White House Down in Middle East

This is a bit off topic, but I live in Germany and I definitely did NOT see “a marked reduction in global levels of anti-Americanism”.

What has changed is that the American media have stopped providing most of the ammunition for anti-Americans abroad. They tend to defend this administration. Now that Obama is in The White House, they are also much less concerned about European opinion when it comes to our supposed sins. But the European elites do not like us better. They sneer at our economic troubles, just as I remember them doing in the late 1970s. Nothing has changed.

Perhaps this is not the place to begin a discussion of free will. But the post in effect makes statements about free will for which I see no good basis.

“[Once President Obama demanded a full construction freeze the Palestinians could ask for no less. When he inevitably and predictably failed to get the Israelis to accept this unrealistic demand he looked weak and the Palestinians had no real negotiating options left.” What was stopping the Palestinian side from accepting the less than hoped for concession and then starting to talk again? In fact they did not agree to resume negotiations (as in the past), but none of this implies that it had to be so.

Most negotiators in similar circumstances choose to act in opposite ways. Perhaps this is evidence that the Palestinians do not really find the status quo so intolerable? Perhaps the difference is that other countries give the Palestinians more support when they don’t compromise?

Richard Tasgal
Beer-Sheva, Israel

The President’s foreign policy team has some real successes under its belt — the reset with Russia, a marked reduction in global levels of anti-Americanism…

And just like that, you toss any shred of credibility you might have into the trash.

Help us out here, sir. Where in the world would you go to justify these two assertions? Especially when reality is clearly the opposite.

One could make the point that the reason there has been a “marked reduction in global levels of anti-Americanism,” is because much of the anti-Americanism was based on envy. There is much less to be envious about and we are weaker. This gives much of the globe satisfaction. Is that a foreign policy success?

The Obama administration’s open dismissing of Israel also amplified Palestinian intransigence by inspiring a hope that the US was, finally, going to abandon Israel. This in turn caused the Palestinians to think that all they had to do is wait, and they would only have to face Israel in the conflict, as opposed to the combined might of the United States and Israel. Against just Israel, and with the support of the Arab nations, they might just be able to achieve their goal of the Second Holocaust they so fervently desire.

The Muslims will get their right of return when all of the Jews and Christians that they have chased from their lands and forced to convert over many, many centuries get theirs. But that of course will not happen until Islam is no longer practiced in the Middle East. It would not be safe otherwise.

The fact of the matter is that the Palestinians have proven that they do not deserve a homeland. They could have stayed in Israel but preferred to take their chances that a Muslim army could drive the Jews into the sea. Jordan and Egypt could have absorbed them but they tried to overthrow the Jordanian government when offered help and they are too barbaric and full of hate to form their own country. No one is stopping them from doing that. It can happen anytime they want. But they prefer to kill Jews.

Most people understand all of this since we got a crash course in Islam after 9/11. The only people who haven’t absorbed the lesson seem to be the usual sort that populate the pundit and government class. Those people have only exacerbated the problem by pretending the Palestinians have a grievance and excusing all of their terrorism and barbaric acts.

As to Obama, he can’t make a deal because everyone knows he does not represent the American people in anything but name. No deal he makes will be accepted or be seen as legitimate. Everyone is just waiting for his reign to pass so we can clean up the mess he has made at home and abroad to our reputation and finances.

BTW, I got a laugh out of the line about anti-Americanism being tamped down. The only place that has happened is on the American left. Ask the Brits and Eastern Europeans what they think of us now. Ask Columbia. And those are just our friends.

The best thing for the US to do right now is to stop. Back off and let things go their own way. And stop funding the UN refugee program that maintains the camps. The Arab countries need to deal with the reality of the Palestinians inside their countries and make them full citizens. Unless the Arabs wage a completely successful war and utterly defeat Israel they will never return ‘home’ the Palestinians.

A crushing defeat of Arabs armies especially of those armies that are Muslim Brotherhood state armies will do more to bring sanity and reality than all of the negotiation have done in the last 60 years or will ever yield. All the US has to do is not get involved as a mediator. Let the parties deal among themselves. This time around unlike the fifties, sixties and seventies there is no Soviet Union to pull the Arab chestnuts out of the fire. China, Russia, the EU or NATO (minus the US) offer any militarily credible threat to Israel and without that threat there is no pulling the Arabs back from the abyss of complete military as in the past. Israel can’t negotiate with a partner that has no intentions of honoring any commitment since that partner always has known it’s losses will be capped so it has no downside in continuing the present state of affairs. With the US out of the picture all bets are off. If the Arabs chose war and lose, they utterly lose which would mean the expulsion of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and possibly the annexation, the rest of the Golan and part of Southern Lebanon (and the expulsion of those populations). If Israel losses those Jews that are not killed will be expelled. If the US steps aside both sides will eventually have to deal with their respective realities.

