Realism and pragmatism needed on Israel-Palestine, but American policymakers find those very difficult

The current outbreak of violence in Israel-Palestine, clearly initiated by Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government, currently facing the dilemma of being unable to form a new government after elections, is obviously developing quickly at the moment. The Israeli attack on worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque was a very dramatic, highly symbolic act of violence and contempt for not only Palestinians but Muslims generally. (Oliver Holmes and Peter Beaumont, Oliver Holmes in Jerusalem and Peter Beaumont Guardian 05/10/2021; Frank Andrews, Al-Aqsa under attack: How Israel turned holy site into a battleground Middle East Eye 05/12/2021)

Juan Cole has a suggestion for how we should describe it at this point: "a performance of Israeli dominance and Palestinian defiance." (Gaza and Israel’s Kidnapper’s Dilemma: Keeping a Million Children Brutalized in its dark Basement Informed Comment 05/15/2021)

He calls attention to the dramatic disparity of power between the two sides:

Israel’s staccato bombardment campaigns against Gaza (2008-9, 2014, 2021) are not a war. Israel has an army, Gaza does not. Israel has a sophisticated Air Force with 581 aircraft, including fighter jets and helicopter gunships. The Palestinians in Gaza don’t have a conventional army or navy or air force, don’t have tanks or aircraft or artillery. Most of their rockets are high school science experiments (they have a handful of longer range rockets). The Izzuddin Qassam Brigades have a few tens of thousands of poorly armed and trained volunteer militiamen. If they tried to mount a conventional assault on Israel they would all be killed in an afternoon. The Asian Spa killer in Atlanta killed more people than Hamas has since the beginning of the current hostilities.

Pragmatic realism on the Israel-Palestine conflict has been desperately hard to find in American politics. It's not that no one has been trying. Two books that appeared during the Cheney-Bush Administration, when conflict with Muslim countries and groups took center stage in American politics represent two significant exceptions. One was The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) by the über-Realist scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. This combined a realist analysis of general US policy toward Israel with a fact-based discussion of groups lobbying for US support for Israeli policies, a subject that has been used in dishonest ways by anti-Semitic propagandists. Having two of the most important American foreign policy intellectuals lay out this analysis was an important step in demystifying the whole topic.

Jimmy Carter's 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is the other. The idea that Israel was in real danger of making a two-state solution a practical impossibility, and that they would be left with an apartheid state, with a Jewish majority and a Palestinian minority deprived of equal civil rights and many denied basic human rights, forcibly held in desperate conditions.

American policy didn't change for the better. Cheney and Bush saw Israel's rightwing governments as allies in the War on Terror against Muslims, and made no serious attempt to forward the Israel-Palestine peace process. The Obama Administration was so stridently anti-Muslim. But the Obama-Biden Administration was generally willing to give Netanyahu's government free rein, as well, and also did little to advance the peace process. And the Trump-Pence Administration was completely deferential, even recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a major issue in an attempt to end the Israeli occupation in a way that would bring actual peace.

There's certainly no guarantee that the Biden-Harris Administration will do better, though the public should demand they do. But there are signs that there might be important shifts in American understandings of the conflict. The two-state solution seems less feasible than ever. And it's at least no longer as shocking as it was in 2006 to talk matter-of-factly about the possibility and reality of "apartheid" in Israel. And there's at least some hope that a more realistic discussions among politicians and at least some of the establishment press about American pragmatic foreign policy interests, human rights, and international law in regard to Israel than we've had for a long time.

But it's not as though there isn't plenty of solid information and analysis on the subject available for those who are motivated to look.

