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Aaron David Miller delivered a lecture at the American University of Beirut last week entitled “Gulliver’s Troubles: Barack Obama in the Middle East.” The talk focused on many of the same points he made recently in a Foreign Policy article; mainly that American policy on Palestine and Israel has been guided by a misdirected faith, a religion, whose mantra is ‘two states for two peoples.’ Miller’s 25 years of experience in the American establishment also yielded some good anecdotes that provide insight, I think. I’ll get to those later.
Steve Walt does a thorough job of addressing the issues with Miller’s arguments so I won’t focus on them. Instead, I want to convey how I perceived Miller and why his professed loss of faith is worth paying attention to.
Miller spoke at a lectern for forty five minutes and then sat at a long table at the head of the meeting hall to take questions. He did not speak about the one-state solution, but instead said that the two-state will not come about. The majority of questioners were students, many of whom were not receptive to Miller’s point of view.
In one memorable exchange, a graduate student challenged Miller on the hegemonic and basically destructive impact of American foreign policy in the region. Miller responded by explaining that policy arises both out of individual presidential prerogative and competing systemic forces (lobbies, bureaucrats, etc…). He then expressed wonder that the American political system could empower George W. Bush, and then Barack Obama four years later.
According to him, it was a sign of political flexibility and reactiveness. The student was not convinced, and replied that George W. Bush and Barack Obama were not so different (something I agree with in many respects). I think most of the hall agreed with Miller on this point, however.
Miller took a very realist and pessimistic view of the state of the Middle East. When asked by a journalist about why State Department officials cannot speak to members of Hezbollah or Hamas, Miller replied that at present, there is nothing to be gained from dialogue alone. He continued to say that in the context of a broader strategic vision, it may make sense to engage these groups, but not now. I disagree with Miller on this point. Taking all of his assumptions about the perception of prestige at face value, it still makes sense to speak to Hamas and Hezbollah in the absence of a broader ‘peacemaking’ strategy. How else is one supposed to identify opportunities around which one can build a greater strategic vision?
I asked Miller the same question I asked former Florida Senator Robert Graham when he was here several weeks ago: in what way does the Gaza siege and collective punishment of the Palestinians there enhance American strategic interests in the region? He didn’t prevaricate or dissemble and gave me a straightforward answer. America is not served by the siege in any way. One can hope that American career diplomats will internalize this message: the immoral and illegal siege of an occupied people will not make America safer or more successful in any way.
While I found Miller to be refreshingly honest about many aspects of his career and the history of American peacemaking, his discussion of Palestinian divisions was weak in its omissions. While he didn’t engage in historical revisionism, he avoided speaking about Dayton’s coup and America’s role in encouraging the failure of the Saudi reconciliation talks. I asked him about that also, and he replied that he didn’t know anything about Dayton’s role.
My last question to him was about Palestinian-Israeli civil rights and whether he supported their equal representation in Israeli society. Here he surprised me. According to Miller, Israel is a ‘preferential democracy’ and he does support their equal rights. He compared it to America in the early nineteenth century before women’s suffrage or the abolition of slavery, noting that societies have the capacity to shift.
I thought the comparison provided insight into the way some in the State Department view Israel and its minority issues. Also very interesting is the anecdote he told in answering the question. He recalled that his 30-year-old daughter had a long argument with him about whether Israeli society is discriminatory, and it was she who eventually convinced him that Israel is a ‘preferential democracy.’ While not necessarily representative, his daughter’s views are an indication that young people in America – people who will one day control the establishment – have a markedly different perspective of the situation.
It is tempting to say that Miller should have awakened to the reality of Palestine/Israel while he was still in a position to do something about it. But he has suffered some consequences resulting from his late theistic intifada. Right now, he’s writing a book about presidential greatness. He told the audience that he interviewed all of the living presidents for research, except one.
Someone in Bill Clinton’s camp still holds a grudge against Miller for spilling the ‘Israel’s lawyer’ beans, and he did not get the interview as a result. It’s not a big blow, but it demonstrates that even retired officials may suffer blowback from speaking truthfully about the ‘special relationship.’
I don’t know if Miller’s losing his religion is an indication of a tectonic shift in the American diplomatic conceptual framework. But I have hope that others who occupy his former roles will employ a reality-based, rather than a faith-based approach to the conflict. His speaking out now may empower them.
Finally, I got the impression that Miller is deeply disillusioned. He seems as hopeless as any man who’s relinquished a core set of beliefs with nothing to fill the vacuum. This may seem like a strange comparison, and I hesitate to make it, but Miller reminded me of Malcolm X when he broke with Elijah Muhammed and the Nation of Islam.
After spending 25 years of his life worshiping and promoting a false idol, at 61, he has come to see things for what they are. Malcom X later filled the vacuum with orthodox Islam. One can hope that Miller finds the cause for equal rights in Palestine/Israel.

