[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Originally posted by Dan Halberstein:
So nobody in the foreseeable future, must in some way consider the issue of the hearts and minds of Israelis. Rather, Israelis are responsible to win the hearts and minds of various populations, from which spring these three (and innumerable other) organizations dedicated to her destruction.

Well I wouldn't say "responsible" so much as it being a matter of enlightened self-interest. If Israel is happy with the situation as it stands, there's no responsibility or need to do anything. However, I don't think that's the case.

As for winning the hearts and minds of Israelis, I think there are any number of Palestinians and Lebanese actively trying to do that, out of enlightened self-interest if nothing else. But that wasn't the question you posited, Dan: You wanted to know if there could ever be peace and happiness with any of the "destroy Israel" factions, which is a question that posits both sides being around long enough to actually make peace. If either side "destroys" the other--and I put that word in scare quotes because it ranges from the removal of a political party and redrawing of borders to salted-earth genocide--then the question of making peace becomes rather moot.

[Dan Halberstein]

Daniel,

A very well reasoned post (and not just because - in large part - you agree with me.) Where we stand now, I could see the U.S. getting Assad under some semblance of "control," through a lot of carrot and not much stick. Iran is another story; until such time as the world moves forward from a petroleum-based economy -- or accepts shortages -- Iran will be in a position to wreak whatever havoc it chooses, with the West's thirst for oil paying for it. The current drive toward UN sanctions can only be successful at the cost of $4-$5 a gallon gas, and the equivalent impact on heating and industrial feuls. The only question is whether we, Europe, and the Far East will pay that, in exchange for foreign policy goals designed to secure access to oil in the first case (i.e., a stable middle east.) It is fairly predictable, at any rate, that China will be happy to be the sole recipient of Iran's oil wealth, even if sanctions do come into play.

"Flipping" Syria -- presumably through an aid influx coupled with contingency demands, and of course threats a-go-go -- would at least establish a choke point for transit of arms to Lebanon.

The money, however, continues to flow, arms embargo or no arms embargo. Therefore, if we do not want Hezbollah's free rein in Lebanon to continue, we have to simultaneously out-rebuild the Iranians, and somehow prevail on the Lebanese to take the de-governmentalization of Hezbollah seriously. Every clinic, school, and laundromat run by Hezbollah is a challenge to Lebanese sovereignty; and every one closed, rather than nationalized and if possible improved, is an invitation to wax nostalgic about those good ol Hezbollah days.

The project of arms interdiction would also take some doing, presumeably on the part of Lebanon's newly potent armed forces, and the thus-far nonexistent international presence. Assuming these become robust enough to control the country's borders, there may be a beginning to an end outlined here. But it involves many, many ifs -- the biggest one, in my book, being the "flipping" of Assad, whose personal idea of Israel, is about on a par with that of his opposite number in Iran.

I do not think the world is serious yet about Lebanon, and from what I've seen, it looks likely we're just at "halftime." But maybe not.

Thanks for food for thought,

Dan

[Robert J. Clawson]

Regarding the "accepted norm," it's good to keep in mind that the largest business in the world is the arms business.

(Second is drugs, third, oil.)

A man who made his money in arms contributed the Nobel Prize for Peace. Ironies abound.

Here's a piece a Jewish friend sent along.

*******

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000, or 20% of the world population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1988 - Najib Mahfooz.

World Peace:
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1994 - Yasser Arafat (can you believe this one?)

Physics:
1990 - Elias James Corey
1999 - Ahmed Zewail

Medicine:
1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
1998 - Ferid Mourad