I really don’t see the “improvements” that you claim. while the Europeans and Latin Americans I work with are polite and considerate as usual, they are a bit baffled by Obama’s foreign relations and see him as inept.
As far as taking out OBL is concerned, I fully believe he intended to wait until a month or so before the election to go after him but was forced to do so early by Wikileaks. His slight bump in the polls will be long gone by November 2012.

Dear Professor Mead,

In this piece you credit the President’s foreign policy team with achieving “…a marked reduction in global levels of anti-Americanism.” I wonder how one measures “anti-Americanism.” Actually, I don’t wonder because in fact it can’t be measured. It can be incited, its manifestations can be broadcast and hyped by the media, and it can notationally be exploited for political advantage, but it cannot be measured. I admire your writing because it is refreshingly free of shrewdly disguised polemics. In this case, however, you are either being overly generous to the President or you are engaging in a little boosterism. I am perhaps nitpicking as it is a minor point in your thesis, but it is a not insignificant issue in terms of American foreign policy and domestic politics. It is one of the least attractive tactics of the left that, during Republican administrations, they are willing to malign this country and then cite the consequent international opprobrium for partisan advantage. So a sitting U.S. senator can equate American soldiers with Nazis and then feign being concerned about how the world sees us. Republicans, for the most part, when out of office do not slander America, accuse our military of war crimes, and make a political issue out of our international standing and why “they” hate us. Perhaps more importantly, with a Democratic President, those angry demonstrations abroad are just not worthy of air time on the major networks. So, it will always seem that anti-Americanism has subsided when a Democrat takes the White House.

Thank you for the fine analysis of the ME “peace process,” Prof. Mead, but by what measure do you judge the “reset” with Russia a success? And anti-Americanism is, as always, flourishing quite nicely.

Probably the first this to do is to realign the definition of “Palestinian refugee” with all other refugees, i.e. count as refugees only the refugees themselves, not their descendants. Second, the same number of Jewish refugees were robbed of their homes, property etc in Arab countries as they emigrated. Why not to give this property to Arab refugees?

There were recently some press reports claiming that in the evening, Obama was surfing the web to read blogs. Well, I’d say if he is pressed for time, he would be well served to regularly read just one blog…

I have only one quarrel with WRM’s superb analysis:
“In Israel, there are many people who think that the Zionist task is unfinished until the entire land is redeemed”
Of course, it depends on what you mean by “many”, but it’s not really many in the sense of a politically significant group. This can be easily illustrated e.g. by the success of Ariel Sharon’s break-away party Kadima; or Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza — and there would have been something like that also on the West Bank had it not been for the realization that the Palestinians have a tendency to use territory they get after an Israeli withdrawal as rocket-launching pads — or Olmert’s offer to Mahmoud Abbas.
The fact of the matter, documented by numerous polls, is that for the past decade, there has been a clear Israeli majority for a 2 state solution roughly along the lines debated under Clinton (Camp David/Taba 2000/01), with the only sore point being a division of Jerusalem, and of course with the caveat that there must be sturdy provisions for security, i.e. land-for-real reliable peace.

… and the fisk hits from the comments on Walter Russell Mead just keep rolling in …

I’m a steadfast supporter of the state of Israel but am nevertheless shocked by the animosity and lack of sympathy shown for the Palestinian refugees in these comments. Put yourself in their shoes please. And remember that this whole conflict was caused by European anti-Semitism.

The idea that war and neglect will settle it, or that the Palestinians will never settle under any circumstances, are both repugnant in my opinion and I hope unreflective of the quality of Mead’s readership.

And so what if he got the Russian reset wrong? That’s no reason to trash his whole post.

Luke, the Palestinian refugees have been emmiserated for 60 years by the fraudulent “sympathy” shown them. By now they have brainwashed to believe an entirely false history of how they got where they are and whom to blame, all in the service of destroying Israel and making the Jews pay for all with a second genocide.

If the Palestinian refugees had been treated like the 14 million refugees of the partition of India and Pakistan, they would have left the camps and been resettled over 50 years ago.

The answer is obvious: make the Arab states grant citizenship to those “refugees” who have lived inside them for generations. This, they refuse to do.

All the pro-Palestinian sympathizers squawking about Israeli “apartheid” would do better to look at the way the Palestinians are treated in Lebanon: no citizenship, barred from most professions, forcibly contained within Dickensian ghettos laughingly called “refugee camps.” That is true apartheid.

Luke Lea says,

“I’m a steadfast supporter of the state of Israel but am nevertheless shocked by the animosity and lack of sympathy shown for the Palestinian refugees in these comments. Put yourself in their shoes please. And remember that this whole conflict was caused by European anti-Semitism. The idea that war and neglect will settle it, or that the Palestinians will never settle under any circumstances, are both repugnant in my opinion and I hope unreflective of the quality of Mead’s readership. And so what if he got the Russian reset wrong? That’s no reason to trash his whole post.”

