Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/ en Copyright 2007 Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:00:00 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Letter from Washington: The Starting Gate Evan Bayh was uncharacteristically dispirited when I met him in the Russell Senate Office Building on a quiet Wednesday before Christmas. For Bayh, who is fifty-one and was first elected to the Senate from Indiana in 1998, December will be recalled as a low moment in an otherwise high-achieving life. Less than two weeks earlier, he had the bad luck to visit New Hampshire on the same weekend that his junior colleague in the Senate Barack Obama, from Illinois, was also visiting. Bayh spoke to a hundred and fifty supporters in a Manchester restaurant; Obama swept through the state trailed by a hundred and fifty reporters. "We originally scheduled the Rolling Stones for this party," the governor, John Lynch, told fifteen hundred people who paid twenty-five dollars apiece to see Obama in a Manchester ballroom. "But we cancelled them when we realized Senator Obama would sell more tickets." It was not merely this experience, though, which led Bayh to announce, shortly afterward, that he would not seek the 2008 Democratic nomination for President. He did not lack for money--his finance chief, Nancy Jacobson, had already raised more than ten million dollars--or desire. His father, Birch Bayh, was also an Indiana senator, as well as a failed Presidential candidate, and Bayh had harbored White House ambitions for years. So his decision, made just two weeks after he formed a Presidential exploratory committee, surprised many Democrats. Bayh suggested that he was deterred by the morass in Iraq and, by extension, the challenges posed by Iran. Liberal Democrats, he said, would not respond to his views about the use of American military power. "You just hope that we haven't soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle," he said. "That would be tragic, because Iran is a grave threat. They're everything we thought Iraq was but wasn't. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they've threatened us, too." Bayh believes that the American experience in Iraq is turning some Democrats away from the Party's internationalist tradition, and although that split in the Party is not new--it helped to shape the race in 2004--Bayh appears to think that it has become more intense as the next election draws closer. "While we're rightfully pointing out those errors in Iraq, we've got to say very clearly that Afghanistan was the right war to fight," he said. "There are those kinds of tough steps that occasionally involve the use of force. Lots of Americans wonder whether we Democrats have that in us." Bayh, to be sure, is a pragmatist: he saw that he had little chance of penetrating his party's consciousness in time for a 2008 race. "There are too many Goliaths out there," he said, referring to Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards, and he added, with more sharpness than usual, "I believe I would be a very strong general-election candidate," suggesting that the dynamics of the Democratic Party left little room for a semi-obscure, non-dazzling senator whose positions, in particular on the Iraq war, have been fairly hawkish. Twelve months before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, foreign policy, and not abortion, gay rights, tax policy, or voters' churchgoing habits, is what seems most to separate Democrats from Republicans and, to some extent, from each other. An early test of the Democratic contenders will be how they approach the Iraq war. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama--at this point, the chief competitors--have many views in common. They tend to see China as an economic challenge rather than as a military threat; they are pro-Israel, and support (Bill) Clinton-style engagement to restart the Middle East peace process; they all want more commitment in the fight against AIDS. On Iraq, though, and on the uses of American power, there is less unity. John Edwards (the 2004 Vice-Presidential nominee, who announced his intention to run just after Christmas) has become the candidate of troop withdrawal. When I asked Edwards last week for a concise description of his Iraq position, he said, "Let's start leaving." Hillary Clinton, who has not announced her candidacy but is said to be close to doing so, is a connoisseur of statecraft, the candidate of the Democratic foreign-policy elite. She brings the most experience in foreign policy to the race--much of it gained vicariously, in her husband's White House. Unlike Edwards, she sees the loss of Iraq as potentially catastrophic for American national-security interests. Obama, who has strongly hinted at a possible candidacy, is the pleaser; he can be rhetorically hawkish, but seems most comfortable when advocating the softer forms of American power. He told me that a quick pullout from Iraq "could result in a spike in deaths," but he does not talk about looming catastrophe if Iraq is not stabilized. His tone is relentlessly measured and sometimes banal; in his best-selling book, "The Audacity of Hope," a chapter on foreign affairs reads like a tentative primer on the history of American foreign policy. Obama speaks at length of a trip to Iraq, but barely mentions the challenges posed by Iran and North Korea. Still, he would enter the race for President with one clear advantage: he did not support the Iraq war, even at its inception. Democrats are doubtful about the usefulness of an increase in troop levels. Obama, who does not use the euphemism "surge," favored by the Administration, but, rather, "escalation," said, "I don't know any military expert who says that a modest increase in troop levels is going to make a big difference. Even if you pursue the logic of increased troop levels, you're going to need one hundred thousand more, one hundred and fifty thousand more, orders of magnitude that we don't possess. Twenty thousand troops is not going to make a difference anymore." Clinton says that she has doubts but will withhold judgment until she sees President Bush's actual plan. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama view themselves as internationalists--eager to keep America engaged in the world and willing to employ force if necessary. And yet, if polls are to be trusted, this outlook separates them from their party's base. A 2005 poll conducted by the Democratic-affiliated Security and Peace Institute found that the top two foreign-policy priorities of Republicans were the destruction of Al Qaeda and a halt to nuclear proliferation; Democrats named the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and the elimination of AIDS. Grassroots Democratic opposition to the Iraq war has been especially potent; it cost Senator Joseph Lieberman the support of Democrats in his primary fight last year. Polls also show that a sizable minority of Democrats now feel that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake--thirty-five per cent, according to an M.I.T. survey conducted in November of 2005. Even more noteworthy, only fifty-seven per cent of Democrats questioned in the same poll would support the deployment of U.S. troops against a known terrorist camp. A German Marshall Fund poll in June of last year found that seventy per cent of Republicans would approve of military action as a last resort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, as opposed to only forty-one per cent of Democrats. As the New Republic editor-at-large Peter Beinart, who has argued for a more assertive Democratic foreign policy, notes in an essay that will appear in a forthcoming collection produced by the Brookings and Hoover Institutions, "America's red-blue divide is no longer chiefly between churched and unchurched. It is between hawk and dove." He is not alone in arguing that Bush has done something that would have seemed impossible in late 2001: he has turned the fight against terrorism into a partisan issue. "This is an exceedingly strange moment, but a plastic moment," said Jeremy Rosner, a former Clinton Administration National Security Council official and now a Democratic pollster. "I tend to think that, once Bush and Iraq are off the screen, someone might be able to rally Democrats to an enlightened internationalism, but the data on that point is mixed right now." The Democratic Party's base may be dovish, but it accounts for less than twenty-five per cent of the American voting public. It is difficult, therefore, to imagine a serious general-election candidate who does not favor some sort of "enlightened internationalism," with its possible military implications. (Lieberman's ultimate victory as an Independent seemed to demonstrate that dovish voters, even in a liberal state such as Connecticut, cannot by themselves unseat a hawkish senator.) But the Democratic Party's chief problem may be finding a way to arrive at a coherent and persuasive post-Bush foreign policy. Michael E. O'Hanlon, of the Brookings Institution, and Kurt M. Campbell, a former National Security Council official under Bill Clinton, argue in a recent book, "Hard Power: The Politics of National Security," that Bush Administration incompetence, not Democratic foreign-policy wisdom, accounts for the Democrats' success in last November's midterm election. "Without answers of their own to the questions they pose to the Bush Administration about how to keep the country safe and secure, Democrats are likely to find current gains in national polls to be fleeting or illusory," they wrote. They might have added that, whether or not the public hopes for a period of international tranquillity, the next President, Democrat or Republican, will inherit an extraordinarily difficult set of problems. "It's not a great bargain for the next President to take over the mess in Iraq," Obama told me last month. "But there is as much pressure in both the Republican and Democratic camps, because both have genuine concern for the troops and the families and the budget. It won't be good for congressmen of the President's party if we're still spending two billion dollars a week in Iraq in two years." Obama, like his rivals, would rather not see the Democrats take the blame for what recent events suggest will be an unhappy denouement in Iraq. But many foreign-policy experts believe that, even without an increase in troop levels in the coming months, Bush may yet succeed in delaying the day of reckoning until the next President takes office. "Bush is going to do anything he can do in his power not to lose," Leslie Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a onetime State Department official in the Carter Administration, said. "The worst challenge the next President will inherit will be to figure out how to lose in Iraq without the appearance or effects of losing. Then, there are these huge problems at either end of Asia--Iran and North Korea. The next President is heading into the biggest, most dangerous set of problems that we've faced since the Cuban missile crisis." On September 12, 2001, Hillary Clinton gave a speech on the Senate floor in which she sounded much like President Bush, saying that the country should "make very clear that not only those who harbor terrorists but those who in any way give any aid or comfort whatsoever will now face the wrath of our country." She added, "You are either with America in our time of need or you are not." When we met recently in her office in the Russell building, I mentioned that speech, calling it "pretty pugnacious." "Well, I was pretty pugnacious," she said, laughing. "Post-9/11, that was appropriate language." She has since been critical of Bush's leadership of the war on terror, and in particular his handling of Iraq. She agrees with Gelb that the next President will inherit a set of foreign-policy challenges that will make her husband's 1993 White House transition seem (to borrow a term from the run-up to the Iraq war) like a cakewalk. Clinton speaks with confidence and directness. On issues of foreign policy and national security, she readily said "I don't know" when she didn't, and she referred frequently, without self-consciousness, to her husband's experience, especially in the Middle East and in the Balkans, perhaps as a way of signalling that nothing prepares a person for four years in the White House like eight years in the White House. She seems to have assimilated data on a comprehensive range of issues. In one conversation, I asked her whether she believed that the best antidote to Islamism might be Islamism itself--in other words, for Muslims to experience periods of Islamist rule to fully grasp its flaws. "Well, I don't see any evidence of that," she said. "You know, if you look around the world, Islamists have had to be defeated by internal military forces, in such places as Algeria and the Philippines, or by external military forces, in places like Afghanistan. We want to be able to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible packages. We want to be smart about this. Take the Palestinians, where we had an election. Don't you think it would have been smart to make sure that the election was run in such a way that everyone knew how to compete? Hamas certainly knew how to compete. They ran a modern election. They knew enough to run only one person in each constituency, unlike Fatah, which we apparently didn't tell. Hamas had a cell-phone system to get everyone to the polls. It's not enough to say, 'Let's have an election.' If you're going to do it and install democracy, democracy means rule of law, it means democracy education, democracy means opening up the media." She went on, "That's what we did during the Cold War. We had a multi-pronged agenda against Communism and the Soviet Union, we worked with candidates and parties in Europe, we worked to persuade people to be part of our alliance, we used every tool at our disposal." Clinton seemed just moments away from naming individual Hamas precinct captains. When I asked Clinton to place herself on a foreign-policy continuum in which Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush's national-security adviser, represents the realists, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former Deputy Defense Secretary, represents the armed idealism of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists, she demurred. "I'm me," she said. "Here's Clinton. I'm not either one of them. I think both of their approaches are not adequate to the task we are facing. I think Wolfowitz's strong feelings and deeply held values come out of the Holocaust, come out of an understanding of the need to expand universal values and create a climate in which people would stand up and fight for those human rights. I think it is real with Wolfowitz, but I think in pursuit of policies people see things that are not real." She continued, "On the other hand, if you entered the world arena and see it just as a series of Realpolitik transactions, you also miss the larger picture. We can critique the idealists, who have an almost faith-based idealism without adequate understanding or evidence-based decision-making, and we can critique the realists for rejecting the importance of aspiration and values in foreign policy. You know, I find myself, as I often do, in the somewhat lonely middle." Obama (like Clinton and Bayh) has studiously calibrated his approach to Iraq. Although he cannot be considered one of Congress's foreign-policy experts, it is hard to think of another recent graduate of the Illinois Senate who could speak as comfortably as he does about the arcana of the Middle East. Obama is discomfited by those on the left who, in his view, minimize the threat of terrorism. In his recent book, he even scolds those who put the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and the improvement of relations with America's allies, ahead of national-security concerns. "The objectives favored by liberals have merit," he writes. "But they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy." He adds that "the threats facing the United States today are real, multiple, and potentially devastating." But when he writes that it's "useful to remind ourselves, then, that Osama bin Laden is not Ho Chi Minh," it's hard to imagine who would confuse the two. Obama has not yet articulated an overarching national-security world view; the political danger in doing so is that it could alienate him from a wing of his party at a time when he's just becoming widely known. In a conversation last month, he focussed on some of the most worrisome issues facing the United States, saying that the possibility of Al Qaeda or another terrorist group obtaining a nuclear weapon was "the No. 1 threat" facing America, and he warned that deterrence theories might not apply to the regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang. "Just because they're state actors doesn't mean they might not act irrationally," he said. "We can't gauge their decision-making process accurately, partly because our intelligence capabilities have been entirely inadequate to the task, and partly due to the nature of the regimes. Whatever you want to say about the Soviets, they were essentially conservative. The North Korean regime and the Iranians are driven more by ideology and fantasy." On the other hand, he is hesitant to describe a scenario in which he would actually use force against those regimes. "What I don't want to see happen is for Iraq to become an excuse for us to ignore misery or human-rights violations or genocide," Obama said. "We should be engaged in Darfur. We have a self-interest and a stake in preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being slaughtered." (Obama's policy prescription for Darfur, though, is more modest than his rhetoric: he wants to build an "international protective force" in Darfur to buttress the African troops already there.) Democratic Party realism, he said, should reflect the country's moral values. He cited the coup, in 1953, against the Iranian President, Mohammed Mossadegh, aided by the C.I.A., as an example of American values gone awry. "Iran is a classic case of something biting us on the ankle, when we assisted in overthrowing the democratically elected regime that was replaced by the Shah," he said. In his less cautious pre-Senate days, Obama expressed his view of the world more bluntly. In a 2002 speech at an antiwar rally in Chicago, he condemned Middle Eastern autocrats, and condemned President Bush (and, it is possible to infer, previous Presidents of both parties) for coddling pro-American dictators in the name of stability. "Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies, so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells." I asked Obama if his sympathy for the victims of civil war and ethnic cleansing takes in the mass of Iraqis who are victims, and not the perpetrators, of the current violence. "We absolutely have an obligation to the Iraqi people," he said. "That's why I've resisted calls for an immediate withdrawal." John Edwards, by contrast, argues that America has fulfilled its commitment to the Iraqi people. "We've been there for a few years," he said. "We've devoted enormous resources, human and otherwise. And now we've reached the place, I think, where the Iraqis are going to have to take responsibility." I asked if he believed that America had a moral responsibility to the Iraqis because the Bush Administration chose to topple a dictatorship, only to replace it, albeit inadvertently, with chaos and what looks like civil war. "My view of Darfur is, we've done nothing but yap. We--as a lot of American families can tell you--we've done a lot more than talk in Iraq. And I think you just reach a place where you have to say, 'We've done our part, and now it's time for them to step up to the plate.' You can't police places forever." When I suggested that Iraqis who "step up to the plate," in the manner that Edwards suggests, are sometimes beheaded, he responded, "But when they're doing it to each other, and America's not there and not fomenting the situation, I think the odds are better of the place stabilizing. I mean, ultimately, that's the judgment." Edwards unequivocally recommends the immediate withdrawal of forty thousand troops, a position that may help to explain his popularity: in one poll last month in Iowa, Edwards and Obama were tied for first place, each supported by twenty-two per cent of likely Democratic caucus-goers. Iowa's outgoing governor, Tom Vilsack, who is also an announced candidate, was backed by twelve per cent of likely caucus-goers, and Hillary Clinton was polling at about ten per cent. It sometimes seems that Edwards is running in a different election than Obama and Clinton. He is focussed on next year's primaries, building support among union members and among Democrats infuriated by the Bush Administration's Iraq policy. Obama and Clinton seem focussed instead on the general election. Edwards disputes this notion. "Well, I call the surge idea 'the McCain doctrine,' " he said, laughing. When I mentioned how Obama and Clinton have approached the Iraq issue, he said, "They may be trying to run for President, too, you mean?" He insisted that his tack on Iraq was "nonpolitical," and added, "I think the political position is to be cautious. There are consequences to taking positions, but leadership in this situation requires you to make clear what you think should happen in Iraq." In his announcement speeches, Edwards called for "getting America and the world to break our addiction to oil" but did not mention counterterrorism as a top priority, which sets him apart from the current Democratic field. Rather, he emphasized universal health care, ending poverty, and combatting global warming. I met with Edwards in New York, just after he delivered a speech to the Asia Society