Israel/Gaza/Lebanon and an American Election

There are a lot of things grinding my gears about this year's election, but the thing that - at least today - is at the top of the list is the effect of Middle Eastern war and politics on our choice of president.

You may recall my basic position on the situation of Israel, the Palestinians, and the rest of the Middle East, which I spelled out in my post almost a year ago titled, "A Plague on Both Your Houses." As far as I'm concerned, the best solution to the problem would be to build a wall a thousand feet high around the entire region, fill it to the top with sand, and start over.

The problem with the Middle East isn't the undying hatred and the endless cycle of attack-respond-attack-respond. The problem is that it's become the rest of the world's problem. I personally don't care if the Jews and Arabs of the Middle East make a national sport of killing each other. What I do care about is that those hatreds are threatening to destroy the United States.

Across the nation, Arab Americans enraged by the Biden Administration's support for Israel are threatening to sit out the election or - worse - vote for Der Furor in the comical belief that he actually cares about them and would put more pressure on Israel to end the wars in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Likewise, Jewish Americans enraged by a Biden Administration they feel is insufficiently supportive of Israel threaten either to sit out the election or to accept the comical belief that Der Furor actually cares about them and would go "all-in" against Israel's enemies*.

I am neither Jewish nor Arab/Muslim, but I have close friends in each camp. They are all sincere in their beliefs and their anger, and those beliefs and anger - which have echoed down the years at least since the well-intentioned but ultimately deadly Balfour Declaration of 1917 - have only grown more intense with each new death. And now all that accumulated hatred and religious bitterness threatens to upend our election here at home and return to power an angry authoritarian driven by petty jealousy, animosity toward his enemies real and perceived, and a disdain for democratic norms and common decency.

There are no ... no ... clean hands in the ongoing horror of the Middle East. I understand the legitimate fears and desires of both sides, but decry the rigidly zero-sum unwillingness of each to seek a peaceful resolution. Any such resolution will leave each side unsatisfied, but in the words of the "Game of Thrones" character Tyrion Lannister, “No one is very happy, which means it’s a good compromise, I suppose.” 

Do not allow your vote to be decided by undying hatreds from the other side of the world. No matter how sincerely you may want the carnage to end, what's important is that the ones actually fighting want it ... and, so far, they don't.

Have a good day and make sure you vote on the basis of what's good for the United States, not the goals of bitter enemies a world away.

More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* To the extent that Der Furor admires leaders he perceives as strong and ruthless, he tends to support Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu. And the fact that he receives more financial support from Jewish than from Arab supporters doesn't hurt, either.

A Plague on Both Your Houses

I've been reluctant to weigh in on the subject of the horrible situation in the Middle East because no matter what I say, somebody is going to be enraged and accuse me of ignorantly and unfairly supporting one side or the other. So let me be clear ... in the words of the dying Mercutio in Shakespeare's play "Romeo and Juliet," 

"A plague on both your houses."

Mercutio, you will recall (if you went to school in a time when the classics were part of your education), was what we would today call collateral damage in the blood feud between the warring Capulet and  Montague families. Who was right and who was wrong in the feud didn't matter to poor Mercutio - he was just as pointlessly dead.

And so it is with the endless, bloody feud in the Middle East between Muslims and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis. Each side claims to be in the right, and to have primacy of ownership of what we laughingly call "The Holy Land." Each religion and ethnic group claims exclusive ownership of the land and is willing to murderously enforce its claim against the others.

Religion is at the heart of this terrible and bloody morass, which has been aided and abetted by the political interests of greater and lesser powers within and outside the area ... you may wish to go back and study things like the Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Mandates, and the 1947 UN partition of Palestine. You may also want to read the masterful nonfiction book A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin, for an excellent summary of the great power machinations which laid the political groundwork for our ghastly current situation.

Who is in the right, here? In my opinion, which counts for nothing, nobody.

I have well-educated and politically savvy friends and colleagues, both Jews and Arabs, whose opinions I generally respect, but who go wild with rage against the other side over the current situation in Gaza. Jews point (with obvious good reason) to the horrific slaughter visited on Israeli citizens and others in the brutal Hamas attack on October 6th. Palestinians point (with good reasons of their own) to the occupation of the West Bank and the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians who live there*. Everybody hates everybody else and everybody blames the other side for the situation. Israelis are motivated to overwhelmingly powerful retaliation against their enemies by the lasting memory of the Holocaust. Palestinians are motivated to violent retaliation against Israelis by the lasting memory of the nakba ("catastrophe") of the creation of Israel and the partition of Palestine. Both Israel and Hamas, in different guises, aim for the ethnic cleansing of the region. 

A plague on both your houses.

Positions in this country have become so polarized and outraged over the situation that even people who should know better insist they will never vote again for President Biden, or will sit out the coming election ... utterly ignoring the obvious social, political, economic, and justice catastrophe - for the nation and the world - of a potential second presidency for Der Furor**. No matter if you are Jew or Muslim, Palestinian or Israeli, Republican or Democrat, if you think things will improve for you if Der Furor returns, you deserve what you get. Sadly, the rest of us will have to suffer along with you.

You can support Israel and still oppose the brutal devastation of Gaza and the deaths of thousands of already-suffering Palestinians. You can support the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people and still oppose the blind hatred and violence of Hamas. There are no clean hands, here, and it's good to acknowledge the fact.

In summary,

A plague on both your houses.

I'm through with all of you.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo

* The part of the Balfour Declaration which reads, "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" has long since been conveniently forgotten.

** Or even a lesser GOP demagogue.

Thomas Friedman's Rules for Understanding the Middle East

Mike's last two posts (this one and this one) illustrate the lunacy that defines the Middle East in general and the Arab/Islamic world in particular (yes, I know that Malaysia is not part of the Middle East). Who can understand how these idiots think...or even if they think at all?

