A harsh Israeli critique of settlements

Bradley Burston of Haaretz unloads:

They say the first step in dealing with rage is acknowledging it. So here it is: I have become a bigot where it comes to the settlement movement.

I believe that the officials, the activists, and the Diaspora bankrollers and rooting section of this movement have ruined my life. They ruin it a little more every single day.

The extent to which they have embittered the lives of millions of Palestinians is incalculable. I won’t pretend to know what they go through or how it feels. For the moment, I just want to talk about what the settlement movement does to its fellow Israelis, and why so many of us are so fed up.

We struck a bargain years ago. This was how it worked for me: I would donate a month a year away from home to keep them safe and in exchange the movement did everything it could to antagonize the Palestinians, to make it impossible for them to have a state of their own, to make it impossible for Israel to make peace with them.

I wanted to make peace with the Palestinians. I wanted them to have a state. I wanted the occupation to end. Some bargain. I lost.

I struck another deal. Year after year I would pay high taxes to subsidize settlement houses, their private highways, their utilities, their yeshivas, the bottomless cost of safeguarding remote and illegal outposts. A theater in Ariel.

In return, settler leaders and activists spearheaded civil and military policies that trampled Palestinian rights to water, highway use, personal security, and housing, and to medical, educational and vocational opportunity. Rabbis and yeshiva directors whose salaries I paid, turned a blind eye to, or actively encouraged attacks against Palestinians, their livestock and property. Rabbis and yeshiva directors whose salaries I paid incited their students in uniform to refuse government orders to evict settlers, and stood up for their students in outlaw enclaves who branded IDF soldiers as Nazis.

Some bargain.

I kept trying. I watched from the sidelines as vast resources were diverted from decaying and depressed towns and villages within Israel, to support ever-expanding settlements, many of them receiving official permission only years after they were built.

In return for my acquiescence, the settlement movement blackened Israel’s democracy and its very name. We gave them Yitzhak Rabin and they gave us Avigdor Lieberman.

Evangelism and social involvement

Justin Taylor posted some good resources here by Tony Payne and Tim Chester.

This essay, by both Payne and Chester, pointed out a key difference between evangelism and social action:

Second, social involvement at its best is about harnessing the resources within a community. It is about empowering a community through their participation. The alternative is a paternalistic approach which is short-term, creating dependency in its beneficiaries. In good development, an understanding of the problem and its solutions come from within a community. In contrast, the message of the gospel is that we are powerless and cannot participate in our salvation. Both an understanding of the problem and the solution must come from outside the community. This outside message does not come from western technology, money, expertise, still less from free market capitalism. It comes from heaven. This is one reason for the emphasis in John’s Gospel that Jesus is ‘from heaven’.

The essay also came to a good conclusion:

If we see social involvement as an expression of Christian godliness, in response to the character of God, the reign of God and the grace of God—which we suggested in Part I is the best way to think about it—then the relationship between evangelism and social involvement is not so fraught or so complicated.

Jesus sends us out into the world to ‘make disciples’. With this in mind, the two key questions are:

1. How do we make disciples? We make disciples through the prayerful proclamation of the gospel of Christ, in dependence on the Holy Spirit to make the message effective.
2. What does it mean to be a disciple? We teach disciples to obey all that Christ has commanded, including the command to live in kindness, generosity, love and active concern for those around us.

A black conservative challenging Jesse Jackson, Jr. for a seat in Congress?

John Kass thinks that he could win.

Game theory and the Arab-Israeli conflict

Lee Smith writes about his conversation with Israeli Nobel laureate Robert Aumann.  Aumann believes that game theory applies to international relations:

In Aumann’s view, the post-Oslo period shows that Israel’s behavior leaves it at a serious disadvantage in a repeated game. “In games that repeat over time,” Aumann wrote in an article called “The Blackmailers’ Paradox,” “a strategic balance that is neutral paradoxically causes a cooperation between the opposing sides.” Aumann offered the example of two men forced to split $100,000. Person A assumes that they will split it evenly and is astonished when Person B explains that he will not accept anything less than $90,000. Afraid that he will leave empty-handed, A relents and takes one-tenth of the money. In this situation, A acted as if this were a one-time game, but had he understood it as a repeated game and refused the split so that both he and B walked away empty-handed, he would have shown for future reference that he was every bit as determined as B. This in turn would make B more willing to compromise. “Likewise,” Aumann wrote, “Israel must act with patience and with long-term vision, even at the cost of not coming to any present agreement and continuing the state of belligerence, in order to improve its position in future negotiations.”…

