Obama's speech in Jerusalem, widely appreciated by the Israel-supporting left such as Peter Beinart, and viewed as a public friending of Israel intended to remove all doubts about US support for Israel under Obama, still contains with in it troubling indications of his essential world view. That view harks back to the 1960s-1980s socialist left's view of the Middle East, and support for "national liberation movements" and violent solutions to the problems of peoples.
Until that changes, there won't be peace in the Middle East. It doesn't change by a myopic focus on Israel's real or imagined sins; i.e. the story of the Palestinian journalist's baby killed, which was widely portrayed everywhere as the faul of Israel, turned out to be the fault of Palestinians. Who noticed, besides Breitbart?
I could put this post in my Different Stans blog, since it covers Iran -- and other conversations about international affairs.
But since the Middle East is the favourite thing everyone loves to argue about on Twitter, I thought I'd put it here for more discussion and any time someone starts one of those factological debates on Israel based on endless scientism about what each side did or didn't do over the last century, I'm going to point to this blog to get at the essential problem I think is never addressed in these debates: the Soviet past and the left's support for violent national liberation movements. These issues will never be solved on Twitter and I will not be changing my own views on them.
Typical example: The other day I got into a Twitter debate with a developer named Benjamin Black. He came to my attention first by re-tweeting my blog posts about unethical hackers, and even made the point that Threat Level at Wired magazine was filled with snitches who were unethical. I replied that I hadn't studied the characters there as much as other hackers like Weev and I would come back to it.
The next time I heard from him, he was criticizing my views on Israel and Palestine. I made the point that Israel will never have a "partner for peace" until Palestine renounces violence and terrorism -- for real. It has never done that. It has never really felt concerted pressure from the left and the international liberal commentariat on this issue. If Palestinians had behaved like Tibetans the last 20 years, instead of like terrorists and a militant, defiant movement advocating violence, they might have had more success. A key reason why the Tibetans could gain as much sympathy as they did is that the Dalai Lama did not advocate violence and Tibetans did not use violence. (BTW, their recent spate of desperate self-immolations are a form of violence, and it was my understanding that the Dalai Lama did not condone suicide as a form of protest.)
If the Palestinians had even behaved like the IRA -- another Soviet-supported "liberation movement" and converted itself into a political opposition that renounced terrorism and violence, even if imperfectly -- we might have a better Middle East. But it didn't, and we don't.
I'm not an expert on the Middle East and I don't follow it closely. Even so, I'm just as entitled to an opinion on it as anyone else, and I've found that those who keep arguing from "expertise" will never admit that any expertise is enough given their ardently and emotionally held views on this subject.
No study of the Middle East is complete without a full-bore recognition of the way that the Kremlin designed, implemented and funded most of the mayhem for many years by supporting terrorist movements in the Arab world and elsewhere against Israel.
To me, the most important thing that has been said about the Palestinians in recent years has been said by Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet political prisoner and refusenik -- and recently reiterated eloquently by David Keyes, who once worked with Sharansky: Palestine faces a democracy deficit, and until it changes along with the rest of the Arab Spring changes for the good -- and is sustained (in ways some of them have not been), we will not see peace. It's not merely about Israel, as it always seems to be portrayed. Partner for peace really does mean, well, partner for peace.
For anyone who has followed the Soviet Union, a key element of Soviet policy was to fund the terrorist organization called then the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and to protect Palestinian violence politically as a "national liberation struggle," in keeping with Communist belief about nationalist liberation struggles everywhere against imperialists (except for their own imperialism) and capitalists. The Soviets supported the ANC in South Africa with this idea and injected this politics into the apartheid struggle which is still felt in the South African government's antipathy to Israel today. The entire BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) is based on this essentially Soviet-produced perspective and politics of decades ago, that demonizes Israel, that claims falsely that "Zionism=racism," and that tries to portray Israel as some kind of imperialist/capitalist/oppressive force like the targets of other Soviet-supported national liberation movements around the world.
The Soviets obviously never accepted that idea that their own Soviet Jews would like to be liberated from their notion of "liberation," and fled in huge numbers from antisemitism, many to settle in Israel, like Sharansky, and embrace the legitimate idea that Zionism is nationalism for the Jewish state and is legitimate as such (an idea that Obama is careful to reiterate in his speech to distinguish himself from Farrakhan).
Mindful of the Soviet dimension involved in externally, artificially, and massively funding the Soviet anti-Western perspective through movements from Africa to Palestine and of course Latin America, Sharansky and others with this perspective have always said that until a "perestroika" comes to Palestine, and until the Palestinian regime reforms, and until the Palestinian people have genuine democracy, which means not a mere majoritarian tabulation of votes, but liberal democracy in which due process and protection of minority viewpoints and minorities is paramount, we will not see change for the better.
Most of the world places their hopes for change in the Middle East on trying to change Israel, as Israel isn't the murderous, terror-mongering oppressive authoritarian power that Palestine is, and seems amenable to pressure. After all, Israel conducts investigations of human rights violations -- Palestine never does.
