Beilin-Abed Rabbo is a conscious effort – by a man who failed even to win a Knesset seat – to sidestep the elected government (if not actually subvert it), leveraging the resources of a pliable foreign government to do so. The Left may not be able to appreciate this distinction. But it should at least understand that the tactics it embraces now will boomerang once they are adopted by the Right.

The Jerusalem Post weighs in, correctly in my view. Read it all.

The unofficial draft peace agreement cobbled
together by Palestinians and Israeli left-wing
opposition members is "delusional," former prime
minister Ehud Barak said Monday...

"This is a fictive and slightly peculiar
agreement... that clearly harms the interests
of the State of Israel," said Barak.

Ehud Barak reminding me why, with all his numerous shortcomings, he's still the only sane man on the Israeli Left. This "agreement" (scare quotes very necessary) is worse than peculiar, its treasonous, and I do not use that word lightly. Its an attempt to wrest power away from a democratically elected government and the people of Israel who overwhelmingly voted for it. Words cannot express how utterly immoral the actions of these people are. They are attempting nothing less than a coup d'etat against the government of Israel. Only the fact that I know most of the people involved acted out of very misguided good intentions keeps me from using even stronger language. I despise Jewish and Israeli infighting but I'm afraid that this time its warranted. How dare Beilin and his crew usurp the legitimate powers of the Israeli government? How did they come by their extraordinary arrogance? How do they not grasp that this is hugely counterproductive and damaging to Israeli foreign policy? How can they treat the will of their fellow citizens so contemptuously? I hope Barak runs for the Labor leadership again and wins, he's the only hope the Israeli Left has after this ridiculous fiasco.

"I don't understand why the prime minister was
angered by the meeting near the Dead Sea...
Perhaps Sharon is scared that a terrible secret
would come out: that there is someone to talk
and something to talk about, and a significant
degree of goodwill on the part of the second
party, and that this is a time in which calm,
even relative calm can be achieved... We,
unlike him, are not afraid."

Leftwing grotesque Yossi Sarid on the Israeli Left's goodbye to sanity, the "Swiss initiative", which essentially reiterates everything Arafat has turned down already while allowing him to exacerbate and exploit Israel's political divisions. There is something uniquely galling about the spectacle of a defeated party, completely without political support from the population of a democratic country, so brazenly conducting their own foreign policy without bothering to consult the electorate. This is exactly the kind of arrogant meddling that got into this mess in the first place. The whole bunch ought to be ashamed of themselves.

There is a simply extraordinary article by Jonathan Rosenthal on European anti-Semitism at Policy Review. Impossible to summarize, read the whole thing.

The Guns of October?

I'm sure that by now all of you have heard about Israel's strike against the Islamic Jihad base near Damascus, as well as the sudden outbreak of Hezbollah violence on the Northern Border, which most everyone seems to think is an act of retaliation. Obviously, its too early to reach serious conclusions about what's about to happen, and I think something is about to happen, but a few preliminery impressions might be in order.

Firstly, Syria is not going to let this go without a military response. Basher Assad is too weak and too new on the job to let himself be seen as a weak-willed beaurocrat being pushed around by the Israelis. His government, already seriously unstable, may very well collapse under the weight of his various competing ministers, who are basically running the country already. The internal schisms within Syria's antiquated one-party government (it is the closest thing to Stalinism still existing this side of North Korea) may not be able to survive a serious military confrontation with Israel.

Of course, Syria's been playing with fire for years, supporting Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and a host of other groups, as well as facilitating Iranian financial and military support for them. Assad has showed himself astonishingly oblivious to the inevitable consequences of this kind of reckless brinksmanship (as his father often did before him), and seems to fancy himself a leader in the great Arab struggle against Israel and the Imperialist West, an attitude which, needless to say, has been a recipie for disaster in this part of the world. He nearly got in hot water with the United States after the Iraq War for his various belligerancies, and we may be seeing the beginning of a comuppance which everyone has seen coming except, apparently, him.