Since its founding in 2001, The Electronic Intifada has earned a well-deserved reputation for being the most influential and effective voice for Palestinian rights. It is backed by a team of smart, savvy and committed individuals. Its co-founder Ali Abunimah is in my view an examplar of what Antonio Gramsci called an ‘organic intellectual’, successfuly fusing political action with theoretical rigrour. 
I have therefore been a long time supporter of the project, occasionally contributing articles and reviews. However, at the moment I am terribly disappointed. Presently on its front page EI runs a ludicrous attack on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s work — work that has been pivotal in shifting the debate on US Middle East policy.
I find it pointless to respond to the author who has freely purloined others’ work, misused sources, and constructed a slipshod argument. But I’ll give two illustrative examples of the deliberate distoritions that keep resurfacing in these ideological assaults on M & W (in both cases the specific claims have been ‘borrowed’ from Noam Chomsky):
Chomsky has long maintained that the war in Iraq was for oil. He always adduces the same evidence to support his case. A State Department document from 1945, a quote from Zbigniew Brzezinski and another from George Kennan. Chomsky argues that Middle East oil is ‘a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ (State Department), and anyone who controls Iraq’s vast oil reserves gains ‘critical leverage’ (Brzezinski), indeed ‘veto power’ (Kennan), over competitors.
All of this is indisputable: the United States would no doubt like to control Iraqi oil; it recognizes the ‘critical leverage’ the control affords it; and the critical leverage no doubt would grant it ‘veto power’. Now here is the problem: The State Department document Chomsky cites is about Saudi Arabia, not Iraq. And it recommends that, precisely because Saudi oil is so important, US must maintain friendly relations with the kingdom.
Also, it does not follow that regime change is the only means to achieve these goals. Indeed, all of these claims have been just as true the past half century, but they did not necessitate war. The US has long preferred shoring up authoritarian regimes which could ensure its dominance and maintain a stable flow of oil.

Since the scrivener writing on EI reproduces Chomsky’s exact interpretation of the ‘critical leverage’ quote, it is clear that he has never consulted the original article. But what of Kennan? Surely the late grand strategist must have been thrilled by the prospect of war which would finally secure the ‘veto power’ he pined for? Not quite. Shortly before the war started, the nonogenarian architect of the ‘containment’ policy, and author of the infamous ‘X Article’ spoke to Albert Eisele of The Hill.
He called the escalation against Iraq a distraction from the war on terror, he defended the record of the UN weapons inspectors, called the alleged Iraq-al-Qaida link ‘pathetically unsupportive and unreliable’, and denounced the Democrats failure to confront Bush on the war as ‘shabby and shameful’, blaming it on ‘timidity out of concern for the elections’. Tellingly, according to Eisele, Kennan

Insisted that there is no evidence that Iraq has succeeded in developing nuclear weaponry, and even if they had, it would be targeted on Israel and not the United States;

Said the Israelis almost certainly possess nuclear weapons, and would be “quite capable of mounting a devastating retaliatory strike” if Iraq ever uses weapons of mass destruction against Israel

The EI contributor similarly introduces a second distortion, related to the notion that Israel serves as an offshore base for the US. Noam Chomsky and Stephen Zunes have borrowed this description from Alexander Haig who called Israel ‘America’s largest aircraft carrier which never could be sunk’. However, they elide the context: As Patrick Tyler has shown in his excellent book A World of Trouble (see my review) Haig would frequently leverage Israel lobby power in his bureaucratic struggle against Reagan (whom he saw as an intellectual inferior). Tyler reveals in detail the lengths Haig would go to undercut Reagan with Israeli assistance.
But, so long as the decontextualized quotes fit preconceived notions it probably doesn’t matter what was actually said or done, I suppose. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim called this the ‘ideological method’: the use of ‘notions to govern the collation of facts, rather than deriving notions from them’. In the a-historical writings of the analysts-on-the-cheap who have rushed to attack M&W, two and two usually adds up to twenty-two. There is no correlation between US support for Israel and its known interests in the region’s energy reserves. As I explained elsewhere,

