Peacelessness

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia:
Israel’s Missing Peace Partner

By Abraham Berkowitz and Tom A. Milstein

May 13, 2008

Does any diplomacy have a more sordid history than the peace process? From its inception at
Madrid, through its many reincarnations (the Oslo Accords, Oslo II, the Hebron Agreement, the
Wye River Memorandum, the Sharm el-Sheikh Memorandum, the Camp David 2000 Summit,
the Taba Summit, the Beirut Summit, the Quartet, the Road Map, the Annapolis Conference – the
list goes on), no initiative in international relations has ever been more loudly ballyhooed or
proven so bereft of positive results (and replete with their opposite – disappointment, terror, and
bloodshed), than the Middle East peace process. And this despite a history of unilateral concessions
by Israel to the Palestinians, both implemented and offered, that would have shocked and
awed earlier paragons of “peace with the Arabs” in Israeli political history.

The peace process is truly the famous snake of Gnostic symbolism – “My end is my beginning” –
which grows by devouring itself. No matter how humiliating or grotesque the actual outcome of
each of its initiatives in terms of crashed hopes and escalated terrorism and violence, it simply
refuses to die. It always returns, somehow strengthened and renewed by each new debacle. No
wonder many wonder if this “magical” rebirth somehow masks a hidden agenda that has more to
do with compromising basic Zionist values – the unity of Jerusalem, the territorial sanctity of the
Land of Israel – than with its ostensible goal of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
There is a certain paranoid charm to this dismal suspicion. There may even be a measure of truth
in it. But we do not believe that the ultimate “secret” to the peace process snake’s many lives lies
in a diplomatic conspiracy to undermine Israel. The real explanation is more mundane and political.
The peace process endures because most Israelis continue to believe that there is no viable alternative
to it. Public opinion polling shows a consistent majority in support of this proposition,
even though the same polls also reveal deep pessimism on the part of this same majority that
peace is actually attainable.

The reason for this apparent paradox lies in the transformed nature of the Middle East conflict.
Israel’s main security threat no longer comes from massed Arab armies on her borders. The Camp
David accords – the only “peace process” that actually worked – put an end to that threat by
yanking Egypt out of the Arab military front against Israel. The nation no longer faced the mortal
danger of a two-front war; no viable Arab military coalition against Israel could be assembled
without the participation of the Egyptian army.

As this reality sank in on the Arabs, their tactics shifted, from pan-Arab nationalism to Palestinian
nationalism and Islamic fascism. Against these new threats, the prowess of the IDF proved to be
less of a bulwark. In some ways, it even became a liability, as the “David vs. Goliath” image
slipped away from Israel and more and more became the (spurious) possession of stone-throwing
Palestinian youth. The stark reality was that a military solution to Israel’s security problems ceased to be viable. Palestinian nationalism and Islamic fascism do not pose a military threat to
Israel. Terror, however monstrous in its effects, will never defeat the IDF or drive the Jewish people
from their land. The threat is political – less tangible, but no less sinister, than the previous
military threat.

The people of Israel grasp this. They sense that no military solution to the Palestinian problem
exists, that the ball has bounced into a different court, the court of politics and diplomacy. In this
court, the peace process appears to be the only game in play. And so, no matter how fruitless that
process has been, they conclude that the only conceivable alternative to it – direct military action
– is no alternative at all, but merely a rationalization for endless bloody stalemate, punctuated by
periodic asymmetric warfare yielding little except casualties and recriminations.

The absence of an effective alternative, however, does not guarantee the success of a fundamentally
flawed policy. And the peace process is so flawed, which is why it always fails.

The peace process is premised on the assumption that some sort of permanent accommodation is
possible between Israel and the Palestinians. A corollary of this assumption is that since Israel
already has a state, accommodation implies that the Palestinians ought to emerge from the process
with a state as well. A state implies territorial sovereignty, recognized borders, a capitol, and
other generally acknowledged attributes of national independence. The details of all these attributes
constitute the stumbling blocks of the peace process. Inability to agree on them has led to the
string of failures which mark each phase in the history of the process.

The peace process always fails because it has been structured from the ground-up, rather than
from the sky-down. A top-down view emphasizes the regional and global factors necessary for an
Israeli-Palestinian accommodation, rather than beginning with the actual facts and players on the
ground in the conflict area. The correct approach to making the peace process actually work to
produce peace should focus on how to realign regional, international and transnational forces so
that negotiations between the actual parties “on the ground” have a chance of yielding practical
results.

