This review was originally posted on a literary blog that no longer exists called The Great American Pinup. My understanding is that the blog was hacked and that attempts by the people who ran the blog to resolve things using Google’s help screens were unsuccessful. I am reposting the review here because I think the books are important enough that the review should continue to be available.

Talk about two very different books by two very different poets, but there are connections, and since I read the books back to back, I want to talk about them side by side. I first met Suheir Hammad some years ago when she came to Nassau Community College (NCC), where I teach in the English Department, to give a reading as part of a day-long program on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The program was sponsored by NCC’s International Studies Committee and it generated, even in the planning, a lot of controversy. I was not involved in putting the day together, so I do not know the specifics of went on, but I do know that the college administration voiced concerns about adequate security, about who the panelists would be and whether a balanced view of the conflict would be presented. What they meant by “balanced,” however, at least as I understand it, was that no one who spoke for the Palestinian side should express views that were overtly hostile to Israel. It did not seem to bother them that people representing the Israeli side might express views overtly hostile to Palestinians and/or Arabs, and, sure enough, one of the speakers was a woman representing a far-right Jewish organization—not Israeli, but Jewish—who spoke quite forcefully about the Arab/Muslim plot to take over the world. It was almost as if she were quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, except that all the references to Jews had been changed to Arabs.

During lunch that day—her reading was in the evening—Suheir and I spoke about “One Stop (Hebron Revisited)” a poem from her first book, Born Palestinian, Born Black, that I had used in a class I’d taught the previous semester called Introduction to World Jewish Studies. The poem is a response to Baruch Goldstein’s February 1994 massacre of 29 Muslims—approximately 100 were injured—in which the speaker, a woman, imagines the violence she would have done to a Jewish man she sees had she “caught [him] on the train/on an empty car into flatbush.” The poem is painful to read, not only for the specific details of the violence it describes, but also for the nakedness of the rage it expresses. The speaker is in pain, and it is hard not to feel implicit in the details of what the woman describes how much she hates herself for even imagining that she would perform those acts.

When I taught the poem, I asked my students, all of whom happened to be Jewish and most of whom came from conservative and orthodox religious backgrounds, if they thought it was anti-Semitic. I was truly surprised when they said no, that if they were in the writer’s shoes, they would have felt a similar anger and that Suheir Hammad therefore had every right to express herself in the way that she did. I told Suheir this and she also was shocked and then she told me that “One Stop” was a poem she never read when she gave readings. I don’t remember her precise words, but I think she told me she was afraid to. It was so angry and so violent that she was not sure how her audiences would react. I told her I thought it was a poem that people needed to hear, that she owed it to herself and to her audiences to read it, precisely because the pain and the violence in the poem are so deeply embedded in the emotional center of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and no one should be spared a confrontation with that center.

My own opinion is that, to the extent the speaker in “One Stop” holds the Jewish man she sees on the train in New York City responsible for the views of Baruch Goldstein and, by extension, the policies of the State of Israel, the poem is anti-Semitic, or, to be more precise, the speaker expresses her rage in anti-Semitic terms. Because her rage is comprehensible, however, it is also an excusable moment of Jew-hatred, no different than the way, say, the rage of a Black South African during apartheid might be directed at all South African whites, despite the fact that there were many whites in South Africa who opposed apartheid. What matters is whether the speaker, once she has calmed down, takes responsibility for that moment. In “One Stop,” she does not, nor do I remember, frankly, whether Hammad takes on the question of that responsibility in any of the other poems in Born Palestinian, Born Black, and since I do not have the book handy, I can’t go back and check. My overall recollection of the book, though, is that it is more angry than it is about coming to terms with anger. I remember a couple of withering poems protesting the way Middle Eastern women are exoticized in the US, and I remember poems that were clearly intended to confront the reader with the physical horrors of occupation. (It occurs to me as I write this that I also should state explicitly that I am not accusing Suheir Hammad of Jew-hatred in any form. Not only is it a mistake to confuse a poet with the speakers of her poems, but I have met her and talked to her, and I just don’t think she harbors that kind of hatred for anyone.) Read the rest of this entry »

From Antiwar.com:

“We don’t have a police state here in Palestine. We have two police states. One in Gaza and one in the West Bank,” says Rabie Latifah from the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq.

“The abuse of Palestinian civilians by both Fatah and Hamas security forces has become systematic and is no longer the exception to the rule,” Latifah told IPS.

Mysterious bomb blasts, assassinations by masked gunmen, detainees denied access to their lawyers, torture and death in detention, the random arrest of critical journalists, and the banning of peaceful demonstrations are but a few of the human rights violations sweeping the Palestinian territories.

