Yesterday afternoon, in tandem with my original essay on Michelle Obama below, I joined a group of exceptional women including Anna Perez, the former Press Secretary for Barbara Bush, Leslie Morgan Steiner, the editor of the best-selling anthology Mommy Wars, and Jolene Ivey, co-founder of Mocha Moms, on Michel Martin's NPR show Tell Me More to talk about:

What Michelle Obama is Giving Up.

It was a fascinating conversation, but five intense women talking about Michelle Obama for thirty-five minutes? We could have been there for hours. I left the studio thinking about all the things I wished there had been more time to say.

I wish the show had been called "What Michelle Obama is Gaining."

There was certainly more to say about the question of "power" vs "influence." It's my view that Michelle has the opportunity to have a tremendous amount of power--political, personal, ideological, symbolic, financial, social, maternal, emotional, psychological-- but Anna Perez opined Michelle will have influence, but because she can't write legislation and doesn't have a vote on key issues, she won't have power. 

But there are different kinds of power. Laws change administration to administration, but transforming the consciousness of a generation is forever. Did Martin Luther King, Jr. have power or influence? Did Jackie Kennedy want more power and less influence? How about Eleanor Roosevelt? And what about our former First Lady, Hillary Clinton? She almost because POTUS in large part as a result of her "influence." What about the Nobel committee? Do they have power or influence? Freud and Jung? Moses?

I was taken aback by Anna Perez's view, her privileging one realm, the political, over what could be called the personal or communal, a view that has disempowered women for centuries. And I was struck by how difficult it seemed for many of the women in the conversation to see Michelle as anything but a victim. Incredibly, they seemed to think she was more powerful as a hospital administrator than First Lady.

We denigrate Michelle by denigrating her choices. Projecting an idea of her as a deer in the headlights rather than a lioness on the plain reflects a crisis of the imagination, and speaks volumes about what we think is possible for a woman, or any human being, to negotiate.

People working to create a better world dismiss their accomplishment at their own peril. They resign themselves to a lifetime of disappointment.

Readers mailed in their questions to the Israeli historian at the J-Post. The best of the bunch:

Daniel Teeboom, Amsterdam: I read that you discovered Jordanian plans about what to do with the vanquished Jews of Israel, had the Arabs won. These stories have been rumors for many years, will the documents be made available online? They can be used for all kinds of pro-Israeli activities and would be worth their weight in gold.

Michael Oren: I was indeed able to acquire Jordanian diplomatic and military documents from 1967. Among these were the plans for Operation Tariq, the planned Jordanian attack against West (Jewish) Jerusalem and the Latrun Quarter. These plans provided for the execution of the civilian populations of several Jewish communities, such as Moza, which lies just west of Jerusalem. Some of these documents fell into Israeli hands during the war and were later presented to King Hussein in the secret meetings he held with Israeli representatives in London. The King denied having any knowledge of Tariq.

It is important to demonstrate that not only the Jordanians but also the Egyptians and the Syrians had planned the conquest of Israel and the expulsion or murder of much of it Jewish inhabitants in 1967. Many of the so-called "revisionist historians" today are claiming that the Arabs never had aggressive intentions toward the Jewish state and that Israel precipitated the Six-Day War in order to expand territorially. The documentary evidence refutes this claim unequivocally. 

Andrew White, London: Tom Segev's new book on the Six Day War received a gushing review in this week's Economist (26 May 2007). Is this the beginning of Six Day War revisionist history?

Michael Oren: Alas, it's not the beginning. Segev's primary thesis, namely, that the Six-Day War was the product of irrational Israeli fears and war-mongering, has been around for many years. It is implicit in Jimmy Carter's recent book, which describes Israel-quite wrongly-as having attacked Jordan and Syria pre-emptively in 1967. It is crucial to note, however, that neither Segev nor Carter employ even one Arabic source. In essence, the Arabs simply do not exist for them. The end result is not only an injustice to Israel but moreover gross discrimination toward the Arabs, who are treated as two-dimensional figures, incapable of independent decision-making and political dynamics.

 

Power, Faith and FantasyA great Q&A with the author of the book every American should be reading. Two choice extracts:

MJT: In your book you show how the Middle East was connected to our Civil War in some ways at the time. Yet it seems there should be no connection at all. Tell us about that.

Oren: Oh, there are many connections. During the Civil War about 500 Egyptian soldiers served with the French Army invading Mexico. It was the only time Arabic-speaking Muslims have fought on North American soil. One of the people involved in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination plot managed to escape to and was arrested in Egypt. There were Civil War officers – Union and Confederate officers – who went to Egypt right after the war to help modernize the Egyptian army. They ended up building a school system for Egypt, as well as exploring and mapping the Sudan.

The biggest impact of the Civil War was on the Middle East rather than the Middle East on the Civil War. The biggest impact was cotton. When the North blockaded Southern cotton the textile mills of Europe went dry. So they turned to the only other place in the world that had cotton of a similar quality and that was in Egypt. The price of Egyptian cotton went up about 800 times. Egypt made a lot of money. And with that money they built wonderful buildings and palaces, they built the opera house where Verdi used to perform, and they also built the Suez Canal which completely changed the face of the Middle East.

In 1869 the cotton market in the South came back and the Egyptian cotton market went bankrupt. Egypt went bankrupt and that led to the British occupation of Egypt that lasted for 70 years. There was actually a direct line between the Civil War and the Suez crisis of 1956 during which the Egyptians tried to nationalize the Suez Canal. Britain and France invaded. And so, really, the reverberations from the American Civil War in certain ways continue to course across the Middle East.

[...]

MJT: You have taken the long view of American involvement in the Middle East perhaps more than anyone else in the world. Having done that, are you more optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

Oren: As a historian I’m optimistic. Listen, I view the war in Iraq not as a war, but as a battle in a much more protracted war. Iraq is America’s Bull Run in the war in the Middle East. It’s our first losing battle.

It is not Vietnam. You cannot withdraw from Iraq and be confident that the enemy is not going to follow you. Because the enemy is going to follow you. America can’t detach from the Middle East because the Middle East is not going to detach from America. And America’s going to have to learn to fight this fight to win in a much more prudent and effective way. And there are ways America can fight it more effectively.

Pajamas Media: Power, Faith, and Fantasy in the Middle East