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000 or about 002% of the world population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Literature:
>>>>>>> 1910 - Paul Heyse
>>>>>>> 1927 - Henri Bergson
>>>>>>> 1958 - Boris Pasternak
>>>>>>> 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
>>>>>>> 1966 - Nelly Sachs
>>>>>>> 1976 - Saul Bellow
>>>>>>> 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
>>>>>>> 1981 - Elias Canetti
>>>>>>> 1987 - Joseph Brodsky
>>>>>>> 1991 - Nadine Gordimer
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> World Peace:
>>>>>>> 1911 - Alfred Fried
>>>>>>> 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
>>>>>>> 1968 - Rene Cassin
>>>>>>> 1973 - Henry Kissinger
>>>>>>> 1978 - Menachem Begin
>>>>>>> 1986 - Elie Wiesel
>>>>>>> 1994 - Shimon Peres
>>>>>>> 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Physics:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> 1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
>>>>>>> 1906 - Henri Moissan
>>>>>>> 1910 - Otto Wallach
>>>>>>> 1915 - Richard Willstaetter
>>>>>>> 1918 - Fritz Haber
>>>>>>> 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
>>>>>>> 1961 - Melvin Calvin
>>>>>>> 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
>>>>>>> 1972 - William Howard Stein
>>>>>>> 1977 - Ilya Prigogine
>>>>>>> 1979 - Herbert Charle s Brown
>>>>>>> 1980 - Paul Berg
>>>>>>> 1980 - Walter Gilbert
>>>>>>> 1981 - Roald Hoffmann
>>>>>>> 1982 - Aaron Klug
>>>>>>> 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
>>>>>>> 1985 - Jerome Karle
>>>>>>> 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
>>>>>>> 1988 - Robert Huber
>>>>>>> 1989 - Sidney Altman
>>>>>>> 1992 - Rudolph Marcus
>>>>>>> 2000 - Alan J. Heeger
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Economics:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> 1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
>>>>>>> 1971 - Simon Kuznets
>>>>>>> 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
>>>>>>> 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
>>>>>>> 1976 - Milton Friedman
>>>>>>> 1978 - Herbert A. Simon
>>>>>>> 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
>>>>>>> 1985 - Franco Modigliani
>>>>>>> 1987 - Robert M. Solow
>>>>>>> 1990 - Harry Markowitz
>>>>>>> 1990 - Merton Miller
>>>>>>> 1992 - Gary Becker
>>>>>>> 1993 - Robert Fogel
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Medicine:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> 1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
>>>>>>> 1908 - Paul Erlich
>>>>>>> 1914 - Robert Barany
>>>>>>> 1922 - Otto Meyerhof
>>>>>>> 1930 - Karl Landsteiner
>>>>>>> 1931 - Otto Warburg
>>>>>>> 1936 - Otto Loewi
>>>>>>> 1944 - Joseph Erlanger
>>>>>>> 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
>>>>>>> 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
>>>>>>> 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
>>>>>>> 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
>>>>>>> 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
>>>>>>> 1953 - Hans Krebs
>>>>>>> 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
>>>>>>> 1958 - Joshua Lederberg
>>>>>>> 1959 - Arthur Kornberg
>>>>>>> 1964 - Konrad Bloch
>>>>>>> 1965 - Francois Jacob
>>>>>>> 1965 - Andre Lwoff
>>>>>>> 1967 - George Wald
>>>>>>> 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
>>>>>>> 1969 - Salvador Luria
>>>>>>> 1970 - Julius Axelrod 1
>>>>>>> 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
>>>>>>> 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
>>>>>>> 1975 - Howard Martin Temin
>>>>>>> 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
>>>>>>> 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow
>>>>>>> 1978 - Daniel Nathans
>>>>>>> 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
>>>>>>> 1984 - Cesar Milstein
>>>>>>> 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
>>>>>>> 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
>>>>>>> 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
>>>>>>> 1988 - Gertrude Elion
>>>>>>> 1989 - Harold Varmus 1
>>>>>>> 1991 - Erwin Neher
>>>>>>> 1991 - Bert Sakmann
>>>>>>> 1993 - Richard J. Roberts
>>>>>>> 1993 - Phillip Sharp
>>>>>>> 1994 - Alfred Gilman
>>>>>>> 1995 - Edward B. Lewis
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Solid Physics:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
>>>>>>> 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
>>>>>>> 1921 - Albert Einstein
>>>>>>> 1922 - Niels Bohr
>>>>>>> 1925 - James Franck
>>>>>>> 1925 - Gustav Hertz
>>>>>>> 1943 - Gustav Stern
>>>>>>> 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
>>>>>>> 1952 - Felix Bloch
>>>>>>> 1954 - Max Born
>>>>>>> 1958 - Igor Tamm
>>>>>>> 1959 - Emilio Segre
>>>>>>> 1960 - Donald A. Glaser
>>>>>>> 1961 - Robert Hofstadter
>>>>>>> 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
>>>>>>> 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
>>>>>>> 1965 - Julian Schwinger
>>>>>>> 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
>>>>>>> 1971 - Dennis Gabor
>>>>>>> 1973 - Brian David Josephson
>>>>>>> 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
>>>>>>> 1976 - Burton Richter
>>>>>>> 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
>>>>>>> 1978 - Peter L Kapitza
>>>>>>> 1979 - Stephen Weinberg
>>>>>>> 1979 - Sheldon Glashow
>>>>>>> 1988 - Leon Lederman
>>>>>>> 1988 - Melvin Schwartz
>>>>>>> 1988 - Jack Steinberger
>>>>>>> 1990 - Jerome Friedman
>>>>>>> 1995 - Martin Perl

