800 Words: The Origins of Shoah Bet Part 2

But it was the very perilousness of Israel’s situation that made Netanyahu’s attempts to create a securer Israel so extraordinary in its danger. There were many right-wing administrations before Netanyahu, some brutally so, but the Netanyahu administration was the first in Israel’s history to so covet an honored place among nations that he would attempt to take it by force.

Benyamin Netanyahu’s relationship to the West, and particularly to America, was Shakespearean in its tragic depth. He was a modern-day Saul whose premiership followed a long series of Davids and Solomons. Like his biblical antecedent, he was the king nobody wanted - a Nixonian figure, anointed by whatever god controls destiny as a leader of convenience, isolated upon his throne and beloved by nobody. If the ‘founding generation’ of Rabin, Peres, and Sharon inspired their followers with pre-1948 visions of what Israel could become, then Netanyahu, Prime Minister for nearly as long as those three leaders combined and the first and only Prime Minster born after the State’s founding, represented with eerie exactitude what Israel seemed to be. Netanyahu exemplified everything with which the modern Israeli was stereotyped - intransigent, overachieving, bellicose, temperamental, brilliant in precisely that low cunning sort of way that history falsely associates with Judaism from time immemorial, and symbiotic with turn-of-the-century America to the point that he seemed to control it like a puppet.

And yet the ironies of how he came to exemplify the modern Israel are stupendous. Netanyahu was descended from Israel's intellectual royalty. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was one of his era’s most eminent scholars of Jewish history and served as personal secretary to Ben-Gurion’s most eminent right-wing rival, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. His uncle, Elisha Netanyahu, was a famous mathematician and dean of Israel’s once-famed science institute - the Techniyon. His aunt, Shoshana Netanyahu, was an Israeli Supreme Court Justice, and his grandfather, Nathan Mielikowski (later Netanyahu), was a writer who moved in the earliest Zionist circles and was widely known as early Zionism’s greatest orator. As an older man living in Palestine, Mielikowski broke so definitively with mainstream Zionism that he personally defended the two men accused of assassinating the eminent left-wing Zionist leader, Chaim Arlozoroff.

Still more ironic is that Netanyahu was perhaps more American than he was Israeli. Until he turned forty, a full half his life was spent in the United States. So privileged was Netanyahu’s upbringing that he lived the majority of his formative years not in scrappy early Israel but in then-prosperous Philadelphia, where his father was a tenured professor. After five years of army service, he spent the majority of his twenties as an architecture student and economist in Boston, and spent the majority of his thirties as a high-ranking ambassador - first in DC as Israel’s Deputy Ambassador to the United States, and then in New York as Ambassador to the United Nations. From the beginning of his career, Netanyahu was fast-tracked because of his Americanness during a period when Israel began to look to America as its sole ally of consequence. Like the far more diplomatically suited Abba Eban before him, Netanyahu spoke an English so beautifully eloquent that he easily out-orated most of his American allies in their mother tongue. In time he became, in so many ways, the right-wing leader turn-of-the-century Republicans desired for America. But only an Israeli intellectual could covet an honoured place among American conservatives at the moment when the American Conservative was the most hated person on the planet.

Whereas Yitzhak Rabin presonified a "Sabra" who seemed just as comfortable on a Kibbutz as he was with a rifle (even though he grew up in Tel Aviv and his knowledge of farming was purely by academic training), and Shimon Peres's elegant polish personified the 'Yekke' - one of the sophisticated German Jews of intellectual bent who were so important to giving Israel credibility in the world's eyes during its early years (even though he was actually from Polish peasant stock), and Ariel Sharon seemed like the ultimate 'Chayyal', the soldier who exemplified the fighting spirit that was so crucial to Israel's establishment (even though he grew more obese with every promotion), Netanyahu seemed to have nothing of Israel's pioneer spirit about him. To Israelis, he exemplified the 'Yordim,' Israelis who left Israel in the 50's and 60's and were heavily looked down upon because they left Israel at its time of greatest need. But once the Yordim and their children began to return, richer and with extremely valuable work experience, the wisdom from the outside world which they accumulated made them re-embraced. To the world, Netanyahu was Israel, but to Israel, Netanyahu was the world - the wider world they longed to see and take their place among as an equal member. 

But to Netanyahu himself, he was Israel's conscience - all that stood between Israel and the second Holocaust he unwittingly helped to facilitate. The more he saw of the wider world, the more afraid he became of it, and the more determined he became to protect Israelis who slept soundly in their beds, not knowing the horrors which could await them without his protection. At the heart of Netanyahu's worldview was his father's. His father lived to the ripe old age of 102, and in his many years, pronounced so many apocalypses that some of them had to come true. At Benzion's 100th birthday celebration, the son recalled his father uncanny prescience about antisemitic elements - having predicted the European Holocaust in 1937, the attack by Islamic fundamentalists upon the World Trade Center in the early 1990's, and towards the end of his life, the nuclear attack in Israel arranged by the Iranian government.   

In an era that saw the height of the Bush family, Osama bin-Laden, Vladimir Putin, Kim-Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Orban, Tayyip Erdogan, and the toppling of Qaddafi and Mubarak, there was not a single world leader who inspired the vitriol heaped upon Netanyahu. The more hated he became by the wider world, the more determined he became to isolate Israel from her remaining allies. The more Israel’s Arab neighbors grew militant, the more his heart was hardened to match them militance for militance. The greater the gulf between the world’s criticism of Israel and its excusal of her neighbors’ intransigence, the more determined Netanyahu became to show his contempt with actions that seemed designed to make his people all the more hated.

800 Words: The Origins of Shoah Bet - Part 1

Chapter XVIII

By 2015, the rational postwar liberal was not quite deceased, but he was very much a dying breed, and he could almost sympathize with the worldview of Prime Minister Netanyahu. For every moment from its founding to the unspeakable manners of its destruction, the State of Israel was an encircled, besieged state; never a refuge from Diaspora but an extraordinarily compromised part of it.

For the entirety of its existence, Israel was a state that strove mightily to be a democracy, yet with every year it seemed to fall farther short of its goal. This Jewish country which never contained more than a few million Jews was encircled upon every side by three-hundred million Sunni and and Shia Muslims, and every poll indicated that the vast majority of their neighbors, at times nearly a unanimous majority, viewed Israel as an enemy combatant whose very existence should be extinguished at the nearest possible opportunity by any and all means.

Like every country, Israel was enabled to exist because of an unspeakably terrible original sin, and its original sin was to forcibly and violently relocate more than half a million native Arabs into still tinier corners of its tiny territory. Jeffrey Goldberg, a famous journalist of the time, posited the analogy that twentieth century Europe of the was a burning building out of which the Jews had to jump lest they be destroyed, and they fell onto an innocent bystander on the street - the Palestinians. It was a horrific act born of the most extreme desperation, enabled by more prosperous Arabs all too willing to allow violence upon their impoverished brethren for their own benefit, perpetrated by Israelis mostly with regret, sustained and consented to by most Israelis with a fervent hope for its eventual end. But colonization born of desperation is still colonization. Israelis grew ever more comfortable with this arrangement with each passing generation, and as Israel grew into one of the most reliably prosperous countries for business in the entire world, she saw no reason to compromise her prosperity for a people who never passed up an opportunity to pass up an opportunity. If generations of Arab despots in every Arab country were categorically unwilling to embrace greater political freedom for their Arab citizens, why should Israel embrace greater freedoms for her own? Had any neighboring state been a functional democracy for any period, they could have absorbed a Palestinian population as hungry for opportunity as anyone in the world had ever been.

