One of the most interesting things about hiking in a desert with two friends and a limited water supply is that at a certain point early on, one of the hikers becomes the Watcher of the Water, constantly warning the others about not drinking too much. At some point, however, that person gets sick of the role. Suddenly left without the constant warning and the confidence that somebody’s making sure the water lasts, inevitably one of the other hikers takes on the role as principal water griper. It’s an intuitive response to genuine danger.
Something similar may be happening between the U.S. and Europe.

Emanuele is clearly on to something, and the developments since his post have only made clearer the role-reversal. Today there are reports indicating that the U.S. is actively blocking tough financial sanctions against Iran in the upcoming G8 summit requested by the Europeans.
Americans are unaccustomed to the decline of empire, but we might be seeing signs of a broad-scale correction of a fairly radical distortion that dates to the Cold War — an abandonment of the U.S.’s long-held role as Watcher of the Water. Americans have long bristled at the fact that it is they who provided the muscle to deter the Soviets, while the Europeans benefited from American investment in the problem, and had the luxury to advocate more universalist, passive, and peace-seeking ideologies. But from an American perspective, there was no choice back then: The Soviet nukes where every bit as much a threat to the U.S. as to Europe.

Today, however, Iran is not aiming ICBMs at the U.S., and the Europeans are far more at risk from an Iranian bomb than are the Americans. What the new American administration calls “engagement” may be little more than a form of strategic disengagement, a way of saying that an Iranian bomb is simply not their problem. With the protective big brother nowhere to be seen, many Europeans realize that it may actually be up to them to stop the bomb.

Is this the beginning of a new era, a kind of strategic American isolationism under the guise of peacemaking, a fundamental shifting of the clash of civilizations? Here in Israel, we sure feel that way. (If today’s Israeli naval maneuvers are any indication, Israel may indeed be taking steps to “go it alone.”) Maybe Europeans are starting to sense it as well.

Call it a hunch. Tzipi Livni, former Foreign Minister and leader of the Kadima party, is on the ropes. Her days heading Israel’s opposition may be numbered.

First, there was the election, where she managed to pull off the remarkable feat of gaining the largest number of seats in the Knesset, while at the same time failing not only to put together a governing coalition, but even to join the government at all. She blew it because her narrative of “we got the most seats, so we won,” didn’t hold a candle to Netanyahu’s narrative of “the right wing got way more seats than the left wing, so we won.”

But then Netanyahu’s narrative shifted, and Livni lost again. Ehud Barak’s Labor party, which should have been devastated by its historic electoral implosion, instead retook command of the Left, joining a “National Unity” government with Likud et al. Bibi became the great Unifier, and Livni was left without anything of substance to distance her party from the government.

The new government’s political pincer-move, led by two former members of the IDF’s most elite special forces unit, was bad enough. Then there came Bibi’s big speech, where he historically allowed for the possibility of a Palestinian State — removing Livni’s only remaining substantive policy disagreement with the Prime Minister — in exchange for the whole world’s agreeing to hear his eloquent discourse about the prophets and Jewish history. (A veteran TV commentator called his speech “a tiny ‘Yes’ and a huge ‘But.’”) Suddenly, Israelis love Bibi again, despise Obama, and Livni is simply left with nothing to say. The one issue that the Americans disagree with Israel on — the idea of zero-growth settlement policy — is something that neither Livni nor her party could agree to. So what is left for her to oppose?

Last week, Livni escaped the physical dismantling of her party, as she led a raucous boycott of the Knesset (including the spontaneous singing of Israeli folk songs in the plenum) in protest over attempts to pass a law that would allow 7 MKs of her party, led by Shaul Mofaz, to split off and join the coalition. Maybe Bibi played his hand too forcefully. A tactical error perhaps. But it only slowed the process.

Today Mofaz has launched a blistering assault on Livni. ”She’s a nice person, you can sit and have a drink with her,” Mofaz said, “but we’re not in a club; she just doesn’t have the ability to make tough decisions.” This is an explicit echo of the Likud’s campaign against Livni: That she is too indecisive to lead.

At the same time, Netanyahu is playing it cool, calling on Livni to join the coalition. If she does, her supporters will clearly see it as a capitulation. Her inability to stick to her guns will be confirmed. Mofaz will have all the momentum in her party. And she will be giving her nemesis, Netanyahu, premiership over an unprecedentedly unified country. But if she doesn’t, she will find herself increasingly irrelevant in opposing a government with which she has no discernible disagreements, left with little to say to Israelis on the Left or Right.

If the current reports are even remotely accurate, the violent suppression of the Green Revolution has taken a turn for the worse. One of the most prolific on-the-scene reporters via Twitter had the following reports in over the last two hours:

saw 7/8 militia beating one woman with baton on ground - -she had no defense nothing — #Iranelection sure that she is dead

so many ppl arrested — young & old — they take ppl away — #Iranelection — we lose our group

ppl run into alleys and militia standing there waiting — from 2 sides they attack ppl in middle of alleys #Iranelection

phone line was cut and we lost internet — #Iranelection — getting more difficult to log into net — #Iranelection

rumour they are tracking high use of phone lines to find internet users — must move from here now — #Iranelection

reports of street fighting in Vanak Sq, Tajrish sq, Azadi Sq — now - #Iranelection — Sea of Green — Allah Akbar

in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat — blood everywhere — like butcher — Allah Akbar - #Iranelection RT RT RT

they catch ppl with mobile — so many killed today — so many injured — Allah Akbar — they take one of us — #Iranelection

Lalezar Sq is same as Baharestan — unbelevable — ppls murdered everywhere - #Iranelection

they pull away the dead into trucks — like factory — no human can do this — we beg Allah for save us — #Iranelection

we must go — dont know when we can get internet — they take 1 of us, they will torture and get names — now we must move fast

thank you ppls 4 supporting Sea of Green — pls remember always our martyrs — Allah Akbar — Allah Akbar — Allah Akbar #Iranelection