United States Middle East policy has been defined since World War II by the tension between two competing concerns: the strategic interests which require good relations with Arab-Muslim states, and domestic political imperatives which demand unquestioning allegiance to Israel.
That the US interest in the region’s energy resources has remained consistent, as well as its support for Israel, leads some to conclude that somehow the two are complementary. They aren’t. US President Harry S. Truman recognized the state of Israel the day of its founding over the strenuous objections of his State Department in order to court the Jewish vote and, more significantly, Jewish money for his re-election campaign.
 Every president since — with the exception of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, who saw no cause to feign balance — has sought to address this tension with attempts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. All these efforts have so far foundered. A study of US policy in the region over the decades, then, is inevitably a study of the causes of these failures [among which the Israel lobby looms largest].

I hope EI is able to put this embarassing episode behind it and shows more discernment in what it choses to publish in the future.
Idrees Ahmad is a co-founder of Pulse media.

A number of writers I respect, including Roger Cohen, have lately embraced Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as the hope for peace in Israel/Palestine. I’ve read that Fayyad is the George Washington of Palestine (per Shimon Peres) and that he is western-educated and wants to build up the West Bank brick by brick and not live in the past.
As someone who agrees that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade, I have no doubt that I’d find Fayyad personally appealing. But these are ultimately political questions, and the central issues for me as a liberal are a, whether Fayyad represents the popular will and b, whether it is desirable to normalize a relationship (Israel and Palestine’s) as long as one country is the occupier, endlessly colonizing Palestine and establishing Jim Crow conditions there. And in the liberal hope that this situation ends as Jim Crow did (legislative/political reform) and not slavery (calamitous war), I wish the freedom to imagine this Fayyad moment Americanly…
If you look at the situation in coldly political terms, the division of power, you have to acknowledge that many of the problems in Israel/Palestine reflect the fact that only half the population has political freedom. Israel/Palestine today is unpartitioned as Ali Abunimah likes to say, there is really only one effective political entity there: the governing structure of the Israeli state. It occupies all of Palestine, controls who comes and goes, controls the air space and borders, and imprisons 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and nearly 10,000 inside Israel (many of them children, on such charges as stone-throwing).
If American Jews were true to our own experience, of the civil rights movement, we would analyze the situation politically and say: Look, the reason you have a rightwing government in Israel that includes out-and-out racists and a bible-and-Auschwitz-thumping boor at the top is that Only half the population here governs the whole; only Jews get to make up the government of the empowered state, and– limited in your political building materials to half the lumber in the shed— you are inevitably hostage to rightwing crazies in the parliamentary process. Hey we lived through Lester Maddox and George Wallace.
And yes, surely one reason that Palestinians choose the rightwing Islamist party Hamas to represent them (for I don’t think that Fayyad can be said to represent the popular will any more than Chalabi in Iraq) is because of the unending occupation and the same political bifurcation–which grants extremists political power stemming from their role in the Palestinian resistance.
What better way to reform both societies than to try to politically integrate them? Allow the broad reasonable middles on both sides to find one another. As any American can tell you, impressive leaders are hard to come by; and if Fayyad is such a metsieh (that’s Yiddish for prize), why not share him? Let Fayyad, a western-oriented politician, appeal to both Jews and Palestinians with a reform list. See what that would do to defeat the frightful rightwing monsters and frightful Islamists in their respective societies.
In a word, work to combine the political processes and give this man you so admire the freedom to try to emulate Obama– who, I would remind the fearful, ceased to say a word about his own race as soon as he was placed in a position of representing all Americans.
I know I’m dreaming. As I know that the writers who embrace Fayyad do so in large part because they believe that we/they need a Jewish state. (Myself I don’t think it’s necessary.) But it’s Sunday morning. And one is allowed to dream about democracy.

