewish community of Rhodes to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only 151 out of 1,673 survived. The Turkish consul general, Selahettin Ulkumen, managed to rescue about forty and is listed as one of the Righteous among the Nations at Yad Va-Shem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. A few survivors ended up in Seattle, where they founded the third largest Sephardic community in the US, which now includes a research center that is leading the revival of the Ladino language of Sephardic Jews. One member of the community, Howard Behar, became president of Starbucks.</div>
Barnett R. Rubinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01022148691890851391noreply@blogger.com123tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-42415874628651497542017-03-02T11:25:00.005-05:002017-03-02T11:25:52.811-05:00Review essay on Michael Flynn and his worldview, including his hostile comments on Islam and Iran<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The piece runs as the lead review in <a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2017/02/campagna-kerven-lecture-on-modern.html">Middle East Policy</a><span class="fullpost">
</span></div>
arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-72042533729754486522014-08-13T11:42:00.001-04:002014-08-13T11:43:20.942-04:00Insights into the Repressive Character of the Government in Egypt<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The response of the Egyptian government to the <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/08/12/egypt-rab-killings-likely-crimes-against-humanity" target="_blank">investigative report</a> <a href="http://www.hrw.org/reports/2014/08/12/all-according-plan-0" target="_blank">"All According to Plan"</a> [<a href="http://www.hrw.org/ar/reports/2014/08/12-0" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 24px; letter-spacing: -1px; line-height: 30px; text-align: right; text-decoration: none;" title="حسب الخطة">حسب الخطة</a> <a href="http://www.hrw.org/ar/reports/2014/08/12-0" target="_blank">Arabic link</a>] by Human Rights Watch is extremely revealing and provides insights into the mentality of the al-Sisi regime. In short, <a href="http://www.ahram.org.eg/News/31273/25/312544/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%88%D9%84%D9%89/%D9%85%D8%B5%D8%B1-%D8%AA%D8%AA%D9%87%D9%85-%C2%AB%D9%87%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%8A%D8%AA%D8%B3-%D9%88%D9%88%D8%AA%D8%B4%C2%BB-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AD%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B2-%D9%88%D8%B9%D8%AF%D9%85-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%87%D9%86%D9%8A.aspx" target="_blank">as reported by the flagship al-Ahram</a>, <a href="http://www.hrw.org/" target="_blank">HRW</a> is biased, serves U.S. interests, is in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood and had no authority to conduct research in Egypt. There is a deep-seated suspicion of foreign NGOs in Egypt. I have witnessed it numerous times over the past 35 years.<br />
<br />
The latest episode, of course, serves a double purpose, viz., it stifles open discussion of the report and its serious accusations that Field Marshal al-Sisi sits at the helm of a repressive security apparatus that very likely committed crimes against humanity by conducting deliberate mass killings of demonstrators in 2013 following the toppling of Muhammad Mursi as President; and, it serves to warn indigenous rights oriented groups that--unlike HRW officials--they cannot escape reprisal arrests, torture and jail. You can be sure that while many educated Egyptians with social media access are well aware of the HRW report, but would also confirm that the message to tread very carefully is indelibly received.<br />
<br />
The government reaction is addressed by <a href="http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2014/08/rabaa-and-its-report-debate-wont-end.html" target="_blank">Egyptian Chronicles</a>.<br />
<br />
Even in comparison with the worst years of the Mubarak era, this is a very dark chapter in Egypt's modern history.</div>
arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com38tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-18759531036037254392014-03-27T22:19:00.002-04:002014-03-27T22:19:20.854-04:00Visions of Gulf Security<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Courting Fitnah: Saudi responses to the Arab Uprisings</h1>
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<abbr class="published" style="border-bottom-style: none; cursor: help; font-style: normal; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 1em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase;" title="2014-03-20">MARCH 20, 2014</abbr></div>
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<i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">By Augustus Richard Norton, Boston University</i></div>
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<i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">* This memo was prepared for the “<strong style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://pomeps.org/2014/03/17/visions-of-gulf-security-memos/" style="color: #142f53; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Visions of Gulf Security</a></strong>” workshop, March 9, 2014.</i></div>
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<i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">[<a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2014/03/visions-of-gulf-security-now-available.html">Download this essay</a> and a dozen others from the March 2014 conference.]</i></div>
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The logic and impact of Saudi interventions in Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria suggest a state pursuing confounding aims with improvised, if not impulsive policies. It is often asserted that the instability-averse Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a status quo power, but recent Saudi actions suggest that it seeks to undermine the status quo. Rather than revealing an aversion to instability, the kingdom has fed instability by radicalizing minority Arab Shiite populations in the Gulf, supporting proxy forces involved in armed struggle and, at least until recently, turning a blind eye to the recruitment of Saudis to join al Qaeda-affiliated groups outside Saudi borders. Referring to the interior minister, <a href="http://www.assafir.com/Article/329144" style="color: #142f53; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Madawi al-Rasheed</a> wryly notes: “To put it bluntly, the prince did not succeed in eliminating terror; he simply pushed it away to countries like Yemen, Iraq, and now Syria and Lebanon.”</div>
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There are obvious security challenges in the Saudi neighborhood, including the continuing struggles underway in Yemen, persistent demonstrations in Bahrain, and the failure of the Iraqi government in Baghdad to broadly legitimate its power, but Saudi Arabia has not been an innocent bystander in any of these cases.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>Recently revived fears in the Saudi hierarchy of mujahideen coming home to roost prompted the announcement of long prison sentences for Saudi nationals traveling abroad to fight for groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria. Thus, the Saudi government is in the bizarre position of attempting to proscribe activities that are prescribed by the ideology that shapes the state and legitimates the regime.<br />
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Saudi efforts to recalibrate its materiel support in Syria, among other things, by sponsoring the creation of a rival Islamist militia, Jaish al-Islam, in contradistinction to Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), have been inconsequential in impact. The loose command structures, the fungibility of allegiance and membership, and the proliferation of side deals between militia groups, suggest the limits of Saudi influence on the ground (or of other external players for that matter). The ad hoc systems of arms dispersals by the Saudis, Qataris, Turks and, to a limited degree, the United States contribute to the disjointed order of battle of the opposition. Distinctions between “terrorist” and “non-terrorist” groups are sometimes arguable at best, as illustrated by the fact that the Saudi-endorsed Jaish al-Islam is known to have joined Jabhat al-Nusra in opprobrious attacks on civilians.</div>
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It is instructive that while Saudi Arabia is committed to the toppling of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and company, it has been sparing in its contributions to humanitarian groups attempting to relieve the suffering of millions of displaced Syrians. For instance, in 2013, the kingdom donated less than $12 million to the U.N. refuge agency UNHCR – in contrast to Kuwait, which donated $112 million). (The revised 2013 UNHCR budget for the Middle East, much of it Syria related, was nearly $1.5 billion.)</div>
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The vast majority of the one million Syrian refugees seeking sanctuary in Lebanon are Sunni Muslims (more than a quarter of Lebanon’s population prior to 2011 were Sunnis; today the proportion is certainly more than a third). Lebanon has been an important focus of Saudi involvement with the goal of buttressing the Sunni community and undercutting the Shiite militia Hezbollah, which is the most formidable military force in the country.</div>
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Saudi funds have buttressed the Lebanese Central Bank, and a recently announced $3 billion grant will fund a renovation of the Lebanese army. Any calculation for the potential impact of that comparatively large sum should begin with the fact that the Lebanese army devours a large proportion of state funds for salaries, benefits, and amenities for officers, which leaves little for basic needs. The army will now be able to acquire weapon systems, such as low-end jet fighters, from France, which the United States has not been willing to provide; U.S. arms transfers are minutely calibrated to avoid posing any threat to Israel, or to challenge Israel’s capacity to routinely violate Lebanese air and sea space. One military component that will benefit from Saudi funding will be the 12,000 special operations troops, which are now poorly equipped to cope with the increased security challenges emanating from the Syrian civil war.</div>
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One benefit of beefing up the army is that it would weaken the rationale for Hezbollah to engage in internal policing, as it now does along the Lebanese-Syrian border in the governate of the north, a prime area for recruitment to groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Jaish al-Islam. While strengthening the Lebanese army is meritorious, supporters of Hezbollah are quick to note that they must rely on the militia to defend them against Israel because the army lacks the ability to deter an attack by the Israeli Defense Forces.</div>
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There have been episodes of the army engaging internal forces, this occurred in the period following the Israeli invasion of 1982 and General Michel Aoun’s campaign against the Lebanese Forces at the end of the same decade, but in Lebanese senior officer ranks these forays are well-understood object lessons that counsel reticence about deploying the army – in which the rank and file are predominantly Sunni and Shiite – in campaigns against formidable militias such as Hezbollah.</div>
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Lebanon has felt Saudi influence in another significant respect, and that is through the transnational impact of Saudi origin militant Salafism, which is quite evident in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city. Tripoli and the Muhafazah (governate) of the north have become a cauldron of anti-Shiite enmity. Tripoli is now an important center for recruitment to fight in Syria (a book in progress by Bernard Rougier offers rich ethnographic detail on the topic). Militant figures, often straight out of Saudi prisons have made their way to Tripoli and the surrounding areas. As a minimum, rather than keeping tabs on militants, Saudi security officials seem to look the other way as the militants slip through the exit turnstiles.</div>
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Meantime, relations between Riyadh and Washington are strained and chilly, in large measure because of the initial U.S. embrace of the Arab awakenings as well as the forward momentum in the P5+1 negotiations with Iran. There appears to be a deep sense of frustration in the royal chambers. Saudi options are limited given its inextricable security dependence on the United States. There has been a fair amount of speculation and piffle about the possibility of Saudi Arabia and other regional states pursuing their own nuclear programs if Iranian nuclear capabilities remain substantially intact, which is likely. The nuclear option provides some negotiating leverage vis-à-vis the United States and other powers, but the Iranian program is a reminder of the economy of scale that a credible program presumes quite aside from the strategic disincentives and risks of going nuclear.</div>
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Vali Nasr <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/06/opinion/nasr-america-must-assuage-saudi-anxiety.html?_r=0" style="color: #142f53; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">argues</a> in a recent commentary that the Saudis are angry about U.S. negotiations with Iran and the stated intention of the United States to pivot its attention to Asia. He argues that the United States needs to work to satiate Saudi apprehensions, for instance by moving to resolve the Syrian civil war. The fact of the matter is that short of capitulating to the regime’s worldview, there is little chance of the Saudis’ anger being mitigated by the United States as long as Washington is pursuing a diplomatic solution with Iran. When President Barrack Obama visits King Abdullah in late March it will be a surprise of historic proportions if the two sides are able to do more than paper over their profound differences, even after a recent preparatory visit to Washington by Interior Minister Muhammad bin Nayef (who is hardly a herald of reconciliation).</div>
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It is Iran’s quest of hegemony that focuses the mind of the royal family, and much as Cold War era U.S. leaders were fixated on the Soviet threat, so the Saudis have a penchant for reading events through Persian-tinted lenses. It is Iran’s quest of hegemony that focuses the mind of the royal family. This was accentuated when the Sunni-dominated Iraqi regime was supplanted by a quintessential Shiite regime with, need we add, the key assistance of an Anglo-American invasion and occupation. That Iran was the major geopolitical beneficiary of the invasion is obvious. It is indicative of Saudi contempt for the current Iraqi government in Baghdad that 11 years after the toppling of the Baathist regime Saudi Arabia still lacks a resident ambassador in Baghdad. (The Saudi ambassador to Jordan is also accredited to Iraq, but he is not seen in Baghdad according to Iraqi officials who would know.)</div>
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If the kingdom is unhappy with the geostrategic cards being played by the United States and its European allies, its intrinsic insecurity was also awakened by the Arab uprisings that began in Tunisia. The deep-seated insecurity that marks the Saudi regime is hardly unique either in the Arab world, or more broadly in authoritarian states around the globe. Despite the obvious differences between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for instance, the penchant of the former Mubarak regime and the present Saud regime to dole out relatively meaningless reforms while keeping a firm grip on power is striking.</div>
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While the particularities vary, the defining principle of these regimes has been <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">après moi le </i><i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">dé</i><i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">luge</i>, which is to say even allowing a small crack in the dam is potentially calamitous. Hence, there is a record of periodic cosmetic domestic “reforms,” often packaged in pretty paper for foreign observers while seen by citizens and subjects as unimportant. “Reforms” undergirded by sweeping prohibitions on public assembly and even tepid dissent are contradictions in terms. (The pattern is well demonstrated in Egypt under the tutelage of Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.) So long as peacefully challenging the power structure exposes “violators” to draconian punishments or disproportionate retribution the incentives for violence are obvious.</div>