Allah — you are the creator of all and all must return to you — Allah Akbar — #Iranelection Sea of Green

This report, of an apparent full-scale massacre being waged in Tehran, is repeated by another witness interviewed on CNN, via Andrew Sullivan:

I was going towards Baharestan with my friend. This was everyone, not just supporters of one candidate or another. All of my friends, they were going to Baharestan to express our opposition to these killings and demanding freedom. The black-clad police stopped everyone. They emptied the buses that were taking people there and let the private cars go on. We went on until Ferdowsi then all of a sudden some 500 people with clubs came out of [undecipherable] mosque and they started beating everyone. They tried to beat everyone on [undecipherable] bridge and throwing them off of the bridge. And everyone also on the sidewalks. They beat a woman so savagely that she was drenched in blood and her husband, he fainted. They were beating people like hell. It was a massacre. They were trying to beat people so they would die. they were cursing and saying very bad words to everyone. This was exactly a massacre… I don’t know how to describe it.

It was only a few days ago when the popular uprising was waxing, that I could say with a straight face that Western leaders might be doing the right thing in showing restraint. The concern was then about discrediting the revolution inside Iran by seeming to confirm the accusation that it was a U.S. conspiracy.
Well, it’s certainly starting to look like I was wrong. Convinced that the protesters did not have the world on their side, the Mullahs have now unleashed total violence and horror on their own people. Fewer and fewer reports are escaping the hell, and the silencing of our sources inside Iran, one by one, suggests something far worse than the few dozen dead and few hundred arrested that the official news agencies are reporting.

Is it too late for massive Western pressure to make a difference? Is there any chance of it now?

The White House is atwitter after a new poll revealed a dramatic shift among Israelis regarding the administration’s policies towards Israel. The poll, conducted by Smith Research and commissioned by the Jerusalem Post, shows that only 6% of Israelis consider Obama “pro-Israel,” while 50% see him as “pro-Palestinian.” Compare this with the same poll from a month earlier, in mid-May, which had 31% responding that the Obama Administration is pro-Israel, and just 14% saying pro-Palestinian. What has changed in the last month? Not much, other than Obama’s dramatic Cairo speech, which described Israel as the product of centuries of Jewish suffering and the Holocaust; and Netanyahu’s no less dramatic response, which described Israel as the product of thousands of years of Jewish attachment to their ancient homeland.

There is a political calculus for the President here: As much as American Jews may have supported Obama without caring too much about his record on Israel, at the end of the day, American Jews tend to care deeply about Israel, and their sense of what’s happening with Israel is highly informed by what Israelis think (or, at least, Israeli elites). In other words, so dramatically lopsided a view of American policy towards Israel will not be lost on American Jewish voters. Midterms are not that far off.

After posting my views the other day as to why we should be rooting for the Green Revolution in Iran (“A Neocon Breaks Ranks” was Andrew Sullivan’s baffling headline), I was finally asked, for the first time, what I thought about (a) the Obama Administration’s response to the situation in Iran, and (b) whether I thought the Bush Administration would have handled it differently. The examples of Georgia and the Ukraine were raised. I discovered my opinions to be somewhat heretical in certain circles, so I might as well share them.

People in positions of responsibility inevitably behave differently than they would have when they were on the outside, criticizing. The knowledge that what you say really can have an impact on the outcome of events makes you behave very carefully. Iran is not the Ukraine or Georgia, for the simple reason that the revolutionary movement is not only being accused of acting under the influence of the U.S. and the “Zionists,” but that accusation still carries a great deal of traction in Iranian society. I really do believe that if the Mousavi supporters succeed, there’s a decent chance the new Iranian government will shift its attitude to the West, at least by a notch or two, if not more. But it’s not something the revolutionary movement is willing to say publicly at this stage.

It is far from clear that overt and flamboyant cheer-leading from the U.S. government will not do more harm than good. And not only is this probably one of the big concerns guiding the current administration, but I will go out on a very long limb and suggest that perhaps President Bush, too, would have understood how carefully this needs to be played. (Of course, Bush would likely have been accused of secretly supporting Ahmadinejad.)

Call me crazy. Political leaders are just like that sometimes. Their sense of responsibility trumps our vivid sense of justice.

This is, of course, Obama’s call to make, and he will be judged far more harshly for it if the revolution fails than if it succeeds. But those of us who are absolutely sure that he is going about this the wrong way should be given pause by the surprising support he has received from a certain Mr. Netanyahu. Bibi has often been cast as the neocon’s neocon, a supporter of democratic freedom and intervention everywhere, especially in the Muslim world — one who, by the way, has no problem going loggerheads with the current president on other issues. And yet, he has chosen not to second-guess Obama. He has wisely let Shimon Peres do the talking instead.

I do not believe it likely that the people of Iran will overthrow the Revolutionary regime in the next few weeks. This is not one of the goals of the Green revolution. Its explicit demands, however, do include not only the resignation of Ahmedinejad in favor of the popular reformist Mousavi, but also the resignation of the Supreme Leader, Khameni, who has supported Ahmedinejad. Contrary to what some overly intelligent analysts think, it seems clear that we should all be rooting for them to get what they want.

Westerners, including many Israelis, often find the Middle East to be a baffling place, and as a result they find themselves saying things that in any other context would sound absurd. One of my favorites is the argument that goes: “It’s better if something really bad happens, because then people will understand how bad it really is.”I heard this in defense of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza.

The obvious flaw in the argument is that less actual terror, with ambiguous world support, is still better than more actual terror with worldwide sympathy. Sympathy evaporates eventually; lives lost can never be returned. Predictably, what happened with Gaza was that Israel ended up losing on both counts. On the one hand, Hamas took over and built a massive terror infrastructure that enabled it to start taking the fight into Israel’s urban centers in the South. On the other hand, international support was short-lived. When Israel dared fight back, it was subjected to a brutal international outcry.