At the twenty-first century’s commencement, nearly half the world’s countries suffered from authoritarian rule, and many more had authoritarian leanings that threatened their democracies at their very foundations. But not a single one of these countries earned more than a fraction of the international approbation continually heaped upon Israel - a state that always imagined herself democratic to the marrow. Israel’s actions vacillated between extreme principle and extreme opportunism, its leaders were everything from lions of liberalism to war criminals, yet criticism and censure of her remained at the highest possible level for the entirety of her lifespan.

The original Zionist dream was built upon sand both literally and figuratively. It is a fool’s errand to create a parochial state that is absolutely committed to the primacy of one religion over others, yet also to the most liberal values of secular democracy. But the doomed attempt to fuse these two concepts was the only way in which millions of Jewish lives would ever be saved, for a time at least. The tension between Israel’s religious dictates and secular aims was the tension which enabled the unprecedented worldwide prosperity of the Jewish people. No longer were Jews a people without a land, and after two thousand years, there was finally a dear price to pay for persecuting Jews.

At the same time that Israel was a triumph for Jews, it was a triumph, perhaps the ultimate triumph, of liberal principles. In nearly every conceivable sense, Israel was the vital center of worldwide discourse - geographically positioned at the absolute cross section between Asia, Europe, and Africa; politically positioned at the exact center between secular values and religious, legally positioned at the exact place between a liberal democracy and an authoritarian dictatorship; economically positioned between capitalism and socialism, and historically having a strong claim at being both the most obviously colonized and most obviously colonialist people on Earth. Upon every issue which the world debates, modern Israel was the ultimate experiment to see if the modern world, with all its contradictions, could long endure. Israel, alleged to be an exclusionist society for every day of its existence, was in its way the most pluralistic country in the world.

Absolutists of nearly all stripes - Islamists, pan-Arabists, Christianists, Libertarians, Marxists, Socialists, Libertarian Socialists, Libertarian Communists, Anarchists - decried Israel for its many sins with a viciousness it reserved only for Zionism as though Zionism was a more totalitarian ideology than any of theirs. Most of them claimed that their motive was human rights, but in fact, their enemy was the permissive modernity that allowed a state as contradictory as Israel to exist. Such worldviews cannot allow for accommodations to pragmatism, and therefore the Jewish state always struck a terrible wrench into their absolutist worldviews. Zionism was always a practical compromise to reality, an ideology as corrupt as any other, allowed to govern a country only because the world is too imperfect to allow any other way to maintain the Jewish people’s security. And for a time, Zionism did ensure that the Jewish people remained fundamentally safe from persecution.

Because of its many contradictions, Zionism was a venture destined to fail from its inception. But so long as it was permitted to exist, the modern world, with all its permissiveness, its imperfect liberties and equalities, knew that it could survive and fight another day to better itself. Jews have long been the petri dish by which the world could gauge its health. A society that allows this consistently overachieving people to flourish is a healthy one, a society that segregates its Jews is an underachieving society, and a society that kills Jews is killing itself. When a society mistreats its Jews, it is not long before every other underclass is still more mistreated. Judaism, a portable religion grounded not in faith and authority, but upon book learning and debate, has always been the yeast by which all the societies which make space for them are allowed prosperity far greater than they would ever have had without them.

800 Words: Park Heights Ave vs. North Ave Part III

V.

In case you don’t or can’t read my facebook page (or have blocked it), I’ve been discussing this war quite a bit lately on this most vapid and life-wasting of all websites. After the past two weeks, the NSA will now be fully informed of the extent of my knowledge (or more likely, ignorance) on this topic, and my surfeit of skill in the once lost art of rhetorical pugilism which the internet now revives.

I usually socialize with people who are emphatically not practicing Jews nor hold the State of Israel’s existence as one of their moral imperatives. Early on in my life, I realized that somewhere within me dwelled an anti-authority streak that made me very bad fit for religious institutions. But over time, I realize that it made me just about as bad a fit for anti-religious institutions as well. In my social life, I’ve heard a lot of disturbingly anti-Israel sentiment over time which would straighten out the curling beard of many a Rabbi. Frankly, neither side seems much deserving of respect, but were the people I associate with online largely pro-Israel militants rather than anti-Israel ones, I would gauge my delightful online trolling to upsetting their prejudices rather than the prejudices of the people I generally associate with.

What amazes me most about this foolish ‘adventure’ in persuasion is that every new posting seems to bring me a new ‘opponent’ with a new objection and a new way to contradict facts which I see as extremely basic to an understanding of an issue I’ve felt compelled to think about since I’ve been able to think. Who knows? Maybe some of their points, maybe all of them, are right. I wouldn’t bet the house on it, but it’s entirely possible that I’ve tacked my ability to feel proud of myself onto moral positions that I’ll be ashamed of myself for holding in twenty years - just as I once held certain beliefs I’m now ashamed I held. But I wonder, do they ever entertain such doubts? Do doubts ever gnaw at the assumed correctness of their beliefs? Have they ever changed them? Have they changed them more than once? Or do they simply know that they’re right and I’m wrong?

Most of their objections don’t bother me much. I think they’re wrong and misinformed, perhaps their beliefs are even destructive and noxious, but I know myself well enough to know that there is far too much about me that is noxious to hold one noxious belief against any of them. I think that 'halflings' like me who are at least partially in ‘their world’ have to stand up to them and tell them that what they believe is horrible. It's better that people I like hear it from me than grandchildren who would one day ask them how they could ever believe such evil things. Of course, it might be my grandchildren (if I ever have any) who ask such questions, but clearly, I’ve made my bed on the idea it will be someone else's grandkids.

But there was one objectant whose exchange genuinely bothered me very much and genuinely depressed me for a few days afterward. This is a person I’d come, perhaps falsely or at least prematurely, to regard as a good friend.

In the last year, I’d come to know her through music - we’d played string instruments in various chamber groups together. She was a midwife or a ‘doula’, and always on call for potential births, but it never really seemed to get in the way of rehearsal. She was a great musician, a much better classical musician than I and impeccably credentialed of course. She went to one of the premiere arts high schools in the country, and when she got a performance injury transferred from music school to one of the greatest universities in the world. She was clearly more than smart and articulate enough for such a background, and we talked and joked at a very ‘high’ level.

I don’t think I kid myself in thinking we got to know each other rather well over that time - conversing after rehearsals and such, which sometimes lasted longer than the rehearsals themselves. Occasionally the post-rehearsal became dinner and drinks. In that time I discovered that she, like me, was not only Jewish but the granddaughter of ‘survivors.’ Clearly, the paths we’d taken were very different. I'm an ersatz-member of my grandparents' generation, whereas she's lives in a hippie/hipster group house. But we clearly bonded over the similarities just as well, and it seemed like we both understood how comically ill-fit we were for the images we presented of ourselves. She was clearly as organized and hyper-competent at life's requirements as I am incompetent and bumbling. But regardless of such details, I felt that I'd stumbled on a friendship that was truly unique in my life - or anyone's; someone with whom you disagree totally but with whom you have a complete understanding and sympathy.

And yes, I don’t doubt it helped enormously that she looked like a young Claudia Cardinale, and of course I was quite attracted to her, as I’m sure every guy is who isn’t narrow-minded enough to be automatically put off by the hippie lifestyle. But even so, I’d like to think that I’m the kind of guy for whom friendship with women isn’t just a waystation. I never tried particularly hard to pursue anything more than friendship - not because I did not desperately want to, but partially because the very idea of my 5’4 220 lbs self pursuing a girl for whom so many guys were also clearly hoping for was laughable, but also because I simply couldn’t get past the choices she’d made. I was a very little in love, but I was far more jealous. God knows how my life would have been different had I her advantages. All that talent, all that privilege, all that intelligence, all that education, all that hyper-competence, and somehow it’s used in the service of dangerous pseudoscience and false notions of truth - and what’s worst about it is that she’s so smart and charismatic that people would believe her. I’d figured that she knew what I thought of her profession and beliefs, and I knew what she’d thought of mine, and on that premise we’d get along just fine.

