27 February 2007 - Draft closing statement added

Thanks to all who have sent me comments and advice—I’m going to make use of your suggestions, perhaps in the opening or closing statements then certainly as ammunition in the arguments to follow. Today I revised my opening statement a bit and added on a closing statement. I’m going to keep revising both in advance of tomorrow evening’s debate; again, contributions and advice are eagerly welcomed.

Opening:

I’ve insisted on drinking a Guinness onstage, because I want to illustrate a point. Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which all of us—Arabs and Jews, Christians and Muslims, men and women—could sit together and have a free and open debate over a pint of stout. I should add that I am here as a South African Jew, with a deep concern for the moral character of Israel and a yearning for peace.

Is Israel an apartheid state? The answer is clearly “no.” Apartheid, as it was preached and practiced in South Africa, was a system of separation and discrimination based on skin color. There is no racial discrimination in Israel. Nor is there legal discrimination against Arabs in Israel. There are inequalities, but there is also progress. For example, Israel recently appointed a Muslim Arab to cabinet.

What about the Palestinians in the occupied territories? The difficulties they face are the result of an ongoing conflict, not an apartheid ideology. The security barrier, the checkpoints, and all the ugliness of life in the West Bank and Gaza today are there because of the ongoing attacks that Palestinian groups have launched against Israeli civilians. The settlements are a problem, but terror is a far greater problem.

The false Israel-apartheid analogy has a shameful history. Jimmy Carter did not invent it. The first world leader to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa was Idi Amin, the murderous dictator of Uganda. The Soviet Union and the Arab bloc then proposed the infamous UN resolution equating Zionism with racism in 1975. The debate at that time was almost exactly the same as the debate we are having today.

Arab states claimed that the “Israeli lobby” controlled the U.S. Congress. They paraded anti-Zionist Jews and presented critical clippings from the Israeli press as proof of their claims. They attacked Israel in every forum they could, crippling UN institutions that were supposed to be focusing their attention on other, worthy causes, such as women’s rights and the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan—a great Irish-American—was the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. at the time. He observed that the goal of the resolution was not to prove that Zionism actually was racism, but to destroy Israel’s very legitimacy. The same is true today. Those who compare Israel to apartheid South Africa are not trying to prove an intellectual point, but to isolate Israel or undermine Israel’s right to exist.

I am not talking about those critics, including Israelis, who use the word “apartheid” as a rhetorical flourish. metaphor. Few of those argue that Israel or her policies actually amount to apartheid. Israeli peacenik Yossi Beilin, even called the idea “crazy”: “Only ignorant people, or people with malice, can say something like that. The ignorance is either about what apartheid was all about, or about Israel.”

I am talking about those who want sanctions against Israel, the way the world once imposed sanctions against South Africa; those who want U.S. companies to divest from Israel, the way they once did from South Africa; those who want Israel to be a global pariah, as the world once treated South Africa. These are the aims of those who claim Israel is an apartheid state. To them, the facts are secondary.

Take John Dugard, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, who last week repeated his claim that “elements of the occupation constitute forms of . . . apartheid.” Dugard, a South African, is often cited by supporters of the comparison. But by his own admission, his mandate “does not extend to human rights violations committed by the Palestinian Authority.” His only job is to criticize Israel.

Not surprisingly, Dugard is a critic of the two-state solution. He has gone on record saying that “consideration should be given to the establishment of a binational Palestinian State.” His reports are celebrated by Israel’s enemies—human rights abusers such as Libya, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Last year Dugard even praised totalitarian Cuba for criticizing Israel. Does this help Palestine? Or human rights?

Closing:

We have heard many accusations tonight. But the truth remains that Israel is the freest country in the Middle East. The real “apartheid states” are its neighbors, which discriminate and deny political freedom. As the Muslim feminist Irshad Manji recently wrote: “Would an apartheid state have several Arab political parties, as Israel does? . . . Would an apartheid state award its top literary prize to an Arab?

“. . . . Would an apartheid state be home to universities where Arabs and Jews mingle at will, or apartment blocks where they live side by side? . . . Would human rights organizations operate openly in an apartheid state? They do in Israel. . . . Would an apartheid state ensure conditions for the freest Arabic press in the Middle East . . .?” The answer is no. The question then becomes: why ask in the first place?

Back in the mid-1970s, Moynihan wrote, the Soviets hoped to use the “Zionism is racism” resolution to block any effort at achieving peace between Israel and Egypt. Today, the comparison between Israel and apartheid is used by those who want to block a two-state solution from taking root. They want to dispense with the peace process and pressure Israel to yield to the most extreme Palestinian demands.

The destructive goal of the Israel-apartheid analogy becomes clearer when you consider how opponents of Israel understand the South African experience. The rest of the world sees the new South Africa as a triumph of negotiation, reconciliation and human rights. But anti-Israel intellectuals tell Palestinian leaders that the South African case is a lesson in how not to compromise, and to go on fighting.

Tony Karon, an editor at TIME.com, a proponent of the single-state solution—and, like Dugard, a South African who left before the new government took over, wrote: “Nelson Mandela . . . agreed to end the armed struggle only when the white minority had conceded to the principle of democratic majority rule after decades of trying in vain to force the national liberation movement to settle for less.”

That is not true, of course. Mandela agreed to suspend the armed struggle six months after his release from prison in 1990, nearly four years before he took power. Mandela realized that violence had to be brought to an end if future negotiations were to be conducted in good faith. Had the Palestinians followed his example, we would be celebrating Palestinian independence instead of arguing.

The main obstacle to Palestinian statehood today is not Israel but the Palestinian leadership. The new unity government of Hamas and Fatah still refuses to recognize Israel or renounce terrorism. The result, ironically, is that it is the Palestinians who now live in an apartheid state, boycotted by the rest of the world, because their leaders care more about destroying Israel than building Palestine.

The Palestinian cause is still what Orwell called a “negative nationalism”—opposed to another nation, but not in favor of itself. Before Israel became a state, Jews in the Middle East and around the world prepared for sovereignty by creating political and social institutions, contributing money to buy land, even living on collective farms. Are there charities collecting donations to plant trees in Palestine? I’d buy one!

Some falsely accuse Israel of offering Palestinians mere “Bantustans.” Well, in 1937 Jewish leaders were prepared to accept a “Bantustan” of their own, roughly 20 percent smaller than the West Bank. Mandela, too, was prepared to accept sixty seats in Parliament as a temporary measure in the 1960s. Good leaders accept compromises. Calling Israel an “apartheid state” is just an old and deadly cop-out.

If there are any lessons the South African example offers for the Palestinians, they are: the need for realistic goals; the benefit of non-violent resistance; and the importance of negotiations. I am confident that there are enough people of good will on both sides to achieve peace. But trying to undermine Israel as an “apartheid state” blocks peace and puts the Palestinian cause on the path to self-destruction.

26 February 2007 - Draft opening statement

I’ve written a draft opening statement for the debate on Tuesday. I only get five minutes at the beginning, and five at the end. The text below is about 625 words long, which should be exactly the right length, assuming a speaking rate of 125 words per minute. Any suggestions, corrections, comments and contrary arguments are eagerly sought and deeply appreciated. Remember, I’ve only got until Tuesday.

Is Israel an apartheid state? The answer is clearly “no.” Apartheid, as it was preached and practiced in South Africa, was a system of separation and discrimination based on skin color. There is no racial discrimination in Israel. Nor is there legal discrimination against Arabs in Israel. There are inequalities, but there is also progress. For example, Israel recently appointed a Muslim Arab to cabinet.

What about the Palestinians in the occupied territories? The difficulties they face are the result of an ongoing conflict, not an apartheid ideology. The security barrier, the checkpoints, and all the ugliness of life in the West Bank and Gaza today are there because of the ongoing attacks that Palestinian groups have launched against Israeli civilians. The settlements are a problem, but terror is a far greater problem.

The false Israel-apartheid analogy has a shameful history. Jimmy Carter did not invent it. The first world leader to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa was Idi Amin, the murderous dictator of Uganda. The Soviet Union and the Arab bloc then proposed the infamous UN resolution equating Zionism with racism in 1975. The debate at that time was almost exactly the same as the debate we are having today.

Arab states claimed that the “Israeli lobby” controlled the U.S. Congress. They paraded anti-Zionist Jews and highlighted critical clippings from the Israeli press as proof of their claims. They attacked Israel in every forum they could, crippling UN institutions that were supposed to be focusing their attention on other, worthy causes, such as women’s rights and the end of real apartheid in South Africa.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. at the time. He observed that the goal of the resolution was not to prove that Zionism actually was equivalent to racism or apartheid, but to destroy Israel’s very legitimacy. The same is true today. Those who compare Israel to apartheid South Africa are not trying to prove an intellectual point, but to isolate and undermine Israel’s right to exist.

I am not talking about those critics, including some Israelis, who make rhetorical comparisons to apartheid. None of those critics would ever try to argue that Israel or Israeli policies actually amount to apartheid. Even Jimmy Carter, who called his book Palestine: Peace or Apartheid, admits that Israel itself is not an apartheid state. The word “apartheid” only appears three times in Carter’s entire text.