Luke, I’m afraid I disagree with your comment in its entirety.

One important question is how you define Palestinian refugees. The refugees who left in 1948 might be entitled to a modicum of sympathy; while the new nation of Israel was not primarily responsible for their exile, it was not entirely blameless either. But subsequent generations of “Palestinian refugees” are really not refugees at all; they are merely another subset of residents of Arab nations mistreated by their rulers.

In the aftermath of World War II there were massive forced movements of populations; tens of millions of people were forced against their will to leave their homes and hundreds of thousands if not millions died in the process. In a speech to the British Parliament shortly after the Allied victory, Winston Churchill famously said,

“Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble. . . . A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed at the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor am I alarmed by these large transferences.”

Within five years of the time that the Palestinian refugees left the new nation of Israel, 7 million ethnic Germans were expelled from the new postliberation regimes of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia and forced to move back to a devastated Germany. Similarly, 1.5 million ethnic Poles who were living in what became the Soviet Union were sent packing to Poland. At precisely the same time, tens of thousands of Slovaks were sent packing from Hungary into Czechoslovakia and a similar number of Magyars were expelled from Czechoslovakia into Hungary. And don’t forget that one year before the Palestinians fled, ten million refugees on the Indian subcontinent left their ancestral homes with Hindus in what became Pakistan fleeing to India and Muslims in what became a free India fleeing to Pakistan.

The 750 thousand Palestinian refugees from 1948 left Israel and moved to nations run by their co-religionists who spoke the same language and shared the same culture they did. All of the European refugees in the Post War period did the same and the sorting of Hindus and Muslims in the former British Raj was also similar.

In none of these other massive population movements that took place in the aftermath of World War II were the children, grandchildren or great grandchildren of the populations forced to flee considered refugees. In fact, in every single one of those cases, the offspring of the original refugees are now considered indistinguishable from the rest of the population of the nations that they inhabit.

Amongst all the large population transferences that took place in the wake of World War II, only the Palestinians are different and the reason for that difference is obvious. The Arab world, primarily for religious reasons, is not able to tolerate the existence of a non-Islamic nation in the Middle east; a region of the world that Muslims consider part of their patrimony. For generations they have chosen to use the Palestinians and the descendants of the original 750 thousand refugees as a weapon against Israel. Western intellectuals, so ignorant of their own recent history that they are unaware of the ethnic cleansing countenanced by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin (the victorious allied leaders), have allowed the charade that Palestinian refugees actually exist to continue to dominate the discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I confess to being astounded that the otherwise well-informed if not brilliant Professor Mead has fallen into the same trap. I expect this type of muddled thinking from a faux-intellectual like the late Tony Judt, but from Walter Russell Mead, it is surprising. Luke, I highly recommend Jerry Z. Muller’s article, “US and Them” from the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs. It is supposed to be behind a “pay wall” but this link might allow you to access it for free,

http://www.tfasinternational.org/iipes/academics/mullercm.pdf

By the way, if you enjoy the article, in the subsequent issue of Foreign Affairs (July/August, 2008) Muller discusses his point of view with some of his critics and in the same issue, Professor Mead’s wonderful article. “The Deep Roots of American Zionism” can be found.

The reality is this; there are few legitimate Palestinian refugees left. Most of the 750 thousand who left have either died already or are dying of old age at a rapid rate. Their descendants should be considered nothing more than oppressed residents of the Arab nations in which they reside.

As far as the Russian reset; I actually support a Russian reset. I believe (as I think Mead does) that with the economic and demographic decline of Europe and Japan, the trilateral stool on which the U.S. has based its dominance in the Post War years is now more precarious than ever. To maintain its influence, the United States needs new allies and we have to face the reality that these new allies probably won’t share our values as solidly as the Europeans and the Japanese did. While the Russians aren’t perfect, I believe that they can become an ally for the United States if we play our cards right.

I don’t disagree with Mead that we should try for a “reset” with the Russians but I disagree that Obama has made any substantial progress. Other comments here have clearly laid out how the United States has gotten little or nothing in return for whatever gestures Obama has made to the Russians.

But I don’t blame the Russians for all of this, I blame Obama. There are plenty of things Obama could have done to show the Russians that he was seriously ready for a “reset” that would have done nothing to violate American values.

Obama could have cancelled the ridiculous U.S. recognition of Kosovo or at the least he could have supported partitioning Northern Kosovo into Serbia. Similarly he could have recognized that Republika Srpska and the rest of Bosnia are irreconcilable and he could support the partition of Bosnia. Most importantly he could have recognized that sending weapons or expanding NATO to include former Soviet Republics is as offensive to the Russians as supplying weapons to Venezuela or incorporating Venezuela into the Warsaw Pact would have been to us.