Secondly, we are seeing a major change in strategy on the part of the Sharon government. Sharon has, thus far, refrained from attacking terrorist bases outside of the territories. Unfortunately, the confrontation with Syria and its support of terror against Israel was bound to happen. There was only so long Israel could allow Syria's double game to go one before taking action. Sharon appears to be pursuing the same strategy as he did with the Palestinians in the first two years of the intifada, a patient push-pull leading to a widening of the political maneuvering room of the IDF. In simple terms: the first time the IDF entered Palestinian cities, there was an enormous political outcry, the second time the response was much more muted, now the IDF operates freely in Palestinian territory largely without comment from the international community and, most importantly, with the tacit consent of the United States. Sharon may be banking on the same phenomenon here. The next time he attacks Palestinian terror bases in Syria - and there will be a next time - the criticism will likely be far more muted, as the world's attention span is, after all, a short one. Sharon is also sending a very serious signal to the Arab neighbors. He is sending them the same message he sent back in the '50s, when he led the commando Unit 101 under David Ben-Gurion's command: we will not be moved, if you threaten us, the price exacted will be prohibitively high. I think he is in earnest and I think the strikes will continue.

The big question is: will this lead to a regional war? The only way that could happen, taking the slovenly state of Syria's military into consideration, is if Egypt abrogates its peace treaty with Israel and enters in a war with us. I think this possibility, if remote, is not entirely unthinkable. Previously a taboo subject, it has already begun to be spoken of in serious terms by the Egyptian intelligensia, and if, as I think is likely, fundamentalist movements in Egypt rise exponentially in political power and influence over the next decade, the threat becomes more and more real. However, the real threat is a reckless retaliatory attack by Syria on Israel soil. This would probably lead to a full-scale confrontation with the IDF, one that Assad simply cannot win given the present state of his forces. This could lead to major upheavels both in Syria and Egypt with a possible fundamentalist takeover in the latter (an event which is, I believe, ultimately inevitable anyways). It may be that regional war is an unavoidable event given present circumstances, but, at the moment, the question is in the hands of Bashar Assad. Ironically enough, the man least likely to make the right decision. Fate is rarely kind in the Middle East, lets hope this is one of the exceptions.

I want to say just a few words about what I saw after the racist Palastinian atrocity in Haifa. I saw a reporter holding a blasted-apart baby bottle while his hand shook with barely controlled rage. I saw restaurants and pubs deserted. I saw people glued to their TV sets. I saw furrowed brows and steely eyes. I saw lips pursed with anger and determination. My girlfriend looked at the deserted pub near her apartment and said: "I like that no one goes out when there's an attack. It lets me know we're all together, all feeling the same thing."

All of you out there who danced with joy in the streets or watched the pictures on television with measured glee and satisfaction, I have only this to say to you: You cannot win, because you have already lost. You have picked a fight with a people that has survived murderers and tyrants a thousand times worse than you could ever dream of being. You have picked a fight with a people that knows how to put its head down and keep moving, even in the midst of the hurricane. You have a picked a fight with a people that has fought a battle with history itself and won. You are defeated already and you don't even know it. You will only shatter yourself against the walls of your own making. We are here. We are staying. We have walked through the darkest abyss humanity has ever known and survived. Believe me, we will survive you. The only question is how much time it will take you to realize it. I hope, for your sake, that it does not take long.

Edward Said and his Discontents

Or: what does one say about an arrogant, petulant, pro-terrorist, anti-semitic intellectual bully who died?

Edward Said, who died last week after a long battle with cancer, was the subject of a recent article by Christopher Hitchens, who remarked in its opening lines that his first meeting with Said took place at an early '80s conference on the rights of small nations. Hitchens is rumored to have a memory somewhat truncated by a lifelong habit of consuming alcohol in heroic quantities, but I will take it for granted that his recollection is accurate. Judging by the rest of the article, a measured critique of Said's recent stance regarding 9/11 and the War on Terror, contrasted with the Hitchens assessed promise of Said's early career, it appears that Hitchens lacks a certain sense of irony. Were this not the case, Hitchens might have noted that, at the very moment Said was attending a conference on the rights of small nations, presumably arguing in favor of said rights, since people rarely attend such conferences to argue the opposite, he was a prominent member of a movement which was, at that very moment, busy violating, in the most brutal and savage manner imaginable, the rights of a small nation known as Lebanon.

It is a shame that Hitchens failed to recognize this paradox, for it manages to say a very great deal more about Said than Hitchens' assessment of his old friend, colored as it is by much admiration and affection. For Said, like many a late 20th century American intellectual, and, lest we forget, Said was an American, made his celebrity, if not his reputation itself, on a kind of ferocious hypocrisy, on an aggressive, vitriolic, condemnatory excoriation of real and perceived enemies which often existed in caustic dissonance with the realities of his own ideology. One of his most prominent critics, and he had far too few over the course of his long career, described him as the intellectual equivalent of a suicide bomber, an intellectual terrorist of the purest kind, a man for whom the violence he apologized for in real life became the means and method of his intellectual career.