The same arguments are surfacing today with regard to the Iranian demonstrations since the election. For several days we’ve been hearing both Israeli and American officials saying we’re better off having Ahmedinejad win rather than the reformer Mousavi. (Today it comes from the head of the Mossad.) True, it’s unlikely that an explicit supporter of the Islamic revolution in Iran will suddenly become pro-Israel. It’s not even clear that he’ll stop Iran’s nuclear program. And it’s also true that there’s a limit to how much change a reformer can affect when he’s under the thumb of the Mullahs setting foreign policy. And yet, I still cannot imagine that having Ahmedinejad remain as president is somehow a desirable outcome.

This, for a few reasons.

1. The logic according to which it is “better have an extreme leader than a reformist one” is flawed. It is always better for things to be better than for them to be worse. The actual reality of life in Iran is the most salient reason — there is something perverse about wishing for the continued oppression of Iranians because of its possible PR advantages for us Westerners. But there are other reasons as well:

2. A Mousavi victory sends a stunning rebuke to the most extreme anti-democratic, pro-fascistic forces in the region. It puts a sudden stop to the momentum of extremism, which until now was threatening not only the citizens of Israel and the West, but pro-Western Arab regimes like Egypt. It is easy for us to say that we’d rather wait for the “real” revolution, i.e., a pro-West democratic one. What’s more likely to happen if Mousavi fails is that Iranians will conclude that they’re better off just accepting their rulers than trying to overthrow them.

3. A Mousavi victory creates a dynamic of reform — a dynamic which, once begun, may go much further than Mousavi himself may have intended. The image of Mikhail Gorbachev comes to mind, who was brought in to save the Soviet system by allowing a measure of reforms known as Glasnost and Perestroika. This opened the door for a popular revolt by a population that had long ago stopped believing in Communism as an ideology. We may not know who will play the role of Yeltsin, but looking back, it seems silly to prefer Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko over Gorbachev, just because it made Cold Warriors more comfortable to have a more unambiguously despicable enemy.

For days now, Mousavi’s revolt is gaining steam. It is being handled wisely, minimizing violence from the side of the protesters, garnering the quiet support of major Iranian figures like Khatami and Rafsanjani. According to journalists on the ground, yesterday’s rally brought together over a million people, and they are just getting angrier with every killing by the pro-government militias. The military has stepped in — to protect the demonstrators, rather than stop them. Iranians had come to expect a certain measure of self-rule by being able to choose their own leaders, at least to a point. Today they feel they were robbed. If they get to have their freedom, even in limited amounts, they may well end up wanting more.

Sometimes you cannot understand the greatness of a speech until you hear the spectrum of reactions to it. Netanyahu’s speech was heavy on style and light on new content: He made a shift from refusing to recognize the possibility of a Palestinian state toward allowing for one under very specific conditions: (i) It must be demilitarized; (ii) No refugees will be moved into Israel; (iii) it must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and (iv) Jerusalem will remain unified. Other than that, at first glance the speech provided mostly historical perspective, a few subtle retorts to Obama (as Jennifer pointed out), and an explicit announcement of his intention to stop building new settlements or expanding old ones beyond their current boundaries, but allowing for natural growth.

Yet the impact of the speech on Israel has been stunning. Most of it I’m picking up on radio and television (sorry no links), consisting of almost uniform praise; from settlers in Ofra who were pleased that he not only promised to allow them to live “normal” lives, but also praised their strength and Zionist values, all the way to Yael Tamir, a Labor-party rebel who has refused to participate in the coalition because it is too far right, but who nonetheless declared the speech to be a “very important step in the right direction” because of its recognition of a Palestinian state — a sentiment echoed by the opposition Kadima party as well.

The responses to Netanayahu’s speech reflect a consensus in Israel that is only growing stronger by the day: Nobody wants to rule over the Palestinians, nobody wants to see the West Bank become another Hamastan like Gaza, nobody wants to be told that their country exists at the expense of their suffering, and nobody thinks peace is around the corner. But everybody agrees that if the Palestinians would drop the violence and just try to live – to build an economy and a demilitarized civilian life alongside Israel, then Israelis would have a much easier time talking about statehood.

The greatness of his speech, in other words, was not in its eloquence or its boldness. It was in its unique ability to express the unified thinking of an entire nation.

This is what both the Americans and the Palestinians will now have to contend with. Bibi has made life fairly easy for Obama. By extracting a concession on the idea of a Palestinian state, the administration can declare victory and turn down the fire on the natural-growth issue. American and world attention will now be focused on what it should have been focused all along: The Palestinians. It is they, after all, who have utterly failed to meet any of the preconditions of the “road map” regarding a cessation of both preaching and practicing violence. It is they who harbor Hamas, Fatah-Tanzim, Islamic Jihad, and other armed groups to the point of having no capacity to rule or speak with a single, reliable voice. It is they who will have to radically change in order for peace to have a chance. If there’s no one to talk to, there’s nothing to talk about.

Small wonder, then, that the Palestinian reaction to the speech was so harsh. “A liar and a thief” is what their initial response called Netanyahu. Why indeed? Because he may have just burst their bubble of American coziness? Because he is openly willing to give them everything they should want, and refuses to give them everything they shouldn’t?

Right now events in Iran are moving too fast for proper coverage in the MSM. Even the bloggers are slow compared with the flow through Twitter. You can follow it here, here, and here. There is also a YouTube channel up with a constant flow of video from Iran. Though it is unclear how many of these reports can be confirmed, they include the arrest of at least a hundred organizers and journalists, Moussavi’s being put under house arrest, and a lot of violence, including (again unconfirmed) killings across Iran.

