Courtesy of Normblog, we are directed to Adi Schwartz’s investigation into how Freedom House determined that Israel is now not a free country, but only “partially free.” You need to read to the end to understand the full extent of the travesty.
AJA
Here is the cache of James Kirchick’s post that led to my email exchange with Andrew Sullivan and that was removed from the Contentions site. I’m not posting it here directly because it is, in fact, filled with scatter-shot invective, including, in line with my speculation about the cause of the post’s removal, one gratuitous and irrelevant swipe at Sidney Blumenthal. Kirchick may even have set a record for “number of people attacked in a single short blog post.”
His essential point, though, is a genuine one. I’m not willing to ascribe the term “self-hating Jew” to Max Blumenthal because I don’t know enough about him. I know enough about his thinking and his professional work to know that it’s callow and intellectually incoherent. I tried to demonstrate that here. His comments and blogging since his Tel Aviv video demonstrate no greater mental acuity. Commenter Jacob describes him as “an over-privileged and undernourished punk.” I won’t argue.
I am willing to say that Philip Weiss fits the bill. His cultural psychodrama is all throughout the posts of Mondoweiss, of which I’ve read far too many in order to be able to write knowledgeably about him. He is a blogging pathology with a missionary purpose seeking to play an historic role – so check your hallways for alarm sirens and flashing lights. He removed a post of his own a while back, after only a day, because it revealed too much. The cache of it is gone now, but I saved it.
Currently, he and co Mondoweiss blogger Adam Horowitz are fussing much about instituting a new more discriminating and “professional” comments policy. They acknowledge their comments sections has been filled, for the life of the blog, with invective and hatred. Obviously, they were in no rush. I’ve cited examples before. In the meantime, as of today, they are still willing to put up with this:
The Israelis filth elected Netanyahu on an exterminationist platform. They wildly applauded the Gaza massacre which Obama graciously paid for and supported to the fullest extent, while mouthing pieties about Israel’s security.
I actually have more respect for israelis like eitan, who have embraced their inner Nazi and are proud of their jack-booted atrocities. It’s the Commentary Leon Weisetlier tapeworms who pretend israelis are decent members of the human tribe who I find the most offensive.
The follow up commenter, seeking to restore a hint of humanity, urges the above commenter, “lovelyisraelis” (let’s work through that psychopathology) to “Try to understand the deep sources of your anger.” It’s almost comical. Yes, if only Adolf had sat thrice weekly with Sigmund, we all might have been spared so much trouble.
Yet Andrew Sullivan thinks the ideas of Mondoweiss and Blumenthal are worth arguing about. And vile demonization of Israel, and the possibility of Israel’s end, is increasingly mainstreamed in the political discussion.
I have a particular fondness, myself, for self-refuting arguments. Currently, those critical of Israeli concerns about Iran rather too easily argue that Israeli worries are overblown. Israeli, and the Jewish, sense of existential threat post-Holocaust (get over it already!) is monomaniacal. Yet what discussion is increasingly in the air, sympathetically or not? The possible demise of Israel. The Israel haters mock Israel’s fierce historical concerns – while they actively seek the end of Israel.
Israel is not blameless in this. I feel no joy in being able to say that I knew thirty years ago that Likud’s stepped up settlement policy, in order to establish “realities on the ground,” would come back to haunt Israel. Yaacov Lozowick’s moving and forceful post, to which I linked earlier, speaks of how the narrative about Israel has changed. Israel and all Jews need to recognize the role Israel played in changing this narrative. When armies lose battles (hopefully not wars) they need to be brutally honest with themselves about their own role – their own failures – in the loss. Any clear-eyed observer of history who is not an antagonist to the very idea of Israel to begin must see the single fundamental cause of ongoing conflict: Arab, and then principally Palestinian rejectionism. Israel has been able to make the mistake it has made on lands captured in 1967 because the Palestinian leadership has never been willing to trade recognition of Israel and peace in return for those lands.
The narrative needs to be changed again. That is one battle, and it will be a long, hard one. But there are other battles now, beyond the fundamental one that has been there from the start.