about a recent trip he had made to China. During the question-and-answer period, he gave perfunctory responses to a series of questions, and seemed most engaged when the conversation turned to domestic policy. "I could go on all day about this," he said. When I asked about his relative inexperience in foreign policy, he said, overenthusiastically, "I love this stuff. I think it is the critical thing for the next President of the United States, and whether it is Uganda and Darfur, or the Middle East, or China, or India, or Europe, I just find it fascinating. And I think the President of the United States has to have a very strong, clear vision about how to engage the world." Edwards is careful not to rule out the use of military force against Iran, but he would much rather talk about other things--his recent interest in Africa, and his antipoverty ideas, which are at the core of his candidacy. Edwards is genial in conversation, but he became almost testy when I brought up his vote, in 2002, in favor of the Iraq-war resolution. Edwards has repudiated his vote, unlike Clinton, who has not renounced her own support for the war despite demands from her backers that she do so. Edwards worries that his vote will be seen as evidence that he was somehow fooled by the Administration into giving it his support. "I was convinced that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons and was doing everything in his power to get nuclear weapons," he said. "There was some disparity in the information I had about how far along he was in that process. I didn't rely on George Bush for that. And I personally think there's some dishonesty in suggesting that members of the United States Senate relied on George Bush for that information, because I don't think it's true. It's great politics. But it's not the truth." When I asked who was making this suggestion, he said, "I've just heard people say, I can't even tell you who, I've just heard people say, 'Well, you know, George Bush . . . misled us.' You know, it's just-- I was there, it's not what happened." (Edwards would not single out anyone, but he appeared to be referring to, among others, his 2004 running mate, John Kerry, who has often said that he was lied to by the Bush Administration about W.M.D.s. "We were misled. We were given evidence that was not true," Kerry told a rally of liberal Democrats in June of last year.) "I was on the Intelligence Committee," Edwards went on, "so I got direct information from the intelligence community. And then I had a series of meetings with former Clinton Administration people. And they were all saying the same thing. Everything I was hearing in the Intelligence Committee was the same thing I was hearing from these guys. And there was nary a dissenting voice. And so, for me, the difficult judgment was not about the factual information, which I was convinced was accurate. It was about whether I was going to give authority to this President I didn't trust. That was where the friction was for me. I decided to do it, and I was wrong. I shouldn't have done it." Hillary Clinton's decision to give Bush her approval in 2002 was influenced by her recent White House experience. "I have respect for Presidential decision-making and I saw what the Republican Congress had done to Bill on a range of issues, denying him the authority to deal with Bosnia and Kosovo and second-guessing him on every imaginable issue," she said. "And I don't think that that's good for the country, and I had no problem in giving President Bush the authority to do what he stated he would do and what I was assured privately on many occasions would be done." Still, Clinton was never an enthusiastic supporter of the war. In a speech to the Senate before casting her vote to support the resolution, she cautioned Bush, saying, "If we were to attack Iraq now, alone or with few allies, it would set a precedent that could come back to haunt us. In recent days, Russia has talked of an invasion of Georgia to attack Chechen rebels. India has mentioned the possibility of a preemptive strike on Pakistan. And what if China were to perceive a threat from Taiwan? So, Mr. President, for all its appeal, a unilateral attack, while it cannot be ruled out, on the present facts is not a good option." When I asked Clinton if she thought that she had been lied to, she said, "I have to tell you, I think that they believed, as I believed, that there was, at the very least, residual weapons of mass destruction, and whether the Iraqis ever intended to let the inspectors go forward was being answered year by year. There was a lot of evidence that this was not their intention." Obama wasn't in the Senate at the time of the invasion of Iraq, and in his 2002 Chicago speech he prophesied some of the difficulties that the Bush Administration is now experiencing. "I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein," he said then. "He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors." He went on, "I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences." A year before the primaries, the Democrats certainly have solid contenders for the Presidency, each of whom--some more than others--is struggling to design a credible series of foreign-policy beliefs for a party that has foreign-policy inclinations but no reigning philosophy. Obama and Clinton appear thus far to be the Party's strongest potential candidates, and each brings strengths to the debate. Obama's foresight on Iraq may be one of his most potent weapons, just as Clinton's expertise, and essential centrism, will be an asset to her candidacy. For now, though, Edwards has something that the others lack: a position on Iraq that resonates best with his party. http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_the_sta.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_washington_the_sta.php The New Yorker Mon, 15 Jan 2007 12:00:00 -0500 What Would Jimmy Do? PALESTINE PEACE NOT APARTHEID By Jimmy Carter Simon & Schuster. 264 pp. $27 Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based. On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made. "With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government." Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his "temerity." He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins -- and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew -- he is on a mission from God. Carter's interest in the Middle East is longstanding, of course; he brokered the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979, and he has been rightly praised for doing so. But other aspects of his record are more bothersome. Carter, not unlike God, has long been disproportionately interested in the sins of the Chosen People. He is famously a partisan of the Palestinians, and in recent months he has offered a notably benign view of Hamas, the Islamist terrorist organization that took power in the Palestinian territories after winning a January round of parliamentary elections. There are differences, however, between Carter's understanding of Jewish sin and God's. God, according to the Jewish Bible, tends to forgive the Jews their sins. And God, unlike Carter, does not manufacture sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed. This is a cynical book, its cynicism embedded in its bait-and-switch title. Much of the book consists of an argument against the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The "imprisonment wall" is an early symptom of Israel's descent into apartheid, according to Carter. But late in the book, he concedes that "the driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa -- not racism, but the acquisition of land." In other words, Carter's title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state. True, some Israeli leaders have used the security fence as cover for a land-grab, but Carter does not acknowledge the actual raison d'etre for the fence: to prevent the murder of Jews. The security barrier is a desperate, deeply imperfect and, God willing, temporary attempt to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from detonating themselves amid crowds of Israeli civilians. And it works; many recent attempts to infiltrate bombers into Israel have failed, thanks to the barrier. The murder of Israelis, however, plays little role in Carter's understanding of the conflict. He writes of one Hamas bombing campaign: "Unfortunately for the peace process, Palestinian terrorists carried out two lethal suicide bombings in March 1996." That spree of bombings -- four, actually -- was unfortunate for the peace process, to be sure. It was also unfortunate for the several dozen civilians killed in these attacks. But Israeli deaths seem to be an abstraction for Carter; only the peace process is real, and the peace process would succeed, he claims, if not for Israeli intransigence. Here is Carter's anti-historical understanding of the conflict. He writes: "There are two interrelated obstacles to permanent peace in the Middle East: "1. Some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians; and "2. Some Palestinians react by honoring suicide bombers as martyrs to be rewarded in heaven and consider the killing of Israelis as victories." In other words, Palestinian violence is simply an understandable reaction to the building of Israeli settlements. The settlement movement has been a tragedy, of course. Settlements, and the expansionist ideology they represent, have done great damage to the Zionist dream of a Jewish and democratic state; many Palestinians, and many Israelis, have died on the altar of settlement. The good news is that the people of Israel have fallen out of love with the settlers, who themselves now know that they have no future. After all, when Ariel Sharon abandoned the settlement dream -- as the former prime minister did when he forcibly removed some 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip during Israel's unilateral pullout in July 2005 -- even the most myopic among the settlement movement's leaders came to understand that the end is near. Carter does not recognize the fact that Israel, tired of the burdens of occupation, also dearly wants to give up the bulk of its West Bank settlements (the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was elected on exactly this platform) because to do so would fatally undermine the thesis of his book. Palestine Peace Not Apartheid is being marketed as a work of history, but an honest book would, when assessing the reasons why the conflict festers, blame not only the settlements but also take substantial note of the fact that the Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence. Why is Carter so hard on Israeli settlements and so easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror? Because a specific agenda appears to be at work here. Carter seems to mean for this book to convince American evangelicals to reconsider their support for Israel. Evangelical Christians have become bedrock supporters of Israel lately, and Carter marshals many arguments, most of them specious, to scare them out of their position. Hence the Golda Meir story, seemingly meant to show that Israel is not the God-fearing nation that religious Christians believe it to be. And then there are the accusations, unsupported by actual evidence, that Israel persecutes its Christian citizens. On his fateful first visit to Israel, Carter takes a tour of the Galilee and writes, "It was especially interesting to visit with some of the few surviving Samaritans, who complained to us that their holy sites and culture were not being respected by Israeli authorities -- the same complaint heard by Jesus and his disciples almost two thousand years earlier." There are, of course, no references to "Israeli authorities" in the Christian Bible. Only a man who sees Israel as a lineal descendant of the Pharisees could write such a sentence. But then again, the security fence itself is a crime against Christianity, according to Carter; it "ravages many places along its devious route that are important to Christians." He goes on, "In addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions, an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples." One gets the impression that Carter believes that Israelis -- in their deviousness -- somehow mean to keep Jesus from fulfilling the demands of His ministry. There is another approach to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, of course -- one perfected by another Southern Baptist who became a Democratic president. Bill Clinton's Middle East achievements are enormous, especially when considering the particular difficulties posed by his primary Arab interlocutor. Jimmy Carter was blessed with Anwar al-Sadat as a partner for peace; Bill Clinton was cursed with Yasser Arafat. In his one-sided explication of the 1990s peace process, Carter systematically downplays Clinton's efforts to bring a conclusion to the conflict, with a secure Israel and an independent Palestine living side by side, and repeatedly defends the indefensible Arafat. Carter doesn't dare include Clinton's own recollections of his efforts at the abortive Camp David summit in 2000 because to do so would be to acknowledge that the then-Israeli prime minister, the flawed but courageous Ehud Barak, did, in fact, try to bring about a lasting peace -- and that Arafat balked. In a short chapter on the Clinton years, Carter blames the Israelis for the failures at Camp David. But I put more stock in the views of the president who was there than in those of the president who wasn't. "On the ninth day, I gave Arafat my best shot again," Clinton writes in My Life. "Again he said no. Israel had gone much further than he had, and he wouldn't even embrace their moves as the basis for future negotiations." Clinton applied himself heroically over the next six months to extract even better offers from Israel, all of which Arafat wouldn't accept. "I still didn't believe Arafat would make such a colossal mistake," Clinton remembers, with regret. According to Carter, however, Arafat made no mistakes. The failure was Israel's -- and by extension, Clinton's. Carter succeeded at his Camp David summit in 1978, while Clinton failed at his in 2000. But Clinton's achievement was in some ways greater because he did something no American president has done before (or since): He won the trust of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. He could do this because he seemed to believe that neither side was wholly villainous nor wholly innocent. He saw the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for what it is: a tragic collision between right and right, a story of two peoples who both deserved his sympathy. In other words, he took the Christian approach to making peace. http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/wpost/what_would_jimmy_do.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/wpost/what_would_jimmy_do.php The Washington Post Sun, 10 Dec 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Conflict in the Bone Interview with Jeffrey Goldberg Rare is the book that keeps me thinking long after I've finished the last page, especially when the book is not a ponderous philosophical tome but a vivid page turner. I was well aware of Jeffrey Goldberg's narrative tricks in his memoir Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide from the first line which sucked me in with intimations of a kidnapping then dropped me just before the climax into a leisurely narrative of his childhood. Okay, fine, he can tell a story. But what kept revolving around my head long after I'd worked out the plot (it's a memoir, so, you know, he survives) was just how close to the surface his emotions are from start to finish. Which is not to say that he's scared. Goldberg styles himself a tough guy (he shrugs off his captivity with a boast about having once talked his way past a hostile check point in the Congo), so we don't see a lot of fear here. What's on display, in fact, is an emotion much less acceptable in polite circles: his yearning for physical power, summed up in the worldview of his thirteen-year-old self as "Jews with guns." There are two ur moments in Goldberg's text: his persecution by schoolyard bullies who humiliate him as a "Christ killer" and a trip to Israel in lieu of a bar mitzvah where he sees for the first time Jews who are not defenseless nebbishes but machine-gun wielding Israelis. Later on, his Zionism is overlaid by a stay at a lefty summer camp in the Catskills that promotes dreams of Arab and Jew living side by side and a long course of self-study on the eternal suffering of the tribe--but at the core of Goldberg's quest is the desire never to be defenseless again. Thus fortified, the author sets out to be the righteous warrior, only to find himself and his ideals standing guard at the largest Palestinian prison camp in Israel, in the midst of the first Intifada. So the rest of the memoir unfolds as a series of contradictions: Goldberg's commitment to Zionism never wavers, but his understanding of the cost of that commitment constantly changes. What is remarkable is not only that Goldberg remembers so minutely the mercurial shifts in his positions, but that he records them so honestly. And that he desperately, almost absurdly, yearns to secure the friendship of the men he holds captive. Or at least one man, Rafiq, the Muslim of the title. Often Rafiq is more a device than a character. A gifted mathematician and surreptitious leader of the uprising, he appears throughout the book, both a sign that Goldberg has not given up on his own ideals, and a perfect foil as Rafiq's commitment to fundamentalist Islam waxes and wanes. Yet Goldberg's view of the contingencies that produce changes in his friend is necessarily obscure and, even so, not sufficiently explored. There is a limit, apparently, to how much crossing the "Middle East divide" Goldberg's character can take. Yet in episode after episode, Goldberg hurls himself against History: now in the Israeli Army, later looking up friends in Gaza; here interviewing Arafat, there Sharon. What fascinates about Prisoners is not that he manages to heal himself or anyone else, but that he dares to expose that self as a network of tiny fractures always on the verge of breaking finally apart. Listen to our conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg in the second installment of the c305 podcast series here.]]> http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/conflict_in_the_bone.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/conflict_in_the_bone.php Interviews Mon, 04 Dec 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Brave Heart: Jeffrey Goldberg You started writing this before the Oslo process broke down in 2000. You must have been planning quite a different book. I actually thought that I was racing against time--that when the book came out everybody would say, "Sure it's possible to make peace; we already have it." The second intifada was profoundly depressing for me, and I did lay it aside for a while. But that seems to have made your friendship with Rafiq more interesting. My relationship with him deteriorated after 9/11. He became more radicalized, and I moved at least from the left to the center. Have things gotten any better in the region since? I have a very low threshold of hope, but I was just there in August, and I came away feeling somewhat optimistic that there are still plenty of Palestinians looking for a solution in this world as opposed to a divinely inspired one, which is something that scares me terribly. Scarier than staying in a Pakistani madrassa and declaring yourself a Jew? How did you manage that? I used it as a way of leveraging a better conversation. They're repulsed by Judaism, but they're also very curious. Did you become more cautious after Daniel Pearl's murder? I was in northern Iraq when my wife told me by satellite phone. This was before the war. I said a line that she'll never let me forget: "Don't worry, that was Pakistan. I'm in Iraq; it's completely different." But sure, in a way, it was the end of innocence. After living in Israel in the nineties, you left disillusioned. Why? I grew up venerating the Freedom Riders, not Bull Connor, and I didn't want to carry a nightstick. But you can't hold a country to the standard of perfection that I held Israel to. It's a real place with real people. Doesn't your history with Israel make you a less-than-objective observer of Palestinians? The advantage of being a magazine writer is that I have to be fair but not balanced. That said, the most criticism I've ever gotten was for a harsh look at the settlement movement. You were also criticized for writing in The New Yorker of alleged contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Is that part of the interview? Okay, fine, if you really want to go into it, the specific allegations I raised have never been definitively addressed by the 9/11 Commission. Of course, I was wrong, as was nearly everybody else, about the WMD question. How do you think Rafiq will feel about the book? I don't want this to be another test of our relationship. At times, I've used him as a stand-in for the Palestinian people. He's a broad-shouldered guy, but he can't sustain that.]]> http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/brave_heart_jeffrey_goldberg.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/brave_heart_jeffrey_goldberg.php Interviews Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Across the Great Divide In the late 1980s, Jeffrey Goldberg moved to Israel because he was committed to the idea of being part of the Jewish homeland. That meant, of course, going into the army, and before long, Jeffrey was working as a military policeman at a prison in the Negev desert. This was just around the time that the first Intifada was heating up, and Jeffrey was guarding Palestinians.

