America is not a Christian nation
Religious conservatives argue the Founding Fathers intended the United States to be a Judeo-Christian country. But President Obama is right when he says it isn't.

By Michael Lind


April 14, 2009 | Is America a Christian nation, as many conservatives claim it is? One American doesn't think so. In his press conference on April 6 in Turkey, President Obama explained: "One of the great strengths of the United States is … we have a very large Christian population -- we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values."

Predictably, Obama's remarks have enraged conservative talking heads. But Obama's observations have ample precedent in American diplomacy and constitutional thought. The most striking is the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797. Article 11 states: "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [sic], of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and, as the said States never have entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

Conservatives who claim that the U.S. is a "Christian nation" sometimes dismiss the Treaty of Tripoli because it was authored by the U.S. diplomat Joel Barlow, an Enlightenment freethinker. Well, then, how about the tenth president, John Tyler, in an 1843 letter: "The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent -- that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgment. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mohammedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma, if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions."

Was Tyler too minor a president to be considered an authority on whether the U.S. is a Christian republic or not? Here's George Washington in a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790: "The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy -- a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support ... May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants -- while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Eloquent as he is, Barack Obama could not have put it better.

Contrast this with John McCain's interview with Beliefnet during the 2008 presidential campaign: "But I think the number one issue people should make [in the] selection of the President of the United States is, 'Will this person carry on in the Judeo Christian principled tradition that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?'" Asked whether this would rule out a Muslim candidate for the presidency, McCain answered, "But, no, I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know has a solid grounding in my faith. But that doesn't mean that I'm sure that someone who is a Muslim would not make a good president. I don't say that we would rule out under any circumstances someone of a different faith. I just would -- I just feel that that's an important part of our qualifications to lead."

Conservatives who, like McCain, assert that the U.S. is in some sense a Christian or Judeo-Christian nation tend to make one of four arguments. The first is anthropological: The majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, even though the number of voters who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated has grown from 5.3 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008. But the ratio of Christians to non-Christians in American society as a whole is irrelevant to the question of whether American government is Christian.

The second argument is that the constitution itself is somehow Christian in character. On that point, candidate McCain said: "I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States as a Christian nation." Is McCain right? Is the U.S. a Christian republic in the sense that according to their constitutions Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan are all now officially Islamic republics? What does the Constitution say? Article VI states that "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust in the United States." Then there is the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ... "

True, over the years since the founding, Christian nationalists have won a few victories -- inserting "In God We Trust" on our money during the Civil War in 1863, adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War in 1954. And there are legislative and military chaplains and ceremonial days of thanksgiving. But these are pretty feeble foundations on which to claim that the U.S. is a Christian republic. ("Judeo-Christian" is a weaselly term used by Christian nationalists to avoid offending Jews; it should be translated as "Christian.")

The third argument holds that while the U.S. government itself may not be formally Christian, the Lockean natural rights theory on which American republicanism rests is supported, in its turn, by Christian theology. Jefferson summarized Lockean natural rights liberalism in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights … that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed …" Many conservatives assert that to be a good Lockean natural nights liberal, one must believe that the Creator who is endowing these rights is the personal God of the Abrahamic religions.

This conflation of Christianity and natural rights liberalism helps to explain one of John McCain's more muddled answers in his Beliefnet interview: "[The] United States of America was founded on the values of Judeo-Christian values [sic], which were translated by our founding fathers which is basically the rights of human dignity and human rights." The same idea lies behind then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's statement to religious broadcasters: "Civilized individuals, Christians, Jews and Muslims" -- sorry, Hindus and Buddhists! -- "all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator."

In reality, neither Jewish nor Christian traditions know anything of the ideas of natural rights and social contract found in Hobbes, Gassendi and Locke. That's because those ideas were inspired by themes found in non-Christian Greek and Roman philosophy. Ideas of the social contract were anticipated in the fourth and fifth centuries BC by the sophists Glaucon and Lycophron, according to Plato and Aristotle, and by Epicurus, who banished divine activity from a universe explained by natural forces and taught that justice is an agreement among people neither to harm nor be harmed. The idea that all human beings are equal by nature also comes from the Greek sophists and was planted by the Roman jurist Ulpian in Roman law: "quod ad ius natural attinet, omnes hominess aequales sunt" -- according to the law of nature, all human beings are equal.

Desperate to obscure the actual intellectual roots of the Declaration of Independence in Greek philosophy and Roman law, Christian apologists have sought to identify the "Creator" who endows everyone with unalienable rights with the revealed, personal God of Moses and Jesus. But a few sentences earlier, the Declaration refers to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Adherents of natural rights liberalism often have dropped "Nature's God" and relied solely on "Nature" as the source of natural rights.

In any event, in order to be a good American citizen one need not subscribe to Lockean liberalism. Jefferson, a Lockean liberal himself, did not impose any philosophical or religious test on good citizenship. In his "Notes on the State of Virginia," he wrote: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

The fourth and final argument made in favor of a "Christian America" by religious conservatives is the best-grounded in history but also the weakest. They point out that American leaders from the founders to the present have seen a role for otherwise privatized and personal religion in turning out moral, law-abiding citizens. As George Washington wrote in his 1796 Farewell Address:

"Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them."

In Washington's day, it may have been reasonable for the elite to worry that only fear of hellfire kept the masses from running amok, but in the 21st century it is clear that democracy as a form of government does not require citizens who believe in supernatural religion. Most of the world's stable democracies are in Europe, where the population is largely post-Christian and secular, and in East Asian countries like Japan where the "Judeo-Christian tradition" has never been part of the majority culture.

The idea that religion is important because it educates democratic citizens in morality is actually quite demeaning to religion. It imposes a political test on religion, as it were -- religions are not true or false, but merely useful or dangerous, when it comes to encouraging the civic virtues that are desirable in citizens of a constitutional, democratic republic. Washington's instrumental view of religion as a kind of prop was agreeable to another two-term American president more than a century and a half later. "[O]ur form of government has no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith," said Dwight Eisenhower, "and I don't care what it is." And it's indistinguishable from Edward Gibbon's description of Roman religion in his famous multi-volume "Decline and Fall": "The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord."

President Obama, then, is right. The American republic, as distinct from the American population, is not post-Christian because it was never Christian. In the president's words: "We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values." And for that we should thank the gods. All 20 of them.

Israel's recent bombing and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, Operation Cast Lead, killed 1,417 Palestinians; thirteen Israelis were killed, five by friendly fire. Thousands of Palestinians were seriously wounded and left without adequate medical care, shelter or food. Among the Palestinian dead, more than 400 were children. In response to this devastation, Caryl Churchill wrote a play.

While some British critics greatly admired the play, which was presented by a Jewish director with a largely Jewish cast, a number of prominent British Jews denounced it as anti-Semitic. Some even accused Churchill of blood libel, of perpetrating in Seven Jewish Children the centuries-old lie, used to incite homicidal anti-Jewish violence, that Jews ritually murder non-Jewish children. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews told the Jerusalem Post that the "horrifically anti-Israel" text went "beyond the boundaries of reasonable political discourse."

We emphatically disagree. We think Churchill's play should be seen and discussed as widely as possible.

Though you'd never guess from the descriptions offered by its detractors, the play is dense, beautiful, elusive and intentionally indeterminate. This is not to say that the play isn't also direct and incendiary. It is. It's disturbing, it's provocative, but appropriately so, given the magnitude of the calamity it enfolds in its pages. Any play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn't arouse anger and distress has missed the point.

The now-rote hysteria with which non-Israeli criticism of Israel is met--most recently dismayingly effective in quashing Chas Freeman as President Obama's nominee to chair the National Intelligence Council--has a considerable and ignoble record of stifling opinion and preventing unintimidated, meaningful discussion, in the cultural sphere as well as in the political. The power of art to open us to the subjectivities of others is especially threatening to those who insist on a single narrative. Hence efforts to shut down exhibitions of Palestinian art all over the country, most notoriously, perhaps, in 2006, when Brandeis University officials removed paintings by Palestinian teenagers from a campus library exhibit, "The Arts of Building Peace."

Theater, arguably the most humanizing of art forms because it begins and ends with human presence, with an encounter between spectators and living actors, has often attracted the ire of people grimly determined to maintain the invisibility of others. It's been twenty years since liberal stalwart Joe Papp caved to pressure and canceled appearances at the Public Theater of a visiting Palestinian troupe, El Hakawati. In the decades since, American discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has only become more vituperative and polarized, as the New York Theatre Workshop learned three years ago when it announced, and then retreated from, plans to present My Name Is Rachel Corrie.

With its title, its subject matter, its distillation of that subject matter, of a long, tangled, bloody and bitter history down to a few simple strokes, it's hardly surprising that Churchill's play has elicited outrage. The hostile reaction to Seven Jewish Children has been amplified by the context of a frightening wave of anti-Semitism in Britain and elsewhere, and exacerbated by the tendency to misread a multivocal, dialectical drama as a single-voiced political tract.

Even among those who are anguished and appalled at the catastrophe in Gaza and repulsed by the invective being hurled at Churchill, some are likely to be startled, if not to say troubled, by the play's blunt assertion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Jewish-Palestinian conflict. Even those familiar enough with Churchill's work to recognize in Seven Jewish Children another installment in her recent move toward poetic compression--and Beckett proved how profound dramatic minimalism can be--may be taken aback by the play's brevity, by the playwright's implicit rejection of the idea that the situation in the Middle East is too complicated, too impacted, too needful of historical exegesis and balancing points of view to be responsibly explored at anything other than great length.