One of my favorite commentators on issues of the Middle East is Thomas Friedman, the author and foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times. He speaks both Hebrew and Arabic, lived in the Middle East for many years, and is one of the most perceptive observers of that bizarre region that I've found. If you only read one book about the Middle East, it ought to be his classic From Beirut to Jerusalem, which is one of the most even-handed, witty, and sad things ever written about this screwed-up region.

One of Mr Friedman's best contributions to helping confused laymen comprehend the hopeless muddle of the Arab-vs-Israeli and Islam-vs-Everyone Else messes came in the form of his classic Fifteen Rules for Understanding the Middle East. Here they are:

Rule 1: What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language. Anything said to you in English, in private, doesn't count. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth off the record. In the Mideast, officials say what they really believe in public and tell you what you want to hear in private.

Rule 2: Any reporter or U.S. Army officer wanting to serve in Iraq should have to take a test, consisting of one question: "Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?" If you answer yes, you can't go to Iraq. You can serve in Japan, Korea or Germany -- not Iraq.

Rule 3: If you can't explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don't try to explain it at all -- they won't believe it.

Rule 4: In the Middle East, never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person doing the conceding. If I had a dollar for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasser Arafat, I could paper my walls.

Rule 5: Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over before the next morning's paper.

Rule 6: In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away.

Rule 7: The most oft-used expression by moderate Arab pols is: "We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it's too late. It's all your fault for being so stupid."

Rule 8: Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas -- like liberalism vs. communism. They are about which tribe gets to rule. So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war as we once did. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It's the South vs. the South.

Rule 9: In Middle East tribal politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, "I'm weak, how can I compromise?" And when it's strong, it will tell you, "I'm strong, why should I compromise?"

Rule 10: Mideast civil wars end in one of three ways: a) like the U.S. civil war, with one side vanquishing the other; b) like the Cyprus civil war, with a hard partition and a wall dividing the parties; or c) like the Lebanon civil war, with a soft partition under an iron fist (Syria) that keeps everyone in line. Saddam used to be the iron fist in Iraq. Now it is us. If we don't want to play that role, Iraq's civil war will end with A or B.

Rule 11: The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel's mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can't understand how, if they have the superior religion, Israel can be so powerful. Al Jazeera's editor, Ahmed Sheikh, said it best when he recently told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche: "It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West's problem is that it does not understand this."

Rule 12: Thus, the Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.

Rule 13: Our first priority is democracy, but the Arabs' first priority is "justice." The oft-warring Arab tribes are all wounded souls, who really have been hurt by colonial powers, by Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, by Arab kings and dictators, and, most of all, by each other in endless tribal wars. For Iraq's long-abused Shiite majority, democracy is first and foremost a vehicle to get justice. Ditto the Kurds. For the minority Sunnis, democracy in Iraq is a vehicle of injustice. For us, democracy is all about protecting minority rights. For them, democracy is first about consolidating majority rights and getting justice.

Rule 14: The Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi had it right: "Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes."

Rule 15: Whether it is Arab-Israeli peace or democracy in Iraq, you can't want it more than they do.

Thomas Friedman has the place figured out. And in my humble opinion, it all comes down to the application of Rule 15: You can't want it more than they do. Arabs, Palestinians, Israelis, and Muslims all want peace. It's just that everybody wants it on his own terms.

And that just ain't gonna happen.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Earlier today I was listening to a show on C-Span radio on which Jordan's King Abdullah was being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer of CNN. The king declared that the most important and dangerous problem in the Middle East - more important than the ongoing carnage in Iraq, and more important than the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran - is the endless fight between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He said that the Palestinian issue was one on which all the Arab lands were united, and the one on which the most progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace might be made. Wolf Blitzer seemed skeptical, but didn't press the King.

With respect to King Abdullah, who is, after all, a man with a large Palestinian population to worry about, I think he's wrong.

Not that the resolution of the Palestinian issue would not be a good thing, for the Palestinians and the Middle East as a whole. To me, though, it looks as if the larger Arab world cares absolutely nothing for the Palestinians except as a useful cudgel with which to beat the Israelis and deflect attention from their own failures.

Consider the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. One might have thought that the Palestinians would use this event as a platform from which to show their ability to govern themselves and take the first tentative steps toward the eventual goal of a Palestinian state. Instead, in their time-honored tradition of always doing what is in their worst interests, the Palestinians began fighting among themselves and using Gaza as a platform from which to continue attacks against Israel...with predictable results. And far from urging them to act responsibly, the rest of the Arab world encouraged their self-destructive behavior.

When, one wonders, will a leader arise in the Arab world who will for once consider what is in the best interests of his people as a whole? How long will it take for the Arabs to realize that Israel isn't going away, and that all their blind hatred and support of violence, as much as they hurt individual Israelis, are doing more harm to themselves?

As I've said before in this space, I've given up on finding any rational adult leadership in the Arab world. While I'm no apologist for Israel, I think a good case can be made that they have at least built a prosperous nation in a difficult neighborhood, in spite of the unrelenting hatred and stupidity of their neighbors. Do the Palestinians have legitimate grievances? You bet. Are they acting in their best interests to resolve them? Hardly. And are the rest of the Arabs helping them out? Not in the least.

King Abdullah is welcome to his opinion. I respect him and the difficulty of his position. But if he really wants to help the Palestinians, the best thing he could do is exert a little leadership and try to turn the Arab world from a gaggle of squabbling bigots into true partners in a peace process that can only benefit everyone.

But don't hold your breath.

Have a good evening. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo