The Kadima Line

Jeffrey Goldberg has a wonderful interview up with Tzipi Livni, leader of the largest opposition party in Israel. As usual, she makes it clear that she "gets it" in a way that Bibi simply doesn't. And, notably, she was very much in favor of Obama's pressure on Netanyahu, which, she claims, caused him to take necessary steps towards peace that he wouldn't have done on his own.

Interview with Gadi Taub

Very cool interview by Michael Weiss with the left-wing Israeli Zionist and polymath Gadi Taub, who has a new book out: The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism (Yale UP). Taub is of the opinion (and I agree) that the religious-nationalist settlement movement is Israel's largest homegrown threat to Israel's status as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people (not unrelatedly, as embarrassing as the McCarthyist Knesset inquiry into leftist NGOs is, I can't tell you how thrilled I am that the Kahanist-linked, terrorist-sympathizing Michael Ben Ari of all people will be the man in charge of the panel).

But anyway, back to Taub, who, if Ben Ari represents Israel's worst, represents Israel's best. And the best of the best excerpt:

MW: One of the more interesting points you make in your settlements book is that settlers seem to be echoing the sentiments of the anti-Zionist left in calling for a binational state. You quote Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook and Shlomo Aviner and others who make it plain that they’d rather see Greater Israel with an Arab majority than any division of land. That the intelligentsia of the Yesha Council more and more resembles the collective wisdom of the London Review of Books might be taken for a sign of how just marginalised and discredited the settlement project is.

GT: I think that’s very true. Which is why recently some on the right have been arguing for annexation which will include full citizenship to all residents of the territories.

I have very little respect for that solution when it comes from them, just as I have little respect for it when it comes from anti-Zionists.

A look at Gaza, where the differences between Hamas and Fatah were settled by the use of arms, should help us all wake up from imaginary schemes of peaceful bi-nationalism. I don’t see how Gaza would have turned into a liberal democracy if only there was a Jewish faction added to the mix. What the one-statists are promoting is going to be a chronic Lebanon style civil war. And the odd thing is, how little the London Review has drifted from old colonial habits of mind. The natives – we Jews and Arabs – aspire to national self-determination. But the good ol’ Brits, never tired of carrying the White Man’s Burden, know that the natives are too barbaric to understand what the right form of self-determination should be for them. So until they grow up, we, Western intellectuals, will serve as their political parents, and impose on them the state we know they should want. Because it is Western and enlightened, of course.

Anyone who can, in such short space, make the accurate conflation of "left" and "right", "pro-Israel" and "pro-Palestine" one-staters, defend two-states, and nail British pseudo-anti-colonialists for so unabashedly taking back up "the White Man's Burden" is an automatic winner in my book. And the whole interview is excellent. He makes no apologies for anti-Semitism or denying Israel's right to exist, but notes the fundamental fact that Israel -- as a matter of basic national self-preservation -- has to extract itself from the occupation. It may not be fair that this burden falls upon Israel, even though the conditions of occupation and the lack of peaceful two-state solution are not entirely (primarily, whatever -- I'm not interested in hashing over degrees of fault) Israel's fault. Life isn't fair. Get over it, and do what needs to be done. Everything else (including, frankly, a comprehensive peace treaty -- even in a state of formal war like that which exists between Israel and Syria, I think the IDF is strong enough to keep Israel safe from any military threat from a Palestinian state with or without the occupation. Cast Lead, more or less, proves that) can come later.

Meanwhile, with respect to Taub's point about externally-imposed solutions, it's worth noting that, while I haven't seen immediately-recent polling out of Palestine, the most recent numbers I recall reading, from about two years ago, had a two-states for two-peoples solution as the clear consensus choice amongst Palestinians, taking 53% of those polled (32% want solely a Palestinian state on all the land, while only 15% preferred what is forwarded as the classic "one-state", binational solution).

Cool Interviews with Cool People

It's a month old, but I just stumbled across this interview with Israeli MK Yuli Tamir (Labor). Dr. Tamir was one of the founders of Peace Now and holds a doctorate in Political Philosophy from Oxford (where she studied under Isaiah Berlin) with a specialty in the intersection between liberalism and national identity. Currently, she is the dissident minority faction of Labor which is refusing to join the coalition government formed by Likud PM Bibi Netanyahu.

It's a really fascinating interview with a really fascinating person. Highly recommended.

Interview Tips

You know that scene in The West Wing, where Donna Moss, assistant to Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman, tries to draw a laugh from a tour by calling herself the "Deputy Deputy Chief of Staff"? And how it fails miserably?

The same outcomes results when you try to describe your time assisting a paralegal as being a "Para-Paralegal".

Ignoring Facebook

In response to the Obama transition team's version of demanding every scintilla of factual information about potential administration appointees, Matt Yglesias observes that eventually norms are going to have to change about the relevancy of a dumb college facebook photo. I've thought the same thing myself. Even today, interviewers can't be shocked! that their prospects might have drank in college. Indeed, they themselves probably drank in college. But there being no permanent electronic record of it, they can delude themselves into thinking they were more responsible about it. As the facebook generation begins to consist of the hirers, however, eventually a more realistic view is going to surface.

Or so I hope.

The Round Mound Holds Court

TNR has a very entertaining interview up with Charles Barkley. Barkley continues to flirt with running for Governor of Alabama. I have no idea how it'll play (I don't even know if he'd run as a Democrat or an Independent), but there is no denying he'd shake up the terrain there.

Martha Nussbaum Interview

She talks to The Guardian, and solidifies her well-established reputation as a total baller (that's a good thing).