The only peace process that ever actually worked – the Camp David Accords – proceeded in exactly
this fashion – from the sky-down. The daunting task of actually implementing peace between
Egypt and Israel came after the two nation’s leaders had taken daring and courageous steps
to reach out to one another, astounding not only all the region’s other nations, but indeed the entire
world – most especially their own native populations. When the Mid-East conflict still took
the form of a primarily national struggle between the Arab states and Israel, the key to neutralizing
the conflict lay in a series of first steps at the leadership level of the two principal combatants,
leaving the laborious but now-soluble details of actual conflict resolution for later.

Each leader made compromises with the other in order to achieve success at Camp David which
remain controversial in their national communities to this day. In some quarters of Israel, Menachem
Begin is still reviled as a traitor for returning the Sinai to Egypt. Anwar Sadat paid with
his life for his dedication to ending the conflict. Nevertheless, the Accord has held, and no Arab
war against Israel has occurred (or can occur) since Egypt opted out of the Arab anti-Israel military
front. This was a tremendous victory for peace and for the national security of both nations.
If the politics of “sky-down” was key to the success of the Camp David Accords, why do the
promoters of the peace process in its present form keep mindlessly insisting on attempting to restore
the process from the ground up? Road maps and shelf agreements are only the latest in a
host of failed “blueprints” for progress toward peace that have emphasized “confidence building

measures” and “interim steps” ad infinitum, all of which have failed miserably to produce the intended
results and most of which have actually engendered additional friction, conflict and enmity.
Reformulating the peace process in terms of the Begin-Sadat model means, first and foremost,
taking into consideration the tremendous change in the character of the Middle East conflict that
occurred in the wake of the success of that model, from the military to the political theater. When
this shift occurred, the leadership of the anti-Israel cause, also shifted: from the Arab nation with
the most powerful army, to the Arab nation with the most political power. Only one state fits this
definition, by virtue of its custodianship of Islam’s two holy sites, Mecca and Medina, and its
parallel mastery over the world’s most powerful wealth machine, the Oil Cartel: the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia, whose twin religious and economic roles have endowed it with vast political
power.

For the peace process to work in the post-Camp David Accords Mid-East environment, the Saudi
leadership must play the same vanguard role vis-à-vis Israel that Egypt’s Sadat did in 1977. This
requirement is based not just on the analogy to success of the Camp David Accords, compelling
though that analogy is. It derives even more powerfully from the political realities on the ground
of the conflict itself. The Palestinian movement, in both its Palestinian Authority and Hamas incarnations,
is deeply indebted to and profoundly influenced by Saudi economic largesse and Wahabi
religious influence.

The fact that the Saudis play this role behind the scenes rather than openly should not be allowed
to discount the enormous effect on all shades of Palestinian opinion which a dramatic Saudi overture
to Israel would have. And not just on Palestinian opinion – a corresponding sea change in
Israeli opinion, even religious Zionist opinion, toward the prospect of a successful peace process
resolving the Mid-East conflict, would also occur. Matters now considered non-negotiable would
come to be seen in a new light – the light of civil relations between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews
and Muslims. The settlers might feel obliged to make painful compromises – but no more painful
than those they would ask of their Palestinian, Muslim and Saudi neighbors.
The actual details of how this unwinding of the Mid-East conflict might work itself out are beyond
the scope of this article. Indeed, it is our core thesis that these details ought properly to be
addressed after, not before, the leadership breakthrough that is their prerequisite. They are not
now the proper subject of any realistic approach to a viable peace process in the Mid-East. What
is proper, is to consider the state of current Saudi diplomacy regarding the peace process. That
consideration is not very encouraging, but it is not altogether discouraging either. Saud al-Faisal,
the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, did break precedent (under intense American pressure, to
be sure) and attend the latest peace process conference at Annapolis, Maryland, on Nov. 27, 2007.
But he did so most grudgingly, and stated that he would not shake the hand of the Israeli representative
nor even converse with her during the summit. He was true to his word. This performance
was far from what is needed.

But the vicissitudes of Annapolis and its aftermath should not cloud the essential desideratum of
peace in the Middle East, which is that the ground-up approach has failed miserably, and only the
sky-down approach has any chance of success. That means that it is time for Saudi Arabia to
show the statesmanship and courage that its tremendous religious and economic weight in the
world require of it. The demand for such a role should become both the cardinal element in the
opposition’s critique of the peace process in its present form, and the keystone of a new peace
process that could actually work.
 
The U.S. State Department is the main promoter of the “ground-up” model. This unrelenting
dedication to a failed model of diplomacy suggests what the real “hidden agenda” of the official
peace process is: to shield Saudi Arabia from having to play a leadership role in bringing about
peace in the Middle East. But this agenda is in contradiction with America’s oft-declared commitment
to the noble goal of peace in the Middle East. There cannot be a peace process unless
Saudi Arabia and Israel join hands in taking the risks necessary to bring it about.

