A Gathering Storm?

Yesterday's commemorations of Israel's independence and the Palestinians' nakba (catastrophe) are already overshadowed by crises in Israel and Lebanon. Israel PM Olmert is under another police investigation, his third in recent years, concerning new charges of bribe taking (in incidents uncovered during the course of an earlier investigation). He is liable to be indicted, in which case, he says, he will resign. That possibility raises the question of his succession by Foreign Minister Livni and her ability to keep a governing coalition, on one hand, or early elections, on another. Olmert and his supporters claim the charges are trumped up by opponents to peace talks the Palestinians or Syria, that, he says, are making progress. So far Olmert has not given any evidence for this claim. Moreover, to judge by the government's record and the current state of the talks, the opponents would need no help from the police to derail they. They can just leave that to Olmert, his coalition partners and the Israel army, all of whom appear quite capable and willing to do that themselves.

In Lebanon, Chairman Nasrallah declared war on the Lebanese government after, he says, the Lebanese government declared war on Hezbollah, by trying to shut down the private communications network that Hezbollah had set up throughout Lebanon, with Iranian help. Hezballah gunmen have blocked the road from Beirut's international airport to the city and also wrested control of West Beirut from Sunnis. These moves come after months of a political stalemate over choosing a Lebanese president, that has pitted Sunni, Druse and most Christian communities in Lebanon against Lebanese Shiites, dominated by Hezbollah. The political situation is aggravated by economic deterioration in Lebanon, due to several factors: a) the devastation from the war with Israel two years ago; b) the political stalemate itself scaring off foreign investment; and c) rising costs of food and other necessities which has provoked violent demonstrations.

In addition, Hezbollah military leaders want to show their muscles, because the party has failed to strongarm its candidate into the presidency of Lebanon, while the Sunni, Druse and Christians grouped in the anti-Syria, anti-Shia coalition would rather have a showdown now rather than later when Hezballah is even stronger. So the parties are likely to spiral into a civil war. In that case, Israel leaders, with or without Olmert at their helm, will decide to "help" the Lebanese government either overtly or clandestinely. The Bush administration would undoubtedly green light any such Israeli move, since it regards conflicts involving Iranian clients -- Sadrists in Iraq, Hamas, Hezballah -- as proxy wars with Iran. Iranian leaders have a corresponding view of conflict directed at US clients, viz., Israel, the Lebanese government, the Arab gulf states. Lebanon today is an opportunity for them to demonstrate Lebanon's disruptive power and consequently its being a necessary player in achieving some stabilities in the Middle East, regardless of Western efforts to isolate it over the nuclear program issue.

International relations in the Middle East are like the old joke about in New England. If you don't like what is happening now, just wait a bit.

School Daze

A naive part of me wants to think of the US as a chill-out zone for combatants in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. That same part wants to believe that the US can be a pluralistic society where the politics of identity are left behind for a struggle over economic justice. These thoughts/ hopes explain why a recent New York Times article especially depressing. It reviewed the controversy over the effort to establish a school in the New York City public school system that would offer instruction in Arabic to children of Arab and other ethnic descents. Despite the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the agreement of school system officials, the leadership (designated school principal) of a talented, moderate Arab woman, her partnership with a well regarded organization providing social services to Muslim communities in New York, and buy in from other ethnic groups, the effort quickly ran into opposition from elements of the Jewish community. These included "outside [New York] agitators," such as Daniel Pipes, head of Campus Watch, who also played a role in the attempt to deny tenure to Columbia University professor Nadia Abu al-Haj. They had questions and accusation, repeated in the tabloid press, about the school's would be principal and curriculum, textbooks, etc., based on the assumption that anything in Arabic would inevitably be sympathetic to jihadists and hostile to Israel. But support the designated principal Deborah Almontaser received from other Jewish group led some Arab-Americans to question her loyalty to them.

The shit really hit the fan when the opponents of the school wrongly linked Ms. Almontaser to an Arab-American that has used the slogan Intifada NYC. The New York Post then distorted Ms. Almontaser's comments about this slogan, so it appeared that she supported jihad in New York. The school system officials then disowned her and forced her to resign, by threatening to not open the school otherwise. The school opened, survived a rough first year, but attracted far fewer Arab-American students than anticipated. The Arab-American communities might have been estranged by having little input in the planning, by the interim principal being a Jewish woman who knows no Arabic, by the controversy, perhaps even by the school being named for poet Khalil Gibran, a Christian. Meanwhile, Ms. Almontaser is suing the school system for reinstatement as principal, a case she is unlikely to win.

This case, like several tenures battles in the past year, bespeaks the intense politicization of US education of all grades over Middle East issues. On one hand, it resembles the struggle over "intelligent design" with the Jewish vigilantes in the role of the anti-Darwinian evangelicals. On the other, it seems a throwback to the Cold War days, when people who tried to create institutions to accommodate pluralism were accused of being pawns of a international conspiracy to subvert the young. (One might remember Socrates was convicted and executed on that charge.) But there is also some resonance with the nasty Oceanside-Brownsville battles between the New York teachers' union and the local communities, power struggles that paraded under the banners of the "canon" and multi-culturalism.

