As the Goldstone report on the Gaza war wends it way up the UN food chain, casting further opprobrium on Israel at each level, it is legitimate to question Israel’s handling of this challenge. Did the Israeli response lessen or aggravate the damage?

There are serious critiques that could have been levied against Goldstone’s mandate even before a single accusation was heard. UN investigations of wars, including this one, typically focus on jus in bello, on the laws of war on the battlefield, and ignore jus ad bellum, the justification for going to war in the first place. It can be argued with great cogency that it is unreasonable to judge the conduct of a war with little or no reference to its causes; echoes of this can be heard in Israeli complaints about the lack of attention to claims of self-defense.

A second critique is that international law has not kept pace with changes in warfare. Most contemporary armed conflicts involve what Rupert Smith has called “war amongst the people,” rather than classic set-piece battlefield scenarios from which laws on wartime conduct (jus in bello) were drawn. These laws seek, quite rightly, to minimize casualties among civilians, but how should they be applied when the very blurring of the military-civilian distinction is a basic strategic axiom of one party? Are insurgents entitled to more rather than less immunity if they refuse to wear uniforms (as required by conventional law)?

So Goldstone’s approach was already blinkered by the framework in which he, without audible complaint, was thrust. This was then compounded by the lack of an Israeli defense to the specific accusations that were brought. Having no “official” explanation that needed to be taken into account, as a straight-laced jurist he then not only accepted any claims of atrocities at face value but also attributed them to deliberate policy rather than the mistakes, negligence, and misconduct out of which most wartime violations are compounded.

Ruth Lapidoth, who has represented Israel in many international legal frameworks, and other leading Israeli jurists have argued that it was a mistake to leave Israel unrepresented in the presentation of evidence and argument before Goldstone. It may be that the final product would still not have been to Israel’s liking, but presenting one’s case in full force would make it more difficult to ignore the basic limitations of the framework (lack of attention to causes, unconventional warfare) and to assign to deliberate policy what could be attributed, in “the fog of war,” to deviations from the rules of engagement that the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) had in fact set out.

A second effective means of damage control would be to address forthrightly the specific cases in the Goldstone report and to draw the necessary conclusions: a clear statement of the facts if the accusation is not warranted, and appropriate disciplinary action if it is. In fact, in international law, taking this step would remove the threat of prosecution abroad that now appears to hang over the head of top-level Israeli military commanders. The army that can fight a bloody conflict in an urban setting, without any cases of misconduct among its ranks, has yet to be created.

According to recent report, it was Defense Minister Ehud Barak who prevailed on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to boycott the UN inquiry. If so, it is further testimony to Barak’s inability to learn from experience, and it comes as no surprise that the latest poll predicts that, if elections were held now, his Labor Party, once the dominant force in Israel, would be reduced to an abysmal seven seats.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

In his June 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asserted that Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” was one of Israel’s requirements for agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Both Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat,immediately rejected the requirement. However, if there is to be a long-lasting peace between Israel and a Palestinian state, Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state is a necessity.

Palestinians have three official objections to Israel being recognized as a Jewish state, as well as a fourth objection about which they do not speak openly, but which lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The three official objections are as follows:

1. It is not the task of the Palestinians to determine the nature of the Israeli state, but that of the Israelis.
2. Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would jeopardize the position of the Israeli Arabs, who form 20 percent of the Israeli population.
3. Israel did not demand recognition as a “Jewish state” in its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.

The fourth Palestinian objection—which they do not assert openly lest it destroy the chances for a peace treaty with Israel—is that many Palestinians simply do not accept the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism (Zionism). For the Palestinians, and for many other Arabs as well, a Jew is defined by religion, not nationality or ethnicity, and given the position of Jews as dhimmis, or second-class religious subjects in Muslim history, the Palestinians feel that Jews have no right to be rulers, let alone rule over what they consider Muslim territory.

These attitudes, partially latent during the heyday of the Oslo peace process (1993-2000), were reinforced by the Al-Aqsa Intifada, which transformed what had been a conflict between two peoples over the same piece of territory into a religious war between Muslims and Jews, and which greatly strengthened Hamas in the process. Indeed both Hamas and non-Hamas religious leaders stressed that the Palestinians were fighting the Jews, just as Muhammad had fought the Jews who they allied with his enemies as he sought to unite the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of Islam.

What the Palestinians—and other Arabs—fail to understand is that Zionism arose as a national movement among Jews in Europe in the 19th century. Very much influenced by the national unification movements of Germany and Italy (as were the Arab nationalists of the time), as well as by the increasingly precarious position of the Jews in Eastern Europe who were beset by pogroms in Czarist Russia, Zionist thinkers such as Hess, Lilienblum and Herzl asserted that just as the French had France, the Germans had Germany and the Italians had Italy, the Jews deserved a state of their own where they could lead a “normal, national life,” and the ancient Jewish homeland of Israel, then occupied by the Ottoman Empire, was chosen as the site of the future Jewish state. To be sure, the land which the Zionists wanted was already populated by Arabs; however, the Arabs who lived there at the end of the 19th century had not yet developed a national identity (that was come during the British mandate of 1922-48), and at the time primary saw themselves as Muslims or Christians, or as “Southern Syrians” or as Ottoman subjects.

This being the case, one can respond to the Palestinian reasons for not recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state” in the following manner:

1. While the Israelis alone can and should define the nature of their state, as the existential nature of the state is a central factor in the conflict (unlike, for example, the conflicts between France and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries), then Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish State becomes central to ending the conflict.
2. There are many minorities in the Middle East, and the often negative treatment of these minorities, whether religious (such as the Copts in Egypt and the Shi’a in Saudi Arabia) or national (such as the Kurds in Turkey and the Azeris) is, in fact, linked to the nature of the country in which they live. However these minorities could be protected by treaty arrangements (currently they are not, although Turkey has begun the process of trying to address its Kurds’ aspirations)—so long as they swear allegiance to the state. Indeed, should a Palestinian state which recognizes Israel as a “Jewish state” emerge, that could make it easier for Israeli Arabs to solve their own identity problems, which have become increasingly serious in recent years, as some Israeli Arab leaders have openly backed Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria in their conflicts with Israel. Thus, as part of a peace treaty between a Palestinian state and Israel, the protection of the rights, albeit not the national rights, of the Israeli Arabs could be stipulated.
3. While acknowledgment of Israel as a Jewish state was not a component of Israel’s peace treaties with either Egypt or Jordan, in neither case was Israel involved in the type of existential conflict with these countries as it currently is with the Palestinians—a conflict in which it often appears that the assertion of one people’s national aspirations negates those of the other people. Thus it is necessary for both sides to recognize the legitimacy of the other’s national aspirations. For the Palestinian side, this involves recognizing Israel as a Jewish State.
4. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, it is necessary for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state to replace the image of the Jew as dhimmi, or second class citizen, with the image of the Jew as a member of a national group exercising legitimate national rights, just as the Palestinians themselves do. Once this is done, the chances for a long-lasting peace between Israel and a Palestinian state will be greatly enhanced.

   Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

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It was high time that anti-Semitism would find something hipper than those dusty Protocols of the Elders of Zion, concocted sometime between 1895 and 1902 by Russian journalist Matvei Golovinski and then used by the pro-Tsarists to discredit reforms in Russia as a Jewish plot. Egyptian and Syrian state media have turned the Protocols into television series, trying to modernize the plot and bringing it forward into the 20th century.

Iranian TV has beaten them hands down with “Harry Potter and the Ziono-Hollywoodist Conspiracy.” (If you cannot view the clip embedded above, click here.) J.K. Rowling, that English (and no doubt, fully Aryan) rose, as avatar of the globe-encircling Jewish kraken? Yes, though the evidence is a bit disjointed as the clip unfolds on YouTube. The basic visual argument is hardly as compelling as the original Protocols which, after all, have real-life Jews who have real faces and names, working out complicated plans to conquer the world and pollute the race. You only get Harry and his buddies and professors flitting in and out of the picture while the voice-over proclaims a story line that actually has nothing to do with Messrs. Voldemort and Dumbledore.

It is “Witchcraft and Brainwashing” that spreads the “evil essence of Zionism.” This is how the logic apparently works: Since Harry Potter movies are all about W ‘n’ B, they are a Zionist tool. Along with “devil worship,” W ‘n’ B will corrupt “innocent children and youth” around the world. Why is this a Zionist tool? Because witchcraft was invented by the “rabbis of ancient Egypt.” Now we get a few seconds from the Order of the Phoenix even though it does not contain witchcraft-mongering rabbis. But wait. Aren’t those longbearded faculty at Hogwarts kind of Jewish-looking? Didn’t we see Jewish symbols in every Harry Potter movie? I swear, the kids were playing with dreidels in The Philosopher’s Stone. And when they assembled for a meal in The Order of the Phoenix, they were actually celebrating Passover. You thought the matzohs were crackers, eh? Whenever the kids joust and fight, they are actually preparing for the Last Battle that will do in or enslave all the Muslims.