No—I am talking about those who want sanctions against Israel, the way we once had sanctions against South Africa; those who want U.S. companies to divest from Israel, the way they once did from South Africa; those who want Israel to be treated as a global pariah, as the world once treated South Africa. These are the aims of those who claim Israel is an apartheid state. The facts are merely secondary.

The truth, of course, is that Israel is the freest country in the Middle East. The real apartheid states are its neighbors, which discriminate against Jews and other groups, and allow little or no political freedom. As the Muslim feminist Irshad Manji recently wrote: “Would an apartheid state have several Arab political parties, as Israel does? . . . Would an apartheid state award its top literary prize to an Arab?

“. . . . Would an apartheid state be home to universities where Arabs and Jews mingle at will, or apartment blocks where they live side by side? . . . Would human rights organizations operate openly in an apartheid state? They do in Israel. . . . Would an apartheid state ensure conditions for the freest Arabic press in the Middle East . . .?” The answer is no. The question then becomes: why ask in the first place?

25 February 2007 – Adam and Moodley revisited

Yesterday I revisited Heribert Adam and Kagila Moodley’s 2005 book, Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians. I disliked it when I first read it, and now I dislike it even more. The book tries to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a South African lens. On the one hand, it rejects the Israel-apartheid analogy; on the other, it makes use of it at every turn.

The authors base their analysis on two bad assumptions. The first is that Israel is chiefly at fault, and that Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory as “the central cause of the strife and suffering on both sides.” The second is that Jews are intolerant of criticism of Israel, and can insulate Israel from pressure because of the moral weight of the Holocaust and the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S.

There are innumerable factual “errors”; in many instances, these amount to a thoughtless repetition of anti-Israel canards. For example, the authors claim “only Arabs with different license plates are checked at numerous roadblocks.” (6) In fact, Arabs from Israel have the same yellow-colored license plates as other Israelis. Only Palestinians have different plates—they are from a different country, after all.

Another awful clanger is the following claim: “Most university administrations in North America, from Concordia to Harvard, would like to declare the controversial issue taboo and ban all discussions among activist students and agitated faculty.” (xvi). Huh? At Concordia, it was the “activist students” that shut down debate by rioting when Benjamin Netanyahu was to speak on the campus in 2002.

As for Harvard, the authors take their story from biased and frankly dishonest sources. They quote former Harvard president Larry Summers as saying “Any comparison between South Africa and Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic,” and accuse him of suppressing academic freedom. (20) They rely on a secondary source—Judith Butler, who is a self-declared anti-Zionist. What Summers actually said was:

“Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent . . . . We should always respect the academic freedom of everyone to take any position. We should also recall that academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism. The only antidote to dangerous ideas is strong alternatives vigorously advocated.”

The historical analysis in the book is really sloppy, and describes events in the Middle East as they ought to have happened, rather than as they actually did happen, in order to fit their perpetrator-victim frame of reference. Israelis are likened to Afrikaners, for example, and must wrestle with problems of “collective responsibility,” just like—wait for it—post-war Germany! Palestinians are off the hook.

The authors seem to have taken their ideas and opinions about the conflict from the conferences they attend and the academic colleagues they interact with, rather than from their own research. In the introduction, the authors acknowledge that an early reader of a chapter of their manuscript called their text: “A mixture of sense and nonsense.” (xii) That may, in fact, have been me—and I still have the same impression.

What is interesting is that despite the fact that the authors accept some of the sillier fallacies of the anti-Israel critique, they reject the Israel-apartheid analogy. They do so for six reasons: 1. Israel and Palestine are not, as black and white South Africa are, economically interdependent; 2. Israelis and Palestinians have distinct religious differences, whereas South Africans on both sides were mostly Christian; 3. Third parties intervene more in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than they did in South Africa; 4. Leadership in South Africa was more cohesive on both sides, whereas extremist minorities have disproportionate influence in Israel and Palestine; 5. Relations between the two sides in South Africa were more hierarchical; 6. Suicide bombing was never a feature of the anti-apartheid struggle.

I am not sure I agree with all of these distinctions—especially numbers 3 and 5. The authors also offer lessons of the South African experience for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some of which seem more useful and valid than others (I am paraphrasing here): 1. Don’t insist on that the other side must be “subdued” before negotiation can begin; 2. Don’t insist on a halt to all violence before negotiating; 3. Let each side choose its own representatives; 4. Educate your constituency to prepare for peace; 5. The stronger side should not dictate terms to the weaker; 6.Don’t try to undermine the other side by encouraging internecine conflict; 7. Use gestures of reconciliation to appeal to the public on the other side; 8. Justice is more important than peace; 9. Try to involve extremists in the process; 10. Use truth commissions in transition.

These “lessons” are largely superficial and self-serving. They tell a sort of fairy-tale story about the success of the South African negotiating process and say very little about what would work in the Middle East. The authors set out to provide an alternative to the knee-jerk attitudes to Israel in academic circles, but have tried to appease those attitudes rather than challenging them with new ideas and research.

Adam and Moodley do provide an interesting account of their attempt to persuade Palestinians of the futility of suicide bombing and the importance of non-violent methods of “resistance”: “Our Palestinian audience received this . . . critical vision with polite dismissal. Wishful thinking in place of realistic recognition of power differentials knows no bounds if you believe in the justice of your cause.” (10)

The authors offer little by way of advice in building institutions and national infrastructure—perhaps because this is something the ANC has done rather poorly in South Africa. On Friday night, I met Sapir Handelman, an Israeli post-doctoral fellow here at Harvard, and he agreed with me that the weakness of Palestinian nation-building is at the core of the conflict right now. More on that another time.

Before I close this entry, I’d like to mention some recent links I found that deal with the Israel-apartheid charge: Bradley Burston’s latest blog at Ha’aretz; Michael Kinsley’s response to Jimmy Carter’s book in the Washington Post; and the Jerusalem Post’s coverage of Israel’s submission to an inquiry on discrimination, which was, surprisingly, praised by the investigating panel for its forthrightness.

24 February 2007 – Game theory and the conflict

Earlier this week, I wrote about Peacemaker, a computer game that models diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That got me thinking about game theory and its possible applications. I did a bit of research and came up with two papers, one by Sukanto Bhattacharya, Florentin Smarandache, and Mohammed Khosknevisan (2004), and the other by Tyler Cowan (2003).

Game theory basically attempts to analyze how people interact with each other when they have to make choices whose outcomes depend on the choices made by other parties. The classic game is the “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” in which two prisoners are interrogated separately, and each is told he can go free if he implicates the other. Both could also remain silent, but must weigh the risk that the other will squeal.

Games may have multiple solutions. In the standard model, each solution is called a “Nash equilibrium,” after Nobel-Prize winning mathematician John Nash, (subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind). A Nash equilibrium is an outcome at which no party, by changing her choice, could improve her welfare. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, there are two Nash equilibria—one where both stay silent and one where both squeal.

The paper by Bhattacharya et al., entitled “The Israel-Palestine Question – A Case for Application of Neutrosophic Game Theory, argues for the use of “fuzzy” model rather than the standard model of Nash equilibria. This is because “the players”—the Israelis and Palestinians—have goals and strategies that change over time. At times, they are playing “cooperative” games, and at other times “zero-sum” games.

In addition, the authors argue, “the objectives and strategies are often ill-defined, inconsistent and have a lot of interpretational ambiguity.” The parties may signal to each other that they intend to achieve peace, but at the same time do things that seem to directly contradict that goal. Or, conversely, they may launch attacks against each other but signal that they still remain open to a peaceful resolution.

After building some mathematical models of the “neutrosophic evaluative judgment functions” for each side, the authors conclude that these spaces will not intersect, and there will be no possibility for a resolution, if the goal of the Palestinian leadership is to end Israel’s existence as an independent state. However, peace is possible if the primary objectives of the Palestinian leadership can be changed.

The authors conclude: “. . . the aim of the mediator should [be] to make the parties redefine their primary objectives without necessarily feeling that such redefinition itself means a concession.” The authors don’t elaborate much, but I would guess that this would mean getting the Palestinians to commit to Israel’s right to exist in exchange for symbolic Israeli recognition of some other Palestinian claims.

The paper by Tyler Cowen, entitled “A Road Map to Middle Easter Peace? – A Public Choice Perspective,” attempts to evaluate the Bush administration’s “Road Map” to peace. Cowen doesn’t build mathematical models; instead, he refers to basic economic concepts such as the Coase theorem (which states that initial allocations of property rights don’t matter if the parties can bargain freely and costlessly).

The Coase theorem often fails in the real world, and the clearest proof is the fact that countries still go to war, even when they could bargain with each other and save lives and money. Cowen begins by considering several standard explanations for the failure of the Coase theorem, and shows how they do not apply very well to the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

One explanation, for example, is that transaction costs are high. But Cowen points out that this cannot be the problem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the parties can meet and talk as often as they like. Another explanation is that neither party can write binding contracts. Cowen points out that outside forces, such as the U.S., have been able to enforce other deals, like the peace between Israel and Egypt.