While armed men are being arrested, politically motivated arrest campaigns are also targeting citizens suspected of merely sympathizing with the opposition.

“We have endured over 40 years of occupation and human rights abuses by the Israelis, and now we are doing it to ourselves,” says Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR).

Stories like this make me feel that even if a two-state solution leads to a genuinely independent Palestine being created, the civil rights outlook for ordinary Palestinians is not bright. (Via.)

The following advertisement aired on Israeli TV:

The following clip was filmed in Palestine:

Fantasy is a strange thing. (via Lenin’s Tomb)

Daniel Taub in The Boston Globe:

…The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian territories, [...] Richard Falk, recently issued a report that goes one remarkable step further. In the conditions existing in Gaza, he asserts, any Israel military response would be “inherently unlawful.” According to Falk’s understanding of international law, Israel has no right whatsoever to defend itself.

Taub’s claim here — that Falk ever said “Israel has no right whatsoever to defend itself” — is not a fair or reasonable summary of what Falk wrote.

It’s true that Falk said, in essence, that under the conditions that existed in Gaza, there was no legal way for Israel to engage in a large-scale attack on Gaza. Taub’s trick here is to ignore that Israel could have changed “the conditions existing in Gaza.”

For example, Israel didn’t exhaust all diplomatic remedies before attacking; had they done so, that would have changed the legal basis of their attack, according to Falk.

Falk also emphasizes that Israel closed Gazas borders, essentially trapping all Gazans, including the elderly, the ill, and children, in a war zone. That’s another condition that Israel could have tried to alter.

Israel could also have really ended the occupation in Gaza — giving Gaza true independence — in which case, Israel would have had the right to treat Gaza as an attacking nation. But since Israel has for all practical purposes never ended the occupation, Israel has taken on the legal responsibility to protect the well-being of the citizens of Gaza — a responsibility which is incompatible with bombing the shit out of those citizens.

Israel has a right to defend itself. That doesn’t mean that Israel has a right to do anything to defend itself, or that it doesn’t have a responsibility to fully pursue all possible diplomatic routes before engaging in an attack that killed or injured 1 in every 225 Gazans.

* * *

Taub also writes:

I met with a group of eminent jurists who were on a fact-finding mission, examining Israel’s military operation in Gaza. After listening to their concerns and criticisms, I asked them: “Considering the rocket attacks launched against Israel by terrorist groups in Gaza, what in your view would have constituted a lawful response?” The answer was total silence.

I really wish I could talk to those “eminent jurists,” and get their account of that conversation. Call me cynical, but my bet is that their recollection would not entirely match Mr. Taub’s.

* * *

A total of 1,434 Palestinians were killed, of whom 235 were combatants. Some 960 civilians reportedly lost their lives, including 288 children and 121 women; 239 police officers were also killed, 235 in air strikes carried out on the first day. A total of 5,303 Palestinians were injured, including 1,606 children and 828 women.

This was in response to Hamas rockets that — horrible as they were — still killed fewer than five Israelis.

Marty Perez dismissed Palestinian concerns the hundreds of civilian casualties as “whining” and wrote:

this is what I would say to Hamas and to the people of Gaza: “If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work.”

When people argue that the appropriate response to the deaths of four Israelis is for Israel to kill a thousand Palestinians, their unstated premise is that Palestinian lives are worth enormously less than Israeli lives.

Hat tip: The Debate Link.

I’ve taken a long time to write about this because I wanted to make sure I had my thoughts on it sorted out. This article by Naomi Klein finally brought me around to the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) campaign against Israel. (Note: as you can probably tell, I’m very new to BDS, so this post is directed at other people who are new to it, too. I realize that many readers have been working on this for a long time.) This passage was what turned the lightbulb on for me:

Why single out Israel when the United States, Britain and other Western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the BDS strategy should be tried against Israel is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work. (Emphasis hers.)

The problem, up until I read the article, was that most of the calls for boycotts I read were the dogmatic kind. Boycott Israeli academics! Boycott Israeli artists! Boycott non-Israeli Jewish business owners! Why? Because we hate them, that’s why! Because Zionism is racism! Even the ones that didn’t come off as dogmatic - or that made passing references to tactics - failed to address Jews’ concerns about anti-Semitism, and that turned me off to them. Was that irrational of me? Yeah, sometimes. But Jews have good reason to be wary.

I know, of course, that BDS will continue to attract anti-Semites, and I still fear that anti-Semitism will drown out pragmatism. I don’t know how to solve that problem - but we can address it by emphasizing, as Klein does, that it’s a tactic, not a dogma. We’re doing it because it works. We’re doing it out of love (for Israelis, too!). And, as Klein says, we’re targeting “the Israeli economy but not Israelis.” Strategy, not punishment.

