Are we witnessing a new vogue in restoring Jewish sites in the Middle East? The renovated Maimonides synagogue in Cairo will be officially inaugurated in March to much fanfare. The Maghen Avraham Synagogue in the heart of Beirut is being rebuilt. Across Morocco and Tunisia, holy sites and synagogues are getting a facelift.

What is going on?

Nobody can pretend that these restored sites are ever going to be working synagogues. Like Hitler's project for a Jewish Museum in Prague, they are monuments, perhaps not to an extinct race - most Jews escaped from these countries with their lives - but an extinct Jewish civilisation and way of life in Arab countries, predating Islam by a thousand years. Once spruced up, these synagogues will be nothing more than symbols. They will never again become the beating heart of a revived Jewish community. Fewer than 50 Jews live in the whole of Egypt; mostly old ladies married to Muslims or Christians. Ditto in Lebanon, the home of Hezbollah and Bourj al-Barajneh, where anyone openly identifying as a Jew risks life and limb.

There are two main reasons why Arab countries might suddenly show an interest in their Jewish heritage.

First, synagogues are good public relations for the regime in power. The unsuccessful candidate to head UNESCO, Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosni, played on the restoration of the Maimonides synagogue to distract from his antisemitic slips-of-the-tongue about burning 'Israeli' books.

No matter if the country has no more Jews, a synagogue restoration project advertises 'Arab tolerance' and pays lip service to pluralism. "Look, we even have Jews here!" it proclaims. "Tolerance of Jewish cultural remains can be exchanged for Western goodwill and aid without necessitating any messy engagement with actual Israelis," as one journalist puts it.

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On November 11 Jewcy published a piece by Isaac Binkovitz applauding a project to renovate the Maghen Avraham synagogue in Beirut. "Although it would be a miracle if the community were ever to regain even a mere half of its numbers from just a generation ago", he writes, "Lebanon gives us reason to hope. ... For me it is a story which speaks to the ability of Jewish culture to survive in many corners of the world."

Given that there are no more than 20 Jews in Lebanon, and these are too frightened to reveal themselves as Jews, even Binkovitz's cautious optimism seems misplaced. The Jewish community in Lebanon is finished. A profusion of armed Islamic groups targets Jews and Israelis simply for being Jews. Until there is peace between Arabs and Israelis, there is no guarantee that Jews will ever feel safe in Lebanon. It may take a very long time indeed before the few beleaguered Jews in Lebanon are emboldened to come out of the closet, let alone identify openly as Jews within the precincts of the Maghen Avraham synagogue.

While Binkovitz is ready to admit that Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews of Arab lands were nearly universally expelled, and large Jewish communities in Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Yemen and Syria were violently uprooted - curiously, he idealises Lebanon.

Lebanese Jews remained largely undisturbed through these decades, despite Lebanon's 1958 civil unrest and American intervention. In fact, Lebanon's 24,000-member Jewish community in 1948 actually grew as it absorbed Jews fleeing other Arab countries. This growth continued until the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975.

The vast majority of Lebanese Jews - and the numbers seem to be closer to 10 - 14,000 than 24,000 - actually fled the repercussions of the Israel-Arab conflict, notably after the Six Day War in 1967, and not after the civil war of 1975. A revisionist history by Kirsten E Schulze, the author of Jews of Lebanon, the only book about Lebanon's Jews to be published in English in the last few years, tries to present all Lebanese, whatever their religion, as victims of the 1975 civil war. But while all sects were depleted through war and exodus, Schulze does not explain why the Jewish community was the only one to be wiped out.

One of the prime movers behind the project to rebuild Maghen Avraham synagogue is a Shi'a Muslim named Aaron-Micael Beydoun. Beydoun started a website called the Jews of Lebanon. Visitors to the site were under the misleading impression that it was by and for Jews of Lebanon, whereas it represented only the thoughts of Beydoun himself. In fact Lebanese Jews in the diaspora have given Beydoun and his website a wide berth.

Beydoun has a political agenda. His aim to exploit the Jews to project the illusion that the multi-confessional system still exists. Yet thousands of Lebanese have left Lebanon, southern Lebanon is a stronghold of Hezbollah, and the influx of Palestinian Arab refugees in 1970 and the 1975 civil war has upset its delicate political and population balance between Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians, Shi'a Muslim, Sunni and Druze.

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The dilapidated Magen Avraham synagogue, Beirut (from al-Mashriq)

The narrative of Jewish history is one of a long line of painful defeats. And these are not defeats in the sense of the Italian army being defeated by Ethiopia or the Ottoman Empire losing at Lepanto. The Jews were defeated not in combat, for they fought few fights, but in unprovoked massacres, expulsions and dispossession. This painful history has left thousands of Jewish graves, marked and unmarked, scattered throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

In recent decades we have had two major victories, as qualified or problematic as they may be. One is the dramatic and remarkable creation of the State of Israel in 1948, symbolizing the rejection of diasporic history and diasporic defeat. The second is the surprising security and prosperity achieved by Jews in the United States and a few other Anglophone countries. The success of Jews in America is often taken as an unusual, perhaps fleeting, exception to the global rule of Jewish diasporic suffering. Others argue America is different and somehow immune, or at least less prone, to turning against the Jews. This debate over whether America can provide an adequate home for the Jews outside of Israel treats all other nations as intrinsically inhospitable to the Jews. On the whole, this view may not be unjustified, but it is clearly simplistic.

The fact is that millions of Jews continue to live in countries other than the US and Israel. Most intend to continue living relatively comfortable lives where they are, though they do face significant challenges at times. There has been much debate about the future of Jewish cultural life in Argentina, Brazil, the Netherlands, Sweden, and France. Some of these communities are in decline and citizens there may be in actual physical danger. In these, and other countries, Jews face the serious and weighty decision of whether to stay or leave. I do not think we as a people should be overly zealous in pressuring our co-ethnics to abandon their homes. We cannot simply retreat into our own small corner of the globe and hope the world will pass us by in peace. We must exercise all reasonable caution. But this need not prevent us from seeking to bolster the vitality and security of Jewish communities around the world. Jewish institutions persist and are re-emerging in places like Poland, Germany, Lithuania, and even Lebanon.

In this entry I would like to share with you the remarkable renovation of the historic Magen Avraham synagogue in Beirut. It reflects the unique history of Lebanon and the Lebanese Jews. It is a history of tragedy more than one of cruelty or defeat. It is a rare instance in which the pain of Jewish history is shared in the broader tragic narrative of an entire nation. It is a well-known fact that the Mizrahi and Sefardi Jews of Arab lands were nearly universally expelled in the wake of the Israeli-Arab wars of 1948 and 1967 (or Algeria’s 1962 independence from France). Large Jewish communities in Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Yemen and Syria were violently uprooted. Approximately 1 million Jewish refugees fled Arab lands in the course of about two decades. By the 1970’s very few Jews remained in any Arab country. However, Lebanese Jews remained largely undisturbed through these decades, despite Lebanon’s 1958 civil unrest and American intervention.

In fact, Lebanon’s 24,000-member Jewish community in 1948 actually grew as it absorbed Jews fleeing other Arab countries. This growth continued until the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, when a general sectarian unrest precipitated the flight of thousands of Lebanese citizens. As the war drew on, more and more Lebanese of all faiths fled overseas. With the Israeli invasion of 1982 various Lebanese sectarian militias began to target Jewish Lebanese civilians as alleged traitors, spies and enemies. Most of the Jewish community was by this point already gone or on their way out of the country. They joined the 14 million-strong (mostly Christian) Lebanese Diaspora, concentrating in France, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Argentina and Brazil. Today only a few hundred Jews remain in Beirut, where they keep a low profile for their own safety. Lebanese synagogues are present and in active use in Montreal and New York City, while other Lebanese Jewish communities are strong in Paris and Sao Paolo.

