The decline of Europe

Over the past few weeks, the widely respected writer Walter Russell Mead has offered readers of his new blog at The American Interest a fascinating series of posts outlining the global trends that are likely to dominate the new decade. Right at the outset of the series, Mead predicted a "wild decade ahead," arguing that the ever accelerating pace of change would pose enormous challenges.

If one accepts this premise, any projections for specific countries or societies will obviously depend on how their capacity to cope with change is assessed. By and large, the US would seem to be rather well-positioned to thrive on change; similarly, the factors described in the recently published book Start-up Nation justify optimism that Israel could do rather well despite its many disadvantages.

However, Europe's prospects might not be too bright, and Mead predicts a diminished role for Europe on the global stage.

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Anything but Jewish

Examples of Arab disregard for historic Jewish sites and artifacts could easily fill a book, and it wouldn't be a problem to fill an additional volume with examples of Arab denials of the historic Jewish connection to Jerusalem and the region. In the most recent example, Jordanian authorities apparently felt no embarrassment at claiming the Dead Sea Scrolls are "our antiquities," and the Palestinians no qualms in asserting the scrolls are "part of Palestinian heritage."

In an apparent attempt to bolster these claims, Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab recently shared his memories of "Growing Up in Bethlehem With the Dead Sea Scrolls Story" with readers of The Huffington Post.

Kuttab professes to be particularly upset by Israeli claims that "the scrolls have no connection to Jordan or the Jordanian people" but are instead "an intrinsic part of Jewish heritage and religion." Kuttab seems to think that these Israeli claims are easily invalidated by his own childhood memories of being told the story about the discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls by a Beduin goat herder - who then asked an Arab cobbler to make sandals out of them. Fortunately, the cobbler realized that these scrolls could be valuable, and according to Kuttab, they eventually were passed on to a high-ranking official of the Syrian Orthodox Church, who managed to sell them for a fortune.

So much for the deeply-felt Arab attachment to this unique historic treasure.

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Palestinian identity and statehood

About a month ago, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas gave a long interview to the leading Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. Among the first issues addressed in the interview were the negotiations with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the wide-ranging proposals he made in the hope of clinching a peace agreement.

Abbas confirmed that Olmert offered him "100 percent," meaning that for any of the West Bank settlements Israel wanted to annex, the Palestinians would receive equivalent territory from the area of Israel's pre-1967 borders. But Abbas made clear that any area populated by Israeli Arabs - many of whom prefer to describe themselves nowadays as "Israeli Palestinians" - was excluded from the land swaps, and he emphasized: "I explained from the beginning that I would not accept anyone (from the Palestinians of Israel)."

One might assume that Israelis who insist on defining themselves as Palestinians would be rather unhappy with this stance, because if the Palestinians are a people who seek to realize their right to self-determination, a Palestinian who gets the chance to have his place of residence become part of a Palestinian state should naturally be very pleased with this prospect. This would seem all the more likely since there are so many Israeli Arab organizations that complain constantly about the alienation their constituency feels due to the fact that the majority of Israelis regard Israel as a Jewish state.

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A decade of anti-Israel clichés

Just in time for Christmas, The Financial Times came out with a seasonally-themed editorial on "The need for peace in the Holy Land." You wouldn't quite know it from this editorial, but the 21st century's first decade began with far-reaching Israeli proposals for peace that were rejected by the Palestinians at Camp David and Taba in 2000/01, and now that the decade is about to end, it turns out that last year, Israel's prime minister proposed a Palestinian state on the equivalent of all the pre-1967 territories of Gaza and the West Bank, with east Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital - but again, the proposal was apparently not good enough.

While these Israeli efforts are not even mentioned, the Financial Times worries about a lack of outside interest and involvement:

It is, at best, disingenuous to pretend that two parties with such massively disproportionate power, resources and diplomatic and financial support could ever reach a deal on their own. The Palestinians are under Israeli occupation and the land on which they hope eventually to build their state is daily being eaten away. Any possibility of dividing the Holy Land into two states - with 78 per cent of historic Palestine for Israelis and 22 per cent (the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem) for the Palestinians - will soon evaporate, if it has not already."

This short paragraph could be a promising entry for any competition that seeks the most concise summary of the past decade's most popular distortions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Ahmadinejad and the four-letter word

"Ahmadinejad is, believe it or not, a very childlike man. [...] He giggles like a little boy. [...] there's an innocence about his eyes." That's how The New Yorker's photographer Platon described his impression of Iran's president after he photographed him and other world leaders last September at the UN. The portrait series is featured on the magazine's website, and you can click on each of the alphabetically arranged pictures and listen to the photographer's commentary.