Do check out the whole article - she responded very effectively to almost every concern that I had.

The Global BDS Movement’s website is here.

Thoughts? (When you comment, please remember that this is a very sensitive and complicated subject. Rude or hostile comments will be deleted.)

(Cross-posted at Alas, A Blog.)

Laila El-Haddad has written a powerful and infuriating post about going home to visit her parents:

“Its not very comfortable in there is it?” said the stony faced official, cigarette smoke forming a haze around his gleaming oval head.

“Its OK. We’re fine” I replied wearily, delirious after being awake for a straight period of 30 hours.

“You could be in there for days you know. For weeks. Indefinitely. “So, tell me, you are taking a plane tomorrow morning to the US?”

****
…

I hold a Palestinian Authority passport. It replaced the “temporary two-year Jordanian passport for Gaza residents” that we held until the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the mid ’90s, which itself replaced the Egyptian travel documents we held before that. A progression in a long line of stateless documentation.

It is a passport that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry to my own home. This is its purpose: to mark me, brand me, so that I am easily identified and cast aside without questions; it is convenient for those giving the orders. It is a system for the collective identification of those with no identity.

Please, please, please read the whole account.

Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

Harvard professor and plagiarist Alan Dershowitz has a reputation for unfairly suggesting that Israel’s critics are antisemites. In response, Dershowitz says:

I have challenged anyone who claims that mere criticism of Israel is often labeled anti-Semitism to document that serious charge by providing actual quotations, in context, with the sources of the statements identified. No one has responded to my challenge.

Howard Friel’s lengthy article about Dershowitz shows that Dershowitz — a lawyer — does in fact manage to avoid calling critics of Israel antisemites… while nonetheless leaving the strong impression that he’s calling them antisemites. Friel’s whole article is worth reading, but here are a few examples:

About former President Jimmy Carter, Dershowitz wrote: “Whatever the reason or reasons for Jimmy Carter’s recent descent into the gutter of bigotry, history will not judge him kindly.”[3] In an interview on Shalom TV in Israel, Dershowitz said: “Jimmy Carter has literally become such an anti-Israel bigot, that there’s a kind of special place in hell reserved for somebody like that.”

So according to Dershowitz, Carter’s descended into “the gutter of bigotry” and is damned to hell because he’s “such an anti-Israel-bigot” — but Dershowitz didn’t call Carter an antisemite!

Because Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—both of which are on Dershowitz’s enemies list—issued reports that were critical of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon in summer 2006, Dershowitz referred to them as “so-called human rights groups,” and described their reports as “bigotry—pure and simple.”

See? Didn’t call them antisemites!

The desire to destroy Jews has been reconfigured as the desire to destroy or dismantle the Jewish State. Boycotters may have Jewish friends, they may be Jews themselves but in supporting a boycott they have put themselves in anti-Semitism’s camp.

See? Didn’t call them antisemites!

Similarly, he calls Noam Chomsky a “Holocaust denier” — a charge that is not true — but he didn’t call him an antisemite!¹

If Dershowitz wasn’t a powerful man, willing to go to great lengths to bully, intimidate and harass anyone he disagrees with (in the comments following Friel’s article, a Hampshire student — where students have recently run a high-profile divestment campaign — alleged that Dershowitz has been “personally calling students and threatening them over the phone,” which if true is grossly inappropriate behavior), he’d be funny.

Curtsy: Muzzlewatch.

1. Ironically, Chomsky himself, as a matter of logic, has argued that Holocaust denial and antisemitism are logically distinct — “if a person ignorant of modern history were told of the Holocaust and refused to believe that humans are capable of such monstrous acts, we would not conclude that he is an anti-Semite.” I don’t think that argument could be credibly applied to the Dershowitz’s critique of Chomsky, however. (back)

From Jonathan Cook:

Masterminding this strategy is the Israeli secret police, the Shin Bet, which has recently turned its attention to sick Gazans and their relatives who need to leave the Strip. With hospitals and medicines in short supply, some patients have little hope of recovery without treatment abroad or in Israel.

According to the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, the Shin Bet is exploiting the distress of these families to pressure them to agree to collaborate in return for an exit permit.

Last month, the group released details of 32 cases in which sick Gazans admitted they were denied permits after refusing to become informants.

One is Shaban Abu Obeid, 38, whose pacemaker was installed at an Israeli hospital and needs intermittent maintenance by Israeli doctors. Another, Bassam Waheidi, 28, has gone blind in one eye after he refused to co-operate and was denied a permit. [...]

As with other occupation regimes, Israel has long relied on the most traditional way of recruiting collaborators: torture. While a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999 banned torture, the evidence suggests the Shin Bet simply ignored the ruling.