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Should we beoptimistic about the current discussions intended to create two sovereignstates in the area of Israel and Palestine? I'm not optimistic. I thinkthe conscience of the world is soothed by these meetings and accords andmemoranda and Camp David get-togethers, during which agreements are made thatwill not be kept, as mostpeople on both sides know. Settlements will continue to be built,terrorist acts will continue to occur, an occupied territory will remain occupied, an occupied people will continue tolose territory and such rights as they have, and then in the course of time the attention of the worldwill again be focused on the next conference or meeting in Madrid. Those of us who care and keep watchwill be hopeful and then again despondent and then again hopeful when attempts at a newagreement are made.

Isthere any reason to believe that something now under diplomatic discussion willchange this pattern? I don't thinkso.

Doesthis mean I am pessimistic and cynical about the possibilities of peace in theMiddle East? I'm not. However, Ido think we are looking for solutions in the wrong places, expecting oftreaties and agreements what can only be brought about by work on the ground,grassroots work, listening, mutual cooperation, and conversation. It's heartening to know that asthe peace treaties come and go work of this kind is taking place, right now, inIsrael/Palestine. I have devotedan entire chapter of my book, Everywhere a Guest, Nowhere at Home, to a study ofthese efforts. The good news (and there is good news) is that these attempts at understanding between two embattledpeoples tend to spread.

I wroteabout a village called the Oasis of Peace: Neve Shalom/Wahat-ha-Salam in orderto study the way it grew from a dream to a reality, hoping to learn how othersin the region could make their dreams of peace come true. In the Oasis of Peace, Jews and Arabswork and teach and study conflict resolution together. At first hearing, this effort must seemmuch less significant than the grand events (Oslo, Camp David, Madrid, Cairo)that enter headlines and call upon the attention of the world. On the other hand, while these summitsare regularly taking place and as regularly failing, the little village is growing; there are six hundred children in the villageschool and tens of thousands of teenagers have gone through the School for Peaceprogram. When I think of them Itend to imagine them as individual glowing sparks seeded out over the landamong their embattled people. These, and those like them, are the people who will find resolutions tothe conflict in the Middle-East.

Theearliest writers and dreamers about Zionism must have looked absurd to thepeople who surrounded them. Theywere poor and middle-class boys and girls living in Russia who gathered insmall circles to talk about building a homeland for Jews in Palestine.Dreamers, who knew how to work hard, they invite us to dream on the same scale they did-always rememberingthat a dream must first be planted on earth, in daily activity, in sustainedcommitment.

In1997, Amin Khalaf and Lee Gordon, Israelis of Arab and Jewish origin,established a non-profit organization called Hand in Hand. In 1998, they opened an elementaryschool where Arab and Jewish children study together. Since then, three more schools have been opened; over 800 students are presently enrolled in the four bi-lingualschools. Here, in thiscountry of bombs and attacks and shelling and dispossessions, 800 students now know how to speak each other's language. Their parents are alsoinvolved, actively working to create social change. Soon it is expected that an entire, countrywide network ofsuch schools will exist, educating children from kindergarten through thetwelfth grade, educating their parents too, and the neighbors of their parentsand probably anyone to whom the children or the parents happen to speak abouttheir lived experience of peaceful co-existence.

Someyears ago, I dreamed that I waslecturing about how we, the privileged in a society of growing poverty, aredamaged by our efforts to deny what is happening to our less privilegedneighbors. We do not understandhow to help them and therefore we close ourselves off to knowledge. In the dream I grasped in graphicdetail the way this self-insulation as making us shrink, impoverishing us,covering us in layers of stiff gauze, so that soon, I kept saying in my dream,we will have enclosed ourselves in an indifference so profound we can no longerbe said to be alive inside all those layers of denial. This was not a dream about Israel andPalestine; I dreamt it years before I wrote my book, but perhaps, working inthe subterranean way dreams do, it eventually instructed me to write the kindof book I wrote, in which I study our ability to ignore what ishappening to our neighbors.

As weare approach Yom Kippur and theDays of Awe, we ask ourselvesto think over the deeds of the previous year, to atone and repent, and to askforgiveness for transgression. Perhaps this year we will be able to bring particular regard to a prayerwe have repeated so often on Erev Yom Kippur we may no longer pay muchattention to it.

"May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who livein their midst, for all the people are at fault." As is customary, we will saythis prayer three times. The first time perhaps for what we have done to thePalestinians; the secondtime for what the Palestinians have done to us. The third time for the possibility that these two peopleswill be guided to forgive each other.

The other week, I had the pleasure of attending a speaking engagement highlighted by the brilliant and well-spoken journalist, Bret Stephens. Short, sweet and to the point, Stephens engaged his viewers while also offering wonderful and thought-provoking insight into the incredible yet labrynthine world of politics and always-shifting alliances. And if that wasn't enough, plenty of humorous bits were sprinkled throughout the speech, including his tongue-in-cheek wish to "see Hillary Clinton walk around in a shirt" with the message "events happen." (This of course, in reference to the cleaned-up saying that "things" happen, rather than more a more risque phrase.) The speech was so engaging, and now, without further ado, the wisdom of the Wall Street Journal's Mr. Bret Stephens! The backbone of the speech was a handful of commandments:

1.) "Thou shalt nt succomb to the lore of the so-called inevitable." Basically, he reasoned, there is nothing that is unstoppable, there is nothing that cannot be changed. Stephens focused on the idea of Iran holding a nuclear weapon, and how such a prognostication should not signal our acquiescence to such a dangerous proposal.

2.) "Don't succumb to temptation of negotiation for negotiation's sake." Stephens noted that negotiations is "simply a tool of statecraft," but it would be "foolish to think we have to" negotiate over just anything.

3.) "Thou shalt not forget human rights activists and supporters of democracy in Middle Eastern states." Too often, the unsung heroes of freedom are overlooked in the Middle East, which is a terrible shame.

4.) "Thou shalt not forget about Egpyt and Pakistan." This point noted that there are serious problems facing both of these large countries, including the Taliban in Pakistan and a weak (and elderly) Egpytian leader, and the impending issue of who will rule Egpyt next.

5.) "Thou shalt take the Iranian regime at its word." If the Iranians and Ahmadinejad are saying they want to wipe Israel off the map and destroy the "Great Satan" of the U.S.A., don't take it lightly.

6.) "Thou shalt not let the name of Israel and the Jews be traduced." [Isn't traduced a great word? SAT vocab!] Namely, don't stand by as the minority is unjustly slammed.

7.) "We need to start making a much better case for Israel." (Start thinking about the "total case for Israel.") Stephens noted that unfortunately, "the main thrust of criticism of Isrsael is coming from the left. This is sad, as only decades ago, the "liberal" Democrats of yore (such as President Harry Truman, Scoop Jackson and Jeane Kirkpatrick, among others) were the staunchest supporters of the state of Israel, because they felt it was right to support the underdog, and had special personal convictions to support Israel as well. 

Listening to Mr. Stephens, one is reminded of the youthful and hip college professor who seems to have a very good understanding of all facets at hand. The best part? No one fell asleep... nor were they even tempted, as all stayed awake, engaged and responsive. I'd call that a rip-roaring success, especially on a Tuesday evening. I would go again anytime, and recommend as much to anyone else interested in learning more about current international relations and statecraft, particularly in such a tumultuous environment. Overall, a 5-star speech by an erudite scholar of our time.

Durban: it's no longer just a South African city.

