The Arab_Israeli Conflict

by Jonathan Rynhold

  7 Jeffrey Jones, “Liberal Self-Identification Edges Up to New High in 2013: Fifteen-Percentage-Point Conservative Advantage Ties As Smallest to Date,” Gallup, January 10, 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/166787/liberal-self-identification-edges-new-high-2013.aspx.

  8 Jones, “Liberal Self-Identification Edges Up to New High in 2013.”

  9 “Independents Take Center Stage in Obama Era: Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987–2009,” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, May 21, 2009, http://people-press.org/2009/05/21/independents-take-center-stage-in-obama-era/’; “‘Nones’ on the Rise,” Pew Research Religion and Public Life Project, October 9, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx.

  10 For example, see Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989); and Richard Cohen, “Shamir Is Wrong,” Washington Post, September 27, 1991, A29.

  11 Interview with Dennis Ross, December 2012. He termed his approach liberal on domestic issues and centrist on foreign policy.

  12 Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 4–6.

  13 Dennis Ross, Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 3–28.

  14 “Address by President Bill Clinton to the UN General Assembly, September 26, 1994,” U.S. Department of State, http://www.state.gov/p/io/potusunga/207377.htm.

  15 William A. Galston, “Incomplete Victory: The Rise of the New Democrats,” in Peter Berkowitz, ed., Varieties of Progressivism in America (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute Press, 2004).

  16 Beinart, The Good Fight, 173; Ross, Statecraft.

  17 Dennis Ross and David Makovsky, Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East (New York: Viking, 2009), 6, 20; Kenneth M. Pollack, A Path out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East (New York: Random House, 2008), chapter 5.

  18 Michael Walzer, “Five Questions about Terrorism,” Dissent, Winter 2002.

  19 Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 121–153.

  20 Author interview with Dennis Ross.

  21 Ross and Makovsky, Myths, Illusions and Peace; Pollack, A Path out of the Desert; Thomas Friedman, “Order vs. Disorder,” New York Times, July 21, 2006, 19; Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Atlantic Israel-Iran Debate,” Atlantic, August 27, 2010.

  22 Pollack, A Path out of the Desert; Ross, Statecraft, 295.

  23 Ross and Makovsky, Myths, Illusions and Peace; Pollack, A Path out of the Desert.

  24 Ross, Statecraft, 228.

  25 Interview with David Makovsky, June 2012.

  26 Richard Cohen, “Israel’s Answer to Arafat,” Washington Post, February 8, 2001, A23; Eugene Goodheart, “A Non-Zionist Reflects on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Dissent, Summer 2007.

  27 William Quandt, Peace Process, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 293–295; Dennis Ross, “Taking Stock,” National Interest 73 (Fall 2003); Hilary Leila Krieger, “Ross: Now’s Not Prime Time for Peace Deal,” Jerusalem Post, February 7, 2012.

  28 The Institute is a leading think tank on Middle East policy. It is pro-Israel but nonpartisan.

  29 Interview with David Makovsky, June 2013.

  30 Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 224–226.

  31 Ross and Makovsky, Myths, Illusions and Peace, 278; Goodheart, “A Non-Zionist Reflects on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”; Gershom Gorenberg, “Burning Gush,” New Republic, April 18, 1994, 21; Leon Wieseltier, “Letting Go,” New Republic, October 4, 1993, 27–29; Jeffrey Goldberg, “Israel’s Self-Delegitimization Movement,” Atlantic, December 23, 2010; Richard Cohen, “Settlements That Settle Nothing,” Washington Post, June 15, 2004, A23; Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem; Richard Cohen, “Whose Israel Shall It Be?” Washington Post, February 24, 2009, A13.

  32 Richard Cohen, “Apartheid? Not Israel,” Washington Post, March 2, 2010, A15.

  33 Richard Cohen, “Bowing to Historical Forces,” Washington Post, September 3, 1993, A25; Thomas Friedman, “The New Math,” New York Times, January 15, 2003, 21; Jeffrey Goldberg, “Is Israel America’s Ultimate Ally?” Atlantic, April 26, 2011.