As we hop along this warped path of Iranian TV logic, we also learn that the world faces a “cultural crusaders’ war” that is more powerful than any military assault the West has engineered in, say, Afghanistan and Iraq. How will the Jews attain world domination? By hastening Armageddon, the “End of Days,” which will deliver a kind of Jewish endsieg, the Nazi term for “final victory.”

What does this have to do with Harry Potter? Well, because in the next volume, Iranian TV intones, he finally wants to face down Voldemort. That will be the mother of all battles, to coin a phrase—a secret metaphor (and call to arms) for Armageddon.

Personally, I find this insulting to the Jews. Previously, the Iranian propaganda line painted the “Little Satan” as mighty regional superpower. Now, this TV clip puts down Israel/Jewry as a bunch of losers who no longer have the will and wherewithal to subjugate the Muslims directly and by force of arms. Now, they have to rely on a bunch of kids—on Harry and Hermione—to execute their evil designs.

What has the Jewish Conspiracy come to? This member in good standing feels so dissed that I will enroll in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the fall to learn how to turn Mr. Ahmadinejad into a toad.

Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.

What’s the meaning of the offer last week by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantánamo detainees to plead guilty to the charge that they coordinated the attacks of 9/11 that murdered nearly 3,000 Americans?

That meaning is revealed by the fact that they withdrew their offer as soon as they learned that procedural problems—and probably the timetable of the presidential transition—could interfere with their immediate executions.

The plea offer—and its withdrawal—should help us understand what drives Mohammed and his colleagues. And it should help the Obama administration understand what to do about the Guantánamo detainees.

What drives Mohammed and his co-defendants, now that they’re in captivity, is what drove Al Qaeda when it flew planes into the World Trade Center: the effort to achieve a spectacular show of martyrdom. But who is their primary audience now that they’re in Guantánamo?

Clearly, that audience is not made up of Westerners. To be sure, were these detainees to make impassioned speeches before their executions proclaiming their joy in dying in response to the victimization of Muslims, a few in the West might admire their dedication to their cause. For most in America and Europe, though, that dedication would be outweighed by the mass murders for which they claimed responsibility.

More likely, the detainees’ offer to plead guilty was aimed at a Muslim audience. It was aimed, first of all, at an audience of hard-core Al Qaeda members, for whom the achievement of a death-wish would be seen as a commitment to martyrdom that they should emulate. And it was aimed at the rest of the Muslim world in the hope that it would highlight the Al Qaeda’s grievances and enlist recruits to the Islamist jihad against the Western oppressors.

In pursuing this strategy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants were trying to use Guantánamo, as the World Trade Center was used, as a symbol of the hated America—an America that could be damaged by turning American power against itself. In the case of the World Trade Center, American power consisted of prominent buildings that symbolized the financial might of a corrupt America, which were destroyed spectacularly by flying Western-made planes into them. In the case of Guantánamo, American power consists of detention facilities that symbolize the legal system of a corrupt America, which would be destroyed by forcing that system to turn its inmates into martyrs.

And in pursuing this strategy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was following Al Qaeda’s playbook to the letter. He was using whatever stage is available to publicize his cause, to demonstrate his commitment, and to provide a big show. His hope was that the show would be spread virally on television, in newspapers and on the Internet to an audience of believers and potential believers in the Muslim world, bucking up the convictions of the believers and recruiting, to the believing camp, many more.

So what is to be done?

Clearly, what’s needed in response to terrorists is the legal pursuit of legal means in the service of legal ends. The plans of the incoming Obama administration, which seem to include the transfer of inmates to U.S. prisons, may eliminate the Guantánamo stigma from America’s legal response to the terrorism aimed at it.

But what’s needed no less is a careful consideration of the consequences, for Al Qaeda and its sympathizers, of executions that would be interpreted as glorious outcomes of glorious martyrdom operations. The Bush administration has sought the death penalty for convicted mass-murdering terrorists. It would be the better part of wisdom for an Obama administration to favor, instead, life in prison.

Over the past week, MESHNet, the closed-forum companion to MESH, conducted a poll of MESHNet members, asking them who would make the best Middle East envoy of the Obama administration (if it is decided to appoint one). The structure of the poll emulated an earlier poll administered to a panel of Israeli experts, taking the same nine candidates and the same scoring system. MESHNet members (persons with a professional interest in the Middle East, 179 in number) were asked to rate the candidates, from “most suitable” for the job (a score of 5) to “least suitable” (a score of 1). Sixty-three MESHNet members responded to the poll question. Here are the results, comprised of the average score for each candidate:

In parallel, MESH asked a number of its members to assess whether the appointment of a special envoy is advisable. Their nine responses appear below. (Respondents did not have prior knowledge of the poll results.)

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Alan Dowty :: Would it be wise for the new administration to dispatch a special envoy to the Middle East? Yes, by all means; it has become standard practice, and not sending an envoy would evoke cries of despair and dismay from near and far. It has become de rigueur to create the impression that the United States is making an all-out effort to achieve settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, whether success is expected or not.

Furthermore, if only to satisfy the need to create the impression of seriousness, the envoy needs to be on the A-list—like the names proffered in the poll. A low-level appointee would, again, evoke hue and cry.

And in order for this impression to be convincing, the appointed envoy must actually be allowed to make a serious effort. Perhaps neither the envoy nor the administration really believes that chances for success are great, but the onlookers are too sophisticated to be fooled by a charade. The effort must be real.

And so long as the envoy is making a serious effort, why should the negotiation not be directed at the most tractable channel, the one where a slight possibility of success actually exists? Not the Israel-Palestinian channel; though a majority of both publics probably still favor a negotiated, two-state solution, there is presently no Palestinian negotiating partner who could credibly implement such an agreement.

But on the Syrian front, there is a glimmer of daylight. The strategic logic of a deal between Israel and Syria is such that the last six Israeli prime ministers have all given it their best shot. Maybe the time has come.

So who, among the august personalities posited, should be the deus ex machina? It must be someone with infinite patience, infinite optimism, and an infinitely thick skin to withstand the inevitable barbs from all sides. Are such qualities likely among the high fliers on the present list of candidates? Unfortunately, such a combination of humility and prominence is a rarity of nature.

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Robert O. Freedman :: Obama’s two predecessors took opposite positions on the question of whether or not to appoint a special envoy to the Middle East. Bill Clinton had a special envoy, Dennis Ross, who was active during the entire period of the Clinton presidency and whose book, The Missing Peace, recounts his experience as special envoy. By contrast, George W. Bush chose not to have a special envoy and was widely criticized, justifiably or not, for paying insufficient attention to the Middle East.

In my view, Obama should appoint a special envoy for a number of reasons.

First, Obama will have many important priorities when he first takes office. In addition to the problems facing the U.S. and world economies, which can be expected to take up much of his time, there are serious problems in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Russia. There simply will not be sufficient presidential time to spend on helping to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, even if the conflict were ripe for settlement, which it is not. Under these circumstances, appointing a special envoy will enable Obama to demonstrate his continued interest in the process—as opposed to Bush, whose interest was, at best, episodic—and thereby reassure the parties to the conflict that the United States is concerned about helping to try to find a solution for it.

A second advantage of a special envoy is that it will enable Obama to gather information about the positions of the various sides to the conflict. Neither the Israeli-Palestinian nor the Israeli-Syrian conflicts is at this point ripe for settlement. The Israeli elections are scheduled for February 10, and there are serious disagreements among the three major parties, Kadima, Likud and Labor, as to how to move forward. At the same time, the split between the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas which controls Gaza, is growing greater by the day, as the cancellation of unity talks in Cairo so clearly demonstrated. Meanwhile, Syria is obfuscating as to whether it would be willing to cut ties with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran in return for Israel giving up the Golan Heights. With none of the conflicts appearing ripe for settlement, a special envoy could serve Obama by gathering information as to the positions of the parties, and imparting it to Obama. He would then have a firm base of information from which to operate when he finally has the time to devote to the Middle East.

Perhaps most importantly, a special envoy could advise Obama on whether or not it is worth investing scarce presidential time on the Syrian-Israeli conflict, as Bill Clinton did, albeit without success. Given the Israeli elections, the special envoy might best spend his or her time, at least initially, in trying to determine whether or not Syria is willing to pay the price of peace—cutting ties with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran—or is just using the talks with Israel to try to improve its position with the United States. Should Bashar Asad of Syria not be serious about peace, as many skeptical Americans and Israelis believe, then the United States can discover this early in the Obama presidency, allowing the special envoy to devote his or her efforts to working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the other hand, if Asad is indeed serious about paying the price of peace, then the geopolitical advantages to the United States of a Syrian split with Iran and its proxies would be well worth the time spent on Syria by a U.S. special envoy.

In sum, even if Obama does not have the time to immediately deal with the Arab-Israeli conflict, his appointment of a special envoy will, at the minimum, commence his administration’s involvement in trying to help find a solution to it.