There are passages, particularly in an ugly monologue near the play's conclusion, that are terribly painful to experience, especially for Jews.

It's difficult to imagine that the author didn't intend to court outrage, whether or not she anticipated its ferocity. This imputes nothing to Churchill of the mischievous or sensationalistic. Her play's political ambitions are at least as important as its aesthetic ambitions. Moreover, it would be disingenuous and, in a sense, a betrayal of Seven Jewish Children to insist upon a calm, quiet reading or hearing free from the voluble passions it has enflamed. The fury that rises up around this conflict, and the cowed silence that is that fury's inevitable concomitant, are simultaneously the object and subject of the play. It's an incitement to speech and an examination of silence; in its content and through its inevitably controversial reception, it describes what can and cannot be said.

Why is the play so short? Probably because Churchill means to slap us out of our rehearsed arguments to look at the immediate human crisis. No wonder it smarts. The play dares reduce the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the kind of stinging simplicity of Neruda's lines, "and through the streets the blood of children flowed easily/like the blood of children."

Why does the title use "Jewish" rather than "Israeli"? Because all the children the play revolves around are Jewish, but not all are Israeli. And because not all Israelis are Jewish; a sizable minority is Arab. More important, because her play addresses the worldwide Jewish community. Our history of diaspora and persecution led to the founding of the State of Israel, which claims to act on behalf of all Jews. We have an impact upon its policies. Many Jews, including the two of us, feel profoundly connected to Israel and concerned for its fate; Seven Jewish Children is speaking to us.

Why does the play feel, even to those of us who admire its virtues, so peculiarly and, at times, almost brutally painful? It is an exigent text, a rapid public response to and at the moment of slaughter; and, remarkably, as few such texts are, it is contemplative, interior, almost entirely soft-spoken, and demanding.

The play consists of seven sequences, each composed of approximately twenty simple sentences, almost all of which begin with the words "Tell her" or "Don't tell her." There is no place-and-time setting specified for the sequences, and the lines are not assigned to specific characters. In fact, there isn't a character list or even a suggested number of performers, and the text looks less like a play than the poem it also is. Nonetheless, it's clear that these are discussions between the parents, adult relatives and guardians of a young girl, presumably a different little girl in each sequence, who the playwright specifies is not on stage, not seen. It's also clear that the first of the seven sequences begins during the Holocaust; then the play moves successively to the founding of the State of Israel, the displacement of its Palestinian population and the intensification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arriving, finally, in a very dark, very dangerous moment--probably, although this is not made explicit in the text, concurrent with the military operation and humanitarian disaster in Gaza that occasioned the play. All else--the cast's size, gender, age (as long as all the players are adults) and ethnicity, as well as all staging choices--the playwright leaves to the director and actors.

The central issue being discussed, in each of the sequences, is what the little girl should or shouldn't be told regarding her circumstances; the tenor of the debate changes as the circumstances change. In the first section, the child faces immediate danger of arrest and murder by the Nazis. Her survival requires that she have an awareness of the seriousness of her situation without being traumatized into paralysis or dissociation. The play begins:

..Tell her it's a game

Tell her it's serious

But don't frighten her

Don't tell her they'll kill her

Tell her it's important to be quiet

Tell her she'll have cake if she's good

In the next sequence, which takes place sometime immediately post-Holocaust, telling or not telling revolves around questions of memory and mourning, of protecting a child from the emotional annihilation of a grief too weighty and of a knowledge of evil too imponderable for her youthful capacities.

Tell her this is a photograph of her grandmother, her 
 uncles and me

Tell her her uncles died

Don't tell her they were killed

Tell her they were killed

Don't frighten her.

Tell her her grandmother was clever

Don't tell her what they did

Tell her she was brave

Tell her she taught me how to make cakes

Don't tell her what they did

Tell her something.

In subsequent sequences, what can and can't be talked about are the anxieties of relocating (to pre-state Israel, although it isn't named), then the presence and forcible displacement of others (the Palestinians, again not named), the roadblocks, the bulldozing of homes, water rights. There's a shift at this point in the dialogue: the tension between assertions and their negation becomes tighter, more suggestive of conflict within the family or community, as the speakers struggle over how to deal with conflict from without.

Don't tell her she can't play with the children

Don't tell her she can have them in the house

Tell her they have plenty of friends and family

Tell her for miles and miles all round they have lands 
 of their own

Tell her again this is our promised land.

Don't tell her they said it was a land without people

Don't tell her I wouldn't have come if I'd known.

Tell her maybe we can share.

Don't tell her that.

Just before the play ends, the back-and-forth of the dialogue is stopped for the first time by a monologue. Though it's ostensibly an answer to the question of what the girl can or can't be told, that question becomes mere pretext for an explosion of rage, racism, militarism, tribalism and repellent indifference to the suffering of others. It's important to note that this monologue is neither the last word in the play nor any kind of summation or harmonizing of the play's disputatious voices. But it's near enough to the end; and expansive as it is, after so much compression, it unavoidably feels like a dreadful conclusion; to some, it's manifestly an indictment.

Tell her, tell her about the army, tell her to be proud of the army. Tell her about the family of dead girls, tell her their names why not, tell her the whole world knows why shouldn't she know? tell her there's dead babies, did she see babies? tell her she's got nothing to be ashamed of. Tell her they did it to themselves. Tell her they want their children killed to make people sorry for them, tell her I'm not sorry for them, tell her not to be sorry for them, tell her we're the ones to be sorry for, tell her they can't talk suffering to us. Tell her we're the iron fist now, tell her it's the fog of war, tell her we won't stop killing them till we're safe, tell her I laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they're animals living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn't care if we wiped them out, the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don't care if the world hates us, tell her we're better haters, tell her we're chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her.

This monologue is the "proof text" for those who've charged Churchill with anti-Semitism and worse, with blood libel, which her accusers discern in the last lines of the speech.

When the two of us first discussed Seven Jewish Children we turned immediately to those lines. We both winced when we read them; we both became alarmed. One of us was disturbed by the line "tell her we're better haters," resonant of Shylock and Alberich the Nibelung. The other focused on "tell her we're chosen people," contending that in this context it reflected a misunderstanding of the term "chosen people," casting Jewish chosen-ness as an expression of divine right and exceptionalism rather than of religious/ethical responsibility. We speculated that these two lines added fuel to the willful misreading as blood libel of the lines that follow: "tell her I look at one of their children covered in blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it's not her." Those who level the blood-libel accusation insist that Churchill has written "tell her I'm happy when I see their children covered in blood."

But that is not what Churchill wrote. Distortion, misrepresentation and name-calling are tactics familiar to anyone who's spoken out about the Middle East. There's no blood libel in the play. The last line of the monologue is clearly a warning: you can't protect your children by being indifferent to the children of others.

There's a vast difference between making your audience uncomfortable and being anti-Semitic. To see anti-Semitism here is to construe erroneously the words spoken by the worst of Churchill's characters as a statement from the playwright about all Jews as preternaturally filled with a viciousness unique among humankind. But to do this is, again, to distort what Churchill wrote. The monologue belongs to and emerges from a particular dramatic action that makes the eruption inevitable and horrifying.

The play traces the processes of repressed speech. The violence forcing that repression comes initially from without; the monologue gives voice to a violence that's moved inside. The play stages the return of the repressed, an explosion of threatened defensiveness that, unexpressed and unowned, has turned into rage. Encountering it is terrifying; we don't want to own it. But that doesn't mean we don't recognize it. And sad to say, there's no sentiment in the monologue's spew that we have not heard or read at some point from presumed "defenders" of Israel (as even a cursory survey of the Internet demonstrates: for example, the chilling story in the March 20 Ha'aretz about some Israeli army units making T-shirts celebrating civilian casualties and rape in Gaza).

The siege of Gaza over the past several years, which nearly starved a high proportion of the population, was unconscionable in humanitarian terms, but an even worse corner was turned this past winter. A placard at a peace-movement demonstration in Tel Aviv in January proclaimed, Slaughter Is Not Security. Apart from some brave thousands who took to the Israeli streets throughout the weeks of Operation Cast Lead, a large majority of Israelis--and their supporters in America--were convinced that the carnage was, indeed, justified as defense. Some even boasted about it. In America's weekly Jewish newspaper, the Forward, the president of the Reform movement, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, in an op-ed defending the Gaza invasion, disparaged more hawkish Israel supporters for "the obscene, cowboy-like delight" in "the damage Israel's army is able to inflict." But even when softened into Yoffie's remorseful notion of the Gaza offensive as a "tragic necessity, unwelcome but inevitable," the justification amounts to the same thing: better them than us. Such dehumanizing rhetoric is common in mainstream Jewish-American and Israeli discourse (and, in fact, in all military conflicts). Churchill, a non-Jew, had the chutzpah to strip that rhetoric of its hangdog, contrite camouflage and reflect it back to us: "tell her all I feel is happy it's not her."


..That hideous sentiment, however, is not the play's final word. There are three more lines:

Don't tell her that.

Tell her we love her.

Don't frighten her.