In 2001, the United Nations hosted a conference, ostensibly on racism and human rights, in Durban, South Africa. The entire conference turned into such a venomous anti-Israel and anti-Semitic parade that the United States, under the leadership of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, departed the conference quickly. It was such a reknowned failure in the eyes of the West and the U.S., that the U.N. is already gearing up for a sequel conference in just over a month and a half.

In 2001, the Durban Conference dwindled down to an anti-Israel rant and rave. This year's version has a script which again seeks to vilify only Israel, which is, ironically, the only true democracy in the Middle East. According to the language of this year's conference talking points, the complete protection of any anti-Islamic speech is also a hot button issue. The top two topics are the defamation of Israel and Jews, and the ironclad protection of Islam and Muslims. Irony? You bet.

This year's replay of the resoundingly unsucessful Durban Review Conference is set to take place from April 20 - 24, 2009 in Geneva. Not surprisingly, the conference takes place during Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembrance for those killed in the Shoah, or Holocaust, of 1939-1945 (officially lasting those years, though many Jews were slaughtered prior to those years). 

The Obama administration initially agreed to send a delegation to the conference. Interestingly, the announcement was quiet. Under pressure from those with memories stretching back to 2001's disastrous Durban meeting, the administration finally did pull out, though it did leave the door open if the language of the conference was to change. With Israel-hating nations like Libya and Syria on board, however, such moderation is more of a pipe dream than a likely scenario. (Already ongoing is the 5th annual Israel Apartheid Week, another disgraceful meeting of the anti-Israel minds. More information on that to come.)

Why has Israel been so villainized by the United Nations? The simple and startingly answer is this: the seemingly weak are easier to bully. Why have the vast majority of U.N. resolutions been aimed against Israel? Perhaps it appears easier to fault a country the size of Rhode Island than it is to fault the cruel but wealthy neighboring states of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

Even France, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany and EU leadership are wobbly in their resolve to support the Israel hate-fest that is the Durban Conference. Unfortunately, even the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights cannot see through the politics of this event, and Navi Pillay has defended the conference as a true meeting on racism. The United Nations has refused to stand up to the true human rights abusers, sexists, anti-Semites and racism-upholders of the world, including brutal Middle Eastern, Central European, African and Asian dictatorships and authoritative rulers such as Syria's Bashar Asad, Iran's Ahmadinjed, Cuba's Castro brothers, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, North Korea's Kim Jung Il, Zimbabwe's Mugabe, Myanmar/Burma's Than Shwe and even Russia's Putin and puppet leader Medvedev, who are clearly hellbent on the path to Russian dominance. An organization such as the U.N., which ignores its purpose and seeks only to chastise those it sees as weaker, has no serious place on the world stage. The U.N. was the post-WWII answer to the post-WWI League of Nations, which was ineffective and failed soon after its establisment.

If the United Nations leadership cannot flex its muscles enough to put on a serious conference on human rights in the 21st century, then it has no business parading around as a global leader. The saying "lead, follow or get out of the way" comes to mind. Since the U.N. has clearly not been leading when the heat is on, perhaps it is time it simply gets out of the way and focuses on something in which it can actually make a difference.

If you visited Jewcy in the past couple of weeks, the sheer abundance of the word "Gaza" in our headlines probably gave you the impression we'd been bought out by Ted Turner.  Or, if you hide under a rock during the holiday season like yours truly, you were completely bewildered. I thought rounding up Jewcy's coverage of the recent disarray in the Middle East, along with some background info, would prove helpful for those who were left in the dust of the Israeli tanks breezing into Gaza.

Back in June, Egypt brokered an informal and rather nugatory six-month truce between Israel and Gaza.  Throughout the summer, Hamas continued firing rockets into southern Israel, and the country's border with Gaza was repeatedly violated. While Americans celebrated the election of their first African-American president, Israeli Defense Forces entered Gaza to destroy a tunnel used to traffic weapons, casting further doubt on the truce's efficacy. Cross-border raids and attacks expectedly increased, leading up to the decision to take the already comatose truce off life-support in late December.

A new, twenty-four hour truce was called, again at the behest of Egyptian mitigators, to put a damper on the rapidly intensifying exchange of fire. Yet, as soon as it expired, six rockets were fired into the Negev and clashes insued along the Israel-Gaza border fence.  This, along with a downpour of dozens of mortar shells launched by Gaza fighters on Christmas Eve, prompted a heavy Israeli offensive.

On December 27, Israel began a series of intense air strikes throughout the Gaza strip, killing upward of 200 and wounding countless others.  Strikes continued unabated the next day, as the international community began voicing its concern. Edmund Standing posted on what he sees as blatantly biased press coverage of the attacks. Meanwhile, Shira Danan gave a voice to those discomforted by Israel's course of action.

As attacks roared on, Jewcy correspondents Paul Widen and Haim Watzman both reported from Jerusalem. Widen updated us on the politics inside Israel while giving unique insight on how Israelis are responding to the offensive. Watzman is hosting his daughter's fellow students who have been evacuated from Sapir College, which is located near Sderot, a southern Israeli city within missle range of Gaza.

Jewcy editor Michael Weiss posted an essay on why Hamas is a political failure.  Meanwhile, Tel-Aviv declared the area around Gaza a "closed military zone," the Gazan death toll rose to over 350, and Jewcy received a letter from Beersheva.

By New Year's Eve, a solution had yet to be reached by the UN.  The Gazan death toll reached 400, while the Israeli death toll remained in the single digits. Gershom Gorenberg reported on the innocent children caught in the crossfire of a childish conflict, the effects of which, he says, Israel has not fully understood. 

Shira Danan gave us some first-hand accounts from Gaza on New Year's Day. Israel denied an EU truce requesting forty-eight hours for the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.  Deaths in the embattled region brushed 420, while the Israeli body count broke ten.

On January 2, foreigners were ushered out of Gaza while Israeli officials begin planning a ground invasion. Andrew Bostom posted an essay displaying Hamas' abhorrence of the Jews.

On January 3, tanks rolled into Gaza to begin a ground offensive.  Neal Ungerleider reported from the "bubble" of Tel-Aviv.  Howard Schweber contemplated the value of pragmatism in the tango between Israel and Hamas.

By January 5, the EU decided it was about time to send an envoy to broker a solution.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy began a tour of the region in search of a long lost truce. Michael Weiss wrote a post pointing out that Hamas is not just a threat to the Jews, but to Islam and Palestinians as well.

The most recent news is all the more disparaging. By now, Gazans have buried over 500 of their compatriots.  Haim Watzman posted on the moral choices involved in the war on the very day Israeli attacks hit refugees outside a UN school. Hamas continues to launch rockets into Israel. The US has only recently begun voicing its concern for a ceasefire.  

I hope this post has helped catch you up on the exploding conflict in the Middle East. Let's hope there isn't much more to follow.

It's difficult to put all the pieces together, and it is tempting to fall into one of several made-to-order narratives. Which might, in fact be true - but that doesn't mean that they are complete.First, the basics. American troops attacked a farmhouse 8 kilometers inside Syria, killing 7 or 8 people, one of whom was Abu Ghadiya, a senior figure in Al Qaeda in Iraq. U.S. intelligence sources have said that there was information that Abu Ghadiya was planning an attack inside Iraq, and that while women and children were present, none were injured. Syrian sources say that women and children were among the dead, killed when U.S. Special Forces opened fire on the building form outside.