Mead is right that a true “reset” with Russia is decidedly in U.S. interests; unfortunately here, as in the rest of his foreign policy, the Obama Administration has been a complete and total failure.

Wigwag quoting Churchhill: ““Expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble. . . . A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed at the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor am I alarmed by these large transferences.”

A separation of populations may in fact be desirable as part of a final settlement but if so it will have to be worked out by the parties themselves. As will a number of other issues (many of which were agreed to during Olso). My point is that without Europe’s massive participation no settlement is possible. Not only is that not obvious, it is something no European country wants to face up to with the possible exception of Germany. The Israelis and Palestinians are too blinded by the passions of war to be able to see this. But if their representatives got together with a new generation of German young people they might be able to bring the European community around.

“My point is that without Europe’s massive participation no settlement is possible.” (Luke Lea)

The Europeans will not be participating, massively or otherwise. With the Euro on the verge of collapse and numerous European nations on the verge of insolvency, Europe certainly doesn’t have the financial wherewithal to provide subsidies or reparations to the so-called Palestinian refugees.

The other option, of course, is for Europeans to offer citizenship to hundreds of thousands if not millions of Palestinian “refugees.” This is not going to happen either.

That Europeans are already fed up with Muslim immigration has been proven in election after election. Most recently we’ve had the stunning electoral success of the “True Finns” party in Finland. Prior to that we watched as Geert Wilder’s party scored amazing electoral successes in the Netherlands. In France, despite Sarkozy banning the Burka, Marine La Pen’s far right, anti-immigration party is coming on strong and could easily defeat Sarkozy. The same type of anti-Muslim sentiment is evident throughout Scandinavia, in Belgium, in Switzerland (where they have banned minarets) and in Italy.

Most recently, as tens of thousands of Muslims boat people have invaded Italy to escape from the turmoil and economic backwardness of Libya and Tunisia, numerous European nations are turning their backs on their obligations under the Schengen treaty (the treaty which insures open borders in Europe). As Muslim refugees flow into Italy (and to a lesser extent Greece) nations throughout Europe are reinstituting border controls to insure that these illegal Muslim immigrants don’t migrate from Italy and Greece into their countries. It’s as if Oklahoma and South Dakota put up border controls to prevent illegal immigrants from Texas or Arizona from entering their states.

The point is that it is absurd in the extreme to believe that there is any hope that Europe will be offering funding or asylum to Palestinians. Hell will freeze over first.

But the question remains; if ethnic Germans who has been living for generations in Czechoslovakia could be easily repatriated into Germany after the War and if ethnic Poles who had been living in what became the Soviet Union for generations could be successfully repatriated to Poland in the late 1940s, why can’t Arabs who were living in one part of the Ottoman Empire be successfully repatriated less than 200 miles away to another part of what had been the Ottoman Empire?

As Nadine said, the answer is obvious. The failure to integrate the children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren of the original refugees was a deliberate tactic designed to be used by Muslims against people they considered to be Jewish interlopers. Islam is an imperialistic (and proselytizing) religion and 63 years ago as today, Arab Muslims could not abide the idea of Jews living amongst them as equals. As the treatment of the Copts in Egypt proves, they can’t stand the thought of Christians living amongst them as equals either.

The idea that there are legitimate Palestinian refugees is little more than a fraud. To the extent Palestinian refugees exist in the second decade of the 21st century, they are little more than pawns created by Muslim Arabs as a weapon to eradicate Jews from a part of the world that they believe rightfully belongs to Islam.

The dispute between Israel and Palestine is in reality little more than a continuation of the war that has been going on between Islam and the West for 1300 years.

If Professor Mead’s thesis is that if only a solution could be found to the problem of Palestinian refugees, the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians would be more tractable, then in my opinion, he is being naive.

Luke, if you have a section of land belonging to a defunct foreign empire, inhabited by a mix of ethnicities and religions, none of whom are used to exercising political control, none of whom have national identities that reach beyond the local town or tribe, to whom does that section of land now rightly belong? Add in the fact that the land is sparsely populated, organized on primitive feudal lines, and 80% owned by the defunct empire, and the question of who should own it and rule it now becomes even more vexed.

If you were to look at it and declare that you had something of a ‘jump ball’ situation on your hands, you would be quite correct.

And so various parties ‘jumped’ for sections of the defunct Ottoman Empire in the 1920s: the British, the French, and their various Arab, Maronite and Jewish clients, with a bunch of con men and adventurers tossed in the mix. New borders were drawn, new countries invented in every corner of what had been the old Ottoman Empire.