In his new book, called Prisoners, Jeffrey Goldberg writes extensively about his time in Israel, and about his relationships with several of those prisoners.

Jeffrey Goldberg is joining us today from Washington. Jeffrey, welcome to Nextbook.

Thank you for having me.

You spend a fair portion of this book talking about the early development of your own Zionist ideology, and I want you to walk us through that.

Sure. I was...it's going to sound strange and archaic today...but I was a socialist Zionist growing up on Long Island. I lived in a non-Jewish part of Long Island, and I had the usual--or something between usual and unusual--experiences with schoolyard anti-Semitism, and those experiences sent me, in a way, to seek out some answer about my Jewishness. And my parents, much to their later regret, decided to take me to Israel for my bar mitzvah. And when I was there, my eyes were opened to the idea of Jewish power. I didn't put it in quite that way to myself then, but that's the way it worked. Seeing Israeli soldiers, Jewish soldiers more to the point, Jewish tanks, Jewish machine guns, was quite exciting to a powerless 13-year-old boy suffering at the hands of Irish pogromists, juvenile pogromists. So, I became deeply enamored of Israel because of that.

I was also, however, raised in a very left-wing household. We were not a religious family. We didn't keep kosher. But in a sense, we did. César Chavez was our rabbi, in a way. Whatever the United Farm Workers told us to boycott, we boycotted. So, by the time I was in my teens, I had sort of two ideas running parallel. One was the socialist universalist ideal, and the other was a sort of tribal Zionist ideal. That was all well and good when I was a teenager. I belonged to a socialist Zionist youth movement, and we did two things, basically. We argued for social change at home, and we prepared ourselves to go on Aliyah to kibbutzim, Aliyah being, of course, moving to Israel, "making the ascent," literally, to Israel--to move to socialist kibbutzim. And so, everything was very harmonious in my life. In other words, I had the tribal and the universal working very nicely together. And I decided when I was about 20 or something that I would move to Israel, that I was going to fulfill this.

So, when you went, did Israel meet your expectation?

Israel did not meet my expectation. At the time I was very judgmental of the place. Kibbutz life was not like the make-believe kibbutz we built for ourselves in the summer in the Catskills at my socialist Zionist youth camp. The commitment to socialist ideals, the egalitarian ideals, was waning at that time. But the real shock to me was the army. I came of age in the period after the raid on Entebbe, so that of course was my model for what a Jewish fighter does. They go off and rescue Jews in inhospitable terrain.

But when I was in Israel, it was the beginning of the Palestinian uprising. And the army had become a police force, in essence, dispatched by the government to suppress Palestinian demonstrators, rioters, rock-throwers, however you want to call it. And that's a very different thing than fighting the Syrian army. I had a hard time with this because I imagined myself, if I were a Palestinian, I'd probably also be out there demonstrating.