So what happens once a Palestinian has been forced to collaborate with the human rights abusers ruling their lives? They then get killed by the other set of human rights abusers ruling their lives. From Global Investment Watch:

As Amnesty International reported in its paper, “Hamas’ Deadly Campaign in the Shadow of the War in Gaza,” dozens of Palestinians have been killed or badly beaten and tortured by Hamas in the days surrounding the Israeli assault on Gaza. Hamas’ disregard for the rule of law and human rights demonstrate its inability to function as a legitimate governing body and its failure to serve the Palestinian people.

As noted in the AI report, Hamas targets include former detainees accused of “collaborating” with the Israeli army who escaped from Gaza’s central prison when it was bombed by Israeli forces on 28 December 2008. Other targets included former members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces and other activists of the Fatah party.

Most of the victims were taken from their homes and killed by the Hamas militia. For those victims not summarily executed by gunshots to the head and chest, victims were often kneecapped, severely beaten or otherwise permanently disabled by their attackers. On some occasions, the killings took place in hospitals in the presence of uniformed Hamas officials. [...]

Should an informant fail in his duties, all Shin Bet needs to do is to let it be known that the informant “was” a spy for Israel. Hamas will then take care of the problem created by its enemy across the border.

Via JVoices:

(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)

February’s up, and that seems as good a time as any to bring this guesting stint to a close. I want to thank everyone very much for reading, listening, reacting and commenting. I hope you found what I said interesting, and for my part I know I’ve been pushed to think in new ways by all the responses I’ve given. Some of the ideas I’ve been forwarding I’ve been baking for a long time; others were developed all in the course of this discussion. I don’t know where they’ll go, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to partake in this little corner of the conversation. If you want to follow me back home, you can find me at The Debate Link, where I blog about identity issues of all stripes, politics, law, philosophy, and occasionally boxing.

I started my contribution here by noting that anti-Semitism lacks a theory — those victimized by it can feel it grabbing and pulling and ripping at them, but we still can’t quite wrap our heads around what is happening to us. The issue is shrouded by layers upon layers of obscuring fabric: the Whiteness of Ashkenazi Jews, the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the meaning of Zionism, the meaning of anti-Zionism, the meaning of oppression, the idea that anti-Semitism is itself a fiction (or is primarily deployed as a distraction), the various motivating ideologies that lead one to partake in or justify hating, harassing, or killing Jews, and above all, constant, unrelenting fear. I’m not saying these elements are not themselves important to discuss, but if they have to be resolved before we can speak intelligibly about anti-Semitism, then we better resign ourselves to a lot of inchoate gibberish.

Jews exist at the margins of the margin — on the fissure point between power and weakness. We have influence, but not rights; [some of us are] White, but not quite. We have enough power and security that the marginalized do not accept us as brother- and sister-sufferers, but not enough to render us truly safe or secure (or truly accepted as equals). Taken together, it makes for a yawning silence, and it is untenable. It will be filled by something — not necessarily the most productive something, not necessarily the most coherent something, but something.

Christine Littleton defines the feminist method as starting “with the very radical act of taking women seriously, believing that what we say about ourselves and our experience is important and valid, even when (or perhaps especially when) it has little or no relationship to what has been or is being said about us.”¹ It was one of those statements that really stuck with me — an empathetic approximating experience (if I may borrow from a co-blogger). The situation as it is now is one where I really, genuinely don’t feel like Jews are taken seriously when what we say differs from what is said about us. If we try to separate Jewishness as something independent from “Judeo-Christianity”, we are not taken seriously. If we try to explain what we mean by concepts like Zionism, or how we perceive many forms of anti-Israel criticism as being extensions of anti-Jewish hate, things that actually threaten us and threaten us as Jews, we aren’t take seriously.

What Jews say about themselves matters. It is important. Even when it isn’t perfectly coherent or cohesive — perhaps especially when it isn’t — something very important is being expressed. Not all Jews agree on everything, of course, that cannot be deployed as an excuse to not listen to Jews at all (or only a tiny fraction of them that confirms pre-existing beliefs), because the most damaging thing of all is the belief that you can understand us without talking to us or without taking our own accounts seriously. We are our own entity. We are not encompassed within the categories of others.

Some Jews are European, but even those of us who are, are not just that. Some Jews are White, but even those of us who are, are not just that. Many Jews are many things — rich and poor, powerful and vulnerable, male and female, straight and queer,  kind and cruel, but whatever it is we are, we are not just that. We have the right, as everyone else, to be addressed on our own terms — not forced into boxes constructed by others.