This attack in Syria follows recent attacks into Pakistan that were apparently similarly based on actionable intelligence. (In other words, the Bush administration is acting rather in the manner that Barack Obama has suggested. John McCain has called Obama "naïve" and worse for saying out loud that he would consider such cross-border raids; the Bush administration appears less reticent. But that particular irony is a tangent I do not want to pursue at the moment.) Although there has been no comment from either the White House or the State Department about the most recent raid, officials quoted in several sources say that it reflects the administrations broad interpretation of Article 51 of the U.N. Charter which provides the right of individual or collective self-defense to member states. This is the same provision that Israel has repeatedly cited to justify its own military actions including its attack on Something Mysterious in Syria last September; it has also been used by Turkish troops pursuing Kurdish militants in their sanctuaries in northern Iraq. President Bush hinted at the scope of the theory in his speech to the U.N. this past month: "As sovereign states, we have an obligation to govern responsibly . . . We have an obligation to prevent our territory from being used as a sanctuary for terrorism and proliferation and human trafficking and organized crime."

It is important to note that this is not the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive attack, it is a theory of "self-defense" that according to administration sources justifies attacks on insurgents in other nations if they threaten "the forces, allies, or interests of the United States" according to U.S. officials. The word "interest," of course, makes the scope of this theory essentially infinite.The immediate reactions from Syria and Iran were predictable: the Syrian Foreign Minister called the raid an act of "terrorist aggression" and warned darkly "if they do it again, we will defend our territories."

The Iraqi government spokesman tried to have it both ways, condemning the attack on the grounds that the Iraqi constitution prohibits the use of its territory to attack neighboring countries - a fairly clear reference to the increasingly hostile negotiations between the Bush administration and the Maliki government over the terms of an agreement to permit U.S. troops to remain in Iraq - and also called on Syria to improve border security.

There are several easy America-centered narratives.

One is that the intelligence was specific enough and the target important enough that other consequences were simply pushed aside. Another is a conspiracy theory about attempts by the White House to influence the election. And a third has Bush either taking advantage of the opportunity to act between now and January or, alternatively, ensuring that Al Qaeda and others do not assume that the U.S. is so distracted by the election its aftermath that they can act with impunity. (If you really want to get paranoid, there is also the Somalia Theory: that Bush is deliberately creating a disaster for his successor to inherit.)All perfectly plausible. But there is still an element of weirdness in the story. As recently as last month, Secretary of State Rice was saying nice things about the progress Syria was making in securing its borders, although she said that there remained much work to be done. The EU has been working to ease Syria's isolation.

The U.S., for all our complaints about them, have been sending suspected terrorists to Syria to be tortured - er, questioned - for years, and may be continuing to do so. This month Syria opened official relations with an independent Lebanon. In other words, there were several reasons to think that relations between Damascus and Washington were beginning to thaw, which I have argued repeatedly would be a very good thing, if only to give Assad some alternative to an alliance with Teheran. So the timing is a little odd.

That can be explained, perhaps, by the unpredictable fact of actionable intelligence becoming available, but then there is the weirdness of the very moderate Syrian reaction. Bluster aside, the Syrian response has been . . . to close the American School in Damascus. Despite talks of "next time we will defend our territories" there are no reports of troop movements to the Iraqi border, unlike the movement of 10,000 Syrian troops to the Lebanese border in September. There was no talk of siccing Hezbollah on Israel; there was no mention of Israel, period. What's going on in Damascus?

Here's some possibly relevant background. In February of this year, Imad Mughniyah, a senior Hezbollah official, was mysteriously assassinated in Syria; one might plausibly assume that the Syrian government was involved. In September of this year, a car bomb in Damascus near the office of security killed 17 people. Assad may be deciding he has had just about enough of Iran's mujahadeen, and Al Qaeda, too. It's worth reminding ourselves that Syria has a secular government dominated by members of a minority Allawite sect and a predominantly Sunni population. Radical Islam is not likely to sit well with Assad's Baathist regime (any more than it sat well with Saddam Hussein).

More context. Israel is about to have elections, as is the United States. In the U.S., the neoconservatives are on their way out, but John "we are all Georgians" McCain - the only person in the U.S. or Iraq who does not accept the idea of a withdrawal of U.S. forces - is not much of an improvement. In Israel, in the person of Bibi Netanyahu, the Bush-era neocon Weltgeist could be on its way back in. (This is not an idle analogy: Richard Perle and Douglas Feith worked for Netanyahu's government during the 1990s, producing the famous 1996 working paper describing a grand strategic vision that included a U.S. attack to get rid of Saddam Hussein; that kind of talk doesn't play well over here any more, but Netanyahu - who got 90% of his primary financing from outside Israel -- is still living the dream).

In 2006, during the Lebanon War, neocons in the Bush administration were urging Israel to attack Syria directly. The Olmert government dismissed the idea as crazy, but a Netanyahu government might be a danger to itself and others. (There was a very odd moment during that conflict in which an Israeli government spokesman explained a troop build-up as aimed at Syria, which caused the Syrian military to go on high alert, but that appears to have been a comedy of errors; the Israeli spokesman preferred to make a provocative and potentially destabilizing statement rather than admit that the high command had lost control over the situation.)

And never mind attacking Syria; if Israel launches a pre-emptive attack on Iran, what are Syria's choices for a course of action? The Israeli elections may present Assad with an opportunity, or a threat.There is also the likelihood that the Americans may not be in the neighborhood much longer. The Iraqi government has proposed amendments to the agreement with the U.S. that would call for all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq - regardless of conditions on the ground - no later than 2011, and include an acceleration clause that would permit total withdrawal on 12 months' notice at Iraq's request.

The U.S. has threatened to cut off all support and all operations of any kind inside Iraq on January 1 if the original draft of the agreement is not signed. But one way or another, it looks likely that the U.S. military role in Iraq will at a minimum be very greatly curtailed in the near future: even a McCain administration cannot get away with forcing a continued presence against the will of the elected government, at least not for long. At that point we would be confronted with the preposterous situation of Iraq appealing to the U.N. to impose sanctions on the U.S.

So here's a thought. Is it possible that Assad is tired of Hezbollah and Al Qaeda both, and maybe even of being tied to Iran? Is it possible that the reason Syrian reaction to the raid is so relatively muted is that they didn't really object, and may even have known about the raid in advance? This would be interesting as all get-out, if it's true. If this is true, it needs to be pursued. From the U.S. perspective nothing is more important than turning Syria away from Iran. Particularly as the Kurds in northern Iraq appear to be becoming increasingly aggressive, Syria is going to be a key player in post-U.S. arrangements.

From Israel's perspective the case is even starker. Nothing serves Israel's interests more right now than giving Syria a good reason to stop supporting Hezbollah and Hamas. It is also possible that Assad has an eye on the elections and does not want to do anything to strengthen Netanyahu and McCain, because he is hoping for administrations he can talk to. Assad is a pure pragmatist with no ties to religious extremists and serious economic needs. He is also notoriously difficult to deal with, but that's what our diplomats get paid for (sorry, guys.) High level talks without preconditions with Syria this Winter? A consummation devoutly to be wished.

Here Comes the Sun: harnessing solar power in the desert3-year-old Mohammed Abu-Kaf was was diagnosed at birth with sleep apnea, a life-threatening chronic illness. A resident of the 'recognised' village of Um Bathin, his father Hassan explained that Mohammed requires a special Seapack mask to keep his airways clear when he sleeps. Sounds simple enough, except that his mask must be plugged in to a regular power supply--a necessity made difficult by the fact that many Bedouin villages aren't connected to the national grid.

Filling the void left by a government seemingly unable and unwilling to address the sometimes dire situation that many of the Bedouin population find themselves in, Bustan--an NGO comprised of Jewish and Arab eco-builders, architects, academics, and farmers promoting social and environmental justice in Israel and Palestine--has initiated a project that utilizes solar energy for sick Bedouin children in the Negev. The organization has teamed up with solar designers and manufacturers at Interdan to bring solar-powered electricity to Bedouin villages that aren't connected to the national grid, and which would obtain electricity only by using expensive diesel or gas-powered generators at each family house.