A few days ago I mentioned the Washington Holocaust Museum in a post in which I raised the two different Holocaust narratives that Jews carried in their hearts. According to one, the Holocaust teaches us to reject violence, embrace tolerance, and learn to get along. According to the other, the Jewish people learned the absolute necessity of defense — including a sovereign state and an army — in order to survive in the real world. How do we react now, to a tragedy that cries out to be read in its own symbolic context?

The alleged attacker, Von Brunn, was a vicious anti-Semite who was not looking to kill a security guard. He was looking to kill Jews. In this he failed, and he failed only because of the heroic acts of Stephen Tyrone Johns, who sacrificed his life, and of the other guards who opened fire and took him out.

The event is tragic in anyone’s eyes, but only ironic according to the first Holocaust narrative. The Washington Post’s editorial this morning talks about how the museum is “ a place where visitors go to confront hatred, learn the danger of prejudice and promote human dignity… Such a reminder was delivered yesterday, in a most unexpected place.” The editors continue:

Several Holocaust visitors described the incident as “unbelievable” because it occurred in a place that, by memorializing the near-extinction of a people, is designed to prevent violence. One woman, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, said the shooting demonstrates that hatred and prejudice are never-ending. Given the vile beliefs that news accounts have ascribed to the suspect, that view is understandable. But the hope that was enshrined in the Holocaust Museum when it opened in 1993 is that exposing the horrors of hate and prejudice will move people to tolerance.

From the perspective of the other narrative, however, the tragic events yesterday were anything but ironic. Indeed, they seem to prove the very lesson its proponents have been trying to teach us. The fact is that neither Johns nor his compatriots represent a rejection of violence. They represent the enlistment of force to protecting liberty — including the liberty of Jews to commemorate their past and celebrate their present. What is horribly clear today is that if not for their swift, heroic, and effective actions — indeed, were it not for the wisdom of whoever insisted on having well-trained armed guards protecting the place — we all know how much worse yesterday’s attack would have turned out.

Shmuel’s post about Netanyahu has it almost right. It is true that in the past, Likud-led governments were willing to risk their own coalitions in order to reach agreements or take other actions that could be perceived as “veering left” — the most notable example being Ariel Sharon’s decision to pull out of Gaza, in defiance not only of his coalition partners but of his own party, and arguably even of the very mandate on which he was elected. And it is true that in all these cases, relations with the U.S. were part of the calculus. But there is something missing in the analysis, which might put the present government in a different situation altogether.

The biggest question that faces any Israeli leader when risking his governing coalition is not how the Americans will like his actions. And it is certainly (alas) not whether they are right or wrong. The biggest question is how the actions will be perceived by the broader electorate — or put another way, whether his party will do better in the next elections if he is perceived as sticking to his right-wing “principles” or alternatively making “bold moves” for peace. Bringing early elections is often seen as a way to take the initiative and try to increase power, not necessarily as a failure or loss of control.

For more than a decade, and really since 1977, the Israeli electorate was deeply divided between “right” and “left” camps. For most of that time, the Likud was seen as the most dovish, or mainstream, party of the right-wing camp. As such, there was frequently a major incentive to appeal to the centrist voters who might be impressed with Likud’s pragmatism and reasonableness compared to the ideologues on the further Right. There was also an incentive to appeal to the left-dominated media, which would continue to portray the leader as a legitimate national figure.

Something shifted with the last election, however. Although we still hear talk of left and right, these terms have become far less meaningful than at any point in the last generation. Ehud Barak has no problem sitting in Bibi’s government, alongside Avigdor Lieberman and the folks on the far-Right. Tzipi Livni, now outflanked on the Left by Barak’s Labor party, is having tremendous difficulty distinguishing herself from the government on either ideological or policy lines. And the entire election ran on a theme not of peace vs. land, but of who will best protect Israelis against violence and international pressure. Indeed, according to a report in today’s Jerusalem Post, on the contentious issue of “natural growth” of settlements, Livni might face a massive mutiny within her own party if she tries to endorse the American position. “The denial of natural growth is not legitimate, not moral, and is anti-Jewish,” said the influential Kadima MK Otniel Schneller, himself a resident of the settlement of Maaleh Michmas. “Nobody can tell my daughters not to have children just because they happen to live in settlements.” And according to IDF radio yesterday (Hebrew link), lifelong dove President Shimon Peres seemed to endorse Netanyahu’s stance against the Americans, saying that the settlements issue “requires serious negotiation, but should not be allowed to dominate the peace process.”

Does this mean that the Obama administration cannot have an impact? Of course it can: by ratcheting up the pressure, a greater number of Israelis will be displeased, and that can affect how they vote next time around. But will they blame Bibi — or Obama? Will American pressure mean that Netanyahu will try to placate disgruntled Israelis on the Left — or that, to the contrary, more Israelis will reflexively turn to a leader perceived as pushing back against the bully? That depends mostly on internal Israeli factors, including whether Bibi can continue to render Livni irrelevant through his partnership with Ehud Barak. So long as that alliance holds, there is no viable alternative to Netanyahu in Israel. And too much American pressure is likely to backfire.

Maybe the mainstream press over in the U.S. is a little slow. Israel’s media today is headlining a new threat from North Korea: Pyongyang announced, through a state-run newspaper, that it will use its nuclear weapons against anyone who, in its mind, provokes it. ”Our nuclear deterrent will be a strong defensive means … as well as a merciless offensive means to deal a just retaliatory strike to those who touch the country’s dignity and sovereignty even a bit.” Through this line, run by the state-run news agency, North Korea is for the first time giving up the pretense of developing only “defensive” nukes. And it is intended as the clearest warning yet against anything the West might consider doing.

