Category Archives: The Middle East

Najwan Darwish on living in doubt

Leave a reply

(Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, from Najwan Darwish, Exhausted on the Cross, NYRB Books 2021.)

I don’t know the Arabic word that is the title of this poem. The English word can mean a logical fallacy–changing the meaning of a term between one part of an argument and another–or a deliberate trick. Macbeth calls a promise “that lies like truth” “th’Equiuocation of the Fiend.”

Deceit is a fault, but equivocation can also imply an inability to decide, or even a choice to remain undecided, like Keats’ “capab[ility] of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts. …” One can equivocate because several options seem attractive, or because all seem terrible.

I read Darwish as self-critical. He is confessing his equivocation, his failure (sometimes) to take a stand, much as, in “In Shatila,” he asks himself how he could have turned smilingly away from an old refugee:

How could you smile, indifferent
to the brackish water of the sea
while barbed wire wrapped around your heart?

How could you,
you son of a bitch?

But what should be expected of him? At a time when everyone is supposed to take one side, to state one truth–when we are all our own communications departments, and silence is called complicity–I resonate with the poet’s equivocation. His uncertainty becomes a doubt about who he is, and that doubt becomes the country he dwells in, wherever he goes. It’s the only country he has.

(By the way, I have no idea whether Darwish feels equivocal today, and I don’t mean to attribute any stance to him in this moment. The poem is several years old. It does speak to me today.)

Scatterplot of counties with % of veterans under 45 and % of Trump vote in 2016, showing a modest correlation.

the post-9/11 wars and Trump

Leave a reply

The image that accompanies this post is my graph of US counties.* The y-axis is Trump’s share of the vote in 2016. The x-axis is the percentage of each county’s population that consisted of veterans under the age of 45 in 2020. I chose that statistic as a rough proxy for direct involvement with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The correlation is modestly positive and statistically significant.

When I ran a regression to predict Trump’s 2016 vote in each county based on 1) the proportion of young veterans, 2) the degree to which the county is rural, 3) the proportion of the county that is non-Hispanic white, and 4) the proportion of the population that was born overseas, all of those variables except the last one were statistically significant and positive. That means that, after controlling for race and community type, the proportion of young veterans still predicts the Trump vote.

This is merely a cross-sectional relationship, and it would be worth introducing a temporal dimension by investigating whether and how votes changed as the post-9/11 wars unfolded.

The pattern that I show here is compatible with several hypotheses. For example, maybe some communities’ cultures and demographics inclined them both to military service and to supporting Trump, or maybe deep disillusionment with the wars turned some people toward Trump in 2016 because he purported that he had opposed US involvement.

I will not claim that the basic relationship shown here is very strong, and I share it mainly for full disclosure rather than to support an argumentative position. (I wouldn’t try to use the regression as the basis of a professional article.) Yet I continue to suspect that blowback from two protracted military disasters is one cause of our current political discontents.

Americans’ assessments of these wars are filtered through ideology and probably fall into at least three categories:

  1. The invasion of Iraq was imperialistic and intended to favor multinational corporations; thus it was unjust from the start.
  2. The invasions were altruistic, aimed at exporting human rights and democracy; and as such, they wasted US lives and resources. OR
  3. The defeats represent corruption or decadence that must be addressed by making the USA “stronger.”

Any of those views is compatible with deep distrust of US elites, and perhaps above all of Democratic Party leaders who supported the wars. Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans benefit from both 2 and 3.

*The graph doesn’t display about a dozen outlier counties that have very high veteran populations. See also the 2020 election in the shadow of the Iraq War; the impact of post 9/11 war on our politics, etc.

Peter Beinart interview on anti-Semitism and Middle East politics

Leave a reply

This is the video of yesterday’s conversation with Peter Beinart at Tufts:

I asked him:

  • What do you think is the relationship (if any) between rising anti-Semitism and rising criticism of Israel?
  • When is criticism of Israel anti-Semitic, and when isn’t it?
  • Is it important that we have dialogue about Israel/Palestine in places like Tufts? Why? What would be trying to accomplish?
  • In Jewish Currents in July, you wrote, “In mainstream American discourse, the word ‘anti-Palestinian’ barely exists. It is absent not because anti-Palestinian bigotry is rare but because it is ubiquitous. It is absent precisely because, if the concept existed, almost everyone in Congress would be guilty of it, except for a tiny minority of renegade progressives who are regularly denounced as antisemites.” Can you expand on that statement and talk a little more about why you focus on anti-Palestinian prejudice here, apart from Islamophobia or anti-Arab prejudice?
  • What should non-Jews know about Judaism to engage appropriately in civic life?
  • What is your own position on Israel/Palestine now, and how did you get there?
  • What would a one state solution look like? How would the state be organized?