A playwright's presumptuous job is to imagine others, and the others Churchill has imagined in this play are Jews. If there's anger in the writing, there's also empathy, tenderness and intimacy. Nothing is more intimate than discussions between parents about what to tell their children; no act of speech is more carefully weighed or more fiercely protected. This is a family play, told from within the family. It concludes with love, and it concludes with fear.

Seven Jewish Children is a play. It must be read with an awareness of the incompleteness of plays on paper, destined as they are for collective rather than singular experience, for warm bodies speaking the lines, for empathy, for the variability of interpretation. All plays require that directors and actors make considered choices. Performance produces meaning. If an actor stresses "tell" in the line "Don't tell her that," it might suggest, That's true, but don't let her know. But if "that" is emphasized, it might mean, How can you even think such an outrageous thing? And much will depend on how the actor strikes the first word, "Don't"--collegially or adversarially.

Churchill ups the interpretive ante by leaving everything, beyond the lines themselves, to her interpreters. The monologue and the lines that follow it will carry different meanings if spoken, say, by a grandmother with a Yiddish accent or by a young man in an Israeli army uniform. Or by, say, a Korean-American man or a Chicana. Or, since the play is so short and could be watched three or four times in a row, with the lines spoken each time by different actors. Any director and company approaching the play will have to decide whether and how the audience will be made aware of the radical degree to which the written text has insisted, through its lack of character identification or stage action, on collaboration. Surely it's essential to understanding Seven Jewish Children that against the specifics of the script, the playwright, relinquishing nearly all traditional authorial control, engineers a far-greater-than-usual slippage among text and performance and audience reception, producing an unusually large amount of room for variant readings.

And it is perhaps only on stage that the central characters of the play come into their own: the eponymous seven Jewish children who are its heroines. We never see them. Our empathic imaginations are enlisted by the playwright. We have to conjure them.

In the opening scene of Churchill's Far Away, a girl asks her aunt about beatings she's seen her uncle commit. What's most terrifying is how easily the aunt placates, justifies and quells her niece's will to question. But in Churchill's play for Gaza, the girls never stop asking.

This is a powerful trope in Jewish culture; it's the questioning child around whom the Passover Seder is built. We're left to hope that this girl we've never seen, the last scene's girl, won't become one of the Israeli teenagers who recently gave the truly frightening Avigdor Lieberman the highest share of the votes in a high school election poll. Perhaps she's a pain in the ass, this girl; perhaps she'll keep questioning. Perhaps she refuses to succumb to those in her family whose loving desire is to protect her by not speaking, by not saying. Perhaps she's realizing that their repression of the truth has become not only misguided and immoral but fatal; for nothing survives on lies, on a denial of reality; eventually, reality wins. Perhaps she's found out about a relative of hers, mentioned earlier: "Don't tell her her cousin refused to serve in the army."

Perhaps this girl will grow up to work for justice.

This article was published in THE NATION and written by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon.


About Tony Kushner
Tony Kushner is a playwright whose most recent work is Homebody/Kabul. more...
About Alisa Solomon
Alisa Solomon teaches at Columbia University's School of Journalism and is the author of Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender

In recent years, increasing numbers of individuals around the world have begun adopting and developing an analysis of Israel as an apartheid regime. This can be seen in the ways that the global movement in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is taking on a pointedly anti-apartheid character, as evidenced by the growth of Israeli Apartheid Week ( http://apartheidweek.org/). Further, much of the recent international diplomatic support for Israel has increasingly taken on the form of denying that racial discrimination is a root cause of the oppression of Palestinians. This has taken on new levels of absurdity in Western responses to the April 2009 Durban Review Conference, a follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in which Palestinians were identified as victims of racism (the US, Israel, Canada and Italy have already announced that they will not participate because of the potential for criticism of Israel).

Many of the writings stemming from this analysis work to detail levels of similarity and difference with apartheid South Africa, rather than looking at apartheid as a system that can be practiced by any state. To some extent, this strong emphasis on historical comparisons is understandable given that boycott, divestment and sanctions is the central campaign called for by Palestinian civil society for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and is modeled on the one that helped end South African apartheid. However, an over-emphasis on similarities and differences confines the use of the term to narrow limits. With the expanding agreement that the term "apartheid" is useful in describing the level and layout of Israel's crimes, it is important that our understanding of the "apartheid label" be deepened, both as a means of informing activism in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, and in order to most effectively make use of comparisons with other struggles.

The apartheid analogy

It is perhaps understandable that some advocates of Palestinian rights look at the "apartheid label," in its comparative sense, as a politically useful tool. The struggle of the South African people for justice and equality reached a certain sacred status in the 1980s and '90s when the anti-apartheid struggle reached its zenith. The reverence with which activists and non-activists alike look to the righteousness of the South African struggle, and the ignominy of the colonial apartheid regime, are well placed. Black South Africans fought against both Dutch and British colonization for centuries, endured countless hardships including imprisonment and death, and were labeled terrorists as the powers of the world stood by the racist apartheid regime. They remained steadfast in their struggle, raising the cost of maintaining the apartheid system until South African capital found it no longer profitable and white political elites found it impossible to maintain. The comparison is further enhanced due to the relationship between the respective Palestinian and South African liberation movements, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the African National Congress, as well as the unabashed alliance between Israel and the South African apartheid regime, which remained strong even at the height of the international boycott against South Africa.

A further impetus for confining the "apartheid label" to a comparison with South Africa is that the commonalities and similarities between the liberation struggles of South Africa and Palestine are quite stark. Both cases involved a process of settler-colonialism involving the forced displacement of the indigenous population from most of their ancestral lands and concentrating them in townships and reservations, dividing the colonized community into different groups with differing rights, strict mobility restrictions that suffocated the colonized, and the use of brutal military force to repress any actual or potential resistance against the racist colonial regime.

Both regimes have enjoyed the impunity that results from full US and European support. Accompanying these and countless other similarities are a host of uncanny details common to both cases: both regimes were formally established in the same year -- 1948 -- following decades of British rule; approximately 87 percent of the land was off limits to most of the colonized population without special permission, and so on. While we speak here in the past tense for South Africa, this still applies to present-day Palestine.

As the Israeli apartheid label has gained ground, some have adopted the approach of describing the differences between the two regimes, albeit for various purposes. In general, Israel has not legislated petty apartheid -- the segregation of spaces such as bathrooms and beaches -- as was the case in South Africa. However, Israeli laws form the basis of systematic racial discrimination against Palestinians. The 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (approximately 20 percent of Israel's citizens) do indeed have the right to vote and run in Israeli elections while the Black community in South Africa, for the most part, did not. The South African version of apartheid's central tenet was to facilitate the exploitation of as many Black laborers as possible, whereas the Israeli version, although exploiting Palestinian workers, prioritizes the forced displacement of as many Palestinians as possible beyond the borders of the state with the aim of eradicating Palestinian presence within historic Palestine. South African visitors to Palestine have often commented on the fact that Israeli use of force is more brutal than that witnessed in the heyday of apartheid, thus leading several commentators to adopt the position that Israel's practices are worse than apartheid and that the apartheid label does not go far enough.

Israel and the crime of apartheid

In terms of law, describing Israel as an apartheid state does not revolve around levels of difference and similarity with the policies and practices of the South African apartheid regime, and where Israel is an apartheid state only insofar as similarities outweigh differences. In 1973, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (General Assembly resolution 3068 entered into force on 18 July 1976 -- the year of the Soweto uprising in South Africa and the Land Day uprising in Palestine). The resolution set forth that the definition of the crime of apartheid was not limited to the borders of South Africa. The fact that apartheid is defined as a crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002 -- long after the apartheid regime was defeated in South Africa -- attests to the universality of the crime.

While the wording of the definition of the crime of apartheid varies between legal instruments, the substance is the same: a regime commits apartheid when it institutionalizes discrimination to create and maintain the domination of one "racial" group over another. Karine Mac Allister, among others, has provided a cogent legal analysis of the applicability of the crime of apartheid to the Israeli regime (see "Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel," al-Majdal #38, Summer 2008). The main point is that like genocide and slavery, apartheid is a crime that any state can commit, and institutions, organizations and/or individuals acting on behalf of the state that commit it or support its commission are to face trial in any state that is a signatory to the Convention, or in the International Criminal Court. It is therefore a fallacy to ground the Israeli apartheid label on comparisons of the policies of the South African apartheid regime, with the resulting descriptions of Israel as being "apartheid-like" and characterizations of an apartheid analysis of Israel as an "apartheid analogy."

Recognition by the international community of such universal crimes is often the result of a particular case, so heinous that it forces the rusty wheels of international decision-making into motion. The Transatlantic Slave Trade is an example where the mass enslavement of peoples from the African continent to work as the privately owned property of European settlers formed an important part of the framework in which the drafters of the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery thought and acted. An even clearer example is the Genocide Convention (adopted in 1948, entered into force in 1951) in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust in which millions of Jews, communists, Roma and disabled were systematically murdered with the intention to end their existence. We do not describe modern day enslavement as "slavery-like," nor do we examine the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of mainly Tutsi Rwandans through a Rwandan "genocide analogy."

