In the Atlantic Monthly today Jeffrey Goldberg writes about "talking to a senior administration official about Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister2 and leader of its seemingly endless provocations of the Palestinians, many of which have been brutal and bloody. Goldberg is no anti-Israeli writer, by the way, and his article seems to me a model of calm, non-hysterical journalism. He reports that the official said, "'The thing about Bibi is, he's a chickenshit.' "
Goldberg goes on to say that "relations between the Obama and Netanyahu governments have moved toward a full-blown crisis. The relationship between these...dual guarantors of the putatively 'unbreakable' bond between the US and Israel is now the worst it's ever been and stands to get significantly worse after the midterm elections."
Goldberg lays the blame mostly on Netanyahu who apparently ¨plans to speak directly to Congress and the American people should an Iran nuclear deal be reached." The administration expresses a "'red-hot anger at Bibi because of "his settlement policies on the West Bank and building policies in Jerusalem...."
These policies in Jerusalem which have led to Israel building housing for Jews past a previously agreed-to demarcation have resulted in Arab protests.
While I think that you could sense growing administration hostility, this article will surprise people, I think. And I think it's excellent that the administration is no longer willing to stand by while Netanhayu leads Israel into horrendous actions against Palestinians. You should read the whole piece. It appears at this point that the administration views Netanyahu as scared to start a war against Iran and most interested in maintaining his place as prime minister.
In no way would I argue that Netanyahu is a good and enlightened leader, but seeing him "as a national leader who acts as though he is mayor of Jerusalem, which is to say a no-vision small-timer who worries mainly about pleasing the hardest core of his constituency" I think points to a serious weakness in the administration's world view. There is rarely evidence that anyone in the administration sees leaders as having biographies and histories of their own, the understanding of which would vastly help US foreign policy. Does anyone know who Netanyahu's father was? How his father influenced him? How the death of his brother in combat with the Israeli army, how spending his teenage years in white, Jewish suburban Pennsylvania, his college years at MIT and post-college years working with Mitt Romney might have influenced him? I don't have a clue how you open someone like Netanyahu up to different possibilities. He's probably much more intransigent than Obama and Kerry realize. Our administration's cultural deafness continues to be a significant problem.
Anyway, you can read about the Israeli and Netanyahu's response to the US in the (leftish) Israeli newspaper Haaretz here.
For a long time I have wondered (as have far greater minds than mine) if it is at all possible to figure out the underlying factors that drive people to hold onto seriously destructive beliefs in the face of all reason. In our black-and-white culture, we tend to paint people who don't agree with us all one color. It's hard to be subtle. As I have watched the ripping apart of Gaza, I have seen no evidence of the policy to spare civilians Benjamin Netanyahu claims exists. Instead, it appears that the Israel Defense Forces he commands are bent on absolute destruction. I wonder how Netanyahu who I am sure sees himself doing good could appear to have twisted himself into someone so evil. Who is this man who stirs the pot of hatred in his country so successfully? And why does he do it? Why does he feel righteous (not to say self-righteous) following his policy of enormous overkill in Gaza? Is it possible to figure out how we justify horrible actions to ourselves, all of us? And why, with all our knowledge, haven't we come to terms with our own proclivity for violence in response to perceived attacks, for hatred of people we don't know. Why haven't we developed a way to soften this hatred.
I happened upon a review by Vivian Gornick of a book called "Becoming Freud" by Adam Phillips. I bought the book for my Kindle, and I will refer to it throughout this piece. I am not a "Freudian", whatever that means, but I think he opened up ways to look at people from unexpected angles. Freud's discoveries give us an opportunity to take a different approach to Netanyahu.
In her review, Gornick says:
"It was through attention to the unconscious that he [Freud] made his major discoveries, the most important being that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; hunger for sexual pleasure, dread sexual pleasure; hate our own aggressions — our anger, our cruelty, our humiliations — yet these are derived from the grievances we are least willing to part with. The hope of achieving an integrated self is a vain one as we are equally divided about our own suffering; we do in fact love it and want — nay, intend — never to relinquish it."
Somewhere I saw an illlustration of the human psyche in which our consciousness, our supposedly sensible, aware part, was riding a giant bull or some similar animal, barely under control. The bull was our unconscious, unruly portion of ourselves, much bigger and stronger.