“The way to make peace is to make your intentions clear,” Aumann told me. But Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza brought not only the second Lebanon war but also the bombardment of southern Israel and most recently the Mavi Marmara incident. To explain what was wrong with the Gaza withdrawal, Aumann drew on an unusual source for a scientist, the Bible, quoting Jeremiah 2:13: “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”

God’s people, according to Aumann’s interpretation of the passage, have done two stupid things—not only did they abandon God but they also worshipped broken idols. “It’s one thing to do something unconscionably bad,” Aumann said. For him, an expulsion that uprooted thousands of people who have yet to get their lives back in order was “unquestionably immoral.” “If it brings the peace,” Aumann said, “if the ends justify the means, that’s one thing, but this doesn’t even achieve the means. It was morally wrong and strategically stupid. The expulsion from Gaza is unprecedented. Jews have been expelled throughout history, but we own the dubious distinction of being the first people to have expelled ourselves. Never before had this happened, and it led to disaster. Our standing in the world was not improved. We didn’t get sympathy. We get sympathy when we act decisively—after Entebbe, Osirak, a lot of sympathy came after the Six Day war.”

When policymakers and analysts use the same sort of examples to draw the same historical conclusions, they’re dismissed as right-wing ideologues, and Aumann has endured the same treatment. The Nobel committee nonetheless realized he’d hit on a truth that explains a fundamental aspect of who we are as political beings—or who we are when we are most human, sitting across the table from our neighbors trying to figure out how to live together. The paradox is that there can be no co-existence if one person isn’t willing to negotiate as hard as the other. The appeaser will always be swallowed up and simply cease to exist. It is stubbornness rather than the willingness to make immediate concessions that brings about successful negotiations. In other words, if you want peace, prepare for war.

Hat tip: Michael Totten

Support for Israeli settlements declining?

Bradley Burston, a blogger with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (in my understanding, a paper on the center-left of the Israeli political spectrum), writes:

Every revolution tends to believe that it is forever. Nowhere is this more evident than in Israel, for six decades cradle and crucible to concurrent revolutions.

But the fate of every revolutionary movement is to age, to fall prey to fissures and compound fractures, and to be astounded to find that one day, it has become history.

Now it is the turn of the settlers. Though the trappings of their past success remain, their revolution is broken. The settlement movement – along with the dovish revolution whose banner was land for peace – was shattered in the chaos of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

In just six days in 2005, the single most indispensible figure in rooting settlements into the territories, Ariel Sharon, quashed a quarter century of Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip – at the approval of two-thirds of the Israeli electorate.

The settlement revolution has never truly recovered. Even as it insists that West Bank settlements can never be undone, the movement is both haunted and crippled by its own private Naqba, the loss of the dream of a Greater Israel in the Likud government’s disengagement.

Of late, figures of significance on the right of both the Israeli and American Jewish communities have begun to rethink the future of the settlers’ core redoubt: the West Bank.

As Israeli-Palestinian negotiations resumed this month, influential Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer astounded many colleagues on the right by observing that “No serious player believes it can hang on forever to the West Bank.

“This has created a unique phenomenon in Israel – a broad-based national consensus for giving nearly all the West Bank in return for peace,” Krauthammer continued. “The moment is doubly unique because the only man who can deliver such a deal is Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – and he is prepared to do it.”

The comments coincided with a number of indications of a beginning of change on the right and within the settlement movement itself.

Among the more intriguing is a group of young Israelis – some of whom grew up in West Bank settlements – who have moved back into Israel to resettle the abandoned kibbutz of Retamim in the central Negev.

The group includes the son of Pinchas Wallerstein, a former longtime leader of the Yesha Council, the effective government of the settlement movement.

The whole article is pretty interesting.  It seems that some believe that Netanyahu’s former support for maintaining the West Bank settlements will be replaced with a unilateral Israeli withdrawal.

Hat tip: Jeff Goldberg

: JeEvery revolution tends to believe that it is forever. Nowhere is this more evident than in Israel, for six decades cradle and crucible to concurrent revolutions.