Another typical explanation for the failure of the Coase theorem is that parties might have “infinite compensating variations”—that is, values they are unwilling to trade for peace at any price. Cowen admits that the problem is a real one—especially around issues such as the “right of return”—but that it is probably not the fundamental problem, because there is room for flexibility on both sides.

Cowen then moves to what he considers more likely explanations for the ongoing conflict. One is reputation—that both parties have an incentive to act tough with each other because they anticipate future negotiations, either with each other or with other parties in the region. That means they may each try to hold out for a better deal in the future, rather than settling for a reasonable deal in the present.

Another reason Cowen offers is that there are “nested games”—games within games, conflicts within conflicts. Israeli and Palestinian leaders have to worry about other Arab nations, not just each other. They also have to worry about internal political conflicts. These nested “mini-games,” Cowen writes, “may constrain the actors from settling the larger Israel-Palestinians game.”

Next, Cowen turns to behavioral economics. In many bargains, people “punish cheaters” even when they hurt themselves by doing so, preferring no deal at all to a deal that is less than what they want or expect. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he argues, is particularly vulnerable to this problem because each party “believes that the other has violated its rights repeatedly, and thus holds great suspicions.”

Finally, Cowen discusses “meta-rationality,” the ability to have a realistic understanding of one’s own “prospects and abilities.” People often ignore reality when evaluating themselves; for example, most people think they are better drivers than others. This is especially true in the areas of religion and politics, where people think what is good for them is good for the world. This makes agreement difficult.

Cowan summarizes: “The two sides are locked into a long-run bargaining game, which leads them to struggle for power at each step along the way. Nested games and behavioral factors make it difficult for the parties to make the mutual sacrifices required for an agreement. Furthermore neither party is meta-rational about the points of disagreement.

“On top of these problems, the minority that does not want peace at all takes actions to exacerbate adverse behavioral and psychological reactions; we can understand terrorism as an attempt to manipulate such behavioral weaknesses. Periodic retaliations from each side then raise the stakes in the long-run bargaining game, and ratchet up the difficulty of earning subsequent concessions from the other side, thus making peace difficult.”

Cowen looks at the “Road Map” and find that it does, in fact, address all of these problems, and that there is a possibility—however slim—that it will actually work. However, he concludes that there is good reason to be pessimistic, given the deterioration of the situation over time. He quotes Milton Friedman’s optimistic observations on a 1969 trip to the region, which turned out to be completely wrong.

All of this got me thinking that perhaps my proposal for a joint negotiating forum between Israelis and Palestinians was not such a dumb idea after all. A joint forum could partially collapse the nested games into a single game. It could isolate extremists on both sides and prevent them from manipulating the psychological weaknesses of the parties. Other problems would persist, but perhaps less so.

22 February 2007 – The taboo of anti-antisemitism

Radical Israel-hater Norman Finkelstein spoke tonight at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, as the guest of the Palestine Awareness Committee, the Alliance for Justice in the Middle East, Justice for Palestine, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the Arab Caucus and the Society of Arab Students. His topic: “Is Jimmy Carter Anti-Semitic? On Palestine and Apartheid.” Sigh.

Why do pro-Palestinian groups insist on inviting the most divisive speakers? Last October the same coalition hosted Daniel Machover, a lawyer who tried to arrest an Israeli general for war crimes in the UK. I went to the talk, and when I calmly pointed out during the discussion that the arrest warrant had been revoked, Machover began shouting for security. So much for free speech and academic debate!

Finkelstein has written in support of Carter’s apparent thesis (apparent, since he hardly addresses apartheid at all in his book) that Israeli policies are comparable to apartheid. Unlike Carter, Finkelstein believes Israel itself—even within the Green Line—is an apartheid state. He claims early Zionists sought “. . . an apartheid-like regime in Palestine while exploring the prospect of expelling the indigenous population.”

This plan, he claims, continued after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Finkelstein cites a slew of Israeli critics who have used the term “apartheid” to describe their country’s policies, as well as several South Africans who have used the analogy. (The Israelis he cites were speaking metaphorically, often to create alarm; the South African sources have a history of anti-Israel prejudice.)

Finkelstein describes an Israel quite different to the one that actually exists—a secular parliamentary democracy with equal rights for all of its citizens. But never mind. The hook on which he hung his discussion at Harvard is the claim that Jimmy Carter has been called an antisemite. Some people have certainly done so, but that is hardly the only basis on which Carter’s book has been criticized.

Looking at the responses to Carter’s book, it is clear that most of them actually attack him on the facts, not on his inferred prejudices or motivations. But even if the accusation of antisemitism had never arisen, Finkelstein would probably have conjured it up. That’s the currency he deals in—minimizing antisemitism and the Holocaust, claiming that both are drummed up by Jews in order to serve Israel.

Dershowitz—Finkelstein’s arch-nemesis, and very likely the prime target of tonight’s lecture—has offered a $15,000 reward to anyone who can find a serious supporter of Israel who claims that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. No one has claimed it. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking closer at Finkelstein’s claims—which are also (partly) echoed by Walt and Mearsheimer and a host of other critics of Israel.

Antisemitism is the irrational hatred of Jews. It is—theoretically, at least—taboo. So accusing certain ideas, or the people who express them, of being antisemitic is a way of trying to remove them from public discourse, or at the very least to undermine their credibility. In a few cases—such as the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks—such treatment is well-deserved and necessary.

But the power of taboo can also be abused. When taken to extremes, it makes rational political debate impossible. If all criticism of Israel were equivalent to antisemitism, after all, then many Jews and most Israelis would be antisemites. In addition, when the power of taboo is invoked too often, it tends to lose its effect and provoke a backlash. So the taboo should only be invoked when absolutely necessary.

It is sufficient to deal with most opponents of Israel by attacking them on the weakness of their arguments, rather than accusing them of antisemitism. What critics such as Finkelstein, Walt, Mearshimer, Kasrils and Carter have in common is that they cannot prove what they allege about Israel. When subjected to serious scrutiny, their claims fall apart—which is precisely why they try to avoid debate.

Increasingly, it is these critics themselves who invoke the taboo of antisemitism. Walt and Mearsheimer, for example, claim in their infamous paper on the power of the “Israel lobby”: “Anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro‐Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy—an influence that AIPAC celebrates—stands a good chance of getting labeled an anti‐Semite.”

This claim—which has become boilerplate among opponents of Israel but cannot be substantiated—is itself a familiar Jewish stereotype: the hysterical Shylock, a villain claiming victimhood in order to manipulate public sympathy. “If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?” (The Merchant of Venice III:i)

By claiming that all criticism of Israel is bound to be labeled antisemitic, opponents of Israel hope to shield themselves not only from accusations of prejudice but from attacks on the quality of their research or the merits of their arguments. Put differently, they shift the presumption of prejudice onto their critics and undermine their credibility. They have created a new taboo: the taboo of anti-antisemitism.

Finkelstein is the master of this occult rite. Back in 2005, Israeli historian and Ha’aretz journalist Tom Segev wrote a humorous critique of the Dershowitz-Finkelstein controversy. “Israel and the Palestinians are secondary characters; the main protagonists are Dershowitz and Finkelstein themselves,” he wrote. “Their egos overflow on every page. It's embarrassing and funny - and worth every cent.”

Dershowitz seems to have taken the article in stride. Finkelstein, however, took it personally, posting several letters on his website by his supporters attacking Segev and his piece. One wrote: “‘The only place I have ever been where all the Jews are stupid is Israel.’ The Israeli Jew Tom Segev seems rather determined to prove the American Jew Philip Roth (author of the above) correct in his assessment.”

The other letters are in a similar vein, betraying both ignorance about Segev’s background and primitive prejudice against Jews. Finkelstein, who has built his career on attacking the “abuse of antisemitism,” is clearly prepared to make use of it. (He also refers constantly to the fact that his parents were Holocaust survivors, exploiting that tragedy in the way he accuses Jews of doing to support Israel.)

For tonight’s event, I helped organize a protest—leaflets and such—but I didn’t stick around, because I attend a swing dance class on Thursday nights with my girlfriend. Hearing Finkelstein speak and challenging his arguments might have been a good way to warm up for my debate next week. But life shouldn’t stop simply because an intellectually marginal propagandist shows up on campus to stir the pot.

A lot of people I know who get involved in debates on the Middle East—on either side—become obsessed with the topic. Having other interests helps you maintain a sense of perspective. Hedonistic attachments in particular remind you of why peace is worth struggling for. It’s more than just existential fulfillment. For most people, peace fundamentally means the chance to enjoy the world more than they do now.

And so I have learned to apply what I call the “barking dog” principle: just because a dog barks at you doesn’t mean you have to bark back. It’s important to challenge ill-conceived and hateful views, but doing so should not mean allowing yourself to be tormented by them. Some simply don’t deserve a platform; others might be good to expose to the harsh light of public scrutiny. Above all, you have to keep your head.

21 February 2007 – Games and fashion

Over the past few days, I have been fiddling around with a new computer game called Peacemaker. It’s a simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and actually quite addictive. You play the role of the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President, and try to build confidence among your own people while developing the trust of the other side and the respect of the world. The goal is to make peace.