In the absence of such boldness and courage, and of a U.S. State Department committed to helping
rather than hindering its expression, there can be no viable peace process in the Middle East.

Marxism for the Orthodox

Orthodox Marxism

(Marxism for the Orthodox)

by Tom Milstein

Karl Marx, whose entire theory of history revolved notoriously around the concept of class, distinguished between two types of class identity, or consciousness: a class “in itself,” and a class “for itself.”

A “class in itself” was simply a social group whose objective circumstances rendered it a class as Marx defined classes – for example peasants in feudal society, or workers in industrial capitalist society. According to Marx, a class occupied a fixed, objective relationship to the “means of production,” whatever that happened to be in a given historical epoch – the land in feudalism’s rural agrarian economy, factories in capitalism’s urban industrial system.

A “class for itself” introduced a subjective dimension into Marx’s historical analysis, the dimension of consciousness. A class for itself was simply a class in itself that had become aware of itself as an historical actor. For example, the embryonic bourgeoisie of early and middle feudalism in Europe was a class in itself, because it clustered together in trading towns in the interstices of feudal society, occupied a fixed position in relationship to the means of production (trading the products of feudalism for profit), and developed a culture and way of life unique to itself. But this bourgeoisie did not become a class for itself until after the Protestant Reformation, and especially the Enlightenment, which caused members of this class to begin thinking of themselves as the representatives of society’s general interest. Soon the bourgeoisie was plotting to overthrow the twin pillars of feudalism: the Roman Catholic Church and the monarchy-aristocracy.

In other words, the European (and American) bourgeoisie transformed itself from a mere “class in itself” into a “class for itself” – but only after it had managed to transmute the other-worldly ascetic dream of Calvinism into a secular call to revolutionary arms, so to speak (of course, this reinterpretation process was helped along by such unpleasant historical events as the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the French Protestants).

A recent column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Sun by Meyrav Wurmser entitled “The New Focal Point of Israel’s Schisms” (attached) got me to thinking about these arcane Marxian notions. Ms. Wurmser is described in her bio as “a neoconservative scholar of the Arab world. She is married to David Wurmser, Middle East Adviser to US Vice President Dick Cheney. She is also a member of the conservative US think tank, the Hudson Institute.” Be all that as it may, the focus point of her “New Focal Point” column is the Israeli Army, and in particular, the great prominence of kippah seruga – “knit-cap” religious Orthodox – in the IDF, especially in the elite combat units which make up the backbone of its fighting forces, and in the middle and upper (although not the topmost) tiers of the officer corps.

Ms. Wurmser notes that membership in these military units has traditionally been identified with “’ownership’ of the nation,” a Zionist property title which arose when left-wing secular  Kibbutz youth supplied the army’s elite cadres. Now of course these committed youth have ceased to exist or have other interests. Their place has been filled by young people from the religious nationalist milieu in Israel. And therein, says Ms. Wurmser, lies the problem – a problem, as her article title suggests, of schism.

She implies, without quite saying so, that the reason – or at least, a reason – for Israel’s military debacle in Prime Minister Olmert’s 2006 War in Lebanon, was rabbinical disapproval of the war, rooted in fear of the consequences of victory: “…after Prime Minister Olmert stated that a victory in Lebanon would provide the impetus for another disengagement in the West Bank, leaders of the religious national settlement movement, rabbis, and thousands of settlers, sent word to their sons in the military telling them to disobey military orders that would take them to war.”

From this insinuation, she proceeds to the main point of her article, which is that if the Annapolis Conference and its aftermath lead to peace agreements requiring extensive Israeli territorial concessions to a Palestinian State, “future withdrawals may turn Israel’s defense forces into the focal point of the country’s schisms.” In other words, the new Zionist title-holders in the IDF cannot be trusted to carry out the orders of the duly constituted civilian authorities of Israel. They will place their loyalty to “the Scroll” over their duty to the State.

Personally, I came away from this piece with the sinister feeling that Ms. Wurmser is hiding behind the role of Cassandra in order to proffer strategic advice to Israel’s American Jewish enemies about how to take apart the Zionist entity. Given her sterling credentials (she is after all an associate of Richard Perle!), I hope I’m wrong about that. But right or wrong as I may be about her motivations, she has laid out a blueprint for the demolition of Israeli society. And that blueprint takes me right back to Karl Marx’s observations about class.

If we strip out of Marx’s ideas about class his “means of production” gobbledegook, we are left with some very cogent political sociology. For the religious Zionist segment of  Israeli society fits perfectly the definition of a class “in itself” that has not achieved the level of consciousness necessary to become a class “for itself.” It has stumbled into possession of the keys to the Israeli Kingdom in a fit of utter absent-mindedness, filling the ideological vacuum left by the implosion of secular Left-wing Zionism without the slightest intention of using this power politically in order to become the new masters of the State.

