Settler letter in NYT

At the prompting of Jewish Voice for Peace Boston, I composed a letter to the NYT complaining about a disgusting column by settler Dani Dayan. Then I realized that they demand really short letters and composed two shorter versions. Here they are, shortest first. It's not like they're anything terrifically original, but hey, at least I wrote something.

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In Dani Dayan's op-ed (July 26, 2012), he claims that a two-state solution is impossible, so the "international community" should accept Israel's settlements as a fait accompli. But it is the very point of Israel's settlement policy that the settlements help to close the window on the two-state solution. Biblical irrendentism aside, a generous welfare state exists for those willing to leave Israel and move to the West Bank, providing an economic incentive to settlers to create suitable "facts on the ground." By strategically using settlements and the land-grabbing wall to remove large chunks of the West Bank and water resources from Palestinians, and using setter-only roads and checkpoints to carve the remainder into discontiguous cantons, Israel makes a Palestinian state unviable; by continually expanding settlements even during negotiations, Israel deliberately derails the bankrupt "peace talks." Thus Dayan's main argument boils down to "a two-state solution is impossible because we are working to make it impossible."



Jeffrey D. Carlson,
Wakefield, RI

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In his disturbing op-ed Thursday, the settler Dani Dayan promotes Israel's illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank as the solution to the problem Israel's oppression of the Palestinians has created. He begins with a lazy justification based on a selective reading of history before conveniently putting morality aside to put forth a realpolitik argument for the settlements.

He disparages the two-state idea, making familiar false allegations about Palestinian "rejectionism" and arguing that the anger of Palestinians at their expulsion from their lands and their continued oppression and refugee status would make their "extremism," if they had a state, a danger to Israel's all-important security and that it necessitates the continued denial of their rights. Thus the worse Israel -- and its illegal adjuncts, as represented by Dayan -- treats Palestinians, the more necessary their continued oppression becomes.

The crux of Dayan's argument for settlements is a similar exercise in the snowballing of injustice. He claims that a two-state solution is impossible, so the "international community" should accept Israel's settlements as a fait accompli. But that the settlements help to close the window on the two-state solution is the very point of the Israeli policy. The fact that, as Dayan points out, Israelis are loath to leave their homes in the West Bank for monetary compensation is due to the fact that, apart from Biblical irredentism, a generous welfare state exists for those willing to leave Israel (or like Dayan, immigrate from abroad) and move to the West Bank, providing an economic incentive to settlers to create suitable "facts on the ground." By strategically using settlements and the land-grabbing wall to remove large chunks of the West Bank and water resources from Palestinians, and carving the remainder into discontiguous cantons with setter-only access roads and checkpoints, Israel makes a Palestinian state unviable; by continually expanding settlements even during negotiations, Israel deliberately derails the already bankrupt "peace process." Thus Dayan's main argument boils down to "a two-state solution is impossible because we are working to make it impossible."

This is about the justification one would expect from someone promoting an enterprise universally agreed to be criminal under international law.  It's ironic that the success that Dayan and his ilk have had at promoting apartheid whilst and killing the two-state solution will in the long run make inevitable a binational solution granting Palestinians freedom to travel and genuinely equal rights. The settlers will react poorly.


Jeffrey D. Carlson,
Wakefield, RI

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It's difficult to know where to begin replying to the distortions and tortured rationalizations put forth by Dani Dayan (nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/israels-settlers-are-here-to-stay.html) in his Thursday op-ed column in your pages, but one would not expect any better from an official representative of a venture universally recognized under international law to be criminal. It is remarkable it was even printed.

Dayan starts off by describing the occupation as an "acquisition" and sniffily insisting on Biblical terms for the occupied Palestinian territories -- three decades ago this kind of linguistic warrior was declaring that Palestinians don't exist and insisting they be called merely "Arabs." He claims a Palestinian state, built on the remnants Israel occupied ("in self-defense") after the 1967 war, would be unnecessarily kind to Palestinians, given threats about "annihilation" made in the immediate run-up to the war by the three Arab countries Israel fought and by the leader of the PLO. Thus the right to Palestinian self-determination on their own land is reconceptualized as a favor or reward that Israel can choose (or not) to grant on the basis of statements made forty-five years ago. Given the moral ground he has to try to stand on, it's not surprising Dayan then decides to put aside moral considerations in favor of realpolitik.