The Palestinians did not meet my expectations either, of course, because these were not the Freedom Riders from 1964. They weren't sitting in at lunch counters. They were throwing rocks at people.

That said, it was an impossibility in a kind of way, because my expectations were unreal.

Let's talk about the prison for a moment. This is a prison that was set in the desert, in the Negev, and my sense from the book is that working there as a military policeman gave you a kind of political education that you hadn't yet had.

Very much so, in the sense that I had barely met any Palestinians previous to my arrival there. And all of a sudden--just to give you a sense of the scope of the place--there were roughly 6,200 prisoners in this camp when I was there--a massive camp, the size of a small city--open-air tents separated by coils of barbed wire and high fences. So, it really was essentially a Palestinian city run by a relatively small handful of Israelis. And what I decided very early on--because I already had a pretty serious notion that I was going to become a reporter--I realized that I had this wonderful opportunity to actually talk to Palestinians. Not just any Palestinians; these were the leaders of the Palestinian uprising. And because of my leftist background, in a kind of way, I was already used to the idea--which was then quite outré--that there was going to be a Palestinian state one day, and I added two and two and realized that the men that I was guarding, whose lives I was in charge of, were one day going to be the leaders of Palestine.

And because of the particular job that I had--I was one of the people who was in charge of organizing the daily lives of the prisoners; I wasn't a guard in a tower, I was right down in there--I had extensive opportunity to actually try to get to know some of these guys.

In the book, when you talk about your time in the prison--and also subsequently, when you have gone back to Israel to do reporting and have re-met many of the people who were prisoners--I get this sense that you do want to have a relationship with these people. And at the same time, there's this sense of guilt on your part that you are very explicit about in the book, that you want sort of the Palestinian approval of you as a Jewish person in Israel, but then when you don't necessarily get that kind of approval, then there's this kind of anger about having felt guilty in the first place.

Yes. You've gotten the full depths of my multifaceted Jewish guilt. I think you captured it pretty nicely.

There were a couple of reasons I wanted to know the Palestinians. One was, I have a reporter's personality, obviously. I'm curious about people I don't understand.

The second part was--this, again, coming out of my socialist Zionist upbringing--I believed in a two-state solution for the problem. I believed in many ways that the argument between the Palestinians and the Israelis was an argument between right and right, and therefore I wanted to--and this was, of course, the grandiose thoughts of someone who's not really experienced in the world--I thought that I could, at least in a small way, advance the cause of understanding or peace by engaging these guys on some of these questions, and engaging them in behaviors that didn't alienate them. But then, of course, it bleeds over into what you're talking about, which is...I'm not joking when I say that my model growing up for what a hero was, in many ways, was the Freedom Riders--Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman--or the civil rights movement.

And all of a sudden I found myself--and again, the analogy isn't perfect by a long shot, but I found myself not in the role of a Freedom Rider, but I found myself in the role of...in bad moments I thought of it as sort of the Bull Conner role, the role of the southern sheriff, keeping people in a prison who didn't actually deserve to be in a prison. Like I said, there's one huge caveat, which is that African Americans in the south used nonviolent resistance, which gave their movement a nobility and morality that the Palestinian movement lacked.

But I did feel bad about it. It wasn't the way I wanted to spend even a minute of my life, and I decided at one point that I would be excessively considerate of the Palestinian prisoners. And on moments when that wasn't received, my anger would be outsized at the rejection of my obvious good will.

Is it fair to say that you've moved from being an idealistic Zionist to a somewhat jaded reporter?

I'm not jaded. I'm just realistic, I think. I love Israel, with all its flaws. I'm deeply committed to its safety and its future. I also, spending several years in Israel, realize that it's a real place with real flaws--flaws that sometimes get overly magnified, both by Jews because we have a self-critical culture, which is, of course, a strength, not a weakness; and, of course, by the rest of the world, which magnifies these flaws.

But after a while of going back and back again, I've come to see the shift in the fundamental relationship from a battle over a piece of land between two warring tribes to more of a battle between two religions. In other words, it shifted from a Palestinian-Israeli dispute to a Muslim-Jewish dispute. And the fault for that shift, I think, lies somewhat with the Jews. But I think it lies in large part with this wave of Islamism that we've seen over the last 10 years that is excessively intolerant and is an ideology that cannot, for theological reasons, grant the Jews their equality as a nation in what they consider to be the Muslim Middle East.

So, I don't think I'm jaded. I just think I know that this is the work of generations now. It's not something that lends itself to easy fixes.

I do have another question. You're signed up to write a book for the Nextbook Jewish Encounter series, and you're going to write a biography of Judah Maccabee, who led the Maccabean revolt in the second century BC. And I wonder if there are any parallels between your own story and his story [Goldberg laughs], or between this book and his story, certainly in terms of muscularity and Jewish power, and if you could weigh in on that for us.

[Laughing] Are you asking me if there are similarities between Judah Maccabee and me?

No, no. I'm not asking you about your delusions of grandeur, if you have any. [Laughs]

Talk about delusions of grandeur. No, I think more of myself as a Queen Esther-type figure.

That's good, too.

[Laughter]

Look, I'm fascinated by Jewish power. Jewish power is an easy subject to deal with theoretically, but it's a hard one to deal with when you actually have power. The Jews reentered history when they regained their territory, the ancient land of Israel. And when you enter history you have to use power. And that's what this whole book is about, and I think that's what Judah Maccabee is about in a kind of a way. Look , the way we celebrate Hanukkah is an oversimplified way as a story of religious freedom against oppression. But what the Maccabean revolt was, in many ways--and look, I haven't written the book yet, so I don't know that much--but I'm thinking about it all the time, and I've been thinking about it for a while. The Maccabean revolt was also a civil war. It was a war between assimilated Jews--to use the current terminology--and religious Jews. The religious Jews from the hills, and the secular Jews of the cities. And they were arguing about religious purity and national purity, and the Maccabees were people who went around and forcibly circumcised assimilated Jews. And the key word in that sentence is force.

I'm fascinated about moments in history when Jews get power, physical power, and what they do with it. And there are a great many positives to the Maccabee story, and there are some negatives. And there are a great many positives to the story of the rebirth of Israel, and there are some negatives, too.

So, yes, in essence, I think both books--the one that was just written and the one that is not yet written--are about Jewish power.

Jeffrey Goldberg, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you very much.