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Adam Garfinkle :: As I have written before and elsewhere, the idea of appointing a special envoy to, not the “Middle East,” but to the Arab-Israeli arena early in the tenure of the next administration is a good one—but not necessarily for the reasons often advanced. The reasons for appointing someone prestigious but politically shrewd do not include actually advancing the so-called peace process, and they are not based on the myth of linkage—the empirically unsupportable idea that an Arab-Israeli diplomatic settlement would have a dramatic positive bearing on other regional problems. The real reasons are these:

1. Despite whatever progress has been made in the post-Annapolis process, the situation remains unripe for a breakthrough for lack of strong and credible leadership on all sides. Yet the optic of U.S. engagement remains important for other reasons. It makes it easier politically for several important Arab states to cooperate with the United States against Iranian intrigues. Supporting the morale of moderates on all sides may prevent things from sliding backwards. It can help keep the Europeans and others from baying excessively at the diplomatic moon in hopes of miracles that don’t exist. And it may have some benign overwash on the tricky process of extracting ourselves from Iraq. The optic of leaving Iraq cannot be allowed to become one of failure or regional disengagement; that’s why some exiting U.S. troops should go to Bahrain or Qatar or Kuwait and not home, and it’s another reason why diplomatic engagement in the Levant can be at least marginally useful. We should want to spread out the newspaper headlines.
2. The optical approach will help keep the issue off the president’s own desk; he has more important things to do both at home and abroad, and he doesn’t need an albatross of diplomatic futility hung around his neck so early in his tenure.
3. A special envoy can help keep up the optic of engagement while the president’s new team gets chosen, nominated, enmeshed in hearings and finally confirmed—a process that can take many months thanks to the ongoing dysfunction of Congress.
4. That envoy could be a useful point-man to help smooth what could be a rough Palestinian political transition in January—in case no one else is in place to do that job.

It is crucial that any special envoy understand the real purposes of his (or her) assignment, and not go forth as if tilting at windmills. That might only make things worse, and end up burdening the president rather than freeing him (temporarily at least) from this mess. As a famous 20th-century American philosopher once put it, “These things must be done delicately.”

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Josef Joffe :: First, forget the usual suspects like Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright or the likes of James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. The only American of weight who understands the duplicities and obsessions of the Middle East is Henry Kissinger. The handicap of his age can be turned into an advantage. Tell the players to come to New York, since Henry can’t shuttle as he used to in 1974. They’ll behave better than in Ramallah or Jerusalem.

But is it wise to appoint an envoy? The Middle East is like Detroit and General Motors: There is no solution, but any American administration has to act as if there were, as if yet another bout of shuttling or another $25 billion will make GM competitive with Toyota. And so with the Middle East.

First of all, the so-called core of the problem, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has never been less at center-stage than it is now. It is dwarfed by the struggle for hegemony that pits Iranian ambitions (with Hamas and Hezbollah in tow) against the United States, Israel and the Sunni regimes. This is the central strategic issue. This is where, short of war, coalitions must be harnessed and containment strategies be organized. This is where regional conflict threatens to spill into the global arena. On that enlarged stage, extending from the Levant to Tehran, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has shrunk to almost negligible dimensions, which do not require the bulk of America’s attention and resources.

Moreover, there is no two-state solution at hand because neither party actually wants one. Why such a counter-intuitive judgement? Israel has learned that it cannot relinquish strategic control over the West Bank, given the sorry aftermath of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. It is “never again,” even if a deal could be struck with Mahmoud Abbas, as it could not with Hamas. No imaginable Palestinian Authority can at this point assure a no-threat West Bank; hence, Israel cannot leave.

Nor does Abu Mazen have an interest in seeing the Israelis leave. For it is the IDF that guarantees not only his political, but his physical survival. This is a heartening irony—Israel protecting a Palestinian president. But there is no Palestinian state in this surprising twist of history.

Perhaps one day, Marwan Barghouti, currently in an Israeli jail for multiple murders, could acquire the leadership status that would allow him to prevail against Hamas and rule the West Bank, perhaps even Gaza, with an iron hand. But the time scale is askew here. “Envoy time” is measured in months, the evolution toward a new and stable political order in the lands of the Palestinian Authority should be measured in years—many years.

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Mark N. Katz :: It has been widely reported that on November 18, Obama called Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and told him that the United States “would spare no effort to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.” Obama, then, should definitely appoint a special envoy for the Middle East.

As previous administrations have learned, efforts to achieve peace between Israel on the one hand and the Palestinians as well as neighboring Arab states on the other are extremely difficult and time consuming. Nor is there any guarantee that these efforts will succeed—as several previous American diplomatic initiatives have shown.

Because of the time commitment needed for seriously trying to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, neither the president nor the secretary of state should get immersed in the nitty-gritty negotiations that will be required. There is simply too much other important business for both of them that will not receive sufficient attention if either (or even more unfortunately, both) become overly involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Nor is this a task that the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs should undertake either, as this would leave precious little time for him or her to deal with America’s many other important relationships in, as well as the other problems of, this region.

In short, for there to be any hope of an American-brokered Israeli-Palestinian settlement, it will have to be undertaken by someone whose sole task it is to try to achieve one. If this effort is successful, the president can—rightly—take the credit. But if it is unsuccessful, the blame can be assigned not so much to the president as to (yes, you guessed it) the Middle East envoy.

Of course, even with a Middle East envoy working on it full-time, the attempt to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian settlement will still take up more of President Obama’s time than he may now anticipate. Although his desire to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is noble, he may find that there is a trade-off between “sparing no effort” on this and getting much of anything else accomplished.

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Walter Reich :: The Arab-Israeli conflict has always been at least as complex as a game of three-dimensional chess. Not only are the problems between Israel and the Palestinians excruciatingly hard to solve. So are the problems between Israel and many of the other Arab parties.

Moreover, the strains within each party—among the Israelis, among the Palestinians, and among the Arabs in general—are very great, and each of them could cause any peace deal to unravel, implode or even explode.

As a result of this, no party has reason to feel confident that a peace deal would actually hold for very long. What would Hamas do before the ink on a peace agreement has dried? What would Hezbollah do? And what would stop the Arab world as a whole from renouncing the treaty once Israel withdraws, even if it’s based on the 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which was endorsed by the Arab League? During a visit to Ramallah last July, then-candidate Obama reportedly told the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, that “the Israelis would be crazy not to accept” the Saudi initiative,” which, he told Abbas, “would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco.” Would it?

And would it now that the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been escalated from the level of three-dimensional chess to an even higher level by the fact that a truculent Iran, which is totally opposed not only to peace with Israel but with that country’s very existence, has, according to nuclear inspectors, finally produced enough nuclear material to make, with further purification, a nuclear bomb? What would Iran do if such a peace deal were signed?

Some argue that, despite this complexity, it’s precisely because of the specter of a nuclear Iran that a peace deal is finally possible: many Arab countries, especially the Saudis, are frightened of this, they argue, and would put muscle behind a peace deal. Moreover, they say, getting a deal, even on paper, might make it easier for the United States to leave Iraq.

Maybe so, and maybe Obama should indeed enter these dangerous waters by naming a Middle East envoy and starting negotiations actively and energetically right away. The risks might be great, but the rewards might be even greater.

Yet the challenge for Obama has grown enormously as a result of the global financial meltdown, which has complicated all of his agendas, both domestic and foreign. Can he afford to take a major, well-publicized gamble and get stuck in the familiar morass of failure? An immense amount of hope has been invested in him and his capacities to save America and the world during this period of economic crisis. Can he afford to dissipate this hope by failing in a very visible and early bid to solve a problem that, until now, has proved insoluble?

At the least, Obama should wait to find out who will win the Israeli elections in February. One candidate, Tzipi Livni, would surely support a major peace-deal initiative. Her opponent, Benjamin Netanyahu, presumably would not—though American pressure might well cause him to change his mind. But events in the Arab/Muslim world, especially in connection with Iran, a major terrorist attack, a crisis elsewhere, or a worsening global economy, could well cause Obama to put all of his plans regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict on hold.

Given these risks and uncertainties, I don’t think Obama should name a peace envoy now. Certainly, he can wait until February. Meanwhile, this new American leader, who based his candidacy on the theme of change, is about to experience a lot of it, both domestically and internationally, and most of it not, alas, under his control.

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Robert Satloff :: Candidate Obama promised he would appoint a special Middle East envoy. President Obama’s decision whether to fulfill that promise depends a) on the purpose of the appointment and b) on the personality of the envoy.

Appointing an envoy makes a lot of sense if the purpose is to signal heightened, sustained and political-level interest on the part of the new Obama administration in key aspects of Arab-Israeli relations, recognizing that a breakthrough toward Israeli-Palestinian peace cannot occur until vital structural factors are put into place. These include building Arab acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state (i.e., putting flesh on the bones of the Arab peace initiative); developing Palestinian security forces as an effective instrument in the fight against terrorism, incitement and corruption; investing in the array of social/economic initiatives currently championed by Tony Blair; and extending the political legitimacy of Mahmoud Abbas past the original end of his term of office to prevent a void of Palestinian leadership and an easy political victory for Hamas.