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The neurotic response of Riyadh to calls for political reforms at home is somewhat paradoxical. Although a few scholars anticipate the fall of the Arabian Peninsula monarchies – Christopher Davidson, author of <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">After the Sheikhs</i>, springs to mind – this possibility seems a distant prospect, at best. In this respect, Gregory Gause’s assessment may have it right, which is to say that the Gulf monarchies are not culturally predestined or necessarily more adept at running economies or implementing economic efficiencies, but they are also not “one bullet” regimes. A large network of inter-married princely families assures that familiar hands pull a variety of levers of power, as well as hold ample purses to reward compliance. Equally important, insofar as the demands of discontented Saudis are voiced, there is little appetite for regime change, even among Saudi youth.</div>
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In the uprisings in the Maghrib and the Mashriq, young men and women played a seminal role in demonstrations. The motivations of these multitudes of young people are not hard to fathom. This is a generation that faces limited job prospects, curtailed marriage opportunities, and corrupt, unresponsive politics. In an excellent monograph, <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.bu.edu/pardee/pardee-papers-16-arab-spring/" style="color: #142f53; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">An Uncertain Future</a></i> (2013) Chloe Mulderig aptly notes that this is a generation confronting “adulthood denied.”</div>
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There is a different profile in Saudi Arabia. The respected journalist Caryle Murphy lived from more than a year in the kingdom to research <i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/kingdoms-future-saudi-arabia-through-the-eyes-its-twentysomethings" style="color: #142f53; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">A Kingdom’s Future</a></i> (2013). She interviewed many Saudi youths and certainly encountered complaints and yearnings for change. Even so, her respondents revealed great trepidation about following the paths of revolutionaries in Tunisia, Egypt, or Yemen, not to mention Iraq. Among her interlocutors stability was highly valued; unlike young Egyptians and Tunisians they do not want regime change, but reform and improvement in life’s circumstances.</div>
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Of course, Saudi Arabia has demonstrated a keen intolerance for protests, and doubly so in the case of the minority Shiite population, which is often subjected to harsh punishments. In recent weeks, protesters in Qatif have been tossed in prison for 20 years for having the temerity to protest publically. The Shiite Saudis are not merely anomalous in the Wahhabi worldview, but they are regularly portrayed as stalking horses for Iran. In fact, the historical affinities of the Saudi Shiite population of the Eastern Province are to the Arab Shiite (Baharna) of Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq. The hawza of Najaf, Iraq looms far larger that the domes of Qum, Iran and the leading jurisconsults in recent years have been Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Najaf and the late Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah of Beirut, Lebanon. Most demands for meaningful accountability and expanded personal rights in Saudi Arabia are seen as a potential security threat, but this is particularly so of Hasawi demands, which are perceived, as Fred Wehrey notes, as Iran-supported demands.</div>
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This was certainly so in Bahrain in March 2011, when Saudi troops accompanied by a convoy of UAE troops intervened to attempt to write finish to popular demonstrations and a U.S. mediated reform initiative. The initiative would have shifted Bahrain toward a constitutional monarchy and enhanced the standing of Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa while expanding the rights of the majority Shiite community. The intervention was facilitated with the collusion of long-serving Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman Khalifa (“Mister Ten Percent” is a common moniker of Bahrainis speaking privately), who is no advocate of reform. The operative principle for the Saudi monarch, a Gulf diplomat observed, is that no diminishment in the power of a monarch will be permitted. Bahraini and the Saudi officials alleged (largely non-existent) links between moderate reformists in Bahrain and Iran. Indeed, the best evidence for Iranian meddling was an inopportune visit to Beirut (including meetings with Hezbollah officials) by officials of al-Haq, the radical opponent of the mainstream al-Wefaq. The predictable subsequent radicalization of the majority Baharna is marshaled by Saudi Arabia and its allies to validate its narrative. Even if unconfirmed recent reports of tripartite Saudi-Iranian-U.S. talks in Oman prove accurate, the status quo in Bahrain is unlikely to change significantly.</div>
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The Saudi regime is intent on solidifying its sphere of influence, as demonstrated in its recent effort to ostracize Qatar for its support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and other sins. The UAE and ever-obedient Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar, and succeeded in revealing a decisive, perhaps fatal crack in the Gulf Cooperation Council. This coincided with Riyadh’s declaration that the Muslim Brotherhood (and some affiliated groups such as Hamas) is a terrorist organization, which provides yet another bludgeon to wield against both domestic opponents and many who resist the coup d’etat in Egypt.</div>
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In Riyadh, the uprisings that began in Tunis merely were a prelude to chaos, which is certainly arguable. Yet, Saudis have proven quite willing to make their own contributions to chaos.</div>
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<i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Augustus Richard Norton, <a href="mailto:arn@bu.edu" style="color: #142f53; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">arn@bu.edu</a>, is a professor of anthropology and international relations at Boston University. His latest publication is the forthcoming third edition of </i><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10251.html" style="color: #142f53; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Hezbollah: A Short History</a><i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> (Princeton University Press, May 2014).</i></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 10px;">- See more at: http://pomeps.org/2014/03/20/courting-fitnah-saudi-responses-to-the-arab-uprisings/#sthash.LxBwutD9.dpuf</span><span class="fullpost">
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arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-56094228321407178372013-05-18T11:16:00.001-04:002013-05-18T11:18:20.354-04:00"The Syrian Refugee Crisis and Lessons from the Iraqi Refugee Experience"--a new report from the Institute for Iraqi Studies at Boston University<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="http://www.bu.edu/iis/publications/reports/">Download the free report</a> (PDF) from the IIS website. A Kindle version is due presently, and an iBooks edition is in progress.<br />
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[Cross-posted with "<a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2013/05/institute-for-iraqi-studies-issues-its.html">From the Field</a>"]<br />
From the Foreword:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Credible estimates reveal
that one of every six Syrians has fled their home, or what remains of their
home, often with little more than what they might carry in their arms or wear
on their back. Millions have sought safety in other towns and villages, and
many have been forced to flee several times to escape the crossfire of rival
opposition fighters and government forces. About one and half million Syrians
now find a measure of safety in neighboring countries: some in the relative
order of well-run camps, but many others are not nearly so fortunate. Even after escaping from predatory militias
and vengeful military assaults, victims continue to be prey for criminals,
sexual predators, sectarian vigilantes or allies of the Syrian government. </blockquote>
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<a name='more'></a>A number of governments that have pledged contributions have
failed to deliver fully on their promises, and neighboring countries, not least
Jordan and Lebanon, are strapped for adequate resources and justifiably fear
that violence inside Syria will spread to their own citizens. The Syrian
refugee crisis is a humanitarian crisis on the scale of some of the world’s worst
natural disasters of recent years, and this man-made disaster threatens
structural political damage far from its epicenter. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Borders may appear as definitive lines on a map, but family
ties, tribal links, sectarian affinities and trading ties routinely transcend
Syria’s borders. Along the
Syria-Lebanon border, for instance, one finds Lebanese villages within Syrian
territory, and the Iraq-Syria border is notoriously porous. In my own travels decades ago I well recall
visiting Turkish border towns, such as Kilis, which survived as entrepots for
trade with Syria and Iraq.</blockquote>
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In March, the Institute for Iraqi Studies hosted a workshop
in order to gain a shared understanding of the disaster, as well as bring
insights to bear from Iraq’s recent refugee tragedy, which at its height
directly affected one of every six Iraqis (the same ratio as Syria today). Nearly
three million Iraqis remain displaced or as refugees, more than two decades
after the uprising of 1991 and a decade following the U.S.-U.K. invasion, according
to 2012 data cited in this report (p. 22).
The Iraqi case is a reminder that what is happening today to Syrians is
likely to have longstanding consequences.
In neighboring Lebanon, savage violence during the 1975-90 civil war precipitated
population displacements that radically diminished the richly diverse human
tapestry of the country. Many villages
and urban quarters formerly known for inter-sectarian cohabitation remain far
less diverse than they were before the civil war. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A follow-up workshop is planned for late September at Boston
University. The program and other
details will be posted on the website in late August.</blockquote>
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arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-51134661823870992802013-03-11T21:10:00.003-04:002013-03-11T21:10:32.735-04:00Obama’s Moment to Make the Case for Middle East Peace<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><span style="color: #272727; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;">Boston Study Group on Middle East Peace*</span></i></div>
[Cross-linked with <a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2013/03/obamas-moment-to-make-case-for-middle.html">From the Field</a>.]<br />
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If it were easy to do, an American president would have long ago shepherded Israelis and Palestinians into the negotiated two-state peace agreement that both peoples and their neighbors so clearly need — a peace that would greatly enhance U.S. interests.</div>
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There are many reasons why it will be hard for President Obama to achieve, in his second term, the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord that has eluded him and his predecessors for so long. The rise of radical one-state nationalists and ideologically driven settlers in Israeli politics, the debilitating split in the Palestinian camp between Hamas and Fatah, the power struggles and sectarian enmities roiling the region — these are all factors adding to the difficulty of forging the two-state peace agreement that alone can end the agony of occupation for Palestinians and bring Israel a sounder more durable form of security.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>It is precisely because Israelis and Palestinians are approaching a fork in the road — one that can lead either to a constructive future or a maelstrom of violence — that presidential engagement is essential to the hard work of peacemaking. The president might start by speaking directly to the Israeli and Palestinian publics, explaining why a prolongation of the current impasse may lead to foreseeable calamities.<br />
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He has emphasized that the U.S. “has Israel’s back” by way of reassuring Israelis that they can count on U.S. support. Sturdy U.S. support is lifeblood for Israel, but even with steadfast U.S. support Israel is increasingly isolated in the international community. Obama would be wise to allude to Israel’s small circle of international supporters and to emphasize that Israeli policies that alienate Israel’s dwindling international allies may be imprudent. Rather than offering proposals for narrowing the specific differences left unresolved in earlier Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the key issues of borders and settlements, security, Jerusalem and refugees, this visit affords Obama the opportunity to affect the Palestinian and Israeli political cultures.</div>
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While the president reassures the Israeli public of the enduring U.S. commitment to the security of Israel he might also declare that the United States is going to join with European allies in adopting an agenda that builds upon previous negotiations, establishing a firm timetable, projecting a desired outcome, and issuing an invitation to Israelis and Palestinians. The aim will be to create political pressure on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to act now in the best long-term interests of their populations.</div>
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Toward this end, Obama might challenge pessimists in both camps who have been warning that this is not a propitious moment for another all-or-nothing diplomatic initiative from Washington — that the two sides are too far apart, that they are too divided, that civil war and political conflicts in the surrounding states would make it nearly impossible to resolve the many tangled issues at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</div>
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To counter this pessimism, Israelis and Palestinians need to be reminded of just how much negotiators in past talks have narrowed the differences on such crucial issues as borders and security. From the Camp David talks of summer 2000, to the Clinton parameters issued at the end of that year, to the Taba discussions of early 2001, to the 2008 negotiations between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, there is a substantial record of narrowed differences. Obama would be confirming a reality known to all if he proclaimed, in Ramallah as in Tel Aviv, that the principles of a conflict-ending two-state agreement are not obscure and have been known to both sides for many years. These include a division of the land based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed-upon exchanges of territory; Jerusalem as capital for both states; resolution of the refugee issue including the return of a limited number of Palestinian refugees to Israel; and a presence of NATO peacekeeping forces along the Jordan River for several years.</div>
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The essential elements that are now needed to transform these general principles into a binding peace accord are political will and courageous statecraft.</div>
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In shaping the argument for a renewed pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, it would be wise to highlight the promise of the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 (renewed in 2007) with its pledge that, in response to a two-state peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, all 22 members of the Arab League will recognize and establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel. This still-standing invitation to regional acceptance offers a prospect that Israel’s early leaders hardly dared imagine.</div>
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Moreover, the current political upheavals in several Arab countries ought to lend weight to an Obama brief for Israel and its Arab neighbors to seize a unique strategic opportunity.</div>