the 2020 election in the shadow of the Iraq War

Leave a reply

Polls usually show that foreign policy is a low-priority issue in US political campaigns. This year is no exception: asked to choose one priority, just 13 percent of prospective voters recently selected foreign policy.

But I think the Iraq and Afghan wars influence Americans in deeper ways. These are not “foreign policy issues,” like how we should address Brexit or North Korea. They represent a wound that hasn’t been treated. The question on people’s minds is not, “What should we do about Iraq?” or even “What should have been done in 2001?” The question underneath people’s explicit thinking is: “What kind of people are in charge of our country?”

After all, the decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan caused about 60,000 US casualties. (That includes those killed or wounded but not suicides or PTSD cases.)

It is very hard to know how many Iraqis and Afghans have died, because the data are not available and because it’s debatable how much causal responsibility the US holds for the deaths of various combatants and civilians. However, by 2007, 53% of Iraqis were saying that “a close friend or relative” had “been hurt or killed in the current violence.”

The running tab for the two wars is about $6 trillion, which is about 30% of the goods and services that all Americans produce in a year.

And for all this sacrifice and damage, we have lost–failing to attain any of the original objectives of the Bush Administration. Iran has the most power in Iraq; we are negotiating a ceasefire with the Taliban, whom we supposedly defeated in 2002.

For some Americans, none of this may be very salient. But for others, it reflects a deep betrayal by the global elites who sent our men and women into danger overseas. For still others, it is a classic case of American imperialism running amok. Considering the magnitude of the disaster, the debate has been relatively marginal or even submerged. But I think it’s always just below the surface.

Consider the record of these presidential candidates since 2008:

  • Hillary Clinton: votes for the war, apparently in large part because she, her husband, and other senior members of her own party favored it (not just because of the Bush Administration). She later calls her vote her mistake but still feels qualified to run for president in 2008 and 2016 and to serve as a hawkish Secretary of State in between. Thus she is partly responsible for managing the war after having helped to start it. When she comes before the voters, she loses both times.
  • Barack Obama: against the war from the outset, not in Washington when it starts, seems to want to wind it down; wins the presidency twice.
  • Jeb Bush: the presumed front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2016, but his brother launched the wars. Wins 4 delegates in the 2016 primary.
  • Donald Trump: actually fairly positive about the war when it started, but claims to have been against it, which is consistent with his general attitude that foreign interventions waste American lives and treasure. Beats all the establishment Republican primary candidates and Clinton. In office, battles the national security establishment and generally refrains from deploying US military assets overseas. His record conveys a willingness to spend money on the troops, a reluctance to put them in danger, and a contempt for the top brass. Now he’s in a good position for reelection.
  • Joe Biden: as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he votes to authorize the war. Although he is the former vice president in a popular Democratic administration, he looks likely to lose the current primary.
  • Pete Buttigieg: he opposes the Iraq War yet serves in Afghanistan–sort of the opposite of the bipartisan elites who started the war without putting themselves in danger. Considering that he’s the 38-year-old mayor of the 4th-largest city in Indiana, he’s done pretty well in a presidential primary campaign.
  • Bernie Sanders: the only Democratic primary candidate who can provide clear evidence that he was opposed to the war and tried to stop it. This is credible not only because his House vote was recorded but because he has opposed almost all US interventions since the 1970s.

If you believe (as I tend to) that dominant US institutions deserved to be sustained and protected even after the debacle of these wars, then there should have been a much deeper house-cleaning. It’s true that Members of Congress who voted for the war faced a hard choice with limited knowledge and no foreknowledge of the 19 years ahead. Nevertheless, they chose wrong and should have been banished from public life unless they took full responsibility for their own decisions and used their power to prevent anything similar from happening again. You don’t shake off hundreds of thousands of deaths, a $6 trillion bill, and a catastrophic defeat and move on to other topics. National leadership is a privilege, not a right, and if you help cause a disaster, you lose the privilege.