Appointing an envoy does not make sense if the idea is to signal American urgency for achieving an early peace breakthrough, the pursuit of which is both impractical and counter-productive in the near term. Nor does it make sense if the envoy views his/her mission as the vehicle to repair America’s relations with the wider Arab and Muslim “worlds,” which is a burden that Israelis and Palestinians should not have to bear.

Given this analysis, the personality of a proposed envoy is important. The particular choice should be someone endowed with patience, persistence, and a willingness to pass the baton to someone else – perhaps the president, perhaps the secretary of state, perhaps another envoy – depending on circumstances. This is not the job for someone who believes that the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be achieved on his/her watch or someone who views this responsibility as the path to a Nobel Prize.

More broadly, under certain circumstances, it makes sense to empower an envoy to be the lead person on both Arab-Israeli and the Iran issues, given that the Iran issue is the most significant strategic factor in Arab and Israeli thinking these days and that demands made of key regional states (i.e., Arabs ) on the Iran issue will be met in turn with demands made of America and Israel on the peace process. Efficiency suggests, therefore, that it is better for a single empowered envoy be capable of holding serious conversations on the issue with his counterparts abroad, who in most circumstances will be the same person. The danger here, however, is of feeding a negative concept of “linkage”–the idea that “if only Israel were to do x, y, z then all the problems of the Middle East would be solved.” This means that anyone asked to fill this broadened envoy portfolio would have to be someone inoculated from the linkage bug, someone who understands the Middle East as it is, not as we Americans would like it to be.

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Raymond Tanter :: Whether it is wise to appoint an envoy for the Middle East depends on the president-elect’s planned focus of attention, whether he intends to have a White House-driven or cabinet-driven administration, and whether he would like to encourage or suppress differences in recommendations to the White House within and from the State Department.

If the president-elect wishes to focus on the economy from the White House, he should have a strong secretary of state, which would argue against having an envoy for the Middle East. However, if the secretary of state were to be given a substantial part of the action on international economy, a Middle East envoy would be desirable. Likewise, if it looks as if policy-driving national security events from the region merit an overarching strategy developed within the White House, he may wish to have a less prominent secretary of state, a strong national security advisor, and an envoy who reports to the White House and State. And if the president-elect wishes to encourage a process of “multiple advocacy” at State, then an envoy with direct reporting to the White House and to the secretary of state would be warranted.

Consider historical examples to illustrate these principles. During the Nixon administration, the president desired highly centralized foreign policy formulation from the White House, at the expense of State. In this regard, Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, played the envoy role in the Middle East, as well as in virtually every other important theater.

In the Reagan administration, I was the White House liaison to Middle East envoy Ambassador Philip Habib, who had an office at State and reported regularly to President Reagan. Although Secretary of State Alexander Haig was at first not keen on sharing the action with the White House, his personal affinity for Habib and me minimized bureaucratic rivalry.

President Clinton chose resolution of Arab-Israeli disputes as the area in which he would make his foreign policy legacy, and so appointed Dennis Ross “Special Middle East Coordinator.” Having Ross at the White House allowed Clinton to organize a last-ditch effort at Camp David during 2000. Although the outcome left much to be desired, it was more the responsibility of Yasser Arafat than the division of labor among Americans or the fault of any of them.

If President-elect Obama decides to appoint an envoy for the Middle East, this person should have a writ that includes a larger region than the Arab-Israel zone, to coordinate contact groups of allies for interrelated problems, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Such contact groups might resolve pressing issues like the future status of the Iranian dissidents in Iraq, an Awakening Council model for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and developing leverage against the Iranian regime by reaching out to its opposition in advance of higher level American negotiations with Iran. An envoy would coordinate these issues as part of a strategic architecture for a similar area of responsibility as CENTCOM.

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Tamara Cofman Wittes :: Obama stated repeatedly during the campaign his intention to devote early and focused attention to the Middle East peace process. Since the transition period is mostly about structure and personnel, observers are naturally focused on the question of whether to appoint a special envoy for the peace process. But to my mind the question is misplaced.

In a bureaucracy, structure is power—but appointing an envoy does not necessarily convey much power or many resources to a diplomatic effort on behalf of Arab-Israeli peace. A special envoy without many staff, or one who is not situated at a senior level within (or above) the State Department bureaucracy, will not have the authority or capacity to mobilize efforts across the department, and will therefore not have as much impact as an envoy with his/her own office and a reporting line direct to the president or the secretary of state. So structure matters, and appointing an envoy does not alone produce the required structure.

Furthermore, effective peace process diplomacy is more than having the right mediator in the room with the warring parties; it must bring in key Arab governments, key U.S. military and intelligence resources, and key external stakeholders—meaning that, to be effective, a peace process envoy must be able to call on the full range of executive branch resources, from U.S. ambassadors at post to CENTCOM planners. Most crucially, an effective peace process envoy must be able to represent the president and bring the president’s personal engagement to bear at the right times.

Thus, the key question is not whether there will be a special envoy, but whether the person taking the point on Arab-Israeli affairs—whoever he may be—will carry with him the authority and credibility of the U.S. president. The local actors all have, or aspire to have, special relationships with Washington. They will not respond well to any diplomatic envoy who cannot both symbolize and operationalize a direct link to the American president. Whether the point person is a special envoy or the secretary of state is less important than whether she can speak on behalf of Obama, and whether she can bring Obama into the process at those critical moments when he needs to weigh in. So the identity of Obama’s peace processor will be crucial—much more crucial than her title.

That Israel’s leadership can’t figure out what to do when faced with the challenge of ransoming kidnapped Jews is excusable. That much of that leadership seems to be ignorant of the fact that Jews have given two thousand years of thought to exactly that problem, however, isn’t.

A few weeks ago, in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers taken captive by Hezbollah two years earlier, Israel released to that organization five prisoners, including one, Samir Quntar, who stands out for his brutality in the annals of terrorism against Israelis. Of all Arabs captured by Israel with “blood on their hands,” this one was one of the most despised. Yet, in order to obtain the bodies of the Israelis taken captive by Hezbollah, Israel released Quntar and the four others.

Israel engaged in this prisoner release as part of its tradition of doing everything possible to get Israeli soldiers out of the hands of Israel’s enemies—and in response to pressure, utterly understandable, from the families of the kidnapped soldiers and from many other Israelis. But Palestinian leaders immediately announced that Israel’s willingness to give up prisoners in order to obtain even the bodies of kidnapped Israelis showed that kidnapping is a tactic that works, and that should be used again. For example, Abu Mujahid, a spokesman for the umbrella terror group Popular Resistance Committees, said that the exchange “proves that kidnapping soldiers will continue to be the most efficient, favored and ideal way to release Palestinian prisoners, particularly those defined by the enemy as having blood on their hands.” In a valuable post on this site, Robert O. Freedman, reflecting the views of many in Israel, sharply questioned the wisdom of Quntar’s release.

So the psychological insight that such exchanges could encourage more kidnappings did surface in Israel’s debate. But it is hardly new. Indeed, it’s an insight that has been discussed at length by Jews since Roman times. And it has been discussed not for theoretical reasons but because paying ransoms for kidnapped Jews has punctuated the experience of the Jews throughout that long period.

The problem of paying ransom for Jewish captives was raised in the Mishnah some 2,000 years ago, and was frequently discussed in the Rabbinic literature in the centuries that followed. In the Middle Ages, families and communities often paid enormous sums, sometimes impoverishing themselves, in order to ransom kidnapped Jews. This occurred throughout Europe but also in Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere. The Cairo Genizah—a collection of some 200,000 documents found in the 19th century in a Cairo synagogue that included materials from as far back as the 9th century CE—includes some ransom receipts.

One of the most famous cases emphasizing the danger of rewarding kidnapping involved Rabbi Meir ben Baruch, known as the Maharam of Rothenburg, who lived in 13th-century Germany. The Maharam was held captive by Emperor Rudolf of Germany, who demanded a large ransom from the Jewish community for his release. According to various sources, the Maharam forbade his fellow Jews from paying it, since he feared that such a payment would encourage further kidnappings. He spent seven years as a prisoner, and died in captivity.

The purpose of this brief excursion into Jewish law and history is to point out that this dilemma has been discussed extensively for at least twenty centuries by Jews throughout the world. The circumstances have been different: the old kidnappers sought money rather than the humiliation and ultimately the destruction of a Jewish state. And in Europe and elsewhere the Jews had no army, whereas in modern Israel they do. But the psychological dilemma—the problem that ransoming kidnapped prisoners is likely to encourage more kidnappings—is similar.

What’s disheartening is that so many Israeli leaders, both civilian and military, seem ignorant of the long experience of the Jews in trying to cope with this dilemma. Now, following the Quntar exchange, the debate within Israeli society has become more focused than ever before. One hopes that Israeli leaders will take this debate seriously, and develop a policy that will help the country deal with the kidnappings that are surely yet to come. They could do worse than take Jewish history, and even traditional Jewish texts, as their point of departure.

Of course, antisemitism cannot be amusing. How could it be? This darkest of creeds has spawned million-fold death, not to speak of its less murderous forms like discrimination, persecution and expulsion.

