Now, everybody who reads me knows that I am not a big supporter of administration policy on the Middle East. But, then, I am not a big supporter of its foreign policy almost anywhere. No, let me correct that. Not "almost anywhere." But "anywhere."
That said, I don't believe that President Obama is trying to weaken the United States or its allies. What we do disagree about (but it's I who am here doing the disagreeing) is what strengthens America and what debilitates it.
Actually, the Obama crowd seems to be reconnoitering a bit after the string of rebuffs it has experienced from those who it has been trying to court. In any case, it has surely registered on them that Israel is amenable to a quite generous compromise ... but it is the Palestinians, riven though they may be, who are insisting on "loser take all." Strange world, theirs, no? And just in case you need a reminder: This is not the first time that the Palestinians have rioted on Al Haram al-Sharif (in their vocabulary) and the Temple Mount (in the West's) to preclude negotiations. It's an old tactic, alas.
I'd bet also that the White House laments the fact that, when it summoned Jewish leaders for a meeting with the president months ago, it sent an invitation to J Street and omitted the Zionist Organization of America, which, for all its troublesomeness, is an institution with many real members and real ongoing work in Israel. Moreover, it is an historically significant body, Louis Dembitz Brandeis having been its president for many years. I can imagine some smart-assed staffer coming up with the idea. "Let's leave out the ZOA and invite J Street instead."
Well, they did invite J Street, and now they are stuck with the damage. The J Streeters went around identifying themselves as Obama's people in the crowd. I suppose that was good for them. But it was not good for Obama. The fact is that, by this past weekend, when J-Street launched its D.C. fest, it was already seen in the public mind as a bunch of nut cases and very much anti-Israel in the very substantive sense. It was callous about Iran's nuclear threat to Israel, was against sanctions, supported negotiations with Hamas, which even the E.U. disdained. Moreover, it refuses to recognize that one obstacle to a two-state solution is that neither the Palestinians nor the other Arabs can even contemplate security guarantees to Israel.
Mr. President: You courted a friend. Now you have him. Woe is you.
Anyway, here are some links to the J Street saga…
Politico (Ben Smith): Frontiers of Pro-Israel
Ha’aretz: Poet booted from J Street meet for comparing Guantanamo to Auschwitz
The Jerusalem Post: Ambassador Michael Oren declines J Street conference invite
The Washington Times: Upstart Israel lobby draws controversy
The Washington Post: Israel conference to open amid controversy
The Guardian (Isi Leibler): J Street's 'pro-Israel' stance is phoney
And, from Lenny Ben-David over at Pajamas Media, an important set of questions for J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami...
Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before
By Michael Fried (Yale University Press, 409 pp., $55)
I.
Michael Fried,who shot to intellectual stardom in 1967 with an essay in Artforum called "Art and Objecthood," is an intimidating writer. He looks very closely. He has passionate feelings about what he sees. And he shapes his impressions into a theory that fits snugly with all the other theories he has ever had. Whatever his chosen subject--Diderot, Courbet, Manet, Kenneth Noland--he comes up with an interpretation that is as smoothly and tightly constructed as a stainless-steel box. His writing amounts to a set of matching stainless-steel boxes. He puts potential critics on notice that the best they can hope to do is leave a few fingerprints or scratches on these perfectly polished surfaces. And so many people back away. Fried wants us to feel that we could as easily demolish the Great Pyramid of Giza with a pick-axe as successfully question his interpretations of his chosen themes--which now include the art of the camera, in his new book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. This is Fried's first extended foray into photography, and although it was a subject of discussion in academic circles even before it appeared, it has not received the more general attention that it deserves. Fried brings audacious arguments to old controversies about the relationship between art and photography. I find the arguments troubling, even wrongheaded, but only a man with a bold, wide-ranging, and fearless mind could have dreamed such stuff up.
For years, I have been reading Michael Greenberg's remarkable column in the Times Literary Supplement and wondering what the English make of it. The New York Jewish quality of Greenberg's take on the writer's life, under the rubric "Freelance," is emphasized by the way he takes turns writing the column with an English poet, Hugo Williams, who is a writer of a wholly different species. Williams is deeply ensconced in the world of poetry-writing programs, residencies, and workshops--the whole infrastructure of institutionalized creativity, which seems no less formidable in the United Kingdom than in the United States. When Williams is not writing about giving a reading or teaching a class, he is often discussing his wife's chateau in France, or his father, a British theater and film star from the 1950s.
