“Peace May Never Be At Hand”: The Passage Of Time Is Imposing A One-State Solution In The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Israelis and Palestinians may someday make peace. But the assumption should be that it won’t happen soon — perhaps not in our lifetimes.
How often have we seen this movie? Palestinian atrocity, Israeli reaction escalating into overreaction, rocket attacks aimed at civilian targets in Israel, airstrikes targeting Palestinian leadership and infrastructure in Gaza, heartbreaking pictures of mangled young bodies on the beach. Palestinians say: We will never forgive the Israelis for killing our children. Israelis say: We will never forgive the Palestinians for forcing us to kill their children.
I applaud President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry for diving in and trying to forge a peace deal, if only because history suggests that anything is better than leaving the parties to their own devices. But the obvious two-state solution seems an ever more distant dream.
Hamas cannot be bombed out of existence. Its leaders — and if some are killed by Israeli missiles, others will take their place — have no interest in recognizing the state of Israel and living side by side in peace. The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, continues expanding settlements into West Bank territory that would have to be part of any viable Palestinian state. And the Palestinian Authority could never win the battle for popular support against Hamas if its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, accepted any deal that Israel is prepared to offer.
I am not arguing that rocket attacks are equivalent to settlements. I am not arguing that four Israeli lives — three murdered teenagers and one civilian — are equivalent to more than 200 Palestinian lives, including those of four children who died by the sea.
I am simply stating the obvious: Nobody really wants to make peace.
Israel presently feels fairly safe — in relative terms — from the threat of a new intifada. The wall that now cordons off much of the West Bank provides effective protection against would-be suicide bombers. And the Iron Dome system of missile defense is a shield — though not foolproof — against the rockets Hamas fires from Gaza.
I would suggest that this feeling of security is illusory, at least in the long run — and demographic trends back me up. About 8 million people live in Israel proper, including about 1.7 million Arabs. There are roughly 4.4 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Given current trends, there will come a day when the Arabs in Israel and the territories outnumber the Jews.
In other words, the passage of time is imposing a one-state solution. How, then, will Israel retain its identity as a Jewish state? How can a democracy govern so many people who do not have full rights of citizenship — and remain a true democracy?
If I were Israeli, I’d probably answer those questions by saying that this is not our doing, that we want nothing more than to live in peace. But Palestinians, too, have a right to feel that they are in a situation not of their own making. The vast majority of people on both sides are too young to remember the events of 1948, when Israel was founded. Many are too young to remember 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. They know only the echoes of those wars, reverberations that never seem to fade.
I wish I could be more optimistic. I continue to believe that the United States can play a constructive role by encouraging dialogue between Netanyahu and Abbas. Even if the talks go nowhere, Winston Churchill was right: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”
But I also believe that realistic U.S. policy in the Middle East should assume that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will continue indefinitely, punctuated by spasms of active warfare.
The close and unbreakable bond between Israel and the United States remains a given. But friends try not to let friends do stupid things. If there are ways in which U.S. advice might shorten this outbreak of violence or delay the next, Obama — and his successors — must speak up. If there is some way to persuade Hamas that the next volley of rockets will be as useless and counterproductive as the last, we should make the attempt.
No conflict lasts forever, but I remember that in my high school history class we read about the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. I fear the Israelis and Palestinians may eventually set a new record.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 19, 2014
“Ignoring Well-Established Law”: Gov. Scott Walker, Allies Knew Prevailing Interpretation Of State Law
Supporters of Gov. Scott Walker have been working hard in recent weeks to conjure up excuses to dismiss the John Doe campaign finance probe.
First, they attacked it as a partisan witch hunt, ignoring the fact that the investigation is led by a Republican who voted for Walker and that it has the participation of both Republican and Democratic district attorneys from across the state.
Then, they tried to dismiss it as a “legally baseless” investigation, and argued that Wisconsin law does not prohibit the Walker campaign and Wisconsin Club for Growth from coordinating on electoral “issue ads” that omit the phrase “vote for” Scott Walker.