Two points made by Mac Allister in her legal analysis of Israeli apartheid deserve to be reiterated because they are often confused or misconstrued even by advocates of Palestinian human rights. First, Israel's crimes and violations are not limited to the crime of apartheid. Rather, Israel's regime over the Palestinian people combines apartheid, military occupation and colonization in a unique manner. It deserves notice that the relationship between these three components requires further research and investigation. Also noteworthy is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign National Committee's "United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation: Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People" position paper, which outlines and, to some extent, details the various aspects of Israel's commission of the crime of apartheid, and begins to trace the interaction between Israeli apartheid, colonialism and occupation from the perspective of Palestinian civil society. [1]

The second point worth reiterating is that Israel's regime of apartheid is not limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In fact, the core of Israel's apartheid regime is guided by discriminatory legislation in the fields of nationality, citizenship and land ownership. This discriminatory legislation was primarily employed to oppress and dispossess those Palestinians (refugees and internally displaced) who were forced from their land and property during the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, as well as the minority who managed to remain within the 1949 armistice line (referred to as the "green line"), who later became Israeli citizens. Israel's apartheid regime was extended into the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the 1967 occupation of those territories for the purpose of colonization and military control over the Palestinians who came under occupation. Using again the example of South Africa, the crime of apartheid was not limited to the Bantustans -- the whole regime was implicated and not one or another of its racist manifestations.

The analysis of Israel as an apartheid state has proven to be very important in several respects. First, it correctly highlights racial discrimination as a root cause of Israel's oppression of Palestinians. Second, one of the main effects of Israeli apartheid is that it has separated Palestinians -- conceptually, legally and physically -- into different groupings (refugees, West Bank, Gaza, within the "green line" and a host of other divisions within each), resulting in the fragmentation of the Palestinian liberation movement, including the solidarity movement. The apartheid analysis enables us to provide a legal and conceptual framework under which we can understand, convey and take action in support of the Palestinian people and their struggle as a unified whole. Third, and of particular significance to the solidarity movement, this legal and conceptual framework takes on the prescriptive role underpinning the growing global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law.

Colonialism and the role of comparison

I have argued that the question of whether apartheid applies cannot be determined by means of comparison with South Africa, but rather by legal analysis. This, however, does not mean that comparative study is not useful. Comparison is in fact essential to the process of learning historical lessons for those involved in struggle. A central point of comparison with South Africa is the fact that it was, and for the indigenous people of Palestine and the Americas, continues to be a struggle against colonialism.

Focusing on the colonial dimension of Israeli apartheid and the Zionist project enables us to maintain our focus on the issues that really matter, such as land acquisition, demographic engineering and methods of political and economic control exercised by one racial group over another. Comparison with other anti-colonial struggles provides the main resource for understanding this colonial dimension of Israeli oppression, and for deriving some of the lessons needed to fight it.

One of the key lessons for Palestinians from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa was the pressure placed on the African National Congress leadership to compromise on its economic demands such as land restitution. Only a tiny proportion of white-controlled land in South Africa was redistributed to Blacks after 1994. As such, while the struggle of the South African people defeated the system of political apartheid, the struggle against economic apartheid continues in various forms including anti-poverty and landless peoples' movements today. The centrality of the demand for land restitution should be highlighted as part of the demand for refugee return as Palestinians and those struggling with them work to reconstruct a political strategy and consensus on how to overcome the political challenges that have emerged since the launching of the peace process and the transformation of the Palestinian liberation movement leadership into a non-sovereign authority dependent on Israel for its international legitimacy and financial solvency.

A second key lesson is in response to the paradigm currently guiding most mainstream accounts of how to achieve the elusive "peace in the Middle East," which is the idea of partition often referred to as the "two-state solution." In the 1970s, South Africa tried to deal with its "demographic problem" -- the fact that the vast majority of its population was Black but did not have the right to vote. The apartheid regime reconstructed South Africa as a formal democracy by reinventing the British-established reservations (the Bantustans) as independent states (British rule in South Africa established reserves in 1913 and 1936 on approximately 87 percent of the land of South Africa for the purpose of segregating the Black population from the settlers). These 10 "homelands" were each assigned to an ethnicity decided by Pretoria, and indigenous South Africans who did not fit into one of the ethnicities were forced to make themselves fit in order to become nationals of one of the homelands. Through this measure, members of the indigenous population were reclassified as nationals of a homeland, and between 1976 and 1981 the regime tried to pass the homelands off as independent states: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981.

Each of these Bantustans was given a flag and a government made up of indigenous intermediaries on the Pretoria payroll, and all the trappings of a sovereign government including responsibility over municipal services and a police force to protect the apartheid regime, but without actual sovereignty. The idea was that by getting international recognition for each of these homelands as states, the apartheid regime would transform South Africa from a country with a 10 percent white minority, to one with a 100 percent white majority. Since it was a democratic regime within the confines of the dominant community, the state's democratic nature would be beyond reproach. No one was fooled. The African National Congress launched a powerful campaign to counter any international recognition of the Bantustans as independent states, and the plot failed miserably at the international level -- with the notable, but perhaps unsurprising, exception that a lone "embassy" for Bophuthatswana was opened in Tel Aviv.

Israel has employed similar strategies in Palestine. For example, Israel recognized 18 Palestinian Bedouin tribes and appointed a loyal sheikh for each in the Naqab (Negev) desert during the 1950s as a means of controlling these southern Palestinians, forcing those who did not belong to one of the tribes to affiliate to one in order to get Israeli citizenship (see Hazem Jamjoum, "al-Naqab: The Ongoing Displacement of Palestine's Southern Bedouin," al-Majdal #39-40, Autumn 2008/Winter 2009). In the late 1970s, the Israeli regime tried to invent Palestinian governing bodies for the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the form of "village leagues" intended to evolve into similar non-sovereign governments -- glorified municipalities of a sort. As with apartheid's Homelands, the scheme failed miserably, both because the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had established itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and because Palestinians largely understood the plot and opposed it with all means at their disposal. The main lesson for Israel was that the PLO would have to either be completely destroyed or would have to be transformed into Israeli apartheid's indigenous intermediary. Israel launched a massive campaign to destroy the PLO throughout the 1980s and early '90s. With the demise of the PLO's main backers in the Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War and its strained relations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the first Gulf War, Israel capitalized on the opportunity, and worked to transform the PLO from a liberation movement to a "state-building" project that was launched by the signing of the Oslo Accords, seven months before South Africa's first free election.

The push for the establishment and international recognition of an independent Palestinian state within the Palestinian Bantustan is no different from the South African apartheid regime's campaign to gain international recognition of Transkei or Ciskei. This is the core of the "two-state solution" idea. The major and crucial difference is that in the current Palestinian case, it is the world's superpower and its adjutants in Europe and the Arab world pushing as well, and armed with the active acceptance of Palestine's indigenous intermediaries.

Hazem Jamjoum is the editor of al-Majdal, the English language quarterly magazine of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Sao Paulo, Brazil – March 2009 may come to be seen as a critical month in the ending of the international community's isolation of Hamas. Finally engaging Hamas would spell the end of hypocritical Western policy and bring the peace process in line with the realities of the Middle East.

First, a group of high-level US foreign policy officials, past and present, went public with their recommendation that the Obama administration talk to Hamas. Coincidentally, European politicians who visited Hamas officials in Syria about the same time echoed that view.

Typically, meetings between European lawmakers and Hamas leaders are conducted discretely, if not entirely in secret. Now, the trips have begun to be publicized: In March there were trips by a cross-party group of British and Irish members of parliaments, as well as their counterparts from Greece and Italy.

There was also an open letter to President Obama, published on March 10, and signed by more than 120 experts and academics. The letter urged a change of US policy in the Middle East. Significantly, the signatories advocated an end to the US "fear of Islamist parties coming to power," and also urged prioritizing human rights over supporting the region's autocrats.

Originally, the rationale behind isolating Hamas (a social and political movement condemned by many in the West as a terrorist group) was to weaken the organization and force a change in policy vis-a-vis the armed struggle and Israel, while simultaneously supporting the Ramallah-based leadership of Mahmoud Abbas. The international boycott emerged in parallel with the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip that began post-Palestinian parliamentary elections in early 2006. The aim: Punish the civilian population into rethinking their choice, and make a Hamas government untenable.

But the attempt to sideline Hamas has not worked. Hamas is no weaker for the cold-shoulder from diplomats, and, in fact, has been able to use the siege to deflect criticism of its policies in the Gaza Strip. The West Bank "moderates" dominated by Fatah have little to show for their negotiations with Israel; rather, the colonization of the occupied territories continues.

Consequently, the anti-Hamas united front is starting to crack. European politicians have been independently visiting Hamas leaders in Syria, and urging a rethink in the position of the so called Quartet of the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia. The appeals to Obama represent this shift in approach, reflective of both how the current policy has failed, and how engaging Hamas will be beneficial.

Ending the isolation of Hamas would strike a blow to hypocritical foreign policy – a small but important step toward changing the way the US and international community relate to Middle East politics. After Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman's success at the polls, Quartet envoy Tony Blair said that "We've got to work with whoever the Israeli people elect"– a courtesy not yet offered to the Palestinians.

Israel's propagandists have tried to use Hamas's increased power in recent years to their benefit by placing the movement at the centre of the debate, presenting the group as an extremist, Iran-sponsored existential threat to the Jewish state. Yet Hamas has only been around for 20 years; Israel conquered the occupied territories in 1967, while Palestinians were originally expelled from their homes more than 60 years ago.