Of course, when it came to Israel, we parted ways. We’d talked about it in the past, very politely, and I figured we’d said to one another anything that need be said. I expected online pushback from others, but not from her. That one genuinely hurt. When most other people criticize me or object to what I think, it slides off. In many cases, I can wear it like a badge of honor. But getting a fingerwagging pushback from her felt both a bit like a betrayal and made me wonder if perhaps I truly collaborate as much with evil as some people no doubt think I do - and as I wonder myself if I do in unguarded moments (and I obviously have many). Given that her response felt meant to be personal, I responded personally, and rather than use her name I called her by the name of her ultra-privileged university. As always, I amuse myself…

I was a bit relieved that she never responded back, because the tone was already pretty ugly. But the fact that such an altercation (even an online one) happened at all between me and her made me very sad. It’s just another piece of evidence that understanding between people who have real differences truly isn’t possible.

It frankly occupied more headspace than it should have for a few days. I was genuinely sad last week, the delight of picking fights simply wasn’t there anymore… and I grew rather exhausted by the constant barrage of anti-Israel attacks I saw that consistently seemed to cross the line into something much darker, which thereby began this series of posts.

But something amazing happened on Sunday afternoon which helped me to regain my equilibrium almost completely. She snubbed me. Not just an accidental, ‘sorry, I didn’t notice you,’ kind of excusable snub we all give to a person we don’t want to see that moment but apologize to later. It was one of those theatrical ‘walk six inches from you in a very crowded space while you loudly say hello yet still not acknowledge you’ kind of snubs. I figured that after I said hi, we could make fun of each other a little bit and move on as all people must. Instead, she told me, in the most indirectly direct manner imaginable, that the friendship was over. It was absolutely glorious.  

I frankly can’t swear on a bible to the fact that I was ignored, in which case I will have an enormous amount of explaining to do for this blogpost… and yet I would venture a 99.9% guess that that is exactly what happened. And yet, after getting snubbed, my mood improved enormously. It alleviated me of feeling that I caused the rupture of something truly unique in my life. Something as banal as a friendship rupture is far easier to deal with than knowing that you disappointed a person in your life who never disappointed you. I could return to my impregnably arrogant self, able to keep a lid on my doubts until the next battle was over.

(postscript: of course, a few days later, I bumped into said girl and she acted as though nothing happened and claimed no memory of the event. It's of course, entirely plausible. And I should have long since taken this post down. And yet, somehow, I haven't. Maybe I just have that much of a self-destructive urge. But what I wrote is what I wrote, and for once in my life, I'd like to feel the need no longer to take down potentially awkward writing about the emotional malestrom that is Evan Tucker every time a 'girl' is involved.)

VI.

In the 1 in a million odds case that anybody cares enough to need actual clarification about my point of view, here it is:

1. If you believe that a Jewish state should cease to exist to give way to a binational state in which Arabs and Jews coexist - your belief is antisemitic and in all likelihood going to get thousands of Jews killed, if not more.

2. If you believe that Israel has a god-given right to borders greater than what the obvious political realities of the moment will ever allow, your belief is fascist like any other fascism, only different in promoting Jews rather than scapegoating them.

3. If you believe that Israel should refrain from measures that will prevent its citizens from being safe, you are delusional, and might as well believe antisemitic things because the end result is the same.

4. If you believe that Israel should take any and all means to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb, you're delusional, and going to get us all killed.

5. If you believe that Israel's use of force is absurdly disproportionate, if you believe that the use of violence countermeasures will only cause more death and not prevent it. You're too naive to be reasoned with.

6. If you believe that Isreal's #1 priority should be anything other than a continual effort to find a peaceful, two state, resolution to the conflict, if you believe that Israel must occupy Palestine indefinitely under which Palestinians continue to live as second-class citizens, you are no better than all the oppressive goyim under which Jews lived for 2,000 years.

7. If you conveniently decided only to care about human rights in the Middle East during the last few days, and joined the bandwagon only when the wagon was facing Jews; if the outrage you feel towards Israel is even a sliver larger the outrage you felt when thousands of protesters were killed and maimed in Turkey, Egypt and Libya, when more than ten thousand were killed in the South Sudanese Civil War, when 1800 Palestinians were starved and killed by Bashar al-Assad in Syria, when 10,000 Iraqis were killed by terrorists, then yes, your belief is the absolute definition of an antisemitic one. I can live with it if you can. I know that there's enough noxious about me that I would never divorce friends over one noxious belief. But you ought to know what the your anger is coming from.

800 Words: Park Heights Ave. vs. North Ave. Part 2

“The permanent misfits are those who because of a lack of talent or some irreparable defect in body or mind cannot do the one thing for which their whole being craves. No achievement, however spectacular, in other fields can give them a sense of fulfillment. Whatever they undertake becomes a passionate pursuit; but they never arrive, never pause. They demonstrate the fact that we can never have enough of that which we really do not want, and that we run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.

The permanent misfits can find salvation only in a complete separation from the self; and they usually find it by losing themselves in the compact collectivity of a mass movement. By renouncing individual will, judgment and ambition, and dedicating all their powers to the service of an eternal cause, they are at last lifted off the endless treadmill which can never lead them to fulfillment.

The most incurably frustrated--and, therefore, the most vehement--among the permanent misfits are those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work. Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worth while, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Eve the wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their unappeased hunger persists and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.”

Eric Hoffer - The True Believer

III.

And then there was Hyde…

I’ve written about the experience of The Hyde School endlessly on this blog and will no doubt write about it far more endlessly before long, so I’ll simply link to this particular blogpost and move on...

When I arrived at college, I was, for all intents, a full-on radical. On 9/12, three weeks after college began, I was dominating the classroom discussion to the rage of many peers about how the Bush administration would exploit yesterday’s tragedy for its own personal gain. As it turned out, I was absolutely right, and yet, something was very very wrong.

Without going into detail, the years of Hyde left me profoundly, psychotically depressed. If those last three years happened, then any other nightmare could come true - and there were times when they genuinely seemed to do so. I did my pathetic best to fit in among other students and carry on in circumstances which easily could have killed me, but I was anything but able to do so functionally, and it’s amazing that I got through college in one piece - because that first year-and-a-half was played by the seat of my pants. In my politlcally half-informed state (better, no doubt, than the quarter-informedness of many peers) I might have become a political radical as a way of reclaiming my identity, but it didn’t work - I didn’t believe in my own beliefs, and my mind was so far gone that it wasn’t even a good social outlet for me. I felt as irreparably broken as I ever have in my life, and as I ever hope to feel. In retrospect, I don’t think I believed I’d live to see the venerable age of thirty-two at which I now reside rather comfortably. And I surely didn’t think a fairly harmonious relationship with my family was possible. But here we are…

But what saved me was politics. Music, perhaps, drove me mad. But an interest in politics, an interest in certainties based on facts, gave me the secure ground on which I was able to rebuild myself. We all need certainties, and for some people, theological certainties are enough. But what good is faith when faith can so easily be demolished by informed argument?

And what is radical politics but a new kind of theological certainty? At its base, every kind of radicalism operates on a one-sentence explanation of the world - the rich don’t owe the poor anything, or the government owes its citizens everything, or governments around the world must be overthrown - and then suits the facts to fit its theory.

IV.

