The Cherry Orchard

Here’s an amazing fact: according to every USA television news show I watched yesterday, including ABC World News Tonight with Charles Gibson, Nightline, The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News and yes, even my favorite, Countdown with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, there is nothing much going on in the Gaza Strip at all. No story. No coverage.

I caught a few moments of video footage from Gaza, finally, on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes, where they used the video as an opportunity to deliver some dumb cliches about Hamas as an irrational “death cult” that supports the use of pregnant women as suicide bombers. I guess the “right to life” angle is what got the story some TV time on Fox, which is more than it’s getting anywhere else.

I don’t even have a theory as to why this big story is being ignored on TV (thankfully, my local newspaper the New York Times is doing a better job). I don’t see that this disinterest serves any political agenda. Maybe the only explanation is an existential one. When real news happens — events that are shocking and upsetting, like a military takeover by a fundamentalist political organization in a massively overpopulated and depressed region of a horribly war-town part of the world — our journalistic community is stunned into silence. I’m guessing they’ll start reporting this news by Wednesday of next week or so, at which point they can begin using the safe past tense instead of the scary present tense.

I wish I had something useful or intelligent to say about the Hamas rout in the civil war that erupted so quickly in Gaza. Because I continue to believe (against all public opinion on all sides, apparently) that a humane peace settlement between Israel and Palestine is both possible and necessary, this is obviously a major setback for the moderate position. Here are some wide-ranging links:

Sabbah’s Blog

Jewlicious

Darwinian Conservatism

Statesman Journal (including photo gallery)

Heathlander

From Occupied Palestine

What do I think? I think life must be pretty hellish over there, for one thing. And I think Israel and Palestine are a long, long way from the beginnings of a peace settlement. And I also think — I know — that eventually peace will prevail in the Holy Lands. But not anytime soon.

There’s been a lot of reaction to Jimmy Carter’s new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, so I checked it out.

Pro-Israel opponents of the book claim that Carter is equating Israel’s painful Palestinian conflict with the former white government of South Africa’s exploitative policy of apartheid. Other critics have pointed out other signs of a biased attitude towards Jews in the book. I’ve checked it out, and it seems to me these charges are unfounded.

Jimmy Carter knows a lot about the Israeli-Arab conflict. As the broker between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in the 1970’s, he demonstrated great leadership and finesse. There’s no strong evidence that the former President has a biased attitude towards any group. What about the comparison to apartheid? Well, it’s a harsh criticism, but Carter is calling the shots the way he sees them.

29 years ago, Jimmy Carter showed the world where his convictions lie: with peace, with compromise, with a humane sense of justice. Israelis and Palestinians are both well-served by Carter’s book, and I hope many in Israel and Palestine will read it.

You may have seen or heard about the controversial Bill Clinton interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News in which the former President scolded the conservative journalist for suggesting that Clinton did not do enough to combat Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda during his eight-year presidency.

The video is 10:01 minutes long but worth it (it gets real good around 5:47). Once you’ve watched this video, check out Keith Olbermann’s brave words about this altercation. Well said, Keith.

I’d like to add another perspective to the discussion of Bill Clinton’s legacy against terrorism. I haven’t heard others mention this recently, but it’s a fact that Clinton’s record as a peacemaker in the Middle East was second only to Jimmy Carter’s.

When Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook the hand of Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat in 1993, that was the inspired work of Bill Clinton and his team, including Secretary of State Warren Christopher and U. S. Envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, whose thick history book The Missing Peace provides an enlightening look at the hard, hard work it takes to end wars.

Do you remember the 1993 Rabin/Arafat handshake? All Americans felt proud at that moment, because our country had helped to bring about a change towards greater global understanding and justice. How far we’ve come since then!

Peace had been a growing trend (though a rocky road) in the Middle East during the years leading up to September 11 2001. The attacks on that day were a strike against the momentum towards peace. Those who loved war found eager partners in the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration, and the rest is history.

I’ve earnestly been trying to keep up with the United Nations General Assembly debates, checking in on day two, day three and day four so as to report on the quality and integrity of each speech by each national representative.  This was the first time I’ve tried to pay anywhere near this much attention to UN’s annual autumn bash, and four days in I am already over my head.  Discouraged by technical problems at the UN.org website and frustrating lapses in coverage (such as the failure to provide an English translation of Venezuelan President Huge Chavez’s speech, which made the biggest headlines of the event so far when he called George W. Bush “the devil”), I’m now aiming for coverage that will be more impressionistic than complete, and I’ll try to dig in harder next year (assuming the planet and the institution known as the United Nations are both intact by next year, and I hope both will be).

As I said above, Chavez stole the headlines.  I don’t think George W. Bush is quite the devil, but I’d probably rather spend a day at the beach with Chavez than with George Bush, and I am amused to learn that the Venezuelan President and I share a high regard for Noam Chomsky who, I agree, everybody should read.

 In contrast to Chavez, here are the surprising words of Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq, who seems to like George Bush more than either I or Hugo Chavez do:

“We here renew our gratitiude for these forces that took part in liberating our country from the worst dictatorship known in history.  We specifically thank George W. Bush for his leadership of the campaign to liberate Iraq from tyranny and opening the doors for a new, democratic, pluralistic and federal Iraq that is at peace with itself and the world.”

Maybe this goes to show that theoretical issues of war and aggression look rather different when you are inside the nation fighting the war then when you’re sitting in Venezuela reading Noam Chomsky or Queens, New York posting to a blog. However one spins it all, it’s clear that a few causes get all the mic time at this debate: Israel and Palestine are number one, America and Iraq a distant second, Darfur virtually nowhere at all.

But what are we to think when despicable royals like Prince Faisal al-Saud of Saudi Arabia say all the right things about the importance of compromise settlements between Israel and Palestine, while Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel fails to rise to the occasion at all?  I’d hoped Israel’s plucky young representative would throw a curve-ball or otherwise try to inject some sand into the vaseline of international hypocrisy on display here, but she instead delivers a cool-toned speech including some prayers in Hebrew and an invocation of Ariel Sharon as “a great leader” – something even a person who cares deeply about the fate of Israel (such as myself) cannot agree with.

Leave it to Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine to deliver the best speech I’ve read so far, in which he speaks passionately for a fair peace and wistfully recalls the still-surprising and, of course, infinitely difficult 1993 compromise agreement between Yasser Arafat of Palestine and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel.  We need more speeches like this one, and we need more moderate world leaders like Mahmoud Abbas.

The debate returns on Monday with speeches by representatives of several straggler nations that didn’t make the cut for the kickoff sessions, including Laos, Nepal, Vietnam, Gabon, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Gambia, and Uruguay.

I planned to review the second day of debate at the United Nations General Assembly this morning. Unfortunately, the UN.org website is still a technical mess, and I can’t get to the texts of most of the speeches. There is no excuse for this, and the volume of web traffic to UN.org can’t possibly justify the poor performance. If YouTube.com can serve millions of LonelyGirl15 webviews to the world with barely a glitch, certainly the United Nations web servers should be able to deliver the text of a few dozen speeches each day without crashing to their knees.

But my review of day two will have to wait, even as day three commences with speeches by Boris Tadic of Serbia, Uribe Velez of Colombia, Emile Lahoud of Lebanon, Emilio Guebuza of Mozambique, Branko Crvenkovski of Macedonia, Stephen Harper of Canada, Jose Socrates of Portugal, Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania, Miyegombo Enkhbold of Mongolia, Solomon Berewa of Sierra Leone, Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea (who is often mentioned as a possible successor to outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan), Sergey Lavrov of Russia, Alexander Downer of Australia, Ursula Plassnik of Austria, Miguel Angel Moratinos Cuyabe of Spain, Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt, Aichatou Mindaoudou of Niger and Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine (who gets, like Israel yesterday, the terrible closer spot at the end of another long, long day of speeches).

I wish I could comment on Hugo Chavez’s speech, which made big news when the Venezuelan leader suggested that George W. Bush was the devil and that the UN’s podium still smelled like sulfur after his appearance the day before. But I haven’t been able to read the full text of his speech, so instead I’d like to follow up on Tuesday’s speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a dynamic and wily speaker who is leaving many moderate and reasonable people stunned and speechless with his inflammatory remarks about Jewish history and the Holocaust.

I hate being stunned and speechless, personally, but my natural emotional reaction to Ahmadinejad’s words leaves me grasping for words, and I’m not sure where to even begin refuting his points. Well, let’s leave some other avenues aside and start right here:

Mr. Ahmadinejad, you have every right to re-examine the myths of history, and you are certainly correct that the European genocide of the Jews that took place during World War II has been overly mythologized. No part of human history can be considered taboo; every stone must be turned over, and every “certainty” is fair game for re-examination. Nobody should stand against the honest pursuit of historical fact, even when one fears (as in this case) that political motivations are underlying the pursuit.

BUT, Mr. Ahmadinejad, you go too far when you suggest that the history of the Jewish holocaust stands as the justification for the current existence of the nation of Israel. As I’ve said here before and I will certainly say again: Israel’s right to exist is based only on the fact that there are human beings living there now. They were born there, they are citizens of no other country, and this is the only home they have.

A new study of the history of the Holocaust may turn up some surprising facts and conclusions (though it won’t find that the genocide was a fraud). But even if it turns out that all of World War II was staged with actors and filmed in a studio in Burbank, the fact remains that millions of Jews have been born in the nation of Israel, and that “the Zionist entity” is their home.

It’s about living human beings, Mr. Ahmadinejad. There are living human beings in Israel and living human beings in Palestine. History happened yesterday. What do you have to offer us for tomorrow?

Last night I met six friends for dinner and debate in the West Village. We had all agreed beforehand to spend an entire dinner discussing future Middle East policy in a structured format. This group was largely made up of software developers, and had an interesting makeup:

• three Christians and four Jews

• two born in Lebanon, one born in Israel, four born in U.S.A.

• five men, two women

This was the second time we arranged a dinner debate, a practice occasioned by the fact that our friend Fadi tends to express himself a bit loudly when possessed of an opinion (and, to tell the truth, some have said the same about me, and I have an opinion or two myself).

Previous social get-togethers had devolved into anarchic yellfests, so this time we agreed to take turns speaking, 90 seconds at a time, with interruptions forbidden. 15 second rebuttals were also available, but everybody had to wait their turn to speak, and each person was assured equal time. We appointed Yaniv as moderator and Dave as time-keeper, and managed to make this format work for an hour and a half.

We learned something amazing during this conversation: when you take the time to structure a discussion and direct it towards a single topic, highly intelligent ideas and solutions can emerge. We listened hard to each other, we tried to understand each other’s viewpoints, and by the end of the dinner we were doing nothing but laughing, high-fiving and tossing around side arguments such as which web development platform is better, PHP/Javascript or Java/Struts (the answer, of course, is PHP/Javascript) just for fun.

If you tend to have loud political arguments that lead nowhere with your family or friends, I suggest you try a structured approach. Why are unstructured arguments always so bad? Well, people like to talk more than they like to listen. Do the math — if you put five or more people who want to talk together, you get a mash of half-finished thoughts, and it doesn’t matter what you say anyway, since everybody is too busy thinking about what they want to say to listen to what you’re saying.

A structured argument can have very unexpected positive results. Now that I see that Evan, Fadi, Sabine, Dave, Amy, Yaniv, Carl and I can survive an hour and a half of this and end up smiling, I wonder how many other problems can also be solved in this way.

It’s Monday morning, and a fragile cease-fire is in place between Israel and Hizbollah. Few expert commentators expect the cease-fire to last, but maybe it will last long enough for the dialogue between the warring sides to improve. As I’ve noted here before, there currently exists no significant dialogue at all between the various sides in this battle, and linguistic barriers are the least of the problems. Each side clings to different histories, different basic premises, which makes rational discussion impossible.

For perhaps only a few days — maybe more, maybe less, who knows? — the rockets and jet fighters are silenced. Please, let a war of words begin, because that is our best chance for an end to this misery.