]]> http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/across_the_great_divide.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/across_the_great_divide.php Interviews Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:00:00 -0500 Letter from Gaza: The Forgotten War Four skittish and dishevelled members of a Hamas rocket team threaded their way down a pitted alley in Beit Hanoun, a destitute town in northernmost Gaza. They stayed close to the walls, searching the sky for the pilotless, missile-firing drones of the Israeli Air Force. It was late July, the fourth week of Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, a conflict eclipsed by Israel's other war, against Hezbollah. The men came near the doorway of the vacant building in which I was hiding. A friend, a Palestinian who had arranged this meeting, stepped into the alley and waved them over. It was 3 A.M. We walked down a half-flight of steps and into a dark, bare room, where we sat in a semicircle, on cinder blocks. My friend introduced the leader as Abu Obeidah. I had met him several years earlier; he called himself Abu Nasser then. He was thinner than I remembered, and he had the look of a man living on his nerves. He apologized for his unkempt appearance, and for his inability to offer me coffee or tea. The night provided no respite from the late-summer heat of Gaza, and the men were sweating through their shirts. My friend tore open a small package of dates for them. They seemed embarrassed, but they took the food. "We're always running," Abu Obeidah said. "We haven't slept a night in a long time." On June 25th, a squad of kidnappers from Hamas--comrades of these rocketeers--and two other factions attacked an Israeli Army position just outside Gaza, killing two soldiers and seizing a third. The soldier, Gilad Shalit, was smuggled into Gaza by tunnel, and is believed to be in the hands of Hamas's Iz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades. The Qassam Brigades report to the supreme leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshal, who is based in Damascus. Hamas is a divided organization; its leaders in Damascus are considered more radical than many of those in Gaza. By some accounts, the Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, does not know who kidnapped Shalit, or where he is. The Israeli Army's answer to the kidnapping was Operation Summer Rains, a major artillery-and-tank offensive. Summer Rains is the forgotten Middle East war. Israel's war in Lebanon, Operation Change of Direction, dominated the world's attention this summer. The Lebanon campaign was also set off by a cross-border abduction--in this case, of two Israeli soldiers. Six years ago, under chronic pressure from Hezbollah guerrillas, the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, unilaterally withdrew his forces from south Lebanon, which Israel had occupied as a buffer zone since its invasion in 1982. Hezbollah exploited the 2000 withdrawal by entrenching guerrillas along the border, and by importing, by some estimates, as many as thirteen thousand short- and medium-range rockets from Syria and Iran. In this latest round of fighting, Hezbollah fired four thousand rockets into Israel. The rockets reached targets thirty miles south of the border, but they killed relatively few civilians--thirty-nine, eighteen of whom were Arabs. The Israeli counterattack left more than a thousand Lebanese civilians dead; killed an unknown, but significant, number of Hezbollah fighters; and inflicted serious damage in south Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. Still, when a ceasefire was reached, last month, it appeared as if the Israelis had been bested. Hezbollah had fought the Israeli Army to a near-standstill, which on the organization's terms represents a triumph. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah chief, had become, in a matter of weeks, the most popular political figure in the Arab world, even though he has since admitted that he underestimated the Israeli response to the kidnapping that he ordered. Hamas, in contrast, was not besting Israel, despite firing its homemade rockets into nearby Israeli towns. Since late June, the Israeli military has killed more than two hundred Gazans, half of them terrorists and the other half civilians, including many children. The world has taken relatively scant notice of the fighting in Gaza. "Do our rocket attacks appear on television in America?" Abu Obeidah asked me. When I told him that most of the news coverage centered on Lebanon, his face fell. The Israeli Internal Security Minister, Avi Dichter, told me, "The Palestinians thought that the Western world and the Arab countries would look at the Palestinian Authority as some kind of golden child, but it came out as the shit child instead. Lebanon is the golden child." The confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah could be seen as an early round of a potential war between Israel and Iran, or even between the United States and Iran. The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has broadcast his desire to see Israel destroyed, and Israel and the United States believe that Iran is attempting to build nuclear weapons. Late last month, Iran risked United Nations sanctions by announcing that it would not suspend its uranium-enrichment program. But Israel's southern war, too, has great consequence for the Middle East. It has undermined the Israeli policy of unilateral disengagement, the signal innovation of the country's former Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. Last year, before he was incapacitated by a stroke, Sharon ordered the evacuation of Gaza's nine thousand settlers, arguing that Israel, for demographic and security reasons, could not integrate a territory inhabited by 1.4 million Arabs. He did this, however, without consulting the Palestinians, reflecting his conviction that they were not suitable negotiating partners. Israelis hoped that the move would bring calm to Gaza's borders, if not actual peace. Instead, it was followed almost immediately by rocket fire. Hamas and Hezbollah rockets now threaten to undo the career of the novice Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, whose party, Kadima, was built by Sharon on a platform of unilateral disengagement. The evacuation of Gaza was met with great public support a year ago; now Olmert's plan to remove seventy thousand settlers, about a quarter of the total, from the West Bank--without negotiating their repatriation with the Palestinians--is nearing collapse. Disappointment with unilateralism has not been replaced by hope for a multilateral, negotiated solution. If anything, this summer's violence has further marginalized Palestinians who still argue for a negotiated, two-state solution to the crisis in the Middle East. Most are members of Fatah, the secular movement that for decades was led by Yasir Arafat, but, unlike Arafat, many seem prepared to strike a compromise deal with Israel--or were, in the days when the peace process still had life in it. With Hamas's victory in the Palestinian parliament in Jan-uary, Fatah lost power in Gaza and the West Bank. The Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas, is still technically in charge of the Palestinian Authority, but Hamas is the real force now. "I'm not going to say I told you so," Ron Nachman, the right-wing mayor of the West Bank settlement of Ariel, said. "I just want the people who said that unilateral disengagement would bring peace and quiet to admit that they're wrong." He went on to say, "The only thing we've gotten from unilateral withdrawal is more rockets." Unilateralism also has critics on the left, who believe that Israel cannot simply redraw its borders on its own. "Unilateralism means that you live under the illusion that there's no one on the other side, no other party to the conflict," said Gadi Baltiansky, the director of the Geneva Initiative, which calls for renewal of negotiations with the Palestinians. Baltiansky, like many of the Initiative's leaders, is a former official of the government of Ehud Barak. "The lesson is that you can unilaterally start a war, but you cannot unilaterally get closer to peace. The only way to serve your interests is through agreements, as Israel proved with Egypt and Jordan. The road to peace doesn't run through Baghdad and Washington; it runs through Ramallah and Jerusalem." Today, Gaza is under siege; it is ringed by Israeli tanks and artillery; the sea is patrolled by Israeli gunboats, and the Air Force can strike at will. The few Palestinians who are allowed to come and go must negotiate an Israeli checkpoint. The main crossing, Erez, is a dystopia of barbed wire, metal cages, and full-body searches. When I crossed over into Gaza this summer, I felt as if I were breaking into a large, beachfront prison. My first attempt was unsuccessful. On the Palestinian side of the checkpoint, the police held me for two hours; Israeli tanks, parked about three hundred yards away, were firing into the fields of Beit Hanoun, more or less over our heads. I eventually tried to walk the nine-hundred-yard distance between the checkpoint and my waiting taxi, but I was forced back by fire from a tank-mounted machine gun. On my second try, four days later, a Hamas-fired Qassam rocket landed fifty feet from where I stood with a group of policemen. They were Fatah loyalists, and they cursed the Hamas rocket team for--inadvertently, it was assumed--firing on their position. The rocket made a sharp blast, but it caused little damage: a small patch of blackened earth. One of the policemen asked, "Do you know how many goats the rockets have killed? And cows?" "Half the rockets they fire fall on our side of the border," another policeman said, as he pointed to the source of the rockets, a few hundred yards away. "All these rockets do is bring the Israeli tanks." He pointed again, toward a platoon of Merkava tanks across the road. The tanks were laying down a barrage of suppressing fire, hoping to keep the Qassam teams from setting up their portable launchers. "Hamas should stop firing rockets," a third policeman said, "until they get better rockets." I had spent the previous day along Israel's northern border, and I was struck by the impotence of the Qassam, in comparison with the Katyusha, the short-range rocket that is a staple of the Hezbollah arsenal. The Katyusha is about eight feet long--it can be fired from an easily concealed tripod--and has alarming power. By late July, Hezbollah's rockets had forced nearly a million Israelis in the northern part of the country to hide in bomb shelters or leave for the cities in the center of Israel. While I was driving near Safed, a city in the far north, on a road that had become known as Katyusha Alley, one of the rockets fell eight or nine hundred feet from my car. The explosion made an enormous noise and shook the car. Fragments of shrapnel flew sixty or seventy yards from the point of impact. Hamas, along with the Popular Resistance Committees and Islamic Jihad, has fired hundreds of rockets into Israel, but since 2004 they have killed only six Israelis, and have not forced the evacuation of a single kibbutz. Israeli intelligence officials believe that radicals in Gaza may have a small number of Katyushas (a few have already been fired in Gaza) and anti-tank missiles, which they are storing until they feel ready to escalate the conflict against Israel. Because Israel maintains such tight control of the border, Hamas cannot take delivery of weapons easily. Israeli intelligence officials have asserted, however, that Hezbollah rocket experts have given Hamas technical help. Palestinian intelligence officials also told me that radical groups have been trying to smuggle anti-tank weapons into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt. A few years ago, I visited an underground Qassam workshop in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. The workshop, a joint project of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other factions, was a quiet, efficient operation. Metal fabricators built steel tubes, which were packed with explosives by demolition experts. Detonators were then loaded and the rockets were welded shut. The equipment was designed to be disassembled and moved quickly, to stymie an Israeli attack, and the rockets were scattered throughout Gaza as soon as they came off the assembly line. One of the rocket designers told me that at the outset of the second Palestinian uprising, six years ago, the rockets were more like crude mortars--steel pipes that fired small, fertilizer-based projectiles. A Hamas explosives expert named Adnan al-Ghul built the first Qassam in 2001; it could carry roughly two pounds of explosives. Ghul was assassinated by Israel in 2004, but his successors have improved upon the original model. The newer Qassams can travel roughly seven miles, and carry as much as twenty pounds of explosives, though most seem to have less. The rocket team I met in Beit Hanoun had been firing Qassams. "We want better rockets, of course," Abu Obeidah said. "Bring us Katyushas and we'll fire them." Another member of the squad said, "And get us Merkavas and Apaches--" "And F-16s," Abu Obeidah said. He added, "We're not going to wait for someone to give us rockets. We have to do this ourselves." That night in Beit Hanoun, Abu Obeidah didn't want to discuss the technical capabilities of the rockets that his team had been firing, but he did talk about their purpose. "The rockets are the device that will liberate all of Palestine," he said. I brought up the complaints I'd heard about the rockets from people in Beit Hanoun; I'd been told that some residents had battled rocket teams when they tried to launch Qassams from school yards. "Spies for Israel," Abu Obeidah said, dismissively. "Some people aren't steadfast." I asked him if he thought that Hamas was losing the war. He sat up straight. "Losing? Ma pitom," he said, using a Hebrew expression that means, more or less, "What are you talking about?" He went on, "We are the first front. It will be Hamas that will defeat the Jews." He argued that Hamas stood at the vanguard of the anti-Zionist Muslim revolution: "Everyone, all the media, says that Hezbollah is wonderful. We stand with our brothers of Hezbollah, of course, but, really, look at the advantages they have. They get all the rockets they will ever need from Iran. If we had rockets from Iran, we could make a hell for the Jews, but we don't get any. Do you think we get help from someone outside? From where? The Egyptians? Of course not. We have to make all of our rockets ourselves. So you have to ask, Who is more steadfast in the struggle against the enemy, Hamas or Hezbollah?" One of his men said, as punctuation, "Hamas." I asked these men if they thought that Al Qaeda had a role to play in the liberation of Palestine. They ridiculed the idea. "Al Qaeda kills civilians," Abu Obeidah said. "So does Hamas," I said. "We do not," he answered. "We only target Jews." (Hamas's position is that all Israelis--whom it refers to simply as Jews--including Israeli children, are combatants.) He became more agitated. "How can you say Hamas and Al Qaeda in the same statement? How can you say the names of Hezbollah and Hamas in the same moment? There is no comparison between Hamas and these groups." His unhappiness at the comparison with Al Qaeda seemed motivated by genuine doctrinal disagreement: Hamas, unlike Al Qaeda, has the finite goal of taking Palestine. Although Hamas is angry at the United States--Abu Obeidah told me, "Israel has America. Who do we have? By God, one day America will pay for its support of the Jews"--it has not attacked American targets. Abu Obeidah's feelings toward Hezbollah, however, seemed to be shaped by resentment of its success. When I asked Mushir al-Masri, a Hamas legislator, if Hezbollah's surprising performance against Israel was a source of humiliation for Hamas, he said, "One group has been living under constant Israeli occupation, the other has had six years without any kind of interference from the Jews. So you have to consider the difficulties the resistance in Palestine has had before you sit there and pass judgment. The occupation is terrible on us." Although Hezbollah is a Shiite group and Hamas is an offshoot of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood movement, they both see the existence of Israel as a severe