This ambiguous role, the role of a class in itself which has been propelled by blind historical forces into the position of having power without any corresponding will to power, is a prescription for political and social suicide. To possess power unconsciously, with no corresponding program for using power in order to transform society and thereby legitimate that power, is to stimulate in the minds of one’s enemies morbid fear and fierce hatred. Shy protestations of political innocence and disinterest do not appease these enemies, they only aggravate their fear and hatred.

The religious Zionist community in Israel finds itself in the potentially tragic role of a class in itself which has unconsciously ascended to an extremely dangerous and exposed position of power. In order to survive, it must negotiate the difficult but feasible ascent to true power – the power which is conferred upon a class for itself, a class which understands and accepts its historical mission and embraces its political destiny. If religious Zionism shrinks from this challenge, Ms. Wurmser has accurately presented the consequences – the schismatic disintegration of the central institution of the State of Israel, which is not the laughing-stock government, but the IDF. Such a disintegration will not be bloodless. And most of the blood will be ours.

What's Orthodox in Karl Marx?

Orthodox Marxism

(Marxism for the Orthodox)

Karl Marx, whose entire theory of history revolved notoriously around the concept of class, distinguished between two types of class identity, or consciousness: a class “in itself,” and a class “for itself.”

A “class in itself” was simply a social group whose objective circumstances rendered it a class as Marx defined classes – for example peasants in feudal society, or workers in industrial capitalist society. According to Marx, a class occupied a fixed, objective relationship to the “means of production,” whatever that happened to be in a given historical epoch – the land in feudalism’s rural agrarian economy, factories in capitalism’s urban industrial system.

A “class for itself” introduced a subjective dimension into Marx’s historical analysis, the dimension of consciousness. A class for itself was simply a class in itself that had become aware of itself as an historical actor. For example, the embryonic bourgeoisie of early and middle feudalism in Europe was a class in itself, because it clustered together in trading towns in the interstices of feudal society, occupied a fixed position in relationship to the means of production (trading the products of feudalism for profit), and developed a culture and way of life unique to itself. But this bourgeoisie did not become a class for itself until after the Protestant Reformation, and especially the Enlightenment, which caused members of this class to begin thinking of themselves as the representatives of society’s general interest. Soon the bourgeoisie was plotting to overthrow the twin pillars of feudalism: the Roman Catholic Church and the monarchy-aristocracy.

In other words, the European (and American) bourgeoisie transformed itself from a mere “class in itself” into a “class for itself” – but only after it had managed to transmute the other-worldly ascetic dream of Calvinism into a secular call to revolutionary arms, so to speak (of course, this reinterpretation process was helped along by such unpleasant historical events as the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the French Protestants).

A recent column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Sun by Meyrav Wurmser entitled “The New Focal Point of Israel’s Schisms” (attached) got me to thinking about these arcane Marxian notions. Ms. Wurmser is described in her bio as “a neoconservative scholar of the Arab world. She is married to David Wurmser, Middle East Adviser to US Vice President Dick Cheney. She is also a member of the conservative US think tank, the Hudson Institute.” Be all that as it may, the focus point of her “New Focal Point” column is the Israeli Army, and in particular, the great prominence of kippah seruga – “knit-cap” religious Orthodox – in the IDF, especially in the elite combat units which make up the backbone of its fighting forces, and in the middle and upper (although not the topmost) tiers of the officer corps.

Ms. Wurmser notes that membership in these military units has traditionally been identified with “’ownership’ of the nation,” a Zionist property title which arose when left-wing secular  Kibbutz youth supplied the army’s elite cadres. Now of course these committed youth have ceased to exist or have other interests. Their place has been filled by young people from the religious nationalist milieu in Israel. And therein, says Ms. Wurmser, lies the problem – a problem, as her article title suggests, of schism.

She implies, without quite saying so, that the reason – or at least, a reason – for Israel’s military debacle in Prime Minister Olmert’s 2006 War in Lebanon, was rabbinical disapproval of the war, rooted in fear of the consequences of victory: “…after Prime Minister Olmert stated that a victory in Lebanon would provide the impetus for another disengagement in the West Bank, leaders of the religious national settlement movement, rabbis, and thousands of settlers, sent word to their sons in the military telling them to disobey military orders that would take them to war.”

From this insinuation, she proceeds to the main point of her article, which is that if the Annapolis Conference and its aftermath lead to peace agreements requiring extensive Israeli territorial concessions to a Palestinian State, “future withdrawals may turn Israel’s defense forces into the focal point of the country’s schisms.” In other words, the new Zionist title-holders in the IDF cannot be trusted to carry out the orders of the duly constituted civilian authorities of Israel. They will place their loyalty to “the Scroll” over their duty to the State.