Zaha Hassan and Daniel Levy provide a good example with Biden's Old Playbook Won't End Israeli-Palestinian Violence Foreign Policy 05/13/2021:

They also have a good analysis of why the latest developments in Israel-Palestine is a problem for the foreign-policy branding that the Biden-Harris Administration is attempting. As they note, "the United States is indisputably the most consequential external actor in this arena." And however cynically pragmatic professed US concerns about human rights problems in other countries so often are, the "soft power" of the US in matters of democratic governance and human rights really is A Thing. And the (so far thankfully tentative) new-cold-war posture toward China has relevant implications on Mideast issues: "The 'America is back' message has been all about a law-abiding, norm-promoting, rights-respecting nation leading a resurgence of democracies. ... It's not hard to imagine the refrain in Beijing: 'You say Uyghurs, we say Palestinians.'"

Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer write about the current situation in Battle between Israel and Hamas is an unwelcome surprise for Biden CNN 05/12/2021: "It is doubtful whether the current crisis in Jerusalem -- which has now grown into a larger battle between Israel and Hamas -- will impel the Biden administration to launch a full-throated effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, at a minimum, it should compel the administration to do everything it can to defuse this dimension of the crisis."

"2020", the Bonus Army in 1932, and asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

We don't know yet whether in 5, 10, years from now classes on Contemporary History with have units on "2020" as an iconic year like "1968". (Hopefully not like "1914"!)

But three historians are giving us a preliminary look in current articles. One is Millsaps College historian Bob McElvaine, who in The Political Price of Military Assaults on Americans Medium 06/17/2020 looks at Herbert Hoover's human and political fiasco with the brutal military suppression of the Bonus Army protest in 1932. He also discussed that and the Great Depression as well in a recent English-language interview with Thomas Seifert from the Austrian Wiener Zeitung, Interview with Prof. Robert McElvaine, Author of "The Great Depression" 06/12/2020:

The German translation of the interview has the title, "'The deepest recession of all time'": "Die tiefste Rezession aller Zeiten" 14.06.2020. In the Medium piece, he writes about the attack on the Bonus Army protesters, commanded by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who is a heroic figure in the rightwing pantheon:

Though MacArthur had acted in direct disobedience of his orders, Hoover chose to take responsibility for what the military leader had done. The President was making a calculated move to the right, to stand in the fall election for law and order. The immediate reaction of major newspapers was generally in favor of the assault. The New York Times referred to the Bonus Army “insurrection.” “We are confident,” the paper’s editors affirmed, “that the decision of the President will be sustained by the great majority of our citizens.”

That confidence was misplaced, as the Democratic nominee understood. “Everyone could see what was there,” Franklin Roosevelt said of the man in the White House, “and they wouldn’t like it.” Hoover, Roosevelt remarked, had “set Doug MacArthur on those harmless vets.” Instead of sending troops and gas, FDR said, Hoover should have sent coffee and donuts. “There was nothing inside the man but jelly,” the challenger said of the incumbent. “Maybe there never had been anything.” [my emphasis]

Sean Wilentz also looks at the Bonus March and its possible relevant for the 2020 Presidential campaign, The Disgrace of Donald Trump Rolling Stone 06/15/2020. He also looks at more recent times, and gives the following description that is a key part of the story of asymmetric partisan polarization in the US. Picking up with the Bush 1 Administration, he writes:

When no conservative in Reagan’s mold successfully claimed his mantle, leadership of the GOP fell to those elements of the traditional party that had accommodated themselves to the Reagan revolution, personified by George H.W. Bush, the Connecticut Yankee reborn as a Texas conservative. Bush well understood that to win the presidency, he would need to claim and then agitate the Reagan base; and as his campaign manager Lee Atwater, steeped in the wiles of South Carolina politics, understood just as well, this meant stirring racist fears, an evil art at which Atwater excelled. When, as president, Bush ran afoul of supply-side dogma, old faces like the reactionary Pat Buchanan and new faces like the firebrand Georgian Newt Gingrich challenged his leadership of the party.