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The diplomatic, economic and military support that several key Arab states are providing to Syrian resistance forces fighting against the regime of Bashar Assad casts light on an emerging reconfiguration affecting the larger Middle East. Arab states have entered into a proxy conflict with what had advertised itself as an anti-American, anti-Israel rejection front comprising the Iranian regime, Assad-ruled Syria and Hezbollah. The gravity of this conflict and the beckoning peacemaking opportunity it creates for Israelis and Palestinians was evident when the Hamas leadership refused a demand to support the Assad regime and subsequently quit its headquarters in Damascus, later finding welcome in Doha, Amman and Cairo.</div>
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Jordan and Egypt are the two Arab countries that maintain peace treaties with Israel. Qatar has been a regional partner for Washington. Accordingly, the present cycle of political transformations in the Arab world, rather than threatening Israel with new forms of hostility and rejection, has opened up a rare chance for Israel’s leaders to ally tacitly with the Arab states now seeking to diminish the influence of Tehran by helping Syrian resistors topple the Assad dictatorship.</div>
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Obama should not miss his chance to make the case — not only to Israel’s political leadership but also to the Israeli public – that overcoming the country’s isolation from its neighbors and many of the world’s democracies is a prime goal of U.S. policy, but that this cannot be done without action by Israel. There is but one way to cross the threshold that leads to a new status for Israel as an accepted state among its Arab neighbors and that is through a peace accord that creates two states for two peoples, ending an occupation that inflicts daily pain and humiliation on Palestinians while turning Israelis into despised oppressors.</div>
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America’s stake in fostering a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never been greater. Beyond the longstanding U.S. interest in protecting Mideast energy sources and shipping lanes essential to the stability of the global economy, and apart from traditional power-balancing goals in that volatile region, Washington confronts a new challenge arising from the dramatic events of the past two years in the Arab world. These disparate revolts against autocrats, dictators, and police-state regimes have one element in common that alters — or should alter — the traditional definition of U.S. interests in the greater Middle East.</div>
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Whether in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Iraq or Syria, a unifying new phenomenon has made its appearance: the demand for a political order deriving its legitimacy from the will of the citizen. Although it is far from clear what kinds of government will eventually emerge from the crucible of the current popular revolts, American policy makers can no longer count on striking deals with client rulers that ignore the wishes of that potent new figure on the Arab stage, the citizen.</div>
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In this new era, a U.S. president can hardly claim solidarity with Arab publics fighting for civil liberties and human rights if, at the same time, he declines to exert American influence to obtain freedom for Palestinians under Israeli occupation. Even if it is true that erupting regional conflicts between Sunnis and Shi’ites, or between Iran and certain Arab states, currently overshadow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama would be neglecting crucial U.S. interests if he hesitates to usher Israelis and Palestinians into conflict-ending negotiations — and to make sure they persevere until a just peace is achieved.</div>
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To achieve this end, the re-elected Obama will have to make use of the considerable powers at his disposal. While in the region he should reach out to those groups using non-violence to make their case and to the Palestinian and Israeli groups already partnering to bridge differences in education, business and peace making.<b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </b>He will also have to resist inevitable efforts from many quarters to leave an unsustainable status quo as is. The power Obama wields is of little value, however, if it is not used to secure America’s vital interests.</div>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Boston Study Group collectively authored </i><b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Israel and Palestine – Two States for Two Peoples: If Not Now, When? which is </b><a href="http://www.fpa.org/usr_doc/Israel_and_Palestine_Two_States_for_Two_Peoples_2010.pdf" style="border: 0px; color: #2e88c7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">available for download</b></a><b style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">. The members of the group are </b><i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Alan Berger, Harvey Cox</i>, <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Herbert C. Kelman</i>, <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lenore G. Martin</i>, <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Everett Mendelsohn</i>, <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Augustus Richard Norton</i>,<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Henry Steiner</i> and <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Stephen M. Walt</i>. <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The members’ biographies are available below.</em></div>
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<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Alan Berger, </em>a retired editorial writer at the Boston Globe, has been writing about the Middle East and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts since 1982. He has interviewed many of the principals and policymakers. And has not yet lost hope.</div>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Harvey Cox</i> is Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. He teaches courses on religion and society in the Divinity School and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, among them a course on the history, religion and culture of the city of Jerusalem. He has worked with the Middle East Peace Program of the World Council of Churches, and has lectured at both Jewish and Palestinian institutions in Israel.</div>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Herbert C. Kelman</i> is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus, and co-chair of the Middle East Seminar at Harvard University. He was the founding Director (1993–2003) of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. A pioneer in the development of interactive problem solving — an approach to unofficial diplomacy — he has been engaged for nearly 40 years in efforts toward the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</div>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Lenore G. Martin</i> is the Wyant Professor at Emmanuel College in Boston. She is co-chair of the Middle East Seminar cosponsored by Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Her publications analyze national security in the Gulf, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the larger Middle East and Turkey. She researches, lectures and travels throughout the Middle East and Turkey.</div>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Everett Mendelsohn</i> is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard University. For more than forty years he has been actively involved in Israeli-Arab/Palestinian peace making first as chair of the Middle East program of the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) and then as Chair of the Middle East Program of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ program on International Security. He is author/co-author of <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">A Compassionate Peace: A Future for Israel, Palestine and the Middle East </i>(1982, rev. ed.1989) and <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Israeli-Palestinian Security: Issues in the Permanent Status Negotiations </i>(1995).</div>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Augustus Richard Norton</i> is a Professor in the Departments of International Relations and Anthropology at Boston University, and Visiting Professor in the Politics of the Middle East at the University of Oxford. He served for a dozen years on the United States Military Academy faculty, and was a career Army officer, retiring as a Colonel. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 2006 was an adviser to the Iraq Study Group (“Baker-Hamilton Commission”). His most recent book is <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2008/01/critical-responses-to-hezbollah.html" target="_blank">Hezbollah: A Short History</a> </i>(Princeton University Press, 2009). He has on-the-ground research experience in eight Middle East countries, including Egypt, Israel, Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Gaza and the West Bank.</div>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Henry Steiner</i>, Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, founded the School’s Human Rights Program and directed it for 21 years. His writing addresses a broad range of international human rights issues. Steiner has taught courses and lectured in over 30 countries, including Israel, the West Bank-Gaza, and three Arab states.</div>
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<i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Stephen M. Walt</i> is Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a contributing editor at <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Foreign Policy</i> magazine. His recent writings include <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy</i> (2005) and (with John Mearsheimer) <i style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy</i> (2007). His daily weblog can be found at <a href="http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/" style="border: 0px; color: #2e88c7; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">http://walt.foreignpolicy.com</a>.</div>
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arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-81497041991366371162013-03-06T14:30:00.001-05:002013-03-06T14:30:57.913-05:00FAREWELL, MY TYCOONS...<div class="MsoNormal">
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<i>(first published in the </i>South China Morning Post <i>as "Cutting the Fat" <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>February 25, 2013)</i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">PHILIP J. CUNNINGHAM<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">When politicians stake out the high moral ground and order a crackdown, it can be a smokescreen for business as usual, or it can mean they really mean business.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">China’s incoming top leader Xi Jinping has signaled the media that he wants to cut back on banquets, but it is too soon to say if this means the anti-corruption campaign of the communist party led is for real, or just a smokescreen for managing public opinion while consolidating power.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Excessive consumption and corruption, especially on the part of state officials who are supposed to be public servants, does make a mockery of the “serve the people” ethos at the heart of good governance. China faces a destabilizing inequality gap, so the waste of public resources on empty gestures — like showy motorcades, honor guards, over-the-top banquets, glitzy hotel receptions and lavish gift-giving — not only squanders funds needed elsewhere, but fuels indignation while eroding social harmony and self-respect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Despite his revolutionary communist pedigree, it is unlikely that Xi Jinping will be saying “Farewell, my tycoon,” any time soon, though. The get-rich-quick ethos launched by the canny “capitalist roader” Deng Xiaoping is still the default ideology in a nation bereft of meaningful ideology. Fawning over the rich and powerful and dispensing bribes to officials, typically in hope of cementing connections has already become a way of life. Laws that are mercilessly enforced when applied to little people rarely apply to the rich and connected in so-called communist China. The corruption and crony capitalism openly promoted by Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, still runs deep, even though Jiang, who, a senior powerbroker and patron of Xi Jinping, has been out of the limelight for a decade.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Putting on aristocratic airs has become so widespread that an everyday act as simple as the sight of US Ambassador to Beijing, Gary Locke, carrying his own bag and buying his own coffee was considered newsworthy in China. Where were his porters and servants?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There is corruption and then there is corruption.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Cutting back on banquets is an easy mark, but what about the ill-gotten wealth of hundreds of billionaires and millions of millionaires in a poor, developing country with no social safety net?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Cutting back on banquets and the maotai toasts in the military is one thing, but what about restraining dry drunk generals gunning for conflict, high on China’s newfound wealth, arrogance and advanced weaponry?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There are many kinds of excess and many kinds of sobriety. The problem is not necessarily the perk; the problem is the quality of the work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Toasts offered at lavish Nixon/Mao banquets in the name of US-China friendship in 1972 marked a turning point in diplomatic history. And even the most lavish food and beverage bill would be a bargain if held in conjunction with peace talks between China and Japan, for example, if negotiations could put to rest, or otherwise resolve, the explosive Senkaku/Diaoyudao islet dispute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bring on the sake and maotai! Fly in the best sushi and seafood!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Cementing deals over food and making toasts to friendship is an East Asian legacy that runs deep. Even in the 1980s, when China was much less affluent than it is today, and a good deal more egalitarian, being invited for a meal at someone’s home was a grand gesture. The meal might have been cooked on a single-burner hotplate on a busy staircase outside a family’s one-room apartment, but it was always a multi-dish affair, a way of showing generosity and respect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">What started out as a heart-felt gesture may indeed have been corrupted over time, but will a crackdown correct this?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">China has a history of swinging from one extreme to another, so even something as simple as a national drive to cut back on banquets needs vigilant monitoring. Is it just a sop to the poor, a showy show of belt-tightening, while the usual rules of a rigged game rigged for the rich apply? Or is it the first shot in a new Cultural Revolution, which will eventually lead to tables being overturned in fancy restaurants and luxury cars flipped and torched by irate crowds?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The tendency for things to swing in China could very well have deep roots in the rise and fall of dynasties over the centuries, but in more recent times, one need not look much further than the wholesale deracination from traditional culture, community and organic growth by decades of divisive and destructive Leninist-style rule.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Whatever the cause for China’s distinct political rhythms; long periods of insufferable status quo, followed by brief revolutionary outbursts, it is the ordinary people who suffer most. Xi Jinping’s populist appeal indirectly acknowledges that there is a problem with hypocritical leaders, greedy tycoons, a politicized bureaucracy and erratic --sometimes negligent, sometimes over-zealous-- application of the law.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There are crackdowns that are empty gestures for show, mere political posturing. Others achieve the opposite of the intended result. Sometimes crackdowns are factional power plays, pandering to public perceptions, while quietly eliminating rivals and consolidating criminal networks. You have greedy leaders calling for law and order even while they contribute to disorder and remain outside the law. You have police instituting crackdowns and curfews even as the children of the rich and connected run continue to run wild and inebriated, bullying anyone who gets in the way, with “do you know who my father is?” And like everywhere, you have silver-tongued politicians who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Experience suggests that anytime a powerful politician, especially one with vast, vested interests, takes to the media and stakes out the high moral ground against one apparent vice or another, one should snap to attention and listen. But don’t judge them by their words; judge them by their actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-22065623716194836272012-08-17T11:59:00.001-04:002012-08-17T11:59:04.539-04:00Lebanon and the Syria Crisis<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Originally posted at <a href="http://www.e-ir.info/2012/08/17/lebanon-and-the-syria-crisis/" target="_blank">E-International Relations</a>. Cross-posted at <a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2012/08/lebanon-and-syria.html">From the Field</a>.<br />