When you’re involved in the arts, the very act of being a normal, boring liberal makes you sound to most other artists like Mussolini. It’s a phenomenon I first noticed in college. I can’t deny that I have an artist’s temperament, but I differ from most artists in that I’ve spent my adult life regretting that. Most people in the arts get involved because they’re normal people who are scared to death of being boring. But I, who’ve had so many brushes with mental illness, long for nothing more than to be normal.

The problem with only associating with other artists is the same problem as when you only associate with people of your own job or creed or interests. You’re shielded completely from any reality that is not your own, and the myopia of your mind breeds like rats. If you’re sheltered within a cocoon of your own beliefs without having them challenged, your mind atrophies and starts to rot.

During 2005-2006, I lived in the Negev desert with a bunch of artists and hippies. I was certainly somewhat closer to the American Center in those years, a sort of Tony Blairite liberal hawk, and one of the only people on the entire program/artists’ colony that was unabashedly pro-Israel. I swore to them that there was an ocean of gulf between me and right-wing nuts, I gave them a battery of facts to try to prove it, but nobody believed me.

I was also one of the only people on the program who knew anything about Judaism. Unlike all those hippies who wanted to come to Israel to connect to Jewish roots their families never showed them, I went to Israel as a kind of rite of passage. My parents both regretted never living there, and they were willing to give me the money to live there rather than among the ‘goyim’ as I did during college. I’m sure they were slightly horrified that most of my friends weren’t Jewish, and were scared that Judaism was going to lose me as it loses half its practitioners in America. Perhaps, so they reasoned, I’d meet a Jewish girl over there and stay ‘within the fold’ for the rest of my life - with the added benefit that I might stay in Israel, and they’d be relieved of regularly dealing with me. I certainly fell in love while I was living there (with a girl much more right-wing than I was), but it was absolutely not to be.  

I left Israel dejected on all fronts - broken friendships, unrequited love, blocked as a composer (a block that never really lifted…), too depressed to hold a job, and having to move back in with my parents in Pikesville - the one town to which I swore I’d never return.

As a learning disabled, mentally slightly unhinged, eccentric, you don’t connect well with “normal” people - no matter how much you aspire to be like them. I knew I was smarter than 999 of 1000 kids I met growing up, and yet here I am, stuck in a job that’s barely a job while many of those Pikesville kids go on to pinnacles of achievement in America (more on that later…). Temperamentally, if I connect with anyone, it’s to the more bohemian types who believe that concepts like career and family are imaginary constructs which don’t really matter.

But they do matter, they matter very much. We are human beings, biologically constructed to keep ourselves occupied with ambition. Ambition gives us a reason to plow through the difficulties which we encounter every day, if we think of the source of ambition as just a distracting ‘construct’, what reason have we to get out of bed in the morning? Being a ‘bohemian’ artist type is not embracing a way of life, it’s a justification for not having one.

And yet, you ought to have enormous sympathy for people with this type of problem, of which, of course, I’m one. Because the temptation to fall for simple explanations and easy outs is especially strong. Rather than blame ourselves for failing to live up to life, it’s easier to blame life. And perhaps we should blame life, because life is goddamn hard. The problem is not that people blame life, but that they embrace quick-fix cures for life’s hardships that will only make life worse.

And yet I can’t deny my own hunger for those quick-fix cures has never slaked.  I somehow end up at Red Emma’s a couple times a week, and I invariably feel like Travis Bickle when he drives his Taxi through Times Square, longing for the very thing which disgusts him. I sometimes find myself driving through Upper Park Heights on Saturdays and see shul-goers walking around the neighborhoods. Both these people seem so at peace with their surroundings, not giving a shit what anybody outside their community thinks of them, shielding themselves from the world’s judgement. I wish I had the lack of self-consciousness to do the same, and even if this appearance is just a mirage, I envy them their mirage.

800 Words: Park Heights Ave. vs. North Ave. Part 1

I.

It’s very difficult to be pulled in two directions. Some people, perhaps most people, have a family with which they fit perfectly well - even if it’s a surrogate family. They say things knowing fully well that they’ll get validation for what they say, and interlopers to their world are easily banished, because no one has ears to hear the value in what they say.

But what about those of us who have no such luxury? What about those of us trying our best to fit as best we can within two worlds to which we only half-fit. We speak both their languages, though with a foreigner’s strain, and consequently have no easy pass into their clubs; not because we never wanted it badly enough, but because they never wanted us.

Every Israeli war is like a holiday ritual for me in which I’m purified through a trial by intellectual fire. I go about with my friends, who expect me as the token Jew to speak up for Israel, then go back to my family who expects me as the token liberal to speak up for Palestine, and both agreeing on nothing but that there’s something in me that is morally lacking. And both taking at least three hours to tell me so.

What can I do? Such is the unhappy life of the pluralistic liberal drowning in a sea of monist ideologues. One side inevitably gets around to calling you a fascist, the other gets around to calling you a communist. I’ve been forced to play these ‘bad-guy’ parts for so long that at this point I play it almost vengefully, deriving pleasure from puncturing their bubbles, because where else could a pluralist between two monist worlds derive such pleasure except by abusing both sides equally? I wouldn’t know how to play a different part, but what else can anyone do in such a situation? Even if gatherings get unpleasant, could you ever abandon your family just because you have some unpleasant disagreements? And wouldn’t you have to be grateful that your friends don’t? And would you ever feel justified in cursing your lot for being in this situation rather than being embroiled in a real war?

II.

Living the political arguments of my family was bad enough - you learned very early that you had to know exactly what you were talking about because you would be shown no mercy, even as an early adolescent you might be called an idiot by older family members or, still worse, a hypocrite. The idea that the personal is not political has never seemed to occur to the Tucker or Witow households. Every political stand you displayed was a potential indictment of your moral character. The fact that you supported higher taxes might be considered indicative of your problem holding a job. The fact that you opposed government-inflicted torture might be a sign that your parents might have spoiled you. The fact that you didn’t hold people with tattoos and unusual piercings up to contempt meant that you were personally responsible for society’s moral decay. Dad, though no saint in any of these behaviors, was considered the decadent liberal rebel of our family until I came along, and he had it bad enough. Though no saint himself in his conduct toward others, he’d tell me stories of how my otherwise saintly maternal grandfather would get so angry with the mere mention of liberals that my father had to talk him down by reassuring him that Richard Nixon was still president. As I’ve often recounted on this blog, he used to say that my mother’s family had pictures of President Nixon in every room. In his family, they had pictures of Nixon on the toilet paper.

I don’t think my dad’s parents ever thought very much about politics. Between Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Czar NIcholas, Marshall Pilsudski, the White Russians, and Kaiser Wilhelm, they lived politics far too much to think about it abstractly. They were business people accustomed to scrounging for a living (and sometimes, to live) in extremely adverse circumstances. Their obsession was money, which they equated with survival, and drove both their family and themselves insane with their obsessiveness over it. In his last years when my grandfather was gripped by dementia, he would routinely insist that my father drive him over to the bank to yell at one of the tellers, accusing the bank of stealing his money from his account. And yet in spite of his paranoia for losing money, my grandparents always voted Democrat. Like everybody on the outside of a club looking in, my father’s parents believed in a system that was rigged against them - probably rightly, in theirs as in every other case. They became liberal Democrats because the businessmen with much more money than they had were Republicans.