challenge to Islam and want it dismantled. And both organizations are stridently anti-Semitic. The Hamas charter accuses Jews of using their wealth to "destroy societies and achieve the Zionists' interests," take "control of imperialist states," and persuade those states to "colonize many countries." Al Manar, the Hezbollah television network, recently broadcast a series based on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Over the years, though, I have noticed one difference in the outlooks of the two groups; although both call for the destruction of Israel, Hezbollah officials seem to believe that this is a realistic goal. Hassan Nasrallah, to celebrate the Israelis' departure from Lebanon in 2000, called on the Palestinians to persist in their armed struggle: "In order to liberate your land, you don't need tanks and planes. . . . Israel may own nuclear weapons and heavy weaponry, but, by God, it is weaker than a spider's web." (He has also said that accomplishing this is, ultimately, the Palestinians' job.) Hamas, because of its intimate connection to Israel--most of its leaders have spent time in Israeli prisons--seemed to have a better understanding of Israel's strength, and of its permanence. And, of course, the occupation of Lebanon was not like those of the West Bank and Gaza; no Israeli wanted to stay in south Lebanon, and Barak's withdrawal was met mainly with domestic approval. Shortly before Hamas's founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated by Israel, in 2004, he told me, "Israel is a very strong, militaristic country, and its removal will have to come by God's hand. Until that time, we will have to be prepared to live with it in an arrangement of some kind." Now, though, in the wake of Hezbollah's stand against a faltering Israeli Army, some of Hamas's front-line fighters seem to be adjusting their views on the subject of Israel's durability. Abu Obeidah, for example, told me that he thought the Palestinians could actually bring about the end of Israel. "Why not?" he said. "If you put the Jews under pressure, they run away. They have a very weak society." One day in Beit Hanoun, I went to the apartment of Abu Hussein, a leader of the Qassam Brigades in Gaza. The walls were scarred by bullets, and we could hear Israeli tanks firing nearby. His home had been raided repeatedly by Israeli forces, he said. "I don't sleep here. I just come for an hour at a time." We sat in his living room, which was decorated with posters of various Hamas leaders who had been assassinated. In the most prominent spot was a portrait of Salah Shehadeh, a senior Hamas commander in Gaza, who was killed in 2002, along with his wife, daughter, and twelve others, nine of them children, when the Israeli Air Force bombed his apartment building. Abu Hussein was one of Shehadeh's bodyguards, but he had not been on duty on the night of the attack. "I would have been happy to die with him," he said. He asked what I'd like to drink, and called out to the next room, "Gilad! Bring us some coffee!" His fifteen-year-old son, Hussein, who was sitting on the couch beside him, laughed. Abu Hussein spoke about what he saw as the slow but persistent decline in the morale of the Jewish state. The pullout from Gaza "proved that the Jews are scared of us," he said. "In Lebanon, you remember, the Jews ran away six years ago because Hezbollah drove them out with fierce fighting. This proves that only by fighting can we make the Jews do what we want. "Yes, we don't have tanks," he said, acknowledging the cannon fire outside his window. "But we have martyrs. Look at the faces on my wall. We are all willing to die to win back our homeland. The Jews will leave Palestine rather than die. That's the difference." When I remarked that the situation in Gaza had deteriorated since the Hamas election victory, he replied, "It's a long war. We will bring the liberation of Palestine to the people. In any case, how can you say Hamas hasn't helped its people? We drove the Jews from the settlements." As we sat in Abu Hussein's living room, he pulled his son, Hussein, close to him. Hussein is a spirited ninth grader whose passion, he told me, is drawing. "I want him to finish his studies, but if he happens to die I don't have a problem," his father said, "so long as he dies as a martyr, and on the condition that he takes Jews with him when he dies. I will be happy if he dies this way." Hussein ran out of the room, and came back with a photograph of himself. "This is my martyr picture," he said, handing it to me. In the photograph, he wore khaki shirt and pants and held an AK-47. "If I die, this is the photo that will appear on the martyr posters in Gaza." All of his schoolmates have a "martyr photo," he said, "so when we get killed we'll have the best posters." "Islam is winning," his father said. "The second intifada was stronger than the first intifada, and the next one will be stronger than this one. We'll keep improving our weapons and rockets, and we're not afraid of martyrdom. We're happy to sacrifice our families to win this battle." Hussein said, "I'm his only son, and he wants me to die!" Then he laughed, and put his arm around his father. In Gaza, the most opulent villas belong mainly to the potentates of Fatah, whose time in power was marked by corruption and an inability to provide basic services, despite infusions of foreign aid. Since winning the January election, Hamas leaders have seemed refreshingly uninterested in the material privileges of power, but they also seem unwilling to acknowledge their own failures of governance. "Hamas never expected to win power," Hisham Abdel Razek, a prominent Fatah leader in Gaza, told me. "They expected to win forty per cent of the vote. They're not ready for this." Razek said that he saw Hamas's rocket campaign as an act of self-sabotage. "I think Hamas wants to show the world that they can't manage Gaza, that they really can't be trusted," he said. Hamas's position is that Israel is still to blame for the debasement of Gaza. Mushir al-Masri, the Hamas legislator, said that the occupation continues as long as Gaza's airspace and borders fall under Israeli control. "You saw it at Erez," he said. "We're in a prison." I brought up the Israeli argument that if Hamas were allowed to take control of Gaza's borders it would import rockets and anti-tank weapons. "Resistance is a right," Masri said, reflexively. He was defensive, as well, about Hamas's performance in the management of Gaza's economy, which is somnolent. An international boycott has forced high Hamas officials to smuggle cash into Gaza in order to meet their financial obligations. The Hamas foreign minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar, was caught by customs officials loyal to Fatah carrying twenty million U.S. dollars across the Egyptian border. (The money was turned over to the Finance Ministry.) There is also a foreboding of civil war between Fatah and Hamas. For several months following the elections, clashes erupted repeatedly; in the fiercest fighting, in May, which involved several exchanges of gunfire and kidnappings, three gunmen were killed and at least ten others were injured. No one is starving to death in Gaza, but very few people are working. The economic benefits of Israel's withdrawal have yet to materialize. One day, I visited the remains of the Israeli settlements, which had occupied about twenty per cent of Gaza's territory, including much of its seashore. Piles of rubble stood at the site of Netzarim, once a settlement of some five hundred Israelis. I asked a Palestinian journalist who had travelled there with me why no one had built apartments for the residents of Gaza's crowded refugee camps, or even a soccer field. "They're waiting for the international community to help," he said. We walked through the remains of the settlement. Only a few walls still stood. On one, we saw garish, spray-painted pictures of exploding Qassam rockets and the words "We are victorious." In July, I visited an artillery battery on a dusty field in Israel's far north. The ceasefire was three weeks away, and the soldiers, reservists, were firing 155-mm. howitzer shells into south Lebanon. I had driven up with the historian Michael Oren, who is a fellow at the center-right Shalem Center but has also been a critic of the settlers. Oren had been drafted into active service--he is a reserve major in the Army spokesman's office--and his task that morning was to guide the "Today" show news anchor Ann Curry to a front-line position so that she could interview soldiers. At a checkpoint, Oren explained Curry's mission to the commander of the artillery battalion. "Hem antishemim?" the commander asked, half jokingly. "Are they antiSemites?" "No," Oren answered. "They're from NBC." Oren was accompanied on his rounds by the screenwriter Dan Gordon, who wrote "The Hurricane," and who served in the Israeli Army as a young man. He had come to Israel this summer to help the Army explain itself to the foreign press, but he was having a hard time understanding Israel's strategy--an air campaign that was simultaneously aggressive and ineffectual, and a stop-and-start ground campaign conducted by ill-equipped and poorly led troops. "If you can figure out even the tactical goals here, let me know," Gordon said, as we drove down Katyusha Alley. Oren, like Gordon, was depressed by the events of the summer. "I don't lament leaving Gaza, not for a second," he told me. "I'm mourning the fact that we didn't respond the first time they fired Qassam rockets at us. That's when we began to hemorrhage the benefits of the unilateral disengagement. It's a very simple calculus--you can shoot the Jews out of Lebanon, you can shoot them out of Gaza, why not shoot them out of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem? It's a logical syllogism. I don't fault them for making that syllogism at all." Oren said that among the victims of Israel's unimpressive response to Hezbollah would be the Palestinian moderates. "The way this war is being understood will kill whatever minuscule chance remains for talks with moderate Palestinians," he said. "Hezbollah is a hero. The thinking among the Palestinians would be: 'Hezbollah beat you guys and you ran away, and now I'm supposed to sit down at the table and make concessions to you?' We hurt the Palestinian moderates when Barak unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. The proof of the failure of the policy is in the rockets Hezbollah is firing at us. We did more damage to the Palestinian moderates from our lack of strength than from our lack of magnanimity." A few days later, I went to see Ehud Barak in his Tel Aviv office. In a photograph on the wall, taken in 1972, a thirty-year-old Barak, then a commando, stood on the wing of a hijacked Sabena airliner, pistol in hand, looking down on a dead terrorist. The events of recent days have not emptied him of his legendary self-assuredness. "I'm very proud of my decision to pull out from Lebanon, which ended a tragedy that cost us the lives of a thousand Israelis over eighteen years, without ever increasing the protection of Israel's north from Katyushas," he told me. "If we hadn't pulled out from every square inch of Lebanese territory, we would not now be enjoying the moral high ground in the world that we now enjoy." He paused for a moment, and then adjusted his analysis: "The moral high ground that we enjoyed at the beginning of this operation, and to an extent enjoy now." Barak doesn't agree that Israeli unilateralism has undermined Palestinian moderates. To Barak, who failed to reach a permanent peace agreement with Yasir Arafat at Camp David, in July of 2000, the Palestinians have consistently undermined themselves. "We tried for a decade to act on the assumption that in the P.L.O. we had a partner that could accept the paradigm of two states for two peoples, and, unfortunately, after ten years we saw it failing--and I know this perhaps better than anyone else," he said. "It failed not because we were not ready to go the extra mile but because the other side had a strategy of redrawing the horizon whenever we came close to a solution." President Clinton, who oversaw the negotiations at Camp David, later wrote that Arafat made a "colossal mistake" by not accepting that offer or a subsequent one. A few months later, when I asked Marwan Barghouti, the West Bank Fatah leader, why Arafat had not made a counteroffer to Barak, he told me, "Egypt got one hundred per cent of the Sinai back in exchange for peace, and Hezbollah got back one hundred per cent of Lebanon through armed resistance. Why should we take less than one hundred per cent?" When we spoke, the second Palestinian intifada was already under way. Despite his disappointment at Camp David, and the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah, Barak said that he believes, at least sometimes, that there are Palestinian moderates with whom Israel can negotiate. "I'm not sure, but probably it is possible," he said. "We should always be optimistic. You can't do it with Hamas and Hezbollah. They get their orders directly from Heaven, and their orders are to destroy us. But with Fatah people it might be possible." Marwan Barghouti is the most popular Fatah politician in the West Bank, and perhaps in Gaza, a man frequently spoken of as a possible future President of the Palestinian state. In 2004, Barghouti was convicted of aiding in the murders of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox monk and is now serving five consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison. The Israeli government says that Barghouti is not a suitable negotiating partner--"He's passe," Avi Dichter, the Internal Security Minister, said--but other Israelis, particularly on the left, predict that he will one day be released from jail. In Israeli government circles, some have speculated that Barghouti could be freed in an elaborate prisoner exchange involving the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who is in an American prison, as well as Shalit and the two soldiers captured by Hezbollah. In the nineteen-nineties, Barghouti was a favored interlocutor of the Israeli left, a stalwart advocate of a two-state compromise, but in the first two years of the second Palestinian intifada both his rhetoric and his actions became extreme. "Negotiations without armed resistance didn't work," he told me in 2000. "So now we have to have both." The following year, when I spoke to him again, he called the Israeli government "the Tel Aviv leadership," a term that is sometimes used by those who deny Israel's legitimacy, and had become closer to figures in the more radical Palestinian factions. Last month, however, Barghouti's wife, Fadwa, who serves as his spokesperson, told me that her husband's understanding of the conflict remains unchanged. "He has always said the Palestinian people have a right to resistance, but that the only solution for this region is two states for two peoples," she said. Fadwa Barghouti, a round-faced woman who is a lawyer by training, seemed haggard when I met her; since the start of this summer's wars, Israeli authorities have not allowed her to see her husband. She has been able to visit her son, Qassam, a twenty-year-old who has been held without charge by the Israelis for the past three years. "It's just a way of putting pressure on Marwan, I think," she said of her son's arrest. I asked Fadwa if she thought that the twin successes of the Muslim rejectionists--Hamas's electoral victory in January, and Hezbollah's military achievements against Israel--have made it more difficult for advocates of compromise with Israel to be heard. "Not if the message is being said by someone with Marwan's credibility," she said. "The fact that he is a resistance figure means that people will listen to him when he speaks about compromise and negotiation." Of course, the Palestinian idea of what constitutes compromise has not often matched the Israeli idea. Barghouti, for one, has spoken about the right of Palestinians who became refugees in 1948--and, by extension, their families--to return to their ancestral homes inside Israel. This would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, so it is unacceptable to most Israelis. But other Palestinian moderates have said that the refugees could be settled on the West Bank and in Gaza. "Everything is still open for discussion," Hisham Abdel Razek