* * *

The Eighth Jewish Child — for Caryl Churchill

In response to Seven Jewish Children, written by Caryl Churchill, and condemned by Howard Jacobson, supported by Jacqueline Rose, and labeled a ‘blood libel’ by Melanie Philipps.

Tell her that it’s more complicated than that.

Tell her that we love Israel.

Tell her that we hate Israel.

Tell her that Israel is in our veins, like oxygen, like a virus, like an antibody.

Tell her that to be Jewish is far more than watching the news and looking for balance, and far more than being a Zionist, and far more than just praying to God.

Tell her that Zionism isn’t a dirty word like racism. Zionism is a complicated word with good intentions and ambiguous results, like idealism.

Tell her that everyone is a human being, everyone is their own story, and everyone you meet is a potential friend however different they may discover you are.

Tell her that everyone is a potential enemy because they fear your difference, because they fear your memory, because they fear the Muslims, because they fear.

Don’t tell her that.

Don’t mention Muslims. Don’t mention anti-Semites. Don’t mention the Holocaust. Don’t mention Gaza. At least not in the same sentence.

Tell her that she can be Jewish anywhere in the world, but that Israel will come with her. Israel is the biggest project that the Jewish world has taken on in the last few thousand years, and it needs all the help it can get, even when it says it doesn’t. Sometimes helping Israel will mean backing its actions, sometimes helping Israel will mean protesting them.

Tell her to say what she thinks about Israel wherever and whenever she wants to. Tell her not to worry about giving ammunition to our enemies, because they create their own ammunition. They do fine without needing ours.

Tell her that Howard Jacobson is right, and wrong. So is Jacqueline Rose. And Melanie Philipps. And Jonathan Freedland. And so am I.

But Caryl Churchill is just plain wrong.

Tell her that those who don’t like us will always pretend to understand us.

We don’t even understand us.

And we would never dare write a 10-minute play about it.

Tell her it’s much more complicated than that.

1. Christine A. Littleton, Feminist Jurisprudence: The Difference Method Makes (Book Review), 41 STAN. L. REV. 751, 764 (1989) (back)

I’m already pretty firmly on the record that the continued expansion of the settlements poses a massive threat to the viability of the two-state solution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The longer the settlements stay up, many argue, the more entrenched they will become — eventually, they will be so dug in that evacuating them will become impossible, and suddenly there is no two-state solution. At that point, the only alternatives will be ethnic cleansing, outright apartheid, or a binational, one-state solution.

This is bad enough for me, because the former two options are morally intolerable and the last I consider to be pretty awful as well. But I was doing some thinking, and it occurred to me that the settlements are near-equally threatening to a one-state solution as they are to a two. There are a few Palestinian advocates who are publicly nonchalant about the settlements precisely because they signify that “the egg is already scrambled” — that is, Israel is inexorably on the path to one-state. But the reasons that the settlements would need to be evacuated won’t go away in a one-state climate. It’s not as if it will suddenly be okay for Jews to be living in Ariel or Hebron just because the territories have unified.

Read the rest of this post

“Swear to God, if [Israelis] ever want a Gentile prime minister, my first order would be to deploy the IDF in a north-south line, facing east. My second order would be ‘forward march’ and the order to halt would not be given until it was time for the troops to rinse their bayonets in the Jordan. After a brief rest halt, the order ‘about face’ would be given, and the next halt would be at the Mediterranean coast.

“That’s my ‘Middle East peace plan,’ and until it’s carried out, there will be no peace.”

–Robert Stacy McCain

McCain writes this genocidal diatribe as part of a post explaining that Glenn Greenwald is a “stereotypical self-hating Jew” for his post decrying the tactic of conflating anti-Semitism with being opposed to some Israeli politcies.

McCain, as he himself says, is a gentile. Which makes the hurled epithet all the worse, and rather underscores Greenwald’s point:

People like Jeffrey Goldberg — and his comrades at places such as Commentary and the ADL — have so abused, over-used, manipulated and exploited the “anti-semitism” and “anti-Israel” accusations for improper and nakedly political ends that those terms have become drained of their meaning, have almost entirely lost their sting, and have become trivialized virtually to the point of caricature.   That behavior has produced serious harm.  Their trivialization and misuse of those terms have severely diminished the ability to stigmatize and attack real anti-Semitism, because legitimate accusations of anti-Semitism are now conflated with and discredited by the neocons’ cynical attempts to wield it as a cheap debating weapon.  That’s a particularly dangerous — and ironic — outcome given that it has been spawned by many who have long claimed proprietary ownership over the “anti-Semitism” term in order, ostensibly, to protect it from trivialization.

