Ben Buckman.net

I'm mostly disconnected from the daily news these days, the political blogosphere in particular, but I've been listening to a lot of On Point Radio and other NPR programs and caught the episode with Jeffrey Goldberg about his recent Atlantic piece on Israel's plans to bomb Iran.

One element of the story that I find so interesting, which they didn't really talk about at all, is how it hasn't changed in years. The administration and pundits were having the same conversation when President Bush was in office. There were neocons who wanted to bomb Iran in 2006 just as there are today. I wrote a column about Iran in March 2006 that reflects a debate (and apparent facts) little changed today. The choices and tradeoffs are almost exactly the same (the one exception I can think of being the vulnerability of US combat troops in Iraq).

The National Intelligence Estimate of December 2007 claimed that Iran had stopped or stalled its nuclear weapons program. Neocons (and the Israeli right) criticized the report for being conveniently "political". It seems pretty clear now, unless everything is still all wrong, that the NIE was in fact correct.

So apparently they're back on track now. And now, according to Goldberg, there's a one year horizon to figure it out. July 2011 is the magic moment of decision. (Don't make any international travel plans for August 2011...) Let's assume for the moment - still, a worst-case scenario - that this time it's for real. War against Iran certainly wasn't an urgent national security priority in 2006 or 2007. Thinking about Iran's nuclear program and trying to stop it were important, but none of that required the kind of large-scale military strikes talked about then. And by extension, talking about those kinds of strikes as if they were urgent in 2007 was absurd in retrospect.

The lesson I take from this is to always question the urgency of alleged crises. Iraq, we have known for years, wasn't an urgent national security threat in 2003 when we invaded. Iran may or may not be an urgent crisis a year from now, but before then it's a diplomatic issue to be thought about and resolved rationally. Urgency just breeds fear (which is why, rightly or not, Goldberg is getting so much heat for the story). Fear short-circuits intelligent policy debate. Always good to keep in mind.

Thomas Friedman gives up on the Israel-Palestinian peace process (for now):

The only thing driving the peace process today is inertia and diplomatic habit. Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has left the realm of diplomacy. It is now more of a calisthenic, like weight-lifting or sit-ups, something diplomats do to stay in shape, but not because they believe anything is going to happen. ...

It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home. ...

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

If we are still begging Israel to stop building settlements, which is so manifestly idiotic, and the Palestinians to come to negotiations, which is so manifestly in their interest, and the Saudis to just give Israel a wink, which is so manifestly pathetic, we are in the wrong place. It’s time to call a halt to this dysfunctional “peace process,” which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility.

If the status quo is this tolerable for the parties, then I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table. Let’s fight about something big.

I basically agree with him. The Netanyahu government is pushing ahead with unilateral "facts on the ground" that make any future negotiations that much harder, while essentially daring the PA to declare a state. The PA has given up, Abbas is quitting; it can't or won't make a deal on any terms the Israelis would accept.

The big question in my mind is, what does happen if/when the PA declares a state? In 1948 Israel had a legal basis - the UN Partition Plan - for the borders it declared to be its own. (The subsequent defensive war expanded those borders considerably, of course, which remains the #1 challenge today: as Friedman puts it, do the Palestinians want 1967 or 1948?) 

What kind of state and on what territory can the Palestinians declare? They can call their current land a state, but their land is split, politically and physically; their sovereign territory is a fraction of what they want; and even in that territory their sovereignty is weak. Does declaring a Palestinian state that includes Israeli territory have any legal bearing? The most effective way for the Palestinians to destroy Israel as a Jewish state is not to declare a state, but to demand the vote - in Israel - and declaring their own state would make such a demand preposterous. (The United States didn't declare independence from Britain in 1776 so it could vote in the British parliament, in other words.) Or flip that around: if the Palestinians declare a state that includes Jewish settlements, can't the settlers demand their own vote (assuming the declared state has any facade of democracy, which given the international players, seems likely)?

The only certainty of the PA declaring a state unilaterally is that all the old rules are thrown away and everything's up in the air. It could lead to massive political pressure on Israel to accept the state, or more likely, the US and EU wouldn't see the point of defending a state that has no effective sovereignty, and it would be DOA. So Netanyahu is betting that a Palestinian state is a bad hand, and he's daring the PA to play it. From his point of view, that's probably a prudent (but short-sighted) approach.

In that situation, the peace process is truly a waste of America's diplomatic capital. I wonder why it's taking so long for Palestinians to demand the vote in Israel, though, because that is a game Israel can't legitimately win.

Via Jeffrey Goldberg, some Iran-related missile defense news:

Israel's Arrow missile defense system was designed to intercept Scud missiles with a range of 300-400 kilometers. After it became clear that the Iranians -- with aid from North Korea and China -- are increasing the range of their missiles, Israel was forced to regroup and cope with the new reality, leading to the development of the Arrow 2 System. But it's not working out so well. Ha'aretz says that after a missile test failed to reach even the direction of its target on Wednesday night, Israel must develop a better way to defend itself against an attack from Iran, whose Shihab 3 missile's range exceeds 1,000 kilometers -- more than enough to reach Israel. 