Some Americans never had strong reasons to sustain dominant US institutions. They have now been joined by people for whom the past 19 years provide reasons for distrust–whether they believe that globalist elites have betrayed real Americans or that America is the global bully of the neoliberal era. Although I make no equivalence between Trump and Sanders–they are opposites in character, policy proposals, and commitment to democracy and rule of law–a national campaign between those two is surely a consequence of decisions made by 2003.

a range of federalism options for Israel-Palestine

Leave a reply

In the Washington Post today, Daniel Hollander notes that there is another possible option for Israel/Palestine beyond one state or two states: “a federalist, multistate solution.” I think this direction should be considered, if for no reason than “inventing options” is generally a good idea when parties are at loggerheads. Expanding the menu of choices is sometimes a way to “get to yes.”

In that spirit, I would note that a federal entity is not one idea but can take many forms. Americans may immediately think of our federal republic, which has certain basic similarities to those of Germany, India, and Brazil, among other examples. But those familiar characteristics can be altered to fit the circumstances.

In our federal system:

  1. The polity that really matters to people is the national one. Yes, some people may care more about Texas than the USA (or more about Bavaria than Germany) but theirs is a marginal view. Most people experience their political citizenship fundamentally in the federal republic, with other social identities (such as race) coming into play in various ways. Membership in a state-level entity is secondary.
  2. All the states are very similar. Nebraska has a unicameral legislature. Bavaria has the Christian Social Union party instead of the Christian Democrats, much as Minnesota has the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party instead of the Democrats. Mississippi has made different social policy choices from Hawaii’s. But the states’ constitutional designs and even policies are much more similar than different. That is not only because of top-down directives from the national capital. It is also a result of having one national debate and one set of national interest groups and movements that produce congruence (or isomorphism) across the states.
  3. Fundamental questions of a constitutional nature are mostly settled at the national level. That includes most of the basic civil and political rights and matters like the relationship between religion and politics.
  4. The states are territorial. Individuals are legally permitted to move across state borders, and many actually do. Citizenship at the state level results automatically from residency, as long as you have national citizenship. Thus a citizen of New York is simply an American who resides in the State of New York.
  5. Goods and investments also move rapidly and frequently across state lines. There is one market.

None of these features is definitive of a “multistate federal system.” I can envision a multi-state arrangement in the Israel/Palestine area with features like these:

  1. Membership in the smaller state is much more important to most people than their relationship with the federal umbrella entity. In fact, many people on all sides may demonstrate–at most–a grudging acceptance of the umbrella entity, while still identifying strongly as Israelis, Palestinians, or in other ways.
  2. The various states may be quite dissimilar. One state might, for example, “establish” Judaism while another might establish Sunni Islam or favor Islam and Christianity. One state might be governed by the Knesset with its current system of proportional voting while another state adopts a presidential system. I write “might” because I don’t know which specific choices would emerge, but the states would be permitted to form different kinds of regimes, within broad limits.
  3. State citizenship might not be territorial. Perhaps anyone who identifies as Jewish remains a citizen of Israel, and whether that person is allowed to live in certain zones within Israel/Palestine is a matter of negotiated policy. You don’t become Israeli by moving to Tel Aviv, or Palestinian by moving to Ramallah, but you retain your state citizenship wherever you live. There is a precedent in the Ottoman millet system, but this version can be more democratic.
  4. The federal umbrella guarantees certain rights, but they are much more limited than the rights enumerated by the US Constitution or even the EU. The separate states retain a lot of flexibility about freedom of religion, economic rights, etc.

Certainly, these options leave extremely difficult issues to be resolved. How many states? With what jurisdictions? How are conflicts among the states, between the states and the federal entity, or among citizens of different states resolved? Can some of the states be non-democratic? What does the federal entity do, and how is it governed? What rights are guaranteed to all, and can they be changed? Who can live where? Is there any redistribution among the states? What is the umbrella entity even called (in Arabic, in Hebrew, in English)?

I could offer my own opinions on these matters, but that’s irrelevant. The question is whether any reasonably decent compromise could attract sufficient breadth of support to fly. The odds are no doubt against that, but then the status quo seems not only unjust but also unsustainable. (I wrote most of this before today’s vote in the Knesset, which just underlines the previous sentence.)