Thus to engage Hamas is to acknowledge that the movement is not integral to the conflict, but neither is it peripheral nor ignorable. It has grown into a powerful social and political force, with a tendency toward prioritizing the pragmatism of political power. The oft-cited Charter – rightly condemned as anti-Semitic, but penned in 1988 by one person – has become increasingly insignificant; the discourse of ceasefires, truces, and national liberation typically trumps inflexible religious doctrine.

But engaging Hamas is fundamentally about accepting (perhaps uncomfortable) facts. Hamas was democratically elected and continues to enjoy considerable support from Gazans. It's important to ask not just why it got such substantial backing in 2006, but why it continues to despite the ongoing Israeli siege and the devastation wreaked in the December war, as well as the cases of human rights abuses by Hamas personnel.

The lesson is that the Palestinian people saw through the flaws of the international community's approach to the conflict long before a few voices in foreign capitals started raising questions about the wisdom of isolating Hamas. In the Middle East, the international community's self-defined moderate/extremist division is but a transparent charade.

The peace process game, the vacuous endorsements of a two-state solution as Israel absorbs the occupied territories, the lack of will to hold Israel to account – this is the fuel for Hamas support, and no amount of "isolation" can change the profound unpopularity of current US and Quartet policies among Palestinians.

Ending the boycott would not be an endorsement of Hamas, but an end to the obtuse – and damaging – refusal to recognize reality.

Amid the escalating violence, and the 60-year-long status quo, there are certain fundamental questions that need to be asked.

Are there certain values and absolute foundations that make resistance in general, and against Zionism specifically, a moral and humane necessity? What is the framework for nonviolent resistance, and how is it connected to these values? What is the ultimate end goal of the struggle? Is it returning the land and some rights to the indigenous Palestinian population, or can it lead to "solutions" that include acceptance of Zionism or even its right to exist?

Millions of persons hope for a chance to participate in this noble struggle, yet can't find the medium in which they can contribute. This is where there is an important role for a group of "movers" to create the vehicles for individual and collective contributions within the above framework and mobilizing the hitherto wasted support to achieve measurable results.

The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions defines Zionism as: "a global, political, ideological movement that aims to return the land of 'Israel' to the Jewish people," but this definition, besides its racist flavor (as it doesn't mention or consider an entire people who were inhabiting that land), doesn't tell the complete story. It might be important to mention that UN Resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975, after a prolonged discussion of the mechanisms of racist regimes, their alliances and human rights violations, decided that Zionism was equivalent to racism (the General Assembly revoked this decision by resolution 84/86 in 1991 after the advance of "peace negotiations").

To properly understand Zionism we cannot rely only on how it defines itself or how the dictionary defines it, as indicative as those might be. We must also look at the behaviors and practices that have characterized Zionism from the beginning of the movement and that were given intellectual and ideological rationales, fundamentally related to the materialization of Zionism through a state.

Zionism could not have effected its program without the ethnic cleansing of the people that inhabited what it called Greater Israel. Forced displacement, terrorism, murder and devaluation of the most basic human rights were justified because of the complete belief in the right of the Jewish "race" which consequently becomes racially "supreme" because Zionism claims that this "race" possesses an undeniable and superior "right" in this land.

The existence of Zionism, and its continuation as it is, constitutes a legitimization of all the previously mentioned crimes, co-existence with the logic of power, and the acceptance of the practical if not openly acknowledged racial inferiority of the Palestinian (read "Arab") people.

The right to resist derives from the values of justice, equality and freedom, but in the case of the Arab people it specifically gains the added value of being an existential struggle and a fight against the supremacist vision of the inferiority of the Arab people, and a refusal of the ideology of the oppressing power. Thus it is in no way merely a nationalistic, Arab or Islamic idea and its end goal can never be fighting the Jewish people or even uprooting Israel.

The clear goal of resistance should be defeating the Zionist ideology. This is an existential fight and one should never fear clearly stating a complete refusal of this ideology and its result (which in no way is an uncivil or a non-life-loving expression). Peace negotiations achieved nothing regarding this central dimension of the struggle, although removing Zionism as an ideology and practice is vital for peace in the Middle East.

The rocket and the gun -- as significant as their role may be -- cannot have the decisive word in the realm of the cultural, intellectual and humanistic battle. We need to understand the role of holistic resistance that the Arab people now more than ever have the ability and interest in deploying to place a siege around Zionism and racism. This resistance is very closely connected to values, culture and history.

In the age of globalization, the Internet and social media, the importance of centralized efforts is diminished as compared with decentralized, self-driven networks. More than ever, nonviolent resistance can harness the work of individuals contributing to a worldwide effort that has several aspects:

The knowledge dimension (cultural/educational/learning): This dimension is the most connected to the motives for resistance and is the logical input into the other dimensions. Understanding the motives and reasons behind the struggle and understanding the adversary and its methods, contributes to building the relationship between the values of justice and humanity on the one hand and the actions of resistance on the other. This dimension answers the "why" and increases the sense of moral and humane responsibility. Resistance must include learning curricula about the values being defended, and the educational and cultural work has to attack Zionism through arts and literature and the other cultural contributions. This is an important role of parents, researchers, writers and the elites in general.

Media and public relations: This dimension has internal and external aspects. The internal is directed to Arab audiences, educating them about the struggle, its goals, methods and cultural importance which it should be emphasized are humanistic and not nationalist or religious.

The external effort is directed to global public opinion which has a central role in the cultural struggle. Zionism realized this from the start and developed its strategy of hasbara (propaganda) and became a model to be studied in polishing the reputation of Israel and pressuring different groups and organizations. There are so many Israeli websites that aim to "educate" volunteers on how to refute accusations against Zionism, on creating pressure groups and organizing networks and public relations campaigns through tapping the huge potential of networks ready to provide support. We need to develop this dimension to empower the many people who believe in the cause but lack the means get the chance to express themselves.

The political-social dimensions: And here I don't mean politics in its direct relation with the military struggle, but rather as the translation of the wishes of the people. It should reflect the people's hopes of a dignified life and culture, and advancement towards good living that supports the belief in the values of justice. Civil society should, as a unit, communicate the values of resistance, justice and equality.

The economic and financial dimension: This is a very important weapon that we have until now failed to utilize. The least we can do is not buy the products of companies that are committed to the prosperity and development of the Israeli economy. I am not calling for a mass-scale boycott here, but rather surgical boycott of certain companies that really have a black history of unlimited and unjustified support to Israel, after communicating with them clearly about the reasons and the intent to boycott their products. There is already a global and growing boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that provides a framework to build on and support.

The judicial dimension: To try all Israeli and other individuals (and the state) for their responsibility for all the crimes (massacres, assassinations, displacement, theft, piracy, murders, rape, kidnapping and more) and flooding the international courts of law and civil rights groups with cases addressing Israeli crimes on all levels. There is a secondary role to this activity which is to direct the world's attention to the gravity of the various crimes. This should include all institutions that and individuals (even those deceased) who have actively contributed to supporting Zionism so they are recognized for what they are: criminals. There seems to be a need here for a central body that can coordinate the efforts of many research and legal groups.

All the above-mentioned aspects of nonviolent resistance are at the heart of a dignified, prosperous and humane life. The belief in and practice of these values can never be negative or destructive, but is a positive, value-affirming activity.

All efforts need to be directed to the origin of the problem in order to solve it, and the origin here is very clear: Zionism. As for occupation, that is just a symptom.

One can easily detect a generally superficial, and convenient, analysis of the outcomes of Israeli elections in western media outlets thus far. Indeed, the far right-wing of the Zionist continuum has strengthened its hold on the Israeli political system in the recent Israeli elections. Yet, it would be misleading to see these results as mainly the direct product of the onslaught on Gaza and the popular sentiment that followed, and to isolate them from processes that were underway years before the war. Indeed, the right-wing has been in a better position than the left within the Jewish vote since 1977, and its power has been steadily increasing since Ehud Barak destroyed the so-called Zionist left in Camp David 2000 and its aftermath.

Likewise, it would be mistaken to think of the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, as a major development or as the main source of concern for the Palestinians. Focusing on Lieberman (charitably called by the Guardian a "hardliner") distracts the discussion from the real issues to the person of one unpleasant politician who says ignominious things others are generally unwilling to say. This logic seems to suggest that the political disappearance of Lieberman will bring about a serendipitous resolution of major problems in the Middle East. Lieberman, however, only exacerbates an already existing problem, and he cannot be easily dismissed as a marginal case of excess or abnormality of the Israeli political system.

First, one needs to be reminded that among Yisrael Beiteinu's elected members of the Knesset are men who come from the establishment, for example, a former ambassador to the US and a former senior commander in the police force.

Second, in the negotiations that followed elections day there was a wide range of agreement not only between the Likud of Benjamin Netanyahu and Lieberman, but also the Kadima party of current Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Lieberman. Both sides were trying to convince him to join their own coalition. Needless to say, both Lieberman and Kadima emerged in the last decade as an offspring of the Likud.

Third, Ehud Barak of the Labor party rejected before the elections some of his senior party members' demand to promise not to join a coalition that would include Lieberman. Even worse, Barak claimed that Lieberman talks the talk but does not walk the walk as he never "shot anyone" thereby implying that he himself is the tough guy since he did actually kill Arabs in his past.