Anti-Semitism is real and, unfortunately, still commonplace, even among those of us on the left who should know better. And I think David has done a great job with his pieces on this site talking about that. But Greenwald is also correct in saying there is a certain segment of far-right hawks who use the charge of anti-Semitism as a cudgel, wielding it not in support of equality for Jews, but in support of genocide against Palestinians. That’s about as far from working for equality as possible.

In the field of criminal law, there are two main philosophical schools on how society is allowed to punish offenders. The first is the retributive school — basically arguing that we can punish people solely based on how much they “deserve” to be punished, no more and no less. Punishment is seen as a matter of just deserts, apportioned to the moral culpability of the offender. We can’t raise or lower punishments because might make society better off (a more severe punishment might serve as a superior deterrent, a less severe one might allow a brilliant scientist to continue his work unhindered by a jail term).

The second school is utilitarian (or consequentialist) — it says we can punish because and only when society benefits from it. Deterrence (preventing further crimes) is a utilitarian rationale, as is incapcitation (preventing the criminal from committing more crimes) and rehabilitation (making the criminal a productive, socially beneficial member of society). We can punish up to point where all parties continue to reap a net benefit, but no further. This might mean we can’t punish at all, in certain situations, where the social consequences of punishment would outweigh its gains. Alternatively, it might mean we’d be justified punishing completely out of accordance with moral fault if there were socially compelling reasons to do so. Hanging an accused thief by his entrails may be wildly out of sync with just deserts, but it would probably make other accused thieves think twice before picking pockets.

Retributivists and utilitarians are not friends. Utilitarians allege that punishment without social benefit is barbaric — solely seeking to quench the victim’s or society’s thirst for blood. Moreover, punishment that isn’t tailored to increase social benefit imposes huge costs on society by, for example, missing critical opportunities to change behaviors. Insofar as we are missing opportunities to, say, deter rape, a utilitarian would say that we are in a lot of ways responsible for the rapes we could have prevented but didn’t. Retributivists counter that utilitarian punishment has no checks to insure it products the basic human dignity of the condemned and risks devolving into state-sponsored torture if the state claims a net benefit from it. On the other hand, it also provides an out for politically or economically-powerful individuals to escape liability for even the most horrific of crimes, if they claim that society would suffer more by their removal than it would gain through punishment. Because the idea of “social gain” is always indeterminate, punishment becomes solely the province of the poor and marginalized, and even can become a collateral weapon against social dissidents who are labeled “undesirable”. This a just a sampling — the literature in this field is rich and dense, and won’t be resolved in the space of a blog post.

Outside the academy, though, I suspect most of us blend together elements of both schools. We want our mechanisms of punishment to achieve social goals — make us safer, rehabilitate wrongdoers, recompense victims — while still staying at least tied to some rational conception of culpability.

One other function of punishment that I think sometimes gets elided in these categories is the function punishment serves of communicating social outrage. When we punish someone by, for example, sending them to prison, we are implicitly communicating a message by society that the behavior they were convicted of is deeply offensive and wrong to our communal sensibilities. The longer or harsher the punishment, the more outrage we are communicating. In its simplest form, I think this can be folded into a retributive model. The claim that X conduct “deserves” Y punishment is another way of communicating the degree the wrongdoer has deviated from communal norms, and our ensuing anger. You could argue that this expressive function of punishment also serves utilitarian ends in the form of social catharsis, or checking the potential for vigilante justice.

I don’t think this is per se invalid. One of the reasons I support hate crimes legislation is because I think it is important for society to send a message that such actions are not “taken in our name”, are not silently endorsed by the majority, but represent an egregious violation of community standards whose voice is communicated most clearly through law. But sometimes, the expressive element of punishment bursts beyond the constraints of either retributive or utilitarian considerations and takes on a life of its own.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Israel Policy Forum has set up camp in the blogosphere with its new venture, “The Mideast Peace Pulse”. The IPF states its mission as “to promote active U.S. engagement to achieve a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and peace and security for Israel with the Palestinians and the Arab states.” Along with J Street, the IPF is a leading element of the burgeoning set of institutions pressing for a “pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-peace” position (via the Z-Word).

I am also heartened to see that the Peace Pulse will apparently include posts by Ghassan Khatib, former Palestinian Authority Minister of Planning and Labor, and Ziad J. Asali, head of The American Task Force on Palestine and former president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. There are unfortunately far too few forums where pro-Israel and pro-Palestine voices feel comfortable sharing a space, much less working together productively in hopes of a shared future and a peaceful tomorrow. Without these circles of engagement, however, the prospects for advancement look dim. I’m a pleased the the Peace Pulse will provide one of those spaces, and I look forward to reading the contributions of all its contributors.

Welcome to the ’sphere!