Along the way, you have to deal with sudden shocks such as suicide bombings, street demonstrations, economic downturns, even slips of the tongue by junior ministers in your government. Each of these events is accompanied by real-world photographs or footage. You gauge the public mood by examining a set of opinion polls and decide whether to use political, economic or security-related policies.

I must admit that I have played this game rather badly thus far. Every time I have been the Israeli Prime Minister, my actions have sparked the Third Intifada. (The game seems to punish targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders.) When I have been the Palestinian President, I have lost the support of the international community for my people’s aspirations by giving strident speeches and failing to control violence.

I have improved a little bit by picking up on the game’s subtle clues. If some international agency expresses concern about the deteriorating fortunes of the Palestinian economy, for example, then as Israeli Prime Minister you should offer economic aid. It’s not that simple, though—aid is often refused if you’ve spent the last few turns fighting terrorists by increasing checkpoints and imposing curfews.

One of the features of Middle East politics that the game tries to highlight is the interdependence of national leaders. Another is the chaotic way in which events respond to, or amplify, each other. Sometimes a gain for the Israelis is a loss for the Palestinians; sometimes both may benefit or lose at once. The need for coordination becomes apparent very quickly, but it is very hard to achieve, as in real life.

Something about the game felt just a little bit unreal to me. It leaves little room for dramatic gestures—positive ones, at any rate—on the scale of Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977. It also gives the impression that all Israeli or Palestinian leaders do is respond to one extremist faction or another, pulling in all different directions. On second thought, maybe that’s a fair picture of the reality.

In other news, a designer in the UK has come up with the “Keffiyeh Israelit,” the Israeli answer to the Palestinian keffiyeh that is showing up on fashionable necks all over the place. (Ironically, I think it’s the erection of the security barrier, and the resultant drop in suicide bombings, that has made the keffiyeh politically safe enough to be a trendy symbol of resistance and counterculture chic.)

I think the Keffiyeh Israelit is a great idea—and I’ve ordered a few—for three reasons. First, it is a satire on the Palestinian one, and on the whole idea of militancy that the keffiyeh has come to represent. Second, it asserts the right of Israelis (and friends of Israel) to be funky and spiky, too. And third, it claims that Israel, too, is part of the Middle East and therefore has a national keffiyeh style.

20 February 2007 – McGreal and Pogrund revisited

The press release for my debate at Rocky Sullivan’s has gone out, and it appears I am not debating Fahim Barghouti after all, but someone named Hadas Their, who is billed as “Israeli-American, long-time activist for Palestinian rights, member of the International Socialist Organization an endorser of Adalah-NY Coalition for Justice in the Middle East and contributing author to The Struggle for Palestine.”

I’ve ordered the book via Amazon, naturally, and I’ve tried to find other things that Their has written. A Google search revealed that she was arrested two years ago at a protest against military recruiters at City College of New York, and charged with several misdemeanors, including assaulting a police officer. (Their claims it was the officers who attacked the protesters). She was also suspended from the college.

Meanwhile, I’ve continued my preparation today by reading Chris McGreal’s essays on the Israel-apartheid analogy. McGreal acknowledges “conspicuous differences” between Israel and apartheid South Africa, but makes a number of facile comparisons anyway. Both, he says, feature “a web of nationality and residency laws designed for use by one section of the population against another.”

In Jerusalem, he says, there are “attitudes, policies and laws similar to those used against Johannesburg's black population.” He acknowledges that Palestinian residents of the city were offered Israeli citizenship, and that many refused it because they did not want to recognize Israel, but somehow this does not lead him to fully acknowledge the role of ongoing conflict in shaping Jewish-Arab relations.

McGreal’s argument is shot through with doublethink. It is true, he says, that “[s]tepping into modern Israel, anyone who experienced the old South Africa would see few immediately visible comparisons. There are no signs segregating Jews and non-Jews.” But he adds: “Yet, as in white South Africa then and now, there is a world of discrimination and oppression that most Israelis choose not to see.”

It was on this point that Pogrund attacked McGreal in the Guardian: “I do not know why Chris McGreal says the Israeli public is unaware of what is happening: newspapers publish the details in profusion, provoking discussion and action.” He also pointed out: “In South Africa, change for the better was simply not possible: the apartheid system had to be eradicated. In contrast, change is possible in Israel.”

In addition, Pogrund provided evidence that disproved many of McGreal’s claims about differences in education, health care and social services among Jews and Arabs in Israel. On the land issue, he acknowledged historical discrimination in favor of Jewish ownership but also pointed out ongoing changes, such as high court decisions barring discrimination on the grounds of religion or nationality.

Some of McGreal’s points stick—such as the misery of life in Palestinian communities, and the determination of Israelis to maintain a Jewish demographic majority in Jerusalem and elsewhere. He also quotes several left-wing Israelis, such as Alon Liel—who was Israel’s ambassador to South Africa during the crucial years of 1992-94—worrying openly about the suffering caused by Israel’s policies.

Yet it is clear, even from McGreal’s essays, that whatever they may feel about the effects of Israeli actions, none of them believes that Israel is motivated by an ideology of apartheid. Again and again, Israelis who worry deeply about their government’s policies point out to McGreal that these policies are reactions to decades of Arab attacks against Israeli civilians and the legitimacy of the state.

McGreal cites a number of dubious sources, including Ronnie Kasrils and Hendrik Verwoerd, to back up his claims about the parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa. He discusses the Israeli alliance with South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, never exploring the connections that Arab states secretly maintained with South Africa during the same period, selling billions of dollars of oil to the regime.

(A really great source on sanction-busting by the Arab states is Arthur Jay Klinghoffer’s Oiling the Wheels of Apartheid: Exposing South Africa’s Secret Oil Trade, which I found buried deep in Harvard’s Pusey library today. I cannot yet find an exact value for this trade, or for Israel’s trade with South Africa during the same time, but it seems fairly clear that Arab oil sales dwarfed Israeli involvement.)

McGreal acknowledges that “Israel faced three wars of survival, and the armed struggle in South Africa never evolved to the murderous tactics or scale of killing adopted by Palestinian groups over recent years.” Yet he still thinks that Israeli Jews are comparable to whites under apartheid, and to back up the point he quotes Kasrils as an authority on the culpability of South African Jews in apartheid.

Most alarmingly, McGreal describes the two-state solution as the Israelis’ way “of ridding themselves of responsibility from the bulk of Arabs. Separation. Apartheid.”
This is really the whole point of the comparison. Almost everyone who invokes the Israel-apartheid analogy in anything other than a purely metaphorical sense, or perhaps in McGreal’s inquisitive fashion, is opposed to the two-state solution.

Take Nancy Murray, for example. Her essay is the last of twenty in the 2001 agitprop anthology The New Intifada: Resisting Israel’s Apartheid, which I first read several years ago. It is also the only essay to address the subject of apartheid, despite the title of the book—yet another indication that the word is just a label for outright hostility to Israel and the two-state solution to the conflict.

Murray admits that the South African anti-apartheid movement had, as the Palestinian movement does not, “a vision of a new society” such as the ANC’s Freedom Charter. But instead of noting that the ANC had to make compromises to achieve its goals, she calls for a “no compromise” approach on Palestinian demands such as the “Right of Return,” which would effectively end Israel’s existence.

Overall, the problem with McGreal’s analysis is that it minimizes the importance of Palestinian-initiated violence in creating the conditions that he refers to as “apartheid.” He allows Israelis to speak in their own defense, but fails to understand that they are not “demanding to be judged by the standards of . . . [their] neighbours”; they are asking that all be judged by the same rules.

19 February 2007 – Plumbing the polemics

I have spent part of the day reading through Uri Davis’s radical anti-Israel polemic, Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within. I first encountered Davis in South Africa in August 2001, when he was touring the country as a guest of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) ahead of the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, promoting the Israel-apartheid analogy.

Davis was treated as a phenomenon. Here he was, an Israeli citizen and a Jew, claiming that Israel was as bad as apartheid South Africa had been! He flogged his 1987 book Israel: An Apartheid State, which had been written before the first intifada and was partly an attempt to stake out a position more radical than the strident yet patriotic dissent that had been adopted by the Peace Now movement.

Rabbi David Hoffman, then the leader of the Green Point Hebrew Congregation, a Reform institution in Cape Town, invited Davis to address the Jewish community at his synagogue—not to endorse what he was saying, but in an attempt to defuse it and to give people a chance to react. The event drew hundreds and kicked off a ferocious debate in the community, which was to continue in the Kasrils Affair.

Davis proved to be a buffoon. When faced with opposing arguments, his face flushed a deep red, his neck tensed and he began to chant, almost shouting, at his interlocutors. Psychologist Theo Schkolne summed it up when he told Davis that he lacked basic empathy for the suffering on both sides of the conflict. But Davis found an eager audience in the Muslim community, prompting him to republish his book.

Apartheid Israel is basically an update of his earlier work. I checked it out of the Harvard library because I thought it might represent the most detailed and strident defense of the idea that Israel is an apartheid state, and that I should study it in order to prepare counterarguments for next week’s debate in New York. However, the book is poorly written, badly argued, devoid of nuance and argumentative force.