Since then, Arabs with either an Arab nationalist or Islamist agenda to push, have attempted to rewrite the history of the era with 20/20 hindsight and a propaganda line, making themselves out as innocent victims of evil Western colonialism. You shouldn’t buy it.

If you blame European anti-Semitism so heavily for creating the impetus for Zionism, how can you just overlook the Arab Jew-hatred that made the Arabs not only become ardent Nazi collaborators, but destroy their own millenia-old Jewish communities and send those refugees also streaming into Palestine, in numbers even larger than the Jewish refugees from Europe?

Don’t the Palestinian refugees and their descendants have every right to turn to the Arabs and ask what they did with the confiscated wealth of the Jews of Beirut, Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad?

The error of US (and other) approaches (from outside) to resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict is that all efforts have been directed toward “peace-making” and none (or few) have been directed to removing Israel’s illegal settlements and thus removing Israel’s insuperable objection to peacemaking.

As matters stand, Israel’s 550,000 settlers and the buildings they inhabit are, like the separation/apartheid wall, present illegally in the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem, and Israel more and more treats the occupied territories as if they were part of Israel — or, more accurately, part of an apartheid state established upon the entire territory of Mandatory Palestine.

International law provides the reasons and justification, both, for an international drive to require Israel to remove the settlers, settlements (buildings), wall, and perhaps highways.

The internal politics of Israel prevents Israel from removing any of these, and the more settlers there are, and the number is growing quickly, the stronger the anti-removal internal Israeli political forces.

Israel has cleverly persuaded the USA to talk about stopping the growth of settlements rather than to talk about removal of all the settlements — and has refused to stop the growth.

Getting rid of the settlements is evidently part of “peace” — and, I argue, is a necessary forerunner not merely to “peace” but even to realistic negotiation for “peace”.

Therefore, the USA, UN, EU, Russia, turkey, Brazil, India, etc., etc., should resolve collectively, in the UNSC by preference, but in the UNGA if the USA is unable to break the chains that bind it, to require Israel to remove settlers, settlements, and wall, and to do it according to a set and ascertainable schedule of observable milestones, with sanctions of some sort as the stick to secure performance.

This program would be easy to agree to, because the international law is well-settled. Sanctions might be massive (shock and awe) or gradually increasing.

This program would not aim at ending the occupation, merely making Israel conduct the occupation legally.

(Requiring Israel to stop using deadly force to put down non-violent demonstrations — a la the Arab spring in Egypt — would also be a help.)

My anticipation is that Israel would find it far easier to negotiate peace if it had no settlers at all in the occupied territories than it does now, with about 10% of Israel’s population living there.

Moreover, it seems likely that two factors would lead toward peace if this project were undertaken.

First, if the period for removal (of settlers, settlements, wall) were lengthy — say a year rather than a month — Israel might be motivated to negotiate DURING the removal in order to arrive at peace in time to avoid the need to complete the removal, say while the settlers and settlements closest to the Old City of Jerusalem were as yet un-removed.

Second, the show of strength whereby the nations of the UNSC (or UNGA) got their “act together” to create a program of enforcement sanctions would persuade not merely the government of Israel but its electorate that the world was changed, that Israel’s external circumstances were altered, and that a law-respecting and human-rights-respecting Israel would find a far easier path in the world than an autocratic, peace-denying Israel.

At all events, the nations of the world have not yet tried co-ordinated action on any project related to Israel/Palestine. If they would be willing to co-ordinate on any project at all, a project to enforce well-settled international law looks a lot more likely to succeed as a joint project than any other project and looks far more likely a project that they could succeed at than drafting and imposing a “peace treaty” would ever be.

Nadine writes: “Luke, if you have a section of land belonging to a defunct foreign empire, inhabited by a mix of ethnicities and religions, none of whom are used to exercising political control, none of whom have national identities that reach beyond the local town or tribe, to whom does that section of land now rightly belong?”

As a moral argument this is sheer insanity driven by desperation. Either we are going to live in a world in which the relations between states are governed by principles of reason and justice or by force and fraud. In this nuclear age I prefer the former. WigWag appears to be planning for WWIII.

“WigWag appears to be planning for WWIII.” (Luke Lea)

The civilizational conflict between Islam and the West is of ancient origin. It waxes and wanes. During the Post War years it was subsumed into the conflict between the Russians and their allies and the United States and its allies. It has now reemerged. The dispute between Israelis and Palestinians is merely one battle in a much larger confrontation. That this is a painful message to hear doesn’t make it any less salient. Try as they might, American elites can’t wish this dispute away nor does pretending it doesn’t exist improve the situation; in fact, it makes it worse.

There are times that the conflict between Islam and the West will turn violent. While thankfully, Europeans and Americans only occasionally experience this violence in the form of terrorist attacks, Christians in Egypt, Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Ethiopia and elsewhere experience the paroxysms of violence that stem from this conflict on a continuous basis. So do Jews in Israel and Hindus in India.