Given some of the discussion generated by Jake’s comment on David’s Breaking The Seals post, I thought people here might be interested to know about (if you don’t already) the work of Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad. I wrote about her second book of poetry, Zaatar Diva, and a little bit about her first, Born Palestinian, Born Black on my blog here. It’s a review of two books of poetry, but some of what it says is germane to what we are talking about here.

A brace of pessimism from Stephen Walt:

There are two trends at play that threaten to undermine the two-state option. The first is the continued expansion of Israel settlements in the land that is supposed to be reserved for the Palestinians. There are now about 290,000 settlers living in the West Bank. There are another 185,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. Most of the settlers are subsidized directly or indirectly by the Israeli government. It is increasingly hard to imagine Israel evicting nearly half a million people (about seven percent of its population) from their homes. Although in theory one can imagine a peace deal that keeps most of the settlers within Israel’s final borders (with the new Palestinian state receiving land of equal value as compensation), at some point the settlers’ efforts to “create facts” will make it practically impossible to establish a viable Palestinian state.

The second trend is the growing extremism on both sides. Time is running out on a two-state solution, and its main opponents — the Likud Party and its allies in Israel and Hamas among the Palestinians — are becoming more popular. The rising popularity of Avigdor Lieberman’s overtly racist Yisrael Beiteinu party is ample evidence of this trend. And it’s not as though Kadima or Labor have been pushing hard to bring it about. According to Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times:

The result is that the next Israeli government, left to its own devices, is likely to opt for the status quo with the Palestinians - continued occupation of the West Bank, desultory peace talks, steadily expanding settlements and military force in response to Palestinian rockets or bombs. The long-term pursuit of a two-state solution will be brushed aside, with the argument that the Palestinians are too divided and dangerous to be negotiating partners.”

One does not need to look far down the road to see the point where a two-state solution will no longer be a practical possibility. What will the United States do then? What will American policy be when it makes no sense to talk about a two-state solution, because Israel effectively controls all of what we used to call Mandate Palestine? What vision will President Obama and Secretary Clinton have for the Palestinians and for Israel when they can no longer invoke the two-state mantra?

There are only three alternative options at that point.

As Walt lays it out, option one is ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. That’s not a solution the US could support. Option two is an apartheid state: “allow the Palestinians limited autonomy in a set of disconnected enclaves, while it controlled access in-and-out, their water supplies, and the airspace above them.” Walt thinks that the US couldn’t support this option, although I’m not as sure as he is.

Which brings me to the third option. The Israeli government could maintain its physical control over “greater Israel” and grant the Palestinians full democratic rights within this territory. This option has been proposed by a handful of Israeli Jews and a growing number of Palestinians. But there are formidable objections to this outcome: it would mean abandoning the Zionist dream of an independent Jewish state and binational states of this sort do not have an encouraging track record, especially when the two parties have waged a bitter conflict across several generations. This is why I prefer the two-state alternative.

But the more times goes on, the less possible a two-state solution will be. For its part, the US needs to push Israel very hard to reverse course on the settlements. (That doesn’t mean that the Palestinians don’t need to be pushed, too; but the US isn’t the country best situated to push the Palestinians. We are the country best situated to push the Israeli government.)

Late last month, the Daily News published this article: Harry Potter part of Zionist conspiracy, Iranian film claims. The ridiculousness of the video speaks for itself, and so, except for a couple of points that I think bear making, I am loathe to spend too much time responding to the analyses and accusations the Iranian so-called experts make:

1. Note the subtle (and not so subtle) conflation of Jews with Zionists throughout.
2. Note as well the reference to the idea of Jewish racial supremacy, which the film attributes to the Zionists in a way that–at least as I read the translation–could be read to suggest that the Jews (and not just the members of the purported global Zionist conspiracy) do indeed believe in our own racial superiority.
3. Note the portrayal of Judaism as a religion of witchcraft and wizardry, a trope that has a long history in European antisemitism.
4. Note the mention of Christian Zionists, which I confess I almost missed. It’s interesting to think about the significance of that mention in light of the discussion of Christian Zionism in part one my antisemtism series on my blog.

There are, I am sure, other things worth pointing out. Please have at it.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Author’s Preface: GallingGalla’s comment on the third post in this series has made me think I should add this preface: I see each post in this series as one section of a single piece of writing, not as a discrete essay unto itself. As a result, while each section may contain its own argument, it is not really possible to know whether an issue that a reader feels is important, such as GallingGalla’s concerns about how accusations of self-hatred are also accusations of treason, will or will not be left out of the argument made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. As I said in my response to GallingGalla, I certainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an inoculation against critique, but given the modular nature of posting to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find yourselves wondering, and commenting on, why I have not addressed something you feel needs to be addressed. Thanks.