Fourth, Lieberman's central idea of land swap or population swap that would include Palestinian citizens of Israel and his view of this minority as a demographic and strategic threat to the self-proclaimed Jewish state are actually not controversial among the major parties and elites in Israel. The question of Palestinian citizenship in a Jewish state started long before Lieberman emerged on the scene and used incitement against the Palestinian citizens to gain more votes. Indeed, many prominent Israeli academics and politicians have expressed support of these ideas including Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Elie Yishai of the Shas party, Ephraim Sneh of Labor, journalist Dan Margalit and historian Benny Morris. To give one example, Ehud Barak said in his June 2002 interview with Benny Morris in The New York Review of Books that the Arab citizens will serve as the "spear point" of the Palestinian struggle, and that this would require changes in the rules of the "democratic game" to guarantee the "Jewishness" of the state. He also expressed support for a land swap that would include large Arab concentrations inside Israel because it makes "demographic sense."

To give another example, on 23 January 2002 Livni urged members of the Knesset to reject an "equal protection clause" according to which equality is the right of every citizen in the state regardless of his or her nationality or religion or views. Indeed, the proposed bill was rejected and formal equality remains outside the Israeli book of laws. She also supported "settlement and allocation of land for Jews only" bills in the Knesset. Finally, she repeatedly argued that Israel will never be the national home for its Palestinian citizens, and if they have a collective aspiration they should look for it somewhere else.

Fifth, this is not the first time that Lieberman has become a cabinet minister in Israel. In fact he served as the minister of national infrastructure (2001-02), minister of transportation (2003-04), and then more recently as the minister for strategic affairs (2006-08).

Sixth, Lieberman is not the first or only outspoken proponent of expulsion of the Palestinians to serve in the government. In fact, Rehavam Ze'evi of the racist Moledet party was a minister without portfolio (1991-92), and then again as a minister of tourism (2001) in the Sharon government until he was assassinated by Palestinians, only to be replaced by Benjamin Elon of the same party and with the same views. Ze'evi was more principled in this issue than Lieberman. Notable in this context is that the Israeli legislator enacted a law to commemorate Ze'evi's "legacy" after his assassination.

Other fascist politicians have also served in the Israeli government in recent years. Effie Eitam of the National Religious Party (HaMafdal), for instance, is another proponent of expulsion who famously called the Palestinian citizens of Israel a "ticking bomb" and a "cancer." That did not prevent the former general from being appointed as a minister of housing (2003-04) and minister of national infrastructure (2002).

In Theodor Herzl's novel Altneuland, published in 1902, Rabbi Dr. Geyer ran in the elections on the platform of disenfranchising the Arab citizens. The mainstream Zionists, on the one hand, and the good Arab who welcomed the Zionists, on the other hand, rejected Geyer as a troublemaker and Geyer was defeated in the elections in the novel. Lieberman currently plays the role of Rabbi Geyer with the difference that he actually won in the elections and he is a kingmaker. This state of affairs seems to have misled many of the commentators who are focused on the danger that the emergence of Lieberman poses. That would be tantamount to focusing on Rabbi Geyer and forgetting Herzl and the Zionist project itself which entailed not only the displacement of the Palestinian people but also the unequal status for those who remained as citizens inside Israel.

The movement to the right wing within Zionism cannot be reduced to Lieberman, and what is troubling about Zionism cannot be reduced to its right-wing side only.

Nimer Sultany is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School. He has worked as a human rights lawyer in the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and as the head of the political monitoring project at Mada al-Carmel (the Arab center for applied social research).

Encountering Peace: Far-fetched - but not beyond imagination

Mar. 30, 2009
Gershon Baskin , THE JERUSALEM POST

Welcome Prime Minister Netanyahu. Your recent statements indicating your intention to be a true partner to the Palestinians in advancing peace through negotiations is what the international community wants to hear. But more than wanting to hear positive statements on your intentions to make peace, the international community want to see progress on the ground.

The international community is quite united on this issue, more than you remember from the last time you sat in the PM's chair, and it's not only those anti-Israeli Europeans. US President Barack Obama also wants to see your commitment to making peace with the Palestinians and beware, Obama is truly interested in a multilateral foreign policy. The Quartet - the invention of the Bush administration to provide the US with a veto vis-à-vis Israel, will now act in a very different way. The US is determined to work in full cooperation with the other Quartet members - the EU, the UN and Russia. The US will even encourage the other partners to take initiatives - in coordination with each other, so that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process can be resumed, and this time, completed.

The international community is not interested in another long, drawn out Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Israel might be in love with peace processes and negotiations, but this time the world wants to see results, not more negotiations. After 18 years of peace processes since the Madrid Conference, there are some issues which, in the eyes of the international community, are no longer under negotiation - they are clear and must be expressed already in peace agreements.

In the eyes of almost every nation, the question of Palestinian statehood, sovereignty and independence is no longer a negotiating issue. Likewise, in the opinion of almost all of the nations of the world, Jerusalem should be the capital of both states - the exact formula of how to do this must be worked out. In Israel's favor, most nations do not expect it to accept and absorb any significant number of Palestinian refugees.

THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY has lost its patience with Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. There will be less tolerance than ever before for Israeli policies that counter the prospects for peace. Continued settlement building and expansion will expose this country, for the first time, to the real possibility of sanctions.

The international community, particularly the friends of Israel, have a large number of "tools" in their diplomatic toolbox which could be used to persuade the new government to make progress toward peace. Not all of those tools come down to the huge amount of financial aid that the country gets from the US. That aid is pretty much protected by Congress, but there are other actions that the international community, including the US could take to pressure Israel.

One small example - imagine if the US and Europe did not threaten to boycott the Durban II summit against racism being held in Geneva at the end of April. The initial draft resolutions branded Israel as an occupying state that carries out racist policies. Following the boycott threat, the document contains no reference to Israel, the Middle East or defamation of religion.

Israel enjoys the protection of an international umbrella in many international forums, not only provided by the US. Israel also enjoys access to many international funds, such as the EU Seventh Framework Program which enables it to compete on grants and contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros.

It also has benefited from the US veto in the Security Council, which has been used 11 times to prevent anti-Israeli resolutions from being passed. If a direct confrontation develops between the Netanyahu government and the international community, we should not be surprised if a new Security Council resolution appears looking something like the following:

Expressing its continuing concern with the grave situation in the Middle East, emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every state in the area can live in security, emphasizing further that all member states in their acceptance of the Charter of the United Nations have undertaken a commitment to act in accordance with Article 2 of the charter, the Security Council affirms that the fulfillment of charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles: Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in June 1967; the establishment of the State of Palestine on the basis of the June 4, 1967 borders, in the areas of the West Bank and Gaza including east Jerusalem; termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force; the governments of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine will enter into immediate negotiations between them on the exact borders between them. The guiding principle in the determination of the borders is that the State of Palestine will be composed of 22 percent of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and the remaining 78% of the territory will be the State of Israel.

This settlement will establish Palestine as the Palestinian homeland, just as Israel is the homeland for the Jewish people. Israel must immediately demonstrate support for the creation of a prosperous and successful Palestinian state by removing unauthorized outposts and ending settlement expansion. The government of Palestine must demonstrate that its state will create opportunity for all its citizens and govern justly and dismantle the infrastructure of terror. It must show that a Palestinian state will accept its responsibility and have the capability to be a source of stability and peace for its own citizens, for the people of Israel and for the whole region.

The Security Council recognizes the city of Jerusalem as the capitals of both states and calls on the governments of the two states to negotiate the modalities for application of such in the city.

The Security Council recognizes the importance of the holy sites in Jerusalem to all three religions and proposes that they be placed under an international guardianship guaranteeing free and open access to all people who respect the sanctity of the sites.

The Security Council empowers the Quartet to work with the governments of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine to conclude negotiations on the permanent borders of the two states within one year, including the modalities for the city of Jerusalem. The Quartet will report back to the Security Council on progress of those negotiations on a quarterly basis.

In accordance with Chapter VI and Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the Security Council announces its readiness to deploy peacekeeping troops to the State of Palestine to assist and to facilitate the withdrawal of Israeli security forces from the territories of the State of Palestine.

The Security Council calls on the General Assembly to act in discharge of its functions under Article 4 of the Charter and rule 125 of its rules of procedure, to: 1. Decide that the State of Palestine is a peace-loving state which accepts the obligations contained in the charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations; 2. Decide to admit the State of Palestine to membership in the United Nations.

Maybe far-fetched, but not beyond imagination.

The writer is the co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information.

“Ze’ev Herzog, a professor of archeology at Tel Aviv University, caused a storm in 1999 when he admitted that archeology had failed to find evidence that an ancient Jewish nation ever existed:

‘This is what archeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom.’

In fact, Herzog’s research, and that of other archeologists suggest that when a historical entity called Israel briefly did emerge, it was pagan and Jerusalem was not its spiritual center.”

“Another controversy flared in early 2008 when Shlomo Sand, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, published a book in Hebrew called When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? According to a sympathetic review by the Israeli journalist Tom Segev, Sand debunks Israel’s official history that today’s Jews are descendants of the Jewish community in Palestine 2,000 years ago, a community that was supposedly exiled by the Romans in 70 AD. He argues instead that most of the Jews and Christians in the region converted to Islam several hundred years later, when the Arabs conquered Palestine. Interestingly, this view was shared by at least two of Israel’s founding fathers, Yitzhak Ben Tzvi and David Ben-Gurion. They believed that many modern Palestinians were descended from the regions Jews. In the 1920’s the pair even dabbled with a plan to convert the native Palestinians back to Judaism….”