Much of the battle that Luke Lea alludes to is not violent but is fought in the realm of ideas and rhetoric. It is more akin to the Cold War between the West and communism than it is to the hot war between the allies and axis powers during World War II.

The battle between the West and Islam that many want to pretend doesn’t exist, needs to be fought with the same steely determination that the West brought to the Cold War battle against the Soviets. Of course, in those days, American and European elites led the charge instead of cowering in a corner and pretending that everything was just fine. A good argument can be made that it was the Christian heritage of American elites that provided the strength they needed to lead the fight during the Cold War. A good argument can also be made that the rampant secularlism that now characterizes American elites is responsible for the cultural relativism that now saps American strength.

To prevail in a conflict, the first thing you need to do is recognize that a conflict exists. When the conflict is primarily one of ideas, if you want to prevail you need to be convinced that your ideas are superior to the ideas held by your adversary. The American public understands this; recent European elections suggest that European citizens are also coming to understand it. Unfortunately American and European elites do not. Mired as they are in the circular reasoning of cultural relativism, Western elites have come to defend with the same vigor Western enlightenment ideals and the values and mores that characterize the backwards Islamic world.

Those who are blind to the reality that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is merely a small sliver of this larger confrontation will never be in a position to midwife reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. The reality is that the nature of Islam as it is currently conceived by tens if not hundreds of millions of practicing Muslims, makes that reconciliation impossible, at least for the time being.

The European world, exhausted by two world wars and the Cold War seems to be incapable of serving as an ally in this new war of ideas against Islam although there are some reasons to believe that European citizens wish to be more proactive on this front than their elites do. European populism has always had a much uglier tint that Jacksonian populism in the United States so it is hard to know whether or not to root for an awakening of European populism.

The question is whether the United States still has the fortitude to lead the fight against this old enemy and whether, at the same time, it can compete with potential new adversaries likely to be found in Asia. To do so, the United States will need the assistance of new allies; it would be foolish to assume that Europe and Japan are up to the job. That’s why improving relations with India is so important; it’s why building positive relationships with China’s Asian neighbors is so important and it’s why a real as opposed to fake “reset” with Russia is so important.

Clearly the Obama Administration, whose idea of engaging the Islamic World mostly centers on genuflecting to radical ideas, can’t be counted on. That’s why I hope Obama is defeated in the next election even though his Republican opponents hold economic ideas that are as daft as Obama’s foreign policy ideas are.

We need stronger Presidential leadership. One good place to start would be jettisoning the idea that Israel or the West is responsible for the Palestinian “refugee” problem in the Arab world.

After more than half a century, that problem belongs squarely in the lap of the people that are responsible for prolonging the suffering; the backwards Arab countries themselves.

“If you want to prevail you need to be convinced that your ideas are superior to ideas held by your adversary.” Thanks, WigWag, for two days worth of amplification to ‘ancient conflict’ implied in WRM’s White House Down in Middle East.

The greater Gush-Dan-Tel-Aviv-Yafo metropolitan area has roughly the same size, population, and density as the Gaza Strip. And, like Gaza, most people there are “refugees” in the sense that their parents or grandparents were forced to flee their homelands over the last century.

Before WWII, the population of Warsaw was roughly a third Jewish. Likewise Baghdad. Thessaloniki, Greece was close to 50% Jewish. None of these cities has a Jewish population to speak of today. And none of those people left by choice.

If you ask residents of Tel Aviv about this today, they may feel some resentment about it, but I doubt they think about it much. In any case, they’re not threatening to kill anybody unless they can “return” to Thessaloniki, etc.

In fact, Everyone in Israel today wants to live in Tel-Aviv, despite the traffic, noise, and the unbearable heat that accumulates between the narrowly spaced buildings. The city keeps winning awards in travel magazines as being one of the world’s best party towns.

Is the problem in Gaza really a problem of “refugees” per se?

How do you presume to discuss a solution to this problem when even you are unable to mention the fact that one party does not even recognize the other side’s right to exist? Or worse, wants to exterminate the other side? How ironic that that you write about how clueless our elites are and the fecklessness of our leaders….

Thanks for your great comments, Wig. You’ve really taken us to school with your remarks and I’ve enjoyed them. The link to the Muller article works fine. It was very interesting. It would be great to hear Meade’s views about the Palestinian refugees referencing all the other refugee groups that Muller talks about. I wasn’t aware of how many different groups were exiled after the Second World War. I had always thought the experience of the Palestinians was relatively unique. Obviously it wasn’t.

