America's interests: a bedside briefing

I've already prepared my briefing for the next president. No point in waiting until he calls me at 3 a.m., which he certainly will. Of course, I could leak it then, but Bob Woodward is already working on his next book, so I might as well leak it now. Here we go.

Thank you for the White House invitation, Mr. President. You don't know how much I appreciate this appointment as your advisor - my talents were wasting away in that think tank. You've asked me to give you a ten-minute briefing on our interests in the Middle East, in a way even a community organizer or small-town mayor or US senator can understand. You've asked for an unvarnished telling - no lipstick. No problem. Here's what you need to know.

Obama buys the myth

In one of my earlier posts The Myth of Linkage, I brought a number of exemplary quotes from figures such as Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski to illustrate my point. Now another quote can be added to the collection - this one from Barack Obama, fresh from his quick tutorial in the Middle East:

I think King, King Abdullah [of Jordan] is as savvy an analyst of the region and player in the region as, as there is, one of the points that he made and I think a lot of people made, is that we've got to have an overarching strategy recognizing that all these issues are connected. If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process, then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It will also weaken Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hizbullah as a way to stir up mischief in the region. If we've gotten an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, maybe at the same time peeling Syria out of the Iranian orbit, that makes it easier to isolate Iran so that they have a tougher time developing a nuclear weapon. "

Confusion at Columbia

On Friday, the Columbia Spectator ran an article by its "news staff" under the headline: "Yiddish Prof Named Acting Director of Israel Institute After False Media Speculation." The Yiddish professor is Jeremy Dauber, and the institute is the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Mazel tov to Professor Dauber.

The article then adds the following:

Last week, the New York Sun reported that sociology professor Yinon Cohen was appointed permanent director of the institute. The article quoted several professors upset by Columbia's decision to appoint Cohen, who signed a letter condemning Israel's policies concerning 2002 military operations in Gaza. The Sun also wrote that it found the information about Cohen on a blog named Sandbox, written by academic Martin Kramer who obtained his master's degree in history from Columbia in 1976.

[Columbia Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas] Dirks said the Sun's article was completely false. "I don't know what the basis for the attack on Professor Cohen is," he said.

Cohen came to Columbia in fall 2007 as a visiting professor from Tel Aviv University. While Cohen was never appointed director of any institute at Columbia, he recently received the endowed position of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi professor of Israel and Jewish studies - a name similar to that of the institute, which may have been the source of confusion.

The report leaves the vague impression that I contributed to that confusion.

Substitute Pulitzer for Nobel

Samantha Power is the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide, and she has a professorship at Harvard (in something called "Global Leadership and Public Policy"). She is also a senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama. This isn't an honorific: she has worked for Obama in Washington, she has campaigned for him around the country, and she doesn't hesitate to speak for him. This morning, the Washington Post has a piece on Obama's foreign policy team, identifying her (and retired Maj. Gen. Scott Garion) as "closest to Obama, part of a group-within-the-group that he regularly turns to for advice." Power and Garion "retain unlimited access to Obama." This morning's New York Times announces that Power has an "irresistable profile" and "she could very well end up in [Obama's] cabinet." 

She also has a problem: a corpus of critical statements about Israel. These have been parsed by Noah Pollak at Commentary's blog Contentions, by Ed Lasky and Richard Baehr at The American Thinker, and by Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.

Columbia's Israelis

On Friday, Amnon Rubinstein, the distinguished Israeli jurist and professor, published a column in the Israeli daily Maariv (in Hebrew) and an op-ed today in the Jerusalem Post, summarizing his stint as a visiting professor at Columbia University. A grim story it is: Ahmadinejad's visit to campus stirred all the muck back up again. 

Rubinstein discovered that the only truly active friends of Israel on campus were orthodox Jewish students. For him, a self-avowed secular humanist, it came as crushing disappointment that like-minded Israelis weren't standing up. At the demonstration against Ahmadinejad, he could "count the Israelis on a hand that's missing fingers." At the faculty level, it was worse. He tells of being present in a meeting attended by two Israeli professors. One proposed the screening of the film Jenin, Jenin, a cinematic slander of Israel, and the other proposed inviting Israel-demonizing Norman Finkelstein to campus. Rubinstein doesn't name the two, but the sad thing about Columbia is that their identities aren't obvious. More than two Israeli professors there could have made these sorts of proposals.