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With the battle for Aleppo continuing and Syria on a course to civil war, neighboring Lebanon finds itself in a precarious spot. Sectarian divisions, especially between Sunni and Shi’i Muslims, have deepened in Lebanon over the past decade, particularly since the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005, the 2006 war with Israel, and the Hezbollah-led incursion into West Beirut in 2008. The Syria crisis has further exacerbated communal fault-lines. As Syrian refugees pour in, the Lebanese have become increasingly divided on just how they feel their government should respond to the crisis. Periodic clashes in Tripoli along the aptly named “Syria Street”, where an Alawi community abuts a Sunni majority illustrate how quickly transplanted Syrian enmities may explode, and how powerless rival political elites may be to dampen the violence.</div>
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As some Lebanese fight amongst themselves and with their newfound Syrian refugee neighbors, the question is whether Lebanon can avoid being sucked</div>
<a name='more'></a><span id="goog_357393134"></span><span id="goog_357393135"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a>deeper into the internal Syrian conflict. An already frail political arena is unable to reach a consensus over how to respond to the crisis. Although the growing numbers of Syrian refugees in Lebanon prompts demands for military and material aid, the Lebanese government has tried to keep the Syrian crisis at arm’s length.<br />
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The most apparent threat to the domestic stability of Lebanon is one of human security. Official estimates place the number of registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon at approximately 36,000 as of August 10, and the number of refugees is likely much greater due to undocumented people escaping the conflict. In one 48-hour period in July, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that as many as 32,500 people poured into Lebanon. The effects of the massive influx of refugees have yet to become fully apparent for Lebanon, but the unfathomable human costs for fleeing Syrians demand profound compassion. Upon arriving, they are dependent in large part upon the kindness and donations of private citizens for everything from food to shelter to medical care. Without a formal government institution willing to address their basic needs, Syrian citizens who leave devastated homes with next to nothing have been left to call out to everyone, anyone for help. Hassana Abu Firas, a refugee from al-Qusayr (near Homs), was reported by Al-Jazeera as saying: “We call on the Lebanese government and the Lebanese army to help us, to hide us, to hide our families… We call on the Muslims and the Arab governments to help us.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Alexandra/Mes%20documents/Downloads/Lebanon%20Syria%20August%2016%2012%20final%20(1).docx#_ftn1" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #154a7f; font-weight: 700; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" title="">[1]</a>”</div>
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These calls have gone largely unanswered by the Lebanese government. It has been reluctant to designate Syrians seeking refuge in Lebanon as “refugees” for both political and financial reasons. The Arab-Israeli conflict has already injected hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees into Lebanon. The history of the problematic Palestinian refugee population makes many in Lebanon wary of giving Syrian refugees any incentive to come to Lebanon and stay. Palestinian refugees, many of whom trace their residence in Lebanon to the 1948 war, are typically crowded into densely settled “camps”, where jobs are few and far between, food supplies limited, infrastructure inadequate, water scarce, and security in the hands of rival factions. The newly arrived Syrians face many of the same challenges. Denied even the title of “refugee,” they are instead referred to as “displaced Syrians,” in an apparent attempt to absolve the Lebanese government of any responsibility for their welfare.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Alexandra/Mes%20documents/Downloads/Lebanon%20Syria%20August%2016%2012%20final%20(1).docx#_ftn2" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #154a7f; font-weight: 700; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" title="">[2]</a></div>
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The village of Wadi Khaled in northern Lebanon, where many Syrians arrive and stay, is often without electricity and, increasingly in recent weeks, under fire by Syrian forces across the border. Having fled besieged urban quarters in Syria, such as Bab al-Amr, many refugees are living in acute deprivation in order to escape the assaults of a predatory government, not to mention a sometimes vengeful opposition.</div>
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Given the propensity of Syrian troops to shoot across the border and the rising number of kidnappings, the benefit of safety may soon vanish as well. A woman was shot and killed, allegedly by Syrian forces, while walking with her daughter in Masharia al-Qaa on May 5. A few weeks earlier on April 9, a cameraman was shot and killed as he filmed Syrian forces from the Lebanese side of the border. On May 22, eleven Lebanese pilgrims returning from Iran were kidnapped in the province of Aleppo in Syria and have yet to be released. Since then the violence has only crept closer to the border and across it. Residents of northern towns like Wadi Khaled report skirmishes between Lebanese and Syrian forces daily. On July 8 U.S. Ambassador Maura Connelly “voiced U.S. government concern over recent reports of cross-border shelling into northern Lebanon and expressed her condolences for the deaths of Lebanese civilians.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Alexandra/Mes%20documents/Downloads/Lebanon%20Syria%20August%2016%2012%20final%20(1).docx#_ftn3" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #154a7f; font-weight: 700; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" title="">[3]</a>” Sheikh ‘Ali al-‘Ali, a leader from Wadi Khaled, reported that incidents of cross-border violence have increased, culminating with the kidnapping of two Lebanese General Security personnel on July 2<sup>nd</sup> by Syrian forces. While the two men were released a few hours later, the confrontation triggered condemnations on the part of the Lebanese government and increased tensions between the two nations.</div>
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In subsequent weeks, instances of cross-border attacks became so numerous that news sources nearly stopped reporting specific events of violence. On July 21 in one of the bloodiest attacks, Syrian forces shelled Lebanese villages they suspected of harboring pro-opposition Syrians, killing twelve and wounding many more. Fifteen Lebanese were also wounded that day in a cross-border raid launched by some 30 Syrian government soldiers. Later that week, in two separate incidents a total of six Syrians (who may have been pro-opposition) were kidnapped, allegedly in retribution for the kidnapping of the Lebanese pilgrims in May. The proximity of Lebanon to the northern frontlines has rendered no one immune to the effects of the conflict.</div>
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Unfortunately for the Syrian refugees and Lebanese civilians on the border, the Lebanese political scene is far from prepared to deal with any of the questions raised by the Syrian conflict, let alone those of housing and feeding yet another large refugee population. Since the fall of the national unity government in January 2011, Lebanon has been split between the pro-al-Asad, Hezbollah-led March 8 Alliance and the pro-Western, Sunni-led March 14 Alliance. The Syrian crisis has only served to further polarize Lebanese politics and shake the hold of the March 8 Alliance on power. The March 14 Alliance has been quick to side with the Syrian opposition forces, a popular stance among the Lebanese citizenry that threatens to draw members from March 8 across the aisle, such as Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and even Prime Minister Najib Mikati. <em>Al-Jumhuriya</em>, a newspaper sympathetic to March 14, frames the Syrian conflict as a plot between Hezbollah and Iran in many of its headlines. On July 5, a lead story reported members of March 14 describing Iran and Hezbollah as “partners in murder” for their resistance to international action against Asad’s government.<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Alexandra/Mes%20documents/Downloads/Lebanon%20Syria%20August%2016%2012%20final%20(1).docx#_ftn4" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #154a7f; font-weight: 700; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" title="">[4]</a></div>
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Aligned with the Syrian government, the leaders of March 8 at first took to formulating the uprising in the language of President Bashar al-Asad himself. According to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah speaking on al-Manar, the Syrian conflict is a foreign plot that aims to use the region as a chess board for the great powers, a claim that echoed the Syrian president’s own words. At present, Hezbollah’s leadership seems to have realized the growing popularity of the Syrian opposition movement in Lebanon and the group’s leaders have tempered their rhetoric. Instead of framing the conflict as a Western/Israeli-constructed ploy, al-Manar, the media outlet of Hezbollah, is now more likely to run stories describing it as fighting between remote armed factions and the government. The news outlet has also been quick to point out the perceived supplies and money being funneled into Tripoli by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.</div>
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The costs of political acquiescence to al-Asad for the March 8 alliance may be dear. Throughout July, reports of disagreements in the Mikati cabinet surfaced and Nasrallah came under heavy criticism for his “loyalty speech” to al-Asad following the assassination of three of his top-level ministers including his brother-in-law Asef Shawkat on July 18. The Lebanese newspaper <em>Al-Jumhurriya,</em>which is sympathetic to the March 14 Alliance<span style="text-decoration: underline;">,</span> reported on July 25 that Nasrallah offered to place Hezbollah “Special Forces” (al-quwat al- khassah) at al-Asad’s disposal;<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Alexandra/Mes%20documents/Downloads/Lebanon%20Syria%20August%2016%2012%20final%20(1).docx#_ftn5" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #154a7f; font-weight: 700; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" title="">[5]</a> however, there is no public evidence that the forces have been dispatched. There is no doubt that Hezbollah has coordinated it plans for defending the strategically vital Biqa valley with Syria.</div>
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Following the defections of Syrian Brigadier General Manaf Tlas and Prime Minister Riad Hijab in July and August, respectively, the question remains: will March 8 and Hezbollah jump from al-Asad’s sinking ship? Hezbollah in particular has a huge strategic stake in Syria, not only because Syria has been the entrepôt for its arsenal and the only Arab state aligned unequivocally with Iran, but also due to the solidarity shared by the Syrian regime and the Hezbollah leadership. Both emphasize that only through resistance to the designs of the United States and its regional proxy Israel may independence and dignity be preserved. Even so, leading figures in Hezbollah have proven to be coolly analytic in their political calculations and it is doubtful that they intend to go down with Bashar’s ship. Instead, they have to be assessing how to preserve a semblance of their privileged relationship with Syria, particularly if the present Syrian regime is toppled. It is true that Nasrallah has enunciated firm support for the regime, but supportive comments have often punctuated long periods of studied silence. Hezbollah is a major political player in Lebanon, and it needs to avoid gratuitously aggravating inter-sectarian tensions, or eroding its still impressive coalescence of support among Shi’i Muslims in Lebanon. Therefore, it enjoys fewer degrees of freedom than Washington-based analysts often presume.</div>
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While the tide of popular opinion may lean towards support for their beleaguered Syrian neighbors, many Lebanese find themselves split between sympathy for the opposition and trepidation for what may occur if the conflict is not resolved. Within the context of confessional Lebanon, sectarian and ethnic divisions become apparent. In a Pew Research Center poll conducted in April and May 2012, the Lebanese proved to be the most divided Arab population surveyed regarding whether or not al-Asad should step down. <a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Alexandra/Mes%20documents/Downloads/Lebanon%20Syria%20August%2016%2012%20final%20(1).docx#_ftn6" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #154a7f; font-weight: 700; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" title="">[6]</a> Fifty-three percent of the Lebanese overall agreed that the Syrian president should go, but when broken down between Sunni and Shi’i, the divide is clear: while 80 percent of Sunnis were for al-Asad’s resignation, 97 percent of Shi’ites were against it. Lebanese may support the Syrian opposition, but Christians, Druze, Sunnis and Shi’ites also view the refugee problem within their own borders from a sectarian perspective.</div>
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One point of political consensus in Lebanon is an opposition to the “tawtin” or naturalization of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. A parallel consensus makes it unlikely that Syrian refugees will be permitted to resettle in Lebanon. An influx of those fleeing the crisis, for the most part Sunnis, could upset the confessional balance of power if they reach great enough numbers. In a political climate already rife with conflict, such a change in the confessional balance could be disastrous.</div>
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The multiple rifts in Lebanese society have already begun to spill over into violence. Upon the arrest of pro-Syrian opposition figure Shadi al-Moulawi, protests broke out across northern Lebanon that resulted in his release but also left at least eight people dead. On May 21, fighting between rival Sunni groups in Beirut killed two people. In Tripoli, at least 20 people have been killed this year in violence between various groups. On June 13, fighting in al-Qaa (near Hermel in the Biqa valley) left three dead and ten wounded. Throughout July, Syrians in Shi’i-dominated southern Lebanon faced harassment, violence, and even death. In one of the most notorious incidents of activist violence, on June 26 Wissam Alaaedine and others attacked pro-opposition media outlet al-Jadeed TV with guns and firebombs. The following day, youths blockaded the road to the Beirut airport in protest of his arrest. The pro-opposition al-Nahar newspaper ran a story condemning the attack and accusing Hezbollah and Amal of using the conflict to inject radicalism into Lebanese society. Yet the overlapping confessional and political boundaries of Lebanon make clear positions impossible to identify.</div>
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The ambivalence of many Lebanese towards intervention in the Syrian conflict is fueled by the perception of volatility in their own country. To get more involved in Syria makes little sense when emotional involvement has already lead to violence, death, and upheaval. Add to that the picture of post-regime change instability in Iraq, Libya, and Egypt, and many Lebanese – whether Christian, Shi’i or Sunni – are reluctant to see the al-Asad government completely lose control over the situation. Given the choice between a moral grey area and chaos on the border seeping into their country, many Lebanese will chose the grey area time and time again.</div>