Now Israel faces an ideological assault, mixed with overt and covert anti-Semitism, unlike any it has faced in its history outside of the Arab world. Mondoweiss and Blumenthal are just two particularly visible crests in a far larger wave of animus rolling over Western socieities. A commenter at another site where I published my Sullivan post wrote that when we begin to talk about the people who talk about the issues rather than talk about the issues, we have ceased to engage in productive activity. I told him that I don’t disagree. But now the movement to call into question Israel’s existence has become an obstacle to peace.
Peace between enemies can be achieved when two fundamental conditions have been met. One is when the political leaderships no longer believe they can achieve the ends they sought through war at a cost they can bear to pay. The other is when the people themselves are so tired of the costs of war that peace becomes more desirable than acting out their hatred of the enemy. Essentially, unless there has been an outright victory by one side, the parties must be worn down to peace. There have been times when it appeared that condition might be close to being met between Israelis and Palestinians.
Now we have the new anti-Zionists, who are not parties to this conflict, who have not paid the cost of war and are not worn down, who happily don their agitprop fatigues on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and in the comfortable suburbs to goad the conflict on. Remember, the objective of the anti-Zionists is not peace; it is the demise of Israel. Do they think Israelis will just fold? Yaacov Lozowick tells us they will not. No more than have the Palestinians. If these agitators for Israel’s end are not fools – and we know that many are – do they think Israel would end in a good way? Do they think it will simply wither away, like the State in the Marxist imagination? Or would there, rather, be just more blood and suffering on a newly calculated scale? They claim to be the Palestinians’ friend. Who will tell the Palestinians they are not?
So directly productive of peace be it not, this is now another battle that needs to be waged, against anti-Zionist hatred and the anti-Zionist idea in new ascendance, and against its promoters – dressed up in whatever finery of righteous compassion they strut themselves.
I have encountered no clearer-eyed writer about Israel, its situation, and its place in the world than Yaacov Lozowick, author of the blog Yaacov Lozowick’s Ruminations. He wishes to live in peace with Palestinians and other Arab peoples. He is no fanatical supporter of settlements. But he does not excuse and will not ignore the animus long directed and acted out from those quarters against Israelis and Jews. He will not ignore the frightening growth of left wing anti-Semitism masquerading as postcolonial advocacy for the oppressed. He does not ignore the array of hypocrisies in the consideration of Israel by its opponents, or by NGOs or news media driven always by the dog of what’s hot and what’s not.
Yaacov is former Director of Archives at Yad Vashem. He is the author of several books, including Right to Exist, A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars. Norm Geras at Normblog profiled him here.
Today, apropos of the growing anti-Zionism that actually imagines an end to Israel, and the inclination of some to blame Israel for that possibility (about which I’ll write more later) Yaacov offers this essential statement. It’s a must read.
AJA
Ever since Andrew Sullivan did a turn on Israel during the recent Gaza conflict (which, by the way, appears to have met its immediate goal, despite all the know-it-all naysayers who said it would fail in even that), I have been trying to get a grasp on just how far he turned. It might seem I should have grasped this before now, since he was already citing Mearsheimer and Walt on the Jewish Lobby at the time of the Israeli offensive, but Sullivan, despite our conflicting politics, had earned credibility with me over the years.
Yesterday he posted citing a response by DiA to James Kirchick’s Contentions post attacking Max Blumenthal and others like him as, in DiA’s words, “self-hating” Jews. Sullivan used the post to offer his own defense of Israel’s critics against charges of self-hatred and anti-Semitism. I emailed Sullivan not to defend Kirchick but to ask if he really wanted to focus the defense on the likes of Blumenthal. Here is my email:
I am not by any means writing to defend Jamie Kirchick’s argument or to take issue with the essential point of your post. Unfortunately, though, DiA’s post, and your post quoting from it, focus on Max Blumenthal and, in DiA’s post, “other young left-wing Jewish political writers who criticise right-wing Israeli policies.” These latter might be, for instance, the authors of the Mondoweiss blog, who were primary posters and defenders of Blumenthal’s videos.
The problem in this is that Blumenthal and those particular “young left-wing Jewish political writers who criticise right-wing Israeli policies” are not, simply, “writers who criticise right-wing Israeli policies.” Blumenthal and Mondoweiss are both anti-Zionist. They are opposed to the existence of the Jewish state and are expressly working to bring about its demise. Their position toward Israel is not that of Jews who wish to correct Israeli behavior, but is in every respect that of the most agonistic Palestinian. Blumenthal (and Mondoweiss) has explicitly stated that the purpose of his videos is to expose the essential racism of Jewish nationalism (Zionism), in contrast to any other nationalism. This goes far beyond the point you meant to make, and warrants acknowledgement.