The Abu-Kaf family home is now powered by a large solar panel, which Hassan turns around twice a day to catch the sun's rays.

"Thank you to Bustan for this," says Hassan. "Now my son is a happy and healthy child. He can sleep well at night, and so me and my family can now, too."

Um Bathin, a village of 3,500 residents who can trace their ancestral, semi-nomadic roots across many generations in this area, is one of seven Bedouin communities in the Negev that has been 'recognised' by the government in the past 3 years, but is still awaiting basic services such as electricity and water.

Founded in 1999 by American-Israeli Devorah Brous, and now headed by Bedouin activist Ra'ed Al-Mickawi, Bustan has a mandate to bring sustainable energy solutions to communities, focusing on a fair allocation for all of such resources. Previous projects have included work on a medical clinic made from straw bales in the 'un-recognised' Bedouin village of Wadi Al-Nam, south of the city of Be'erSheva.

Bustan also offers tours of the Negev area, bringing participants directly into the Bedouin villagers' homes and meeting places, and to meetings with the manager of the Ramat Hovav--Israel’s controversial chemical plant and industrial complex-- amongst other local players.

With Bustan's intervention and the involvement of Interdan, more sustainable and environmental solutions are on the horizon for Israel's marginalised communities.

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or email.

Title: The Truth About Camp David Author: Clayton Swisher Description: Before Swisher wrote this book in 2004, conventional wisdom dictated that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David negotiations was all Arafat's fault and that Barak was a victim. Swisher, who was at Camp David, interviewed all the players and demonstrates that Barak was as much responsible for the failure as Arafat. Additionally, he shows that the Clinton "peace team" helped doom the Camp David talks by acting, in negotiator Aaron Miller's words, as "Israel's lawyer" not as an honest broker. This book helps Jews get beyond the blame-the-Palestinians game to the realization that peace was almost achieved, and that the reason it wasn't is due to mistakes, blunders and, in Barak's case, the sheer arrogance of the various parties. The book also helps one understand just how Barak evolved from peace negotiator to the hawk he is today. The answer: he hasn't evolved. He is no more skeptical about negotiating with Palestinians today than he was then. Recommended By: M.J. Rosenberg is the Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum (IPF), a position he has held since the spring of 1998. In this position, MJ heads IPF's Washington, D.C. office and writes IPF Friday, a weekly opinion column on the Arab-Israeli conflict which is widely circulated throughout the United States and the Middle East. In addition, MJ has published numerous op-eds, in the national and Jewish press.

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or tips.

Previously: Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Recommended by Vanessa Ochs

Our post earlier this week about No Sweat, the sweatshop-free apparel company creating jobs for Palestinians in Bethlehem, set off quite the debate. Whatever your stance on the work Adam Neiman and company are doing, one thing is for certain: A number of their organic, Bethlehem-made T-shirts are must haves. Here are a few of our faves:

Organic Bethlehem Green Menorah Tee, $18: "The Shalom Center of Philadelphia does remarkable interfaith work with an integrated approach to the issues of peace, justice and environmental responsibility. Their new green menorah covenant campaign is focused on climate change. It's an especially good fit on our Palestinian produced organic t-shirts from Bethlehem, West Bank. $4 per t-shirt goes to support the Shalom Center's climate change campaign."

 

Organic Bethlehem Vision in Action Tee, $18: "There’s only one symbol in the holy land that’s embraced by Jews, Christians & Muslims & this is it, the eye of Fatima (or Miriam), encircled by a Japanese proverb that fits the moment to a T: Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. Fatima was Mohammed’s daughter, Miriam, Moses’ sister. It is said that the symbol actually represents the hidden female aspect of the deity and is used as a talisman to ward off the evil eye. For us the placement of the eye in the hand implies vision in action - what we strive to provide every day."

 

Organic Bethlehem Musicians Against Sweatshops Tee, $20: "Musicians Against Sweat Shops™ official tee is here, and only here! Support this initiative to help wipe sweatshops out of the music merchandising business while raising awareness of the issue. $5 on every T goes to MASS."

Previous: Alternative Jewish Grooves for Passover

Of the many strange things George W. Bush has said while president, here is one of the strangest: “I couldn’t imagine someone like Osama Bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah.”

Shrub must have figured this sound bite was a slam-dunk. He was wrong. Osama Bin Laden may be the person on the planet most attuned to the joys of Hanukkah. As it turns out, the traditional Hanukkah spiel about the oil-that-was-only-supposed-to-last-for-one-day-but-lo-and-behold-it-lasted-for-eight-wowza is mostly Talmudic PR. Contrary to popular myth, the holiday arose from the exact struggle Bin Laden is waging today: an armed rebellion against an imperial power, driven by religious fanaticism and suicidal self-assertion.

The genesis of Hanukkah resides in the Books of Maccabee. You can be forgiven if you have not read these books--they never made it in to the Biblical canon.* I only read them, in fact, because my wife is converting to Judaism and I wanted to be able to provide her a full accounting of the festival. Weirdly, I happened to have the New American Bible at home, a Catholic version of scripture that includes both books.

History repeats itself: Insurgents in action 1 Maccabees opens with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. The Hannukah story begins around 175 BC, when Antiochus, leader of the occupying Seleucid dynasty,issues a decree forcing the Jews to profane their Covenant: “Women who had had their children circumcised were put to death, in keeping with the decree, with the babies hung from their necks.” The high priest Mattathias kills a Seleucid official, then retreats to the desert to launch a revolt, which under the direction of his sons Judah, Jonathan, and Simon becomes a guerilla war. There’s another word for all this, of course: insurgency.

Judah Maccabee leads the Jews to numerous improbable victories on his way to reclaiming the Temple in Jerusalem, “destroying the impious” (here defined as any Jews less pious than themselves) along the way. Up north, Judah squares off against Antiochus IV’s son, the unfortunately named Eupator, whose army includes armored elephants, the Old Testament equivalent of tanks.

The account of a Maccabee soldier named Eleazer made me queasy:

Eleazar, called Avaran, saw one of the beasts bigger than any of the others and covered with royal armor, and he thought the king must be on it. So he gave up his life to save his people and win an everlasting name for himself. He dashed up to it in the middle of the phalanx, killing men right and left, so that they fell back from him on both sides. He ran right under the elephant and stabbed it in the belly, killing it. The beast fell to the ground on top of him and he died there. (6:43)

Eleazer sounds to me like a Biblical version of the suicide bombers who launch themselves at military convoys in Iraq. He isn’t trying to kill and maim innocent bystanders, so it’s not an exact comparison, but his mindset is essentially the same: He relishes the chance to give his life in exchange for the glory of the cause, and his own name.

I got the same queasy feeling when I read about Judah decapitating the vanquished general Nicanor and putting his head on display in Jerusalem. This might have been how you asserted your might 2000 years ago. But isn’t the gesture really just an old school version of the decapitation videos Al Qaeda uses today to horrify its Western foes?

Judah himself eventually dies, but his brothers Jonathan and Simon carry on the insurgency. Their methods could hardly seem more familiar:

They watched and suddenly saw a noisy crowd with baggage; the bridegroom and his friends and kinsmen had come out to meet the bride’s party with tambourines and musicians and much equipment. The Jews rose up against them from their ambush and killed them. Many fell wounded and after the survivors fled toward the mountain, all their spoils were taken. Thus the wedding was turned into mourning, and the sound of music into lamentation.

Again, from where I’m sitting this sounds a lot like, well, terrorism. It calls to mind the horrifying images of the 2005 attack at a Jordanian hotel, when members of al Qaida turned a wedding party into a bloodbath.