Davis starts out by assuming what he intends to prove: that Israel is an apartheid state. He bases his claim on the fact that Israel aspires to be a “Jewish” state, and eschews the supposedly universalist ethos of western Europe and the United States. He laments the revocation of the UN’s “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1991, and celebrates the World Conference Against Racism as a harbinger of things to come.

Those things include sanctions against Israel, and the creation of a single, unitary state in mandatory Palestine. Like many anti-Israel Jews, Davis seems obsessed with debunking the notion that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism. In place of that canard, he imposes his own: that Judaism is merely a “confessional” matter, and that at the same time to be a “good Jew” actually requires one to be anti-Zionist.

This is drivel, and highlights the point that the primary purpose of the Israel-apartheid analogy is to delegitimize Israel and end any peace process that aims at a two-state solution. Davis’s lack of empathy (and coherence) shines through, as he imposes his concrete, absolutist definition of Judaism in terms that few Jews would recognize (referring to Israeli Jews as the “Hebrew” population, for example).

Davis is fairly easily dismissed; less so Chris McGreal, the Guardian correspondent who published two essays last year—“Worlds Apart” and “Brothers in Arms”— arguing the parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Benjamin Pogrund responded in an updated version of his earlier essay in Focus, and a rebuttal was also published on the web by HonestReporting.com, a media advocacy website.

I’m going to examine these writers more closely in the coming days, as well as the issue of discrimination against Arabs in Israel, which is coming before the United Nations this week. The great Muslim lesbian feminist critic Irshad Manji wrote a strident defense of Israel two weeks ago which specifically attacks the notion that Israel is an apartheid state; I’ll take a closer look at that as well in the coming days.

18 February 2007 - Moynihan's courageous dissent

At the suggestion of a friend who is writing a B.A. thesis on competing human rights traditions in international law, I checked out Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s memoir of his term as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, A Dangerous Place. There is an entire chapter, and more, devoted to the notorious U.N. General Assembly resolution in 1975 equating Zionism with racism, and Moynihan’s role.

Though he had no connection with Israel, had never been to Israel, and by his own account did not have a good personal relationship with Israel’s U.N. representative, Moynihan realized early on—before the White House, before the anti-Israel State Department and even before the leadership of the American Jewish community—that the resolution had to be fought, because its target was bigger than Israel itself:

“The Non-Aligned and the Soviet blocs were reinforcing one another in a generalized assault on the democracies and a specific attack on Israel . . . . That an honorable cause [fighting racism] was being put to the service of a dishonorable one, few seemed to understand or care.” (156-7) Moynihan correctly perceived that the very legitimacy of the struggle against apartheid, and the UN itself, were at stake.

The rest of his account makes for fascinating reading. I knew that the “Zionism is racism” charge had originated with the Soviets, and was the direct ideological descendant of their equation of Zionism with Nazism. I had not known a few other particulars, such as that the person who first compared Israel with apartheid South Africa at the UN was none other than Idi Amin, then president of the O.A.U.

I was struck by the parallels between the debate thirty years ago and today’s debate over whether “Israel is an apartheid state.” The Arab states, for example, claimed that the “Israeli lobby” had established control of Congress, and believed that exposing it would rally the American people against Israel. They also paraded anti-Zionist Jews and critical clippings from the Israeli press as proof of their claims.

Moynihan described how the assault on Israel hijacked a wide variety of UN forums that were supposed to be focusing their attention on other, worthy causes, such as women’s rights and the end of racial discrimination. I was reminded of what I had seen and felt at the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001, where anti-Israel hatred had turned the conference into a convention of racists.

Referring to Freedom House ratings (I had arrived independently at the same notion, thirty years later), Moynihan related how the states supporting the resolution were overwhelmingly authoritarian, and those opposing the resolution were overwhelmingly democratic. Dictators like Pinochet backed it; so did a few third world democracies that had been bought off by oil-rich Arab autocracies.

The goal of the resolution and the debate, Moynihan noted, was not to establish that Zionism actually was ideologically or politically equivalent to racism or apartheid, but to undermine its very legitimacy. The UN accepted many different kinds of states as members, he wrote. However: “Only regimes based on racism and racial discrimination were held to be unacceptable.” (Original emphasis.)

Then as now, there were those who argued that the United States should sacrifice Israel to pacify the anger in the Arab world. People who hold this view today believe that pressuring Israel would appease the radical Islamists, or at least convince the moderates not to support them. Back in the 1970s, in the midst of the oil embargo, similar views were held by those who thought Israel should be traded for energy.

The debate about the resolution inspired some amazing thoughts about the origin and purpose of human rights. Moynihan and his team argued that the concept of human rights was born in the social contract theory of the seventeenth century, which took for granted that people had an existence independent of the state, and that when this language lost its meaning the concept of rights would disappear, too.

Perhaps the most interesting of Moynihan’s observations was that the Soviet goal in putting forth the “Zionism is racism” resolution was to thwart any effort at achieving peace between Israel and Egypt. Peace efforts had been led, ever since the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, by the U.S. The Soviets, who had lost their Egyptian client, now sought to create conflict and thwart America’s influence.

Then as now, the notion that Israel is a racist or apartheid state is calculated to destroy the peace process. It seeks to isolate Israel and deny it legitimacy, just as apartheid South Africa was—correctly—isolated and undermined. Its effect is to encourage Islamic radicalism and Palestinian terror; to force Israel into a defensive crouch; and to postpone peace. That is why the idea must once again be torn apart.

17 February 2007 - Brainstorming the debate

On Thursday, I spent some time brainstorming several reasons why Israel is not an apartheid state:

1. The argument that Israeli is an Apartheid state suggests that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be the same as the solution to Apartheid: namely, the creation of a new, unitary state, whether binational or simply Palestinian. This is contrary to the will of both the Palestinian and Israeli people, will lead to war in the long term and the further isolation of the Palestinians in the short term.

2. Unlike Apartheid South Africa, the creation of the State of Israel was not a settler-colonialist enterprise, since Jews did not arrive representing a foreign power, bought the land they worked, and did not seek to exploit local labor.

3. Israel is not an apartheid state because the roots of Jewish civilization in the area did not have to be invented; there had been a continuous Jewish presence in the area for millennia, and a constant Jewish cultural connection to the land.

4. Those who claim Israel is an Apartheid state rarely consider the practices of neighboring states, which more closely resemble the practices of Apartheid South Africa in their outright discrimination in law against various groups of people, including Jews (who are barred from citizenship in some countries; are refused mere entry, even as tourists, in others; and are the targets of official antisemitism).

5. Allegations of imperial or genocidal designs attributed to Israel’s founding fathers are destroyed by the overwhelming weight of evidence that Zionists hoped to achieve some kind of coexistence with the Arab and Muslim inhabitants of the area.

6. At several points in the past century, the Palestinian Arabs were offered either a unitary state or a partition heavily in their favor, and rejected it every time because of their insistence that Palestine be Judenrein – a logic similar to that of Apartheid.

7. Those who argue that Israel is an Apartheid state ignore the consensus among an emerging group of Arab states that who are prepared to recognize Israel if outstanding issues such as borders, Jerusalem and refugees are finally settled.

8. Unlike Apartheid South Africa, human rights violations in Israel and Palestine occur because of an ongoing conflict over land, not because of the attempts of a minority to subjugate a majority that had done nothing to initiate the conflict.

9. None of the alleged Israeli violations of human rights—not settlements, or checkpoints, or other actions—is done for its own sake; all are a response to continued Arab rejectionism, and more recently, Palestinian terrorism.

10. Far from Israel being an Apartheid state, it is subjected to a form of apartheid in that it is singled out for condemnation and is denied any meaningful representation in the committees of the UN because of bloc voting by Arab states.

11. Attempts to isolate Israel as Apartheid South Africa was isolated have only caused the Palestinian Authority to be so isolated, because such attempts encourage Palestinian extremists and the Hamas government to continue a strategy of terror.

12. The question of whether Israel is an Apartheid state shifts focus away from where such an inquiry might be more important—such as whether, with its covenant of hatred against Jews, the Palestinian government is a genocidal one.

13. Israel itself is not an Apartheid state because it does not have a body of legislated discrimination, as Apartheid South Africa did, and in fact it even has affirmative action programs aimed at assisting Arabs and other minority groups.

14. Israel itself is not an Apartheid state because it does not have separate public amenities, spaces and rules for people depending on their race or religion; such features were omnipresent in Apartheid South Africa and the defining fact of life.

15. It is the right of Israel to discriminate in its immigration and citizenship laws, just as Arab states discriminate in favor of Arabs and Muslims, African states discriminate in favor of blacks, and European states in favor of Europeans. These laws may fall short of a universalist standard, but they are not based on race and they are subject to change through a democratic process that includes Arabs.

16. Israel recently named Raleb Majadele MK to be the first Arab minister in an Israeli government; such an act would have been unthinkable under the Apartheid laws in South Africa and has no parallel in the Arab world or almost anywhere else.