True, North Korea is known for its bellicose phrasing. But phrasing is part of the reality of politics. While the U.S. “weighs” putting North Korea back on the terror list and “considers” whether to start enforcing a UN Security Council resolution calling for the inspection of North Korean vessels, Pyongyang is saying explicitly what it intends to do. Is it just rhetoric? If so, a lack of response from the West sends a terrifying message to South Korea and other neighboring countries, who are now all looking to Washington for leadership. If not, then we all need to begin asking ourselves: What will Washington do if North Korea decides to send its messages in the form of military strikes, even a nuclear attack?

Oh, and if you wonder why Israelis are so concerned about North Korean nukes, maybe it’s because Israelis feel in their bones what many Americans have yet to figure out: that there is no better indicator as to how the administration will really handle the Iranian threat tomorrow than to look at how it handles North Korea today. There is, potentially, a direct link between American failure here and the likelihood of an Israeli attack there.

Having become almost entirely inaudible within her own country, Tzipi Livni is looking for a new audience. She’s found it in the New York Times, where Israel’s Leader of the opposition put forth her own official response to President Obama’s Cairo speech.

Her central thesis is that for democracies to thrive in the Middle East, it is not enough for elections to be held. There needs to be an underlying worldview, a belief in liberty, a set of values that must be inculcated in a culture before one can call it democratic. This is perhaps the key paragraph:

I believe that democracy is about values before it is about voting. These values must be nurtured within society and integrated into the electoral process itself. We cannot offer international legitimacy for radical groups and then simply hope that elections and governance will take care of the rest. In fact, the capacity to influence radical groups can diminish significantly once they are viewed as indispensable coalition partners and are able to intimidate the electorate with the authority of the state behind them.

Livni is right, of course. There is no reason to legitimize Hamas or Hezbollah just because they’re taking part in elections — even if they win. This is an especially timely message today, as Lebanese go to the polls. But if the Times’s point was to show the world that Israel has voices that are different from the current hard-right-but-also-hard-left government, it failed. Livni’s article did not present a single idea that has not already been voiced by the Israeli center-right, most notably Prime Minister Netanyahu himself. In fact, the importance of creating the infrastructure for democracy — through education, law and order, and economic development, is the central point of his own prescription for peace with the Palestinians, and is likely to be the central feature of his major policy speech next week. For years, Natan Sharansky has been calling for a similar “bottom-up” approach to dealing with the region, and took issue with the Bush Administration’s elections-first approach to Iraq on precisely these grounds.

Which leaves us wondering: What was the point of the article? Was she trying to steal Netanyahu’s thunder by making it look like the ideas are her own? To distort Netanyahu’s views by implicitly suggesting that they are somehow different from her own?

Or maybe the explanation is something far less nefarious. Perhaps she is trying to show the Americans, particularly in the Obama administration, just how much of a consensus the current Israeli government’s views represent; that there really is such a thing as a “loyal opposition” — especially in the face of what Israel is currently facing around the world.

President Obama is to be commended for his eloquent repudiation of Holocaust denial, and his commemoration of its memory. However, Obama’s focus on the Holocaust carries more, and different, weight than we may realize. While it may sound like a nod in Israel’s favor to balance his other words, in truth it is both wider and narrower than that, and will largely fail to speak to the very Israelis he hopes to reach.

Wider: The Holocaust is not just a foundational memory for many Jews, but for Europeans as well. In the European context, it sits at the core of a narrative that goes like this: Half a century ago, Europeans got swept up in a fever of intolerant, racist nationalism, which resulted in the greatest catastrophe ever. Because of that, we are forever suspicious of particularist national ideologies, the abuse of power, and intolerance. In this narrative, the present-day villain is none other than Zionism, which is seen as precisely the ethnic-nationalist militarism that should have long been left behind. Letting the Jews have a state turned out to be a mistake, for it enabled them to switch from being the oppressed to the oppressor.

Narrower: For a great many American and Western Jews, the Holocaust is taught as a personal tragedy whose implications are universal: Not unlike the European reading, the Holocaust carries a message for all humanity, and that message is tolerance and peace. Small wonder that Holocaust Museums have morphed into Museums of Tolerance in the last generation.

Alongside this reading, however, most Israelis and Zionists abroad carry a second narrative with them: The Holocaust teaches us that centuries of collective powerlessness lead to collective catastrophe. That no matter how alien this may feel after so long an exile, Jews can and must defend themselves, through a state and an army, as a precondition for survival, and as the basis of a national renaissance. In Israel, a tour through the Yad VaShem Holocaust Museum ends with a celebration of Israel.

This is the side of the Holocaust you will not hear about from Barack Obama. The closest he can come to it is to suggest that the Jews deserved a homeland after so many centuries of anti-Semitism. Sort of an international act of grace that the Arabs will just have to come to terms with. This is not how the Jews view their own tragedy, however, nor is it the aim of their state, the foundations of which were already in place before the Holocaust happened. A state, not for mercy and respite, but for revival, empowerment, and the tools needed to chart our own course. What’s that word again? Freedom?

It is usually the case that the more a presidential speech is hyped, the less that is genuinely new in it. At least with respect to policies on Israel, that was the case today, at least on the face of it. His two main demands of Israel — stop settlement construction and accept the two-state solution — have been made explicit over the last weeks and months.

Was there anything interesting between the lines? Two minor points worth mentioning. Obama’s citation of Israel’s historical background seems to affirm the Arab narrative that Israel was created as a response to the Holocaust, and that therefore Israel’s militancy is making Palestinians pay for Europe’s crimes. But this fails to explain Israel’s relentless efforts at peace initiatives, even bad ones, and it fails to take into account much of the Arab world’s ongoing violent hostility to Israel as a reason for Israel’s defensive posture. But Max is right that it could have been much worse. There no question that Obama affirmed a special relationship with Israel, sending a signal to the Muslim world that their expectations should not get too high as to whether America is effectively switching sides, to abandon Israel and support the Arabs instead.