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Aside from the local impetus for non-involvement in Syria, regional and international power plays are ever-present in Lebanon and affect the government’s choice to remain distant from the conflict. Looming large over the decision to thus far pursue a path of “disassociation” from the Syrian crisis is the ever-present threat of Israel. Fears that what is happening in Syria is simply a result of great power jostling and Israeli desires for turmoil are very real for the Lebanese, who have already spent the last four decades been pushed one way or another by Syria and Israel. What many see as the inevitable showdown between Lebanon and Israel has pressed government officials to avoid taking a stance that would commit their forces to action in Syria, even if the action were providing border security and safe passage to refugees. Preventing further complications in politics has become paramount over pursuing an interventionist stance in another country.</div>
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Given the Lebanese experiences with external interventions, refugee populations, and civil conflict, to ask the government to get further involved in the crisis in Syria is akin to asking a man missing one eye to give up the other. The current wait-and-see strategy of the March 8 Alliance has served to keep the country from direct involvement up to this point. Yet as the death toll in Syria mounts, Lebanese citizens themselves are killed and wounded, and the harrowing tales of the refugees diffuse throughout Lebanese society, the government’s equivocal stance may prove impossible to continue.</div>
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What form that action might take, however, is up for debate. It would be unlikely for Lebanon to join the majority of the Arab League in imposing sanctions on its Syrian neighbor. Military intervention by Lebanon in Syria is also unlikely, although this does not preclude opportunistic efforts by Lebanese arms dealers to exploit the demand for bullets and guns, probably with tacit support from local elites. As long as Lebanon sees itself alone in a sea of chaos and enemies, its likely role in the Syrian conflict will be that of a destination for refugees where the blowback from the Syrian civil war will occur as displaced Syrians align with sympathetic Lebanese against Syrian foes and their Lebanese supporters. Yet as the recently resigned U.N. Special Envoy Kofi Annan pointed out on June 26, “Syria is not Libya, it will not implode, it will explode beyond its borders<a href="file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/Alexandra/Mes%20documents/Downloads/Lebanon%20Syria%20August%2016%2012%20final%20(1).docx#_ftn7" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #154a7f; font-weight: 700; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" title="">[7]</a>” and Lebanon is right in the path of the blast waves.</div>
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<strong>Vicky Kelberer</strong> <em>(Boston University, B.A., 2012) studies the Middle East, and she is </em><em>planning to continue graduate studies at Boston University.</em><strong>Augustus Richard Norton</strong><em> is Professor of Anthropology and International Relations at Boston University and his latest book is <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8363.html" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #154a7f; font-weight: 700; outline: none; text-decoration: none;">Hezbollah</a>(Princeton University Press, 2009).</em></div>
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arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-1958837622641564682012-02-16T23:39:00.001-05:002012-02-17T00:07:14.646-05:00From the field: Devastating, horrible news--Anthony Shadid dies with his boots on in Syria<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">I have been reading Anthony's House of Stone, his pitch perfect and beautifully wrought chronicle of his struggle to bring his ancestral home in Marjayoun back to life. The last phone conversation I had with him was a couple of years ago in Lebanon. I reached him in south Lebanon, where he was described himself captured by challenge of restoring his great grandfather's house. I will have more to say about the book shortly, but for now I must simply express my profound sadness about Anthony's death. So many who crossed paths with him will be pained by the loss of this gifted, brave and astounding man.</div>arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-74637717685582094092011-12-11T22:56:00.002-05:002011-12-15T15:55:17.952-05:00Resurgent Arab Islam need not be unsettling<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><h1 style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia; font-size: 32px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 31px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #272727; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;">By Emile Nakhleh and Augustus R. Norton</span></h1><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #272727; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #272727; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;">[Cross-posted with "<a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/12/resurgent-arab-islam-need-not-be.html">From the Field</a>" and Boston Globe's "<a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/blogs/the_angle/2011/12/resurgent_arab.html">The Angle</a>", where it was first published December 11, 2011]</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #272727; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 14px;"><br />
</span></div><div class="blogText" style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px; margin-bottom: 35px; margin-top: 0px;"><div class="firstGraph">In the wake of the youth-directed “Arab Spring,” which rocked the Middle East to its core and felled autocratic governments in several countries, Islamic political parties are poised for an historic resurgence across the region — and that is neither surprising nor necessarily alarming.<br />
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Popular mass demonstrations, “Days of Rage,” have been the hallmarks of the season that dislodged dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and exposed the fragility of fierce but unpopular regimes across the Arab world. Youthful demonstrators in quest of dignity, hungry for jobs, and fed up with corruption formed the vanguards.<br />
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But because Arab rulers did not allow serious opposition parties, the best organized opposition groups were often Islamist movements. While they did not launch the Arab Spring, they lent resilience and discipline to the demonstrations. These movements are deeply insinuated in the contours of daily life in Arab societies, and now are emerging as early victors in what Arabs are calling <em>al-sahwa</em> (the awakening).<br />
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The successes of Islamic parties inspire consternation and alarm in some US policy circles. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-the-hope-of-the-arab-spring-the-chill-of-an-arab-winter/2011/11/28/gIQABGqHIO_story.html?hpid=z3" style="color: #2851a2; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">Daniel Byman</a> of the Brookings Institution worries that these parties will not embrace democracy. Like former Israeli defense minister <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/arab-spring-will-just-bring-upon-islamist-dictatorships-1.396976" style="color: #2851a2; cursor: pointer; text-decoration: none;">Moshe Arens</a>, he suggests that the Arab Spring is likely to become a long Arab Winter as Islamic parties gain power and then thwart hopes for substantial reforms and freedom. But these groups are not the extremists that critics fear, and Islamist political parties deserve the opportunity to deliver on the mandate they’ve been granted at the polls.<br />
<br />
</div><div class="articlePluckHidden">It is crucial to note that mainstream Islamic parties in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco are not your grandfather’s Islamists. Their views about human rights, toleration, and the legitimacy of democracy have evolved in encouraging directions in the past two decades.<br />
<br />
Serious debates about earlier episodes of both failed and successful political change have been wide-ranging in Islamist circles. These include reflecting on the army coup that thwarted an Islamist victory in Algeria nearly two decades ago; the failure of violent jihadist tactics, not least by the widely despised Al Qaeda; and the exemplar of non-Arab Turkey, where a democratically elected Islamist party has been in power since 2002. While there are certainly radical dissenters, the mainstream is politically pragmatic and fully capable of embracing the give and take of democratic life.<br />
<br />
Electoral victories of Justice and Development in Morocco and al-Nahda party in Tunisia confirm the powerful resurgence of political Islam in post-autocratic societies. And results from the first round of Egyptian elections for two-thirds of the seats in the People’s Assembly indicate the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice party obtained 36.6 percent of the vote.<br />
<br />
This means the Brotherhood’s party will lead a coalition government in Cairo when the complicated three-stage election concludes in two months. The religiously conservative Salafi al-Nour Party got about a quarter of the vote, which surprised party leaders and many Egyptian and foreign analysts. But the Muslim Brotherhood said it would form a coalition government only with liberal parties, not with the Salafis.<br />
<br />
Many Egyptian liberal activists, including presidential candidate Muhammad ElBaradaei, have expressed apprehension that by getting almost a fourth of the vote in the first round, the Salafis might push for a conservative social and political agenda — banning music, liquor, and certain types of literature, and restricting minority and women’s rights.<br />
<br />
ElBaradei also said that, with over 60 percent Islamists, the new People’s Assembly is not a true reflection the Egypt that toppled the Mubarak regime. Election results made it obvious the Freedom and Justice Party was well-organized and campaigned effectively whereas the liberal coalition, including the “generation of the uprising,” was woefully splintered and ran an unconvincing political campaign.<br />
<br />
The struggle now shifts from party politics to the writing of the Egyptian constitution. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists are demanding that the People’s Assembly should form the committee charged with writing the constitution. Liberals, like ElBaradei, are leaning toward having the generals who now wield political power play a larger role in shaping the constitutional committee as a countervailing force to the Islamists.<br />
<br />
As the Arab revival surges on, it is likely that Islamic-inspired groups will gain a major share of political power in Yemen and Syria — and perhaps even in Jordan and Bahrain. Despite the strenuous efforts of Saudi Arabia to stem the tides of change through influence and money, the pathology of authoritarian rule suggests continuing vulnerability to mass protests and resistance.<br />
<br />
But now, having won elections, these parties will need to govern. The challenges facing popularly elected governments in the Middle East are formidable, especially job creation and economic needs. Chanting “Islam is the solution” will not do the trick.<br />
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Of course, there will be a political honeymoon for these new governments — a “night of honey,” as Arabs call the wedding night. But there will be no bliss unless the victors can deliver. This means the new governments often will be obliged to embrace compromise and deal-making — or face repudiation by an electorate that now knows how to institute political divorce.<br />
<br />
Arab publics are repudiating a strong executive — whether president or king — in favor of parliamentary democracies. In presidential republics, the 2011 upheavals have signaled a desire to replace a powerful president with an independent prime minister and a parliament with legislative powers. They also have demanded a civilian government, an end to the <em>mukhabarat</em> (security) state, and constitutional reform. Even the privileged status of the military now is being questioned — especially in Egypt, where the prerogatives of the generals had been off limits for debate.<br />
<br />
The transition to democracy in Egypt could face several risks that could derail it. They could come from terrorist organizations and radical Salafi groups, which do not believe in democracy, or from entrenched militaries ready to thwart any attempts to undercut their economic and power status. Sectarianism, which has been fomented by regimes in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, poses still another potential risk on the democratization path.<br />
<br />
Yet, despite these looming hazards, mainstream Islamic political parties that remain committed to pluralism, inclusion, and civil rights are poised to play a constructive role in combating sectarianism, radicalism, and militarism. They should be afforded the opportunity to do so.<br />
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<em>Emile Nakhleh is former director of the political Islam strategic analysis program at the CIA. Augustus R. Norton is a professor of anthropology and international relations at Boston University.</em><br />
<i><br />
</i></div></div><span class="fullpost"> </span></div>arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-14638359594832790602011-10-04T10:13:00.001-04:002011-10-04T10:17:12.335-04:00SUPPORT THE WALL STREET PROTESTS<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuwjNil3IfKkfvRiTnukqdDy3sqL97fBNNGVckBqQcKGmldmtzuN__BCq3B7NPvNt1ioEBqtnRAPen-TrpMnxUX43l16WUG3oKi7bLHk_wX7kr7QvqUfC3zagVmSCJvmqYkRsubOEkx-8/s1600/IMG_2594.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuwjNil3IfKkfvRiTnukqdDy3sqL97fBNNGVckBqQcKGmldmtzuN__BCq3B7NPvNt1ioEBqtnRAPen-TrpMnxUX43l16WUG3oKi7bLHk_wX7kr7QvqUfC3zagVmSCJvmqYkRsubOEkx-8/s400/IMG_2594.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5659638094686988690" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP38ss6iONneWLtkIoemGJxtF6Vy3m7krrYf37FTiWMrpIkBt8iiPT99hkrjpiF1l9fMd_40tIw6sTqllVtQquSSGiR-vHvIzFu7m1zUQZaAtSl2oQM0et2eZyMGziK_vafOVhMPJ5fx0/s1600/IMG_2596.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP38ss6iONneWLtkIoemGJxtF6Vy3m7krrYf37FTiWMrpIkBt8iiPT99hkrjpiF1l9fMd_40tIw6sTqllVtQquSSGiR-vHvIzFu7m1zUQZaAtSl2oQM0et2eZyMGziK_vafOVhMPJ5fx0/s400/IMG_2596.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5659637778412829570" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgivqfGxkFtDRdcgMQ5bhC0VUnCB3xvmQxNgAKz543bfghqWZqxzV7dPQ8zYjQWuTPYkpeqTx-iSQ8IL_fRgwtrDsmIPwS_PCnMfjXzeWP4_aSCSwp9Qg7MLi5-_f9U-3bgwOzr-9jy_VI/s1600/IMG_2590.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgivqfGxkFtDRdcgMQ5bhC0VUnCB3xvmQxNgAKz543bfghqWZqxzV7dPQ8zYjQWuTPYkpeqTx-iSQ8IL_fRgwtrDsmIPwS_PCnMfjXzeWP4_aSCSwp9Qg7MLi5-_f9U-3bgwOzr-9jy_VI/s400/IMG_2590.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5659637529164388626" /></a><br />Hello readers,<br /><br />I am happy to report from New York that there are signs of positive social change in late imperial America. <br /><br />The photos accompanying this post were taken by the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011.<br /><br />I've been in China for the last few months and unable to update this blog because Blogger is blocked by Beijing. <br />Although Chinese internet controls can be a nuisance, or worse, block vital information that citizens need to understand and improve the society in which they live, I don't really dispute the right of a sovereign nation to block data-mining products that collude with the US government.<br /><br />The surreptitious statistical surveillance conducted by Google, Facebook and other "darlings" of late-era US imperialism takes the joy out of technological innovation and erodes trust on the creative commons of the Internet. As such I refuse to post on Facebook and am winding down my use of Google products; as attractive as some of the technology is, the company is not to be trusted.<br /><br />Please look for future posts on Wordpress under my name, or by my internet tag, jinpeili.<br /><br />Phil CunninghamUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-28737318476022826722011-04-13T18:38:00.000-04:002011-04-13T18:38:45.631-04:00Important piece on Saudi Intervention in Bahrain<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><div dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; text-align: left;"><div>Cross-posted with "<a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/04/important-piece-on-saudi-intervention.html">From the Field</a>" </div><div> </div><div>Caryle<span style="color: #073763;"> Murphy provides interesting detail on the March 16, 2011, intervention in Bahrain by Saudi Arabia. There are a variety of notable elements in the piece:</span></div><div style="color: #073763;"><ul style="color: #073763; text-align: left;"><li>King Abdullah and company have been riled by the U.S. embrace of reform in Egypt and in Bahrain. </li>