Personally, I came away from this piece with the sinister feeling that Ms. Wurmser is hiding behind the role of Cassandra in order to proffer strategic advice to Israel’s American Jewish enemies about how to take apart the Zionist entity. Given her sterling credentials (she is after all an associate of Richard Perle!), I hope I’m wrong about that. But right or wrong as I may be about her motivations, she has laid out a blueprint for the demolition of Israeli society. And that blueprint takes me right back to Karl Marx’s observations about class.

If we strip out of Marx’s ideas about class his “means of production” gobbledegook, we are left with some very cogent political sociology. For the religious Zionist segment of  Israeli society fits perfectly the definition of a class “in itself” that has not achieved the level of consciousness necessary to become a class “for itself.” It has stumbled into possession of the keys to the Israeli Kingdom in a fit of utter absent-mindedness, filling the ideological vacuum left by the implosion of secular Left-wing Zionism without the slightest intention of using this power politically in order to become the new masters of the State.

This ambiguous role, the role of a class in itself which has been propelled by blind historical forces into the position of having power without any corresponding will to power, is a prescription for political and social suicide. To possess power unconsciously, with no corresponding program for using power in order to restructure society and thereby to legitimate that power, is to stimulate in the minds of one’s enemies morbid fear and fierce hatred. Shy protestations of political innocence and disinterest do not appease these enemies, they only aggravate their fear and hatred.

The religious Zionist community in Israel finds itself in the potentially tragic role of a class in itself which has unconsciously ascended to an extremely dangerous and exposed position of power. In order to survive, it must negotiate the difficult but feasible ascent to true power – the power which is conferred upon a class for itself, a class which understands and accepts its historical mission and embraces its political destiny. If religious Zionism shrinks from this challenge, Ms. Wurmser has accurately presented the consequences – the schismatic disintegration of the central institution of the State of Israel, which is not the laughing-stock government, but the IDF. Such a disintegration will not be bloodless. And most of the blood will be ours.

White-eyes

The New York Times
January 14, 2007

For Human Eyes Only

By MICHAEL TOMASELLO

January 14, 2007

 

LeIpzig, Germany

COL. WILLIAM PRESCOTT is said to have prepared his troops for a charge from the British Army at the
Battle of Bunker Hill by telling his men, “Don’t one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”
If the opposing army had not been British men but rather a horde of charging chimpanzees, the American
troops would have been summarily overrun. Why? Because neither chimpanzees nor any of the other 220
species of nonhuman primates have whites of the eyes, at least not that can be easily seen. This means that if
their eyes are looking in a direction other than the one in which their heads are pointing, we can easily be
fooled about what they are looking at.

Why should humans be so different? And yet we are. We can’t fool anyone. The whites of our eyes are several times larger than those of other primates, which makes it much easier to see where the eyes, as opposed to the head, are pointed. Trying to explain this trait leads us into one of the deepest and most controversial topics in the modern study of human evolution: the evolution of cooperation.

The idea is simple. Knowing what another person is looking at provides valuable information about what she
is thinking and feeling, and what she might do next. Even young children know that when a person is looking
at one toy and not another, she most likely prefers that toy and may reach for it. Professional poker players
are often so worried about others reading their minds by reading their eyes that they wear sunglasses.
Evolutionarily, it is easy to see why it is to your advantage to be able to tell with maximum certainty where I
am looking. You may use this information to detect food you wouldn’t otherwise have seen, or to detect the
dominant male approaching in a fighting mood.

But evolution cannot select the color of my eyes based on advantages to you. Evolutionary theory tells us that, in general, the only individuals who are around today are those whose ancestors did things that were
beneficial to their own survival and reproduction. If I have eyes whose direction is especially easy to follow, it must be of some advantage to me.

If I am, in effect, advertising the direction of my eyes, I must be in a social environment full of others who are
not often inclined to take advantage of this to my detriment — by, say, beating me to the food or escaping
aggression before me. Indeed, I must be in a cooperative social environment in which others following the
direction of my eyes somehow benefits me. Of course, it’s possible that having large whites of the eyes serves some other purpose, like enabling me to advertise my good health to potential mates. But such an advantage would apply to other primates as well.

Cooperation, on the other hand, singles out humans, as humans coordinate activities to do such things as
construct buildings, create social institutions and even, paradoxically, organize armies for war.
In a recent experiment, our research team has shown that even infants — at around their first birthdays,
before language acquisition has begun — tend to follow the direction of another person’s eyes, not their
heads. Thus, when an adult looked to the ceiling with her eyes only, head remaining straight ahead, infants
looked to the ceiling in turn. However, when the adult closed her eyes and pointed her head to the ceiling,
infants did not very often follow.