He argues that the anger of Palestinians at their expulsion from their lands and their continued oppression and refugee status would make their "extremism," if they had a state, a danger to Israel's all-important security and that it necessitates the continued denial of their basic rights. Thus the worse Israel -- and its illegal adjuncts, as represented by Dayan -- treats Palestinians, the more necessary their continued oppression becomes.

There's a similar snowballing justification in Dayan's insistence that the "international community" should accept the settlements as a fait accompli making a two-state solution impossible. In terms of Israeli policy, that the settlements help to close the window on the two-state solution is the very point. The fact that, as Dayan points out, Israelis are loath to leave their homes in the West Bank for monetary compensation is in fact a victory of Israeli policy: a rather generous welfare state exists for those willing to leave Israel (or like Dayan, immigrate from abroad) and move to the West Bank, providing an economic incentive to settlers to create suitable "facts on the ground." All of Dayan's disingenuousness about the long history of the "peace process" aside, in the present the facts are that by strategically using settlements and the land-grabbing wall to remove large chunks of the West Bank and water resources from Palestinians, and carving the remainder into discontiguous cantons with setter-only access roads and checkpoints, Israel makes a Palestinian state unviable; by continually expanding settlements even during negotiations, Israel deliberately derails the "peace process." Thus Dayan's main argument boils down to "a two-state solution is impossible because we are working to make it impossible."

The most likely solution Palestinians will insist on once the two-state solution is finally completely dead is a binational solution that Dayan no doubt would like even less; after all, the hostility of people in a position of power towards those they have wronged is a historical constant. Israel's future as an ethnoreligious settler state is menaced by the possibility of being surrounded by Arab governments actually accountable to their people, a growing international movement for boycott, sanctions, and divestment (bdsmovement.net), and an increasing unwillingness among young Americans to countenance crimes they had previously been unaware of or chosen not to let notice. Ending the occupation, dismantling the wall, allowing refugees to return to their original homes, and allowing Palestinian citizens of Israel equal rights would render Israel a state of all its citizens, rather than one existing for the benefit of a minority. Such a process happened in South Africa, and the resulting state would be on a par legally with other developed countries. Dayan would find it difficult to accept this "annihilation" of Israel, his real hope being that Palestinian demands for justice continue to be ignored.

Dayan's claim that "security prevails," typically, ignores the Palestinians. Palestinian children suffer double-digit percentage rates of permanent damage due to malnutrition (haaretz.com/news/poll-10-of-palestinian-children-have-lasting-malnutrition-effects-1.217826), Palestinian farmers are  cut off by their land by the wall, Palestinians are imprisoned on a massive scale without charges being brought, and their families' houses demolished as a punitive measure. Palestinians' weekly nonviolent protests in Bil'in and Ni'lin and whose hunger strikes in Israeli prisons are ignored by Westerners continuing to arrogantly wonder where the "Palestinian Gandhi" is. He is in jail, when he hasn't been assassinated.

Anyone interested in what conditions look like for Palestinians forced to live with settlers should look at the caged area covered with trash from the aggressive, military-protected settler minority in occupied Hebron on YouTube and ask for themselves whether the situation is morally tolerable. They should ask themselves what it would be like if the land they lived on were colonized, its land and water resources claimed and cut off with walls, and the remaining territory cut off by colonist-only roads, passage being blocked by the military. They should imagine their grandmothers being humiliated by soldiers with machine guns and their relatives dying on the way to the hospital in ambulances that take hours to move a few miles because the security of the illegal colonists might be in doubt. They should consider all that Dayan and his ilk represent and then consider Palestinian security for a change.


Jeffrey D. Carlson,
Wakefield, RI

My ex-girlfriend was essentially right when she said to me something to the effect of "Why do you care so much about politics? You don't care about people!"