<li>They signalled this in several ways, including refusing to receive Hillary Clinton and Bob Gates.</li>
<li>Hardliners in Bahrain have been intent to sabotage active reform efforts by the Bahraini crown prince, and the hardliners have willing collaborators in Saudi Arabia.</li>
<li>Once "requested", the Saudis were glad to lead the charge into Bahrain and launch a wave of repression and thuggery against the majority population in Bahrain.</li>
<li>Reading between the lines, there is good reason to question how much freedom of action the Bahraini leaders truly enjoy. The Saudi godfather is not easily ignored, especially given the financial dependence of Bahrain on the KSA.</li>
<li>Notable for it absence from Murphy's account is any mention of a significant role by Iran, which has the poppycock peddled by King Hamad in recent weeks.</li>
</ul></div></div></div>arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-15457459296633263732011-03-27T22:18:00.004-04:002011-03-27T22:30:00.807-04:00JAPAN QUAKE SHAKES TVby Philip J Cunningham<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />When the biggest earthquake in memory hit Japan at 2:46 PM on the afternoon of March 11, 2011, it took less than ten minutes for the bright, cluttered screens of Tokyo top six stations to be drained of color, commercialism and fun. With a disaster unfolding, TV stations were under intense pressure to change the tone of their broadcasts and offer news and safety advice.<br /><br />To review broadcasts from that afternoon, is to be transported back to a turning point in which everything suddenly changed. The state of TV, as it existed at that precarious moment, good, bad and banal as it might have been, is now a broadcast relic, the last gasp of normalcy before the earth shook Japan to its core, the sea swept the Northeast with tsunamis and a nuclear crisis broke the easy access to electric power that has been a hallmark of modernity in Japan for decades.<br /><br />For an illustration about how the 3.11 quake is changing life in Tokyo, with particularly focus on the airwaves and the energy-guzzling lifestyle promoted on TV, please view my latest piece at <span style="font-weight:bold;">http://www.japanfocus.org/-Philip_J_-Cunningham/3506</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-14498169174312510222011-03-15T17:16:00.001-04:002011-03-15T17:20:35.605-04:00WORDS ON THE JAPAN DISASTER FRONTby Philip J Cunningham<br /><br />The world of information made possible by Twitter technology is vast and fascinating, but what really rises above the Twittering noise, random comments and repetitive multiple posts of second, third and fourth hand material is the work of an intrepid individual, sharing, in short installments, an eye-witness view of an evolving situation. It is a take on the news as old as the news itself, first person testimony, offering a degree of coherence and individual fidelity that stands head and shoulders above the random, aggregate posts of a busy Twitter feed.<br /><br />In a matter of just a few days, one of the most privileged, affluent societies in Asia has been hit and laid prone with multiple disasters, and though the worst may be over, it's far from over yet. Japan, indeed the world as a whole, will feel the influence of the deadly March 11 earthquake, tsunami, related aftershocks, eruptions and subsequent damage to nuclear power plants and more generally the economy for years to come.<br /><br />The following is the tweet record of an American reporter, now an Asia correspondent for VOA, with 18 years experience in Japan as he covers what could be fairly described as the biggest news story of his career<br /><br />The reporter is Steve Herman and his twitter tag is W7VOA. <br /><br />Steve Herman and I worked together in the International Division of NHK in 1990-1, sharing a Tokyo office while working as televison producers on Asia Now and China Now respectively.<br /> <br />Even then, long before he became a radio correspondent for CBS and later President of the FCCJ, I thought him the epitome of a newsman, one who was living and breathing news round the clock. A solid reporter with an excellent understanding not just of international news issues but the minutae of how things work in Japan, Steve is a good guide to a big breaking story.<br /><br />The veteran reporter happened to be out of Japan when the big quake struck but managed to get back in country, despite disruptions at airports and rail lines, within a day. His posts chronicle a journey across Japan as he seeks access and interviews in the three hardest hit areas, Fukushima, Miyagi and Iwate prefectures.<br /><br />His intial entries in this informal online diary commence with short notes about news he is reading and re-tweets of posts made by other journalists he is following on Twitter, reacting to news rather than reporting it, and appropriately enough, as it takes him the better part of a day to get on the scene. RT is short for re-tweet and sometimes he posts links to published articles that he likes or makes reference to.<br /><br />Once he’s on his way to the scene of tsunami damage and dysfunctional nuclear power plants, the second-hand news and reactions to the news are gradually replaced by first-person anecdotes, sensations, interviews and reporting. When the earth starts shaking, he describes it. Then he finds out more about the quake or aftershock, and tweets the best information available to him at the time. <br /><br />Sometimes it's an earthquake warning with no earthquake, sometimes an earthquake without warning.<br /><br /> The constant tickertape flow of tweets by him and other people on the scene start to be incorporated into news updates which are also tagged, retweeted and made reference to on the Internet, TV and radio. <br /><br />In short, by looking at a series of thoughtful on the scene tweets, one can get a feel for how information travels, how information is culled and selected and how it is then broadcast and repeated until it becomes the received understanding of an event.<br /><br />This sort of tweet diary is interesting even when second-hand and third hand information is collated and forwarded, but it really is at its best when it shifts to the first person, and the tweeter on the scene is telling us about things he or she sees, hears, wonders about and analyzes in an original way.<br /><br />Following his twitter reports in real time is to be transported into the urgency of a breaking story in the company of a cool, seasoned guide who does not flinch in the face of obstacles or bad news. Even with the haiku-like discipline of writing in short bursts, there is narrative arc and a building sense of drama as the reporter moves onto the scene and traverses difficult, sometimes outright dangerous territory.<br /><br />For all their news value and dramatic impact, tweets are also snippets of personal conversations put to print. In Steve’s case, as he makes a dash from a safe part of Japan to an area at risk, his friends on Twitter urged him not to go, to consider the dangers, to which his response was simple and firm.<br /><br />“It's my job.”<br /><br />Here, then, a record of informal tweets from veteran Asia correspondent Steve Herman as he does his job. While investigating a tough, multifaceted breaking story, he took the time to tweet updates about things he saw and heard and gleaned from official sources. His short, abbreviated observations were informative enough that within a few days time he had ten thousand “followers” reading and re-tweeting his posts, including fellow journalists, all the while filing formal, in-depth reports for Voice of America.<br /><br />The posts here have been copied from his twitter history, and thus are in reverse chronological order. To better sense the drama of an unfolding story in which each subsequent development is unknown, one might browse his posts by scrolling from the bottom up.<br /><br /><br />Steve Herman<br />@W7VOA ÜT: 37.373258,140.371634<br />Voice of America (VOA) Bureau Chief/Correspondent, based in Seoul, mainly covering NE Asia (Korean peninsula & Japan)<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://jinpeili.blogspot.com/">(TO READ IN FULL, PLEASE CLICK HERE)</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-20425362780790729462011-03-12T11:55:00.003-05:002011-03-12T12:00:53.239-05:00COMING SOON: TO EACH NATION, ITS OWN INTERNETby Philip J Cunningham<br /><br /><br />When reveille sounds, it's time to wake up and smell the coffee.<br /><br />The US military is now thinking of ways to block and segregate the internet into smaller ‘‘cyber nations’’ which would be easier to monitor and control.<br /><br />During this era of incessant online babble, blogs, tweets and cacophonous concatenations, the internet has become a virtual Tower of Babel, an ambitious, overloaded unitary structure breaking at the seams. It's only a matter of time before it crumbles.<br /><br />That, in a nutshell, is the view put forward by a group of US military thinkers in the latest issue of <span style="font-style:italic;">Strategic Studies Quarterly</span>, who see the breaking up and "Balkanisation of the Internet" as natural as it is inevitable, and not without public benefit, assuming that the 'Net reorganises along traditional, nationalistic lines.<br /><br />Theirs is a clarion call to end the utopian, universal stage of internet development and instead to hunker down and build national bunkers.<br /><br />The internet has been imbued with a feel-good idealism since its inception, despite it having been a quasi-military invention. It was developed by a generation familiar with John Lennon's utopian lullaby Imagine, dreamily invoking the idea of a world with no countries. And some cyber utopians took a cue from that, driven by the concept that "information wants to be free", a formulation first given voice by Stewart Brand and dramatically acted out more recently by Julian Assange.<br /><br />But even if information wants to be free, there are the vagaries of human nature that have to be taken into account.<br /><br />Just as a handful of hijackers can burden millions of jet flyers, in the communication commons the bad behaviour of a few can change the rules of the game; trolls lurk in comment sections, spammers clog up your inbox, data-miners violate your privacy, hackers close your system down.<br /><br />These problems are being addressed on an ad hoc basis, mostly by the private sector, to make the cooperative, interdependent venture known as the internet safe for commerce and communication.<br /><br />And then there is the US military, which has bigger fish to fry.<br /><br />Entrusted with the keys to the world's biggest nuclear arsenal, bound by social contract to guard the nation with vigilance, it should come as no surprise that military thinkers are more worried about information control than information freedom.<br /><br />The US Cyber Command, which works closely with the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies, is tapping technology organisations such as Google, Intel and Microsoft for help with cyber-defence, integrating traditional concepts of military preparedness and defence of the state with new borderless technologies.<br /><br />If military thinkers tend to be more orthodox in their regard for the sanctity of national borders, it is in part a reflection of the role they assign themselves to play as defenders of the nation.<br /><br />Where a tech geek might revel in faster computation speeds and an advertiser might obsess over ways to get more clicks, and academics might demand unfettered freedom of expression, it is natural that military thinkers should want to consider the same technology with an eye to violations of sovereignty and security, especially with regard to command and control systems and energy infrastructure.<br /><br />Inspired by the folk wisdom that good fences make good neighbours, there is a school of thought in the US military that posits a not-so-distant future in which the worldwide web will be divided up along national lines.<br /><br /><a href="http://jinpeili.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-style:italic;">(TO READ ARTICLE IN FULL, PLEASE CLICK HERE)</span></a><br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(as published in the Bangkok Post, March 12, 2011)</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-68038839949906369732011-02-20T15:53:00.001-05:002011-02-21T12:16:35.954-05:00No longer thwarted: Egypt's Hizb al-Wasat finally gains legal status<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">Cross-posted with:<br />
<a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/02/egypts-hizb-al-wasat-finally-gains.html#links">From the field: No longer thwarted: Egypt's Hizb al-Wasat finally gains legal status</a><br />
Links for AR Norton's study of Hizb al-Wasat are on <a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/">From the Field</a>. </div>arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com75tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-59071989499988004912011-02-11T13:57:00.000-05:002011-02-11T13:57:42.771-05:00The Egyptian people have toppled Mubarak, an extraordinary moment, but the regime has not been toppled, not yet.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">The military has taken power, but in reality the military has--even since the 1952 coup-- held the balance of power in Cairo.<br />
<br />
The Egyptian military has always lurked in the shadows of the Egyptian regime. The levers of influence were seldom exposed to view. Yet, when senior civilian politicos, such as Osama al-Baz, reflected on the regime and its prospects for reform, they often pointed to the powerful role of the generals and vetoes they held in their back pockets. For years, as expectations grew that Husni Mubarak's son Gamal would succeed his father, it was the military veto that thwarted him. <br />
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Now the power of the generals is in the sunlight. There are some reasons to be optimistic: the army generally showed commendable discipline in its response to the last three weeks of demonstrations, and the demonstrators--whether intuitively or shrewdly--embraced the soldiers; the officer corps is highly professional, promotions are based on merit not connections, and no officer or soldier wishes to be seen as an oppressor of the nation that it is pledged to defend; a skilled group of opposition figures is poised to negotiate a transition, and the Ikhwan have wisely forged consensus with the non-Islamist elements while also remaining in the background; and, the actions and misactions of the military will be in full international view.<br />
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Nonetheless, the senior officers have a big stake in the existing system, not least economic interests. In retirement, many senior officers move to industries dominated by the military, and others move into the thriving private sector. But many others infiltrate the civilian branches of government. They will want to protect their prerogatives. The military leadership will prove cautious about dramatic changes, and they will be nervous about permitting a powerful civilian government to challenge their privileges, or hold officers accountable for their misdeeds. The deep suspicion of the Ikhwan will not be erased, so the generals will want to be assured that the Ikhwan (still an illegal entity) will gain no more than a marginal role in politics. <br />
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When Presidential elections are held, you can be sure that the military will have satisfied itself that its interests will not be jeopardized. It is too early to determine who all the contenders for the Presidency will be, but it is now clear that Amre Mossa, is a front runner. He is widely respected, and, indeed, is a man of integrity. He was the popular Foreign Minister of Egypt, so popular that Mubarak that "promoted" him to become Secretary General of the Arab League in order to keep him well distant from Egyptian politics. But a lot may happen in a year of transition, and many secrets will be exposed, so keep your bets in your pocket for now.<br />
<span style="color: #888888;"> </span></div>arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-71730078761623120692011-02-06T19:57:00.003-05:002011-02-06T20:02:08.048-05:00EMBRACING THE OPPOSITIONBY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM
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<br />A powerful regime, facing a rare moment of vulnerability, is all of a sudden interested in reform and willing to talk. It invites its arch-enemies to the negotiating table. But once the crowds are gone, what guarantee remains that the police state will not regroup and retrench and strike back with a vengeance?