The Israelis are not demonstrating with their dead in the streets, yelling and chanting and asking for revenge. The Israelis are not brainwashing their children in military training camps, teaching
them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths. They don't highjack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, they don't traffic in slaves, nor have their leaders called for Jihad and death to the "Infidels." Israel doesn't have the economic strength of the Petroleum Cartel, nor the presumption to force the world's media to see "their side" of the question.

Perhaps if the world's Muslims could invest more in education and less in blaming others for all their problems, we could all live in a better world.

******

That was forwarded to me by Ted Casher, who teaches music to kids.

Bob

[Ethan Anderson]

Um, Bob, correlation isn't causality, and stereotyping entire populations is embarrassingly past its sell-by date. Anti-Muslim sentiments aren't any prettier than Anti-Jewish ones.

[Janet Kenny]

Cultural accident of birth has a great deal to do with educational opportunities and recognition. Many of the Jewish Nobel prize-winners were residents in Europe, America or Australia--the fortunate countries.

I find this way of measuring human worth to be about as useful as the IQ test when applied to cultures outside the test's culture of origin.

To generalise about any religious group is pretty unpleasant (although I often think a plague on all their houses.)

I dissociate myself absolutely from fundamentalist Christian zealots who support war (mass-murder) and who blow up buildings in the name of their personal beliefs.

I can't hold Daniel Barenboim responsible for an Israeli citizen who shoots up mosques and generally despises the displaced people whose ancestral land they inhabit.

Nobody is without guilt in this idiotic frenzy and nobody should cast a stone.

I am ferociously against anybody who oppresses women, who blows up citizens, who bombs cities and villages and who thinks they have a license to punish. And if anybody thinks this applies solely to Muslims they haven't been paying attention. Patriarchy is not a myth. Islam is more in its grip than other religions, that I grant but may God save me from the whole blooming lot of them.

I am as scared as any of you.
Janet

[Alder Ellis]

I haven't been keeping up with this humungous thread, but something from the Jewish music teacher's statement quoted by Bob caught my attention. The music teacher was drawing a distinction between Israelis who do not engage in terrorist tactics and Muslims who do.

I don't know if it's been brought up yet, but the Jews in Palestine did engage in terrorist tactics against the British way back before Israel was established. The bombing of the King David Hotel was the most famous instance. I don't know enough about the history to opinionate re.: how effective the terrorism proved to be, & how much support it had from the whole Jewish population. In any case, a state of Israel was indeed established, so it can't have been utterly catastrophic.

Whenever I see categorical moral condemnations of Islamic terrorism from the Israeli point of view I always wonder how the condemning party would regard historical Jewish terrorism. Isn't terrorism a recourse for a militarily & politically disadvantaged party? Were not the Jews in Palestine disadvantaged, in relation to the British, way back then, in the same way that the Palestinian Muslims are in relation to the Israelis now? Can the Israelis remember when the shoe was on the other foot? Can they imaginatively sympathize with the situation of their enemy? A little bit goes a long way.

[Dan Halberstein]

Originally posted by AE:
I haven't been keeping up with this humungous thread, but something from the Jewish music teacher's statement quoted by Bob caught my attention. The music teacher was drawing a distinction between Israelis who do not engage in terrorist tactics and Muslims who do.

I don't know if it's been brought up yet, but the Jews in Palestine did engage in terrorist tactics against the British way back before Israel was established. The bombing of the King David Hotel was the most famous instance. I don't know enough about the history to opinionate re.: how effective the terrorism proved to be, & how much support it had from the whole Jewish population. In any case, a state of Israel was indeed established, so it can't have been utterly catastrophic.

Whenever I see categorical moral condemnations of Islamic terrorism from the Israeli point of view I always wonder how the condemning party would regard historical Jewish terrorism. Isn't terrorism a recourse for a militarily & politically disadvantaged party? Were not the Jews in Palestine disadvantaged, in relation to the British, way back then, in the same way that the Palestinian Muslims are in relation to the Israelis now? Can the Israelis remember when the shoe was on the other foot? Can they imaginatively sympathize with the situation of their enemy? A little bit goes a long way.