Even those that demonize Israel and call it the "apartheid state" (merely a reformulation of the discredited "Zionism=Racism" gambit in fact renounced by the General Assembly when the Soviet Union collapsed) don't think it is somehow immune to pressure -- that's why they pressure it relentlessly. Nobody ever pressure the Palestinians directly -- either because they believe they are victims with a "defensive jihad" alibi, or because they rightly know that such pressure is deadly, especially from the inside, as "traitors" are dragged to their deaths by thugs on motorcycles. People pressure Israel because they can; because they are a liberal democratic society with critical newspapers, opposition, and even a Supreme Court that can sanction torture. You may not like the hardline government, but that government is in a context where it is pressured by an opposition, and a liberal to left opposition at that.
Not so Palestine, where different fighting factions don't represent civil society pressing for the rule of law against authoritarian thugs, but merely various forms of thugs struggling with each other for power.
Hamas has rightly been declared by the US as a terrorist organization, and it controls Gaza. When it won by "democratic" elections in a setting in which the population is mobilized for violence and hatred and is not free to form any critical factions under penalty of arrest, torture and death, the West responded by freezing aid and demanding that Hamas, this lovely democratic thing, renounce violence, which is what democracy really means in the civilized world, and acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, which is recognized in the civilized world.
It didn't.
Then there was the Hamas-Fatah split and all the rest which you can read about in Wikipedia -- and look for alternative sources as I don't know if it is accurate.
In any event, two key features of Obama's past visits to Israel, or Obama administration officials to Israel, or the visit of the UN's Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, or any number of other Western liberal politicians have been: a) denunciation of the settlements, to put pressure on Israel b) silence about Palestinian violence and terrorism and failure to make a direct call on Palestinians of all factions and forms to stop. Now, maybe you can Fisk this statement and find something that looks like a hemi-demi-semi denunciation of violence, but you won't likely, because I've noticed for years that the Soviet line, permeated the left to this day, always retains: no one ever ceases to legitimize the violence of the "national liberation struggle" to overturn "the imperial power" -- least of all Obama, who came out of the socialist movements in the US of the 1980s and follows many of their basic precepts -- unrecognized -- to this day (which is why I always call it "stealth socialism").
So it was with this understanding that I made a bet about Obama's latest trip to Israel that he would denounce the settlements and fail to denounce directly Palestinian violence. You know, equal-opportunity bashing, a plague on both your houses (which is the best you can expect with liberals who will never see the authority based on revolutionary violence and repudiation of the rule of law as worse than the state based on affirmation of the rule of law and state violence as self defense).
It looked like Obama might get through the trip never mentioning the settlements, as clearly this was a feel-good, back-patting trip to sweeten the environment, the way the dinner with the GOP in the expensive restaurant was.
But sure enough, true to form, and true to the socialist idea laid in stone by the Soviets in their communist doctrine of national liberation struggle, Obama denounced the settlements:
Israelis must recognize that continued settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace, and that an independent Palestine must be viable– that real borders will have to be drawn
Then he didn't denounce Palestinian violence directly -- he "pulled a Durban," as those of us who have watched the world left's gyrations since the UN World Conference Against Durban have termed this cunning exoneration of excessive focus on Israel every time, and refusal to denounce Palestinian violence every time.
Oh, but wait, you cry! This speech is filled with references to Israel's right to defense; it has even this very poignant phrase about how Israelis live in fear and have a right not to live in fear:
When I consider Israel’s security, I think about children like Osher Twito, who I met in Sderot – children, the same age as my own daughters, who went to bed at night fearful that a rocket would land in their bedroom simply because of who they are and where they live. That’s why we’ve invested in the Iron Dome system to save countless lives – because those children deserve to sleep better at night. That’s why we have made it clear, time and again, that Israel cannot accept rocket attacks from Gaza, and have stood up for Israel’s right to defend itself. And that’s why Israel has a right to expect Hamas to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Sounds so robustly empathetic with Israel, right? Yeah, but did you notice that isn't directly a criticism of Palestinian violence? That it shifts the entire thing to Israel -- once again. It makes it seem, well, subjective when it does that... It's empathy with Israel "We can understand how Israel gets like this" -- but it isn't a firm call-out of what is objectively Israel's situation -- unremitting violence from Palestinians who will not renounce violence.
It's negotiation-speak -- "Hey, Palestine, try to appreciate Israel's subjective point of view here, they don't feel safe" -- without saying *those are your rockets being lobbed at them*. It's leftist empathy-speak -- which is why Slate can grab on to it and endorse it and try to isolate the right with it.
But it's not a voice of conscience speaking directly to pressure Palestine: "Hey, Palestine, stop those rockets. They're wrong. Renounce violence. Then you can be a partner for peace. You are not one now."
Contrast that with this other paragraph, which is supposed to be the other book end in this matched book-end set of moral equivalency:
But the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.