Of course, her claims were in favor of political passivity: stop paying attention, because what you do doesn't matter; things happen, and you can't influence them. The outside world doesn't matter, so focus exclusively on your family and friends. But we know from history that people, coming together, can do incredible things. The problem is that I am not a part of humanity. I look like them, but I am not one of them. I can't take part in a movement because I can't leave the house. I can't be involved in my community because I'm not a part of it. I can't influence people because people don't care about me. There's no one even willing to talk to me.

So I follow the news, not as closely as I once did, and miss out on things that are days or weeks old sometimes, and feel dumb. I post pronouncements and links and the occasional petition on Facebook in lieu of doing something else, because that is the most I can actually do. But there is no point, because no one is actually interested in what I have to say.

I just fucking take up space.

Not conversant

I've have thoughts why I can't talk with others about politics when they don't already agree with me, at least partially. I find myself avoiding my friends and acquaintances Facebook updates because the liberal claptrap, the painful conventional wisdom I see there, actually irritates me too much to argue rationally. It pissed me off that people I like would even consider thinking in ways that are so self-evidently misguided, it pisses me off that I live in a society that drums this shit into people's heads, and it pisses me off that I have nothing coherent I could say that would change their minds.

Part of it is my inability to argue points and remember things (my memory has been failing at a remarkable rate the last two years or so), but part of it is lack of effort, a laziness, and a conviction that it will be futile whatever I do. Sometimes I assure myself all was lost before I began, and other times I kick myself for failing to argue a viewpoint that they may never hear again if I don't personally intervene. A person with opinions who doesn't act on them is worse than someone who believes nothing at all, and I am the former.

And then I wonder if it's just that I'm not brave enough to pick fights with people who will think worse of me, even though it's their beliefs that are ridiculous and offensive, not mine. There's certainly a level of that. Do I really want to post on my brother's friends's wall (who I don't know that well) on how Birthright is a cynical Zionist PR plot designed to force young Jews into a narrow view of their cultural identity that condones apartheid and murder? Maybe I should be that guy. I thought about it, and I guess I'm not. It looks like I'm just the guy who is very picky in choosing brands of hummus.

And I wonder if such otherwise reasonable and smart people could get things so wrong, what might I have wrong, having displayed lacking judgment and intelligence at so many points in my life?

I am not a strong enough person to stand up for anything.

Mini-BDS

Victory for yesterday (Easter): I (seemingly successfully) warned my aunt off Sabra and Tribe brand hummus. I don't really know why I was so nervous before I said it. I literally summoned up my courage in order to tell her, and I'm not sure why it was necessary.

She and her husband are born-again Christians from Catholic families. He is rather conservative, she less so. I guess I had a fear they might be Christian Zionists and I might have to face their wrath or something. So relieved.

To letters@newsweek.com

Your Feb 21 piece on the drone strikes essentially failed to question their legality or question the massive (> 32%) civilian casualties they cause. You are content to cite, unexamined, an anonymous government official's statement that they are legal. A throwaway mention of the civilian toll is postponed to the end of the article, when you've already gone on at some length at how precise, bureaucratic, advantageous, and wonderful these assassinations are. Where are the critics? Is it that hard to find the ACLU, for instance?

Your article falls so far short of The New Yorker's articles on the same subject that it's embarrassing. I wish I could say I was surprised by this typically craven act of water-carrying for US foreign policy on the part of Newsweek.

Jeffrey Carlson,
Medford MA

Comments on a professor's draft article on a math school in Pakistan

Dear [redacted],

Sorry I took so long on this.

[grammar and usage comments]

Now the important things, bearing in mind that I do not bear you any ill will...

                   p. 1
         first line, long spiel

The first eight words, "A crucial ally of America's War on Terror," are an unmitigated disaster that will turn off readers far less revolutionary than me. I find myself hoping against hope that you didn't mean them in the way that I interpreted them. This phrase implies (hopefully unintentionally?) a myriad of positions which you may or may not hold, but which are at least orthogonal to, if not possibly detrimental to, the goal of the article. I will sum up my adverse reactions.

(0) "The US" is a more neutral appelation than "America." The latter usage also seems to irritate people from other parts of North, South, and Central America.