told me. He is a former Palestinian minister of prisoner affairs, and one of the most prominent voices for moderation in Gaza. "Right now, emotions are in charge, but that can change," he said. "I was emotional myself once." He looked down at his hands, which were scarred thirty years ago when a bomb that he was trying to plant in the Israeli town of Rishon LeZion exploded prematurely. He served twenty-one years in prison for that attempt. Like many Palestinian moderates, Razek blames Israel for the weakness of Fatah. "Israel doesn't help the situation at all," he said. "It has strengthened Hamas and Hezbollah in so many different ways, and they never try to strengthen the moderate camp." He said that Sharon's refusal to acknowledge that Arafat's successors might have been more willing to make the hard compromises necessary for peace was a mistake. He added, "If the pullout from Gaza had been done as part of a negotiation with the Palestinian Authority, Fatah would still be in power here. Hamas would have lost. But Hamas appeals to the emotions, not to the intellect." There is little reason to believe that Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat's successor, could have made a durable pact with Israel. He is considered by both sides to be ineffective. But Ariel Sharon virtually assured Abbas's failure, and Hamas's rise to power, by refusing to enter into negotiations with him. The battle between Fatah and Hamas might be the crucial war for Israel's future. In the short term, Israel's struggle with Iran is more consequential, but the possibility of a permanent peace hinges directly on the ability of Fatah moderates to convince Palestinians that Hamas's path is self-defeating. "There's no alternative except negotiations," Rafiq Hamdouna, a former Fatah leader who heads an organization of Palestinians who have served time in Israeli jails, told me last month. "The only realistic solution is a two-state solution. There are many people here who believe this." But he added that the Israeli siege, the temptations of violent death, and Hezbollah's example have made it difficult for Palestinians to recognize the advantages of unheroic compromise. "My son Basel came to me one day and said he wanted to be a martyr bomber," he told me. "I had to keep calm. I said to him, 'Basel, do you know what happens when you blow yourself up?' He just looked at me. I said, 'You don't go to Heaven. You go into a hole in the ground, and you get covered up with dirt.'" I was reminded of Abu Hussein, the Qassam commander in Beit Hanoun, who had had a very different answer for his son. "Every father in Gaza has the same conversation with his sons," Hamdouna said. "Every father faces this." http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_gaza_the_forgotten.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/tny/letter_from_gaza_the_forgotten.php The New Yorker Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:00:00 -0500 A Writer's Notes and Comments on the Mideast Melissa Block, host: New Yorker writer Jeffrey Goldberg has just returned from a reporting trip to the Middle East. He was in northern Israel and Gaza. On previous trips he spent a good deal of time in southern Lebanon, meeting with the leaders and members of Hezbollah. I asked him if he hears anything different in Hezbollah's rhetoric during this conflict. Jeffrey Goldberg: What they're getting better at is adjusting their rhetoric for Western ears so as not to sound anti-Semitic. And they've been more careful, I've noticed lately. Maybe people aren't asking them these questions but even when they're asked, as you did, you know he's using now a traditional Palestinian rejection as formulation about Israel. I'm not going to say I recognize Israel's right to exist. I'm going to acknowledge that it exists, which of course is not the same thing. And it's not exactly a recipe for long term calm and peace in the region. Block: And it goes far beyond that. I mean, in your travels in southern Lebanon, you found very explicit signs of exactly how Hezbollah sees Israel and sees the Jews. Goldberg: Literally, one of the signs. There was a billboard that they had planted about ten feet from the Israeli border. And it was a billboard that had a blown-up photograph of a Hezbollah fighter holding the severed head of an Israeli commando, and basically threatening all sorts of, you know, vile acts to come against Israel. It's a very, very radical, anti Semitic organization and we need to acknowledge that. Because if we acknowledge that, then we'll understand what the long term hope is or not is for disarmament and for Hezbollah to join the political process in Lebanon without arms. Block: Is there a hope that that could happen? Goldberg: No. Probably not. I should never say never. But in 2002, when I spent much of the summer there, there was a debate at the time in Western circles. Is Hezbollah becoming part of the political process or will it maintain its core identity as a Jihadist organization? And there were big splits in the community of people who study these things. And a lot of people thought that they were going to give up their arms. They were going to stop this. Of course, they didn't. And so I'm surprised now when people look at this organization today and say well, now they can disarm. They have no incentive to disarm. If anything, they've come out less powerful on the ground, obviously, at least for the moment, because they've been degraded. Their weapons have been degraded and their fighters have been killed. But they come out empowered. They come out as the vanguard, as the leading edge of the Islamic fight against Israel. I can see no reason why they would want to give up their arms. Block: You hear Hezbollah described often as a state within a state in Lebanon and I wonder whether that actually understates their strength at this point? Goldberg: It's not a state within a state. It's a state that controls a state. They don't control it in the same way that al-Qaida controlled the Taliban, but they certainly have a veto power over its progress, as we have just seen. They invited Israeli attacks that have set back the country I don't know how many years, and it's sort of interesting because the Bush administration for one has argued that the Cedar Revolution of Lebanon, the democratization process in Lebanon, is proof that the Middle East is progressing toward democracy and greater freedom. And I was always struck by that, because the Bush administration argument seemed hollow. It just seems to me that all this talk of Lebanon as being on the road to democracy is a bit premature, to say the least. You can't have a viable democracy when a terrorist militia has functional veto power over the acts of your government. Block: When you talk to people, Shiite Muslims in the south of Lebanon, do they share Hezbollah's views about Jews, about Israel? Would that be widespread? Goldberg: Hezbollah itself, Hezbollah's ideologues, have very advanced and convoluted and complicated theories about Jews. I was in Bint Jbail, the town that people are talking about, one of the centers of the fighting. I was there four years ago, and you don't pick up that sort of European style anti- Semitism. By European style, I'm talking about the archaic sort of European style, fascist anti-Semitism. You pick, obviously, a great deal of resentment about Israel. There is not that same quality, the average person, that same quality of Iranian style theocratic anti-Semitism that one finds in the ruling councils of Hezbollah. You have resentment toward Israel, but I think many of the people there would be happy, and have been happy, to live in peace with Israel a few miles to the south. Block: They would be? Goldberg: It's been a pretty good six years in the south of Lebanon since the Israeli withdrawal in 2000. Business is booming. When I was there, building was going on like crazy. People were making money. It wasn't a bad life there, and I think Israel had receded from many people's minds as a problem. Israel had withdrawn behind an internationally recognized boundary, and they were done with it. It's not analogous to what's going on in Gaza or the West Bank, where the lives of the Palestinians and Israelis are deeply intertwined. The people of south Lebanon, I think to some degree had forgotten about Israel. And certainly one could argue that Israel, especially its military establishment, had forgotten about Hezbollah. The past six years have been a strange period where one organization, Hezbollah, was building up for something, the Israelis were ignoring it and I don't think the average Lebanese person in the south or in Beirut fully understood what was coming. Block: Was there, do you think, a serious miscalculation on the Israeli side? Goldberg: Yes. There are tactical miscalculations, obviously. I think that Israel is in a position right now - I mean, I think the government of Israel is in a position right now where it might not survive. You have another aspect here, which is very interesting, which is that you have a government whose platform has now been taken away from it. Ehud Olmert and the Kadima Party were elected to do one thing, to disengage from the West Bank as Ariel Sharon had disengaged from Gaza. Pull out Jewish settlers, bring the lines back in. That's dead. That's not going to happen any more. The Israeli people have recognized the futility of unilateral disengagement. So combining these two things - the fact that you have a ruling party that has no platform anymore with the fact that many Israelis believe that both tactical and strategic miscalculations were made in this war - and you have a recipe for longer term instability in Israeli itself. Block: It would bring down this government, you think? Goldberg: I think there's a good chance that many people in the army will lose their jobs over this. I mean, it's a fascinating thing that the asymmetries here are manifold. By technical standards, Israel did very well in one sense. They probably killed 25 to 30 percent of all Hezbollah fighters. They probably destroyed hundreds of rocket launchers. They certainly destroyed the infrastructure of Hezbollah, and yet it's consensus in Israel that Israel lost this war because Nasrallah is still alive and he comes out of his bunker and he says we won. Block: Jeffrey Goldberg, thanks for coming in. Goldberg: Thank you. Block: Jeffrey Goldberg is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He just returned from a reporting trip to Israel and Gaza. http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/a_writers_notes_and_comments_o.php http://www.jeffreygoldberg.net/articles/interviews/a_writers_notes_and_comments_o.php Interviews Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:00:00 -0500 Letter From Washington: Central Casting An enduring predicament of the Democratic Party was revealed one day in August, 2004, when John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for President, and John Edwards, the nominee for Vice-President, visited a soybean-and-cattle farm outside Smithville, Missouri. The announced purpose was to speak about alternative energy sources (soybeans are an important source of biodiesel), but the goal was to express solidarity with rural white voters, who have been abandoning the Democratic Party in disquieting numbers. About a hundred and twenty-five people, mostly farmers, sat on hay bales in an orchard near the farmhouse. Claire McCaskill, the Missouri state auditor, was there, too; she was running for governor and was eager to appraise the two Senators, whose names would be on the ballot with hers. Kerry reminisced about clearing fields on a Massachusetts farm and promised to side with small farmers in their struggles against agribusiness. Teresa Heinz Kerry handed her husband a note, and then stood up to speak, recalling a visit to an organic hog farm in Iowa. "It's really inspiring to see the work that they did," she said, and encouraged her audience to consider organic farming. "It can be done. It's economical, and there is a huge market in America." At that point, Winston Simpson, a hog farmer from Clarence, Missouri, stood up and interrupted. "I said, 'Mrs. Kerry, you've got to understand that hog farmers just freak out when they hear people telling them to go organic,' " Simpson recalled recently. "She looked kind of surprised. I was just there helping out, making a crowd, but I've got an adrenaline problem, and when someone pisses me off I jump up and tell them." Simpson is a grower-finisher; four thousand or so hogs come to him at forty pounds and leave their pens for slaughter two hundred and fifty pounds later. "I'd go broke if we switched to organic farming," he said. His public advice was informed by tactical, rather than ideological, concerns. "I don't have a problem with people raising food organically. If people want to eat that way, fine, but she shouldn't have been pushing that as a solution to the farm problem. A lot of farmers think of those organics as some kind of elitist lunatic-fringe thing." For some, Mrs. Kerry's performance recalled other moments of Democratic campaign obliviousness, like Michael Dukakis's endorsement of Belgian endive as an alternative crop for Iowa farmers. Simpson described himself as a loyal Democrat who would have preferred to attend a better-orchestrated Kerry rally. "I'm even pro-choice-that's how much of a Democrat I am," he said. He came to that position, he explained, through his knowledge of animal husbandry. "If you've ever seen a young heifer get bred too soon, you know what a fiasco that is, which is why I think teen-agers should have access to abortion. But I'm out of the mainstream on this." He continued, "I always tell people who are running for office that if they want to get elected in Missouri, when someone asks them for their feelings about Roe v. Wade don't give some long scientific talk. Just say, 'I'm against abortion,' and move on quick." Simpson, whose son, a former marine, served in Iraq, wishes that Kerry had won in 2004. "Kerry couldn't connect with people," he said. "It's too bad, because just think if they got elected-maybe they could have turned this whole thing around in Iraq. Maybe we would be better off today. But they never took the lesson that you shouldn't give the Republicans things that they could use against you." Claire McCaskill lost her 2004 race for governor, but the contest was close-fifty-one per cent to forty-eight. Kerry lost Missouri to George W. Bush by a slightly wider margin, fifty-three per cent to forty-six. This year, McCaskill is running for the U.S. Senate. Polls show that the race is a statistical tie, and analysts from both parties consider McCaskill to be one of the two or three strongest Democratic challengers in the country. McCaskill says she is a centrist. She is one of many Democrats-Hillary Clinton being the most visible, and the most diligent-who are trying to establish themselves with middle-class moderates. These candidates see an uncommon opportunity this November-and in November of 2008-to win back many "Reagan Democrats," the voters whom the Party lost to Ronald Reagan a quarter century ago: the white working class, suburbanites, and Catholics. The collapse of President Bush's popularity-brought on most directly by his detached performance during Hurricane Katrina, the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals, and public displeasure with the mismanaged war in Iraq-is working to the Democrats' advantage. Polls show that even on national security-the issue that has favored Republicans since George McGovern's candidacy, in 1972-Republicans are now no more credible than Democrats. "We could be seeing in George W. Bush a Hooverian Presidency," the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz told me. "This would go a long way to helping the Democrats rebuild a new version of the grand Roosevelt coalition"-one that included a great measure of the country's working class. Wilentz added, though, that "what you need for a Roosevelt coalition, of course, is a Roosevelt." For the midterm elections in November, the Democratic Party does not need a Roosevelt. Some agree with Newt Gingrich, who recently told Time that if he were a Democratic strategist he would run a campaign that simply asked voters, "Had enough?" Many liberal Democrats would like to make Bush's record the focus of the upcoming campaign. Centrist Democrats, though-particularly