From that point forward, a radicalizing dynamic overtook Republican national politics. Constituencies that the traditional GOP had tried to absorb to build its post-1960s majority - conservative white Southerners, including, more broadly, white evangelical Christians - became the party’s heart and soul. Establishment Republican leaders vying for the presidency — Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney - had to appease an ever-hardening right-wing base, centered in what has become the solidly Republican white South. When those leaders lost - as they did twice to Bill Clinton and twice to Barack Obama - the base despaired of anything resembling conventional conservative politics. The one GOP victor, George W. Bush, did win over the party base, thanks in part to his Svengali, Karl Rove, and in part to the patriotic surge that followed the attacks of 9/11. But Bush disastrously invaded Iraq, and he ended his presidency with the start of the Great Recession and the birth of the radical Tea Party, which went on to hound President Obama at every turn. [my emphasis]

And that "radicalizing dynamic" is still running wild in the Republican Party, the sideshow of the NeverTrump Republicans notwithstanding.

And Rick Perlstein reflects on the current consequences of four decades of Reagan-Thatcher economic and cultural dogma, aka, neoliberalism, although he doesn't use the term here: Market Logic Is Literally Killing Us In These Times 06/17/2020. He writes:

Covid-19 has sucked the world into a vortex of interlocking crises that demand collective sacrifice to resolve. The world’s most powerful nation has revealed itself as tragically unequal to the challenge - unwilling to transcend private interest. From the deranged Republicans running the White House and the Senate to the penny-pinching Democrats running the House of Representatives, from ordinary folks who can’t be bothered to wear a mask to corporate titans scouring the horizon for profit-taking opportunities - it all marks the distillation of a national ideology: selfishness, über alles.

He also reminds us how bipartisan this push was:

President Carter ... declared, in his 1978 State of the Union, "Government cannot solve our problems, it can't set our goals, it cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or cure illiteracy or provide energy." Two years later, Carter ran for reelection against Reagan by holding himself up as Reagan's deregulationist equal: The party of FDR now believed, "We ought to get the government's nose out of the private enterprise of this country. We've deregulated rail, deregulated trucking, deregulated airlines, deregulated financial institutions, working on communications, to make sure that we have a free enterprise system that's competitive." [Carter]

That larger project, of writing public obligation out of business's social contract with the people, was bipartisan. "Business is entitled to its decade, and I will try to help them get it," the Democratic chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, told a business association in 1981. By 2020, the surrender to market logic had advanced so far along that when the moral equivalent of war came, America's arsenal to fight it proved quite nearly bare[.] (my emphasis)

That represents the other side of the asymmetric partisan polarization. The Republican Party has spent four decades in the throes of Wilentz' "radicalizing dynamic." He suggests in the article is better dated to 1992, but his description of Old Man Bush's more moderate course running up against the Reaganized Congressional party is accurate.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have mostly been dominated for the last four decades by a tendency of what I'll call radical centrism, because that sound politer than the alternatives that come to mind. There has been durable opposition to the course of those decades, represented in Presidential politics by the campaigns of Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, Jerry Brown in 1992, and Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Ted Kennedy mounted a substantial primary challenge to Carter in 1980, attempting to keep the party more on the New Deal/Great Society track. Including, yes, national health insurance.

I don't want to get too caught up into the Presidential-level references. But Obama's 2008 campaign was generally perceived as a progressive work, particularly compared to his establishment Dem rival Hillary Clinton. But in his policy priorities, he quickly proved to be on board with the chronic centrism. And is still there in 2020, when he helped in the emergency operation to consolidate the donors quickly around Joe Biden. Biden's record, if it can be fairly called centrist at all, is a centrism titled toward the conservative side.

Donor influence and the steady increase of massive amounts of money in politics, particularly since Citizens United decision in 2010, has been the most important influence in this asymmetric polarization process. But some of it is also due to the duck-and-cover style the Democrats have developed, in which they embrace Republican framing of issues and a general duck-and-cover impulse they can't shake:

A final thought on Carter's deregulation policy in 1976-80. On the whole, it was clearly a bad general direction. But the Democrats' position on deregulation at that time was not simply surrender to business lobbies. It was also one of the response to the inflation that seemed to be intractable, the idea being that establishing more price competition could restrain inflationary pressures. Even figures clearly identified at the time as being on the pro-labor left of the party, including Ted Kennedy and Fred Harris, also adopted some form of this approach.