Writer Mark Oppenheimer regularly writes the Beliefs column for the New York Times. Last week he wrote a piece on a new Jewish book review that includes a notable stretcher:

[Jewish Review of Books editor Abraham] Socher also hopes to provide a politically neutral zone for discussion. The Jewish monthly Commentary publishes good long reviews, Mr. Socher said, but he implied that it exists mainly to push its conservative political agenda. “I have great respect for Commentary, and have contributed to it,” he said, but he did not believe that even Commentary considers the exploration of Jewish thought and culture “as its primary editorial purpose.”
He might have added that The New Republic is so identified with Zionism, and The New York Review with skepticism about Israel, that many minds may have closed to those publications. The Jewish Review of Books’ editorial board is free of notable anti-Zionists, but it includes liberals as well as far-right types like the Harvard professor Ruth R. Wisse. 

I’m grateful to Oppenheimer for characterizing Wisse as a “far-right type.” But notice the suggestion that American Jewish publications, or publications with Jewish leadership (NYRB), publish anti-Zionists. I don’t see any anti-Zionists in the New York Review of Books. It is true that Tony Judt offered the one-state solution to readers in 2003, but since then NYRB has retrenched on that view, publishing many, many letters opposing it in an act of Jewish consensus-building, and Judt himself has not pushed the position. I believe that Judt is himself a non-Zionist (which is how I’d like to call myself) or post-Zionist; he is certainly a former Zionist.
As for the New York Review of Books, on Israel/Palestine it has published Michael Walzer, Gershom Gorenberg, and Avishai Margalit, all Zionists, and has never reviewed Walt and Mearsheimer’s important book. Where are all the anti-Zionists?
What Oppenheimer is guilty of here is liberal imposture, the suggestion to the Times’ good liberal audience that there’s diversity in the Jewish media world re the question of Zionism. There isn’t. I’d note that Oppenheimer is a contributor to Tablet, which tends to pipe Zionist ideas about Jewish identity.

Last week at the Doha debates, Roger Cohen of the New York Times said that the U.S. might well not veto a Security Council resolution that condemns Israel and this would be huge. We get the same report from Mark Landler in the Times:

Separately, these officials said, Mr. Mitchell’s deputy, David Hale, indicated to the Palestinians that if Israel proceeded with the construction of 1,600 housing units in Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo, the United States would abstain from, rather than veto, a resolution in the United Nations Security Council condemning the move.

American Thinker has knickers in twist over the report. H/t Mark.

A week ago Friday I was walking down Fifth Avenue in New York when I saw an old friend on the street corner with his children. I saw him but he didn’t seem to notice me. And I couldn’t place him. The bags under his eyes, the long and comic, odd face, the big intelligent forehead and goofy manner– he was familiar to me as my brother but I couldn’t place him.
I kept walking, then I hoped he wouldn’t see me. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t try and do more to meet his eye. Something stopped me.
I was upset about it that night. I thought I am really losing my mind as I age, I wondered if he was not in the too-broad category of former friends I’d crossed off the list. So I made a bunch of notes to try and coax my memory. I wrote, I don’t think I know him from my work on Jewish identity, but he is Jewish. He is eccentric and very smart, he is goofy but he’s not a loser. Actually I think he’s rich. A nanny seemed to be there with the two children, on Fifth Avenue. But he is also a bit of a slob. I wonder if we parted on a bad note? If we had had words.
The next day I kept seeing his face, and I made more lists to try and bring him back before the memory faded. I could see him right before my eyes. I was thrown by his gray ponytail. It didn’t make sense. I wondered if he was from my city world or my country world, from my work world–no– or my internet world?
I was writing another list of his attributes as I sat on a plane last Saturday night when his name came to me suddenly, about 36 hours after the fact. He is a wealthy eccentric, in the arts. He is incredibly refined and also wild. It has been five or six years since I’d seen him. That is why the gray hair threw me.
The last time I’d seen him we’d gone for a walk with his kids, on a mountain trail near the Hudson. I took my dogs. His son kept bugging them and the girl dog kept running away from him. I told the kid that he could pick her up, I even helped him. As he started to lift her, my dog snapped at him. It was a close call. Another inch or so and it would have been a long afternoon at the hospital, and talk of plastic surgeons, insurance companies, and the legal weirdness about reporting the dog. He had been goodnatured about it; but it was all my fault. My wife was furious at me. You know how she is, she said of the dog. And I was furious at myself.
See: www.dodoweiss.net