Motley Moose – Archive

A different kind of terrorist atrocity hit Tel Aviv Saturday night. In Israel’s most liberal and gay-friendly city, and also by some measures its largest, a gunman dressed in black entered the basement room of a gay and lesbian center where a support group of young people, ages 14-21, was meeting with facilitators.  He pulled a pistol and opened fire.  Nir Katz, 26, one of the facilitators, and Liz Troubishi, 17, were murdered.  15 others were injured, 10 hospitalized, 2 in critical condition.  The gunman remains at large.  A variety of articles provide more information at www.haaretz.com, including condemnations by both Netanyahu and Livni, leaders of the two largest political parties, and background that reveals this as a radical escalation of anti-gay violence here.    

Most assume that the perpetrator acted with a religious motive.  And indeed, the ultra-orthodox have become more actively hateful in recent years.  What I find astonishing about this is that despite the widely interpreted biblical prohibition on male-male anal sex, Rabbinic Judaism actually contains a legal mechanism that would not just enable, but mandate acceptance of homosexuality.  According to a principle called pikuah nefesh, any commandment, excluding prohibitions on murder, idolatry, and adultery, is superseded if a human life is potentially at stake.  Given what we know about the relationship between the closet–self-imposed and as a function of overt social repression–and suicide and murder, it seems to me that this biblical prohibition, which does not even hold for all gays or for any lesbians, should be considered null and void.  

Such a principle of reverence for human life, pikuah nefesh should guide the ethos of a state that calls itself “Jewish.”  Instead, it has been relegated to a parodic flexibility and inconsistency by those who claim to be the standard bearers of Torah Judaism.  Steven Spielberg’s holo-kitch flick, Schindler’s List, at least popularized the Talmudic maxim that one who saves a single life is like one who has saved a universe entire.  Following the concept that all humans are created in God’s image found in the creations myths in Genesis, Rabbinic Judaism has always considered murder to be the gravest desecration of God’s holy name.

Demonstrations have been announced.  I would love to see hate crimes legislation brought to the floor of the Knesset, if only to force the leaders of religious parties to take public responsibility for the incitement that has destroyed the young lives of Nir Katz and Liz Troubishi and so hideously and blasphemously desecrated the holy name of the God they claim to represent.

Here’s a clip of my favorite Israeli songwriter (one of my favorites in general for that matter) Ehud Banai performing with two legendary Palestinian musicians, George Samaan and Salem Darwishe, on the shores of the Galilee.  The song is called Nitzotz Ahava or Spark of Love.  It contains the lyric “What for me is peace, for you is war” followed by “The place you are going to, there I will also reach.”

What would peace here sound like?  A lot like this.  Pretty damn good I think.  Enjoy.  

On my way into the center of Jerusalem this week, I witnessed some proverbial “writing on the wall.”  An enigmatic call appeared in graffiti on the retaining wall of a park I pass through each morning.  Against the pale stone background someone had spray-painted in Hebrew: “If Obama will not come to the mountain; the mountain will come to Obama.”  Beyond the worrying placement of Obama’s name where that of Muhammed usually appears, I am not sure what the scrawl defacing this picturesque park intends to say.  But an editorial by Aluf Benn in this morning’s Haaretz clarified to me that in order to move forward here, it is time for the President to come to the mountain, to the original “city on a hill.”

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When President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to fill David Souter’s seat on the US Supreme Court, he ensured that opponents in the confirmation process will focus sharply on the President’s listing of “empathy” among the qualifications he sought and the related question of his nominee’s ability to apply the law fairly and impartially.  Conservative activists and pundits have already been harping for weeks on the alleged problem of “empathy” and have consistently raised the fact that the traditional allegorical figure of “Lady Justice” wears a blindfold.  

What they seem less eager to discuss, however, is the object “she” always holds in her hand and its particular condition.  “Lady Justice,” of course, bears scales.  Furthermore, “her” scales always appear perfectly balanced, neither side elevated over the other.