Does it matter that the New Yorker's photographer wanted to capture the "innocence" he perceived in the eyes of a politician who suppressed protests against his disputed re-election with savage brutality? Ahmadinejad is also a political leader who doubts that the Holocaust has been properly researched, and who talks about Israel like the Nazis talked about Jews. He is a leading member of a regime that for years has subordinated the welfare of Iranians to the overriding priority of developing nuclear technology, and now the regime seems close to realizing its ambition of having nuclear arms.

The New Yorker's photographer Platon certainly knows all this; yet, he wanted to capture the "innocence" in the Iranian president's eyes.

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The US, Islam and pro-Israel neocons

Stephen M. Walt, one of the authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, believes that "one measure of the impact that our book on the Israel lobby has had is the lengths that some critics go in their attempts to discredit it."

In this spirit, he has brushed off a recent article by Peter Beinart, who argued that Obama's decision to send additional troops to Afghanistan "blows a hole in the thesis that made them [i.e. Walt and Mearsheimer] famous: that America wages war in the Muslim world, in large measure, because of the Israel lobby."

Beinart pointed out that Iran's nuclear ambitions were the greatest concern for the Israel lobby and that the "surge" in Afghanistan made action against Iran less likely; yet, he noted that "virtually all the prominent 'neoconservatives' who allegedly backed the Iraq war out of concern for Israel backed the Afghan surge too, even though this time, Israel and its lobbyists took no position."

In his response, Walt rejects Beinart's attempt to sum up the main thesis of The Israel Lobby by stating that "America wages war in the Muslim world, in large measure, because of the Israel lobby." In no uncertain terms, Walt declares: "We make no such argument, of course," and emphasizes: "We never said the lobby's influence was behind every war the United States has fought since Israel's founding, or even every military action the United States has undertaken in the Middle East; such a claim would be absurd."

Walt betrays the weakness of his case here, because he knocks down a straw man by rejecting a claim that Beinart never made, namely that "the lobby's influence was behind every war the United States has fought since Israel’s founding." Beinart only wrote about America's wars in the Muslim world and claimed that Walt's book attributed those wars "in large measure" to the influence of the Israel lobby. And this is indeed what the book did, Walt's protestations notwithstanding.

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The EU's Jerusalem policy

Last week, the international media were abuzz with reports that the European Union (EU) planned to act on a Swedish initiative that called for the formal recognition of east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. The endorsement was apparently expected in the wake of a meeting of EU foreign ministers scheduled for December 7-8 in Brussels, where the EU's policy on Mideast peace was among the issues on the agenda.

It is important to understand that the EU is currently trying to assert itself as a major player on the world stage. Europe has just filled two newly created leadership positions by appointing the first President of the European Council and the first High Representative for Foreign Affairs. Both positions went to "surprise" candidates who are hardly known on the European stage, and the appointments were widely criticized and even ridiculed. Indeed, it was rather fitting that one of the first media reports on the appointments concluded with some culinary revelations: "The decision was made last night over a dinner of wild mushrooms, spiced sea bass and chocolate fondant."

However, life in the service of the EU is not all about gourmet pleasures, and there has been quite a bit of concern recently because European politicians feel that they are no longer enjoying a "special relationship" with the US. A recent study on the subject warned gloomily:

An unsentimental President Obama has already lost patience with a Europe lacking coherence and purpose. In a post-American world, the United States knows it needs effective partners. If Europe cannot step up, the US will look for other privileged partners to do business with."

The EU's proposed stance on east Jerusalem may well be an exercise in muscle-flexing designed to show Obama that Europe is ready to fully back demands for a complete settlement construction freeze that would include Jerusalem.

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UN solidarity with Palestine

In 1977, the UN's General Assembly designated November 29 as "International Solidarity Day for Palestinian People." It was of course no coincidence that the day chosen for this event was the very same day on which the UN had voted in 1947 to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

But this was arguably a rather unfortunate choice: by selecting this historic date, on which the UN endorsed a decision that was rejected by the Arab League and Palestinian representatives, the UN seemed willing to retroactively approve this rejection and the subsequent Arab aggression.

It is worthwhile to recall the straightforward condemnation of the Arab conduct by the first UN Secretary General, Trygve Lie:

The invasion of Palestine by the Arab States was the first armed aggression which the world had seen since the end of the war [i.e. World War II]. The United Nations could not permit such aggression to succeed and at the same time survive as an influential force for peaceful settlement, collective security and meaningful international law."

Even before the partition plan was endorsed by the UN, the Arabs openly threatened war. During a meeting with Jewish Agency representatives David Horowitz and Abba Eban in September 1947, Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha declared:

The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely, Mr. Horowitz, that your plan is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight. You won't get anything by peaceful means or compromise. You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we'll succeed, but we'll try. We were able to drive out the Crusaders, but on the other hand we lost Spain and Persia. It may be that we shall lose Palestine. But it's too late to talk of peaceful solutions."