Now, Walker’s allies are acknowledging that the probe is grounded in Wisconsin law, but are claiming that prosecutors are enforcing a “zombie law” — allegedly rendered unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court — that the Walker campaign was purportedly free to ignore.
This is not the case.
The governor is endowed with many powers, but he cannot single-handedly rewrite the law or reverse legal precedent.
For decades, Wisconsin law has capped campaign donations to limit the influence of money in elections, and required candidates to disclose major contributions so the public can see who is bankrolling our politicians. Courts have interpreted the law to mean that “issue ads” coordinated with a candidate for state office can be regarded as in-kind contributions to the campaign, because they are of great value to the campaign. Any coordinated issue ad “contributions” that exceed donation limits and are omitted from campaign filings can be illegal. The same is true in federal elections, under federal law.
Even if the Walker camp believed that coordinated issue ads shouldn’t be regulated, or that at some point in the future a court might overrule existing Wisconsin precedent, this belief shouldn’t have given them license to ignore well-established law during the 2012 elections, as the prosecutors’ theory in the case alleges.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never held that counting electoral issue ads as contributions is unconstitutional. In fact, in 2003 the court explicitly upheld a provision of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act that treats issue ads that air near federal elections (called “electioneering communications”) as in-kind contributions if coordinated with a candidate. That holding has never been overturned.
And, even as a slim majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has chipped away at campaign finance limits for PACs and non-profits, it has done so with the express proviso that these groups are “independent” and their activities not coordinated with candidates.
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy explained in Citizens United vs. FEC that “the absence of prearrangement and coordination…undermines the value of the expenditure to the candidate.” In other words, if a candidate is coordinating with a third-party group, that group’s expenditures are of value to the campaign — and the contribution limits and disclosure requirements that apply to candidates would be rendered meaningless if politicians can work closely with a group that takes secret, million-dollar donations.
Wisconsin courts have had a similar take, and the John Doe prosecutors are relying on an interpretation of state law established by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in 1999, in a precedent-setting case called Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation.
In that case, the court rejected arguments identical to those now being made by Walker and the Club for Growth, and held that, under Wisconsin law, electoral issue ads coordinated with a campaign count as contributions to the campaign.
Despite the claims of op-ed writers published by the Journal Sentinel, it is not the case that the courts had overturned the Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation precedent or rendered its holding unenforceable in advance of the recall elections. Just ask Wisconsin’s Republican Attorney General, J.B. Van Hollen. As thousands of people were occupying the Wisconsin capitol in 2011 — sparking a movement that would lead to the recall elections — Van Hollen was citing Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation in court briefs as controlling precedent.
Just months later, with recall elections heating up, prosecutors believe the Walker campaign and Club for Growth began working together, an alleged violation of the Wisconsin Court of Appeals’ interpretation of state law that Van Hollen had recently endorsed.
The Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation precedent was no secret. It is explicitly cited in the end notes to the Wisconsin statutes, which provide guidance on the prevailing interpretations of Wisconsin law for candidates such as Walker and the raft of lawyers who advise him.
Plus, the Wisconsin Elections Board — the precursor to the Government Accountability Board — issued a 2002 opinion citing both state and federal cases to advise that coordinated electoral issue ads are contributions under Wisconsin law. That opinion was affirmed by the GAB in 2008 and is clearly posted on the GAB website.
If the Walker campaign or Wisconsin Club for Growth believed courts were “moving” toward a different interpretation of Wisconsin statutes, they could have sought an advisory opinion from the GAB, or requested advice from Van Hollen. If they believed that U.S. Supreme Court rulings had made the Wisconsin Coalition for Voter Participation decision unenforceable, they could have sought a declaratory judgment from a state court.
The Walker campaign and Wisconsin Club for Growth cannot claim they were unaware of the prevailing interpretation of Wisconsin law, and Wisconsinites should know better than to buy their after-the-fact rationales.