Second, and more important, is the weird language about settlements:

The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

What is unclear here is whether he is referring to new construction, new settlements, or the very existence of settlements at all — meaning, are the homes of a quarter million Jews in cities and towns, including throughout Jerusalem, now illegitimate? This would mean a radical break from previous American policy. What on earth could the phrase “It is time for these settlements to stop” mean? Stop what? Existing? Expanding? In so carefully crafted a speech, the ambiguity here seems deliberate.

The Obama administration is trying to figure out whether it has pushed Israel too hard, too fast. It is becoming increasingly clear that the current Israeli government has no intention of either buckling or being perceived as buckling to U.S. demands. While the New York Times is convinced that Netanyahu is busy “holding together a fractious coalition,” the truth is there is little fractious about it — little, that is unless Netanyahu chooses to ignore the overwhelming voter mandate that is behind his coalition, and give in to the administration’s demands of a total freeze of construction in the “settlements” - a squishy word which occasionally includes the eastern half of Jerusalem.

Because the Palestinians are impossibly divided and have effectively deteriorated into two separate mini-states that have little to say to one another, much less to Israel or the West; because Israelis voted against further compromise after discovering that every previous effort at compromise in the last 16 years resulted in more violence; because it really makes no difference on the ground whether Israel or the U.S. believe in a “two-state solution” or not when the prospects of a Palestinian state have never seemed more remote — because of all these things, American rhetoric is becoming increasingly difficult to connect with anything that is actually happening over here in the Middle East. The U.S. opposes a plan to build a hotel in East Jerusalem — even though in practice, very few people living in the city have any idea where the Green Line actually runs, and the vast majority of Israelis are about as interested in dividing Jerusalem as the Germans are in re-dividing Berlin. (This includes the vast majority of Palestinians living in Jerusalem, who get most of their income from working in Western Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel.)

Nor is the debate over the “settlement freeze” a meaningful one. The American media love to portray the settlers uniformly as religious kooks who put their children under a kitchen table while making dinner, while the majority of them are ordinary folk living in places like Ariel and Maaleh Adumim. These images of hilltop shacks and wacky gun-toting Olive-tree-burning ex-Brooklynites make it very easy to call for a freeze to “natural growth” of the settlements — after all, if the people are fanatics, why should we let them build more houses for their children? But again, the reality is far more complex: most of what Americans call settlements are in fact bustling communities, most of whose residents, such as in Ariel or the towns of the Jordan Valley, have little if any connection to the religious motivations of the people in Kfar Tapuach and Kiryat Arba.
Americans call for a freeze so as not to “prejudice” the outcome of peace negotiations. This sounds like a reasonable goal. But what prejudices the outcome more: adding housing units in a Jewish town that is geographically removed from any Arab population center, or continuing to preach hatred, violence, and martyrdom in Palestinian schools? Building another hotel in the city of Jerusalem, or smuggling missiles and terror money into the Gaza Strip?

The whole purpose of Palestinian violence is to prejudice the outcome of negotiations. So far it has worked.

What a relief. Farouk Hosni, the Egyptian Culture Minister and candidate to head up UNESCO, has apologized for saying he would “burn Israeli books” if he found them in an Egyptian library.

It’s a relief because Israel had just dropped its objection to Hosni’s candidacy, as an apparent goodwill gesture to Egypt. That would have been very embarrassing, no? For Israel to agree to having an outright Judeobibliophobe heading up the UN’s leading educational and cultural body. Just think of all those books in Hebrew the UN might have to consider burning — beginning with the Bible. Olaf Zimmermann, the head of Germany’s Culture Council, told Der Spiegel that ”Choosing Farouk Hosni as the new director of UNESCO would be a mistake… UNESCO is on the verge of putting into practice the Convention on Cultural Diversity. A responsibility like that shouldn’t be trusted to someone who hasn’t fully internalized the ideals of UNESCO.”

But now that he’s apologized, we can wipe the slate clean and start over. Hosni has now fully internalized UNESCO’s values, and now the reverse can happily happen as well. Isn’t the UN great?

North Korea says it just tested another nuclear weapon. Why is this happening? Hasn’t the West done everything to give them a ladder to climb down from the tree of Armageddon?

One particular rung in the ladder was the decision by the Bush Administration to remove North Korea from the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring states. This surely had not a shred of justice in it: there is no evidence that suggests the North Koreans have stopped supporting terror. On the contrary, it was less than a year before that they were caught building Syria a nice fat center-for-the-production-of-weapons-of-mass-destruction. They have also been caught supplying weapons to Palestinian terrorists by sea, and building underground tunnels for Hezbollah.

The only reason for taking the North Koreans off the list was as part of a carrot-and-stick policy regarding that blasted nuclear thing. It failed.

If the Obama Administration wants simultaneously to (a) show it will not be pushed around, (b) pounce on an opportunity to right a wrong of its predecessor, and (c) draw attention away from its other troubles, it will immediately put North Korea back on the list.

As the political dust settles in the wake of the Obama-Netanayahu meeting, the two governments’ positions are starting to come into focus. Netanyahu rejects the two-state solution; Obama affirms it. Netanyahu insists on continuing the “natural growth” of existing settlements; Obama rejects it. Netanhyahu insists that Jerusalem will remain the “eternal, undivided” capital of Israel; Obama sees Jerusalem as up for negotiations.

One would almost think from this that Israel and the United States are negotiating with one another. But they’re not. Israel’s supposed to be negotiating with the Palestinians. And there are all sorts of questions that have to do with what the Palestinians are willing to give up: the “right of return,” contiguity, Jerusalem, education, a permanent end to hostility, etc. What happened to all of these? As long as there is no Palestinian side to this negotiation, the respective positions of both Netanyahu and Obama are meaningless.