Said was all illogic and dissonance, he personified it in the very marrow of his personal and intellectual identity: a Marxist who was also an ultra-nationalist, an utterly Westernized Arab who spent his career condemning America and the West in near-cosmic terms of approbation, a cosmopolitan to his bones who embraced an almost Fascistic ethnic romanticism, a Christian Arab who spent his adult life in the service of an organization which spent the better part of the 1970s slaughtering Christian Arabs en masse, a scholar of the most erudite of Victorian literature who nonetheless engaged relentlessly in the most vulgar kind of character assassination, a self-proclaimed advocate of human rights who spent his career advocating and apologizing for terrorists and terrorist organizations, a self-proclaimed advocate of peace and coexistence who called for the annihilation of an entire nation of people. Said sought purity, moral, political, intellectual, while imbibing the debased and cruel. In the end, as his old friend Hitchens noted with some sadness, he seemed to have wholly lost his grip on reality itself.

Like most college professors, his ego was of epic proportions, and he was used to deference, deference to his genius, deference to his wisdom, deference to his moral superiority. When a Commentary article blasted several battleship-size holes in his claim of Palestinian refugee status, he reacted with characteristic bluster, first calling the author a damn liar and then, when the article turned out to be accurate, accusing him of racism. It surprised no one, and it shouldn’t have. Said's specialty was a kind of superfluously verbose character assassination, the intellectual's equivalent of kindergarten name calling (his friend Hitchens often suffers from a similar tendency). He preferred slander to debate, buzzwords to logic, and polemic to reasoned argument. He was the godfather of that generation of academics for whom fury was the mark of insight, and rage the watchword of righteousness, and if intellectual consistency or reason threatened to dampen, or even extinguish fury and rage, then reason be damned and on with the struggle. Said must have seen no contradiction in advocating the Palestinian cause on the grounds of a universal right to self-determination and statehood, while simultaneously advocating, as the very consummation of that right, the denial of the Jewish people's own right to self-determination and statehood. To think otherwise might have dampened the furies at work within him, and that could not be allowed. His belief in himself as an anti-racist, even faced with the obvious racism of his own ideology, never seemed even slightly shaken. In fact, Said seems not to have noticed it at all.

And perhaps this is the most telling and disturbing aspect of Said's work, his utter lack of inner struggle. He appeared, in fact, to be utterly conscienceless. He seemed never to wrestle with the intellectual or moral implications of his ideas at all. His politics, over the course of thirty years, shifted not a single iota. He seemed to expend his considerable intellectual energy on building elegant, but ultimately empty, defenses against the changing world beyond. To twist the upheavals of a troubled age into complex and impenetrable knots, so that they might conform to the schema of his theories. So that he might remain secure in his own infantile resentments and carefully cultivated discontents. He was the purest kind of ideologist, the one who eventually sacrifices his ability to perceive the world in order to remain faithful to his creed. Said's recent writings, which so shocked Hitchens in their disconnection, denied, among other things, that terrorism was a mass phenomenon in Palestinian culture, that Iraqis saw Saddam Hussein as a brutal dictator who they wished to see deposed, and that 9/11 was anything much worth bothering about. It seemed that that precious fury and rage, which had intimidated so many and so inflated his reputation, was now reducing him, slowly but surely, into something small, pathetic, and perhaps pitiable.

But on the way to this perhaps pathetic nadir, he did an incalculable amount of damage. He fostered an entire generation of scholars dedicated to the proposition that Western culture is irredeemably racist and imperialist, that Israel has no right to exist and the Jews no right to national self-determination, that all the problems of the Third World are the product of capitalist/Zionist/imperialist machinations, and helped turn the American university from an institution of learning and investigation into an Orwellian nightmare, complete with Saidian thought police eager to root out the slightest hint of Orientalism. The man himself is gone now, perhaps to an oft-dreaded meeting with the Christians of Damour or the Israeli schoolchildren of Maalot, massacred at the hands of the PLO he did so much to legitimize, but the academic culture that spawned him and that he did so much to spawn is alive and well, and in many universities ubiquitous and hegemonic. His ideological offspring are mourning today at Columbia University, where a Saudi-funded Edward Said chair now exists for the foreseeable future. We will hear much from them in the coming years, much spitting of fire and poison, much fury and rage, all of it, ultimately, signifying nothing. The same cannot be said of Said. He did indeed signify something. And now, for that, he is no doubt facing a most uncomfortable reckoning.

Beersheva, Israel
September, 2003