By: Brendan Fischer, General Counsel, The Center for Media and Democracy in Madison: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 17, 2014
“Faith-Based Fanatics”: The Ancient Struggle Of My God Versus Your God Is At The Root Of Dozens Of Atrocities
He’s had a busy summer. As God only knows, he was summoned to slaughter in the Holy Land, asked to end the killings of Muslims by Buddhist monks in Myanmar, and played both sides again in the 1,400-year-old dispute over the rightful successor to the Prophet Muhammad.
In between, not much down time. Yes, the World Cup was fun, and God chose to mess with His Holinesses, pitting the team from Pope Francis’s Argentina against Germany, home of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Well played, even if the better pope lost.
At least Rick Perry was not his usual time-suck. The governor proclaimed three days of prayer to end the Texas drought in 2011, saying, “I think it’s time for us to just hand it over to God, and say, ‘God: You’re going to have to fix this.’ ” The drought got worse. Two years ago, Perry said that God had not “changed his mind” about same-sex marriage. But the states have. Since Perry became a spokesman for the deity, the map of legalized gay marriage in America has expanded by 50 percent.
Still, these are pillow feathers in a world weighted down with misery. God is on a rampage in 2014, a bit like the Old Testament scourge who gave direct instructions to people to kill one another.
It’s not true that all wars are fought in the name of religion, as some atheists assert. Of 1,723 armed conflicts documented in the three-volume “Encyclopedia of Wars,” only 123, or less than 7 percent, involved a religious cause. Hitler’s genocide, Stalin’s bloody purges and Pol Pot’s mass murders certainly make the case that state-sanctioned killings do not need the invocation of a higher power to succeed.
But this year, the ancient struggle of My God versus Your God is at the root of dozens of atrocities, giving pause to the optimists among us (myself included) who believe that while the arc of enlightenment is long, it still bends toward the better.
In the name of God and hate, Sunnis are killing Shiites in Iraq, and vice versa. A jihadist militia, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, boasts of beheading other Muslims while ordering women to essentially live in caves, faces covered, minds closed. The two sides of a single faith have been sorting it out in that blood-caked land, with long periods of peace, since the year 632. Don’t expect it to end soon. A majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are peaceful, but a Pew Survey found that 40 percent of Sunnis do not think Shiites are proper Muslims.
Elsewhere, a handful of failed states are seeing carnage over some variant of the seventh-century dispute. And the rage that moved Hamas to lob rockets on birthday parties in Tel Aviv, and Israelis to kill children playing soccer on the beach in Gaza, has its roots in the spiritual superiority of extremists on both sides.
The most horrific of the religion-inspired zealots may be Boko Haram in Nigeria. As is well known thanks to a feel-good and largely useless Twitter campaign, 250 girls were kidnapped by these gangsters for the crime of attending school. Boko Haram’s God tells them to sell the girls into slavery.
The current intra-religious fights are not to be confused with people who fly airplanes into buildings, or shoot up innocents while shouting “God is great.” But those killers most assuredly believed that their reward for murder is heaven.
Of late, God has taken a long break from Ireland, such a small country for such a big fight between worshipers under the same cross. There, the animus is not so much theological as it is historical. If the curious Muslim is wondering why Protestants and Catholics can’t just get along on that lovely island, take a look at the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century, when about 20 percent of the population of present-day Germany fell to clashes between the two branches of Christianity.
Violent Buddhist mobs (yes, it sounds oxymoronic) are responsible for a spate of recent attacks against Muslims in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, leaving more than 200 dead and close to 150,000 homeless. The clashes prompted the Dalai Lama to make an urgent appeal to end the bloodshed. “Buddha preaches love and compassion,” he said.
And so do Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The problem is that people of faith often become fanatics of faith. Reason and force are useless against aspiring martyrs.