Of course, Jewish groups being pissed about people saying bad things about Israel or good things about Arabs, Palestinians in particular, is nothing new. For decades, American Jewish leaders have been denying any Israeli responsibility for the flight of Palestinians in 1948 or the suffering of Palestinians in the occupied territories, notwithstanding the historical records and their research by Israel historians, e.g., Benny Morris. They have denounced, boycotted and blacklisted people and media that have said differently, because they are more concerned with current public relations than truth in the past. And for the past two or three decades they have been formidable. A difference in today's battles is people of little stature and no followings have organized the campaigns against the offending Arabs -- more facilitators than leaders. Their success testifies to the Internet's power to arouse people and lower the costs of their participation over a wide catchment.

But what motivates individual Jews to join these campaigns on the basis of meager, one-sided information, without almost no thought. First, because people think in stereotypes, Americans and especially New York Jews are likely to identify Arab-Americans as threats, linked to the perpetrators of 9/11 and those militants lobbing rockets into Israel. Second, as Nation columnist Eric Alterman suggests, some join these campaigns to prove they are good Jews. This points to a spiritual and educational poverty that many Jews in the US experience, their own guilt regarding about it and the belief that unquestioning support of Israel is a basis of Jewish identity. Third, these small battles give their participants opportunities to lead or, at least, to feel they can make a difference. They do not need money or arguments, but rather passion and a some resentment at having been shut out of decision making. For such reasons, politics around school boards, hiring and curricula have been the most passionate in the United States.

The anthropologist Levi-Strauss defined neurotic conflict as grievance looking for a target. I think the definition applies to most Middle East conflicts and their recent extensions in the United States.

Judgements of Histories

On the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, I remembered Thucydides's account of Athens's catastrophic expedition to Syracuse. Daniel Mendelsohn's brilliant New Yorker review of an annotated edition of Herodotus's Histories suggests to me that other Greek historian (and Thucydides's predecessor) had a better template for the Iraq expedition. In Mendelsohn's reading, Herodotus's point was not to gossip or celebrate Greek courage, but to recount the rise and fall of the great Persian empire. The empire fell because of a rash ruler's effort to expand it beyond its natural limits. That puts a nice socio-biological twist on hubris, the motor of Greek tragedy, and echoes Dirty Harry's line that "a man should know his limitations." In concluding his review, Mendelsohn lays the template thickly over the present case:

Then, there is the story itself. A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man [Darius], far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son[Xerxes]: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.

Max Rodenbeck, the Economist's Middle East correspondent, also uses a book review to deliver a similar judgement of the Iraq expedition's effect on the American empire. He finds much wrong with Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, especially her assuming that Middle East societies can easily adopt civic culture and democratic values. However, he agrees with her that the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath helped put an end to such efforts earlier in this decade.

As numerous interlocutors in the region tell her, not only did the debacle promote extremism and further isolate pro-Western liberals, it alerted people to the terrible risks of toppling tyrants. The Iraq adventure, in Wright's view, may have been the biggest American policy failure of all time. It could yet prove to mark the end of an imperial America's influence in the region, much as France and Britain's catastrophic invasion of Egypt in 1956 demolished the colonial powers' standing and dangerously boosted the fortunes of Egypt's reckless leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. That is surely a sound judgment.

A Change of Mind

At the height of the recent fighting in Basra, Tahseen Sheikhly, a high profile Iraqi government official and a Sunni, was abducted from his home in Baghdad by Shiite militiamen. He was held in Sadr City and released unharmed several days later. In an interview on NPR, Sheikhly said he was surprised by the depths of poverty he had seen in Sadr city. He now recognizes that the government must relieve some of this poverty, if it hopes to achieve greater security in Iraq. His words suggest 1) members of the al-Malaki government are awfully detached from the plight of common folks in their country; 2) new manuals on counter-insurgency notwithstanding, the strategy the US and the Iraqi government to achieve security is still largely that of killing or capturing insurgents and criminals, rather than winning over the people that support them. Sheikly's change of mind -- his questioning that strategy -- reverses the cliché that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Perhaps a voluntary hostage program by members of the Malaki government and the US command might help change their strategic thinking, like Sheikhly's was changed. Such human shields in Sadr City and other Mehdi army strongholds might also encourage the Malaki government to honor the cease fire it struck with Sadr that presumably included Baghdad as well as Basra. It would have the side benefit of reducing the bloodshed -- the killing of three bodyguards in Sheikhly's case -- that often initiate the guided tours of Shiite militia strongholds; it would also raise the probability of the tourists getting home alive and whole.