I wrote about this issue, and all of these parties, at length: http://sadredearth.com/the-malice-of-mondoweiss/
This was Sullivan’s reply:
it may be true of phil weiss but it isn’t of blumenthal and their position, while i disagree, is a legitimate one, worth arguing about. at the rate things are going i cannot imagine israel having a 60th anniversary.
To which I responded:
I wonder how much of Blumenthal you’ve read. In the recent Tablet profile of him he calls himself a “non-Zionist,” a not so cute evasion if ever there was one, and states, ” “I wanted [when he was younger] to describe myself as a liberal Zionist, but there was no way-the liberal values I’d been raised on were not compatible with Zionism.” Is there any other group’s national aspiration he considers incompatible with liberal values? He called the behavior of the students in his first video ”the painful consequences of prolonged Zionist indoctrination.” Is there any other group’s assertion of nationalistic faith and desire he considers, in itself, “indoctrination” rather than, simply, an idea?
And did I read you right? You think anti-Zionism, and an overall stance that demonizes Israel in every respect and seeks its demise, a legitimate position worth arguing about? With respect to what other national group do you hold such a position?
Of course, Israel has already had its 60th anniversary, but it is the very fact that you can conceive of the nation’s end that is the point in all this. Again, of how many other nations could you make such a statement? And this is precisely why people like Blumenthal and Weiss and others like them are waging the campaign that they are. Because unlike with Russia, or China, or Iran, or Sudan, they actually think they can do it. They think can bring an end to the Jewish state. I can offer you chapter and verse.
And this is a position you think worth arguing about? And you wonder why Israelis feel the way they do? I really do recommend you read my analysis: http://sadredearth.com/the-malice-of-mondoweiss/
As far as I know, Sullivan has not chosen to read my analysis, and he has not further replied. You’ll have to provide your own answer for that fact. But now I know, and you do, just how far Sullivan has turned.
Interestingly, Commentary has now removed Kirchick’s Contentions post, about which his pals at Mondoweiss are crowing, calling it a loss of nerve. I think we can all agree that it was not the “Jewish Lobby” responsible for this. Is it perhaps – do you think it could be – who’d a thunk it – an “anti-Jewish Lobby” at work?
At any rate, I’ve not lost my nerve. You want to read serious criticism of Blumenthal and Mondoweiss, read this.
AJA
From The Economist, courtesy of Yaacov Lazowick, this testament to the simplicity and singularity of the kind of brave life few of us will ever live: Natalia Estemirova, Chechnyan human rights defender, dead at 50.
Her story and testimony teach us that the origins and truth of the Chechnyan wars were far deeper and more complex than most distant observers could ever have understood, which is usually the case. The crimes continue while world attention returns to the stories and conflicts that can be squeezed into more convenient ideological boxes – no matter how ill-shapen the stories are thus made. The history of Chechnya is ugly and bitter. There is little reason to hope its near future will be different. A strongman, Vladimir Putin, has “rescued” a failing nation and state, Russia, by means of such wars and other crimes and corruptions. And many people will live, in fact, better lives as a consequence, ignorant of those who suffered worse lives in making it so.
All of which makes someone like Natalia Estemirova all the more remarkable.
Hardest line to read: “All of them are now dead.”
Heartening news from the Individual Indian Money Trust Fund litigation listserv of today’s appellate decision:
Today’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the Indian Trust case makes clear that the government’s duty to account continues and that the government “cannot simply throw up its hands and stop the accounting,” Lead Plaintiff Ms. Elouise Cobell said.
She expressed appreciation for the court not freeing the government from its burden to render an accounting.
For hundreds of thousands of Indians, including children, the elderly, and the infirm who depend upon their trust funds for food, clothing, shelter, and health care, this ruling means that many more years will pass before they can hope to secure trust funds that the government has withheld unconscionably and in breach of trust duties that it has owed for generations.
The appellate court reversed the trial court’s $455.6 million award in restitution, stating that the district court may not relieve the government of an accounting duty as a matter of law.
