Onward to apartheid in Greater Israel

The surprise agreement bringing Israel's leading opposition party into the governing coalition will have uncertain impacts.  Andrew Sullivan has the rundown - I tend to think it makes a disastrous attack on Iran somewhat less likely.

I'm less optimistic about the effect on apartheid in Greater Israel, where there's some bad news:

• Israel bringing back collective punishment, destroying the family homes of terrorists.

• American Congressman Joe Walsh supports soft ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, with annexation, second-class citizenship for Palestinians and incentives to leave the country for Jordan.

That second proposal is only somewhat different from the present situation, where there's a longstanding, tacit agreement that a ruling majority will not rely on Arab parties to survive no confidence votes.  (Sorry I can't find a link referencing this, please leave one if you've got one in the comments.)

To The Point discusses Israel's decision to exclude visiting foreigners whose political viewpoints it dislikes (the US has also done this in the past, but I don't know of it happening recently for people not supporting violence).  The show discusses more extensively Peter Beinart's book, which seems to make a lot of sense about how Israel is betraying the democratic dream and what American Jews should do about it.

While I think partial democracies can last for a long time, they're not stable at a fixed level of partial democracy but instead change over time.  While it usually changes towards improvement, that's not always the case.  The pre-Civil War American South became more oppressive in some ways in the 1800s, criminalizing attempts to discuss abolition in the press.  Israel can become more democratic in some ways (gay rights) at the same time that it may double down on oppressing West Bank Arabs.  An oppressive policy creates its own tension - do you ease off on the policy, or double down to reinforce it?  We're seeing that in play in Israel.

And despite that fact, the room for political discussion on this is still wider in Israel than in the US.  A major Israeli politician can accurately call the situation apartheid, while a retired American president gets pilloried for doing the same. Whether either country will do anything to fix the problem is much less clear.

"Israel Firster" versus "climate denialists" versus Lindzen

An interesting article by Spencer Ackerman sounds off against the term "Israel Firster" as used by the American progressives as a label for Americans that support every Israeli policy and interest, especially the most aggressive and anti-Muslim policies.

My most left-wing views concern Israel, its shameful treatment of Palestinians, and the accurate description by Israeli politicians of that policy as "apartheid".  Still, I think I agree with Ackerman, not entirely but enough to say that the Israel Firster term should be dropped.  The key to me is that the term originates in anti-Semitism (this is my first and probably last positive reference to anything written by David Bernstein).  While the African-American community has shown how to reappropriate words with disgusting historical origins, that's not something to be done lightly.  Let this term go.

Juan Cole does a better job with the term Likud-supporter, describing the American politicians who reject as anti-Israel the positions favored by a significant strand of progressive Israeli politics.  I'm not sure that captures the thought of politicians who can't see any divergence between American and Israeli interests, but it's good enough for now.

By contrast, I've never bought the claim that "climate denialism" must not be uttered because of its similarity to "Holocaust denial".  I used climate denialism years long before it was claimed by opponents to be derived from Holocaust denial terminology.  Even if it was for some, the connection isn't nearly as seamless as the term "Israeli Firster" is with anti-Semitism.  These people truly are climate denialists and it has a connection to being anti-science, not to anti-Semitism.

And since we're on a related subject, there's the issue of Richard Lindzen claiming to be offended by the term climate denier because he claims to be a Holocaust survivor.  His claim is based on the fact that his Jewish parents emigrated from Germany in 1938, and he was born in 1940.  Even the broadest-accepted definition of Holocaust survivor would only include his parents, not him (and many would not include his parents, although they undoubtedly faced severe persecution).  Actual Holocaust survivors would have good reason to be offended by Lindzen.

Cordoba House and learning from the Hamas-Likud symbiosis

The radical extremists among Israelis and Palestinians have an unstated symbiotic relationship - each extremist side advocates committing outrages upon the other side but has to contend with more moderate elements who oppose them. Each time the extremists on one side commit an outrage against the other side, the moderates on the victim side get weaker. The extremists on the victim side are now more free to commit an outrage in return, and the cycle worsens. It doesn't have to be a deliberate or conscious collusion by the two extremist sides, and they don't have to be morally equivalent to each other. It's still a symbiosis.

I think that's partially what's going on with the Cordoba House controversy. Islamophobes in America don't even want to acknowledge the existence of Islamic moderates like the ones running the Cordoba project, so they lump all forms of Islam together. And to the extent Islamophobes succeed in killing or tarnishing the project, they succeed in harming moderate Islam. That's just great for extremists in Islam, or even unreformed and undemocratic elements of Islam, and their behavior will then just reinforce the power of Islamophobes.

What to do about this symbiosis is less clear, except that the cycle can work in reverse, of increasing moderation. I think the Cordoba House will be built and will help increase the influence of moderate Islamic leaders at the detriment of Islamic extremists and American Islamophobes.

I've also thought the Cordoba House could highlight the Muslim victims and heroes of 911, something that could help blunt the claim that the project is somehow an affront to the memory of 911.

Supporting Tibet and West Bank embargoes

American politics has a ridiculously low tolerance of criticism of Israel, so much so that Sarah Palin got away with saying we shouldn't be allowed to "second-guess" the policies of a foreign nation.  It seems like the mainstream tolerates almost no criticism, so what there is comes from looney-tune antisemitism on the far right and ridiculous claims on the left that Israel is exactly like the former South Africa.

The left does have a point when it comes to the occupied West Bank, that Israel has an apartheid policy there.  The comparison to Tibet seems pretty valid to me as well - while the West Bank occupation was provoked and Tibet wasn't, at least the Chinese give the petty rights of citizenship in a dictatorship to Tibetans.