But the fate of every revolutionary movement is to age, to fall prey to fissures and compound fractures, and to be astounded to find that one day, it has become history.

	Settlers protesting in Kfar Maimon in 2005. The sign reads “Only a totalitarian regime uses the army against the people.”
	Photo by: Alex Levac

Now it is the turn of the settlers. Though the trappings of their past success remain, their revolution is broken. The settlement movement – along with the dovish revolution whose banner was land for peace – was shattered in the chaos of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

In just six days in 2005, the single most indispensible figure in rooting settlements into the territories, Ariel Sharon, quashed a quarter century of Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip – at the approval of two-thirds of the Israeli electorate.

The settlement revolution has never truly recovered. Even as it insists that West Bank settlements can never be undone, the movement is both haunted and crippled by its own private Naqba, the loss of the dream of a Greater Israel in the Likud government’s disengagement.

Of late, figures of significance on the right of both the Israeli and American Jewish communities have begun to rethink the future of the settlers’ core redoubt: the West Bank.

As Israeli-Palestinian negotiations resumed this month, influential Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer astounded many colleagues on the right by observing that “No serious player believes it can hang on forever to the West Bank.

“This has created a unique phenomenon in Israel – a broad-based national consensus for giving nearly all the West Bank in return for peace,” Krauthammer continued. “The moment is doubly unique because the only man who can deliver such a deal is Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – and he is prepared to do it.”

The comments coincided with a number of indications of a beginning of change on the right and within the settlement movement itself.

Book review, “King Leopold’s Ghost” by Adam Hochschild

I found this review that I wrote for my own memory after I read King Leopold’s Ghost in the winter of 2007-2008, and I figured that I would post it here.  I edited it a bit today (although it still suffers from my overuse of parentheses).  This is definitely one of my favorite books of all time.

For Hochschild, this is a story about both King Leopold II’s greed and deception and the movement that arose to stop him, centered in Britain.  It also received help from Belgian Socialists, Americans, and others, with Protestant missionaries being a major source of information on the terror inflicted upon the inhabitants.

Leopold hoped to gain colonies and eventually decided that central Africa offered the best chance, sending the famous Henry Morton Stanley to explore the region (with chiefs signing treaties that they did not understand but promised everything for very little) and getting America and then Europe to recognize his claim.  He built support for it by offering free access to trade with the colony (which it ran as a monopoly), speaking the benefits of civilization (there is little evidence in the book that this was ever taken seriously, except for making the “lazy” natives work in ivory- and rubber-gathering), portraying himself as a crusader against the Afro-Arab slave trade (they did fight Afro-Arabs like Tippu Tip, but also instituted forced labor practices), and opening the Congo to missionaries (Protestant missionaries were some of the main opponents of the brutality).  He also led the Americans to think that it would be something like an association of free states like the US.  It was eventually called the Congo Free State, the property of Leopold alone and run by a bureaucracy centered in Belgium.  The portrait of Leopold that emerges is one of a greedy, power-hungry monarch in a Europe that is passing him by (with his wealth from the Congo he built up great monuments and his chateaus and palaces) and a very effective tyrant who could manipulate people for his own ends and understood public relations.

Book review, “How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind,” by Thomas Oden

Through his work as editor of Intervarsity Press’ forays into making ancient Christian commentary more accessible to modern people, Thomas Oden became much more aware of early African Christians’ contributions to the faith.  He became convinced that early African Christianity was the “seedbed” for European Christianity, reversing the popular idea of Christianity as a Western faith that has just come to Africa recently.  This book, then, is a call for intensified research into ancient African Christianity especially by African scholars.  He believes that it will provide a more solid base for African Christian identity than is often claimed by African Christians now.

He believes that Africa shaped the Christian mind in several ways:

• the library of Alexandria provided the genesis of the idea of the university
• influential ancient Biblical exegetes like Origen and Cyril of Alexandria
• some of the great contributors in the development of orthodox doctrine, like Tertullian, Athanasius, and Augustine
• the churchwide councils built on African church practices of assembling bishops
• monasticism spread from Africa
• the first Christian Neoplatonists and rhetoricians, like Lactantius, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine, came from Africa

Oden describes each of these briefly in Chapter 3, and believes that each (along with many other ways that Africa influenced Christianity) needs further research.  My first thought was that much of what he discussed was accomplished in the Greco-Roman context, but Oden argues that many of the African Christians, even if Greco-Roman in name, were shaped by the indigenous cultures of the Nile and Medjerda river valleys.  He rejects the differentiation between sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa that many Africans and non-Africans make, and writes that early African Christianity can provide a common identity for African Christians and can be a source of healthy self-respect in that it refutes the Eurocentric idea that anything worthwhile in African culture came from Europe.