Jimmy Carter is also a special case, because after his Presidency, he has become a figure possibly more respected for his stances, which at times look radical in comparison to those of timid duck-and-cover Democrats. For instance, his book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005) was a more searing indictment of the Cheney-Bush Administration that established Democrats in Congress could muster. He has said publicly that he voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016, although in 2020 he expressed concern that both Biden and Sanders were too old to start a Presidency.

The Christian Right and the radical Republicans (a perennial topic)

Adele Stan (When Money Meets Jesus Democracy Journal Spring 2020) reviews a new book by Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (2020). Stan's review includes a nice brief sketch of the Christian Right that has such a prominent role in the Republican Party.

And she reminds us that the relationship between the Christian Right and the Trumpified Republican Party, which seems unlikely on its face to people who aren't particularly familiar with the kind of white Christian nationalism involved, is not especially hard to understand:

From the outset, Christian nationalism has always been a con, sold to its followers on the false claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. David Barton, Stewart shows us, is the foremost purveyor of this myth; she notes that the publisher of Barton’s 2012 book, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, felt compelled to withdraw it after National Public Radio checked Barton’s biblical citations only to find that “not one of them checked out.” ... But that hasn’t put a damper on Barton’s career as the right’s favorite “historian,” or in his career with the GOP. For nine years, Stewart notes, Barton served as vicechair of the Texas Republican Party, and in the 2016 presidential campaign, he ran a super-PAC that supported Ted Cruz’s candidacy.

The con is in Christian nationalist and religious-right rhetoric that falsely describes common methods of birth control as abortifacients, routinely and falsely links Muslim Democrats to terrorist groups, claims that “homosexuals” seek to “recruit” your children to their “lifestyle,” and posits that the Earth is a mere 4,000 years old. There’s the rhetorical con that is effectively rewriting the First Amendment to advantage its own religion over all others and compares the social safety net to “slavery.” To a constituency already so distanced from any objective notion of truth, the greatest liar of all the U.S. presidents is a Moses to his people. [my emphasis]

Fundamentalist Christianity has a strong authoritarian component. The desire for safety and order can quickly overwhelm nominal moral and religious scruples.

Al Gore wrote a book called The Assault on Reason (2007) about the danger represented by the continually radicalizing Republican Party, then grimly embodied in the Cheney-Bush Administration, and the dangerously accomodating Democratic Party. That is the ugly and still ongoing situation of asymmetric polarization in Americana party politics.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. ...

The single most surprising new element in America's national conversation is the prominence and intensity of constant fear. Moreover, there is an uncharacteristic and persistent confusion about the sources of that fear; we seem to be having unusual difficulty in distinguishing between illusory threats and legitimate ones. [my emphasis]

Gore was highly critical of the way the Cheney and Bush fear-mongered with fabricated "evidence" to invade Iraq:

Terrorism relies on the stimulation of fear for political ends. Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual danger that the terrorists are capable of posing. Ironically, President Bush's response to the terrorist attack of September 11 was, in effect, to further distort America's political reality by creating a new fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger Iraq was capable of posing. That is one of the reasons it was so troubling to so many when in 2004 the widely respected arms expert David Kay concluded a lengthy, extensive investigation into the administration's claim that Iraq posed an enormous threat because it had weapons of mass destruction with the words We were all wrong. [my emphasis in bold]

The tone of Christian fundamentalism in its various manifestations in the Christian Right relies heavily on a context of fear. Fear of Hell, fear of temptation, fear to punishment, fear ofd sex, fear of rejection. And they are particularly inclined to look for a Strong Leader and a political discourse of order and control to ease the fear.