“How, then does Sand explain today’s widely dispersed Jewish Diaspora if there was no exile? These Jews, he argues, are in fact the descendants of non-Jews who converted to Judaism, thereby explaining the great ethnic diversity to be found among the modern Jewish population. In Sand’s view, Judaism was a proselytizing religion that competed for converts with the new upstart faiths of Christianity and Islam. It had most success among pagan populations*, particularly the Berber tribes located in north Africa, the Arabs of southern Arabia and Turks of South Russia, who converted from the fourth century AD onward. [my emphasis: I was first confronted with this “fact” in the research of Merlin Stone, presented in her book When God Was A Woman, back in the 1970’s.]

The people did not spread, but the Jewish religion spread”, Sand observed in an interview.”

“Most damagingly to the Zionist idea of a Jewish ‘return’, Sand argues that Askenazi Jews, the first immigrants to Palestine following the pogroms in eastern Europe and today’s ruling class in Israel have no historic connection to Palestine. Sand and other scholars believe they were originally Khazars, a Turkic people who created a kingdom 1,000 year ago in what is now southern Russia. The Khazar king, says Sand, converted himself and his subject to Judaism. In partial support of this theory, Paul Wexler of Tel Aviv University argues that Yiddish—generally assumed to be a Germanic tongue—is, in fact, a Slavic language.”

Below are the articles from the BBC on-line and Israel Newspaper Ha’aretz from which Cook quotes:

Israel digs into the past

Israel: The promised land?( BBC on-line, Dec 23, 1999)


By Paul Adams in Jerusalem

Picture one of the Bible's great scenes: Moses, aged 120, looks out over the Promised Land.
For 40 years, he has led his people, the Israelites, on an extraordinary journey from slavery in Egypt across the desert wastes of the Sinai.

All these events are contradicted by archaeology


Professor Ze'ev Herzog, Archaeologist

With a glimpse of the ancient city of Jericho, the old man dies. His chosen successor, Joshua, goes on to capture the city and conquer Palestine.
What if this never happened?
Jericho - the first walled city on earth - still stands. Archaeologists have poured over its dusty ruins since the 19th century, unearthing evidence of at least 23 levels of occupation.
The ruins have revealed a history of prosperity, decline and conquest.
No proof
Despite all of the digging, they have never found any proof that Jericho's fabled walls "came tumbling down" as described by Joshua himself.
Not only that, there is nothing to support the great, miraculous story that precedes the fall of Jericho.

Moses glimpsed the ancient city of Jericho - or did he?

There is no sign of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the slavery in Egypt, or anyone wandering in the desert.

Professor Ze'ev Herzog is an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University who has participated in excavations up and down the country.
"All these events are practically contradicted by archaeology," says Professor Herzog.

"Basically, these events did not happen on a national level. Some of these events could have been the local experience of a few families that were later nationalised into one coherent description."
For decades, Israeli archaeologists have attempted to prove that the Bible justified the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland.
Digging for evidence was a national obsession and part of the state-building process.

Time to reassess

There is ample proof that the Jewish people occupied the land almost 3000 years ago.
However, their arrival was probably a migration, rather than a conquest. Professor Herzog says it is time to stop looking for what is not there.
"After so many years of development of Israeli culture, we are now mature enough to look at the evidence in a more critical way, and not accept the legendary parts of the Bible as historical ones", he says.

Controversy

It is hardly surprising that Professor Herzog's conclusions - which coincide with efforts to re-evaluate Israel's modern history - should spark controversy.

Rabbi Spiro is concerned that the history of the Bible is being "undermined"

Rabbi Ken Spiro, who brings Jewish students from around the world to Jericho, acknowledges that the archaeological evidence is slight, to say the least.

He argues,"lack of evidence does not mean evidence of lack."
He also believes that what Professor Herzog and others are doing is dangerous.
"When you undermine the historicity of the Bible and the veracity of the claim that the Bible is essentially accurate, you are basically saying that it is fiction and that we have no more right to be here than anyone else."
For Jewish settlers, who base their right to occupy Palestinian land on the Bible and evidence of an early Jewish presence, Professor Herzog's findings are particularly problematic.

A large audience assembl
ed recently at the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut to debate the evidence.
The Tel Aviv professor received a polite welcome, but this was the lion's den.

Symbols of the Old Testament are everywhere in Israel

Noam Arnon represents the small, militant Jewish community living in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron.

He says that the Jewish patriarch Abraham will be remembered long after Professor Herzog is forgotten.

'This country is the land of Israel'

"To doubt, or debate some minor facts in the Bible will not change the minds of the people here that this country is the land of Israel and their mission today is to fertilise it and to settle it," says Mr Arnon.

"... an attempt to prove that Zionism is wrong and Israel is wrong."


Tommy Lapid, Israeli member of parliament

Some critics go further and smell a political conspiracy to discredit Israel.
The outspoken member of parliament, Tommy Lapid, dismisses Professor Herzog's theories as Jewish self-hatred. He says,
"There is an underlying political motive of very left-wing attitudes towards Zionism."
"The attempt to prove that the Bible is wrong is really an attempt to prove that Zionism is wrong and Israel is wrong."
The debate over what is Jewish historical fact and what is legend is sure to continue.

An invention called 'the Jewish people'
By Tom Segev ( Ha’aretz feb 29, 2008)

Israel's Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland. Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE. The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia of exile. Wrong, says the historian Shlomo Zand, in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened - hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts.

According to Zand, the Romans did not generally exile whole nations, and most of the Jews were permitted to remain in the country. The number of those exiled was at most tens of thousands. When the country was conquered by the Arabs, many of the Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the conquerors. It follows that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews. Zand did not invent this thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others.

If the majority of the Jews were not exiled, how is it that so many of them reached almost every country on earth? Zand says they emigrated of their own volition or, if they were among those exiled to Babylon, remained there because they chose to. Contrary to conventional belief, the Jewish religion tried to induce members of other faiths to become Jews, which explains how there came to be millions of Jews in the world. As the Book of Esther, for example, notes, "And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them."

Zand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse. He also describes at length the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish Berbers in North Africa. The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians, and from European-born individuals who had also become Jews.

The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Zand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as merchants.

We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers. According to Zand, the Zionist need to devise for them a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.

Prof. Zand teaches at Tel Aviv University. His book, "When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?" (published by Resling in Hebrew), is intended to promote the idea that Israel should be a "state of all its citizens" - Jews, Arabs and others - in contrast to its declared identity as a "Jewish and democratic" state. Personal stories, a prolonged theoretical discussion and abundant sarcastic quips do not help the book, but its historical chapters are well-written and cite numerous facts and insights that many Israelis will be astonished to read for the first time.

March 17, 2009 | Trying to figure out what Barack Obama intends to do in the Middle East is like trying to read the leaves in a cup of tea stirred by Jackson Pollock. For every signal Obama has given that he intends to break decisively with Bush's failed approach to the Middle East, he has given another that indicates he plans to simply give the same policies a fresh coat of paint.

Obama took what many regarded as a backwards step even before assuming office by appointing Hillary Clinton, who supported the Iraq war and as senator toed the establishment line on Israel, as secretary of state. But then he gave his first presidential interview to the Arabic-language station al-Arabiya and announced that his administration would approach the Arab-Muslim world with a spirit of respect and willingness to listen. He said, "If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us." But then he named as his Iran advisor the right-leaning Dennis Ross, who signed a threatening Iran paper drafted by two hard-line neoconservatives, claimed, in a statement to Congress accompanying his renewal of sanctions against Iran, that the country posed "an extraordinary threat" to the U.S. and gave every indication that he would continue Bush's failed carrots-and-sticks approach. Obama has ordered a top-to-bottom strategic review of U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, but sent 17,000 more troops there and has continued to assassinate militants in Pakistan with missiles fired from Predator drones. He announced that he was winding down the Iraq war, but is doing so at a hyper-cautious pace.

Not surprisingly, Obama's most contradictory messages concern the most important, and politically radioactive, issue of all: the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. His appointment of the respected negotiator George Mitchell as special envoy for the Middle East was taken as strong evidence that he was prepared to challenge Washington's blank-check support for Israel. In a major break with the Bush administration's refusal to deal with Hamas, Mitchell told Jewish leaders that a Palestinian unity government made up of the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority and Hamas would be "a step forward" for peace. Similarly, after Britain announced that it would break with U.S. and European policy by beginning low-level contacts with Hezbollah, an anonymous State Department official told reporters that the U.S. might enjoy some benefits from the diplomatic rapprochement. "We are looking for a comprehensive approach" in the Middle East, the official said. For her part, Secretary of State Clinton, on her first trip to the Middle East, criticized Israeli house demolitions in East Jerusalem, albeit in feeble, Condoleezza Rice-like terms as "unhelpful," and hinted that the Obama administration was prepared to challenge the ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. She also pledged $900 million in U.S. aid to rebuild Gaza after Israel's devastating 22-day onslaught earlier this year.

All of these developments represent a significant change from Bush administration policies on Israel-Palestine. But the Obama administration's right hand proceeded to undo what its left one had done.