Our nearest primate relatives, the African great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas) showed precisely
the opposite pattern of gaze following. When the human pointed her eyes only to the ceiling (head remaining
straight ahead), they followed only rarely. But when she pointed her head only (eyes closed) to the ceiling,
they followed much more often.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated that all great apes, including humans, follow the gaze direction of
others. But in previous studies the head and eyes were always pointed in the same direction. Only when we
made the head and eyes point in different directions did we find a species difference: humans are sensitive to
the direction of the eyes specifically in a way that our nearest primate relatives are not. This is the first
demonstration of an actual behavioral function for humans’ uniquely visible eyes.

Why might it have been advantageous for some early humans to advertise their eye direction in a way that
enabled others to determine what they were looking at more easily? One possible answer, what we have
called the cooperative eye hypothesis, is that especially visible eyes made it easier to coordinate close-range
collaborative activities in which discerning where the other was looking and perhaps what she was planning,
benefited both participants.

If we are gathering berries to share, with one of us pulling down a branch and the other harvesting the fruit, it
would be useful — especially before language evolved — for us to coordinate our activities and communicate our plans, using our eyes and perhaps other visually based gestures.

Infant research, too, suggests that coordinating visual attention may have provided the foundation for the
evolution of human language. Babies begin to acquire language through joint activities with others, in which
both parties are focused on the same object or task. That’s the best time for an infant to learn the word for the object or activity in question.

We are still a long way from figuring out why humans evolved to do so many complicated things together —
from building houses to creating universities to fighting wars. But the simple fact that we have evolved highly
visible eyes, to which infants attune even before language, supplies at least one small piece of the puzzle of
how.

Michael Tomasello is the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Extremism in Israel

POLITICS NOW

by Abraham Berkowitz & Tom Milstein

March 14, 2007

Religious Zionism, and the broader modern Orthodox movement, must call themselves to account: the opponents of the peace process have killed twice since the Oslo accords were signed, and both murderers were shelanu, from our camp. Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 innocent Arabs at the Maarat HaMachpaila — Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs — graduated from American modern Orthodoxy’s flagship institutions. And Yigal Amir, the admitted assassin of Yitzhaq Rabin, was a product of Israel’s Hesder program which combines Tora study with military service and is a current student at the Law School of Israel’s leading modern Orthodox university.

To be sure, by the time these men killed they were no longer true partisans of Religious Zionism or of modern Orthodoxy. Baruch Goldstein had become a follower of Meir Kahane long before he entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs on that fateful Purim day, while Yigal Amir appears to have been deeply entangled with Israel’s GSS when he pulled the trigger on Yitzhaq Rabin. But these facts, at most, only mitigate the responsibility.  They do not absolve us.  Both killers were educated at our institutions and grew up under our flag. In some perverse way, the education we gave them — or failed to give them — allowed them to be turned into deadly instruments. And so we must call ourselves to account and take stock of our movement.

But no honest accounting can be rendered until we first release ourselves from our humiliating dependence on the political ideologies our opponents. In recent times, this self-imposed political addiction has driven our movement to the Right side of the political spectrum. Since the early 1980’s, from about the time that Yitzhaq Shamir replaced Menachem Begin as the leader of the Likud Bloc, Religious Zionism practically ceased to function as an independent political movement.  Instead Religious Zionism nearly dissolved into the secular neo-conservatism and Cold War geopolitical calculations of Shamir’s Likud. During this period, Religious Zionism contributed little more than a religious or Biblical patina to the security arguments which Likud’s secular neo-conservatives advanced against world pressure to trade land for peace — pressure which they pretended was Communist (or “Leftist”) inspired. When the fall of the Soviet Union revealed that the true source of this pressure was not Communist or Leftist but rather American, our reliance on the Likud’s security-based arguments left us utterly disarmed. Most distressing of all, as part of our surrender to the secular Right, we allowed the tens of thousands of religious settlers in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the flower of our movement, to be turned into human pawns, hostages to the vicissitudes of the Likud’s strategic calculations and political ambitions.

But freeing ourselves from the suffocating embrace of the Right most emphatically does not mean returning to the arms of the Left. Israel’s political Left, the former socialist Zionists of the Labor Party and their anti-religious partners who currently constitute the Meretz Bloc, represents a political culture from which we were lucky to escape in 1977 following Menachem Begin’s first electoral victory. Already at that time, when the religious settlers in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza were still portraying themselves as the new halutzim, long before their settlements became “strategic assets,” it was already clear that the so-called traditional alliance between socialist and Religious Zionism had run its course. This alliance, which began in the pre-State period and lasted for the first thirty years of our national independence, led us to distort our world historical mission so as to better fit the socialist paradigm of our allies. And so, instead of building institutions to facilitate the ideals of Religious Zionism and the broader modern Orthodox movement we created miniature religious replicas of socialism’s grand institutions — a religious kibbutz movement, the Mizrachi bank, a religious workers union, and so on — which we then invested with great significance and too much influence.