But here is a rare instance that might bring at least a bittersweet smile to your face. Then, further below, we’ll get serious again.

Let’s listen to Captain Sayyed Shahada, a member of the Egyptian Unique Mustache Association, who opined as follows on Egyptian TV on July 11, 2008 (the clip may be viewed at the end of this post):

I respect the mustache of this Hitler, because he humiliated the most despicable sect in the world. He subdued the people who subdued the whole world—him with his ‘11′ mustache.… The generation of this Hitler… When I was little, my father, may he rest in peace, grew that kind of mustache, and so did all his classmates. They all had this ‘11′ mustache. That was in the days of Hitler.

Funny, isn’t it? Here are some salt-of-the-earth Egyptians who take pride in sporting “unique” mustaches and who have formed a club to promote this harmless pastime. Yet another little beacon of “civil society” which we cherish so much, isn’t it?

But the problem in the Arab Middle East is a civil society that is by no means civil. Indeed, as this Egyptian example shows (add Jordan), there is an inverse correlation between governmental policy and societal attitudes. For the government, it has been peace with Israel for almost 30 years. Down below, it is deeply rooted and pervasive antisemitism.

Aren’t we exaggerating a bit? No, and this is why these mustachioed Egyptians deliver such an interesting example. What could—normally—be farther away from a facial hair artist’s mind than Jews? Who would worry about this “despicable sect” while clipping his bristles?

Well, Captain Shahada does, and if he does, who does not? Classical European antisemitism—blood libel, world domination and all—has migrated to the Arab Middle East. Interestingly, it got there way before the founding of Israel, let alone the taking of the West Bank. And so did the admiration of Adolf Hitler, as the good captain recalls.

And so this semi-funny little story reveals a truth that is much larger than Hitler’s No. 11 mustache. Antisemitism, like any “anti-ism,” is not about its object (the Jews), but about the obsession in the anti-ist’s head. An obsession, your shrink will tell you, is the compulsive recurrence of images and ideas over which you have no control. The obsession consumes you, and it spreads relentlessly—all the way to mustaches, wax and clippers.

Think stubble and you think Hitler, Jews and world domination.

The Israelis have vacated Gaza, they might yet pull out of the West Bank, but how will they, qua Jews, ever manage to escape from the obsession-filled mind of Captain Shahada and millions of his kind?

It will be easier to re-divide Jerusalem than to remove this deepest of “root causes” from the collective psyche of Israel’s neighborhood.

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If you do not see an embedded clip, click here.

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With August fast approaching, MESH has asked its members to recommend a book for summer reading. (For more information on a book, or to place an order with Amazon through the MESH bookstore, click on the book title or cover.)

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Daniel Byman :: Yaroslav Trofimov’s The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam’s Holiest Shrine and the Birth of al-Qaeda (Doubleday, 2007), is a fast-paced, informative, and tight book about how Saudi zealots took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Trofimov appears to have excellent access to some sources that others have not tapped, and he sheds light on an event that has long been known but not well understood in the West. We learn a tremendous amount not only about the bloody combat in the holy shrine itself, but also about Saudi ineptitude and the motivations of the zealots. The only annoying thing about the book is that the author repeatedly stretches to make links to Al Qaeda that are at best weak and at times rather fanciful. My guess is an editor pushed him to have a “9/11 link” even though the rest of the text is gripping and illuminating without tying it to Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda.

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J. Scott Carpenter :: Summer reading should be stimulating, informative, and, most crucially, fun. Robin Wright’s new book, Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, while flawed, fits the bill. Wright whisks the reader from Morocco to Iran introducing us to the men and women engaged in the contest for the soul of the region, the dreams and shadows of her title. For a region associated with autocrats and suicide bombers, the reformers she introduces are like a breath of mountain air. Their dreams are our own. But like haze on a hot summer day, those dreams are threatened by men of dark vision such as Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Hamas’ Mishal and Hezbollah’s Nasrallah, all of whom Wright lets speak for themselves. She’s an optimist in the end, but be fair-warned, she is also partisan and ambiguous about U.S. power to shape the region (the chapter on Iraq is best avoided). Still, there’s more right than wrong here. (Penguin, 2008.)

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Mark T. Clark :: Antonio Giustozzi’s Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan (Columbia University Press, 2007) traces the emergence of the neo-Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in late 2001. He notes how the Taliban have become more flexible in interpreting Sharia, using innovative guerrilla and terrorist strategies as well as technology in their quest for power. He shows that neo-Taliban successes have stemmed from three things. First, the Taliban have exploited the political weaknesses of Afghanistan’s new government, especially between central and local arms. Second, they have adopted new strategies and tactics in fighting the Afghan army, its militias and its “foreign” supporters. And third, the insurgents have confronted an inconsistent and ineffective counter-insurgency strategy against them. When Giustozzi pieces together the recent history, he is at his strongest; when he interprets elements of strategy, he is at his weakest. The work is worth reading, if only to understand some of the recent “successes” the insurgency has scored and anticipate some counters we may soon employ.

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Steven A. Cook :: When I saw Aaron David Miller at the Council on Foreign Relations shortly after his book was published, he told me that it would make me “laugh and cry.” The author knows his work, as I found myself cackling in between moments of great despair while making my way through Miller’s terrific account of his time working the Arab-Israeli account. I can pile the number of Arab-Israeli conflict books ceiling-high in my office, but what makes The Much Too Promised Land different is its sobering and thus refreshing examination of American policy. Miller, it seems, has lost patience with Arabs, Israelis, and the follies of American policymakers who have been led down the garden path of the peace process by visions of the Nobel prize. I hope the next team that takes on the unforgiving task of managing the Arab-Israeli conflict learns the lessons that Miller has taught us. (Random House, 2008.)
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Adam Garfinkle :: About 28 years ago, a Chicago publisher called Nelson-Hall put out The Last Crusade: A Negotiator’s Middle East Handbook, by William R. Brown. The book is an analysis of Henry Kissinger’s step-by-step diplomatic odyssey from Kilometer 101 to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, written by a U.S. official who was along for much of the ride. As far as I can tell, the book was not widely reviewed (perhaps because of its unfortunate title; who knows?). Foreign Affairs just squibbed it, with the then doyen of the Middle East section, John C. Campbell, devoting two whole sentences to Brown’s effort. But the second sentence was this: “Brown’s background in public service is largely in the Arab field, and his analysis of Arab perceptions is particularly apt.”

Damn right it was. Before political correctness made it uncomfortable for State Department Arabists even to believe what they saw with their own eyes, let alone to write about it, Brown evinced a knack for keen insight, honest analysis and crisp prose. Consider, for just one out of dozens of examples, this remark: “The Arab perceives a single community of faith and language that contrasts sharply with our emphasis on competing but mutually adjusting political factions. In the West, politics has a flavor of controlled conflict that the Arab regards as destructive to community…. In the Middle East the purpose of political institutions is to facilitate the constant unfolding or revelation of a popular consensus. According to the liberal democratic norms of the West, political institutions are dedicated to enacting the wishes of a tolerant majority.”

The Last Crusade is not in print—hasn’t been for decades—but copies are available through Amazon. It’s fun to locate Brown’s more general conclusions, distilled out of the dense diplomatic interactions of the Kissingerian era, and throw them into the headwinds of today’s Middle Eastern storms to see how they fly. On the whole, they fly pretty well.

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Michael Horowitz :: While it is a bit older, I would like to encourage people that have not already done so to go out and purchase a copy of The Age of Sacred Terror by Dan Benjamin and Steve Simon (Random House, 2002). The book remains one of the best descriptions of Al Qaeda in the period up until 9/11. The rich historical detail, supplemented by the insights Benjamin and Simon gained from working on terrorism and Al Qaeda-related issues as National Security Staff members during the Clinton administration, provides a great deal of important information. They describe both the inner workings of Al Qaeda from its genesis through 9/11 and the efforts by the United States government to respond. Whether as an introductory text for advanced undergraduates interested in terrorism issues or a handy reference tool for more advanced scholars, The Age of Sacred Terror significantly contributes to our understanding of Al Qaeda.

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Raymond Ibrahim :: One of the most informative books I’ve read on Sunni Islam’s notions of international affairs—the whens, whys, whats, and hows, of warfare and peace—is appropriately titled War and Peace in the Law of Islam (reprint, The Lawbook Exchange, 2006), by the late Johns Hopkins professor, Majid Khadduri, himself a former Baghdadi jurist. What especially makes this book valuable is that the earliest edition was originally written in 1941—that is, some decades before the reign of political correctness infiltrated academia, stifling the sort of conclusions that Khadduri makes (e.g., that jihad is an eternal obligation). Indeed, though Khadduri was a well-respected scholar and never accused of having any “anti-Arab/Islam” agendas (he was, after all, an Arab and a Muslim), the straightforward assertions he makes in this book, if made today by another scholar, are liable to classify the latter as an “Islamophobe.”