17. Israel is not an Apartheid state because the system of Apartheid in South Africa referred to skin color, and there is no discrimination in Israel based on color; in fact, Israel went out of its way to rescue Ethiopian Jews and admit them as full citizens.

18. Israel is unlike apartheid South Africa in that Arabs have the vote and have equal access to the legal system, as blacks and other “non-whites” in South Africa did not; this means that Arabs have the power of political change, too.

19. Unlike apartheid South Africa, which used official censorship to control news reports about the townships and about the border wars, Israeli media are inundated by stories of conditions in the West Bank and Gaza; there is no official censorship.

20. As Adalah recently , Israel has severe problems with de facto discrimination against Arabs, but in Apartheid South Africa Adalah would have been banned and its leaders arrested merely for publishing such findings.

21. The Palestinian areas are not Bantustans because the Bantustans were created to provide a supply of cheap labor to South African industry, whereas Israel is not economically dependent on the occupied territories and want to sever its ties.

22. The Palestinian areas are not Bantustans because their borders were created as the result of military conflict with Israel in wars that were initiated by the Palestinians and the Arab states as an alternative to declaring statehood.

23. The Palestinian areas are not Bantustans any more than the areas offered to Jews by the Peel Commission and the United Nations were Bantustans, and yet Israel was prepared to accept these unfavorable partitions to achieve sovereignty.

24. Separate public services and road in the occupied territories are the outcome of the intifada, because these did not exist until the last few years and were only created as a way of protecting Israeli civilians from terror attacks in disputed areas.

25. The security barrier is not an “Apartheid Wall” because it is almost entirely a fence and because its primary purpose is to protect Israeli lives; it is not a land grab because its route has to be justified in security terms according to the High Court.

26. The term Apartheid is only used because of intellectual laziness, in order to generate sensation through metaphor, or to isolate Israel as Apartheid South Africa was isolated; it does not stand up to serious intellectual scrutiny.

More to come...

15 February 2007 - Freedom House survey

Regarding Israel and apartheid, I just re-discovered the annual Freedom in the World survey, compiled and published by Freedom House, a non-governmental organization devoted to promoting human rights around the world. It was founded in 1941 by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as a response to Nazism. Later, it spoke out with equal fervor for the U.S. civil rights movement and against communism.

The survey examines every country in the world, as well as disputed territories such as Kashmir and Tibet, and measures political rights and civil liberties in each. These two indicators are scored on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being the most free and 7 being the least free. Countries are then grouped into categories based on their average scores: Free (1.0 to 2.5); Partly Free (3.0 to 5.0); and Not Free (5.5 to 7.0).

The methodology of the survey is worth a closer look. In its research, Freedom House applies basic standards of human rights, “irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.” The questions cover every political and social feature you might wish to examine if you wanted to know whether a particular state—say, Israel—was an “apartheid” state.

Interestingly, though Freedom House mentions economic conditions and covers such rights as the right to form labor unions, it does not wade into the muddle of socioeconomic rights, which invite moral relativism about political and civil rights. And unlike most rights organizations, Freedom House considers the negative impact of non-state actors such as terror groups, and the positive impact of NGOs.

In 2005, Freedom House issued a special edition entitled Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa, which draws from the 2004 survey results. Eighteen countries are included, and the book provides a detailed, no-nonsense summary of the human rights situation in each. Not surprisingly, the region as a whole is far less free than the rest of the world: only 2 percent of its residents live in freedom.

And where do they live? In Israel, of course. Out of all the countries in the region, only Israel was classified as “Free.” Twelve countries—two-thirds of the total, representing eighty-six percent of the region’s population—were “Not Free,” and five countries were listed as “Partly Free.” Three countries—Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Libya—received the lowest possible ratings on the Freedom House scale.

Little has changed in the most recent survey. Israel’s rating has, in fact, improved: its political rights remain at 1 while its civil liberties rating has risen from 3 to 2, “due to a marked decrease in terrorist attacks in 2005, as well as a surge of civic activism surrounding the country's ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip.” The rest of the region remains almost as miserable and oppressive as ever.

Freedom House also monitors the Palestinian Authority, and the most recent survey, which covers the period after Arafat’s death but before the election of Hamas, upgrades the PA from “Not Free” to “Partly Free.” It notes: “While Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip led to greater freedom for Palestinians, these freedoms were limited by the anarchic-like conditions that took hold in September 2005.”

The Freedom House survey, though relying on the subjective judgments of experts and researchers, is about as objective as a comparative study could possibly be. And its results make clear that Israel is far and away the freest, most democratic and rights-upholding country in the Middle East. Most of the other countries have ratings near those of apartheid South Africa, which hovered around 5 and 6.

It might be argued that Israel bears some responsibility for the fact that the PA has such low ratings. And the survey is honest about the effects of Israeli occupation on Palestinian freedom. But it also notes that much Palestinian suffering is self-inflicted, including government corruption, suppression of the media, attacks on Christians and churches, officially-sanctioned incitement and internecine violence.

The Freedom House research simply reinforces Pogrund’s argument that Israel is demonstrably not an apartheid state, neither within its 1967 borders nor in the occupied territories. Furthermore, if judged by an objective standard, almost every other country in the region would be considered an apartheid state. Not one of them upholds basic political rights or civil liberties. The metaphor must be inverted.

14 February 2007 - Kelman and the future

I met yesterday with Professor Herbert C. Kelman, who gave a talk last week at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs here at Harvard entitled, “Inching Toward and Looking Beyond Negotiations: A Dual Strategy for Reviving the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process.” I happened to miss most of the lecture, since I had a class that conflicted with the talk, but I managed to catch the general drift.

Kelman argued that it is necessary to look beyond the peace process to the future relations between Israelis and Palestinians, while at the same state moving slowly forward in bilateral negotiations. This “two-track” process, he argued, would create the momentum for peace that could carry the process through difficult issues such as sovereignty in Jerusalem and the resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem.

That is, at least, what he seemed to have said. The question and answer session was disappointing, as usual, with participants attempting to propound their own views. One fellow, a priest, went on and on about how impressed he was with the progress and the achievements that Hamas had made since being elected to lead the Palestinian Authority. At that point I gathered my belongings and left.

However, I was eager to meet with Kelman and discuss some of his ideas. I thought I remembered later that I had read a paper of his within a book called The Elusive search for peace: South Africa, Israel and Northern Ireland, edited by the redoubtable Hermann Giliomee and Jannie Gagiano and published in 1990 by Oxford in association with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa).

This book was very important to me as I began thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in depth. The only copy I could find in South Africa was in the National Library, which doesn’t allow you to check anything out. I went to Idasa to see if they had any copies; they told me it was out of print. (Today Idasa’s contribution has been reduced to Richard Calland’s anti-Israel ranting.)

What interests me about Kelman’s work is his application of social psychology to the study of political conflict, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular. My friend Theo Schkolne, a clinical psychologist, also has a keen interest in this dimension of the conflict. I e-mailed Kelman and arranged to meet him in his delightfully cluttered office near the top of the William James Hall skyscraper.

Kelman told to me that he was more concerned about Israel’s fate today than he has been since 1967. The disengagement of 2005 had offered Israelis a way forward, he said, but would have required continued coordination with the Palestinians in order to achieve positive gains for peace. For various reasons, this had not happened, and the war of 2006 had—deliberately, he seemed to indicate—stalled the process.

He gave me a paper that he had just sent to a publisher, entitled “The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process and its Vicissitudes: Insights from Attitude Theory.” I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but in it Kelman seems to explain the collapse of the Oslo process in terms of the triumph of “avoidance” over “approach” attitudes, when the reverse should have happened if negotiations were to have succeeded.

His proposed solution is that new negotiations begin, and that they work towards a “principled peace” and an “historic compromise,” as opposed to a bargain that simply reflects “the best available deal.” That means explicitly recognizing each state’s right to self-determination, each side’s historic and present attachment to the land, and a shared vision for a positive future in two neighboring states.

The idea is to help Israelis and Palestinians think of the two-state solution as sharing the land instead of dividing it, and helping them overcome old zero-sum, mutually-exclusive, hostile identities. I’m not sure how this can be brought about, and Kelman doesn’t seem to say, but given the intense discussions going on about next week’s Olmert-Abbas-Rice summit in Jerusalem, maybe he’s onto something.

Kelman suggested a few sources for me to look at in my research, including The psychology of resolving global conflicts: from war to peace, a collection of papers edited by Mari Fitzduff and Chris Stout. We also discussed my paper: he felt my idea about using public institutions to support peace negotiations was new and interesting, but that I shouldn’t neglect the importance of privacy in diplomacy.

I think the point about looking forward, beyond the immediate intricacies of negotiations, is a very important one. It strikes me that the only area in which Israelis and Palestinians seem to be actively working together is on environmental issues. The deal to save the Dead Sea by building the Two Seas Canal, for example, was signed in 2005 by Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.

I remember visiting the Dead Sea Works, the giant minerals factory on the sea’s southwest shore when I was on a youth trip to Israel in 1995. Normally, students didn’t go there, but our Israeli guide had some connection there. I was fascinated to hear how the company had become involved in both environmental restoration and building peace with Jordan. It might have been propaganda, but I was impressed.