those running in states that have cooled to their party-think that something more is needed this year, and certainly for 2008, when Bush will be retiring. They argue that their party must speak in language familiar to, among others, the disaffected hog farmers of Missouri. To take control of the Senate-no longer a fantastical notion-the Democrats need to win six seats; for a majority in the House of Representatives, which has been in Republican hands since 1994, they must take back fifteen. The Senate races are populated with centrists like McCaskill. Among those running for the Senate are Jim Pederson, a shopping-center developer in Arizona; Harold Ford, Jr., a thirty-six-year-old African-American congressman from Memphis, who is running a campaign meant to appeal to conservative white Tennesseeans; and Bob Casey, the anti-abortion state treasurer in Penn-sylvania, who hopes to defeat the incumbent Rick Santorum. McCaskill's Republican opponent, the incumbent Jim Talent, has been hurt in the polls by aligning himself against a Missouri ballot initiative to protect stem-cell research. His stand has been inconsistent, which has alienated some of the evangelical Christians who are part of his core constituency. McCaskill, an ex-county prosecutor who believes in the death penalty and says that she worships, in the Missouri manner, "God and common sense," has made her name as the state auditor by running uncompromising investigations of state government performance. Winston Simpson, the hog farmer, said of her, "She's the kind of woman who could really jerk Donald Rumsfeld through a knothole." McCaskill is disarmingly loquacious. She is fifty-two and speaks with a flat Missouri accent; the day we met, she was wearing a red suit of a style that, in Washington, one associates with Republican women. "I'm having a good day," she said, almost as soon as we'd said hello. "You want to know why? I'll tell you why. Laura Bush is coming to the state to campaign for Talent, and Vice-President Cheney and the President of the United States are coming, too. They must be scared of someone." The candidate was on a domestic errand. Her sixteen-year-old daughter was applying for a learner's permit, and had forgotten her I.D., so her mother was making a detour home. "Oh, damn," McCaskill said, with a laugh. "I didn't want you to see that I was a rich lady." She is indeed rich, and lives in an oversized modern swooped-roof house beside a creek in a St. Louis suburb. But her wealth is of recent vintage: her second marriage, in 2002, was to a developer. She grew up in small-town southern Missouri. Her father's family kept a feed mill, and her mother had a drugstore that, she says, was "put out of business when Wal-Mart opened up." She worked her way through college and law school as a waitress, and later married David Exposito, with whom she had three children. It was a troubled marriage; Exposito nearly ended McCaskill's political career when he was arrested on a riverboat casino and charged with possession of marijuana. He was sentenced to community service, and he and McCaskill subsequently divorced. As we drove past strip malls and big-box stores, McCaskill talked about the Democrats she most admires. "I would say I go back before McGovern to find role models. Clinton was an exception in some ways, but certainly not on a personal level. Harry Truman, J.F.K.-those are the role models." She added, "I'm not a liberal. When I was a prosecutor, I saw child murderers, people like that, and so I believe that there is such a thing as evil in this world." In many ways, McCaskill sounds like any traditional Democrat. She speaks out against oil companies and pharmaceutical companies-she usually gets her biggest applause when she condemns Bush's prescription-drug plan-and she is in favor of abortion rights, although she doesn't make it a central issue. "If people ask, I tell them I'm pro-choice," she said. "That doesn't mean I can't understand the other side of the debate, though." She went on, "Being a Democrat is about balance. It's about being moderate and truthful and strong. Harry Truman, leaders like that, they were strong enough to take on foreign enemies when they needed to, but they were also strong enough to know when not to fight, when to use other weapons besides military force. That's the message the Democratic Party should be sending. We should let the American people know we want to work with allies, work with the U.N., and that we don't like war, but that we'll defend this country's interests with everything we've got." Referring to the Kerry-Edwards campaign stop, she said, "I'm sure Teresa's motives were fine. But I think it's a tone thing. It's the 'We know better' thing. Some of it is completely unfair, but there's a critical number of Missourians who believe that people from the East Coast or West Coast don't think that people in the heartland are smart." In 2004, exit polls showed that sixty-one per cent of voters who said that they attended church on Sunday supported Bush; Kerry received the support of thirty-nine per cent of the churchgoers. Fifty-nine per cent of voters who were married with children supported Bush, to Kerry's forty. It is difficult for Democrats, who are so closely associated with abortion and gay marriage, to shake off entirely their McGovern-era "acid, amnesty, and abortion" label, and the Party's recent history is a reason that many centrist Democrats still feel uncomfortable about the election, last year, of Howard Dean to chair their party. Dean had backing from the Party's antiwar wing, which supported his briefly astounding run for the Democratic nomination in 2004, but his main support came from state Party leaders, and he has rewarded them by funding a handful of field workers in each state to help fortify the local parties. Dean has tried to reach out to, among others, evangelical Christians, and he doesn't like what he suggests is the Party's gradual abandonment of the socially conservative but economically liberal working class. "The Democratic Party was built on four pillars-the Roosevelt intellectuals, the Catholic Church, labor unions, and African-Americans," he said not long ago. "But we had stopped communicating with the Catholics and with labor, and so all you had left was the Roosevelt intellectuals and the African-Americans." Nevertheless, Dean often seems almost chemically incapable of communicating effectively beyond his base. Not long ago, at a rally in a union hall in a grimy industrial section of Albuquerque, New Mexico, he drew hundreds of Bush-loathing liberals of the sort who animated his 2004 candidacy. The crowd consisted of union members, including many from unions that represent government workers; Navajo activists from New Mexico's vast reservations; a modest number of hardscrabble Latinos; and a much greater number of retirement-age whites, some of whom came to the event from Santa Fe and Taos and who wore sandals and turquoise jewelry. Dean was late arriving from the airport, so a succession of local Democratic politicians took to the stage to deliver excoriations of the Republicans. (The popular centrist governor, Bill Richardson, skipped the rally, telling me later that he had been busy.) Many nodded in sympathy when the New Mexico secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron, told a story about the flag that flies over her house. A neighbor-a veteran, she noted-pointed out one day that her flag was "torn and tattered" and asked her if she wanted him to mend it or replace it. She said no, and explained, "I keep it here because it's going to stay flying tattered and torn because that's how this war is going. It's going nowhere. And it will come down when this war is over." The woman seated next to me, Carol Ann Bowman, the secretary of the Torrance County Democratic Party, leaned over. "I just hate this war," she said. "I don't understand how anyone could vote for Bush." Then she confessed, "I have two children who were in the military, and they voted for him. I just don't understand why." Dean came into the room at a gallop. The applause was raucous and sustained. "It's like a Dean rally," Bowman said, and, at the podium, Dean proved that he is still ready to follow his own muse, even in public. He was soon improvising an attack on Vice-President Cheney. Returning to Cheney's accidental shooting of a hunting companion in February, he said, "I don't want to get on Cheney's case too much, but this is a hunting state, right? I come from a hunting state. What kind of guy has a beer at lunch and then goes hunting and shoots a guy in the face? For God's sake." Dean's face was turning purple and his neck muscles were stretched tight. "I mean, this is a hunting state, this is New Mexico, right? Vermont's the same way. You know, you don't hunt like that. What kind of hunting program is that? I never heard a respectable hunter do that kind of stuff. Nonsense. Enough already. Go back to Vermont-I mean, go back to Washington. For God's sake, don't go to Vermont." Dean looked over at his fretting public-relations man. "All right, we won't go too far. I can see my staff and the choir over here are getting really nervous." His words were cheered enthusiastically. So was his praise for the absent Richardson, who recently ended electronic touch-screen voting in the state, reverting to a paper-ballot system. Dean got his loudest applause when he suggested that Republicans were conniving with the manufacturers of electronic voting machines, and he singled out Diebold, a favorite target of bloggers whose rage against the Bush Administration seems limitless. The only statement that was greeted with apathy was a blunt pledge to confront America's enemies. If the Democrats are restored to power, he said, "we will not permit Iran to be a nuclear power, we will make the deal with the Chinese to get nuclear weapons out of North Korea, and we will catch Osama bin Laden or kill him, one or the other." One of the Democratic National Committee's initiatives under Dean has been to place campaign field workers in every state rather than to concentrate resources where the Party's chances seem most promising-in particular so-called "red states" on the electoral map that may be leaning Democratic. Dean told the crowd that his fifty-state program was going to pay dividends. "If we can win races in Mississippi and Alabama and Utah after only less than a year, because these organizers haven't even been on the ground a year, we can win races anywhere," he said. "You know why? Because this is a Democratic country, with a big 'D.' We ought to be speaking about our values everywhere we go, because the truth is, American values are consistent with Democratic Party values. Most Americans believe that it is immoral for small children to go to bed hungry at night, and we believe those kids ought to be fed, but the Republicans are cutting school-lunch programs." Dean's fifty-state plan has caused fissures in the Party. Congressional leaders want the D.N.C. to direct its money to states where the odds-and the polls-favor the Democrats. Scott Pastrick, a former D.N.C. treasurer, said, "A lot of people think this strategy is pie in the sky, and this feeling is shared by a lot of the traditional donors. They're wondering why we're not putting resources in winnable states." Representative Rahm Emanuel, of Illinois, who chairs the Democrats' congressional campaign committee, and who has fought openly with Dean on this question, is more disparaging. When I suggested that Democrats in Mississippi were probably grateful for Dean's attention, he said, "If you think that Mississippi and Ohio are the same thing, you're an idiot." In a restaurant in Santa Fe after the Albuquerque rally, I asked Dean if the crowd's lack of reaction to his stand on national security surprised him. His supporters, he replied, "are more liberal than I am." That is true. Because of his early opposition to the Iraq war, Dean was often characterized as a leftist, but he is a pro-gun, anti-gay-marriage (although pro-civil union) fiscal conservative who sounds hawkish on the question of a nuclear Iran. Dean's stance is actually in harmony with the idea put forth by Third Way, a new centrist group that advises Democrats on ways to speak to moderate voters. (Third Way's views are similar to those of the Democratic Leadership Council, which helped Bill Clinton win the Presidency in 1992, but more sharply focussed on the practical business of electing Democrats.) Third Way argues-and Dean agrees-that the Democrats risk perpetual irrelevance if they write off entire sections of the country. However, when I asked Dean, not long ago, if Democrats might have to risk alienating core supporters in order to attract national-security voters and cultural conservatives, he replied, his color rising, "Certainly not. Absolutely not. Why would you even think of such a thing? It goes contrary to everything we're doing. No, it's the wrong thing to do." For Governor Bill Richardson, a possible Presidential candidate in 2008, "the key to victory is to develop a coherent national message of optimism and opportunity and not incessantly try to appeal to our base." He said last week, "It's more important to try to appeal to disaffected Democrats and Independents who are on the verge of coming back to us. What is important is that we not just criticize the President, that we have alternative, positive policies." Democrats have a set of policy prescriptions that they hope to enact if they win majorities in Congress, such as increasing the minimum wage, rolling back parts of the prescription drug law, and reinstating budget deficit controls. But they are only muddling toward a Gingrich-style Contract with America, which, in its drama and clarity, gave 1994 voters an understanding of national Republican priorities. Even on the minimum wage there is no consensus: Party moderates believe that a proposal to make college tuition taxdeductible would appeal to more voters than a promise to raise the minimum wage. As if policy differences weren't enough, the Party's many spokesmen tend to speak disparately and concurrently, especially on matters of national security. Witness the confusion, not long ago, when Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, a former marine, called for an immediate pullout of troops from Iraq, leading to graceless scenes of Democratic leaders scrambling to embrace him and keep him distant, sometimes simultaneously. Rahm Emanuel, who worked in the Clinton White House, says that the collapse of Bush's support-recent polls put his approval rating in the high twenties-is not enough to propel the Democrats back to power. "We still have to pick the lock here," he said, referring to the difficulty of unseating incumbents, especially in congressional districts that, over the years, have been gerrymandered into single-party redoubts. Some of his colleagues, however, do little to restrain their optimism. "I'll tell you this: if the election were held today, we would win," Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, who represents San Francisco, told me earlier this month. Pelosi appeared excited by the prospect of one specific consequence of a Democratic victory: "We win in '06, we get subpoena power." Pelosi has said that the Democrats would reserve the right to investigate every aspect of the Bush Administration, including its rationale for the Iraq war. Pelosi's vision of a subpoena-filled 2007 appeals to her party's most liberal supporters. But there is a worry that such a tack might alienate moderates, and that it would motivate otherwise dispirited Republicans to go to the polls. "You know, if you spend your whole day trying to catch the dog that bit you because all you want to do is kick him, you're not going to win many friends," Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana, told me. This would be a surmountable problem for Democrats if liberals outnumbered conservatives. But the liberal base of the Democratic Party, even fully mustered for battle, is too small to carry a Democrat to the Presidency, or even to many of the Senate seats being contested in 2006. The math is unforgiving, according to Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way. "Exit polls consistently show that twenty-one per cent of Americans self-identify as liberal and about thirty-four per cent as conservative," he said. "And a plurality, about forty-five per cent