Politics, however, was the long-term obsession of my mother’s family. Like many Jewish neoconservative famlies, they began as communists and somewhere along the way made a Damascus conversion. My red-headed great-grandfather was apparently quite an intellectual, and such a committed socialist that he refused to accept a promotion at his factory to forman. Other parts of the family came to blows with one another over whether or not to embrace the Soviet Union and Stalin as the coming savior, and refused to speak to one another for decades. But my grandfather paid his own way through Hopkins, and after the war, he worked as an engineer for the Defense Department - no private company would hire a Jew. A few years later, he nearly ended up on McCarthy's blacklist. Somehow, a few years after that, he was as right-wing as Barry Goldwater, and never diverted from these new beliefs. He even passed on all his neo-con/libertarian genes to both his children. Like my other grandparents, he believed in everything against which the ‘club’ believed. He saw the waste of government bureaucracy, and as a result he wanted to destroy it. And who knows? Perhaps he was also right to want that. He loathed the hypocrisy of liberal Jews who all the made money never available to them in the old country, and nevertheless still preached about the evils of the capitalist system.

800 Words: Who is Mohamed Morsi?

In August of this year, a huge deal was made in the press about Mohamed Morsi’s trip to Tehran for the 16^th summit of the ‘Non-Aligned Movement’ so that he could personally hand over the presidency from Egypt to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in Iran. Virtually every policy expert in the world agrees, the Non-Aligned Movement is a colossal waste of time and resources. In 2012, Non-Alignment doesn’t mean anything. Non-Alignment was a policy option for many third and second world governments during the Cold War who didn’t want to be in lock step with the dictates of either the United States or the Soviet Union. Today’s Non-Aligned Movement is for all purposes a ineffective counterweight for all the other countries in the world against the US and the EU. Virtually everybody else (except Israel, of course) is either a member-state or an invited observer.

The visit by the new Egyptian president was seen by many in the West as the first step in a thaw of relations between Iran and Egypt which had existed since Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, the same year in which Iranian revolutionaries deposed the Sha of Iran with a coalition of Islamists, leftists, moderates, and liberals. The parallels between the quickness with which the radical Islamist Ayatollah Khomeni consolidated power was seen by many as being in strong parallel with the quickness with which Morsi, candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, achieved power in Egypt. It was seen by many that Morsi was doing everything he could to play up that parallel and that it would be a harbinger of the end of Iran’s long isolation in the diplomatic world. Thomas Friedman opined in the New York Times that his very presence at the meeting was a signal of hostile intent against the West and the democracy which Western thought represents.

And yet when Morsi arrived, he turned everybody’s assumptions for how the meeting would go upside down. Morsi blasted the Assad Regime in Syria for its repression and mass murder, for its neglect of democratic principles, for its disrespect of rule of law, and by extension, he blasted the Iranian regime whose support of Assad is so crucial to both regimes. In the ultimate insult, Morsi likened the Syrian struggle for freedom against Assad to the Palestinian struggle against Israelis. The Syrian delegation walked out, and as the host country, the Iranian representatives had to sit still as this lifelong critic of the United States gave a lecture in Tehran that could easily come from George W. Bush’s mouth.

But like George W. Bush, only much moreso, Morsi has a record of beliefs and membership that is abysmally far from the values he preached. Not only is Mohamed Morsi a US critic, he’s also a 9/11 truther. As late as 2010, Morsi was still alleging  that 9/11 was an inside job. About the Israel/Palestine conflict, he stated that ‘The two-state solution is nothing but a delusion concocted by the brutal usurper of the Palestinian lands.’ These statements of belief are not in themselves too different from those one hears on the proverbial ‘Arab Street.’ But Morsi belongs to an organization far more dangerous and cultish than even the Republican party, and that organization would not select him as their first leader to ascend to the Egyptian presidency if they were not positive that he is a perfect representation of their beliefs.

Like any successful organization, the Muslim Brotherhood gives their members a sense that they belong to something greater than themselves, and therefore the lack of freedom within the organization can be forgiven. Like all effective religious organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood is a combination of religious order, social club, and political action committee. It should go without saying, but women are not permitted, no matter how religious. Like any fraternity, the recruits of the organization have a period of evaluation during which their suitability is assessed. That period can last from five to eight years, during which their ability to tow the party line is assessed closely. Those who display signs of iconoclasm are summarily drummed out of membership. When Brotherhood youth activists, many of the same ones who organized the protests against Mubarak, expressed opposition to the Brotherhood consolidating themselves in post-Mubarak Egypt as a single party – the Freedom and Justice Party, with Mohamed Morsi as its leader – they were immediately thrown out of the Brotherhood. When a relatively liberal Brotherhood leader, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, announced that he would run for President, the Freedom and Justice Party’s President – Mohamed Morsi – announced that the party was not ready to endorse a candidate, and then the Brotherhood threw Fotouh out. When younger Brotherhood members announced their support for Fotouh, they too were thrown out.  

The brotherhood’s first stated goal is an authoritarian one: the widespread imposition of Sharia law. Its second goal is an imperial one: to unite the Islamic world. This is the Muslim Brotherhood creed: “Allah is our objective, the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader, Jihad (Holy War) is our way, and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of all our aspirations.”

This creed is not merely authoritarian or imperial. Those final two phrases will be familiar to anyone who has studied movements as different as Nazism and Communism and the Crusades and the KKK. It is the totalitarian credo. To the totalitarian, a great death is the highest honor life may bestow. And because a great death is so honorable, it gives totalitarians the spiritual cover their consciences require to do any beastly act in the quest to bring about their glorious end. In achieving their great death, they die so that a new, more glorious world may begin. Even if their world is one of squalor, these totalitarians have spent their lives killing, maiming, raping, and torturing so that a world can be born free of the acts they perpetrate. And yet after all those glorious ends, the new beginning never happens, and the bloody, ignominious suffering of millions happened for no reason at all.

And yet for the moment, Morsi’s proven quite practical in his foreign designations. It was Egypt, not Saudi Arabia, whom America was first to consult during peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine – and America consulted him because he was smart enough not to give any indication that he means to give up on the Israel/Egypt alliance. For all the rhetoric which Morsi and his party have issued against Israel, Morsi has thus far been surprisingly cool-headed on the issue.  He even went so far as to send Israel’s President Shimon Peres a letter in which he said “I am looking forward to exerting our best efforts to get the Middle East peace process back to its right track in order to achieve security and stability for all peoples of the region including the Israeli people.” A  Morsi spokesman later denied the veracity of the letter to his own people (a tactic many Israelis will remember as being straight out of Yassir Arafat’s playbook), but it doesn’t change the fact that the letter exists, and it says something encouraging (though not too much so) that Morsi is obviously convinced that the appearance of diplomacy is necessary.

Time will demonstrate whether Morsi means to plan for war while keeping the appearance of diplomacy. But whether or not he means to be a democrat, he clearly means to keep the appearance of an authoritarian. It’s hardly clear why Mohamed Morsi declared his edicts above judicial review, but he did so in such a way as to announce that his ultimate goal is to rule by decree – and also did so in such a way that he had to compromise with the judiciary to come to an understanding. It’s entirely possible that the whole mess was a masterful plan to show corrupt judges sympathetic to the military that he was not above overturning their decrees – or maybe it was just an extraordinarily clumsy power grab. But the end result was that he will not be seen as a democratic reformer for the foreseeable future – and when dealing with a country used to dictatorship, perhaps that’s necessary, even if he's really a democrat.

But if Morsi runs too afoul of democracy and peace, there are still some rather enormous incentives to keep Egypt stable – principle among them the $4.8 billion check Egypt requested from the IMF to stop their reserves from being depleted and the $1.7 billion check which the United States cuts to Egypt every year as a reward for unimpeded access to the Suez Canal, being at peace with Israel, and not remilitarizing the Sinai Peninsula. Should Morsi become a ‘War President,’ this money would dry up faster than the Dead Sea (hiyo!).