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Josef Joffe :: Weighing in at about 3 pounds, and numbering almost 800 pages, Michael B. Oren’s Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present (Norton, 2007) is not exactly beach-time reading. But the book should be on the shelf of anybody who takes a serious interest in the history of America’s involvement in the Arab/Muslim world. Even before the Constitution was written in 1787, the fledgling republic was already embroiled in conflict—when, in 1784, a Boston ship was seized by Moroccan pirates. In fact, that conflict was one reason for the constitutional convention in Philadelphia: how to create national institutions (like a navy) that would deal with the brigands of North Africa. Remember Ronald Reagan’s airstrike against Qadhafi in 1986, in retaliation against a terror attack against U.S. soldiers in Berlin? A haunting precedent is Tripoli’s declaration of war on the United States in 1801. So America’s entanglement in the Middle East is as old as the republic itself, and this is why Oren’s book makes for such important and instructive reading in these breathless, indeed, a-historical times. As a side-benefit, this book will dispense once and for all with the myth of isolationism. As Oren shows, the United States was embroiled in world politics from day one.

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Martin Kramer :: It being summer, I finally found time to read Mohsin Hamid’s novella, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt, 2007). What leads (or drives) young Muslim men to terrorism, and “why do they hate us”? Hamid has given us a thesis in the guise of a thriller that takes the reader on an odyssey from Princeton’s campus to a high-powered valuation firm in midtown Manhattan to the alleys of Lahore. A young Pakistani comes to America, rises rapidly, finds a semblance of love, ignores contradictions—and then tumbles into the great divide. All of this he narrates to a mysterious American in an unforgettable voice, and anticipation of the climax will keep you hanging to the end. The thesis: America has its own unique way of inspiring self-loathing in others, even those it embraces—and it comes back to haunt us. (Think Sayyid Qutb and Edward Said.) There is a very different way to tell this story, but Hamid tells his version grippingly.

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Walter Laqueur :: I have been reading Iu. N. Golubchikov and R.A. Mnatsakanian, Islamizatsiia Rossii: Trevozhnye stsenarii budushchego (Islamization of Russia: Alarming Future Scenarios) (Veche, 2005). This book deals with problems widely ignored in the West (and also by the Russian leadership, overwhelmed and preoccupied by the good fortune of oil and gas royalties). The difficulties facing Russia differ in some ways from those confronting Western Europe, but in the longer run are even more formidable. Like some Russian experts, I believe it doubtful that Russia will be able to hold on for very long to the Northern Caucasus—to mention only one problem.
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Bernard Lewis :: The Ottoman Empire was the longest-lived regional regime in the Middle East since antiquity; it was also the most recent, and left enduring traces. Şükrü Hanioğlu’s A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2008) is a major contribution to the better understanding of the region. His account is based on intimate knowledge of the Ottoman archives, as well as of many other sources, both internal and external. Concerned with trends more than events, this book illuminates the ideas and movements that shaped the course of history.

Two processes of change are of particular relevance. One is that of identity and loyalty, variously determined by faith, place, and blood; another is the theory and practice of government, evolving from authoritarian to democratic and/or dictatorial. Some of the words in later use, notably “constitution” and “revolution,” acquire special resonance against the late Ottoman background. All this is of obvious relevance to the better understanding of the present-day Middle East.

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Walter Reich :: What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism, by Alan B. Krueger (Princeton University Press, 2007) is a necessary and superb book. It demolishes the myth that poverty breeds terrorism, especially Islamist terrorism. To be sure, this myth was demolished many times before Krueger’s book appeared. But probably because it’s such a simple and widely-embraced explanation in the realm of ordinary crime—one that, moreover, suggests a simple solution (in this case, some kind of anti-poverty program in the Muslim world)—it was a myth that refused to die. World leaders such as Bill Clinton and Shimon Peres, as well as a panoply of other high government officials, theologians, journalists, intellectuals and Middle East specialists, all of whom should have known better, repeatedly resurrected this myth. Krueger’s demolition of the myth is probably the most effective and sustained one to date. I’m sure, though, that, like so many characters in contemporary action movies and video games, “poverty breeds terrorism” will prove impervious to Krueger’s on-target bullets and will rise again and yet again. The argument that the gang member in West Side Story sarcastically cites to explain his criminal behavior—that he became depraved because he’d been deprived—will, quite seriously and foolishly, continue to be applied to the depravities of terrorism. As it happens, I discovered the book only when asked to review it; my full review is here.

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Michael Reynolds :: Although for much of the 20th century most people regarded the Caucasus as an exotic borderland of Russia, it has been an essential part of the Middle East from the dawn of history. Its peoples are bound to those of the Middle East by language, culture, religion and civilization. Today the Caucasus is again an inextricable part of the politics of the Middle East. It is also a fiendishly complicated region. It boasts a truly mind-boggling variety of ethnicities and linguistic groups (fascination with that diversity is not a modern preoccupation: astonished Arab invaders in the seventh century dubbed the Caucasus jabal al-lusun, “the mountain of languages”). It is the site of not only some of the oldest lands of Islam, but also the most ancient living Christian civilizations in the world, the Georgian and Armenian. In more recent centuries, Persian, Turkish, and Russian civilization have all indelibly stamped the Caucasus (and each in turn has been stamped by the Caucasus) as they jockeyed and struggled for dominance. The contemporary Caucasus remains in important ways unchanged: polyglot, culturally rich, and riven by often bitter internal and external rivalries.

However intimidating the complexity of the Caucasus may be, greenhorn and old hand alike will benefit from Charles King’s The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford University Press, 2008). In a single volume, King manages to pull off the seemingly impossible task of presenting a portrait of the region as a whole, and one that is wonderfully written as it simultaneously informs, entertains, challenges, and stimulates.

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Philip Carl Salzman :: An academic colleague said to me that, before Israel, Muslims and Jews rubbed along well enough. Enmity toward Jews, he felt, stemmed from Jewish (colonial) immigration to Palestine. Some specialists have recently made a case that Muslim anti-Semitism flowered under the ideological ministrations of the Nazis. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History by Andrew Bostom (Prometheus Books, 2008), a compendium largely of original texts from the Quran forward, makes a different case: The most extreme prejudicial animus against Jews is integral to Islamic thought and deed from Muhammad, and is honored by his many successors through the centuries with determination and energy. Introduced by Bostom’s 174-page overview, this collection of documents, of Muslims speaking for themselves, and observers reporting historical events, is extensive and convincing, illuminating and distressing, and will break through the many pious obfuscations that often pass for Western commentary on Islam.

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Robert Satloff :: Arab principals rarely write their memoirs, and such books are even rarer in English. Americans and Israelis live in a tell-all culture; theirs is a world largely without secrets anymore. By contrast, Arab leaders, ministers, courtiers, and hangers-on may speak in whispers but they rarely put their tales in print. The exceptions—like memoirs by Sadat and King Hussein—are mainly stylized versions of history written to burnish images, not to explain politics or policy. In this light, The Arab Center, Marwan Muasher’s memoir of his public service, is wonderfully refreshing—even beyond its often fascinating content and its courageous call for moderation in a region that knows too little of it. The “center” of the title refers to a political center, neither Islamist right nor Nasserist left, but it is a subtle reference to the fact that Muasher—Jordan’s first ambassador to Israel, an ambassador to Washington, a foreign minister and a deputy prime minister—had a center-aisle seat throughout a turbulent period in Jordanian and wider Middle East politics. That inside look iinto a largely closed world is reason enough to commend this thoughtful book. (Yale University Press, 2008.)

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Tamara Cofman Wittes :: Every year, my students, my cousins, and random strangers ask me to recommend a single book that provides a good introduction to the contemporary Middle East. Very few of those asking are willing wade through something as edifying as Albert Hourani’s A History of the Arab Peoples. Let me recommend, as an alternative for the general reader, a delightful memoir by the scholar R. Stephen Humphreys entitled Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age (2d ed., University of California Press, 2005). Personal, readable, and thoughtful, Humphreys’s essays hit all the key issues (Islamism, demographics, oil curse, etc.) while weaving in history and personal narrative.

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Michael Young :: I highly recommend Bernard Rougier’s Everyday Jihad (Harvard University Press, 2007) about the development of militant Islam in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp next to the Lebanese city of Sidon. Rougier’s thesis is that trans-national militant Islam is now so dominant in the camp that “a considerable part of the population has freed itself from the national Palestinian framework and is no longer governed by a nationalist universe.” The thesis is debatable, and I happen to disagree. But Rougier was one of the first to document the rise of Salafist groups in the camp—groups that have indeed come to play a central role in the politics of Ain al-Hilweh. My quibble is whether Palestinians have psychologically freed themselves from the preeminence of a nationalist universe—whether Peshawar can ever count for more than Jerusalem or Haifa.

Rougier’s merit is to constantly come back to Lebanon and investigate on the ground. Indeed he did research for his book inside Ain al-Hilweh. He knows the Salafists well, understands the value of reportage, and speaks and reads Arabic fluently. Everyday Jihad is a fine example of a type of research on Lebanon sorely lacking, with so many scholars manacled to a desk, or a prepaid ideology. The country is much more interesting when the scholar is also a sociologist and a journalist. Rougier shows why.