Miniature imperialists: This is roughly what a battalion of Seleucid troop looked likeIt gets worse.

Jonathan then cuts a deal to send 3000 of his soldiers -- let’s not call them foreign-born terrorists – to help the despot Demetrius put down a rebellion by his troops in Antioch. The Jewish mercenaries kill 100,000 people.

Obviously the Maccabees were in a tight spot, surrounded by hostile enemies and forced to defend themselves in mortal combat. What’s striking is the righteous lust with which they carry out this defense. Because they believe in the one true God, they have no problem with killing innocent civilians, killing other Jews, and killing themselves.

Radical Islam, meet radical Judaism.

I hoped the second book would be a softer ride, one that might tease out the less martial aspects of Hanukkah. Wrong.

2 Maccabees recounts the victories of Judah, only this time the Almighty plays a much more significant role in the combat. Indeed, if the message of the first book was that Jews kick serious ass when inspired by God, the message of the second is that the Jews kick ass because God actively intervenes on their behalf

In one particularly hallucinogenic episode, God helps his people by conjuring a “manifestation” straight from the pages of the Book of Revelation: he takes the form of a “richly caparisoned horse, mounted by a dreadful rider” who attacks one of Judah’s antagonists. Elsewhere, Judah reminds his troops that the Almighty will vouchsafe their victory. The rebels cut down “at least 35,000” of the enemy and “rejoice greatly over this manifestation of God’s power.”

The second book also places a disturbing emphasis on martyrdom. The most famous example is the story of a Jewish mother and her seven sons who refuse Antiochus’s order that they eat pork. The story illustrates the cruelty of the Seleucid soldiers, but its real emphasis is on dying for a cause:

At that, the king gave orders to have pans and cauldrons heated … He commanded his executioners to cut out the tongue of the one who had spoken for the others, to scalp him and cut off his hands and feet, while the rest of his brothers and his mother looked on. When he was completely maimed but still breathing, the king ordered them to carry him to the fire and fry him. As a cloud of smoke spread form the pan, the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die bravely…

Which they do.

I am going to resist using this story to suggest that torture doesn’t really work, because I think it speaks to a broader pathology—the mindset that exalts a noble death above all other human courses.

The other oil miracle of the Hanukkah story: Drilling for petroleum One other passage in 2 Maccabees is nothing short of eerie. It’s the retelling of a story about Nehemiah, the leader who had helped rebuild the Temple wall after the Babylonian Exile. During the exile, the priests took some of the sacred fire of the Temple altar and hid it in the hollow below a dry cistern. Hoping to rekindle the altar flame, Nehemiah sends the priests to retrieve the hidden fire, but they come back with a thick liquid instead. “And when the materials for the sacrifices were presented, Nehemiah ordered the priests to sprinkle the liquid on the wood and what was laid upon it.” (7:21) A great fire blazes up and everyone marvels. The King of Persia declares a miracle. The material, whatever it is, comes to be called naphtha – which, translated from Greek, means “petroleum.”

I wish I were making this stuff up. But it’s really and truly in the book. Twenty two hundred years ago, with insurgents and imperialists doing battle in the Middle East, people were agog over the miracle of petroleum.

In recent years, Jews have made an understandable decision to steer people away from the violence in Hanukkah’s exegetical basement. As an assimilated and not-very-observant Jew, I grew up hearing almost exclusively about the miracle of the oil.

The only thing I knew about the Maccabees was that they were heroic defenders of the faith who had something to do with the Jewish Olympics. The modern holiday has been recast as a cheery Festival of Lights, a counterpart to the bright tinsel of Christmas. It’s the same impulse that leads Christians to repackage Easter as a vista of bunnies and candy eggs, rather than the commemoration of a brutal public murder.

But this kind of soft-pedaling distorts our history and distracts us from the true meaning of our holidays. Hanukkah really is about a violent insurgency. It’s about the lengths to which the oppressed will go to defend their beliefs. But it’s also about a strain of unchecked aggression that infects those who are convinced that God is on their side. It’s precisely the sort of holiday story, in other words, that might force us to confront the moral crises of our present historical circumstance – before we go the way of the Maccabees, or their imperial enemies.

* * *

RELATED LINKS:

In Slate, Christopher Hitchens agrees that Hanukkah is predicated on some less-than-enlightened principles. Being Christopher Hitchens, he also calls Judaism "an ancient and cruel faith" and suggests that Hanukkah violates the first amendment; hilariously, Slate illustrated this rant with a picture of an adorable Jewish child lighting the menorah.

In the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Danya Ruttenberg takes a more positive approach, looking for the good in a holiday that celebrates Jew-on-Jew civil war.

Correction, December 14: The original piece mistakenly stated that the Books of Maccabee were removed from the Biblical canon in the third century. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Hamas, he said Hamas!: Hummus, he said hummus!I was reminded of last year's Oscar-winning short West Bank Story when I stumbled upon this article today. Amidst the tense discussions at Tuesday's Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, the Israeli diplomat noticed - and relished - the fact that "one member of the Egyptian delegation grabbed a sandwich from the kosher table set up especially for the Israeli side."

What is it about food that can, even in the middle of the world's most difficult peace negotiations, shift our attention from the serious to the comical? Perhaps it's the simple, usually subconscious fact that in the end - after all of the conflicts, accusations, and wars - we're all just people who need to eat.

For those who somehow missed Ari Sandel's hysterical film, it's "a musical comedy about David, an Israeli soldier, and Fatima, a Palestinian fast food cashier - an unlikely couple who fall in love amidst the animosity of their families' dueling falafel stands in the West Bank."

Do yourself a favor and Netflix it.

The leftist origins of neo-conservatism are frequently exaggerated but Joshua Muravchik is one of those neo-cons who really did cut his teeth in the radical left scene before heading rightwards – he was a member of the Young People's Socialist League who has ended up at the American Enterprise Institute. It is perhaps not so surprising then,in his overview of the current state of neo-conservatism, for Commentary Magazine, which is a must-read defence of neo-conservative foreign policy (“the only game in town”), he addresses the old question of revolution from above or below. Francis Fukuyama has explained his disaffection from neoconservatism on the grounds that, in contrast to his own, “Marxist” approach to democratization, his former friends and allies had behaved like “Leninists.” By this he means to separate his analysis in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) from the policies to which that analysis seminally contributed. In writing about the “end of history,” Fukuyama now says, he was only attempting to discover the historical laws that, sooner or later, would lead all nations to democracy. But just as Lenin took matters into his own hands when he tired of waiting for Marx’s predicted revolution, so had the neoconservatives tried, fatally, to force the pace of democratization. Muravchik argues against Fukuyama by showing that many of the advanced democracies reached that stage not due to some historically inevitable process but as a result of intervention – sometimes military. “It turns out that we are all “Leninists,” he says. Fascinating though such a discussion is (and who could argue with the writer’s point?) it is disappointing that Muravchik does not go further into this analogy and address what is surely the fundamental question facing both neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists in the wake of the Iraq disaster, namely what if interventions in favour of democracy in the Middle East end up producing something even worse than the status quo?

Continue reading...

Someone responding to Josh's post about the Hezbollah-loving hottie asked if he (Josh) had ever been to the Middle East. Josh said no, and then came this:

crazy, fascinating place.

crazy, fascinating place. you need to go someday, spending time there day may add an interesting dimension to your thoughts, experience that nuance

"Experience That Nuance" -- can we get that on a t-shirt?

Bonus points for baiting Josh, too. He might have lied and said, "Yeah, I taught English in Tyre for a couple years," to which he'd have been met with stone-cold silence or -- even better -- a terse, "Oh."