(1) The usage of the rhetorical framing of "War on Terror" seems to imply the following,
which may alienate people.

a) The name makes sense. This is disputed. Most obviously, the name itself doesn't make sense. Terror is an emotion; quoting Jon Stewart (I think), "Yeah, and we're going to take on that bastard ennui next." So it should be short for a "war on terrorism." But terrorism is a political tactic. Paraphrasing something Lt. Gen. William Odom, US Army (Ret.) said in 2002, it makes as much sense to declare war on terrorism as to declare war on night attacks. Terrorism will exist when people are politically motivated and desperate enough. It fundamentally cannot be defeated by war.

b) The "War on Terror" is just. The ensuing American wars (mainly Iraq and Afghanistan, but don't forget the lesser military operations and drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) are necessary, appropriate, and right.

c) You are not paying close enough attention to properly genuflect to US foreign policy. The "GWOT" was Bush administration rhetoric; the Obama administration, while stepping up the wars themselves, has backed off the "War on Terror" name.

(2) The notion that the "War on Terror" can have a "crucial ally" seems to imply an acceptance that the "War on Terror" itself (whatever it is) is crucial. This is at the very least disputable. It is correlated with, but distinct from, the following constellation of offensive beliefs.

(a) The "War on Terror" is honest, in that it is about what it claims to be about, the safety of US residents (or at least citizens). You may recall that in 2002-3, the government cycled through a half-dozen different justifications for the incipient invasion of Iraq. It was like Whac-A-Mole, except everyone already knew the moles would win. The arguments that it would increase safety of US citizens were quickly defeated, so the Bush administration came up with new ones.

(b) The "War on Terror" has been or will be successful in its alleged goal of making US (and world?) residents safer. This is pretty objectively false, even discounting the death toll in the armed forces from the wars themselves. Many people agree with me on this, including people as radical as Pervez Musharraf and David Cameron.

(c) If the real goals of "War on Terror" differ from the stated ones, they are still justified in some way. Many people wildly disagree with this, certainly as it applies to the actual wars that have ensued. It doesn't take a deeply cynical person to see in these wars, say, a doomed empire fighting for resources, providing justification for its vast weapons expenditures, shoring up its economy with military Keynesianism, or just flexing its muscle to show people who's boss. Again, America's wars are just.

(3) The notion that Pakistan *is* a crucial ally seems to imply that Pakistan's government is correct in embracing US foreign policy, either because the US's goals are noble, or because supporting these policies are good in some way for Pakistan, rather than extremely risky. This is again very contentious, in and out of Pakistan.

(4) The citing of Pakistan as a crucial ally in the very first line implies that Pakistan's importance, if any, is due to its relationship with the US. I can see that offending people.

Even if you accept any of these abominable positions, I think including them in the first line of your paper is probably not a good idea.

          par. 2, line 1
Was it the empires that made it glorious? The Raj?

What is "glory" anyway? Was ancient Athens glorious? It had a burgeoning literary, philosophical, and mathematical culture; it had democracy for property owners; it also fought wars of conquest against its neighboring city-states, and between two-fifths and four-fifths of its inhabitants were slaves. Was the Roman Republic glorious, then? The Roman Empire? Han Dynasty China? The Xiong-nu? The Huns? The Mongol Empire? Considerations of "glory" of a country, and especially of an empire, tend to not consider the condition of the majority of people who have to live there. To me, there is nothing glorious about conquering people and demanding their submission, and that puts my damper on my considering most political entities "glorious."

          par. 2, line 2
Before the British occupation, I don't know if the subcontinent was ever under the control of a single political entity at any time. The "succession of ancient empires" line seems to imply that India progressed monotonically from empire to empire, rather than frequently being divided between different empires and numerous small states.

          par. 2, line 3
If you're playing up Pakistan's plight, then since you mention Partition, you could mention that it cost millions of lives.