The most immediate symbolism of “her” scales, the significance that accords most easily with that of “her” blindfold, surely is “her” ability to avoid privileging either side in a dispute, her commitment to applying justice without being swayed improperly to one or the other.  But this rather misses the point.  When any judge renders a verdict, they very frequently imbalance their scales by deciding in favor of one side or another.  The figure thus contains a fair amount of ambiguity.  Considered another way, the balance of the scales represents the result of “her” adjudication.  One of the functions of “Lady Justice” is to recognize imbalance, i.e. injustice and restore it to its appropriate condition.  “She” must recognize that the positions of parties to a dispute do not have equally valid claims and/or positions, and render a judgment that creates a situation of fairness and justice.  Empathy certainly is not sufficient for this process, but neither is it irrelevant.

As we approach the highly mythologized “100 days” mark of the Obama presidency, I am generally pleased and unsurprised about the directions of his administration.  Without hard poll numbers, my impression is that most of us who supported Obama in the primaries, and many who supported Clinton but lined up behind the Democratic nominee in the general election, feel we received the president we voted for.  I even know some independents who voted for McPalin who are reasonably impressed and feel comfortable with our Chief Executive and Commander in Chief.  One such relative informed me yesterday that he is currently reading The Audacity of Hope, finds its arguments compelling, and thinks Obama’s initial policies and initiatives follow coherently from the principles he lays out there.  

Accordingly, I believe this is an appropriate moment to begin to discuss how applications of these principles are beginning to shape a doctrine.

[Dear Moose Brigade, I posted this diary over at MyDD in an attempt to improve the I/P debate over there.  Fat chance, you say?  Sure.  But I am a fan of experiments in impossibility.  That’s why I love being a parent.  Anyway, I think this issue WAY too important to be treated as it is over there.  If you want to comment here, using it as a repectful I/P open thread, please do.  But comments from those of you who haven’t completely sworn off that site or this issue would be most welcome over there where it may be more relevant.]  

Something has gone seriously awry here and I want to try to correct it.  This requires your help.  Please forgive the `meta’ tone of the current diary and the personal narrative it contains.  Its purpose is to widen active engagement of one of the most entrenched twentieth-century conflicts and human rights disasters that endures into the twenty-first, one of the greatest foreign policy challenges America is embroiled in, and one of the most important stages upon which the structural tensions between liberal nationalisms and principles of human rights are being exercised at this historical juncture.  This conflict is at one and the same time idiosyncratic and representative, peculiar and paradigmatic, unique and influential.  That its discussion has been limited on this progressive blog is not due to a lack of recognition of its importance.  Rather, it is because participants in this discussion – and I do not absolve myself here – have shown insufficient consideration for one another, insufficient humility with regard to their own understanding and knowledge, insufficient appreciation for the cultural-historical complexity that underlies this conflict, and insufficient faith in their opponents’ intentions.  

The discussion has thus been limited to a handful of participants.  Most others are reticent to read and participate.  No one is learning anything.  All that it produces is heightened division, entrenchment of already formed positions, and ad hominem demonization.  As such, our discussion of the conflict here seems to mirror some of the least productive aspects of the conflict itself.  Given the international importance of this subject – the involvement of our tax dollars, the ramifications for our foreign policy and our position in the world, and the progress we seek as progressives with regard to international human rights and civil society – we have a responsibility to do better.

My own engagement with this conflict is protracted and personal.  I am a dual Israeli-American citizen.  From January 1987 through December 1989, I served in an infantry division of the Israel Defense Forces, much of it as a squad commander.  Readers familiar with the history of the region will immediately note that this period included the first Intifada.  I had always been on the left side of the political spectrum.  I always saw Zionist nationalism as a means to an end.  I saw it as part of an optimistic historical process wherein it would prove a means to the transcendence of nationalism, to its obsolescence, to an ethically superior mode of cultural self-determination that included emphasis on productive cosmopolitan participation.  I admit that this was naïve and plead youth and good intentions, as well as my enduring commitments both to Jewish cultural life and to ethically engaged cosmopolitanism, as its primary motivations.