Justin Raimondo believes, with emphatic certainty, that "Iran is no threat to Israel, and that there is no danger of Iran dropping nukes on Tel Aviv." Likewise he says that "Iran, with or without nuclear weapons, represents no threat to America." Far be it from me to take Mr. Raimondo seriously when he says such things – his contributions to last week's exchange were studded with so many hateful condemnations, bizarre declarations, and quarter-baked ideas that doing so would require me to empty my brain of everything I've learned about both the Middle East and foreign policy. But these two platitudes do serve as a good jumping-off point for discussing the true nature of the Iranian threat, which is, I believe, why the editors of Jewcy asked me to contribute to this debate.

Iran is indeed a threat to both the United States and to Israel – but the threat does not come in the cartoonish form of Mr. Raimondo's fevered imagination, with Iranian bombers nuking Tel Aviv and Iranian ICBM's rocketing their way toward New York. Those scenarios are red herrings intended to make Raimondo's task of turning America and Israel into the world's leading belligerents much easier.

The actual threat posed by a nuclear Iran involves the manner in which such a development would upset the balance of power in the Middle East, which no doubt for Mr. Raimondo is a boring subject as it does not provide ready opportunities for Israel Lobby hysteria and mushroom cloud fantasies. To understand the consequences of a nuclear Iran, we have to look to the recent history of Middle East power arrangements.

Before the American-Israeli alliance was solidified in the late 1960's and early 1970's, the Middle East -- especially the eastern Mediterranean half of it -- was home to regular warfare. This bloodshed arose from the conviction among the Arab nations that they could destroy Israel, which they tried to do repeatedly: in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. Even though some of the Arab countries were allied with the Soviet Union, Israel repulsed the invaders, and in the latter two wars even captured territory from the attacking armies. In doing so Israel created for itself a reputation as the most militarily competent country in its half of the region.

And then, as Martin Kramer explains, "the United States began to look at Israel as a potential strategic ally. Israel appeared to be the strongest, most reliable and most cost-effective bulwark against Soviet penetration of the Middle East. It could defeat any combination of Soviet clients on its own and, in so doing, humiliate the Soviet Union and drive thinking Arabs out of the Soviet camp."

In contrast to the benefits that Israel's victories provided the United States in its maneuverings against the Soviets, the 1973 war did create something of a crisis for America, in the form of the Arab oil embargo. Having suffered a gasoline shortage at home, American strategists decided to attempt to impose peace in the region by showing so much support for Israel that the Arab states would henceforth refuse to challenge it. And this strategy has been a resounding success: Since 1973 there have been no more wars between Israel and Arab countries. This security arrangement even ended up prying Egypt away from the Soviets and into an alliance, later joined by Jordan, with America.

What does all of this have to do with Iran today? It has to do with the Islamic Republic's prospects for success in its endeavor to undermine this American-enforced security architecture. Iran is trying to destabilize the Middle East by creating its own set of alliances and clients that it hopes will rival America's. This is why it funds Hezbollah in Lebanon and now Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories; has cultivated an alliance with Syria that seeks to engulf Lebanon and allow Hezbollah free reign there; and provides weapons, money, and leadership to insurgents in Iraq.

Iran's intentions are clear: it wants America out of the Middle East, so that it can control the Persian Gulf and manipulate the rest of the region through its alliances and proxies. Are these goals going to be easier or harder to accomplish with the benefit of nuclear deterrence? The answer is obvious, and it is the real reason why preventing a nuclear Iran is both in the American and Israeli interest. The short-term stakes, though, are higher for Israel (and Lebanon, for that matter). A nuclear Iran allied with Hezbollah to the north and Hamas and Islamic Jihad to the Southwest and East would dramatically embolden Israel's enemies, suppress foreign investment and tourism in Israel, and over time would cause the economic and psychological attrition of the Jewish state -- with no bombing runs over Tel Aviv necessary.

And so the true disappointment of Israel's war against Hezbollah last summer was its failure to act as a competent American client by dominating the part of the region it is responsible for keeping quiet. The war against Hezbollah was a particularly important conflict for Israel to win, because Hezbollah is more than just another disruptive presence in the Levant -- it is a vanguard force in the Iranian arsenal that is attempting to make American involvement in the region as costly as possible. It is one of the means by which Iran can summon a counterattack should the U.S. or Israel strike its nuclear facilities, and it is the primary asset of the Syrian-Iranian project to co-opt Lebanon, defeat the American-allied nascent democracy there, and bring uncontested Iranian power to Israel's northern border.

In one of his many dumb asides, Raimondo says that people who favor preventing Iran, by force if necessary, from acquiring nuclear weapons "don't have any compunction about throwing the entire region into chaos." This is probably the most wrong-headed of his many ridiculous assertions. Western acquiescence to a nuclear Iran would do perhaps more than anything else to throw the Middle East into chaos. It would shatter the balance of power that has governed the region, however shakily, for nearly forty years. Second-tier powers, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, would be sent scrambling for their own nuclear weapons and new alliances, and the United States would almost certainly be forced from the region. Raise your hand if you're in favor of handing over control of the U.S. economy to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

That'll teach me to skip the cover of a print magazine's cover story. Damnable web-version articles! I thought I was getting a fairly straightforward analysis of Western shibboleths and misconceptions about the Middle East in this month's Prospect, that is, until I got to this paragraph:

That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world's population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia's 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia's annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.

A oil-saturated regional economy where the wealth gap is continent-wide; where oligarchs pay off religious radicals to export their only commodities -- violence and misery -- to the West; where illiteracy rates stagger the statistician; where Jew hatred, that reliable bellwether of civilizational decline, is the cultural norm; where a nuclear arsensal is being developed by at least one messianic regime we know of.... Yeah, what's worth paying attention to there?

The War: SucksBack when the Iraq war began, I caught a lot of shit for being a poet against the war. Which shocked me at the time.  But other Jews seemed to feel that although my anti-war position was philosophically understandable, my willingness to go on the record as a member of such an organization was NOT!

I was told (by otherwise progressive intelligent people) that such groups are all (either secretly or not so secretly) anti-Israel groups.  I was told that such groups were only “using” the war in Iraq as a more acceptable way of opposing Israel.  I was told that by siding with anti-American groups I was siding with anti-Israelis.  And that in adding a Jewish name to their ranks I was lending support to the efforts of  Jewish anti-Semites, letting them use me. 

Yeah, well.  That all seemed insane to me.  I figured there are always wingnuts screaming on both sides of any fight.   And you have to follow your own instincts…

Until one day I went down to a demonstration at the anti-war tent-city in downtown Iowa City, and I discovered that there were, in fact, an awful lot of Jewish anti-Israel demonstrators mixed into the population.  And that by right of being Jewish, I was assumed to be “with them”.

I didn’t know how to feel.  The two issues had gotten conflated and confused somehow, and though I wanted to support the war-protesters, and though I do have complicated feelings about certain Israeli policies, I did NOT want to be seen as generally anti-Israel.

Well now I don’t have to be! 

Because now I can be a Jew Against the War!  I’m certainly on board with this (link via Jewschool):

Believing in the wisdom and relevance of the Jewish tradition, we, the undersigned, maintain that the invasion of Iraq was not just and that the continued occupation extends this injustice. It is now common knowledge that the “permission” to prosecute this war was gained under false pretenses by our president, and that the goals of the war were ill-considered, unrealistic, and poorly planned….

…We the undersigned implore our elected officials to act according to the will of the people of this great country and end this war! We ask that Congress set hard and fast limits on the ability of the President to expand this war or to extend it further in a military action against Iran.

This is important to me, the existence of a sane Jewish anti-war response.  Really important.  
I only wish that in 2003, there had been a more mainstream segment of the Jewish community looking critically at the war. Or that I had known about it.