I also enjoyed Naif Mabat’s comment. How far is Tel Aviv from Gaza? At most its 50 miles. Yet the Jewish exiles who arrived penniless in Tel Aviv have turned it into one of the most desirable cities in the world to live in. The penniless Palestinians who arrived in Gaza have created nothing but a cesspool. They would like us to believe that their failure is a result of the fact that Jews lived in Gaza from 1967 until they left in the mid 1990s. They also blame Jews for having the nerve to respond when rockets are launched from Gaza towards their school buses.

Is there anything else we need to know about the difference between Arabs and Jews or am I missing something?

While some of the comments from fellow readers about the reset with Russia may well have merit and while acknowledging that Palestinian refugees (and their descendants) may have their leaders to blame, I want to thank Walter Russell Mead for his incisive analysis which was brone out by the Nakba events. Recognizing my own hyperbole, he is a national treasure.
Thanks also to the authors of comments, containing substative points and intelligent rejoinders.
I fear that the President and many on his staff are unwilling to face the reality Mead describes. Part of the problem is that that our current and prior administrations have taken at face value statements by Palestinians that they favor a two-state solution, even though no PA leader has stated that he will agree to only a limited right of return. Abbas’ piece in the NYT is indicative. Benny Morris has recognized that there were some expulsions, but Abbas statement appears to be directed at those favoring a one-state solution:

“It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued. Indeed, it was the descendants of these expelled Palestinians who were shot and wounded by Israeli forces on Sunday as they tried to symbolically exercise their right to return to their families’ homes.”

On the Israeli side, while I personally agree with Livni that Netanyahu’s response to events has been less than creative and lacks vision, a Livni stewardship (which I would support were I an Israeli voter) would change little. Given the Palestinian leaders’ panicked reacton to disclosure of the Palestinian papers indicating a narrowing of differences, it does not appear (to me) that Palestinian leader would accept only a token right or return or even a land swap. Indeed, the Arab Spring — giving a voice to the “Arab street” may have retarded hopes for progress — as if the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation weren’t enough.

(Worth reading – if available by Alon Pinkas, former Consul General of Israel in New York and very dovish:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/Article.aspx?id=220826&prmusr=fFA%2f2WBaXGuvZjssj79Myd6mS8MWD%2b5e0839z2YJCucAMGK4fYIjB%2fQaOaQ3LKtb

I recently read Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete which recounts the history of the British Mandate, and it supports Mr. Holsinger’s sketch of the population situation as well as highlighting the grievous civilians losses due to famine and disease that accompanied the British conquest of Palestine.

One of the points that surprised me in Segev’s account was the Arab solidarity (both Muslim and Christian) against the Jewish immigration in public, even as so many of them freely sold the land to the Jewish immigrants.

Ultimately, I find myself drawn the somewhat pessimistic conclusion voiced above that war and neglect will ultimately resolve the issue. Too many of the Palestinian community reject conceding the verdict of arms reached in 1949, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The allure of a single decisive victory to overturn the status quo has proven too great to compete with reaching a two state solution. So Israel forts up behind their fence, buys ABM systems, promises MAD on the Muslim world if they are put on the receiving end of WMDs and various Muslim leaders use the conflict and fight to the last Palestinian to advance their own agendas.

I’ll certainly concede that is a tragic reading the situation. Ultimately, I think that Dr. Mead has the sequence of resolution reversed. Spending lots of money to resettle and/or compensate the Palestinians should only be the consequence of their acceptance of a two state solution. Spending money ahead of agreement seems likely onto to provide resources that are ultimately funneled into violent resistance (insofar as money is fungible, one can argue that even current UN and US aid ends up indirectly subsidizing ongoing terrorism against Israel).

A perfect example of what I previously stated about anti Semites posing as “reasonable Middle East experts” has appeared from someone named [name deleted --ed].

Of course these people will retort, as always, that they are not anti Semitic but anti-Israel. Then they will complain that saying anything against Israel does not make them a Jew hater.

Well I am here to tell you that after a career spending 20% of my time in Europe and Asia I was continuously (in Europe)confronted with anti Semitism posing as acceptable truisms. Comments such as “the Jews are all crooks… the Jews are corrupt and greedy etc etc.” And this type of conversation went on in front of me when they knew my wife and daughters were Jewish! Why? Because of the assumption that what they said was common knowledge and everyone knew it to be true so no big deal.

Anti-Semitism can be seen between the lines of commentary that poses as “constructive criticism”. Saying the Jews have to do this and that, and give 100% from their side or suffer some kind of vague consequences shows an absolute lack of a balanced view of reality.

Israel is the ONLY Democracy in the Middle East. The other governments are unsavory corrupt dictatorships who contantly use the Palestinians for bait-and-switch and misdirection.

Israel has tried to settle with the Palestinians over and over but as in the Clinton talks the Arabs show they are not willing to settle until the Jewish state is eliminated.