Some news items:

1. The son of Israeli novelist David Grossman was killed Saturday on the ground in Lebanon, where he was fighting with a tank unit. David Grossman has represented Israel’s troubled but stubborn anti-war movement with books like The Yellow Wind. Earlier this year, Grossman participated in the PEN World Voices festival in New York City, where he attempted to participate in a one-on-one conersation with Palestinian/Lebanese author Elias Khoury that was sadly cancelled due to political considerations.

2. The great research journalist Seymour Hersh, who’s been raking muck since the Vietnam War, has written a New Yorker article exposing the American-Israeli agreements that led to Israel’s aggressive response to Hizbollah’s incursions.

3. Peace — hah! The regular retinue of war, deprivation, provocation and ridiculous propaganda continues unabated today in Gaza, Iraq, Sri Lanka, The Congo and Sudan. Some world we live in!

Please, let the war of words begin …

Eighteen notable writers, including Harold Pinter, Toni Morrison and Russell Banks, have issued a short statement about the current war. It culminates in one pointed paragraph:

Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.

There’s plenty of room for argument here — why does this article hint at two-sided-ness but then fail to mention that there are also significant long-term military, economic and geographic practices aiming for the liquidation of the Israeli nation? Regardless, these eighteen writers are to be commended for speaking clearly and simply, for stating premises that lead to a conclusion, and for keeping their message short and sharp.

High quality discourse is absolutely essential to the peace process. Whether one agrees with these eighteen writers or not, one can at least appreciate that the clarity of their statement might bring the discussion to the next level by allowing responses of similar clarity.

Then there’s Jostein Gaarder of Norway, the very successful author of Sophie’s World, a book that presents the history of philosophy in a meta-fictional framework. This book was an impressive achievement, and it’s shocking and disheartening to read an Aftenposten article by this author that culminates in a vivid fantasy of Israel defeated and its people sent into exile (at which point Gaarder urges, with facetious sympathy, that the nationless wanderers should not be hurt):

They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!

This is a revenge fantasy, and I am seriously disturbed to find a reputable author of a popular book on philosophy indulging himself in this type of emotional excess at a time when actual war rages, a time when words matter. This is not a vision of peace but of humiliation. A snail without a shell, Mr. Gaarder? In fact, revenge fantasies are a dime a dozen in our violent times. There are certainly also Israelis who dream of seeing their Palestinian enemies finally defeated and hopeless. Revenge fantasies are common, but what they are not is helpful.
I’m looking forward to using this site to critique public statements on difficult global issues, especially statements made by writers. I hope this will turn out to be a helpful way to shed light on difficult problems. Today’s quick check turns up one group that’s angry but trying to help … and one writer who’s angry but has nothing helpful to offer.

I’ve mentioned CGJT (the Committee to Give Jerusalem to Tibet) before. One interesting feature of this organization is that it does not exist. I made up the name as the fake sponsor of a poetry reading I arranged at the Bowery Poetry Club in the Spring of 2002.

This was a time when the daily carnage in Israel and Palestine was nearly as bad as the carnage in Lebanon and Israel is today. I put posters with this fake organization’s name up all over New York City, and I was then very pleased to find the name living on after the event was over. “The Committee to Give Jerusalem to Tibet (CGJT)” would randomly appear as a fake sponsor of various other event listings at the Bowery Poetry Club for the next month (I’m pretty sure this was the handiwork of club owner Bob Holman, though we never said a word about it to each other).

The name is a joke, but there’s a very serious (and fairly obvious) suggestion behind it. Any long-lasting peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians should involve equally sharing the city of Jerusalem, where great numbers of Jews and Muslims live and worship at historic temples. Realistically, the solution is likely to involve some kind of international overseeing force. This force would need to have sovereign authority, and therefore what we are proposing amounts to the internationalization of Jerusalem.

This wouldn’t be easy to achieve, of course. Battling would occur. I can think of three groups that would vigorously (and violently) fight this type of equitable settlement: fundamentalist Muslims, fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Jews. Nevertheless, it is the right approach and it must be considered.

Jon Stewart recently said as much on The Daily Show while interviewing political critic Vali Nasr, author of Shia Revival. As they discussed possible solutions to the Middle East, Stewart asked why we don’t just internationalize the city of Jerusalem. Nasr and Stewart kicked this around for a long time, agreeing that this might actually work. You can see the video here.