Oden believes that too much of African Christian identity comes from modern European ideas, meaning that African Christian writers make the ironic mistake of ignoring a genuinely African Christian heritage while importing modern European theories to explain their identity:

The almost frenetic quest for a new African Christian identity would have been far less turbulent if it had been less forgetful of African patristic exegesis.  Intead it rerooted itself in nineteenth-century European forms of philosophy, historicism, psychology and sociology.  The price paid for this historic identity loss is that modern African Christianity has had to look desparately for some other way to relate to African traditional religions, when it already possessed viable traditions of ecumenical teaching all along.  It could have been already instructed through its own historical experience concerning the Spirit’s work of the preparation for the gospel through African traditional religions.  It could have also recognized that despite this diversity there is a unified center for Christian teaching: the primitive African baptismal confession, which in time gained ecumenical confirmation….

In much African theology since 1960 it seems as if all the old standards compulsively has to be reviled and rejected in order for something truly African to be newly invented.  That sort of revolutionary conceit was derived not from indigenous African sources.  It came from modern Enlightenment ideas far more at home in eighteenth-century France than twenty-first-century Africa.  It taught some Africans to bitterly oppose their own heritage, and thus to ignore the early African influences on European Christianity.  These influences were wrongly imagined to be alien to Africa. (96-97)

Oden’s book is an interesting introduction to the topic, but more suggestive than substantive (as he intended it to be).  There aren’t any footnotes because it’s really more of a research proposal based on his vast experience with ancient Christian texts.  The book is strong when Oden calls for an African Christian identity grounded in the apostolic witness and work of the Holy Spirit throughout African Christian history, but weaker when he talks about this grounding as an urgently-needed solution to African Christian woes.  He even argues that the study of ancient African Christian texts will help to reconcile Christians and Muslims on the continent.  Without great knowledge of my own about African Christianity and without supporting evidence from Oden, I was not persuaded.

Oden’s book was an interesting read.  If you’re interested in researching the subject it might be a good place to start, but there are probably better ways to get into the field.  Oden writes that a website, http://earlyafricanchristianity.com, has been started to coordinate research efforts.  I hope that Christian scholars do indeed take up the quest of researching this topic.

I also posted about Peter Leithart’s article on “What Africa Can Teach the North” here.

Jonathan Edwards as pastor

Jeff Lacine, writing on the Desiring God blog, briefly tells three stories to illustrate Edwards’ approach to the ministry.  Here is one:

Edwards’ first call to the pastorate, at age 19, was to a splinter church (a recent church split) in New York. He labored to reconcile the church he was pastoring to its mother. He accomplished his aim in two years, working himself out of the pastorate.

His ability to shepherd a whole church, full of anger and hurt over a recent division, back to submission and unity with its former rival shows amazing pastoral prowess. Those of you who have been a part of a church after a split know what kind of feat was accomplished in this work.

Teaching boys to work

Doug Wilson republished a column on this topic in Credenda Agenda recently.

Israel under a microscope II

An essay by Yoram Hazony asks why Israel is consistently vilified in ways that other nations are not.  I think that his answer considers something that I did not when I discussed why Israel finds itself under the microscope.  I said that the rise of human rights and anti-colonialism as ideas of global importance were critical.

Hazony adds a different dimension which is at least as important as these two, at least in Europe: Israel is a nation-state in an age where the original nation-states (in the modern sense of the word) are disappearing into the European Union.  Here is the crux of Hazony’s reasoning:

The defeat of the universalist ideal in the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 led to the establishment of a new paradigm for European politics—one in which a revitalized concept of the national state held the key to the freedom of peoples throughout Europe. By the late-1800s, this idea of national liberty had been extended to the point that it was conceived not only as a governing principle for Europe, but for the entire world. Progressives such as John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson championed the sovereign nation-state, which would have the right to defend its form of government, laws, religion and language against the tyranny of imperial actors, as the cornerstone of what was ultimately to be a new political order for humanity. Herzl’s Zionist Organization, which proposed a sovereign state for the Jewish people, fit right into this political understanding—and indeed, it was under British sponsorship that the idea of the Jewish state grew to fruition. In 1947, the United Nations voted by a 2/3 majority for the establishment of a “Jewish State” in Palestine. And the birth of Israel was followed by the establishment of dozens of additional independent states throughout the Third World.