To me, the point was obvious. Basing the Jewish claim to the land of Israel on the Jews’ own reading of the Hebrew Bible was asking the overwhelmingly non-Jewish world to accept as objective and incontrovertible the truth that Judaism claimed as its own, never mind the implication that the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians was somehow the will of the monotheistic god. To assert that line of reasoning as an argument for Israel’s right to exist, I suggested, was self-defeating at the very least–even if, as a believing Jew, it was a cornerstone of your faith.

“I never took you for an SHJ,” said one the colleagues with whom I was talking.

“An SHJ?”

“A self-hating Jew.”

The other agreed. “My husband,” she said, “would say you were an antisemitic Jew.”

I stared at my colleagues across a sudden gap of estrangement I did not know how to bridge. I had never been called self-hating before, but I understood it meant that, in their eyes, I’d revealed myself as a Jew who accepted an antisemitic definition of Jewishness. It was a logic I had heard often when I was in yeshiva, though my teachers always used it to explain the antisemitism of non-Jews who were critical of Israel: To suggest that there might be a perspective from which Israel’s existence as a Jewish state was not self-evidently valid, my rebbes would say, in many different ways, over and over again, was to suggest that the Jews had no right to claim such a state in the first place, which was also to imply that the Jews as a people ought not even to be.

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For anyone who is interested I wrote an article recently in where I interviewed Dr. As’ad AbuKhalil and FAIR representative Peter Hart.  The article was about U.S. media bias on the coverage of Israel.  This is my original article which was translated by journalist Ashraf Allam.

In a recent Crossing the Line podcast, Seth Porcello interviewed Juliano Mer-Khamis, a director of the Freedom Theater in the Jenin refugee camp, a theater for children. Mer-Khamis gives us these solemn words of wisdom:

The Palestinian people are going to be cut into fragments, which has already been done.  They are gonna be surrounded by walls and fences, electric ones, with tanks around, and a lot of missiles from Apaches, like happening in Gaza.  There are gonna be massacres in the future because people are not going to sit quit, they are going to march to the fence and try to break down the checkpoints…I see no future, I see no hope, I see no even bits of light in the coming, I believe, three, four, five years.  What I see is bloodshed of suicide bombers and massacres like happening in Gaza and much worse.

…

There’s two ways to deal with this conflict: either you surrender or you struggle.  Struggling is not something that you can discuss upon the results or make speculation how it will come out, you just struggle.  Because if you don’t struggle you surrender…I think, the Palestinians, one of the main phenomena, they are still struggling and not surrendering and I want to be part of this struggle, in my tools.  There struggle is my struggle.  I’m not a good person who is going to help the “poor Arabs” or the “poor kids.”  I’m joining them hand by hand, because Zionism is also my enemy, my dream is to live together, Arab, Jews, in one free democratic country and Zionism is exactly the opposite.  Zionism is all about ghettoing people into walls, it is about separation, it is about ethnic racism.

…

What happen in Jenin, in Palestine, which does not happen elsewhere is a culture of death which is growing.  And what is culture of death?  Because of the imbalance of powers between the Israelis and the Palestinians the main tool of the Palestinians against the Israelis…is their ability to die.  Now this is a very dangerous thing, to build a resistance on the ability to die creates a very hopeless perspective…We have a whole generation who wants to be shahids, not because they are incited or because they are brainwashed, no, no, no, this is the Western interpretation.  Because they know that if they want to resist the occupation they will face death.  And this imbalance between the Israelis and the Palestinians everyone who will resist the occupation will die and either he suicide inside Israel or either he suicide outside Israel.

Any kind of resistance, today, the name of the game in this region; as long as the Palestinian puts a gun on his neck, hangs a gun, even if this gun doesn’t shoot, the Israelis have the OK to kill him.  This is the concerns within Israel, this is the concerns within the world.  They call it “militants, armed people were killed.”  Once you are armed you are a terrorist once you are a terrorist it is OK to kill you.

…

I do believe in guerrilla fighting.  I don’t think the pen and the camera and the stage can replace the gun.  They are both legitimate tools against the occupation…Guns has no value against Apaches and tanks.  Guns has value when they shoot at the right targets and this can be only where those fighters and where those guns are backed withe knowledge, with culture, with discourse, with free discourse, with theater, with music, with revolutionary songs as we saw in different places in the world.  And Israel knows that and Israel is working very hard to eliminate any kind of different resistance: destroying networks, computers, libraries, has one purpose, one purpose, to push those people into only the guns and the mosques because it is very easy to fight this kind of enemy…And that’s why I think the culture resistance or the struggle for culture for basic humanelements of life are very important today.