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<br />Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman met with members of the opposition over the weekend. What remains unclear is if the Mubarak regime is sincerely extending an open hand of peace to the opposition, or trying to draw them in close enough so they can be slapped or lured into a trap. Is the inclusion of the Muslim Brotherhood a heartfelt bid to hear all sides or a plan to sow division in a protest that to date has been notable for being leaderless, secular, spontaneous and youthful?
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<br />Given the low esteem with which the Muslim Brotherhood is viewed in Israel, Europe and the US, extending an olive branch to the banned, radical opposition might seem paradoxical at first. But it is sometimes easier for entrenched power to deal with its arch-enemy, the enemy that it knows, and not only knows, but probably needs, as an existential doppelganger. On a certain functional level it may be easier for a ruthless power to deal with, if not respect, another ruthless, tightly organized entity, rather than deal with a random mass of peaceful moderates without a hierarchical political organization.
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<br />Certainly in other places, at other times, this paradoxical embrace of the opposite can be seen in effect. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US found it easier to work with Japan’s old wartime elite than the communists, pacifists and trade unionists who opposed Tokyo’s war on Asia. In recent decades, Beijing’s rulers have found it easier to engage the Communist Party of China’s arch-enemy represented by the KMT party on Taiwan, rather than deal respectfully with rag-tag individuals such as Liu Xiaobo, and many thousands of others, who demonstrated at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
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<br />Thus, what appears at first glance a gesture of inclusion on the part of the Egyptian regime might in fact be a bid to exclude the moderate core demonstrators and keep the focus on mutually antagonistic extremes instead.
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<br /><a href="http://jinpeili.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-style:italic;">(TO READ THE FULL TEXT, PLEASE CLICK HERE)</span</a>></a>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-57583012296709114682011-02-04T18:29:00.005-05:002011-02-09T16:15:21.022-05:00EVERY UPRISING IS DIFFERENT<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW1MbkJoiT3xse4fCm_Pxf_OuGgceLqeh1ahE0aTWTxVnv1OnGS92Gda9nWhIq69snKK97TVmc4A2D0XUBv4sjukCr6KhpwxO8X4uoD0zpWM5N3fwap1XecHdXqLkHQuRv0Stj0yutnF4K/s1600/images.jpeg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 254px; height: 198px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW1MbkJoiT3xse4fCm_Pxf_OuGgceLqeh1ahE0aTWTxVnv1OnGS92Gda9nWhIq69snKK97TVmc4A2D0XUBv4sjukCr6KhpwxO8X4uoD0zpWM5N3fwap1XecHdXqLkHQuRv0Stj0yutnF4K/s400/images.jpeg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5569981396979619426" /></a><br /><br />Philip J Cunningham<br /> <br /> <br />Every uprising is different. But given shared human strengths and weaknesses, the dynamics of crowd behavior, crowd control, and crowd chaos play out in ways that strike a common chord. Having written about popular protest, cultural clashes and street marches in East Asia for two decades now, there are certain commonalities that come to fore as the events in Cairo, as reported by Al Jazeera and other Internet sources, unfold in real time on my computer screen.<br /> <br />-Truth is an early casualty of any conflict, and the media comes under pressure almost immediately. Competing media narratives diverge wildly, usually the storytelling of the government pitted against the storytelling of the protesters. Distortions to the truth range from outright lies and censorship, to mudslinging, misdirection and deliberate prevarications. There is obfuscation and startling clarity. There are also moments of heartfelt expression, courageous calls for change and sometimes shocking clandestine reports from the frontlines of the conflict.<br /> <br />-Television stations are a coveted resource for those seeking political control. State television, even when it is reduced to producing propaganda, is such an effective transmitter of information, (including mis-information, mis-direction, taboos and telling silences) in regards to an escalating crisis that it can inadvertently help fan the flames of nationwide protest. Even when the details of a mass incident in progress are garbled or distorted by heavy-handed censorship, the fingerprints of the heavy-handedness are visible for all to see. The odd, Orwellian quality of manipulated news, what with its revved up nationalistic fervor, glaring contradictions, threatening reassurances and a rather too loud pleading of innocence, is politically charged enough to betray meta-truths about the abject nature of the regime.<br /> <br />-Reporters and citizen Journalists are at risk. Be it for their truth-telling capacity or simply a vengeful way of blaming the messenger, journalists often get roughed up as public disturbances unfold. Journalists are detained and denied access to key locations, often in the name of safety. Western journalists are especially easy to find as they tend to hole up in luxury hotels where they are subject to surveillance, harassment, and confiscation of film, memory chips, cameras, etc.<br /> <br />-Al Jazeera TV. The upstart TV station based in Qatar has come of age, although it observes, like every news service on the earth, certain ground rules and avoids certain sensitive topics. Its unique take on world news is largely ignored by US cable TV providers, but luckily Al Jazeera Internet streaming can reach a truly global audience, providing a service to viewers whose television and cable service is tilted in favor of the national agendas of the traditional media giants such as CNN, BBC, Fox and ABC. In what might be understood as a backhanded compliment, Al Jazeera has been accused of meddling by the Egyptian government.<br /> <br />-The Internet. Online news services, specialist blogs, Twitter and social networking tools have helped get the story out as well. Advanced information technologies, and the costly, complex devices required to view the news on, are convenient when they work well, and they work especially well across borders at global distances, but remain largely out of the reach of the poor and can be rendered momentarily worthless when the plug gets pulled, as was the case in Egypt when the Internet was turned off. The technology itself is neutral, and there are various ingenious ways to get around blocking, but despite the freedom of expression hype, modern tools are no different from the printing press or radio in the sense that they can be used to further things good and bad and can be used to promote the cause of either side through skillful public relations and information control.<br /> <br />-Word of mouth. Fortunately, the information ecosystem is full of diverse platforms and incidental redundancies; if one technology fails, or is blocked, other ways of transmitting information remain. This includes everything from hardy, traditional technologies such as landline telephones and fax machines to hand-painted banners, chants, slogans and word of mouth.<br /> <br />-Rumors. Rightly or wrongly, rumors take the place of reliable information when reliable information is hard to come by. Rumors serve to excite people to action. The more severe information control at home, the more likely agitated citizens are to turn to the latest gossip on the street.<br /> <br />-Crowd dynamics. When a large crowd manages to gather and assemble, especially in an environment where political gatherings are generally banned and ruthlessly suppressed, success breeds success. If ten, a hundred, a thousand brave individuals get away with the impossible, it inspires others to follow.<br /> <br />-Something in the air. When a large crowd asserts itself in public space and coalesces on symbolic ground, a window is opened to possible political change, an opportunity not normally evident. An indefinable “something in the air,” combined with concrete opportunities for assembly, adequate channels for expression and a broad consensus that change is desirable if not necessary, helps kick-start a major public uprising. When this takes the form of staking out contested ground in the heart of the capital its significance is magnified in a way that enables a crowd to grow exponentially. Under the natural evolution of such circumstances, the crowd is likely to be diverse and composed of people from all walks of life.<br /> <br />-Safety in numbers. When the numbers soar to the hundred of thousands, not only do individual members of the crowd begin to feel uncannily safe –however illusory that protective aura might be – but it gives rise to a sense that a historic turning point is at hand. Suddenly, due to a confluence of rising frustration, mutual reinforcement, strength in numbers and chance developments, there’s a perception that an unprecedented and largely unexpected overhaul to the status quo just might be possible. It’s a bid to hit society’s reset button.<br /><br /><a href="http://jinpeili.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-style:italic;">TO CONTINUE READING, PLEASE CLICK HERE</span></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-40402007183272077042011-02-01T13:25:00.011-05:002011-02-02T17:53:44.539-05:00Hard truths in Hardtalk<span style="font-style:italic;">posted by Philip Cunningham</span><br /><br />There's a telling moment in the February 1, 2011 BBC Hardtalk interview when host Stephen Sackur asks US publisher and billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman if he supports democracy. He does but he doesn't. The non-verbal shift of gears is comical, but the subject itself is not. The hypocrisy brings to mind another wealthy publisher, self-styled human rights activist and opinion leader, Robert L. Bernstein, formerly of Random House, who recently attacked Human Rights Watch, a group he himself helped to found and fund, for having the temerity to criticize Israel. <br /><br />An excerpt of the exchange below sums up an attitude that permeates America's "democratic" elite.<br /><br /><br />Sackur: Do you believe in democracy?<br /><br />Zuckerman: Totally...<br /><br />Sackur: Totally?<br /><br />Zuckerman: Without question.<br /><br />Sackur: In the Middle East?<br /><br />Zuckerman: Ah, well, no. The Middle East.... <br /><br /><br /><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9383436.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9383436.stm</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-60416736739162087742011-01-30T21:40:00.004-05:002011-01-31T19:29:39.646-05:00Egypt: Sentiments vs. Advice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><span class="fullpost"> </span><br />
<div>[Cross-posted with <a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/01/egypt-sentiments-vs-advice.html">From the Field</a>]<br />
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“Some may argue that the events unfolding in the Middle East now are too unpredictable to warrant a wholesale shift in U.S. foreign policy, that transferring support from loyal satraps to an untested popular opposition may backfire if that opposition fails or is put down, that the U.S. needs reassurances of friendly allies (often at the expense of democracy). But America is not simply a bystander in all of this -- its actions and words will affect the outcome. They will signal to opposition and regimes alike how far each can expect to go in challenging -- or repressing -- the other. Opposition movements (and would-be opposition movements) secular or Islamist are not only waging a battle against authoritarian oppression -- but a battle against the ways in which the U.S. manifests its quest to secure its geo-strategic interest."</div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">I know and respect the three authors </span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">(<span style="letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">Amaney Jamal, Ellen Lust and Tarek Masoud</span>) of</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"> this piece, but I do not fully share their prognostication. No doubt, the Obama administration like its predecessors has been complacent about the stability of Egypt, as a <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e5f639aa-2ca9-11e0-83bd-00144feab49a.html#axzz1CZcVeaf8">number of scholars and analysts</a> have warned. Nonetheless, despite a few misstatements along the way, including by VP Biden and SecState Hillary Clinton, the Obama administration has handled the Egypt crisis sensibly, if not deftly. When the demonstrations began on January 25th, it was not clear how much momentum the protests would sustain. It is unreasonable to expect the U.S. to turn its policy on a dime, and the administration would have been derelict to do so.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