When I spoke to Israelis in 1999, when peace seemed to be just around the corner, they all seemed excited about the new Middle East that was just waiting to happen. They excitedly pointed out Jordanian license plates cruising the roads around Tel Aviv and talked about the new opportunities opening up. Maybe it’s time to revive some of that optimism and think of a the post-conflict, no matter how utopian.

13 February 2007 - News and Responses

I’d like to begin today’s entry by thanking those who have taken the time to read this blog and post their comments, especially those who have followed the link from It’s Almost Supernatural—a truly great blog. The more people who visit here, and the more debates we have, the more this discussion will grow. I’m going to try to respond to each comment in turn—but first, I wanted to share a bit of news.

I have been invited to participate in a debate in New York City on the topic, “Is Israel an Apartheid State?” The event will be held at Rocky Sullivan’s pub on Tuesday, February 27 at 8:30 p.m. and will be the second debate in the pub’s new monthly “Debate Night” series. Apparently the organizers were having trouble finding someone to take the “against” side of the argument—in New York!

My opponent will be Riham Barghouti, who as far as I can tell is a Palestinian woman who served as the External Relations Officer for Bir Zeit University in the West Bank and is now apparently living in New York. She has been one of the main organizers of this week’s ghastly anti-Israel hate-fest, Israel Apartheid Week, which has been held in New York and in several cities in Canada and the UK.

I think it’s funny that we’re going to be debating in an Irish pub. I will be sure to point out that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where a Jewish man and an Arab woman could have a free discussion over beer in a bar! So much for apartheid. I’m looking forward to making the unpopular arguments—and if you want to make them seem more popular, please come along and support the side.

Now, to the comments. Gill is first off the mark—and I’d be happy to send you a copy of my thesis, Gill, if you send me your email. It’s sitting with a publisher at the moment, though I’m not sure if it will ever be printed. There’s probably a market out there for a book called “The Kasrils Affair,” but there might not be publishers willing to back a first-time author and take on the Minister of Intelligence at once.

Next, “thermblog” suggests that Carter should be called a “Nazi,” and that doing so would be more effective than trying to tackle him on the facts. Carter is not a Nazi. I also think it’s pretty obvious that name-calling and hysterics are guaranteed ways to lose an argument. The best way to tackle Carter is on the facts. Also, I think he’s damaged his own credibility by refusing to face the real “debate” he says he wants.

An anonymous poster asks whether there are any Palestinian moderates for Israel to negotiate with, and implies that Hamas is the true representative of Palestinian public opinion. I do think that there are important moderates on the Palestinian side, such as Sari Nusseibeh of Al-Quds University. Also, apparently 161,000 Palestinians have signed on to the peace plan he proposed with Israel’s Ami Ayalon.

It is true that the majority of Palestinians support Hamas, and support terror attacks against Israelis. It is also true that the majority of Palestinians favor a two-state solution and want peace with Israel. People are capable of holding both views at once. Explaining why and how they do is a job for journalists and social scientists; guiding them towards one and not the other is the task of good leaders.

Finally, “hard rain” asks about the prevalence of Islam throughout the Middle East, and whether this is inimical to the flourishing of democracy and human rights. This is a very good question. We know that, theoretically, there need not be contradiction between Islam and liberal democracy. 150 million Muslims live in democratic India; Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, is also a democracy.

However, fundamentalist Islam, as both a religious and political movement, and both its Sunni and Shia varieties, is opposed to human rights and democracy. The Palestinian Authority is now governed by a violent fundamentalist party that does not care about human rights in the slightest—and the human rights record of the Palestinian Authority before Hamas came to power was already shocking.

In 2003, I spent a day with the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which took me and a friend to see the fence near Bethlehem, as well as the wall in Abu Dis (when it was still just a few metres high). I learned a lot about Israeli human rights violations that day, but I also learned that Israel had established institutions and norms to uphold human rights, whereas the Palestinian Authority had not.

The fieldworker who accompanied us said that Palestinian human rights organizations had become largely inactive, and that fieldworkers on the Palestinian side had often been arrested by the Palestinian Authority and prevented from doing their research. In addition, she noted, there was no mechanism for human rights advocacy on the Palestinian side, nor were there avenues for protest or redress.

When human rights are taken seriously by one side and not the other, it would seem that there is little chance for human rights to serve as a common ground for conflict resolution. At the same time, however, the doctrine of human rights contains the idea that every individual has equal dignity and is equally entitled to live in peace and freedom. So there is potential, I believe, for rights to play a role.

13 February 2007 - News and Responses

I’d like to begin today’s entry by thanking those who have taken the time to read this blog and post their comments, especially those who have followed the link from It’s Almost Supernatural—a truly great blog. The more people who visit here, and the more debates we have, the more this discussion will grow. I’m going to try to respond to each comment in turn—but first, I wanted to share a bit of news.

I have been invited to participate in a debate in New York City on the topic, “Is Israel an Apartheid State?” The event will be held at Rocky Sullivan’s pub on Tuesday, February 27 at 8:30 p.m. and will be the second debate in the pub’s new monthly “Debate Night” series. Apparently the organizers were having trouble finding someone to take the “against” side of the argument—in New York!

My opponent will be Riham Barghouti, who as far as I can tell is a Palestinian woman who served as the External Relations Officer for Bir Zeit University in the West Bank and is now apparently living in New York. She has been one of the main organizers of this week’s ghastly anti-Israel hate-fest, Israel Apartheid Week, which has been held in New York and in several cities in Canada and the UK.

I think it’s funny that we’re going to be debating in an Irish pub. I will be sure to point out that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where a Jewish man and an Arab woman could have a free discussion over beer in a bar! So much for apartheid. I’m looking forward to making the unpopular arguments—and if you want to make them seem more popular, please come along and support the side.

Now, to the comments. Gill is first off the mark—and I’d be happy to send you a copy of my thesis, Gill, if you send me your email. It’s sitting with a publisher at the moment, though I’m not sure if it will ever be printed. There’s probably a market out there for a book called “The Kasrils Affair,” but there might not be publishers willing to back a first-time author and take on the Minister of Intelligence at once.

Next, “thermblog” suggests that Carter should be called a “Nazi,” and that doing so would be more effective than trying to tackle him on the facts. Carter is not a Nazi. I also think it’s pretty obvious that name-calling and hysterics are guaranteed ways to lose an argument. The best way to tackle Carter is on the facts. Also, I think he’s damaged his own credibility by refusing to face the real “debate” he says he wants.

An anonymous poster asks whether there are any Palestinian moderates for Israel to negotiate with, and implies that Hamas is the true representative of Palestinian public opinion. I do think that there are important moderates on the Palestinian side, such as Sari Nusseibeh of Al-Quds University. Also, apparently 161,000 Palestinians have signed on to the peace plan he proposed with Israel’s Ami Ayalon.

It is true that the majority of Palestinians support Hamas, and support terror attacks against Israelis. It is also true that the majority of Palestinians favor a two-state solution and want peace with Israel. People are capable of holding both views at once. Explaining why and how they do is a job for journalists and social scientists; guiding them towards one and not the other is the task of good leaders.

Finally, “hard rain” asks about the prevalence of Islam throughout the Middle East, and whether this is inimical to the flourishing of democracy and human rights. This is a very good question. We know that, theoretically, there need not be contradiction between Islam and liberal democracy. 150 million Muslims live in democratic India; Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, is also a democracy.

However, fundamentalist Islam, as both a religious and political movement, and both its Sunni and Shia varieties, is opposed to human rights and democracy. The Palestinian Authority is now governed by a violent fundamentalist party that does not care about human rights in the slightest—and the human rights record of the Palestinian Authority before Hamas came to power was already shocking.

In 2003, I spent a day with the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which took me and a friend to see the fence near Bethlehem, as well as the wall in Abu Dis (when it was still just a few metres high). I learned a lot about Israeli human rights violations that day, but I also learned that Israel had established institutions and norms to uphold human rights, whereas the Palestinian Authority had not.

The fieldworker who accompanied us said that Palestinian human rights organizations had become largely inactive, and that fieldworkers on the Palestinian side had often been arrested by the Palestinian Authority and prevented from doing their research. In addition, she noted, there was no mechanism for human rights advocacy on the Palestinian side, nor were there avenues for protest or redress.

When human rights are taken seriously by one side and not the other, it would seem that there is little chance for human rights to serve as a common ground for conflict resolution. At the same time, however, the doctrine of human rights contains the idea that every individual has equal dignity and is equally entitled to live in peace and freedom. So there is potential, I believe, for rights to play a role.

12 February 2007 - Human rights and conflict resolution

This blog is called “Guide to the Perplexed,” after the treatise The Guide for the Perplexed, written in Arabic by the great Jewish sage Moses Maimonedes in the 12th century A.D. (or C.E., if you prefer). I have substituted the pronoun “to” in place of “for,” since when it comes to questions of human rights and peacemaking in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I am just about as confused as everybody else.