Fun? Yes. Factual? Sorta: Sacred Drift, by Peter Lamborn WilsonIf you spend a lot of time reading Middle Eastern history, it becomes pretty clear that there’s a plot afoot.  It’s not to blame the elders of Zion, so much as to clamp a squeaky clean face onto the Islamic Golden Age.  Unless you’re a Middle Eastern studies geek, you probably have no idea about the heretical-Sufism-professing, wine-drinking, boy-fucking, satirical poetry-writing strands that run through the history of Dar Al-Islam.  Are you into the radically anti-authoritarian Bektashi Dervishes of Anatolia?  Dig Abu Nuwas’s perverse homosexual wine poems?

How about this ditty…

 

“Would that all wine cost a dinar a glass
and that all cunts were graven on a lions brow
so that only the generous would drink
and only the valiant make love”

(Courtesy of Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, edited by Robert Irwin)

Of course the Islamic world has just as many misfits and reprobates as Christendom.  And that’s where the work of Peter Lamborn Wilson fits in.  Wilson, a former translator for the Shah of Iran and alter ego of ontological anarchist Hakim Bey, is also the author of two books on the sensual, heretical history of Islam.  Sacred Drift:  Essays from the Margins of Islam, and Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy, hone in like lasers on the freaks of the Islamic world.  I.e.:  the folks like us.  

Is his history accurate?  Hells no!  Wilson embroiders and overstates to make his point, and even calls his work “poetic history.”  But, as a starting point to recommend the names of dissidents and derelicts, you couldn’t ask for a better guy.  And with that in hand, Middle Eastern history becomes a lot more fascinating.

It's not a bong: Hookah bars just serve tobacco, you drug fiendIn 2003, Mayor Bloomberg banned smoking in New York City bars, and, inadvertently, started a rose scented mania.

Hookah bars, since they made most of their money off of tobacco sales, were permitted to allow smoking on premises. And they did! Two years after September 11th, the Arab-owned shisha parlors were booming. They lined Alphabet City, smelling like incense and rose petals and exoticism. After the smoking ban, the hookah bars were packed every night with bridge and tunnelers. There were belly dancers in the bars, and scare articles in the paper, warning that heavens- hookah bars were right next to NYU.

I was living on 10th street then, studying Arabic at the New School. Hanging out at the hookah bars was a great way to practice. I’d spend hours nursing a pipe and drinking milky sahlab, fantasizing that I was just like Richard Burton.

Tobocco is a drug, of course, but hookah takes it’s drugginess to a new level. It gives it a ritualism, a set of paraphernalia that’s expensive and alien. Making a good hookah is a skill. My coauthor John puts bourbon, ice, and milk in the base, to get a thicker smoke. Taking a drag from the pipe causes water to burble up. Thus the English name- hubbly bubbly.

It’s been a long day, and I’m writing this article under the influence of lemon scented tobacco. Plumes of it. Billows.

The NYC hookah bars remain packed, with the prices inching up each month. Nonetheless, I’d recommend trying them. If you’re going to sabotage your lungs, hookahs are a way to do it with near alchemical refinement.

When I was 18, I traveled for months in Turkey, Turkish Kurdistan and Morocco. The Middle East is always interesting for a girl alone, but for a one with an agenda it can be particularly informative. And agenda I had! I was going to combat Islamic Anti-Semitism, one unwilling listener at a time.
Throughout most of my Middle Eastern travels, I was proudly, vocally Jewish.
In Williamsburg I’m an atheist. But, in Diyarbaker, scarcely had I been introduced to someone- whether liberal college student or 70-year-old mullah, and on I was. “I’m Jewish!” I would chirp, big smile even though I was wearing a full coverage outfit in 90 degree heat. Bemused?: This imam was the victim of one of my speeches.

Responses varied.

“As long as you believe in god,” said an earnest matron in Marrakesh.

In Mardin, along the Syrian border, an engineering student had a different reaction.
“Are you not Israeli?”
“No”
“Do you speak Hebrew?”
“No”
“Were you in the Israeli army?”
“No”
“Do you want to kill all Muslim babies and take over the Middle East?”
“Certainly not”
“Lets have tea”
He called me for the next three years, promising me that I could keep my Jewish faith in marriage, and even call our son Isaac.

In the holy city of Sanliurfa in Eastern Turkey, a very friendly kilim salesman and me were talking about New York. “The bombing, terrible”, he said, greatly sympathetic. “The Jews all knew and escaped”
Seizing my chance at conversion, I let loose with a long harangue about conspiracy theories, Judaism, and how many, many Jews died on September 11th. “Would you like more tea,” he responded.

In my experience, Anti-Semitism is rabid in the Middle East. Hanging out with a family in Fez, I heard children’s chanting out the window. “What are they saying?” I asked, imagining some picturesque local custom. My friend Fatima giggled. “They’re telling the dirty Jews to go into the sea.” In 2003, in between coverage of the anti-Bush protests, TV stations blared constant footage of Israeli tanks demolishing Palestinian homes. But they were always just described as “The Jews”.

But the Anti-Semitism was oddly theoretical too, and my big mouth never got me in trouble. Confronted with an actual Jew, most people got over it rather quickly. At 5’2, I look pretty harmless. And never, as in France, did people continue ranting about “The Jew” once they knew where I came from.

I haven’t been back to the Middle East since 2004. I wonder how it is now, if I’d still get the same response.

The world would be a vastly better place if more monarchs were like Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the emir of Qatar. Since ousting his father in 1995 in a bloodless coup, al-Thani has worked tirelessly to eliminate his own control over what’s said, published, or broadcast in his small country. In the process he’s helping to redraw the media landscape of the entire Middle East. Hamad bin Khalifa al-ThaniNot ...

Judging by Peter Galbraith's excellent The End of Iraq, the advent of Kurdistan as a distinct country has occurred in all but name. The language is different, the identity is different (most Kurds are Sunnis, but declare themselves Kurds first), and you won't find the flag of democratic Iraq flapping in Suleimania, Erbil or Dohuk. To drop "Sevres" into casual conversation in any of these three Iraqi governates would be like mentioning "Balfour" in 1945 Brooklyn. The spark of self-determination awaits the right wind to catch fire, if you'll pardon the hoary Orientalist metaphor. And if sectarian killing and anarchy in the rest of Iraq reaches the parliamentary level -- where, with a preeminent Kurd as president, it has yet to divide state with demands for secession -- then the Kurds are ready to put the official stamp of independence on the de facto variety they've been enjoying for over a decade. It is their constitutional right as Iraqis to do this, not to mention their moral right as victims of genocide and centuries-long persecution. With 30,000 million in diaspora, they're as much entitled to their own state as the are Palestinians, or as were the Jews or Ukrainians. The precedent for a unified "Iraq" isn't all that compelling. This is Michael Totten in Reason:

If Middle Easterners had drawn the borders themselves, Iraq wouldn’t even exist. Blame the British for shackling Kurds and Arabs together when they created the post-colonial, post-Ottoman map. The Kurds do. Like the English, they refer to a toilet as “a W.C.”—but they insist that stands for “Winston Churchill.”

History has suffered incalcuably by having valid arguments mouthed by the worst human beings. Tariq Aziz was fond of reiterating the Saddamist line during the first Gulf War that Kuwait "belonged" to Iraq because the latter territory was delineated by arrogant English cartographers after the World War I and was therefore subject to native reassessment. To accept this was to accept that Kuwaitis, too, had a legitimate grievance with their own boundaries and just as much of a claim to redraw them through conquest and annexation... Where does post-colonalism end? How far back do we have to go to "remake" the Middle East? With Kurdistan, the destination has already been reached by on-the-ground realities. No less important, so has justice.