And telling the Jews they have to give up East Jerusalem and go back to pre 1967 borders will NEVER happen for strategic reasons so why do people demand such a thing? Because in reality they also want to see the destruction of the Jewish state. Does anybody really believe that Israel giving up East Jerusalem and the Golan will NOT lead to their destruction? Well I got a bridge in Brooklyn I will sell you cheap

Everything bad that happens in the region is not Israel’s fault. Sometimes they become overbearing but that is a lot different than sending young girls in with bombs on their chests to blow up busloads of school girls.

Moral relativity has really destroyed people’s ability to see things clearly and logically. It is the part of PC that is most destructive to our nation, values and way of life.
JLK

Tom Holsinger says, “A realist in the Obama administration would make the same calculations European governments have – that no resolution short of genocide is possible in the ME and genocide won’t happen, so the Obama administration, as well as European governments, are all free to be irresponsible and cater to their domestic constituencies’ anti-Semitism.”

The European governments are in the happy position of being able to cater to their hearts content without ever being held responsible for a solution, or blamed for the lack of same. Obama is not this lucky.

So you are saying, in effect, that Obama made a big whoop-de-doo over his signature foreign policy initiative, to which he appointed George Mitchell on the second day of his administration, knowing beforehand it would be an utter flop, to which his name and US prestige would be inextricably linked? Not very smart diplomacy, that.

No, I fear the answer is simpler and more dire: Obama drank the Kool-Aide. Knowing nothing about the Middle East but the “narrative” fed to him by his buddy Rashid Khalidi and backed up by the “realists”, he really believed the “get tough on Israel” approach would work.

Luke, your whole explanation sounds very plausible. Unfortunately, it is an exercise in fiction because you know so little of the real history. There were no “Palestinians” in 1948. There were only Arab refugees from Palestine. The only people called “Palestinians” in 1948 were the Zionists. They were the only people hoping to make a country out of Palestine. Go read contemporary accounts and see for yourself.

The Palestinians have acquired a national identity since then, chiefly since they mostly came under one government — which was Israel’s, in 1967. All their universities were founded after 1967, did you know that? The Jordanians did not allow it.

Most of the Arab refugees from Palestine in 1948 had not been there long. They had migrated in to partake in the economic development. That is why the special UN organization devoted to Palestinian refugees, UNWRA, only required that Palestinian refugees show evidence of two years of residence in Palestine to qualify.

All other refugees in the world are handled by the UN High Commission on Refugees, which requires twenty years residence to qualify.

The Arab refugees from Palestine were not going to some alien region, but areas that were culturally similar to Arab Palestine, which they had often just from themselves.

It’s a pretty good post, in its recommendations for a more conservative (small-c) U.S. approach to assisting the peace process.

But I think the post could use an update on one issue, or perhaps that issue deserves a second post: From Yaacov Lazowick’s blog, with a link to a very candid interview:

***Anyone who wanders around the West Bank (admittedly a very very very small subset of the people with an opinion on the matter) knows perfectly well that the settlements aren’t growing, and haven’t been growing much for at least the past 5-6 years, not to mention the mildly relevant fact that there aren’t any new ones being built at all.

Sadly, this is true also in Jerusalem, where Netanyahu’s rhetoric has been quite decisive: Jerusalem is our capital and we’ll build in it as needed. Now the minister of Housing and Construction admits as much openly.

[ http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/shas-minister-east-jerusalem-construction-blocked-due-to-netanyahu-s-pledge-to-u-s-1.356317 ]

There are no large construction projects happening in East Jerusalem (and precious few small ones, either).***

Luke, you might consider how many of the 1917 inhabitants of Palestine lived in the area comprising 1949 Israel, as opposed to the West Bank. Population density varied significantly from one area to another based on the availability of water, soil fertility, etc.

An eonormous amount of backbreaking labor on the Zionist kibbutzes between the World Wars went into soil reclamation, primitive (low energy) irrigation systems, etc.

I would be interested in your reaction to the speech today.

A perspicacious and illuminating article.

I’m commenting on WRM’s belief that a total freeze would have been a smart move.

Political factors aside, at issue is the reality that this severely affects actual citizens and is thus extremely difficult to implement.

A question arises from norms elsewhere. I live in Canada where there are land disputes everywhere. More than 100% of British Columbia is claimed by various native tribes. I’ve never heard of a building freeze. How about in the USA which has had (still does?) similar problems?

I don’t see how a freeze could be productive except in the final stages of a real peace negotiation where there was doubt about the designation of a particular piece of land. If freezes became part of all negotiations it would be unattractive for Israel to even enter into them.

As a matter of detail and as memory serves: Israel did impose a building freeze for a period, but not in Jerusalem. Clinton praised that but the administration then harshly criticized Netanyahu over the building announcement during Biden’s visit. I took that to be a bit of opportunistic backstabbing that signaled hostility to Israel, not conducive to trust.