We've touched on it, AE. Irgun and Lehi were the most enthusiastic Jewish groups that used terrorism. Haganah, which became the core of the IDF, practiced restraint as a basic principal throughout its existence.

The similarity is, as you point out, that Jews also committed terrorist acts.

The difference is that, after the war of independence, Haganah disbanded Irgun, Lehi, and even Palmakh (the non-terrorist elite troops within Haganah.)

In one incident, IDF forces sank a ship of armaments destined for Irgun and Lehi forces, clearly risking civil war.

By contrast, Lebanon has never done the parallel in regard to Hezbollah (although we do like to think that they'd like to.) The Palestinian Authority refused to disarm and disband any of the terrorist organizations, inside or outside of the PLO umbrella. In fact, Fatah, the "moderate" secular nationalist alternative to Hamas, has its own suicide bombing wing, the Al Aqsa brigades.

I don't believe this information by itself gainsays your point about the brief period in which organized Jewish terrorists operated, but the hoped-for sympathy for terrorism would be confined to those who remember the 1948 war, and among those, a small number who were pretty much villified by their opposite numbers in Haganah/Palmakh.

He who remembers history is condemned to recite it ,

Dan

[Daniel Haar]

RJ,

I'm not sure what your post accomplishes besides highlighting your friend's racism.


Dan,

The Lebanese have barely been independent a year, and the Palestinians are still hoping. By the way, both the Irgun and the Stern Gang were integrated into the IDF. I suppose if Hamas is rolled into the PLO/PA, and Hezbollah into the Lebanese Armed Forces, you will be happy.

- Daniel

[This message has been edited by Daniel Haar (edited August 22, 2006).]

[Alder Ellis]

Dan,

You draw the parallel between Lebanon & pre-Israel Haganah. This seems, at best, weird. Lebanon is a fragment of Ottoman Syria cut off by some European mapmaker, an impossibility struggling towards national identity. What Lebanon has to deal with is drastically different than what Haganah had to deal with.

Furthermore...

"but the hoped-for sympathy for terrorism would be confined to those who remember the 1948 war, and among those, a small number who were pretty much villified by their opposite numbers in Haganah/Palmakh."

This, I don't believe. Anybody in a significant position who doesn't remember it has got to be wilfully forgetting it. And remembering it is not the same thing has having been oneself a terrorist, villified or not. It's just remembering.

Anyway, the quotation you cleverly twist is, of course, the relevant one: those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. But this raises the really big question: how does one profitably remember history? How do you remember things in a way that makes a difference in what you do? This, perhaps, is one basis for the definition of "wisdom." There seems to be a dearth of wisdom, a plethora of self-justifications, in political discourse, generally, nowadays. A lack of stature. Everybody seems zeroed in on their little interests, with no sense of context. All it takes is one person in a position of authority to rise above that level & speak "wisdom", & anything can happen. But let's not hold our breaths.

[Robert J. Clawson]

Originally posted by Seree Zohar:

"RJ

re:

'I think our current administration is just too incompetent to handle the complexity.'

while many may feel that to be true, I am not at all sure any administration could do a great deal better; the below
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008768

is only 13 short paragraphs in length but describes, with clarity, a mindset that is tough (understatement) to crack and entirely foregin to ours, making it all the more incomprehensible and difficult to work with."

Thanks, Seree, I read it.

The apocalyptic view is not exclusively the province of radical Iranians. It's held by many radical, right wing fundamentalists in our country. They make up a significant portion of the Republic Party base, and I'd not be surprised if Mr. Bush anticipates the second coming. (I have a friend who's called him the Antichrist since he decided to make war in the Middle East.)

I think there's a parallel between apocalyptic expectations and the expectations of the neocons when they discuss the benefits of "creative destruction" in the Middle East, you know, "the birth pangs of the New Middle East."

Here's the part of the article you cite that most disturbs me:

"In the long term, it would seem that the best, perhaps the only hope is to appeal to those Muslims, Iranians, Arabs and others who do not share these apocalyptic perceptions and aspirations, and feel as much threatened, indeed even more threatened, than we are."

Our administration WAS making that appeal, especially to the nations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, trying to get them (with some success) to assist in the discrediting and disarming of Hezbollah. Unfortunately, after the devastation that the Israeli response wrought, they backed off and showed sympathy for Lebanon and less suspicion and fear of Hezbollah.

As Kurt Vonnegut would say, "So it goes."

Bob



[This message has been edited by Robert J. Clawson (edited August 22, 2006).]