In the United States, God is on the currency. By brilliant design, though, he is not mentioned in the Constitution. The founders were explicit: This country would never formally align God with one political party, or allow someone to use religion to ignore civil laws. At least that was the intent. In this summer of the violent God, five justices on the Supreme Court seem to feel otherwise.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, July 18, 2014
“Higher Consciousness Thinking”: Who Started It Doesn’t Matter, Who Has The Wisdom To End It Does
Remember back in childhood how, whenever a melee erupted on the playground or in a backyard, mothers, fathers or teachers would suddenly emerge to pull wrestling bodies apart while some sweaty kid, with pointed fingers and glaring eyes, would caterwaul, “But he started it!”? That familiar, blurted defense was intended to justify the chaos and fisticuffs, rationalize the bullying and bloody noses, and, usually, it didn’t work.
Because instead of reacting as the finger-pointing child hoped, most intelligent adults would respond along the lines of (and this was my mother’s favorite rejoinder): “I don’t care who started it! I just want to know which one of you is going to end it?” And from there heads hung, consequences were meted, and we’d be on our way, grumbling about how unfair life was.
Yet our parents’ wisdom in understanding that who “started it” was irrelevant to the goal of peace was actually a highly evolved concept pulled right from the tenets of higher consciousness thinking, philosophy that seeks to transcend our biological response to aggression and adversity. Unfortunately, the persistence of human beings to assert that who “started it” matters terribly (with results that usually are terrible), is, in fact, the flawed rationale behind why rockets are blowing up families in the Middle East and passenger planes are being shot out of the sky in service to the Ukraine/Russian skirmish. We are a world beset by tragedy and trauma motivated by the battle cry, “they started it!” and… it’s killing us.
While many question who exactly shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 (according to the latest it was Russian-backed separatists), and media, social and otherwise, is aflame with heated discussions of who’s more right or wrong in the Middle East, there’s no end to the spectrum of finger pointing to be found. Charles Krauthammer’s “Moral Clarity In Gaza” was posted on Facebook today with an assertion that it defined who, at least, “started it,” but my own thought was: does that really matter at this point? Hasn’t the never-ending reality of war proven that defining who “started it” has no bearing on the impact and tragedy of the escalation beyond that inception?
But we continue to go round and round, century after century, for time immemorial, ripping each other to shreds with pointed fingers, bombs and rockets, terrorism and intolerance, in support of nationalism, ethnicity and religion, defended and justified by who “started it.” Seems we’ve not gotten much beyond our schoolyard defenses… except now the costs are so much more grave.
In response to the current state of warring humanity, l can’t help but ponder an oft-asked and existential question: what is a human being? Apart from our ethnic, national, religious and sexual background, what, really, are we? If one has a religious or spiritual bent (and isn’t religion most often cited for our historical attachment to war and violence?), doesn’t one embrace the doctrine that every human is a spirit, has a soul, or is in some way an energy or essence that transcends the physical self? If so, doesn’t it follow that, beyond life, as one transitions to whatever is next, the spirit shakes off those physical identities we hold so dear and fight for so viciously? And if that’s true (and if one has spiritual belief one typically believes some measure of that is true), then it also follows that, in fact, and beyond where we landed on this planet at birth, we are all, truly and irrevocably, made of the same stuff, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or religion. If human beings — particularly those who would kill or die for their religious or national affiliation — instead embraced that spiritual philosophy of oneness, wouldn’t peace, then, be possible?
Certainly it should be. But history tells us peace is the greatest uphill battle. Because the invisible hand of religion, national and ethnic pride, and that unfortunate human impulse to, instead of turning a cheek, push when pushed, shoot when shot at, or rush to the killing field to decimate an enemy rather than negotiate a peace, keeps our warring factions ratcheting to higher and higher levels of discord and devastation. Strange how religious tenets of harmony and oneness are never the rallying cry of those who kill in religion’s name.