...

          col. 2, line 7
This is not as surprising as it may seem; compare the situation in Iran, where most college students are women. (See, e.g. this.)

          col. 2, line -12
I couldn't find a homepage (in English, at least) for this institution on the Internet. Are you sure it's the right name? Either way, I think it's a bad idea to call it the ISI: to most people with a passing familiarity with Pakistan, that's the Inter-Services Intelligence. Also, you never mention it again, so including an acronym doesn't really help.

                    p. 3
          line 5
An "important societal need"? I am all for mathematics, but I am not sure that it is. As you yourself say in the next paragraph, "it is difficult to make a case for theoretical mathematics when millions of people, displaced from their homes, lack food, clean water, and medical care."
Apparently ASSMS graduates are eminently employable, but that's not necessarily the same thing as being useful. Consider the article you sent me about investment bankers. I'm forced to agree with G. H. Hardy that one of the best things pure mathematics may have going for it is that it is at least mostly harmeless.

In recent years I've come to view colleges, certainly in the US, as essentially a credentialing industry. The teaching part of college isn't concerned mostly with educating people per se, but with making money, and societally, as a way of creaing technical workers, propagating a managerial and/or middle class, and providing a means of rationing out jobs to people who college somehow "qualifies." I am all for the pursuit of knowledge and wish I could consider myself an intellectual, but that is not the primary reason why institutions of higher education exist, at least in the US. I hope the ASSMS graduates are serving a more important societal need than I anticipate myself filling.

          last paragraph, first sentence
This is overly broad. Terrorism usually isn't a consequence strictly of misery per se; there have been plenty of times and places where most of the population lived in misery but terrorism did not thrive. Secondly, laws in and of themselves do not stop misery, and lawlessness doesn't necessarily arise therefrom. Consider police states, where misery can abound without much lawlessness seemingly being able to occur.

Secondly, this line seems to be trying to tie in the ASSMS with counter-terrorism in order to solicit aid. I am not sure this is a safe bet; I think it seems rather tenuous, and doesn't tie in well to the preceding paragraph.

Finally, citing "lawlessness" as a scourge in the same breath with terrorism strikes me as comical. I thought of both Han Fei and Polyanna. Then I thought of how the Chinese Communist Party is still referred to as "bandits" in Taiwan. Apparently their repressive state bureaucracy is on a par with highwaymen ambushing travellers, stealing their money, and fleeing into the mountains. I've thought of this as a holdover from the pre-1949 era, but it seems like it also reflects a mindset where illegality is an insult, to be applied to anyone you disagree with.

I don't know if this is a residue of some Legalism you acquired culturally or through education, or something else, but I don't think it's right. Laws don't make people good, and I don't think that a lawless society is necessarily a miserable one. I think people have the capacity to regulate their own behavior, and while I'm not against the law per se, I think it's a mistake to fetishize it. One must keep in mind that people create the law, and often people who derive a definite advantage from it. At its best it outlines a population's notion of justice, but more often it is used to make one group serve another.

          last paragraph, second sentence
My personal view reverses the clause order: While the development of mathematics is a step in the right direction, it cannot be expected to solve any of the ills of a society.

That's it for the proofreading.

Finally, I'd like to talk about the book. When I gave it to you, I suspected it might not be your cup of tea. You asked me with concern, after having looked at it briefly, whether Tariq Ali could be relied upon to be objective. My answer is no, of course not, and neither can anybody else. I think writing objectively about history or politics is impossible, and claiming to do so is dishonest to both writer and reader.

So when people refer to a piece of writing as objective, I think they actually mean something else. Namely, there is a "safe" range of discourse in any society containing views that can be considered "objective," and opinions outside of that range are considered to fail that objectivity test. American newspapers and television offer brilliant examples of this, but I know the same is true of the UK and I believe it is universal. But there's nothing more inherently true in the statements of someone who attempts to be middle-of-the-road or to hide their own opinions in their writing. It's just perceived to be that way because those views are socially acceptable. There are any number of instances of actual falsehood being common knowledge in a society. I much prefer candor, people who let you know their agenda before they begin. In giving you that book on Pakistan, I hoped, probably naively, to provide you a different point of view.


Best,
jeff

The Battle of Algiers

I just watched The Battle of Algiers with my mother. After it ended, I asked her what she thought.

"Do you just try to pick the longest movies?"

"It was two fucking hours!"

"God, it seemed a lot longer!"

Here I'm trying to watch classic movies, and all I hear is that they're long. Even when they're not. Given, my appreciation of everything is limited, but at least my philistinism isn't intentional.