What role do human rights have to play in the conflict and its resolution? On an everyday basis, we are confronted with the human rights claims of both sides, which compete for international attention. These include positive claims, such as the right to life, liberty and security of person (Article 3, Universal Declaration of Human Rights), or the right to freedom of movement (Article 13), for example.

More frequently, both sides make negative claims—claims that their human rights are being violated by the other side. These positive and negative claims serve two purposes. They address the needs and aspirations of individuals in both communities. At the same time, human rights claims are used by each side to promote its own political and territorial goals as against those of the other side.

Amidst all these claims and counter-claims, it can be difficult to sort out truth from fiction. In his essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” George Orwell observed that “atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.”

Human rights advocates, however, tend to approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and other conflicts) with a sense of certainty, a faith that victims and perpetrators can be correctly identified. Sometimes human rights groups seem to have decided in advance which side is which, based on the perceived relative strengths of the two sides, or on preconceived notions of who is wrong and who is right in the conflict.

Human rights doctrine, as it has evolved since the Second World War, emphasizes the responsibilities that states must fulfill in relation to individuals. There has been little effort to hold non-state actors, such as terror groups, accountable to the same laws and principles. As a result, human rights advocates tend to hold states to a higher standard than the armed groups or militias that may threaten them.

For example, in the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer, human rights groups were accused of taking sides against Israel. Professor Alan Dershowitz, for one, accused Human Rights Watch (HRW) of bias, a charge that HRW former executive director Aryeh Neier disputed in the New York Review of Books. Other groups, such as Amnesty International, have also been criticized.

I visited HRW’s website, and examined its press releases for the months of July and August 2006, the period during which the war was fought. Of 24 documents, I found 15 that seemed targeted at Israel, 7 that referred to abuses by both sides, and only 2 that singled out Hezbollah. HRW did criticize a UN resolution for being one-sided against Israel. But its voice was heard most often in condemnation of Israel.

Perhaps that was appropriate, given that more Lebanese civilians were killed than Israeli civilians. But Hezbollah deliberately put Lebanese civilians in harm’s way, at the same time that it openly tried to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible. And Israel seemed to be trying to avoid civilian casualties when bombing Hezbollah (though evidence of its use of cluster bombs has since weakened such claims).

Human rights issues, in sum, can make a complex conflict even more complicated. And yet it seems possible that human rights could be introduced in a way that helps to manage the conflict and to clarify the reciprocal obligations that each side has toward the other. There is a growing realization among human rights activists that emphasizing conflict resolution may be more effective than simple rights advocacy.

To take one example: I supported the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. A vocal minority of Israelis and Jews opposed it, however. Some did so on religious or nationalistic grounds; others did so for security reasons, arguing (correctly, it turned out) that the Palestinians would use Gaza to stage attacks against Israeli territory. Others opposed the disengagement out of plain sympathy for the settlers.

Very few opposed it on human rights grounds. One who did so was a young man who came to South Africa as part of a delegation of Israeli students, and argued that Gaza should not be made Judenrein—that is, that the settlers should be given the option of staying where they were. If the Palestinians could not be trusted to protect them, he argued, what was the point of making any concessions at all?

A similar argument was made by Natan Sharansky, who resigned from Israel’s government over the disengagement, arguing that “we are repeating the mistakes of the past by not understanding that the key to building a stable and lasting peace with our Palestinian neighbors lies in encouraging and supporting their efforts to build a democratic society.” Only democracies, he believed, could make true peace.

So peace and conflict resolution can perhaps be linked to human rights if human rights and democracy can be strengthened in Israel and throughout the region. But how to do so in the Palestinian Authority, which is governed by terrorists? How to do so anywhere in the Middle East, when the American experiment in Iraq has faltered under the assault of nihilistic mass murderers and fanatical sectarian strife?

At the moment, American diplomacy seems to be moving back to the realpolitik of the past. President George W. Bush is not giving up on Iraq, but he seems to be more interested in facilitating peace deals between Israel and Syria on one front and Israel and the Palestinians on the other. Stability is returning to the fore as a primary goal of U.S. foreign policy; it is, to be sure, the prerequisite for other goals.

But there is still something there, in the concept and doctrine of human rights, that seems important and possibly fundamental to the future of peace efforts in the region. Perhaps it’s the idea of mutual recognition; perhaps its some silly western idealism I’m still clinging to. But I intend to ask the question in the coming weeks and months, as I explore the substance of human rights law and diplomacy.

11 February 2007 - A TRC for the Middle East?

Last week, I happened to notice a draft paper on a shelf in the reference section of Harvard’s Langdell Law Library. It was sitting face-up at the end of a row of books on one of the shelves devoted to student-edited law journals, presumably waiting to be edited by an army of sub-citers. I noticed that the sources on the shelf were all familiar staples of the Israel critic’s diet—Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe and so on.

I saw that the paper had been written by a friend of mine—a Jewish student who shares my fascination with Israel and South Africa and with whom I disagree about almost everything. Her paper suggested the creation of an historical commission of inquiry, modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), to “to investigate 1948 and the creation of the Palestinian refugee population.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the idea. Last year, Justice Dennis Davis—a South African Jewish leader and former anti-apartheid activist—also suggested that the model of the TRC could be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Heribert Adam and Kagidla Moodley touched on the idea in their somewhat flawed 2005 book, Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians.

Yossi Beilin also brought up the TRC when I interviewed him in September 2001. Interestingly, he specifically ruled out a search for historical “truth”: “When I met with Archbishop Tutu,” he told me, “we talked about the ability to build something like the TRC between Israelis and Palestinians—without the ‘T’. I mean, I don’t need ‘lies,’ but the truth is not the important thing, because you have many truths.”

The TRC inspires imitation because it came to symbolize the “miracle” of the South African transition to democracy. Notorious agents of state terror, and violent anti-government radicals, came together in a forum where they confessed their complicity in human rights abuses in exchange for possible amnesty. Victims confronted and even forgave their persecutors for the sake of the new nation.

It is natural to wonder whether a similar “miracle” could be produced in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the prospects seem unlikely. First of all, the TRC was only established when the South African struggle was at an end; it was a post-conflict institution. Second, it relied heavily on Christian notions of forgiveness that may have little currency in a conflict that is largely between Muslims and Jews.

Third, the TRC was actually a deeply flawed institution. Some complained that it did not address the culpability of those who had not participated directly in human rights abuses but had benefited from apartheid. Others point out that many people denied amnesty by the TRC have yet to be prosecuted, while others have been let out of jail for no reason, and that reparations promised to victims have been paltry.

The TRC also propagated a version of South African history that suited the ANC’s political purposes—though Tutu, to his credit, did not obey calls for him to absolve the party of any responsibility for human rights abuses. It remains a controversial part of South Africa’s history—and given the reluctance of the government to do anything about Aids or Zimbabwe, one from which South Africans have yet to learn.

I have become rather skeptical of the possibility that the TRC or any such “transitional institution” can bring about peace between Israelis and Palestinians in the absence of real and reciprocal political will to resolve the conflict. But I understand the desire to search for possible solutions in the pages of not-too-distant South African history. I have often turned to those pages myself.

Four years ago, I published an article in the Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture entitled “Let Peace Go Public.” In it, I argued that while comparisons between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other conflicts have been “extremely selective and highly partisan,” there were lessons to be learned from other cases that could be useful to the peace process in the Middle East.

I examined the successful negotiations in South Africa and Northern Ireland, and concluded that what had been missing from the Oslo peace process of the 1990s was the creation of “shared, public negotiating institutions composed of representatives from the various parties on both sides.” These institutions generated public support for negotiations that sustained the peace process through violent interruptions.

Crucially, by excluding groups that refused to abandon the “armed struggle,” the negotiating forums in South Africa and Northern Ireland—the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) and the Belfast Assembly, respectively—had marginalized extremists. They had also provided a means through which moderates on opposite sides could reach out to each other and build a constituency for peace.

I proposed the creation of a multiparty “Israeli-Palestinian Forum” to negotiate and oversee the implementation of the “road map” for peace. I acknowledged, however, that there were two problems with my idea. One was the lack of trust between the two sides, which I hoped the forum could overcome. The other was that a joint elected institution might be seen as “a backdoor entrance for binationalism.”

The feeling I had at the time was that I had “nailed my colors to the mast”—that I had gone as far as I possibly could in drawing lessons from the South African experience that could be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I was skeptical of unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, believing that it would be “inadequate in dealing with most outstanding issues.” (And it has been.)

But as Israel began constructing its security barrier, and prepared to disengage from Gaza in 2005, I began to change my mind. Unilateral steps do not resolve enduring disagreements over borders, refugees, and Jerusalem; nor do they provide lasting security, as rockets from Gaza and Lebanon remind us. But they do begin to set boundaries, and they provide a backup plan in the absence of real negotiations.

At the very least, Israel’s security barrier—to take one example—has saved hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian lives, though it follows an inappropriate route and causes hardship to many people. In a region where people cannot even agree on what is happening outside the Al-Aqsa mosque, in the face of clear evidence, it may be better to build fences and save lives than to invest hope in truth commissions.