These few lines illustrate how little today's political discourse reflects the historical reality: Azzam Pasha categorically ruled out any peaceful resolution, openly threatened a war of aggression, and - unrestrained by concerns about "political correctness" - didn't hesitate to frame the conflict in terms of the centuries-old quest for Arab domination.

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United against Britain's 'Israel lobby'

Lavish praise was heaped on some of Britain's media in the English-language Saudi Arab News, where columnist Neil Berry hailed last week's screening of "a groundbreaking Dispatches documentary for Britain's Channel 4 television, trailed by an article in The Guardian newspaper, [that] investigated the covert influence of Britain's 'Israel lobby.'"

If you take Berry's word for it, Tony Blair was a Zionist stooge, the British Labor party is run by the "Israel lobby," and if the Conservatives come to power in Britain, things will get even worse - if that's at all possible. But Berry assures his readers that not all is lost: he describes the publication of the Mearsheimer/Walt book on "The Israel Lobby" in the US as "an epoch-making event" that has led over the past few years "to a sea change in the climate of Western intellectual, as well as general public opinion, vis-à-vis the boundaries of debate about the Jewish state."

Indeed, relating to another event that caused much debate in Britain last week - namely the publication of the English translation of Shlomo Sand's new book, The Invention of the Jewish People - Berry confidently asserts that this book "is of similarly cardinal significance."

So let's try to get this straight: first the Jews (or maybe the Zionists?) invented the Jewish people, then the Jewish people and/or the Zionists proceeded to invent the Jewish Lobby - no, make this the "Israel lobby" - and then all these inventions went on to control much of the world.

Obviously, the idea that every Jewish achievement, including nowadays the Jewish state, comes at the expense of non-Jews and is somehow due to one big conspiracy that needs to be uncovered and undone, is hardly new. It unmistakably echoes the idea "Die Juden sind unser Unglück," that is: "the Jews are our misfortune," a concept first made popular by the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke in the 1880s and later adopted by the Nazis.

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Eliminationism

In the mid-1990s, political scientist Daniel Jonah Goldhagen caused a heated controversy with the publication of a book arguing that the Holocaust was possible because ordinary Germans served as "willing executioners [...] who believed that exterminating Jews was right and necessary." Last month, Goldhagen came out with a new book, that is likely to once again generate much controversy.

The book's main title, Worse Than War, is already provocative: what could be worse than war? The subtitle hints at the answer: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity.
Some of the controversial aspects of this book - as well as the still-lingering controversies about Goldhagen's previous work - are addressed in a recent interview with Goldhagen published by the German news magazine Spiegel.

One issue that will certainly invite much criticism is Goldhagen's view that "political Islam" poses a very serious danger. As Goldhagen explains in the interview:

'Political Islam' is the appropriate term to describe political movements that are grounded in an understanding of Islam and seek to assert control - often totalitarian control - over their societies and other societies which they think should be Islamic. These movements often use violence and often with a genocidal or eliminationist attempt."

Goldhagen's views on this subject are also highlighted in a New York Times review of his book. Noting that Goldhagen argues "that 'political Islam' - jihadism - constitutes 'the most coherent and deadly mass­murderous ideology since Nazism,'" reviewer James Traub accuses Goldhagen of turning "political Islam into an eliminationist bogy." Traub also argues that "even al Qaeda, with its ideology of mass murder, has not been able to marshal the resources of a state to attain its ultimate goals."

However, from an article published in the spring 2007 issue of the progressive journal Democracy (free registration required), it is clear that Goldhagen's primary concern in this context is not al Qaeda. Indeed, he explicitly argued in his concluding paragraph:

Abandoning the Middle East to the Political Islamists and having Israel capitulate (and ultimately surrender its existence) is the only thing that will satisfy them - the only thing that will stop Political Islamists […] from feeling 'humiliated' (and then only partly, given the growing number of Muslims in Europe). Needless to say, this would be extremely self-injurious, not to mention immoral.

Instead, we should recognize the broad-based danger not merely of terrorism, but of Political Islam. And we must realize that it can only be defeated by active diplomatic, economic and military containment and, when practical, rollback by the United States and its allies in Europe and in the Middle East.

We should stop fixating on al Qaeda and terrorism, narrowly construed, as the overwhelming problem and recognize that the biggest danger is the Political Islamic colossus and aspiring hegemon: the soon-to-go-nuclear Iran."

This view will of course be vociferously rejected by many as just another variation of the "clash of civilizations" theme. While there is obviously room for a legitimate debate about Goldhagen's arguments, it is clear that this debate will inevitably reflect the wide-spread Western ignorance - and even denial - of anti-Semitic, anti-American and anti-Western sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world.

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