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Last September, when I arrived in Cambridge for my fall stay at Harvard, I opened the Boston Globe and saw this headline over an editorial: “The Other Middle East Conflict.” I immediately said to myself: well, I know what the Middle East conflict is—that’s the Israelis and the Palestinians. So what is the other Middle East conflict? But as I read through the first sentence, it became clear that I was totally wrong. The editorialist, or the headline writer, assumed that most readers would understand “the Middle East conflict” to be the war in Iraq. By the “other Middle East conflict,” it turned out, they meant the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which was the subject of the editorial.

I began to wonder whether typical students, in a classroom, would know what I was talking about if I started discussing “the Middle East conflict” without defining it. And if I defined it as Israel and the Palestinians, would I be showing my age?

It also reminded me of something else that had surprised me: a 2005 National Geographic survey of 18-to-24-year-olds, asking them to look at a blank map of the Middle East and locate Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. I would have guessed that Israel would have loomed largest on the mental maps of young Americans today.

I would have been wrong. 37 percent can identify Iraq and 37 percent can find Saudi Arabia—not high percentages overall. But even fewer, 26 percent, can identify Iran, and still fewer, 25 percent, can find Israel on a blank map. Perhaps it isn’t surprising when one recalls that war has cycled well over over a million Americans through Iraq and Afghanistan—as soldiers, administrators, and contractors. It was Ambrose Bierce who once said, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Thanks to war, the Middle East of early 21st-century America has been re-centered—away from Israel and toward the Persian Gulf. That is where conflict commands American attention.

But not everyone thinks it should. The last time I counted papers at the Middle East Studies Association annual conference, about two years ago, there were 85 papers on Palestine-Israel, 30 on Iraq, 27 on Iran, and only 4 on Saudi Arabia. Here, too, the skewing is conflict-driven—that is, the judgment that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians should command American attention.

And it isn’t just the specialists. They would be seconded by Jimmy Carter, who was recently asked: “Is the Israel-Palestine conflict still the key to peace in the whole region? Is the linkage policy right?” Carter’s answer: “I don’t think it’s about a linkage policy, but a linkage fact…. Without doubt, the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem.” Likewise, Zbigniew Brzezinski: “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single most combustible and galvanizing issue in the Arab world.”

This is obviously meaningless unless one has weighed all the other issues. Is it more combustible than the Kurdish question? Is it more galvanizing than Sunni-Shiite animosity? How would Brzezinski know if it were? I have broken down all Middle Eastern conflicts into nine clusters, and have appended them below. You decide.

But the bottom line is this: given so long a list, it is obvious that conflict involving Israel is not the longest, or the bloodiest, or the most widespread of the region’s conflicts. In large part, these many conflicts are symptoms of the same malaise: the absence of a Middle Eastern order, to replace the old Islamic and European empires. But they are independent symptoms; one conflict does not cause another, and its “resolution” cannot resolve another.

So the more interesting question is this: why is the idea of “linkage” so persistent in some quarters? Why are there still people who see one particular conflict as “the Middle East conflict,” and who believe that in seeking to resolve it, they are pursuing “the Middle East peace process”?

Some would answer this question by pointing to the world’s fascination with Israel. Unlike, say, the future of the Kurds, the future of Israel (and the Palestinians) fascinates the world. A conflict involving Jews, set in the Holy Land of Christianity and in a place of high significance to Islam, is destined to received more than its share of attention. There is also an illusion of familiarity with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No one beyond the specialists can spell out the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, or understand why the (Muslim) Sudanese government is persecuting the (Muslim) people of Darfur. But many people believe (usually wrongly) that they understand the core of the issue between Israel and the Palestinians.

Others might point to the West’s self-imposed obligation to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Europe, but to some extent also in America and even Israel, there is a perceived sense of guilt at having caused the conflict in the first place. There may be other conflicts that are more dangerous, but foreigners did not create the Arab-Persian or Shiite-Sunni conflicts, whereas the international community facilitated the creation of Israel and legitimated it by a U.N. resolution, along with a Palestinian state. Thus, many believe, the world has a special obligation to employ all means to bring peace to Israelis and Palestinians, by creating that Palestinian state.

Others might point to the fact that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (and the leftover Israeli-Syrian conflict) still lies just around the corner, because it was once so tantalizingly close. All of the conflicts’ protagonists were regular guests in the White House and frequent guests of a succession of Secretaries of State. No one knows what it would take to end other conflicts, but there are “parameters” for ending this one. The United States theoretically has enough leverage on Israelis, Palestinians, and Syrians, and if only it were prepared to use it, this conflict could be ended, along predictable lines.

All of these beliefs are widespread, and they explain why so much attention and effort have been lavished on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they do not explain the belief in linkage. It is possible to be fascinated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, feel obligated to resolve it, and think it is relatively easy to resolve, and still not believe in linkage—that is, that the success of your efforts will bring a greater reward across the Middle East, or that an absence of progress will have grave consequences across the region.

The concept of linkage requires another belief: that the Middle East is a system, like Europe, and that its conflicts are related to one another.

Europe in modern times became a complex, interlocking system in which an event in one corner could set off a chain reaction. In Europe, local conflicts could escalate very rapidly into European conflicts (and ultimately, given Europe’s world dominance, into global conflicts). And Europe had a core problem: the conflict between Germany and France. Resolving it was a precondition for bringing peace to the entire continent. Churchill put his finger on this in 1946: “The first step in the re-creation of the European Family,” he said, “must be a partnership between France and Germany.”

Linkage, I propose—and this is my original thesis—is a projection of this memory of Europe’s re-creation onto the Middle East. The pacification of Europe was the signal achievement of the United States and its allies in the middle of the 20th century. It then became the prism through which the United States and Europe came to view the Middle East. From NATO to the European Union, from the reconstruction of Germany to Benelux, Europe’s experience has provided the template for visions of the future Middle East.

It was this mindset that led analysts and diplomats, for about three decades after the creation of Israel, to interpret Israel’s conflict with its neighbors as “the Middle East conflict.” Like the conflict between France and Germany, the Arab-Israeli conflict was understood to be the prime cause of general instability throughout the region, as evidenced by repeated Arab-Israeli wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973.

The flaws in the analogy only began to appear after Egypt and Israel achieved peace in 1979. From that point onward, the Arab-Israeli conflict moved in fits and starts toward resolution. Yet other conflicts in the region intensified. Large-scale wars erupted—not between Israel and its neighbors, but in the Persian Gulf, where a revolution in Iran, and the belligerence of Iraq, exacted a horrendous toll and required repeated U.S. interventions.

By any objective reading, the reality should have been clear: the Middle East is not analogous to Europe, it has multiple sources of conflict, and even as one conflict moves to resolution, another may be inflamed. This is because the Middle East is not a single system of interlocking parts. It is made up of smaller systems and distinct pieces, that function independently of one another.

The myth of “linkage” persists, then, because many observers cannot shed the analogy of the Middle East with Europe. A good case is Brzezinski, a man who did play a role in reconstructing Europe, and who has said: “The problems of the Middle East are conflated, and certainly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq are interactive. That’s absolutely a fundamental truth.” This is no more than a profession of faith, mere habit and analogy substituting for analysis. In what way are these problems conflated? How are they interactive? Brzezinski offers no substantiation at all.

The myth of linkage also persists because, paradoxically, the neo-conservatives embraced it. They, too, made extravagant claims about the likely effects of Iraq’s “liberation” from Saddam’s regime, which they understood as directly analogous to the destruction of Hitler’s dictatorship. Former CIA director James Woolsey, before the war, used precisely this analogy: “This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world. Just as what we did in Germany changed the face of Central and Eastern Europe, here we have got a golden chance.” But it may have been a realist, Henry Kissinger, who first claimed that “the road to Jerusalem will lead through Baghdad”—that victory over Iraq would produce a peace dividend for Israel. Saddam’s fall hasn’t had any such effect, but such claims have tended to validate the idea of linkage as a principle—that roads from here lead to there.

Finally, there is the deliberate effort by Iran, Al Qaeda, and others, to create linkage, or at least the illusion of it. In a bid for the sympathy of the fabled “Arab street,” they seek to portray the conflict with Israel as a supra-conflict between Islam and evil. The globalized Arab media such as Al Jazeera effectively do the same. Then various Pew and Zogby polls pick up the reverberations, and spread the message to Western elites that nothing interests the “Arab street” so much as Israeli misdeeds and American support for them.

Take, for example, this statement by Jimmy Carter:

There is no doubt: The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by whether or not the Israel-Palestine issue is dealt with fairly. Even among the populations of our former close friends in the region, Egypt and Jordan, less than 5 percent look favorably on the United States today. That’s not because we invaded Iraq; they hated Saddam. It is because we don’t do anything about the Palestinian plight.

Carter, of course, has no idea what is in the “heart and mind of every Muslim.” He simply picks up sound bites from pollsters and so-called experts on Arab opinion. He then avoids the inconvenient fact that while the United States has been accused for decades of doing nothing for the Palestinians, its popularity in places like Jordan and Egypt has only plummeted since the Iraq invasion—military action that removed a ruler, Saddam Hussein, who was beloved by the “Arab street” and Arab intellectuals.