Left-wing radio here in the Bay Area had an Israeli activist talking about how we should boycott companies and products involved in the West Bank occupation (more info here).  I wouldn't support a broad boycott of everything Israeli or everything Chinese, but a boycott related to their illegal occupations sounds proper and well-targeted, even if it's mostly symbolic.

In related news, Matt Yglesias points to the hissy fit rightwingers threw when Jimmy Carter labeled Israeli politics in the West Bank as "apartheid" and notes that former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has just used the same term.  It would be helpful if conservatives could stop having the vapors and drop some of their political correctness.

Pro-peace, pro-Israel, pro-other-countries, anti-one-state-solution

Matt Yglesias writes about some confusion over the J-Street identity. Some visitors to this alternative to the hard-conservative, militaristic, and uncompromising approach to Arab-Israeli peace had trouble with the label "Pro-Peace, Pro-Israel."

I can't believe and don't believe that they had trouble with the idea of millions of Jews living in this part of the Middle East. While I wouldn't have supported this stupid idea 70 years ago, the ship has sailed and it would be no more just to kick out the modern Jewish citizens than it would be to kick out all the non-Native Americans from North America.

I assume the people having trouble with the "Pro-Israel" phrase don't want to remove the Jews, but rather would merge the Jewish and Palestinian populations in Israel and the occupied territories (plus the Palestinian Diaspora) into a single country, the so-called "one-state-solution". This might be showing my personal opinion somewhat to say that my first reaction on hearing this solution several years ago was, "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." I haven't changed my opinion. Take two peoples who hate each other and leave it unclear who's going to be politically dominant. Just brilliant.

So I don't support that idea and don't think J-Street needs to either. I could call myself pro-Israel, in the same sense that I'm pro-Jordan and pro-Bhutan, and pro-world-in-general. That attitude probably puts me on the far left of the extremely narrow range of political discourse in the US over Israel. It might take me out of the target group for J-Street, which is looking for people who are especially pro-Israel. I think it's fine to be especially pro-Israel so long as that doesn't translate into harming other countries and peoples, and people with Matt Yglesias' attitude can help improve the discourse in the US, to help peace and to help Israel.

Proportionality in response to violence should be more specific for an occupying power

Just war theory requires the defender to be proportionate in response to provocation, although what exactly is proportionate hasn't been well defined. I think in the case of an occupying power acting in self defense such as responding to terrorist acts, it should be possible to define proportionality more specifically: the occupier has no right to inflict more deaths upon the civilian occupied population than the occupier itself has suffered.

A number of reasons support this argument - the occupier has the moral obligation to protect the innocent in the occupied region instead of making the innocent suffer in order to protect a smaller number of people elsewhere. The occupation itself may be a contributing factor for the attacks on the occupier, and the length of time of the occupation gives increasing responsibility to the occupier for the conditions that created the problem.

These reasons boil down to the occupier having the most power of anyone involved, including the power to leave. The occupier might deny that the choice to leave is feasible, but to a large extent, that's a problem that the occupier has either created or maintained over time.

This idea was inspired by the Gaza mess, where the Israelis have killed hundreds of innocents so far in response to a dozen or two killed by terrorists, but it only partially applies to the partial occupation Israel had in partially controlling Gaza's borders. Even under the traditional ambiguity of proportionality, though, I think Israel's gone too far.

I wish I knew a complete answer to the problem there. I feel like Israel has done its utmost to turn the Palestinian population into monsters, and it has succeeded to a tragic extent.

Israel to bomb Iran this week?*

*As The Daily Show once noted, insinuations made without evidence are often justified by adding a question mark, but here goes nothing.

Enough celebrating over what I anticipate the election to be, and time to get cranky. Presently, it seems unlikely that the US will try to obliterate Iran's nuclear program, although I wouldn't rule out semi-accidentally stumbling into a hot border war that spreads. Given US reluctance, what will Israel do?

If they decide to do it themselves, I think their two best time periods to do it are before Obama's inauguration, or at some point in the future when the US relinquishes control of Iraqi airspace. The safest path for Israeli bombers is over Jordan and Iraq, not Saudi Arabia. Bush would be less resistant than Obama, and Israel could present Obama with a fait accompli, so that favors an attack relatively soon.

The other possibility for Israel is to wait one or more years, when the US doesn't have legal responsibility for Iraqi airspace. It'll be many years after that time before Iraq could really do anything about the Israeli air force, so this would be the diplomatic sweet spot for attacking Israelis, assuming they're willing to wait.

It also assumes the Israelis want the diplomatic sweet spot to get America off the hook. Maybe they don't - if they attack while the US sits on its hands and refuses to shoot down Israeli warcraft (and I doubt we would), then the Arab world would blame the US for the Israeli attack, which would make Israel happy enough.

So what should Obama do? Not much he can do until he's inaugurated. If it happens before January 20, he should say "Once is enough - when I'm President, any warcraft from any nation that enters Iraqi airspace under US control will be shot down." If no attack occurs, he could still say that when he's President, eliminating the "once is enough" part.

More happily, there's this Fresh Air interview with former CIA operative Bob Baer. He knows Israeli officials who want an attack but are not getting their way. Maybe someone in Israel realizes there's still time to figure out what Iran is really doing, or even that a long-term smoldering war with Iran is even worse than Iran getting nukes.

UPDATE Jan. 10 2009: Israel wanted to attack Iran and asked for Iraq overflight rights, but was refused by Bush. Good for him.