Despite the fact that today’s decision may prolong the ultimate resolution of the case, Ms. Cobell affirmed the commitment of the plaintiffs to pursue the case: “We will continue to seek justice, no matter how long that takes. Tens of thousands of beneficiaries have died while this case has been pending without ever receiving an accounting of their trust assets.”
Accordingly, unless there is a fair settlement, plaintiffs will seek further review and request the appointment of a receiver to ensure that individual Indian trust beneficiaries finally receive the protection they are owed under the law.
The Alberto Gonzalez Justice Department had attempted to thwart justice in the now thirteen-year old case by removing Judge Royce Lambert eleven years into the case, after it became clear that he had been persuaded over the length of the suit of the Interior Department’s racism and malfeasance. Lambert’s replacement, Judge James Robertson, dutifully awarded hundreds of thousands of American Indians $477 million, when plaintiffs are seeking $47 billion, and Gonzalez himself had once estimated the liability at over $200 billion.
What is being worked out in this suit, and in the Tribal Trust Fund case still in its very early stages, is the culminating act in the hundreds years old conquest of Native America. However, today’s good news needn’t mean years more of litigation while the Bureau of Indian Affairs attempts once more to reconcile accounts that the firm of Arthur Anderson years ago judged to be unreconcilable. As Justice Blackmun himself, speaking for the majority, wrote in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians,
Other decisions clearly establish that Congress may recognize its obligation to pay a moral debt not only by direct appropriation, but also by waiving an otherwise valid defense to a legal claim ….
It is long past time for the Obama administration, in simple recognition of a great injustice, to seek through congressional action to give Native Americans what they were promised and are owed, never mind pay the true debt.
AJA
Dogs gone wild, in Red Bay, Alabama, home to Tiffin Motorhomes.
JD
We’re in Atlanta now. Actually, the suburb of Stone Mountain. And actually only I am. Julia is back in Los Angeles to teach at the workshops, so if you are in the Los Angeles area and like photography – and you want to take a class with the finest photography teacher, with the most winning personality, you are ever likely to encounter – click on the brochure link to the right and check her out.
Left on my own, I’m doing dog duty. I led Homer and Penelope west along the walkway of busy Highway 78 looking for a side street to follow toward some still unknown and interesting terrain for canine romping, foraging, and sniffing. Passed a Days Inn motel, and just beyond it a moderate size generator, or maybe transformer. I’m unsure because my focus quickly shifted to what was just on the other side of it. In a small, shaded clearing, next to a fenced-in hotel swimming pool, bordering the long, curving, tree-lined suburban street, was a tiny cemetery. There were maybe fifty graves, including one family plot. The most recent burial was 1986, but most of the graves date to the first half of the twentieth century, with birth dates in the 1830-1880 range. Many had obviously lived thought the Civil War, perhaps the burning of Atlanta.
Clearly, suburban growth had reached a formerly rural area, and what is now a typical commercial corridor, with chain and fast food restaurants, hotels, and all the small businesses of busy megalopolis life, has pushed Pleasant Grove Cemetery into a dark corner, even on the sunniest of days, where it is unlikely, often, to be seen or recalled.
It put me in mind of the long awaited (by me, anyway) part four of Blink, coming very soon. You can catch up on the first three parts under “essays” on the drop down menu.
AJA
Over at Talking Points Memo’s TPMCafe, we have the latest preposterous and slanted post from Mondweiss’s Adam Horowitz. In the comments section, one writer referred to me as “the flip side of Mondoweiss.” Here is my reply.
AJA
Nazune Menka is a graduate student in environmental science who this past spring semester was participating in the Native American Political Leadership Program at George Washington University. Through the program, she had the opportunity, with other students, to meet with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The students were given the opportunity to ask questions of Scalia, and Menka began a question about a recent decision, Carcieri v. Salazar, that had not been favorable to Native interests. Menka’s impressively sincere and ingenuous account of the meeting in Indian Country Today relates the rudeness she felt in Scalia’s cutting her off mid question and embarrassing her before the other students. “The case is a laugher,” she reports he told her.
Of much greater significance is Menka’s account of a question posed by another student. “He had earlier stated to another Indian student brave enough to stand and ask a question that the U.S. right to rule was by conquest and all Indian law was based off that.”