I have called linkage a myth, both in past and present. It is a myth because the Middle East is not a single region. But is it destined to remain so?

I still believe Middle East is less integrated than Europe, but it does share one feature with early 20th-century Europe. Until now, the Middle East has had more geography than military power. States have been unable to project power very far beyond their borders. But the spread of missiles and, possibly, nuclear weapons, could change that, leaving states with too little geography and too much power. In these conditions, conflicts that have been localized could become regionalized. In this case, it would not be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would occupy the place of France and Germany. It would be the conflict between Iran and Israel, and between Iran and the moderate Arab states. Such a conflict could configure the Middle East as one region, collapse the distance between the Levant and the Gulf, produce arms races, spur nuclear proliferation and proxy wars, create tightly-integrated alliances—in short, make the Middle East very much like Europe in its darkest days.

Whether the United States will act to affirm the pax Americana, by checking Iran’s rise, remains to be seen. Whether or not it does, but especially if it does not, the common understanding of “the Middle East conflict” seems destined to shift again. We may then look back with nostalgia to a time when the grandiose title of “the Middle East conflict” belonged to Israelis and Palestinians. The next Middle East conflict could be very different.

Clusters of Conflict

• First, the Arab-Persian conflict (with its origins in earlier Ottoman-Persian conflict). This manifested itself in our time most destructively in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, and it continues to inflame post-Saddam Iraq and other parts of the Arab/Persian Gulf (even the name of which is the subject of dispute). This is probably one of the oldest rivalries in the history of the world. It has been exacerbated by the bid of Iran, under the Shah and now under the Islamic regime, to restore lost imperial greatness and achieve hegemonic dominance over the Gulf and beyond.
• Second, the Shiite-Sunni conflict, which goes back in various forms for fourteen centuries, and which the struggle for Iraq has greatly inflamed, both within that country and beyond. There is some overlap here with Arab-Persian conflict, but the Shiite-Sunni conflict also divides Arabs against each other, in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Gulf countries. The ruthless violence between the sects in Iraq suggested the savage potential of this sectarianism, which has some potential to spread to other places in the Middle East where Shiites and Sunnis contest power and privilege.
• Third, the Kurdish awakening, which involves a large national group experiencing a political revival in the territory of several existing states. Over the past two decades, violent conflict generated by Kurdish aspirations has torn at the fabric of Turkey and Iraq. Kurdish groups have used terrorism, and states have used scorched-earth repression and chemical weapons against Kurds. Now that Iraqi Kurds have established a de facto state in northern Iraq, there is every prospect that the Kurdish awakening will generate more conflict, and that it will spill over borders, possibly involving Turkey, Iran, and Syria.
• Fourth, the inter-Arab conflict among Arab states over primacy, influence, and borders—the result of disputes created by the post-Ottoman partition of the Arab lands by Britain and France. In some places, these disputes are exacerbated by the inequities in nature’s apportioning of oil resources. The most destructive example of such a conflict in our times was Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait—the attempted erasure of one Arab state by another. Other examples include Nasser’s invasion of Yemen and Syria’s occupation of Lebanon.
• Fifth, conflicts over the political aspirations of compact Christian groups with strong historic ties to the West. Foreign Christian minorities were turned out of the region decades ago, but the Maronites of Lebanon and the Greeks of Cyprus have held their ground. In the 1970s, wars were launched to deprive them of their political standing, leading in Cyprus to de facto partition between Greek and Turkish areas, and in Lebanon to a quasi-cantonization. These conflicts have defied all attempts at final resolution.
• Sixth, conflicts that arise from the quest of Arab states to preserve or restore parts of their pre-colonial African empires. The most significant conflicts in this category are the long-running war in Sudan, which has descended into genocide in Darfur, and the festering contest over Western Sahara.
• Seventh, the nationalist-Islamist conflicts within states, which are the result of failed modernization and the disappointed expectations of independence. The costliest of these conflicts in our time were the Iranian revolution in the 1970s (Islamists prevailed), the Islamist uprising in Syria in the 1980s (nationalists won), and the civil war that ravaged Algeria for much of the 1990s (nationalists triumphed). Smaller-scale conflict has occurred in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and is now afflicting the Palestinian territories.
• Eighth, numerous conflicts, centered in the Persian Gulf, generated by the addiction of the industrialized West to the vast oil resources of the region, and the need of the United States to maintain its hegemony over the world’s single largest reservoir of energy. The United States essentially keeps the Gulf as an American lake, using aggressive diplomacy, arms sales to clients, and its own massive force to keep oil flowing at reasonable prices. This has put the United States in direct conflict with regional opponents—Islamic Iran, Saddam’s Iraq, and a non-state actor, Al Qaeda—who have seen its dominance as disguised imperialism. In particular, U.S.-Iranian conflict for regional hegemony has escalated over the last thirty years, and is now being exacerbated by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and pursuit of regional power status.
• Ninth, there is conflict involving Israel, on three planes: Arab-Israeli (that is, Israel versus Arab states), Palestinian-Israeli, and Iranian-Israeli. The Arab-Israeli conflict produced a series of four inter-state wars in each of the four decades beginning in 1948. But since Egypt’s peace with Israel, three decades ago, there have been no general Arab-Israeli wars, and Israel has negotiated formal or de facto agreements or understandings with neighboring states. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict periodically erupts and subsides (most dramatically in two intifadas), and continues to defy resolution, but hasn’t led to a regional conflagration. The brewing Iranian-Israeli conflict isn’t about the Palestinians; it is an extension of the contest between the U.S. and Iran for regional dominance. So far, this conflict has manifested itself in short but sharp contests between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Martin Kramer presented a version of this post in the Director’s Series at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies on October 24.

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“If Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas does not get control over at least part of the West Bank soon, he will have no authority to sign any draft peace treaty with Israel. He will be totally discredited.

“But Israel cannot cede control over any part of the West Bank without being assured that someone credible is in charge. Rockets from Gaza land on the remote Israeli town of Sderot. Rockets from the West Bank could hit, and close, Israel’s international airport. That is an intolerable risk. Israel has got to start ceding control over at least part of the West Bank but in a way that doesn’t expose the Jewish state to closure of its airport.

“Radical pragmatism would say that the only way to balance the Palestinians’ need for sovereignty now with Israel’s need for a withdrawal now, but without creating a security vacuum, is to enlist a trusted third party—Jordan—to help the Palestinians control whatever West Bank land is ceded to them. Jordan does not want to rule the Palestinians, but it, too, has a vital interest in not seeing the West Bank fall under Hamas rule.

“Without a radically pragmatic new approach—one that gets Israel moving out of the West Bank, gets the Palestinian Authority real control and sovereignty, but one which also addresses the deep mistrust by bringing in Jordan as a Palestinian partner—any draft treaty will be dead on arrival.”

Thomas L. Friedman, “Time for Radical Pragmatism,” New York Times, June 4, 2008.

From Adam Garfinkle

The Jordanian option is an idea whose time never exactly comes.

When I was writing about it—urging it, as it were, as the least bad of alternatives—nearly thirty years ago, the time was not right because, as Asher Susser put it back in April, the Israeli government of the day was not sufficiently foresighted or realistic to understand the likely future of the matter. By the time later Israeli governments did understand, it was too late for the Jordanians. What Tom Friedman has been thinking all these years I can’t say, but in light of what those of us who have been following this for more than thirty years know, his column looks to be a classical example of a BFO—a blinding flash of the obvious—but too late for prime time.

About a year or so ago Abdul Salem al-Majali was in Washington, carrying with him a very delicate version of a new Jordanian option. He raised it up the flag pole in a few places around town, and seems not to have noticed many people saluting. The problem with the idea, as was pointed out a few months ago, is that the Jordanians are afraid that instead of them re-containing Palestinian nationalism, the Islamicizing Palestinian national movement will finally toss the Hashemites into the proverbial dustbin of history. Israel would then be back where it was, geostragically speaking, before June 4, 1967, except instead of a Hashemite state in both east and west banks, with which it had a range of tacit understandings and some significant shared interests, it would have to deal with a far less cooperative neighbor.

This leads me more or less to the same conclusion Rob Satloff mooted earlier: It may be possible to bring the Jordanians into a kind of relatively quiet trialogue on issues like trade, water and energy, air space and other aspects of security, medical-technical cooperation and a few other items, but only up to the carrying-capacity of the Jordanian political system which, under the current king, is still not back to where it was under an experienced and shrewd Hussein ibn Talal. If one takes the idea of path dependency seriously, as I do, then this sort of functional mix might lay the ground for a larger Jordanian role in the future, which might still end up being part of the least-bad-of-all policy alternatives for Israel, the United States, and arguably the Palestinians, too. But we’re talking years here, and Israel’s problem in the West Bank, where the collapse of Fatah has indeed created a dangerous vacuum, runs on a different, faster, timetable.

So, as I said, the Jordanian option is a idea whose time seems never to be right—Tom Friedman columns notwithstanding.

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