It doesn’t really matter who started it, whichever it we’re talking about. If it’s one side this time, it’s another the next. The anatomy of feuds, combat, war and strife depends on enflaming our differences — nationalities, religions, ethnicities – instead of honoring our shared humanity. And until someone on one side or the other finds the humility and wisdom to not shoot back, not point fingers, and not allow ancient wounds and animosities to persistently preempt peace, the human right to pursue happiness and raise our children in health and safety will never be a reality for some in some parts of the world. And that is unacceptable.
Our parents were right… it only matters who ends it. So let’s stop talking about “moral clarity,” and “who’s at fault this time.” Just tell me who will end it. That’s the only analysis I want to hear.
By: Lorraine Devon Wilke, The Huffington Post Blog, July 19, 2014
“Neocons Have Learned Nothing”: Rand Paul Faces Challenge In Opposing GOP War Hawks
Kentucky senator Rand Paul is a curious vehicle for reformation of the Republican Party. He’s not a font of creative ideas; he’s hobbled by intellectual contradictions; he’s viewed skeptically by his party’s establishment. Still, Paul brings a refreshing view of the limits of warfare to a GOP that has spent the last several decades enthusiastically embracing military interventions across the globe.
So here’s to the senator’s efforts to help his party lay down its battle armor and beat its swords into plowshares. The country needs no more Dick Cheneys and far fewer John McCains.
Paul won’t easily transform the Republican Party’s views on military might. Earlier this month, Texas governor Rick Perry wrote an opinion essay criticizing him as “curiously blind” to the threat represented by international jihadists. “Viewed together, Obama’s policies have certainly led us to this dangerous point in Iraq and Syria, but Paul’s brand of isolationism (or whatever term he prefers) would compound the threat of terrorism even further,” Perry wrote in The Washington Post.
As much as anything, that’s a sign that Perry is considering once again seeking the GOP nomination for president and sees Paul as a significant rival. One way to knock off Paul, Perry believes, is to play to the GOP’s armchair hawks, who haven’t tired of sending other people’s sons and daughters to war.
Paul immediately fought back with an op-ed of his own, published in Washington-based Politico. “Unlike Perry, I oppose sending American troops back into Iraq. After a decade of the United States training Iraq’s military, when confronted by the enemy, the Iraqis dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms and hid. Our soldiers’ hard work and sacrifice should be worth more than that,” he wrote.
While Paul’s views are closer to those of the American people, there is still a significant partisan divide — a challenge for the senator. Half of Americans now say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, while only 38 percent say it was the right decision, according to the Pew Research Center. (The rest are undecided.) But a closer look at polling shows that 52 percent of Republicans still believe toppling Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do.
That may simply reflect the reluctance of Republican voters to admit the failings of the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. And GOP leaders know there is a lot of political fodder in knocking President Obama’s foreign policy, even if few of them present alternatives. They denounce the president’s international leadership as feckless, weak and naive — red-meat rhetoric that fires up the base.
That means Paul will have to be not only smart but also courageous if he is to help his party find a more reasonable response to a complex world. The impulse to bend the globe to our will ought to be resisted, as should the instinct to continue to feed the military-industrial complex by draining the national treasury.
One of the reasons we ended up on a misguided mission in Iraq was that Democrats failed to put up enough resistance to the neocons who were then firmly in charge of the GOP. The doomed Vietnam War (though prosecuted by Democratic presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson) had left Democrats labeled wimps and cowards — a reputation they couldn’t shake. As a result, too many who should have known better, including then-senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards, voted to give Bush the authority to oust Saddam.
It took Obama’s victory — he campaigned as a critic of the Iraq invasion — to help leading Democratic pols find the courage to resist a “dumb war.” There are still military interventionists in the Democratic Party, but there are far fewer who would support a war in hopes of appearing strong on the national stage.
The Republican Party hasn’t yet managed that transition. Its neocons have learned nothing from their years of folly, with Cheney and the entire cohort of Iraq War cheerleaders refusing to admit their mistakes. But if Paul can win enough support from his party’s base, he can help the GOP come to terms with a world America cannot rule.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at the University of Georgia, The National Memo, July 19, 2014
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