What Scalia here referred to was the 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M’Intosh, in which the court held that only the U.S. government, and not private citizens, could purchase land from Native Americans. European nations, and their American inheritors, had assumed free title to the lands they had “discovered” – by right of discovery: “Discovery is the foundation of title, in European nations, and this overlooks all proprietary rights in the natives,” whom the court in its decision further acknowledged were being treated “as an inferior race of people, without the privileges of citizens, and under the perpetual protection and pupilage of the government.” Johnson v. M’Intosh formed the foundation for what has since been known as the “Discovery Doctrine,” the basis in law for all further U.S. government relations with Native Tribes.
Of course, few Americans are aware of the court case or familiar with the doctrine as a doctrine of American law rather than a historic and philosophical belief behind the de facto conquest of Native America. They don’t know that American law, and U.S. treatment of and relations to Native Americans are legally founded in and rationalized by such a doctrine. They don’t know that at least one sitting Supreme Court Justice still defends the doctrine.
When I cover the history of the European-Indian contact with my students, who are predominantly African-American – with emphasis, culturally, on the American – I like to complicate their moral considerations. Once the nature of the material has stoked sufficient upset and outrage, I ask them, a little puckishly, “So, you want to give it all back?” Interesting conversation always ensues. Clear-headedness on the issues requires stepping out of self-defining historical parameters. It is easy to judge others from the superior (we think) vantage point of a later, more evolved moral development. But who would we have been within the defining constraints of the time? There seems evidence that Scalia – and how many of his brethren? – would have found as Chief Justice Marshal and his fellow justices found in 1823.
Referring to the Menka incident, long-time legal advocate of Native interests Peter d’Errico writes also in ICT of general acquiescence, even among Native advocacy organizations – the preeminent Native American Rights Fund, for instance – to the legal universe established by Johnson v. M’Intosh.
The culture of acceptance of the pretense of federal Indian law prevails not only at NARF, but also in law schools, even in Indian law programs. The standard approach seems to be to train young lawyers to accept the existing paradigm, rather than question it. The standard approach produces arguments acceptable to judges like Scalia, rather than challenge the discriminatory basis of federal Indian law.
No doubt the belief of all those d’Errico describes is that it is better to work progressively at achieving what can be achieved according to the rules that prevail and cannot be overturned than to tilt at windmills. Shall we pretend the conquest can be rolled back? It was just this kind of division over methods, and in the visions of what was possible, that led to the political eruptions in Native America in the 1970s, coincident with similar eruptions elsewhere in the American polity.
However, it needn’t be a choice between acceptance and fruitless, even self-destructive conflict. Argues d’Errico,
The motivation to fit in has not hampered advocates in other fields. Civil rights lawyers challenged racist precedents dating from slavery and won historic legal change in the middle of the 20th century. It’s been more than 50 years since the historic decision, Brown v. Board of Education, overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Meanwhile, federal Indian law is still bound by racist theological precedents.
As with African-American civil rights, those precedents need to be overturned.
Let’s take a look at what the Supreme Court says about when it’s time to overrule a precedent. In Vasquez v. Hillery (1986), the court said it will overturn a precedent that is “outdated, ill-founded, unworkable, or otherwise legitimately vulnerable to serious reconsideration.” That set of terms exactly describes the doctrine of “pretense of conquest by discovery.”
“Pretense of conquest by Christian Discovery” is “outdated”: a decision from 1823. It is “ill-founded”: based on racist and religious discrimination. It is “unworkable” as a basis for Native sovereignty. As Steve Newcomb’s book, “Pagans in the Promised Land,” shows it is “legitimately vulnerable to serious reconsideration.”
There is no doubt that overturning Johnson v. M’Intosh would be a revolution in American political history. The implications in law, territorial rights, land ownership claims, sovereignty, and matters of reparation, would seem monumentally unmanageable, a threat to the very sense of the nation’s legitimacy. This is why, far more even than the Dred Scott decision, the effort to overturn Johnson will be resisted by forces and institutions that represent the mostly deeply embedded pillars of traditional American nationhood. And as wise preparation, extensive policy development and legal preparation – to conceive a way forward – would be required in advance of such an historic act. But even as Cobell V Salazar, the thirteen-year-old Individual Indian Money Trust Fund suit appears likely limping toward just one more unjust and exploitative decision, the time has come to begin the work of removing the legal foundation for all the exploitation and injustice.
Hat tip to The Local Crank and Rob at Newspaper Rock
AJA
The Atlantic Wire