  34 Mitchell Cohen, “Anti-Semitism and the Left That Doesn’t Learn,” Dissent, Winter 2008; Richard Cohen, “Why Boycott Israel?” Washington Post, April 24, 2007, A2; Thomas Friedman, “Campus Hypocrisy,” New York Times, October 16, 2002, 23; Leon Wieseltier, “At the Window,” New Republic, March 27, 2009, 48; Richard Cohen, “Zionism: Refuge, Not Racism,” Washington Post, September 6, 2001, A23; Thomas Friedman, “The Gridlock Gang,” New York Times, February 26, 2003, 25; Jeffrey Goldberg, “The New Israel Fund, Dipping Its Toe into the BDS Swamp,” Atlantic, November 17, 2010.

  35 Kupchan and Trubowitz, “Dead Center”; Robert Y. Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, “Foreign Policy, Meet the People,” National Interest 97 (September–October 2008), 37–42; Beinart, “When Politics No Longer Stops at the Water’s Edge.”

  36 On the influence of Realists in the Obama administration, see James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Viking 2012), 156–167.

  37 Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); G. John Ikenberry, “An Agenda for Liberal International Renewal,” in Michele A. Flourney and Shawn Brimley, eds., Finding Our Way: Debating American Grand Strategy (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security: 2008), 43–60; G. John Ikenberry et al., The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Henry Nau, Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), chapter 2.

  38 Peter Beinart, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (New York: Harper, 2010).

  39 G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty under Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century: Final Report of the Princeton Project on National Security (Princeton, NJ: Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, 2006).

  40 Beinart, “When Politics No Longer Stops at the Water’s Edge.”

  41 Ikenberry and Slaughter, Forging a World of Liberty under Law.

  42 Ikenberry, “An Agenda for Liberal International Renewal.”

  43 Dana H. Allin and Steven Simon, “America’s Predicament,” Survival, 46, no. 4 (2004): 7–30; Dan Kurtzer and Scott Lasensky, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2008), 8; Daniel Levy, “Political Islam 101,” American Prospect, March 2009, 33; Marc Lynch, “Veiled Truths,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 4 (July–August 2010).

  44 Bruce O. Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology, and Future (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008).

  45 Michael Lind, “American Strategy Project – Grand Strategy No. 1,” New America Foundation, March 13, 2003, http://newamerica.net/publications/policy/american_strategy_project_grand_strategy_no_1.

  46 Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, America and the World (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 21–29.

  47 Shibley Telhami et al., “Middle Eastern Views of the United States: What Do the Trends Indicate?” Middle East Policy 13, no. 3 (2006); Brzezinski and Scowcroft, America and the World, 19.

  48 Mara Rudman and Brian Katulis, “U.S. Must Lead for Middle East Progress,” Washington Post, May 28, 2007; Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch, and Robert C. Adler, “Window of Opportunity for a Two-State Solution: Policy Recommendations to the Obama Administration on the Israeli-Palestinian Front,” Center for American Progress, July 2009; Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda; Robert Reich, “How to Be Tough on Terror
ism,” American Prospect, November 2001, 48; Daniel Levy, “Fork in the Road Map,” American Prospect, July 2005, 19; Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, “A Durable Middle East Peace,” American Prospect, November 2003, 55; Daniel Levy “Political Islam 101.”

  49 Kurtzer and Lasensky, Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace, 78.

  50 Samuel Berger and James A. Baker III, foreword to Pathways to Peace: America and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, edited by Daniel C. Kurtzer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), vii–xii.

  51 Katulis, Lynch, and Adler, “Window of Opportunity for a Two-State Solution.”

  52 Author interview, January 2013.

  53 Dana H. Allin and Steven Simon, “The Moral Psychology of US Support for Israel,” Survival, 45, no. 3 (2003): 123–144; John Judis, “The Real Foreign-Policy Debate,” American Prospect, May 2002, 10; Brzezinski and Scowcroft, America and the World, 80–81.