And yet right after Morsi left Tehran, he went to Beijing to visit Hu Jintao. Trade between China and Egypt is was $8.8 billion of business last year – a 30% increase over 2010. The Muslim Brotherhood may yet find that they can behave as bellicosely as they like and still get a source of funding should the US funding dry up.

It is simply not in Morsi’s interests to be too democratic or too diplomatic. Money should matter to the Muslim Brotherhood, and there should be no doubt that it does. But even if the US doesn’t give it, China might. And even if Morsi decides to broker peace between Israel and Palestine and institute democratic reform, there is still a larger problem.

Even if Mohamed Morsi is truly a moderate, or even a relative liberal in his own way, the organization which backs him is not. And any organization which spent the large majority of 84 years railing against American imperialism will be none too happy about an state ruled by an Islamic party that must still be dependent on America for its funding. And even if Morsi convinces the Muslim Brotherhood to a man to follow him in the accommodation of America and Israel, there is the added problem that 25.5% of the Egyptian parliament is comprised by three other Islamic parties – all of whose principle objection to the Brotherhood is that its goals are too moderate.

We liberals have a bad lot. We want to hope against wanting to hope that this revolution will be different, in spite of the fact that it hardly ever is. For all the Velvet Revolutions and constitutional republics, there are more authoritarian regimes which topple in great expense of blood and treasure, only to create a terrible power-vacuum in which a still more authoritarian regime takes over – sometimes a totalitarian one. It is virtually hopeless for a liberal rule of law to succeed in any country in which rule of law is lacking. If the judiciary is dishonest, if speech is censored, if elections are not fair, what is the point of democracy?

The perfect is the enemy of the good, the good the enemy of the adequate, and the adequate the enemy of the bearable. Over and over again, we’ve been wrong about the conditions which are required for revolutions to succeed. We were already wrong about the Liberal/Islamist alliance in 1979 Iran. We were wrong about the Liberal/Communist alliance in 1948 China and 1917 Russia. We were wrong about the Liberal/Nationalist alliance of 1848 Europe, and we were wrong about the Liberal/Military alliance of 1789 France. Many of us were even wrong about the liberal/conservative alliance of 2003 America/Iraq.  In Egypt, the protests against Mubarak were 2 million strong – a high number until you realize that the total population of Egypt is 80 million. Those voices were not heard in the debates leading up to the toppling of Mubarak, but we hear them now; and what they have to say is terrifying.

There is a paradox within liberalism that while it can compromise on details, it can have no possible accommodation to other ideologies. The end goal of every political compromiser is either to ensure greater liberty, or to ensure less. Therefore, all elements of a ruling government must share the end goal of allowing for greater liberty - because in a compromise with authoritarians, all the authoritarians have to do is to sabotage liberty until authoritarianism becomes necessary. If, as in the case of President Obama, the rule of law is still on the side of liberals, then some compromise is possible if the other side is rational enough to allow for one. But any liberal who wants to ride the coattails of a more bloody ideology to greater power is an idiot. By their very definition, authoritarians have more incentive and willpower to enact their agenda. In a fair battle between liberalism and authoritarianism, liberalism will always win. But there are very few countries in which that battle is fair. In a no-rules battle with other ideologies, the most  repressive and violent ideology always wins. And the winning ideology won’t make the mistake of allowing even the small amount of liberal discourse which enabled them to come to power. It may yet seem probable that Mubarak was the best which Egypt – and the entire Middle East – could hope for, and if he was, then we will be moist-eyed for the good old days when a dictator only killed a few thousand people to keep the peace. 

800 Words: Bibi Netanfucktard - A Plea for Mature Discourse About Israel Part 2

At this point, attacking the excessively pro-Palestine crowd is like picking the lowest-hanging fruit off a tree. The thrill of the fight is almost completely gone. I know I’m right, and they’ll never know they’re wrong (and if they ever figure it out, they’ll probably go to the other extreme and become ultra-orthodox Jews or fundamentalist Christians). Instead I’m just refighting the same old lazy clichés that were there long before I reached any kind of political consciousness. Debating the Palestinian side is only getting stupider, but the Israeli side is growing ever more in need of people who can scare them straight. And because this is a new movement that is growing exponentially more in need, this will necessarily be a much longer post.

To the excessively pro-Israel crowd: There is an authoritarian virus spreading through the Jewish world. It’s present in the politics of Israel, it’s present in the politics of supporting Israel, and it’s present in every other aspect of Jewish life. It would have us reject the conversions and marriages of any Jew that was not performed by an orthodox rabbi. It would have those of us Jews not privileged enough to believe in God 150% die for the Israeli army while they get paid exemptions to study Torah. It would have us believe that settlers in Arab Majority land are pioneers and heroes instead of fanatics. And in a stunning reversal of feminist triumphs, it would have women slave away at work while the men do nothing all day but study torah. It’s also present in all of the people who accommodate those who believe this way as though it were merely a charming quirk of people who are fundamentally on our side. It is present in the Orthodox community, it’s present in any secular or non-orthodox Jew who still believes in ‘Greater Israel,’ it’s present in anyone who believes that Muslim life is cheap, it’s present in anyone who believes that assimilation is the greatest evil to beset the Jewish community, it’s present in any Jew who would choose faith over enlightenment, it’s present in any Jew who still believes that we can negotiate the dialogue between faith and enlightenment without choosing one over the other, it’s present in any Jew who believes that there can ever be either peace or security without negotiation, it’s present in any Jew naïve enough to believe that Israeli security is simply something we Jews can ‘take’ by ourselves if no one in the Goyish world gives us the right to it. If this is the true future of Judaism, I want out immediately.

It grows stronger with every passing election and debate, and has ever less regard for the decencies of human interaction and the necessities of geostrategic thinking. It rewards bellicosity and stupidity, it regards all change as a threat. It allows the worst elements of Israeli society to feed on the body politic, and it’s growing to allow the worst elements of fanaticism as unchecked a rein among Jews as it currently has among Christians. It refuses to acknowledge that the world has changed since 1967, and would like to keep Israel and the Jewish religion precisely as it once was when the evidence of an overwhelming change in both is all around us. It has allowed a newly rejuvenated Likud Party (right wing) to drive out any elements from its party which insist on rational considerations and deposit them in Kadima (the centrist party – founded by that liberal lion, Ariel Sharon) and has just approved a merger with the (far-right) Russian immigrant party which distrusts anything that smacks of liberal (aka American) weakness and the ever-swelling ranks of the ultra-orthodox religious parties who demand sums which bankrupt the Israeli coffers. This virus may yet kill Israel and lead Judaism back into the dark ages of pogrom, proscription, and persecution.

To those of us even slightly in touch with reality, it forces each of us to choose, are we for or against the idea that Jews can live without goyim. I am as sad as anybody else to have to make this choice, but I am 100% against it, and will fight it in every way I can for the rest of my life. I am a Jew, and a reasonably proud one. I don’t believe in the religion, and I don’t know how anyone else can. But I believe that Jews have a belief in learning and ethical conduct that produces much more success and purpose and happiness than people have in the general population.  But if the Jewish community itself forces me to make a choice between belief and learning, I’ll choose more learning every time.

 The current government in Israel does not resemble the best traditions of Western liberalism even in the slightest. If the Likud party wins re- election, the only ‘First World’ government which Israel will resemble is Hungary, in which the right-wing is flanking to the most populist, pernicious, and bigoted elements of the far right in an attempt to expel any element from government that is not ultra-nationalist. Many governments have tried this – including France and the Netherlands, but only in Hungary has this ‘democratic’ course of action proven more successful than it has in the current State of Israel. It is amazing to think that only six months after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli public would elect the Knesset opposition leader who did absolutely nothing to prevent the calls of ultra-orthodox rabbis for Rabin’s assassination. But that Israel would re-elect him fifteen years later after throwing him out the first time for corruption is beyond belief. And in this second premiership, Netanyahu responded by providing a right-wing government that is precisely as right-wing, corrupt, and authoritarian as his previous record would suggest. 