Landscape and Memory
by Simon Schama
(Knopf, 652 pp., $40)
We rush across the gleaming surface of the ocean, moving rapidly but smoothly above the untroubled beauty of the dark waters. Jagged cliffs and wild surf, rugged hills and lush grass pass beneath us. Music plays. Finally we reach our destination, where the action begins. It may be a prison from which a psychopathic bomber prepares to break out, or a clearing where poor Scottish farmers will discover the hanged bodies of their chiefs, or a village where women will be impregnated by aliens. Whatever the details of the action that follows, the sequence of images--from any one of the fashionable movie openings of the last two years or so--teaches the same lesson: nature is the realm of purity and beauty, and man imports violence to this separate world from his own corrupt and frightening habitat, the city.
In 1943, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who was living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, wrote “Campo dei Fiori,” his great poem about the coexistence of normality and atrocity. The Campo dei Fiori is the plaza in Rome where, in the year 1600, the heretical philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned alive by the Catholic Church; “before the flames had died,” Milosz writes, “the taverns were full again.” The same willed blindness could be noted in Warsaw, the poem declares. Just outside the wall of the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews were being starved and shot, a Ferris wheel was operating: “The bright melody drowned/the salvos from the ghetto wall,/and couples were flying/high in the cloudless sky.”
Mike, you make a good point about Obama’s smart decision not to try to impose any symbolism on Kennedy’s death in his eulogy today. The timing of the loss lurked underneath nearly every discussion of Kennedy’s legacy this week, but using it as a rallying cry to pass health care reform at his funeral would be too easy to decry as a craven attempt by Obama to make political gains on his death.
The verse is from Psalms 119, that is, King David, poet and hero.
Robert Malley and Hussein Agha are (let me just to be polite say "adversaries" instead of) enemies of Israel. That is why they are so welcome in the New York Review of Books and, of course, on the op-ed page of the New York Times where their latest missive, "The Two-State Solution Doesn't Solve Anything," appeared on Tuesday. (The same piece was published simultaneously in the Guardian, the closest thing to a pro-jihadist publication in ordinary journalism.) While fronting as an academic at St. Antony's College, Oxford, Agha makes no bones about his role as a strategist for the Palestinian leadership or as one of his admirers and the brains behind "J-Street," Daniel Levy, (the son of Lord Levy but that's another ugly story) characterizes him, "a track-II activist." In any case, Agha is not a flack for the official Palestinians; he is really and for all intents and purposes just one of them, even more under their intellectual discipline than Rashid Khalidi. Unlike Khalidi, he is also coarse.
Whether Agha is track-II or track-I, however, Robert Malley was once a real comer. He was a special assistant on Israeli-Arab affairs to President Clinton and then reappeared with basically false narratives of the Barak-Arafat negotiations as the Democratic administration limped to an end. When Barack Obama was running for the nomination, the Clinton campaign put out rumors that Malley was one of Obama's middle east advisers, and then the McCain campaign picked up the same tale, with even less scare-success than Hillary had.
I was one of those who put the kibosh on the story, and I was correct. Malley was not attached to the Obama campaign and he is not attached in any way to the present administration. You can understand why. Primarily, it is because he is against a "two-state solution." There were hints of that in his previous appearances in print. But there are no deceptions in the present Times article. The Times and the NYRB, for that matter, have previously published encomia for a "one-state solution." You will recall Tony Judt's outcroppings for that. But, then, you should also recall Leon Wieseltier's devastation in TNR.
Thomas Hardy
By Claire Tomalin
(Penguin Press, 486 pp., $35)
Yehuda Amichai, the great Hebrew poet dead a year now, a friend of The New Republic and its editors, wrote a poem two decades ago that began:
The diameter of the bomb was thirty
centimeters
And the diameter of its effective range
about seven meters,
Landscape and Memory
by Simon Schama
(Knopf, 652 pp., $40)
We rush across the gleaming surface of the ocean, moving rapidly but smoothly above the untroubled beauty of the dark waters. Jagged cliffs and wild surf, rugged hills and lush grass pass beneath us. Music plays. Finally we reach our destination, where the action begins. It may be a prison from which a psychopathic bomber prepares to break out, or a clearing where poor Scottish farmers will discover the hanged bodies of their chiefs, or a village where women will be impregnated by aliens. Whatever the details of the action that follows, the sequence of images--from any one of the fashionable movie openings of the last two years or so--teaches the same lesson: nature is the realm of purity and beauty, and man imports violence to this separate world from his own corrupt and frightening habitat, the city.