  54 Rudman and Katulis, “U.S. Must Lead for Middle East Progress;” Daniel C. Kurtzer, “American Policy, Strategy, and Tactics,” in Kurtzer, ed., Pathways to Peace, 196.

  55 Malley and Agha, “A Durable Middle East Peace,”, 55.

  56 Katulis, Lynch, and Adler, “Window of Opportunity for a Two-State Solution.”

  57 Ibid.; Helena Cobban, “Who Is the Real Hamas?” Salon, March 2, 2006; Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah, “A Path to Peace,” American Prospect, March 2010, 13; Henry Siegman, “Hamas: The Last Chance for Peace?” New York Review of Books, April 27, 2006; Zbigniew Brzezinski et al., “Failure Risks Devastating Consequences,” New York Review of Books, November 8, 2007.

  58 Ernest Sternberg, “Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For,” Orbis, 54 no. 1 (2010): 61–86; Jeffrey C. Isaac, “The Poverty of Progressivism and the Tragedy of Civil Society,” in Peter Berkowitz, ed., Varieties of Progressivism in America (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2004).

  59 Justus Doenecke, “Non-Interventionism of the Left: The Keep America Out of the War Congress, 1938–41,” Journal of Contemporary History, 12, no. 2 (1977): 221–236; Robert Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

  60 Beinart, The Good Fight, 33–53.

  61 Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 6

  62 See Young, Postcolonialism, chapter 26.

  63 Naomi Klein, “Terror’s Greatest Recruitment Tool,” Nation, August 29, 2005; Peter Beinart, The Good Fight, 171; Simon Cottee, “The Culture of Denial: Islamic Terrorism and the Delinquent Left,” Journal of Human Rights, 4, no. 1 (2005): 119–135; Paul Hollander, ed., Understanding Anti-Americanism: It’s Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), 24–27; Noam Chomsky, “The New War against Terror,” transcript, October 18, 2001, http://www.zmag.org/GlobalWatch/chomskymit.htm (no longer available); Tony Smith, “Wilsonianism after Iraq,” in Ikenberry et al., The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century.

  64 Fern Oppenheim, “The Segmentation Study of the American Market, Fourth Quarter 2010,” conducted by the Brand Israel Group and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

  65 Irfan Khawaja, “Essentialism, Consistency and Islam: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism,” Israel Affairs 13, no. 4 (2007); Ronald Niezen, “Postcolonialism and the Utopian Imagination,” Israel Affairs, 13, no. 4 (2007).

  66 Robert Wistrich, “Anti-Semitism and Multiculturalism: The Uneasy Connection,” Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/pprobert.pdf.

  67 Arnold Forster, “American Radicals and Israel” in Robert S. Wistrich, ed., The Left against Zion: Communism, Israel, and the Middle East (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1979), 221–225; Noam Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 17, 28, 119; Michael Neumann, The Case against Israel (Petrolia, CA: CounterPunch, 2005), 7, 13, 61–62, 89, 161; Joel Kovel and Jeff Halper, letters to the editors, in “Israel’s Radical Left; Henry James’s Conservatism,” Azure 42 (2010), http://www.azure.org.il/include/print.php?id=557.

  68 Author interview with Stuart Eizenstat, July 2013, regarding the development of Jimmy Carter’s view of the conflict; John B. Judis, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). One particularly vitriolic work is Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (New York: Nation Books, 2013).

  69 George McGovern, The Essential America: Our Founders and the Liberal Tradition (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 22–23; Tony Judt, “The Rootless Cosmopolitan,” Nation, July 19, 2004, 29; Carter, Palestine, 17–28, 208–209; Naomi Klein, “Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction,” naomiklein.org, January 7, 2009, http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/01/israel-boycott-divest-sanction; Sara Roy, “Apartheid, Israeli-Style,” Nation, July 26, 1993; Sternberg, “Purifying the World.”