But the idea of the nation-state has not flourished in the period since the establishment of Israel. On the contrary, it has pretty much collapsed. With the drive toward European Union, the nations of Europe have established a new paradigm in which the sovereign nation-state is no longer seen as holding the key to the well-being of humanity. On the contrary, the independent nation-state is now seen by many intellectuals and political figures in Europe as a source of incalculable evil, while the multinational empire—the form of government which John Stuart Mill had singled out as the very epitome of despotism—is now being mentioned time and again with fondness as a model for a post-national humanity.[7] Moreover, this new paradigm is aggressively advancing into mainstream political discourse in other nations as well—even in countries such as the United States and Israel.

Hazony bases much of his essay on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of a paradigms and paradigm shifts: people fit facts into a paradigm, rather than adjusting their paradigm when contradictory facts emerge.  He argues that Israel and European post-nationalism both emerged from a reaction to the evil of Auschwitz.  He succinctly summarizes each view:

Paradigm A: Auschwitz represents the unspeakable horror of Jewish women and men standing empty-handed and naked, watching their children die for want of a rifle with which to protect them.

Paradigm B: Auschwitz represents the unspeakable horror of German soldiers using force against others, backed by nothing but their own government’s views as to their national rights and interests.

Here are the implications of each view for Israel, in his opinion:

Paradigm A: Israel represents Jewish women and men standing rifle in hand, watching over their own children and all other Jewish children and protecting them. Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz.

Paradigm B: Israel represents the unspeakable horror of Jewish soldiers using force against others, backed by nothing but their own government’s views as to their national rights and interests. Israel is Auschwitz.

Look at his whole essay to see his discussion of the historical and philosophical underpinnings of nationalism and post-nationalism.  It’s really quite impressive.  For discussion of the importance of European nationalism to Zionism, see one of my posts here (in which I less impressively summarize some information from an impressive book that I read on Zionism).

One weakness, I think, is that Hazony focuses too much on the Holocaust as the turning point.  The Holocaust wasn’t the only thing, in my view, that caused Europeans (or at least post-WWII European elites) to change their minds about the nation-state.  The Holocaust was the most horrible and extreme outcome of European nationalism, but one has to think of the material, human, and cultural devastation brought about by both world wars.  Europeans weren’t only looking at Auschwitz at the end of World War II, they were looking at massive casualties, destitute refugees, destroyed cities, all powerful counterarguments to the narrative of European progress and superiority.  I wouldn’t be surprised if studies showed that these factors were more important than the Holocaust in the push for European unification.  So I don’t think it’s as simple as comparing European and Jewish responses to the Holocaust.

I’ve also said that reading Hazony’s argument adds another dimension to my thoughts.  But how do post-nationalism (in Hazony) and anti-colonial nationalism (in my argument) fit together as causes for the way that people view Israel?

First of all, I’d say that they are countercurrents stirred up by the turmoil of the 20th century.  The world wars called into question the claims of the European nation-state and of European empires.  They both represent the erosion of Western confidence over the course of the 20th century.  Neither of these made as much sense anymore.  Out-of-control nationalism had led to the horrors of the wars, and these horrors had undermined not only the military and financial strength of empires but also the European narrative of “civilization” that had helped to underpin colonialism.

Also, I think that post-nationalism and anti-colonialism have fueled different types of critics of Israel.  Post-nationalism is probably more important for European critics and anti-colonialism is probably more important for Third World critics, although there is probably significant crossover.

Hat tip: Michael Totten.  Totten also includes an interesting video defending Israel that’s embedded in his post.  Totten adds this important caveat, which I would echo:

It may be useful, then, for Europeans and other Westerners who find Israel so exasperating to step outside their own paradigm and take a look at how Israel views itself. The following six-minute video is an excellent place to start. It’s not comprehensive, it avoids the tough questions, and the Palestinians have their own counter-narrative, but when Israel looks in the mirror, it sees this…