Well, not entirely meaningless. Both leaders have internal interests that their positions serve: Netanyahu calculates he will win points among Israelis by standing tough against American pressure; whereas Obama needs to show that he’s not beholden to the “Israel Lobby.” There’s something overly comfortable about this clash of views.

But, as I have pointed out, there is no Palestinian side to this negotiation, and there will not be one so long as the Palestinians are irreconcilably split between Hamas and the PA. The whole thing is process, and there is a price to pay for a show that never ends.

Fresh off Prime Minister Netanyahu’s meeting with President Obama, in which the former again refused to endorse a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem, members of his party are hard at work trying to come up with a different approach. The latest is a conference for parliamentarians held under the title “Alternatives to the Two-State Outlook,” which will include major figures such as former IDF Chief-of-Staff Moshe Bogie Ya’alon, Shas leader Eli Yishai, and Labor MK Yuli Tamir.

I don’t know whether genuinely new ideas will emerge. Of greater interest is the conference being held at the initiative of Likud MK and former TV personality Tzipi Hotovely. Hotovely, just 30 years old, is a rising star on the Israeli political scene, and represents a whole new generation of young Likud leaders, including Danny Danon, Gilad Erdan, and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar. These under-45s are all dynamic, well-spoken people who take the grunt-work of parliament seriously. They are, in all likelihood, the future of Likud.

Part of a party’s success depends on its ability to speak to a younger generation of voters, and give them a sense of where the future lies. Don’t be fooled by campaign cameos of the likes of Benny Begin and Dan Meridor. Keep your eyes on the other Tzipi and her friends.

In case you were wondering where the two-state solution is holding on the scale of fruitful-to-fallacy, the Palestinians have now weighed in. In response to the Obama-Netanyahu meeting, Hamas issued a press release declaring the American President’s optimism to be “intended to deceive the world community, regarding everything connected to the… existence of the racist and radical Zionist entity.” That would be Israel.

Okay, scratch Hamas. Maybe the Palestinian Authority will solve the Hamas problem by incorporating the terror group that today rules the Gaza strip into a unified Palestinian government, and then we can talk about a two-state solution again? Not so fast. The same day, PA President Mahmoud Abbas swore in a Hamas-free government, effectively slamming the door on reconciliation talks. He has worked so hard to permanently divide the West Bank from Gaza that he has even infuriated his own Fatah faction, which boycotted the swearing-in ceremony.

According to Haaretz, one Palestinian commentator spoke directly to the point, when he raised the question of whether Obama’s optimism was justified. ”Obama still doesn’t know what the Middle East is and what the Palestinian issue is,” he said. “With time, he will learn.”

In the most easily misunderstood headline of the last few days, the Jerusalem Post declares: “Reform Convert Bodies to Get Funds.” Once you get to the article you discover that “Convert” is not a verb, “Bodies” does not refer to human beings but institutions, and “to” is not short for “in order to” but “are going to.”

It refers to one of the two major Israeli High Court rulings handed down over the last few days on the problem of conversions in the Jewish State. By ruling that Reform conversion institutes are to be funded equally alongside Orthodox ones, the Court has taken a major step towards undercutting the Orthodox rabbinate’s monopoly on determining the status of converts in Israel.

There are good arguments for maintaining that monopoly. A single standard for conversion, while discriminatory against non-halachic views, has the benefit of maintaining clarity in the question of “Who is a Jew?” — a question that has broad implications for immigration and personal status issues like marriage and divorce.

In recent years, however, the monopoly has been widely abused by the Chief Rabbinate — a rabbinate which has come under increasing control of ultra-Orthodox elements whose commitment to the idea of a Jewish state, or to broader Jewish unity, is far less robust than in the past. Orthodox courts have traditionally respected each other’s rulings, if not those of Conservative or Reform rabbis, especially about questions like one’s status as a Jew. In the last few years, however, the Israeli chief rabbinate has become increasingly intolerant of any rabbinic courts, especially those outside of Israel, that it suspects of not adhering to its own particular standards. More troubling is the courts’ decision to overturn conversions undertaken by Rabbi Chaim Druckman, a Zionist, who headed the conversion authority for years. The result: full-fledged Orthodox converts are discovering, even decades later, that their Jewish status is suddenly in question. This is not how conversion is supposed to work.

Monday, in a second ruling, the Supreme Court gave the chief rabbinic court 90 days to justify its decision regarding the Druckman conversions. It is a major step towards forcing the rabbinic courts to act more equitably. If they fail to fall in line, they will suddenly be acting outside of Israeli law, and there will be increasing public pressure to reconsider the whole idea of giving the rabbis government backing in determining personal status issues. In a country where the majority of the population does not live according to traditional halacha, the prospect of disestablishing rabbinic Judaism in Israeli democracy is always on people’s minds. A major religious battle in Israel may be around the corner.

Rick, your analysis is acute and on the mark. Most remarkable are the implications for Israeli politics, and the degree of sea change in the internal political debate about the peace process over the last decade and a half. Not too long ago, Israelis were divided over the question of keeping land and building settlements, on the one hand, versus giving up territory in exchange for peace, on the other.

Today, Israeli policy is backed by a left-to-right coalition (Kadima excluded, but their objections tend to be incoherent), which reflects a remarkable Israeli consensus that goes something like this: We’ve tried everything, both settlements and a peace process, and nothing’s worked. So let’s focus on our own security, and on the economic mess we’re all in. From left to right, the feeling seems to be that Israelis have given up on permanent occupation, but that talking about a Palestinian state seems to make actually building a viable one less and less possible.

Netanyahu’s bottom-up approach is remarkably similar to that of Natan Sharansky, who has been pushing for it not only in the Israeli context, but also for Iraq and Lebanon (in which he took marked issue with the Bush Administration). It is bound to be unpopular with the Europeans and the pro-process Left, not only because it takes much longer to implement, but also because it’s coming from perceived pro-Bushies like Bibi and Sharansky. But it has a lot of traction with an Israeli public that is thoroughly sick of quick fixes. And it is has shown early signs of working, at least on the security side, in Jenin and Hebron.