Speaker of the Knesset: Reuven Rivlin – the first speaker in the history of Israel to break with the tradition of neutrality. In his first term as speaker, he used his platform to become one of the most vocal opponents of Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan from Gaza. He's also used his platform to criticize Yad Vashem for allowing Pope Benedict XVI to speak there (as a former 'Nazi') and has advocated for an apartheid state in which the emerging Palestinian majority becomes Israeli citizens stripped of voting rights rather than a two-state solution.

Minister of Strategic Affairs: Moshe Ya’alon – who was removed by Ariel Sharon as Chief of Staff to the Israeli Army after he publicly protested Sharon’s plan to disengage from Gaza. He was then sued by citizens of Qana, a town in Southern Lebanon, for his role in an incident in 1996 when 800 Lebanese Civilians took refuge in a UN compound. As results of the incident, 106 refugees were killed and another 120 injured by artillery shells in an action which the UN ruled unlikely to be an accident.

Minister of Internal Affairs: Eli Yishai – who advocated blowing Gaza back to the middle ages and destroying all infrastructure.  After the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, he declared that the failure to complete objectives was due to soldiers not being religious enough. He also tried to refuse African refugees and migrants because of his belief that the Africans brought large amounts of disease with them (scientifically proven to be mistaken, in case anybody thought otherwise).

Minister Without Portfolio: Benny Begin – The son of Likud’s founder, Menachem Begin, who during Netanyahu’s first term lead the right-wing of Likud in forming a separate ultra-right-wing party after Netanyahu announced that he would uphold some clauses of the Oslo Accords. Begin believes that Palestinians and Israeli Arabs should live as a semi-autonomous independent state with Israel controlling all security questions.

Foreign Minister: Avigdor Lieberman – who called for the execution of Israeli Arab members of the Knesset, bombing all places of business in Ramallah, suggested drowning Palestinian POW’s in the Dead Sea (admittedly, half-jokingly), and implied that the best solution to Gaza would be a nuclear weapon. He proposed that all Israeli Arabs be made to swear a ‘loyalty oath’ and to jail all Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day. He has also been investigated and indicted for corruption accusations and was once convicted of the physical assault of a twelve-year-old.

Minister of Environmental Protection: Gilad Erdan – who advocated for the use of Hamas prisoners as human shields against Qossam rockets and for the right of Israeli judges to revoke citizenship for ‘disloyalty to the state.’

Minister of Housing and Construction: Ariel Atlas – who called for the complete segregation of Arab Israelis from Jewish Israelis.

Minister of Justice: Yaakov Neeman – who was reported to say that Israeli law should be gradually made to be in accordance with Halakha (Jewish ritual law).

Minister of Culture and Sport – Limor Livnat – who called for gender segregation on public transportation in Ultra-Orthodox areas and for the National Anthem to be sung at all Israeli schools at the beginning of every school day.

Finance Minister: Yuval Steinitz – a former academic who has warned repeatedly that Egypt plans to remilitarize the Sinai Peninsula.

A few things should be said about this list. The first, obviously, is that a list of ministers in any Palestinian government thus far in Gaza or the West Bank would probably include a litany of actions and comments five-times as blood-curdling as the one you’ve just read – and will probably remain so for another generation. Secondly, every Israeli government since its inception has included at least a few militant nuts. One of them, Yitzhak Shamir, even became the second-longest serving Prime Minsiter. But the true nuts, even during the Shamir era, were exceptions rather than the rule. But look at the composition of the current Israeli Knesset. The Knesset holds 120 seats. 27 of these are Likud, another 15 are Yisrael Beitenu, still another 18 are comprised of Israel’s various religious parties. Together they form a governing coalition of exactly 60. If the coalition members were a bit more rational, they could include the centrist Kadima and their 28 members in their coalition for a super-majority coalition of 88. When one adds the four seats of the still further right-wing National Union party, that means that there are roughly 28 current members out of the 120-strong Knesset who are well-disposed to speak up for any point of view that is left of the current Israeli center. Of those twenty-eight, seven are Israeli  Arabs.

Even now, to call Israel anything but a democracy is pure sophistry. Israel may be flawed, and now more than ever, but it is not a dictatorship, and is still by exponential quantities the most liberal state in the Middle East. To draw any sort of moral equivalence between what Israelis do to Palestinians and what Palestinians do to both Israelis and themselves is pure moral frivolity. But the moral equivalence between the Israeli government and the Palestinian government is drawing too close for anyone who believes that Zionism and Liberalism have proven absolutely compatible in the past and should still be compatible today. It has to be wondered if Israel’s ability to maintain itself as a democracy is stretching to the breaking point – is the break imminent?

There was a time, not too many decades ago, when the State of Israel and the state of political liberty were not seen as two distinct entities by any sane person. The world saw Israel correctly for what it is, an embattled democratic underdog encircled by authoritarian neighbors who long for nothing more than its destruction as a replacement goal for the hard work of liberalizing their countries. Israel is still the most democratic country in the Middle East by far, and yet the rest of the region, admittedly at a crawl, is beginning to catch up while Israel jogs backwards.  It is conceivable that in our lifetime, the false moral equivalence or superiority from Arab to Israeli policy which many insist already exist, will be true.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu clearly awaits a green light from President Obama to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, as though an attack on Iran will put an end to the nuclear threat on Israel. Even if Israel successfully destroys the entire Iranian nuclear program, there still remains the problem that any Israel-hating country, any Israel-hating terrorist organization, can still import a nuclear weapon from the A. Q. Khan network  in Pakistan (remember them?) or from North Korea. An attack on Iran is all Iran needs to declare holy war on Israel – for which political Islamists will line up, perhaps by the tens of thousands to be holy warriors with suicide bombs for the cause. Any missile which lands or even detonates in the air can contain radioactive material or chemical weaponry. An Iranian nuclear weapon is a serious, serious problem. But an attack on their nuclear facility is about as far from a serious solution as can be imagined.

It’s not hard to believe that had Ariel Sharon survived his second stroke without brain damage, he’d have known better how to handle it. One of the great ironies of Modern Israel is that Arik Sharon, supposedly ‘the bulldozer’ barred from high office for so long because no one thought he would ever give up on the settlement project or on the occupation of any territory, was the only Prime Minister in Israeli history to dismantle settlements and leave occupied territory in either Gaza or the West Bank. Like Richard Nixon before him, he stoked right wing fears as a means to achieve high office, and then used his credibility from the ultra-right as a tactic to pursue some diplomatic policies that were almost left-of-center.

After all that worry about World War III breaking out during an Ariel Sharon premiership, it turned out that Arik wasn’t a fascist after all, he was merely a brilliant demagogue willing to say or do anything to get the desired result. The unilateral Gaza evacuation was no great triumph for either Israel or Palestine, but it’s certainly preferable to continued occupation and insurrection. I have no idea what Sharon would have done to neutralize the Iranian threat, but I’m sure he’d have found a better solution than Bibi’s.