And the sense that Trump is on Their Side is simply more important for the Christian Right than the actual religious adherence and personal conduct of the President. That fact stands out in the results of a recent Pew Research Center report, White Evangelicals See Trump as Fighting for Their Beliefs, Though Many Have Mixed Feelings About His Personal Conduct 03/12/2020:

On the whole, Americans care more about having a president who stands up for their religious beliefs than having one who personally shares those beliefs. Roughly seven-in-ten say it is either very (38%) or somewhat (31%) important to have a president who stands up for people with their religious beliefs.

White evangelical Protestants are particularly likely to hold this view. Two-thirds of white evangelicals say it is very important to have a president who stands up for their religious beliefs, about double the share who say it is very important for a president to have strong religious beliefs. And white evangelicals say Trump fits the bill: Fully eight-in-ten white evangelical Protestants say that the phrase “fights for what I believe in” describes Trump “very well” or “fairly well,” including roughly half who say this describes him “very well.” [my emphasis]

Yes, the political culture of Christian nationalism is white Christian nationalism.

And the "white" part of this sentiment is not restricted to fundamentalists:

White evangelical Protestants are not alone in their admiration of Trump. Among other groups of white Christians, smaller but still substantial majorities also express agreement with Trump’s policies and associate him with a number of positive traits, such as intelligence.

For example, roughly two-thirds of white Catholics say the phrase “fights for what I believe in” describes Donald Trump very well or fairly well, and 68% of white Catholics say “intelligent” is a fairly or very good descriptor of Trump. Similar shares of white Protestants who are not born-again or evangelical Christians say the same. And more than half of people in both groups say they agree with Trump on many, nearly all or all of the important issues facing the country.

The survey shows, furthermore, that growing numbers in all three of the largest white Christian groups (white evangelical Protestants, white Protestants who are not evangelical and white Catholics) think that their side has been winning recently on the political issues that matter to them. [my emphasis]

I take this as an encouraging sign, though, "Overall, just 5% of U.S. adults believe God chose Trump to become president because God approves of Trump’s policies."

There is a theological side to this, which is the idea that God in all-powerful (omnipotent) but that human beings have free will. But the entire concept of democracy and government by popular consent assume that individuals are capable of making free choices based on an understanding of their interests and desires. As Al Gore put it:

Our Founders rejected direct democracy because of concerns that fear might overwhelm reflective thought. But they counted heavily on the ability of a "well-informed citizenry" to reason together in ways that would minimize the destructive impact of illusory, exaggerated, or excessive fears. "When a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced that it is infinitely wiser and safer to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power," wrote Thomas Paine in his legendary pamphlet Common Sense, specifically warning that the Founders should not take the risk of waiting until some fear seized the public imagination, in which event their reasoning processes would be hampered.

So that is an interesting chink in the authoritarian psychological armor of the Christian Right. Most of them consciously realize that they are making conscious political decisions for which they have some responsibility. But the most striking finding of the Pew survey to me is how indifferent even Trump's Christian Right supporters are to his actual religious beliefs and personal conduct.

To conclude, I want to draw attention to the role the Christian Right has played in promoting a key authoritarian goal to weaken democracy, the attempt to replace actual judicial independence with pro-authoritarian idolgoical partisanship. Jimmy Carter wrote in his book Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis (2005):

Perhaps one of the strangest and most disturbing examples of this political effort by right-wing Christians has been to attack the federal court system itself, after Senate Democrats failed to approve a handful of the -most conservative nominees for federal judgeships. They ignored the fact that this was the same number as Republicans had successfully opposed among Bill Clinton's nominees. Senator Bill Frist, the highest-ranking member of the United States Senate, aligned himself in a public telecast with a fundamentalist religious group to promote false claims that Democratic senators who opposed a few judges were conducting "an assault against people of faith." The group's leader announced that the "activist" judiciary poses "a greater threat to representative government" than "terrorist groups." Dr. James Dobson, another sponsor of the event, called the Supreme Court "unaccountable," "out of control," and "a despotic oligarchy," and accused the justices of a forty-year "campaign to limit religious liberty." (At a subsequent press conference, President George W. Bush [ludicrously] disavowed the connection between religious faith and opposition to the appointment of federal judges.) [my emphasis]