But in 1967 we began a new course. The new generation of Religious Zionists who had grown up under Jewish sovereignty and who had been schooled by the late Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, determined to settle all of the new lands which had been won in the recent war in order to complete the Zionist revolution of “returning the children to their boundaries.” Their bold creation of “facts on the ground” propelled Religious Zionism onto the center stage of Israeli politics.  Taking an independent stand on the “domestic” question of the territories brought Religious Zionism face-to-face with the single most important issue in Israeli foreign policy:  the question of Israel’s final territorial boundaries.  This issue would shape not only Israel’s role in the Middle East but also its relationship with the great powers beyond the region and especially with its superpower patron, the United States of America, and thus also with the American Jewish Establishment.

Religious Zionism now more than ever needed its own approach to international relations, to the role of Israel among the nations.  But no such approach was forthcoming.

In the years since the 1967 war, modern Orthodoxy failed to advance any systematic approach to understanding the connection between Israel’s territorial boundaries and its relations to the nations. At a time when the strongest partisans of Religious Zionism were building settlements throughout the length and breadth of the Land of Israel, up to the Biblical borderline, modern Orthodoxy ignored the implications of this enterprise for the other nations of the world. Worse yet, we treated the entire matter as an internal Jewish affair, a battle between religion and secularism, as if the world outside was quite irrelevant to the debate over Israel’s proper boundaries. It was this blithe disregard of the outside world — so completely at variance with the engaged spirit of Modern Orthodoxy — that tore a gaping hole in our movement.  Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  Into the political vacuum which we created by our refusal to face the foreign policy implications of our own “domestic policy” values — i.e., our demand for recognition of the sanctity of the boundaries of Eretz Israel — flowed the looney messianism of Meir Kahane and his sad band of hardened police provocateurs and gullible teenagers.  It was this absurd, apolitical messianism which sprouted in our midst with such tragic consequences.

And so, when we call ourselves to account, we must recognize that what we need is politics now.  As a first step in this direction, we must provide our partisans with a sound and serious political alternative to the capitulation counseled by the Left and the hollow security arguments espoused by the Right.  This alternative must address the worldly significance of the Zionist revolution and especially of the “return of the children to their borders” without raising unrealistic, other-worldly expectations about the imminence of the Redemption.  The Redemption will no doubt come in its time, with or without a clap of thunder or a hail of bullets.  Meanwhile, we must go about our business of building the land while developing an answer to the very difficult question which we have avoided asking for the past thirty years: what will the “goyim”—the nations—say, and more importantly do, when we succeed in holding on to our entire patrimony, up to the Biblical boundary lines?

Mighty Hunters, but Lousy Mothers

The New York Times

Neanderthal Women Joined Men in the Hunt
By NICHOLAS WADE

December 5, 2006

A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that
occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by
two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.

Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and
women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main
occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in
an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.

Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large
game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown
those of the Neanderthals.

The Neanderthals endured for about 100,000 years, despite a punishing way of life. They
preyed on the large animals that flourished in Europe in the ice age like bison, deer, gazelles
and wild horses. But there is no evidence that they knew of bows and arrows. Instead, they
used stone-tipped spears.

Hunting large game at close range is perilous, and Neanderthal skeletons bear copious
fractures. Dr. Kuhn and Dr. Stiner argue that Neanderthal women and children took part in the
dangerous hunts, probably as beaters and blockers of exit routes.

Their argument, necessarily indirect, begins with the human hunter-gatherer societies, almost
all of which have a division of labor between the sexes.

At sites occupied by modern humans from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, a period known as the
Upper Paleolithic, there is good evidence of different occupations, from small animal and bird
remains, as well as the bone awls and needles used to make clothes. It seems reasonable to
assume that these activities were divided between men and women, as is the case with modern
foraging peoples.

But Neanderthal sites include no bone needles, no small animal remains and no grinding
stones for preparing plant foods. So what did Neanderthal women do all day?

Their skeletons are so robustly built that it seems improbable that they just sat at home looking
after the children, the anthropologists write. More likely, they did the same as the men, with
the whole population engaged in bringing down large game.

The meat of large animals yields a rich payoff, but even the best hunters have unlucky days.
The modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic, with their division of labor and diversified food
sources, would have been better able to secure a continuous food supply. Nor were they putting
their reproductive core — women and children — at great risk.

David Pilbeam, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard, said the Arizona researchers’ article was
“very stimulating and thoughtful” and seemed to be the first to propose a mechanism for why
Neanderthal populations declined.