If the American president Arik Sharon most resembles is Nixon, then the president Bibi Netanyahu most resembles is George W. Bush. Bibi is a far more articulate man than Bush in both Hebrew and English, but in his decision making he appears no more intelligent, and has no more spine when faced with right-wing nuts who whisper in his ear. Like Bush, Bibi comes from something approaching right-wing royalty in his country. Bibi’s older brother, Yoni Netanyahu, was the commander of the Entebbe Raid that rescued 102 Israeli passengers from an Air France plane hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and brought to Idi Amin’s Uganda. Yoni was the only Israeli soldier killed in the raid, and only four of the 106 hostages were killed. Bibi’s father is the historian, Benzion Netanyahu, perhaps Israel’s most important ultraconservative intellectual from its founding until his death just this year at the age of 102. For three generations, Benzion Netanyahu was a  living link to the original circles of ‘Revisionist Zionism’ which advocated the forcible removal  by any means necessary of all potential enemies of a Jewish Israel whether British or Arab. Even after turning 100, Professor Netanyahu continued to warn in public pronouncements of the coming nuclear threat from Iran and the necessity of bombing their nuclear facilities. Bibi’s uncle is a famous mathematician, and his aunt is a former Israeli Supreme Court Justice.

If Sharon’s insane rhetoric and behavior masks a Nixon-like realist, then perhaps Bibi’s Bush-like charming swagger similarly conceals the brazen heart of a true believer. And yet his rhetoric, while overheated, isn’t entirely wrong. Netanyahu denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian – a not quite as insane view as it might seem. It might have had some legitimacy if the people who now call themselves Palestinians hadn’t been left to rot together in refugee camps by Israelis and Arabs alike for sixty-five years. If there wasn’t such a thing as a Palestinian people in 1948, there is certainly such a thing now. But Netanyahu has made some still more insane statements – such as that the Arab desire to rid Israel of the West Bank is like Germany’s desire to rid Czechoslovakia of the Sudetenland. It’s a very dramatic wording, but well... many Arab leaders probably do want to rid Israel of the West Bank as a way to conquer more of Israel down the road. It can't be denied, there are many powerful people in the Middle East who see Hitler as an ideal model of how to treat Jews. 

However, any question of whether or not Bibi was sane was put out of my mind ten days after the Barack Obama’s Cairo address to the Arab world. When Obama gave the Cairo speech, he fed Netanyahu a golden egg only for Netanyahu to spit it out immediately. The only true criticism of Israel Obama made was over the issue of settlements. And yet because Obama included that little criticism of Israel (and perhaps because he didn’t praise Israel more in front of an Arab audience…waaahhh….), Netanyahu convened an emergency meeting of his cabinet. Ten days later, Netanyahu made a speech at Bar-Ilan University stating that Israel will only accept a demilitarized Palestinian state which accepts with an undivided Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, and the right of Israeli settlements to exhibit ‘natural growth.’ It was a speech designed for the specific purpose of stopping peace negotiations before they could even begin.

It’s not hard to see why Netanyahu did it, and perhaps it’s even easy to have a bit of sympathy with his problem. It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that all this talk of a new generation of rational Muslim liberals powerful enough to take over the Middle East from authoritarian oppressors is as completely idiotic and simple-minded as it was when people said the same thing about 1979 Iran. But now, we’ll never know, because Netanyahu closed the door on perhaps the key way in which relatively liberal Arab leaders like Salaam Fayyad and Mohammed Morsi  (do we even know if Morsi is a liberal yet?) might have proven themselves serious leaders for the  future – a bilateral peace agreement with Israel in which the Arab states recognize the State of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, renounce the Palestinian right of return, and prosecute those who would do Israel harm in exchange for Israel recognizing an independent and completely equal Palestine, giving up all claims to territory in Gaza and non-Jerusalem West Bank, give Muslims control of their holy sites, and renounce East Jerusalem so that it may be the Palestinian capital. In giving that speech, Netanyahu may have signed the Arab Spring’s death warrant before it even began, and in doing so, there’s at least a small chance he may have also signed Israel's death warrant too.

Whether the enemy is Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood or the Ayatollahs of Iran, there will always be someone still more insane on the horizon. Israel tried to work its way around Yassir Arafat, and the result was a Gaza (and perhaps soon a West Bank) controlled by Hamas. 25.5% of the Egyptian parliament is currently comprised of “the Islamist Bloc,” a collection of three Islamic political parties for whom the Muslim Brotherhood is too moderate. If Mohammed Morsi proves unsuccessful, his replacement could be far more extreme.

But what is true for the Arab world is just as true for the Jewish world. Neither Menachem Begin, nor Yitzhak Shamir, nor Ariel Sharon, nor Ehud Olmert, nor Bibi Netanyahu could solve the neighborhood conflict by force. Yet each uses force more overwhelming than the last, and each time, a plurality of Jews decide that the situation requires the use of still more force. Rather than being easier after the Arab spring to be a liberal in this region, it may well turn out to be harder to be one than ever before. 

Israel’s best and brightest seem to leave the country in droves and the statistics for it are staggering, Meanwhile, the birthrates of the ultra-orthodox increase exponentially. The vast majority of those who remain are fundamentally cut off from any international discourse and see the rest of the world as hostile to everything Israel is – in many ways, they’re not wrong. But if Jews engage rational critics of Israel while dismissing irrational ones, it will be Jews who control how Israel is viewed in the world. If Jews dismiss all criticism of Israel, it will be the most irrational and strident anti-semites who control worldwide discourse about this most important subject.

The world has changed immeasurably. And yet many if not most Jews still pretend we live in 1967 – the year when the Jewish idea of a prosperous secure Israel lined up best with the world opinion’s image of a secular, semi-socialist state that took no side in the Cold War. By the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, both images were shattered. Within the next six years, it became clear that Israel would be insecure for the duration of its existence, and its survival could only be ensured by the backing of American military and financial power’s most distasteful elements. Since 1973, Israel underwent an eighteen-year quagmire in Lebanon and assumed an endless series of ground assaults in Gaza and the West Bank. Whatever one’s feelings about the morality of these actions, you would have to be blind to the present realities to still believe in the idea of an Israel that remains secure, secular, and democratic. Many if not most Israelis have chosen the first at the expense of the latter two, and while one can’t blame them, one can still question whether or not they’re ensuring the impossibility of their security by not concentrating on the two elements simultaneously. 

The era when Israel was seen as an important liberal cause is a half-century in the past. And yet we address the Israel problem to the larger public as though the Holocaust still means what it did to public memory in the 1960’s, as though Israel is still a plucky little quasi-socialist state with little infrastructure or foreign investment, and as though Israel’s support from the United States is not guaranteed. Every time we allow this discussion to proceed as though we’re still living in 1967, we allow authoritarians who live in 2012 to get away with whatever they wish. In an era when the Justice Minister of the world’s one liberal Jewish state can start talking about bringing Israel to Halakhic law, when its Minister of Housing can advocate for complete segregation between Arabs and Jews, when its Minister of Strategic Affairs was probably involved in a mass murder, and when its Foreign Minister implies that the best solution to the country’s problems would be to nuke a contiguous state, this is not just an unfortunate aberration. This is a systemic problem which every Jew among us has allowed to happen by allowing a virus to grow in the entirety of Jewish society – both in Israel and outside of it. Ze’ev Sternhall, chair of the Political Science Department at Hebrew University and a worldwide expert on fascism remarked, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post-World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain…a crude and multi-faceted campaign is being waged against the foundations of the democratic and liberal order.” In 2008, a settler set off a pipe bomb in his house.

And the future probably holds still worse. In 2009, a mock-election of high school students around Israel produced Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman and 56 percent of those students polled would oppose the idea of Israeli Arabs being elected to the Knesset. Both Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert have warned about the coming demographic shift that would lead the combined Palestinian and Israeli Arab populations of Israel to exceed the Jewish Israeli population, perhaps as early as 2017 – in which case Israel would truly be an apartheid state like South Africa.