Last night, national air time that was meant to provide Pres. Obama with a platform to address GOP opposition to his stimulus plan was instead largely diverted to several of his nominees’ failures to pay their taxes.  E.J. Dionne reports that this air time was sought due to a growing awareness that the defeated GOP is winning the media battle over his economic initiative (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/article s/2009/02/obama_losing_stimulus_fight_to .html).  Obama published an Op-Ed in this same issue of the Washington Post to confront GOP obstructionists.  But the stimulus bill has also found plenty opponents on the left.  

Instead of arranging for air time and newspaper space, Obama needs to put his economic team into action to support these efforts.  Many of us find Obama’s academic background a cause for optimism, and his comfortableness with academics a potential boon to his administration.  His economic team is stacked with world-class academic economists.  He needs to take them out of their research mode and put their lecture and seminar experience in the field to engage critics on both sides.

I suggest Obama arrange for some conference rooms in the Capital building all day on Mon.  He should invite legislators from both houses and include members of the press to sign up for presentations given by professors such as Roehmer and Summers, as well as senior advisors with august credentials such as Paul Volcker.  They need to prepare materials for distribution presenting the data that supports both the general architecture of this plan and its particulars and leave plenty of time for questions.  If they cannot answer a particular point convincingly, it needs to be addressed further before submission of the final bill.

An academic president who has surrounded himself with top academics in his effort to lead this country and serve the American people needs to use all of the assets associated with the academic approach to our challenges.  He needs to use them to research and to teach, to field questions and to persuade.  If opponents do not engage, he wins the PR battle.  If they do engage and the encounter produces amendments, he makes good on his promise to listen to us.  If the academics who make up his economic team prove incapable of explaining their plans, absorbing criticism, and making adjustments, then what’s the point of paying for their credentials?

Crossposted at MyDD

Since the Oslo accords, the majority of American statespersons have adhered to a belief in a Two State Solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that may not be, and may never have been achievable.  Platforms of major Israeli political parties such as Labor and Kadima might indeed embrace the concept in name, but the current impasse may have less to do with disagreements regarding the final configuration of borders, the status of Jerusalem, and the questions of refugees and reparations than it does with a potentially irresolvable conflict over the institutional parameters of the future Palestinian state.  Israel is highly unlikely to accept a Palestinian state that is fully sovereign with regard to its military, water rights, and border control.  And setting aside competing narratives of how we arrived at this point, doing so would likely entail very real and enormous security risks to Israel’s population.  On the other hand, Palestinians will not accept anything less than a full state with regard to these functions, and it’s awfully hard to argue that they should.  Add to this the economic implications, and it becomes difficult to avoid seeing the outlines of the Two State Solution as deeply compromised, and a difference between what each side can and should accept as beyond compromise.  

People on all sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including committed Zionists, have expressed horror at the carnage and humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.  Among democrats and progressives, debates are taking place in an attempt to put history in context and assign responsibility.  Others argue about whether President-elect Obama should or could be more involved at this point.  

But there is, I think, one thing upon which we can agree: what is happening now highlights another horrific failure of the Bush administration.  And though that might make it a moot point with regard to debate in this forum, it does not diminish the importance of broadcasting it.

As we look forward to the inauguration of the first democratic president of our young century, we are perhaps just as eager to evict the current office holder from “our house” as we are to install the new one.

Given George W. Bush’s disastrous record and poll numbers, we can expect the culmination of his service–if we can call it that–to be greeted with significantly subdued fanfare. But we nonetheless face a bit of a conundrum that may significantly affect political debates for at least a decade.  Some will attribute the failure of our 43rd president to his culture of incompetence.  Others will emphasize the failure of his conservatism to address both domestic and international challenges.