Note here, the evil Other, that "foreign army". That's Israel. Israel is cited as the problem -- the Other that is the Foreign and is responsible for the insecurity of little Palestinian children. The blame is cast -- on that foreign army. That the foreign army's acts in fact may be justified by Palestinian state violence -- never, ever denounced by the left -- are portrayed as if they have no context -- the context that includes that foreign terrorist organization, Hamas.
Not so in the preceding paragraph which cast the sense of insecurity that the Israeli child feels as not the responsibility of *the aggressive neighbour* and *the aggressive Palestinian state recognized by some, not all* and *a foreign terrorist organization" -- speaking of foreign stuff -- but just cast completely with the accent on Israel in neutral terms as something Israel "cannot accept" with those "rockets" never having an origin and an address -- in Palestine. Why can't Obama denounce the rockets directly? Why is it merely that Israel can't accept them?
Obama, I saw what you did there.
Pretty cunning and crafty, and the sort of thing that Israel will not formally be able to complain about without sounding whiny. After all, um, their concerns were technically checked off.
And that's what's wrong with this speech. Even when it pretends to assign equal blame, it never actually does that, but does some fancy footwork worthy of the WCAR Durban final declaration that winds up singling out only Israel, and then essentially reiterates the "Zionism=racism" canard it pretends to reject by placing the "plight of the Palestinians" under a section of racism and implying that Israel has a racist policy -- which it doesn't. The real problem is that Palestine has a violence policy -- and nobody ever wants to call it out.
Then there's the other cunning and distractive thing that happens in this speech, and people who know more about all this can explain it to me, but it looks pretty deliberate to me -- no direct confrontation of Hamas.
You'd think in a speech like this, where Obama is willing to pull up his socks on Iran and say very clearly, without mumbling about talks without prerequisites, that the US will not allow a nuclear Iran, that he could also state what is, well, American policy: that Hamas is a terrorist organization, designated officially as a foreign terrorist organization, and as long as you had a FTO that would not renounce violence in Gaza, you won't get peace.
Instead, he does something hugely cunning, and says this:
And that’s why Israel has a right to expect Hamas to renounce violence and recognize Israel’s right to exist.
Why couldn't he say that the US and the civilized world expects that? Why couldn't he put this in objective instead of subjective terms, making it seem as if it's all on Israel? Why couldn't he say "And the US has designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization precisely for this reason?" This might be subtle, and no doubt some might find it nit-picking, but I don't think it's an accident, comrade.
And I think the reason for this is that if you put the candle under Obama's speech and make the Democratic Socialists of America and "community organizer" socialist doctrine show up in the purple dye under the speech, burning away the rest of the distractive rhetoric, you will find it's because Obama and company are reluctant to drop their deeply-held concept -- despite what other security elements of the US administration have compelled with the FTO designation -- that Hamas is some kind of national liberation struggle for whom violence is justified -- like the Soviets always claimed when the KGB dropped off Moscow gold to these movements.
Having failed essentially to explicitly reiterate US policy that Hamas is a terrorist organization and therefore the world calls on it to renounce violence, Obama then switches the conversation to Hezbollah, which is easier to do because Hezbollah is not formally part of the Palestinian state but only backs it, and is tied to Assad, which the US -- Obama -- finds easier to denounce now than Hamas, and which is easily tied to the evil regimes of Iran and Syria.
Note that in this Jerusalem speech, the Syrian people "have the right to be freed from the grip of a dictator who would rather kill his own people than relinquish power" but the Palestinian people are never acknowledged as having the same right despite having murderous dictators in charge of them as well. To claim so would be to depart the sacred Soviet framework of the national liberation struggle (African leaders have gotten a pass on the basis of this same doctrine as well).
The left and the anti-neo-con RealPolitickers will be so preoccupied with Obama's sturdiness on Iran (maybe his mind personally got concentrated on this wonderfully when the Iranians were found to have stolen the plans for the presidential helicopter from a consultant's laptop) and so preoccupied with his support for the Syrian opposition, that they won't be molified by his failure to mention and denounce Hamas roundly. Or his failure to confront Palestinian violence directly. Few on the left would be placated in any event, given that he still backhandedly pushes the onus on to Israel's perception about itself, which may still be "too much empathy" for them. And Israel already has enough "sweeteners' in this speech, even with the garbled Passover stuff and the cloying mention of "Bibi" that they won't want to seem churlish by mentioning this Hamas gap.
But I saw what you did there and it explains why Obama isn't a partner for peace, either. Until he can renounce and relinguish the socialist left's preference for politically-correct violence, whether in the hands of Palestinians or Putin, and until of course Palestine itself renounces this violence as a method, there isn't going to be peace. You can endlessly argue about what Israel is supposed to do and how its self-defense causes human rights violations at times -- no one needs any help from me on this as Human Rights Watch and the rest of the zealous miners of factoids take care of this.
Yet the essential truth about the "partner for peace" issue is that violence continues to be accepted as a "national liberation struggle" paradigm out of the KGB's playbook. Until this is finally defeated, we will never see peace in the Middle East.
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