There is no definitive explanation of the conscious and the unconscious, nothing even close as far as I'm concerned. But we tend to recognize that we have been exposed to so much, have woven so much out of what we´ve been exposed to, that we can't possibly be conscious of it all, pull it into our decision-making or our creative efforts, even when it would be useful to do so. And if Freud is right, we don't even want to know all the unconscious stuff we harbor: it would go against who we think we are and what we want to be. We tend, all of us, to justify our own hideous actions to ourselves and others. Very few of us happily accept ourselves as evil creatures who enjoy doing evil things.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Nathan Mileikowsky (1879-1935), Benjamin Netanyahu's grandfather, shared pretty large pieces of cultural heritage (so did my dad's parents for that matter). But they responed to their heritage in very different ways. Netanyahu's father and grandfather became revisionist Zionists who were deeply committed to getting as much of the British Mandate of Palestine as they possibly could to turn into the country Israel. Their efforts were bloody. Freud's background was not so political.
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Adam Phillips says,"The Jews of central and eastern Europe in the 19th century lived mostly in small communities as minority groups in what were often tolerant but hostile cultures.They were hemmed in by restrictions and prejudices, but were not perceived as a threat to the states in which they lived....They had access only to the resources of their tightly knit communities, and they lived, like all immigrants with, and under, a great deal of suspicion. The continuity of their lives resided in their family traditions, which were religious in origin, their inherited ways of life in a diaspora that had become their culture....The consolations of locality were always provisional....
"....The stories of the poorer Jews in central Europe in the ineteenth century tend to be generic...due to the lack and limits of ...documentation. (Freud's parents and grandparents would mpt jave beem omterested om tjeor ñoves tje wau [Sigmund Freud] taught us to be. For these people, success was survival....[T]here fate was to be always potentially nomadic because they had no political or civic status, living always on sufferance in foreign states.
Orthodox judaism itself was declining in the nineteenth century "...due to the pressures of modernization. The haskalah--the Jewish Enlightenment...--was eroding the old scholarly-rabbinical tradition in favour of a more rational, skeptical humanism, radically suspicious of dogma and traditional forms of authority and encouraging more politically active forms of assimilation."
This was a period in which "European boundaries were shifting in Europe and the status of Jews was unclear. Whether or not they were a race or a people...they were resident aliens wherever they lived...As both the enemies and inventors of Christianity the Jews were doubly disadvantaged...they were by definition a dissenting group....
Although Freud ended up with an education in Enlightenment values, there had been "Generations of politically marginalized Jews in his family, people for whom political participation was unthinkable."
Freud and other Jews of his generation believed they had found a culture in which they had "a place and a voice" in Vienna.
Phillips goes on, " The allure of a taken for granted liberalism, however wishful it seems ...[in]hindsight...must have seemed irresistible to the Viennese Jews of Freud's generation...[which] wanted to free themselves from...a 'history of the Jewish people...long limited to a religious narrative of persecutions and martyrdoms. Esther Benbassa writes this 'story of suffering stood in for History in the proper sense of the term' as a way of preserving the fragile unity of the community in diaspora.'
This "story of suffering" still is dominant in the lives of Jews, secular or religious, who participate in Jewish culture. For some (many?) it merges with the notion of Jewish specialness, of Jews as "chosen people." Before the end of World War II, these beliefs offered, sometimes, means to survive and to maintain some integrity in their identities. Of course the genocide they suffered under Hitler gave it new life. Today, I think, especially in light of the great social and economic changes wrought in the second half of the twentieth century,Jewish communities themselves have changed. For some Jews, the mythology of their past has become malignant.
Netanyahu, the Zionist, is one of these Jews I think. Freud was not. Freud's father had renounced orthodox Judaism. He was apparently a failing wool merchant and because of this, the family moved first to Leipzig and then to Vienna, at the time a particularly vibrant and liberal city. The family stayed there. Many, many Jews who couldn't sustain themselves in "local shtetl communities" were migrating to eastern and central European cities.
Jews wanted their kids to gain respectability by hopefully taking up a profession, "preferably medicine or the law." Freud was consciously drawn to Enlightenment values, and himself said his father "allowed me to grow up in complete ignorance of eveything that concerned Judaism". Yet Freud's endeavors seem shadowed by his family's Jewish immigrant past.
In today's La Jornada, Adolfo Gilly reports that American historians who are members of the organization "Historians against the War" have been circulating a letter to President Obama and members of Congress. I feel like being extremely sarcastic about the fact that haven't seen this mentioned in the US press...I mean, who would find HISTORIANS newsworthy in the US? In any event the signarutres include famous historians and just ordinary folks like me. The text, from the the Historians against the War is below:
In the face of the ongoing carnage in Gaza, members of Historians Against the War are circulating the letter below, with an initial list of signatories. We encourage you to sign it and to quickly forward this message to fellow historians. As our numbers grow, we will seek opportunities to publicize and to forward to relevant officials.
We deplore the ongoing attacks against civilians in Gaza and in Israel. We also recognize the disproportionate harm that the Israeli military, which the United States has armed and supported for decades, is inflicting on the population of Gaza.