Dr. Stiner said the division of labor between the sexes was likely to have arisen in a tropical
environment. Indeed, it may have provided the demographic impetus for modern humans to
expand out of Africa, she said.

A rival hypothesis proposed by Richard Klein of Stanford University holds that some cognitive
advance like the perfection of language underlay the burst of innovative behavior shown by
Upper Paleolithic people and their predecessors in Africa.

Why did the Neanderthals fail to adapt when modern humans arrived on their doorstep?
Under Dr. Klein’s hypothesis, the reason is simply that they were cognitively less advanced.
Dr. Stiner said that in her view there was not time for them to change their culture. “Although
there may have been differences in neurological wiring,” she said, “I think another very
important key is the legacy of cultural institutions about social roles.” Is there a genetic basis to
the division of labor that emerged in the modern human lineage? “It’s equally compelling to
argue that most or all of this has a cultural basis,” Dr. Stiner said. “That’s where it’s very
difficult for people like us and Richard Klein to resolve the basis of our disagreement.”

Land for Peace?

Land for War

by

Abraham Berkowitz, John Bradford, and Tom Milstein

7/19/2006

“Land for Peace” is now acknowledged by everyone to have failed. This failure should
have been recognized long ago, but hope triumphed again and again over reality and
“the dream” persisted in clouding the consciousness of the Israeli people.
Israel has her definitive Arab-Islamic answer to “Land for Peace”: war, war to the
uttermost, not just against the Hovels of the Settlers on the West Bank (demonized as
the source of all Israel’s problems), but even against the Palace of Israel itself, “Green
Line” Israel, Israel inside its “proper borders.”

“Land for Peace” used to be Israel’s grand strategy. It has failed. It is time to try “Land
for War.” The “Land for War” strategy is predicated on the failure of its predecessor. If
the Arabs will not make peace with Israel in return for the ceding of land conquered in
1967 and the founding of a Palestinian state on that land, it is time for Israel to turn the
tables and adopt the opposite approach: instead of giving up land in return for (the hope
of) peace, Israel should announce a schedule of annexations of the land formerly slated
for withdrawal. This schedule should be shaped by the continuation of the terrorist War
on Israel. Step one – in response to the attacks already carried out– should be the
immediate annexation by the State of Israel of the territory lying between Jerusalem and
Ma'aleh Adumim. This annexation should be declared irrevocable. The schedule should
then lay out further steps and stages of irreversible annexation of territories conquered
in the Six-Day War, each in response to terrorist attacks against Israel, in whatever form
they take and wherever they occur. If the terrorism does not stop, Israel should commit
to continued implementation of the schedule until nothing is left to annex.

What the “Land for War” strategy does is to effectively put the terrorists in charge of the
Israel’s annexation program. It says to them, “Every time you attack Israel, you enlarge
the Jewish State, and you correspondingly diminish the Arab patrimony. It’s your
decision.”

This strategy will throw the Arab world into crisis, because while the Islamic extremists
of Hamas and Hizbollah don’t give a fig for the cause of Arab nationalism, the Middle
Eastern states which nurture and appease them do. Therefore “Land for War” will drive
a wedge between Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism. It will put the Islamists in
the role of gravediggers of the Palestinian state. It forces them to argue openly for the
supremacy of Islam over nationality. This is the great socio-political chasm of the Middle
East. A strategy which exploits this chasm is a strategy for victory rather than stalemate
and confusion.

Israel is bravely responding, as any self-respecting nation would, to the acts of
aggression perpetrated against her. But mere war, past a certain point, will only
perpetuate Israel’s no-win strategy. The time for a resolution of the Israel-Arab conflict
is at hand. Given the total failure of “Land for Peace” as a strategy, the necessary
political dimension of this war can only be supplied by “Land for War.” Neither the
Middle Eastern states nor the terrorist organizations which they harbor care about the
pain and suffering which Israel’ s military measures will inflict. In fact, these measures
by themselves have the effect of uniting nationalists and Islamic terrorists in a common
cause against the Jews. But the unfolding spectacle of Israeli annexation of Judea and
Samaria, step by inexorable and irreversible step, at a pace and to an extent dictated by
the terrorists themselves – that will have the opposite effect. It will devastate the anti-
Israel consensus in the Middle East and place the blame for Israel’s territorial
aggrandizement squarely on her supposed arch-enemies.

“Land for War” speaks to the Arabs in a language they understand: the language of lost
territory, the real and just price for starting and losing a war.

Abraham Berkowitz holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in Political Science. He will be making
aliyah in August of this year.
John Bradford is an artist and teacher.
Tom Milstein is an Executive Director of a property management firm.
All currently reside in New York City.