Just as there is a little bit of West Bank “Jewish settler” in almost every Israeli, there is a little bit of the caliphate dream in almost every Sunni.
.. As Shadi Hamid, a fellow at the Brookings Center for Middle East Policy, put it in an Atlantic article entitled “The Roots of the Islamic State’s Appeal”: “ISIS draws on, and draws strength from, ideas that have broad resonance among Muslim-majority populations. They may not agree with ISIS’s interpretation of the caliphate, but the notion of a caliphate — the historical political entity governed by Islamic law and tradition — is a powerful one.”
.. If you listen closely, of those dreams, ours — “pluralistic democracy” — is not high on the list. We need to protect the islands of decency out here — Jordan, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Oman — from ISIS, in hopes that their best examples might one day spread. But I am skeptical that our fractious allies, with all their different dreams, can agree on new power-sharing arrangements for Iraq or Syria, even if ISIS is defeated.
Zionism and the Right to Culture
As my Bildung-German Jewish grandmother and my traditional Iranian Jewish grandfather have by now realized, Israel’s Jewish education system doesn’t protect their Jewish culture, but their Jewish ethnicity. The fear is that a humanist Israeli public school system would not be able to protect this so-called right because, if they studied together, Jewish and Arab children would quickly fall in love.
.. And indeed, how could a Jewish state handle the mixed sons and daughters of a humanistic education system? Would the Supreme Court approve their designation as Israeli rather than Jewish or Arab? Would they be drafted for obligatory military service? Perhaps enroll in the expedited ‘conversion-to-Judaism’ program, which the Israeli Defense Force takes pride in offering to soldiers whose Judaism, as state and military rabbis determine, is in question?
.. Reality perhaps permits us, for a limited amount of time, to live in a Jewish democratic contradiction. The latter two alternatives are problematic, but they would at least allow Israelis to become conscious of what Halbertal’s essay attempts to obliterate: the existence of a “big question.” This question—an urgent crisis, really—consists in the fact that the main challenge to Judaism nowadays isn’t posed by nationalist anti-Semitic regimes. On the contrary, it is posed by liberal democracies that inhibit ethnic separations.
Even Israel’s Best Friends Understand That It Is Disconnecting From Reality
JEFFREY GOLDBERG: A lead editorial in The New York Jewish Week, the flagship American Jewish newspaper, center to center-right in orientation, with many thousands of Orthodox Jews among its readers and an ardently pro-Israel editorial line, bluntly asks whether the Israeli government has become unmoored from reality.
.. When future historians write about this period in U.S.-Israel relations, this editorial will warrant serious mention. The unease felt by some American Jews about Israel’s direction is moving into the mainstream.
Another Israeli Housing Project Threatens a Peace Deal
In what has become a depressingly familiar routine, Israel has given final approval for construction of 2,610 housing units in geographically sensitive parts of East Jerusalem that will make it harder, maybe impossible, to reach a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
The timing of the decision, which came shortly before a meeting on Wednesday between President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, also seems familiar: another in a string of calculated embarrassments that over the years have undermined American efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.