We are profoundly disturbed that Israeli forces are killing and wounding so many Palestinian children. Desperate conditions in Gaza resulting from Israeli policies have made effective evacuation of war zones virtually impossible. We regard as unacceptable the failure of United States elected officials to hold Israel accountable for such acts.
As we watch the death toll mount and observe the terror of the trapped inhabitants in Gaza, we call upon you to demand a cease-fire, the immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, and a permanent end to the blockade so that its people can resume some semblance of normal life. We urge you to suspend US military aid to Israel, until there is assurance that this aid will no longer be used for the commission of war crimes.
As historians, we recognize this as a moment of acute moral crisis in which it is vitally important that United States policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict change direction.
Gilly concludes his article saying, "Let me note the sternness and restraint of the language of this document which continues to be valid now more than ever since that Benjamin Netanyahu, forced by world conemnation to interrupt his offensive, declares that it was justified and proportionate and that Hamas is responsible for the war crimes of Israeli leaders."
If you are interested in signing a protest letter without finding the next window asks you for money, this is your letter. You don't actually have to be a historian.
There is a
novel by Jose Saramago called The Cave set in Spain. In it, a rural potter and
his family find themselves selling their wares to a place called The
Center. They slave to make the quotas,
and one day, The Center cuts them off cold turkey: no more of your pots. Finally, the family has to move to The Center
to work and to survive. The Center turns
out to be an enormous surrealistic construction which aims to meet all the
needs of the workers as well as the shoppers and businessmen so that they no longer have any desire to
return to the real world. I am abridging
here mercilessly. I only want to say
that The Cave reminds me of the Chinese-Mexican plans to build a Dragon Mart
near Cancun. The Dragon Mart is to be an
enormous complex 122,000 square meters or 1,310,000 square feet. In addition to some 3000 commercial locations
operated by Chinese businesses, there will be housing for some 700 housing
units for Chinese workers. A lot of
things are blurry: how many workers will be Chinese, for instance, vs. how many
jobs will be available to Mexicans.
Something like 6000 Chinese are expected to come to work in the
complex. What isn’t in doubt is that the
products will be Chinese and will be sold at far cheaper rates than comparable
Mexican (or other nations’) goods. It will probably make WalMart look like child's play.
There are
growing objections to the project, as well there should be, especially to the effect on Mexico’s economy and industrial
production and to environmental damage.
Random changes foreseen: vast increase in shipping (Chinese) into the
area; the use of Mexico as a point from which to ship cheap Chinese goods not only around Mexico to
the US, Canada and Latin America without the need for non-Chinese middlemen;
the Chinafication of Mexico; the ability of the Chinese to vastly undersell EVERYONE.
The model
for this monstrosity is Dragon Mart, Dubai, the biggest shopping and wholesale
mart in Dubai, though the Mexican Dragon Mart is to be bigger. http://www.yadig.com/business/Dubai/Dragon-Mart/19382
describes the Dubai version this way:
DragonMart is the largest trading centre for Chinese products outside
mainland China. DragonMart features everything you'd find in mainland China:
home appliances, communication and acoustic equipment, lamps, household items,
building materials, furniture, toys, machinery, garments, textiles, footwear
and general merchandise.
Shoppers
describe mountains of junk and mountains of “such-a-deals”, everything you need and don't need, all Chinese. ALL Chinese.
Of course there is a huge difference between Dubai and the country of
Mexico. Dubai is not an agricultural and
industrial country which depends on its own goods at least in part for its
survival.
The project
seems to have slipped in under the radar in 2011, but recently, people have
taken notice. Initially, mostly
Chinese-funded, it is now funded maybe up to 90% by some very rich Mexicans
including some from Monterrey. This will
not change the basic nature of the place, but will make some very rich Mexicans
richer. Also the state and Federal
governments are starting to stir as are environmental groups.
It will, I
suspect, make WalMart seem like child’s play.
Here is a link to a group of brave (foolhardy?) young activists from all over who are documenting what is happening in Gaza. It is called International Solidarity Movement. As a somewhat old person, I shudder a little at the ummm hints of earlier times but if you want to see what's going on.
You should see the extraordinary video on Juan Cole's post in which a very young and frightened woman is blocking Israeli soldiers from shooting at Palestinian rock-throwers.
Today Israel tanks shelled a UN school and killed at least thirty people among a couple of hundred civilians who had sought safety there. Here is a link to the article in Al Jazeera describing the carnage.
Here is a photo of a terribly distressed little boy at the school described in the above-linked article.
Mexico Bob For all of you with curiosity about Mexico this is a great blog by a guy married to a Mexican in Irapuato. Really, this kind of stuff is what people up north should be reading.
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