It is both the greatest weakness and the greatest strength of the French that they are capable of holding a nuanced view of just about anything. So we should not be particularly troubled by the Jerusalem Post’s headline today about a new survey of French public opinion regarding the Middle East: “France Views on Israel are Nuanced.” While most Israelis think the French public is overwhelmingly anti-Israel, the truth is more, well, nuanced. For example, while twice as many French support the Palestinian side of the conflict rather than the Israeli side (27% versus 14%), a far larger portion (32%) support neither side. And while 77% opposed Israel’s invasion of Gaza in January, more French think Hamas is to blame for the humanitarian crisis than Israel. Fully 83% say they are in favor of a two-state solution, and yet the same portion says that such a solution is “not realistic right now.”
Perhaps the most interesting figures concern how the French order the priorities of action in the Middle East. When asked what single issue needed to be solved most urgently, they answered, in order of priority: (i) Iran’s arming and funding terrorists, (ii) Palestinian rocket fire into Israel, (iii) Israel’s military strikes in Gaza, (iv) the Arabs’ refusal to recognize Israel, and (v) the Palestinians’ teaching of hate in their schools.

Given everything else going on in Europe this year, a lack of clarity may be the best one can hope for.

My tendency to disagree with Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy has become a natural reflex, an almost-biological urge. Yet this time he is dead-on. Levy writes of a new anti-Semitism, flowering in North Tel-Aviv, aimed at ultra-Orthodox Jews who have moved into the neighborhood.

Anti-Semitism is raising its head. Not in Warsaw, Munich or Paris, and there’s no need for the Anti-Defamation League to wave the evidence around. It’s right here, in our own home, in verdant Ramat Aviv, the most enlightened suburb of Tel Aviv, our most enlightened city. The entry of a handful of ultra-Orthodox Jews to this lovely, modest and tranquil neighborhood has provoked an unlovely wave of racism, tearing the thin veil of openness and liberality from this seemingly left-wing community. If anyone were to behave this way toward Israeli Arabs, the residents might raise a hue and cry, but when it comes to Haredim the gloves are off because attacking the “blacks” is the fashion.

Natan Sharansky has promoted what he calls the “3D” test for anti-Semitism: De-legitimization, Demonization, Double-Standards. Sharansky of course is talking about how to tell legitimate criticism of Israel from the bigotry spreading across Europe. Yet the same test can be applied to internal, Jewish anti-Semitism. Dare I deploy the cliche of “baseless hatred” from the Talmud? We know how that ended up…

One should not expect new, creative ideas about the middle east to appear in a New York Times editorial. So when yesterday’s paper pushed an “Agenda for Mr. Netanyahu,” its perfect lockstep with the Obama Administration didn’t surprise too much. What did surprise, however, was its unique combination of cynicism and chutzpah. Bibi being Bibi, the Times could not take seriously any of his recent comments in favor of negotiations with the Palestinians, dismissing them as “unconvincing and insufficient.” As though Obama has by contrast produced a peace plan that is in any way convincing or sufficient. But what really gets the Times’ goat is that Netanyahu apparently “hinted” that Israel’s willingness to concede on the Palestinian side might depend on America’s successfully thwarting Iran’s nuclear program.

Stopping Iran’s nuclear program is crucial… Yes, the clock is ticking as Tehran’s capability improves. But Mr. Netanyahu should not artificially constrain Mr. Obama’s initiative. And Mr. Obama must discourage any move by Mr. Netanyahu to lead Israel, or push the United States, into unnecessary military action.

The Times has things backwards, in more ways than one. If Netanyahu did indeed hint at such a thing, it was in response to members of the Obama administration explicitly making the reverse linkage: that by failing to make progress on the Palestinian side, Israel was making it harder to stop Iran. Now, neither linkage makes a huge amount of sense, but while the American position is simply a non sequitur, at least one can understand where the Israelis are coming from: If you want us to feel comfortable taking risks with the lives of our people, they are saying, it will be easier to do so once you’ve eliminated another huge existential threat over our heads.

The Times is also appalled by Netanyahu’s backtracking from the two-state solution. As if to support its case, it is quick to point out that “On Monday, the 15-member United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a statement endorsing the two-state solution.” Yet the authors seem to forget that Israel is one of the two states in question; and that its opinion — especially that of its democratically elected government — is more important than that of the UNSC. The Times is full of people who are aware that Israelis really do not enjoy endless warfare: Perhaps if Israel is today reluctant to take further steps down the Oslo road, it is because all the steps so far have resulted in failure and bloodshed?

But there is more than just the past that stands in the way of peace today, and that renders the “two-state solution” to be little more than a slogan. The Palestinians themselves are no longer a single entity, with which one can negotiate anything. We’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating. The regime in the West Bank is merely dedicated to supporting terror operations and a full-fledged “right of return” that would destroy Israel demographically; whereas the regime in Gaza is actually not interested in the two-state solution at all, at best offering prolonged cease-fires on the path to destroying Israel militarily. Hamas took over Gaza by force of arms, and it seems clear that the biggest thing keeping the two factions from all-out war against each other is the thin strip of land that divides them — that is, Israel. Maybe enough arms can be twisted to create a joint PA-Hamas regime; but what kind of peace could it make?

Perhaps the most curious element of the editorial, however, is the tone, of which the above passage is just one example. The amount of influence the Times seems to think Netanyahu has over Obama is astonishing. It’s almost as though they view the Obama administration as not having an opinion of its own, but rather as an internationally lifeless, infinitely malleable political creature, and the only question is who can exert more pressure on it: the Israeli government or the New York Times.

Do they know something we don’t?