Imad who?

As Hizbullah's official funeral of Imad Mughniyeh unfolded last week - Hizbullah's leader eulogized him over a coffin decked in Hizbullah's flag - it was useful to recall the party's denial of his very existence over all these many years. Mention of his name to Hizbullah officials would draw a blank stare or blanket denial. "Hizbullah professes no knowledge of the man," the New York Times reported in 2002. A journalist who interviewed a top Hizbullah official and parliamentary deputy, Abdullah Kassir, once asked him if he knew Mughniyah. "Kassir flashed a blistering look and responded curtly, 'I have no answer.'"

Hizbullah's leader, Hasan Nasrallah, followed a double tack: he would defend "freedom fighter" Mughniyeh, but not acknowledge him. "The American accusations against Mughnieh are mere accusations," he was quoted as saying. "Can they provide evidence to condemn Imad Mughniyeh? They launch accusations as if they are given facts." But when pressed, Nasrallah "refused to reveal whether Mughniyeh has a role in Hizbullah." Of course.

Gaza buried in flour

The Boston Globe has just run an op-ed under the headline "Ending the Stranglehold on Gaza." The authors are Eyad al-Sarraj, identified as founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, and Sara Roy, identified as senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. The bias of the op-ed speaks for itself, and I won't even dwell on it. But I do want to call attention to this sentence:

Although Gaza daily requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent.

You don't need to be a math genius to figure out that if Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, as the authors also note, then 680,000 tons of flour a day come out to almost half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day.

Gaza into Egypt

"This may be a blessing in disguise." This is how an unnamed Israeli official greeted the destruction by Hamas of a chunk of the border barrier separating Gaza from Egypt, followed by an unregulated flood of hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinians across the border into Egypt. "Some people in the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry and prime minister's office are very happy with this. They are saying, 'At last, the disengagement is beginning to work.'" Obviously, a broken border between Egypt and Gaza is a major security problem for Israel. But war matériel and money for Hamas crossed the border anyway. An open border effectively absolves Israel of responsibility for the well-being of Gaza's population, and may prompt Israel to sever its remaining infrastructure and supply links to Gaza. A large part of the responsibility for Gaza would be shifted from Israel to Egypt, which might explain the satisfied murmurings in Jerusalem.

But the implications of the big breach go further. Given that Gaza and the West Bank are unlikely to be reunited, the question of Gaza's own viability as a separate entity is bound to resurface. In the 1990s, economists talked about Gaza's viability as a function of economics: massive investment could turn it into a high-rise Singapore. But in an article written back in the summer of 1991, a leading geographer argued that this wasn't feasible, and that a viable Gaza would need more land. Most of it, he argued, would have to come from Egypt.

Memo from Gulfistan

Martin Kramer made these remarks at the 8th Herzliya Conference on January 21.

Mearsheimer, Walt, and "cold feet"

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt appear at Princeton University tonight, to promote their book The Israel Lobby. I've held back while other critics have had their say, and many of them have done a splendid job. But I don't think anyone has understood the neat sleight of hand the authors performed in moving from article to book. The innovation in The Israel Lobby is their "cold feet" thesis about the Israeli genesis of the Iraq war.

But first, remember why pinning the Iraq war on the "Israel lobby" is so important to Mearsheimer and Walt. Their main argument isn't that the Palestinians are paying a terrible price for that support. In most quarters, that draws a simple shrug. Instead, the duo claim that Americans are paying the price for US support for Israel. They paid it on 9/11, and they're paying it now in Iraq. The killers of 9/11 set out on their mission because of their rage against unconditional US backing for Israel; and the pro-Israel lobby got America into the Iraq war because it served Israel's interests, not America's. America is bleeding so that Israel can avoid doing what it should have done years ago: give the Palestinians their state. And it's because Americans are dying that Israel shouldn't be indulged anymore.