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</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">By January 29th (Saturday), it was clear that Mubarak would not survive, and official U.S. rhetoric began to reflect that view. The challenge for the administration now is to help support a transition in Egypt, a country where the regime has assiduously attempted to depoliticize civil society and to repress any serious effort at mounting a political opposition. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">If George W. Bush erred by assuming that a couple of Thomas Jefferson aspirins at bedtime (e.g., democratic elections) would suffice to transform an authoritarian political system, then scholars err, even highly qualified ones, in assuming that "</span><span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">supporting those calling for democracy and knowing it is in our best interest" constitutes serious policy advice.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">As the authors know, I have been a long-term supporter of political reform and democratization in the Middle East, and I have certainly been critical that stability has often been the drug of choice of U.S. administrations. Yes, the U.S. needs to embrace reform not dictators, but its also needs to play a constructive role and not instill instability and chaos, as it did in Iraq.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Turning to the Egyptian case, the urgent question is transition. There are respected institutions in Egypt, including the judiciary, which has often proven its integrity and the judiciary stands ready for this historic moment. The military remains an essential player. Like it or not, the military infiltrates many segments of the government, and it is hard to imagine a stable transition unless the military plays a constructive role (so far, the restraint of the army has been commendable). Any transition that does not take account of the military’s corporate interests is likely to fail. [See this <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/21fc84d6-2caa-11e0-83bd-00144feab49a.html#axzz1CZcVeaf8">smart piece</a> by the widely respected Bassma Kodmani.] Of course, many players in Egypt’s rich civil society will need to have a role as well, including the vocal opposition parties, ranging from the Wafd, Tagammu and the al-‘Araby al-Nasseri, and others including al-Wasat, which has been seeking official status for more than a decade and a half. The largest opposition group in Egypt is the Muslim Brethren, which despite being banned has sustained an impressive level of support in Egypt’s middle class. (Ideas about excluding the Ikhwan are just plain naïve.) In my view, the Ikhwan has demonstrated that it is willing to play by the rules of participant politics, but there are many other Egyptians who are suspicious of its agenda. There is, in short, a lot to be discussed.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">It seems that Muhammad Baradei enjoys a mandate from the Ikhwan and several other opposition groups to play a leading hand in negotiating a political transition, but the process of constructing a transition compact is going to take time and good will on all sides. [Added: Among Baradei's advisors is <a href="http://bostonuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/01/al-jazeera-arabic-reporting-police-have.html">Osama el-Ghazali Harb</a> who had a deep knowledge of Egyptian politics and also knows where many of the skeletons are hidden.]</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">In that regard, it serves no useful purpose for the U.S. to rush to publically pull the rug from Mubarak (<a href="http://www.accuracy.org/an-open-letter-to-president-barack-obama/">as some academic colleagues urge</a>), or to raise misgivings in the top reaches of the military. And, by the way, what about all those NDP functionaries who have been beneficiaries of the regime? They will not—poof! —just disappear.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">As for U.S. policy imperatives, I think the authors are not being particularly realistic in addressing the U.S.-Israeli relationship. I may regret that the U.S. has allowed itself to become so entangled and ensnared with Israel's self-destructive polices, but the U.S. and Israel are tightly connected. It is fine to argue that “real peace needs to reflect the interests of citizens in Tel Aviv, Ramallah and Cairo”; however, you cannot build a policy on that fine but difficult-to-realize sentiment. It is a fact of life (and domestic American politics) that the U.S. will take into account its relationship with Israel. The U.S. will want to encourage any government that emerges in Cairo to respect the existing (but very chilly) peace with Israel. As the authors know, if you put the Egypt-Israel peace treaty to a popular vote in Egypt, the results would not even be close; it would fail. </span><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><o:p></o:p></span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">So, Ellen, Amaney and Tarek, here is my request: I might share your sentiments, but let’s get down to the nitty-gritty about how this transition will work. We all know that it is going to be messy and probably disappointing in some respects, but the transition to post-Mubarak is an historic opportunity to address the legitimate needs and hopes of Egypt’s long-suffering people. Slogans are fine, but let’s move on to the hard work and give policymakers some advice they can use.</span></div><div><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"><br />
</span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"></div></blockquote></div><div><div class="MsoNormal"></div></div></div>arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-86726355259494051302011-01-29T12:26:00.002-05:002011-01-29T16:20:39.285-05:00Mubarak chooses a familiar general as the first Vice President in thirty years<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on"><blockquote><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />“My analysis is, the government will leave them until they reach a level of exhaustion---<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world/middleeast/28mubarak.html" style="color: blue; text-decoration: underline;">Abdel Moneim Said</a>, who heads the state publishing house al-Ahram.</span></span></span></div></div></blockquote><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Egypt is in a moment of enthusiasm when the people are propelled by adrenalin, coffee and anger. Don’t stay up waiting for them to nod off to sleep in exhaustion. The Mubarak regime has relentlessly worked to depoliticize society, but the people are now highly politicized, meaning that they share the view, many of them at least, that there is a political solution—Mubarak must go.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">One impact of the Days of Anger gripping Egypt is that the plotting to put Husni Mubarak’s banker son Gamal on the presidential throne has likely been thwarted. The demonstrators don’t want Mubarak, and they surely don’t want his son. [An report on al-Jazeera-Arabic reports that the two sons, Gamal and 'Alaa, and their families, have arrived in London. If true, Gamal's political future is bleak.] </span></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></span></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">General <a href="http://www.omarsoliman.blogspot.com/" style="color: blue; text-decoration: underline;">Umar Suleiman</a> is the head of Military Intelligence and he has been at the nexus of U.S.-Egyptian relations. The 74-year old general has been deeply involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, especially in Gaza. Regime intellectuals have told me that Suleiman is disdained by Mohammed Hussein Tantawi the Armed Forces Commander in Chief and Minister of Defense. Tantawi views Suleiman as a subordinate who has been accorded undue prominence.</span></span></span></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></span></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Suleiman is known to have worked closely with Suzanne Mubarak, whose major goal is to put her son Gamal in place as President. Suleiman’s appointment might be intended to eventually ease the way for an attempt to engineer the succession, but that scenario does not look very feasible. Suleiman has also been thought to have his own ambitions for the presidency.</span></span></span></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></span></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">The news that Mubarak, after waiting thirty years, has finally found a man suitable for the Vice Presidency (once held by Anwar Sadat), reflects several elements:</span></span></span></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;"></div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Mubarak is trying to insure his grip on power by appointing someone who the Americans can be comfortable with, while keeping in place his ambitions for Gamal's eventual ascension.</span></span></span></li>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px;">
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Suleiman is a general, but he is on the periphery of the army not from its core. It is widely suspected that the senior generals have so far thwarted plans to install Gamal. Suleiman’s appointment would be intended to fend off those generals rather than bringing them closer to the centers of power.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Most important is that Mubarak’s game has usually been to promise reform and then to renege when the pressure relents. This is evidenced by the repeated promises to lift the State of Emergency that has been in force almost every day of Mubarak’s tenure.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">Real reform requires opening up political space in Egypt. This regime has suppressed legitimate political life and repressed civil society. </span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">If we take <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/28/remarks-president-situation-egypt">President Obama</a> at his word, this sort of resuscitation of political life will be a litmus test for Mubarak’s willingness to engage reform. </span></li>
</span></span></ul><span class="fullpost"> </span></div>arnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07277990738351577529noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2275824557999662261.post-19885111453915991322010-12-01T11:20:00.007-05:002010-12-01T15:45:31.862-05:00.......THE POWER BEHIND THE CURTAIN.......<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifA4JIgKNs6PcP4yV9ky60WtW8rsGIi76-8hx1-SB4nIDMfTDh6kKLiU1h_YxrS8BWJGH64_lvnta6k3lilKrNoGnJBcAxz5Vo07iThgP4sX-g4QpPnuYpa9eAqudWZjOdt2wvkWma5q28/s1600/wizard3.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 248px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifA4JIgKNs6PcP4yV9ky60WtW8rsGIi76-8hx1-SB4nIDMfTDh6kKLiU1h_YxrS8BWJGH64_lvnta6k3lilKrNoGnJBcAxz5Vo07iThgP4sX-g4QpPnuYpa9eAqudWZjOdt2wvkWma5q28/s400/wizard3.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545817734953250610" /></a><br /><br /><br />by Philip J Cunningham<br /> <br /> <br />Wikileak's online dump of US State Department cables is interesting to peruse but not especially revelatory so far. From what documents have been made public to date, it looks like the messy work of diplomacy as usual. As veteran whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg pointed out on “Democracy Now”, the material comes from a database which has been given a security classification so low in the hierarchy of US intelligence briefings that he wouldn't even have bothered to look at it when he worked as a mid-level intelligence analyst, given the priority accorded to truly secretive and sensitive documents.<br /><br />That’s not to say the data trove is irrelevant; it's the sort of raw material that makes diplomats cringe and historians intrigued. It's a random, grab-bag snapshot of official US thinking about friends and enemies, diplomatic challenges past and present. It has shed rather more humiliation than light, sort of like a bathroom stall being suddenly kicked open.<br /> <br />The unflattering material ranges from sordid to insightful, from Machiavellian finesse to blunt bullying, but it’s the methods of Hillary Clinton’s State Department, which call on diplomats to cull biometric data and engage in virtual stalking, that really raise eyebrows.<br /> <br />Much of the information is awkward but not at all secret, rather like transcripts of friends talking about friends behind their backs.A significant portion of the “statecraft” described in on-line posts certainly has an odor of hypocrisy and deception, but what foreign ministry could survive without a certain amount of double-speak? <br /><br />In due time, the sheer volume of data to come may help to better determine as to whether the US government has so lost sight of its espoused ideals as to allow deception, petty thuggery and double standards to be the new norm.<br /> <br />The US State Department is quick to perceive skullduggery when dealing with others but it apparently cannot see the same in its own behavior.<br /><br /><a href="http://jinpeili.blogspot.com/">(to read the essay in full, please visit Frontier International)</a><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit5nGFez65hUOf5nsw0jq57icElxipSKi7OVi7HgiQfm0evHl-4i_cqxXNNMM-cuWJ97GTwYgOPiJu5btaKuMf6Wu0uIsR1r6fl1zn9rbjOu7Vp2Rs7EASLC2Ttk7qDI4CjpmI3lQusZ8/s1600/76591-thumb-fxfc.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; height: 180px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit5nGFez65hUOf5nsw0jq57icElxipSKi7OVi7HgiQfm0evHl-4i_cqxXNNMM-cuWJ97GTwYgOPiJu5btaKuMf6Wu0uIsR1r6fl1zn9rbjOu7Vp2Rs7EASLC2Ttk7qDI4CjpmI3lQusZ8/s400/76591-thumb-fxfc.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545741138153585570" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com