  70 Phyllis Bennis, “Death Blow to the Peace Talks,” Nation, March 1, 1993, 264–267; “The US and the Mideast,” Nation, April 8, 2002; “Mideast Mirage?” Nation, March 7, 2005; Henry Siegman, “A Last Chance at Middle East Peace?” Nation, January 12, 2009.

  71 Eric Alterman, “AIPAC’s Back (Oy Vay!),” Nation, July 29, 1996, 24; Philip Weiss, “Israel Lobby Watch,” Nation, September 18, 2006; Alexander Cockburn, “Israel on the Slide: Who’s to Blame?” Nation, September 11, 2006; Michael Massing, “The Israel Lobby,” Nation, June 10, 2002; Judis, Genesis.

  72 Stephen Morris, “Whitewashing Dictatorship in Communist Vietnam and Cambodia,” in Peter Collier and David Horowitz, eds., The Anti-Chomsky Reader (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004), 1–29.

  73 Gerald Steinberg, “Soft Powers Play Hardball: NGOs Wage War against Israel,” Israel Affairs, 12 no. 4 (2006): 748–768.

  74 Robert L. Bernstein, “Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast,” New York Times, October 19, 2009.

  75 Hardball with Chris Matthews, transcript for January 31, 2006, broadcast, updated February 2, 2006, NBC News, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11145182/.

  76 Carter, Palestine, 59–62, 74–80, 98–104.

  77 “Noam Chomsky on Israel, the U.S. and Palestine,” Socialist Worker, March 24, 2001; Richard Falk, “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, June 29, 2007, http://www.oldsite.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/Falk_PalestineGenocide.html; Elhanan Yakira, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 37–45.

  78 The Daily Kos is a discussion forum for activists interested in influencing the Democratic Party. It ranks as the tenth most popular political website in overall traffic, with over a million unique visitors per month. See Adam Levick, “Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism in Progressive U.S. Blogs/News Websites: Influential and Poorly Monitored,” Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism 92 (January 2010). On Far Left anti-Semitism in America, see Stephen H. Norwood, Antisemitism and the American Far Left (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

  79 Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001), chapter 3.

  80 Richard Falk, “Trusting Khomeini,” New York Times, February 16, 1979, A27.

  81 “Judith Butler on Hamas, Hezbollah and the Israel Lobby (2006),” Radical Archives, March 28, 2010, http://radicalarchives.org/2010/03/28/jbutler-on-hamas-hezbollah-israel-lobby/. Ely Karmon, “Hizballah and the Anitglobalization Movement: A New Coalition?” Policywatch 949, Washington Institute, January 27, 2005, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/hizballah-and-the-anitglobalization-movement-a-new-coalition.

  82 On the size of the readership of these publications see Katerina-Eva Matsa, Tom Rosenstiel, and Paul Moore, “The State of the News Media 2011,” Pew Research Center’s Project f
or Excellence in Journalism, http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/magazines-essay/; “About Us,” American Prospect, http://prospect.org/cs/about_tap/our_mission; “About the Review,” New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/about/; Daniel Treiman, “As the Left Says No to War, a Journal’s Editor Dissents,” Jewish Daily Forward, January 31, 2003, http://www.forward.com/articles/9243/.

  83 Richard Cohen, “…And the Rise of the Zealots,” Washington Post, November 6, 1995, A25; Thomas L. Friedman, “Foreign Affairs: Mona and Maya, Yitzhak and Yasir,” New York Times, October 15, 1995, 15.

  84 Leon Wieseltier, “Letting Go”; Michael Walzer, “On the Road,” New Republic, October 4, 1993, 22–26; Michael Kinsley, “TRB: Arafat and Hitler,” New Republic, October 11, 1993, 6; Leon Wieseltier, “Peace and Illusion,” New Republic, March 25, 1996, 12; Thomas L. Friedman, “Foreign Affairs: It’s Time to Separate,” New York Times, January 29, 1995, 15; Richard Cohen, “Tokens of Their Courage,” Washington Post, March 11, 1996, A19; Thomas L. Friedman, “Foreign Affairs: Who Are You?” New York Times, March 6, 1996, 21.