It gets worse:

"Iran is about to incorporate a missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers into its arsenal. Not coincidentally, even though there has been little media attention on the subject, Israel is mulling the purchase of the U.S.-made THAAD missile defense, which is still in the development phase. ... This mishap will be thoroughly examined in Iran. There is no doubt that Tehran's director of its missile program will be rubbing his hands with satisfaction. Beyond the technical glitch, this failure is also a psychological blow for Israel and the U.S, its partner in the project."

Oh, and it doesn't help that Israel, at least in public, is calling all of this a "partial success" for its missile defense strategy.  

And a thoughtful analysis of J Street and Obama's Israel policy:

Jamie Kirchick wrote this week, under the headline, "Obama's Jews," that the "constellation of far-left 'pro-Israel' organizations put a kosher stamp of approval on Obama's bizarre hectoring and moral equivalence." Well, count me - a genuine warmongering fascist, according to some on the Interwebs - as a person who also puts his kosher stamp of approval on Obama's approach to Israel. I don't think his approach is bizarre or hectoring, or represents an exercise in moral equivalence. If he equated Hamas and Israel, then he would be making a moral equivalency argument, but he didn't. And I don't think there's anything bizarre about an American president asking Israel to end its addiction to settlements. And I don't think there's anything bizarre or marginal about a group of American Jews forming an organization like J Street to press for a different vision of Israel than the one advocated - or acquiesced to - by so-called mainstream groups like AIPAC and the ADL. 

I agree with Jamie - J Street has made some dumb mistakes in its brief history; its knee has jerked to the left when it shouldn't have, and it needs to grapple with the Iranian threat in a sophisticated way, and not simply stand in opposition to whatever AIPAC happens to be advocating at the moment. But all knees in the organized Jewish community tend to jerk, and when they do, they jerk in the direction of the status quo, and the status quo is untenable. The Zionist vision of a Jewish democratic state won't survive the demographic and moral realities of the current situation. Some people in J Street, I think, are motivated by animus to the idea of a Jewish state, but most, in my limited experience with them, want to preserve both Israel's democratic and Jewish character. That's more than I can say for some people in the "mainstream" pro-Israel community, who blind themselves to the coming crisis.

I'm not naïve about Arab intentions - or should I say, I'm no longer naïve about Arab intentions. I don't automatically believe that the creation of a Palestinian state will lead to an end of claims, or an end to the conflict. But I know that Israel's continued entanglement with the Palestinians, an entanglement deepened and exacerbated by its addiction to settlements, will eventually lead to the demise of the Jewish state. So I'm glad that "Obama's Jews" support his demand for Israeli self-reflection (are we so wonderful that we couldn't use a little self-examination now and again?), and I'm surprised that people are surprised by Obama's modest demand. He said in his campaign that he would hold up a mirror to Israel, and he is. He's also holding up a mirror to the Arab side, and that's all for the good as well. Time is running out - if Israel doesn't achieve permanent, internationally-recognized borders and diplomatic relations with the bulk of Muslim-majority countries soon, the campaign to delegitimize the very idea of Israel will become even more ferocious than it's been.  In my humble opinion, J Street is trying, in its own way, to prevent this from happening, and this puts it in the mainstream of American Jewish political life.

From the NY Times and UK Times (and many more sources no doubt) come stories about IDF atrocities in Gaza. And my response is: well, duh. Watch Waltz with Bashir and say that the Israeli army is immaculate. Watch any war documentary and say that any military force fighting in a civilian population doesn't commit atrocities. It's the nature of the thing: put a bunch of kids with big guns in a hostile zone where other kids with big guns are trying to kill them, and they're going to do fucked up things. Waltz depicts it perfectly: they land on the beach in Lebanon and start shooting wildly at everything that movies. A car with a family drives up, it's blasted to smithereens. Look at all the US soldiers returning from Iraq with PTSD and say with a straight face that war by its nature does not involve cold-blooded murder of innocents. Fallujah didn't make the US Marine Corps evil. Gaza doesn't make the IDF evil. But every war proves again that war is a fucked-up endeavor from the get-go.

What bothers me about Israeli advocates - be they in the Israeli government, the Israeli embassies on twitter, the kids trained in AIPAC seminars, the kids who don't know any better - is this failure to acknowledge, or willful ignorance, of the human cost of military policy. Gaza 2008 was a brilliantly executed engagement. They destroyed thousands of enemy objectives at minimal cost to the invading force. Bravo. Now acknowledge that they killed babies and blew up sleeping families to do that. And acknowledge that really, really, if terrorism is evil because it kills innocents, then the line between terrorism and war is really not a line but a big blob of bloody gray, and defending yourself against insanity makes you insane yourself. There is no virtue in war. That's the dilemma Israel faces every day. Make of that what you will.