Shalem College takes off

Ask Martin Kramer if spearheading the country's first liberal arts college isn't a daunting - maybe unachievable - goal in these hard times, and he invokes the name of his old friend Prof. Zvi Yavetz.

The venerable historian, Kramer tells me, was part of a small group of scholars who helped to found Tel Aviv University, ex nihilo, in the 1950s. They gave their lectures in makeshift classrooms in Abu Kabir. As Kramer heard it, the vision of creating a world-class university, on a par with the already-existing Hebrew University of Jerusalem, that would teach everything from music to physics was hashed out by Yavetz and his contemporaries as they worked away "in miserable shacks." Kramer quotes Yavetz: "Students who were later to become great professors sat on first graders' chairs."

Relative to Yavetz, Kramer has certain advantages. All he is trying to do is bring to fruition a small liberal arts college that, if everything goes according to plan, will one day have an enrollment of 1,000 students. And he is doing it at the behest of Jerusalem's powerhouse Shalem Center.

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Kissed to death by America

People in and around the Obama administration are taking the position that his low key on Iran is carefully calculated. It's not that he doesn't sympathize with the protesters, he just doesn't want their cause to be identified with the United States. That would be a kiss of death. I'm not persuaded, and as I've suggested already, his real problem with Iran's turmoil is that it's just so inconvenient to a Palestine-first approach.

Laura Rozen at her blog The Cable quoted an "Iran hand in touch with the administration" as saying that Obama "is dedicated to diplomacy in a manner that is almost ideological," that he's already decided what he wants to do in the Middle East "over the next eight years" (bit of presumption there), and that he doesn't want to be "distracted" from the "larger strategic objective" or "let himself get shaken by stuff like this" - "stuff" referring to the reality in the streets of Iran and the Middle East more generally. If this spectacular hubris isn't a formula for failure in the Middle East, what is?

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Sweeping Khalidi under Obama's rug

The Washington Post ran an article Saturday, exploring the origins of President Obama's heels-dug-in stance on Israeli settlements. White House officials described Obama's position to the Post as "years old and not the product of recent events or discussions." The Post then traced it way back to some of Obama's Jewish friends from Chicago days. The earliest influence named in the piece is the late Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf of Hyde Park, whose synagogue was across from Obama's home (and whom Marty Peretz memorably described as "one of those remaining nudnik Reform clergy who is always pained that, given the distress of the Palestinians, life is too good for the Israelis").

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Did Hamas really win in Gaza?

One way to approach this question is to ask whether Hamas has achieved the objectives for which it escalated the crisis, by its refusal to extend the cease-fire. Musa Abu Marzuq, number two in the Damascus office, explained the primary Hamas objective in a very straightforward way: "The tahdiyeh had become 'a ceasefire [in exchange for another] ceasefire,' with no connection either to the crossings and [the goods] transported through them, or to the siege. Terminating it was [thus] a logical move." So Hamas gambled, escalated, and now finds itself, once again, in a "cease-fire for a cease-fire." Israel's primary objective was to compel a cease-fire by means of deterrence alone, without opening the crossings, thus serving its long-term strategy of containing and undercutting Hamas. This it has achieved, so far.

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The return of George Mitchell

As early as today, according to reliable reports, President Obama will appoint former Senator George Mitchell as his special Middle East envoy. Mitchell, it will be recalled, led a commission to investigate the causes of Israeli-Palestinian violence back in 2001. (Details and some takes here.)

I had the chance to spend some time with Mitchell last month, when he and I attended a conference at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. I don't think he'd spent much time in the region since his earlier mission, and he was clearly collecting information on all that had happened in the interim. During a twenty-minute taxi ride, he peppered me with questions about Hamas and Gaza - the new twist that will make his mission that much more difficult. I hope I set him straight.

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A plan for surrender

Israeli Yossi Alpher publishesd a piece in the International Herald Tribune, under the headline "Stop Starving the Gazans." Alpher claims that the economic sanctions imposed on Gaza after the Hamas power grab in mid-2007 (what he calls "the economic-warfare strategy") have failed totally; indeed, they have "produced no political or strategic benefit." "There is not a shred of evidence," he adds, that economic punishment or incentives toward Palestinians have ever worked. The "blockade" should be abandoned unconditionally - which, by the way, is precisely the main demand of Hamas.

Israel's Gaza strategy

In the fog of war, it isn't just the truth that falls casualty. So does common sense. Quite a few pundits seem to think that Israel lacks a strategy in Gaza. But unlike the Lebanon war of 2006, this war has been planned in advance, and every stage has been war-gamed. Here is my read of Israel's strategic plan, which lies behind "Operation Cast Lead."

Israel's long-term strategic goal is the elimination of Hamas control of Gaza. This is especially the goal of the Kadima and Labor parties, which are distinguished by their commitment to a negotiated final status agreement with the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas. The Hamas takeover in Gaza reduced Abbas to a provincial governor, who no longer represents effective authority in all the areas destined for ar future Palestinian state. Hamas rule in Gaza is a bone in the throat of the "peace process"- one Israel is determined to remove.

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Hamas and the Bushes

It was December of an election year, and President Bush was winding up his term. The newly elected Democrat was waiting in the wings. In Israel, a prime minister who seemed committed to the "peace process" decided to put an end, once and for all, to the threat posed by Hamas to Israel's citizens. The prime minister took a bold move, and entrusted Ehud Barak to do the job.

No, this scenario isn't December 2008. It's December 1992. The outgoing president was George H.W. Bush; the incoming one, Bill Clinton. The Israeli prime minister was Yitzhak Rabin; Ehud Barak held the position of IDF Chief of Staff. The bold move? The deportation of 415 Hamas activists from the West Bank and Gaza to south Lebanon, following Hamas's killing of four Israeli soldiers, and its abduction-murder of a border policeman. Those expelled included Ismail Haniyeh, now the Hamas "prime minister," and Mahmud az-Zahar, today its "foreign minister." Israel announced that the deportation would be "temporary," for two years, and that it was required by the "state of emergency" engendered by Hamas attacks.

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The year 1967 and memory

How did the outcome of 1967 change the way Arabs think about themselves and the world? It was the late Malcolm Kerr, one of America's leading Arabists at the time, who perfectly summarized the consensus. (Kerr was a UCLA professor, later president of the American University of Beirut, who was killed there in 1984.) He put it thus, in a famous passage written only about four years after the 1967 war:

Since June, 1967 Arab politics have ceased to be fun. In the good old days most Arabs refused to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June War was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves instead of scrimmaging happily as before.

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Muftis of Morningside Heights

Columbia University will be hosting an "Edward Said Conference" on November 7-8, with the title "1948-1978: Orientalism from the Standpoint of its Victims." The participants, who include all of Columbia's Palestinian mandarins, will focus on the contradiction "between European representations and Palestinian realities" as a case study of Orientalism. 1948, the audience will learn, was "a world-event enabled and prepared by the history and structures of Orientalism" - the anti-Oriental, anti-Arab and anti-Islamic racism supposedly endemic to the West since time immemorial, as alleged by Said in his 1978 book, Orientalism. The West therefore owes the Palestinians a reversal of 1948, for sins of misrepresentation going back to Homer.

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