Having sent signals that it might be prepared to break with Bush's policy of excluding Hamas and Hezbollah, the Obama administration proceeded to exclude them. Secretary of State Clinton has continued the Bush administration policy of dealing only with Fatah, the dominant faction in the Palestinian Authority (PA) headed by Mahmoud Abbas. She ordered that U.S. funds for Gaza go only to the PA, not Hamas. And in direct contradiction of the cautious support for a British-Hezbollah thaw expressed by an anonymous Obama official, another anonymous official sharply criticized it.

The most glaring sign that Obama might continue the status quo on Israel was his failure to defend Charles Freeman. Obama's director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, had asked Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council, but the highly respected diplomat withdrew after he was heavily attacked by supporters of Israel, including neoconservative ideologues and politicians from both sides of the aisle, such as the Democratic New York senator Charles Schumer. "His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step with the administration," Schumer said. Obama's refusal to stand up for Freeman indicates that he is unwilling to challenge Washington's quasi-official, bipartisan policy of unswerving support for Israel, and raises serious questions about whether he will be prepared to confront the incoming right-wing Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. But if he fails to do so, all his diplomatic overtures in the region will only be so much hot air.

Obama has broken with Bush's Middle East policy in one key area: He is talking to more players in the region. The most notable difference concerns Syria. Bush demonized Syria as a junior-varsity member of the Axis of Evil and refused to deal with it, but Obama is talking to Damascus and encouraging it to resume peace negotiations with Israel. His strategic purpose is to drive a wedge between it and its fellow hardline state Iran, thus weakening the militant rejectionist groups Hamas and Hezbollah and strengthening Fatah. This is a good idea as far as it goes, and it represents a qualified change from the Bush strategy of trying to line up the "moderate" states of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan against the "extremist" ones, Iran and Syria and their militant clients.

The problem, however, is that it is only a qualified change, because Obama is still refusing to deal with Iran and the militant groups, hoping they can be marginalized. But they cannot be marginalized unless the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved. Obama can fiddle around the edges all he wants, make all the right noises, but unless he is willing to deal with the real problem, his Middle East policy will go nowhere.

His cautious and contradictory moves so far give the impression that Obama hopes that more diplomacy will somehow cause the chess pieces on the Middle East board to move in such a way that he will be able to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace without going head-to-head with Israel. But that hope is unrealistic.

Capitalizing on their fear of Iran, which his Iraq war greatly strengthened, Bush prodded the "moderate" Arab states to close ranks against the "extremists." So far, Obama is following a similar path -- with the only difference being that he has opened communication with Syria. But the "moderates," their legitimacy badly damaged by Israel's Gaza onslaught, never fully embraced that strategy, and they have now rejected it. They still distrust Iran, but they have come to realize that the only way to weaken it and its militant proxies is by addressing the root cause of extremism: the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. That's why the Arab states have been engaged in furious diplomacy in the run-up to the upcoming Arab League summit in Qatar -- including reaching out to Syria. The recent four-way meeting in Riyadh between King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Syrian president Bashir Assad, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Kuwaiti emir Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah ended with a pledge to speak with one voice on Israel-Palestine.

The fact that all the Arab states have adopted a uniform position on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, demanding that it be resolved along the lines of the 2002 Arab Peace Plan, spells a death knell for Bush's attempt to use the "moderate" regimes' fear of their own Islamist radicals to sideline them on Israel-Palestine. And it puts the onus squarely on the U.S., and its client Israel, to take immediate and concrete steps towards a two-state solution.

Seen in this light, Israel's Gaza war was a major strategic blunder. Not only did it achieve nothing militarily -- the crude rockets it was ostensibly intended to stop continue to rain down, Hamas is more popular than ever, and Abbas is weaker -- but it united the Arab states against it. The Saudis and Egyptians fear Iran and were enraged after Syria's Assad derided them as "half-men" for failing to oppose Israel, but after Gaza they had no choice but to present a united front on Israel-Palestine. As Agence France-Presse reported on the recent Riyadh meeting, "[T]he Saudis see themselves as 'delivering' the Arabs to comprehensive peace talks, hoping to provoke the Obama administration to 'deliver Israel' -- regardless of who is leading Israel's government. Riyadh wants to maneuver Israel into 'a put up or shut up' situation, said one foreign analyst."

U.S. hopes that Syria can somehow be persuaded to break with Iran are misguided. As Syrian analyst Marwan Kabalan told the National, "Syria believes it can have good ties with Iran and America, that it does not have to choose between one or the other." The only way for America to undercut Iran, Kabalan said, was to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace. "The answer is the peace process, and not just a deal between Syria and Israel over the Golan," he said. "If you want to undercut Iran, you don't need to ask Syria to move away from Iran, you just need a fair peace. Peace will automatically mean that Hamas and Hizbollah are playing a more political role."

As Kabalan's comments suggest, neither Syria nor Iran is going to drop its support for the militant groups until there is a viable Palestinian state. Nor are Hamas and Hezbollah going to give up armed resistance until the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land ends. This leaves Obama no choice: If he wants to stabilize the Middle East, prop up the "moderate" regimes and disarm the militants, he has to pressure Israel to accept a two-state solution. America's present policy, demanding that the rejectionist and radical Arab factions agree in advance to renounce violence and recognize Israel while not simultaneously demanding that Israel end the occupation and return to its 1967 borders, has not worked, will not work and is simply a recipe for a continued conflict. And time is not on Israel's side.

But demanding that Israel take the steps necessary to make peace means a harsh face-off with the Netanyahu government. If the Gaza war moved the Arab states to the left, it moved Israel to the right. On Monday, it was announced that Avigdor Lieberman, a bigoted ultra-nationalist who ran an explicitly anti-Arab campaign, would be Netanyahu's Foreign Minister -- the equivalent of Obama naming George Lincoln Rockwell or David Duke to be his secretary of state. The stage is set for a major collision.

Obama's cautious moves so far, and the lengths he went to before the election to assure right-wing American Jewish groups like AIPAC that he was staunchly pro-Israel, suggest that he wants to avoid that confrontation at all costs. A showdown with Israel will split the Democrats, threaten campaign donations and distract attention and resources from his domestic agenda. But unless he is content with the status quo, he has no choice. If he wants to stabilize the Middle East, deal justly with the Palestinians, reduce the threat of jihadist terrorism and ensure a secure future for Israel, he will have to seize the third rail of American politics.

The fact is that the U.S. desperately needs a game changer in the Middle East, and brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace along the lines of the 2002 Saudi peace initiative or the 2003 Geneva Accord is the only game changer we have left.

Under Bush, the neoconservatives tried their own game changer, reversing the old mantra that the road to Tehran and Baghdad runs through Jerusalem. But it turned out conquering Baghdad did not open the way to an undivided, Israel-run Jerusalem. Israel's enemies, contrary to neoconservative dreams, did not cry uncle. In fact, the rejectionists among them are more powerful than ever.

The new Middle Eastern diplomatic detente leaves Obama only one way forward. If he wants to succeed, he will have to make it clear to the far-right Israeli government that it must stop settlements, return to its 1967 borders and accept a viable, contiguous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

If Obama dares to do this, he will find himself in a political storm like none he has ever seen. But there is reason to believe that Americans are starting to think about Israel and Palestine in a new way. Israel's brutal attack on Gaza badly damaged its international standing: Only its most hard-line supporters defend that atrocity. Roger Cohen's confession in the New York Times that "I have never previously been so shamed by Israel" expresses a widespread sentiment. Even the Israel lobby's victory on Freeman may have been Pyrrhic. As IPS's Jim Lobe, whose reporting on the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby stands above all others, pointed out in a piece he co-wrote with Daniel Luban, the Freeman affair forced the mainstream media to at last acknowledge the elephant in the room: that there is an Israel lobby, and that it wields enormous power. (When Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer published "The Israel Lobby" in 2007, they were widely accused of being anti-Semitic, scurrilous charges that have now mostly disappeared.) Unswerving support for Israel is still official America's default position, but it is becoming more and more hollow as politicians and American Jews alike begin to question whether such "support" is in America's, or even Israel's, interest.

Obama also has some political cover. The Iraq Study Group report made it clear that significant parts of the American foreign-policy establishment reject Bush's good-and-evil approach. Now, another blue-chip group of senior foreign policy officials, including Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, have urged the U.S. to open a dialogue with Hamas.

Paradoxically, the huge gulf between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government could actually make it easier for Obama to broker a peace deal. As veteran analyst Henry Siegman, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, recently argued in Haaretz, center-left Israeli governments have never been willing to take the steps necessary to make peace: They have "used the peace process they champion as a cover for the continued expansion of settlements and the closing off of East Jerusalem to any future Palestinian entity." But American presidents have been unwilling to challenge any Israeli government that pays lip service to the two-state solution, which means that such governments can stall forever. By contrast, Siegman notes, "a Netanyahu-led government with coalition partners like Avigdor Lieberman and other extreme right-wing parties that do not enjoy much popular support in the U.S. (or anywhere else for that matter) would allow President Barack Obama and his administration to advance [a peace] initiative."

Finally, there is Obama himself. Elected to bring change, in the wake of a disastrous war whose intellectual architects were ardently pro-Israel, he has more of a mandate to change the imbalanced U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians than any recent president.

So Obama has the power, and probably the wisdom, to change America's misguided course in the Middle East. Whether he has the will, or the courage, is another question.