Duck doings

Today, at the Duck of Minerva, I blogged "New 'crimes against humanity'?" The piece considers the claims various political figures have tossed about concerning biofuel production. I also note some additional uses of this phrase in contemporary political debates.

On May 6, I blogged "The taboo," which is about the lack of debate concerning Israeli nuclear weapons -- especially in the US. Why is OK to talk of obliterating Iran, but not OK to talk about Israel's arsenal? [Note: this post originally appeared here, but I'm noting the Duck cross-posting because it was mentioned in a Chronicle of Higher Education footnoted from academic blogs post.]

Finally, May 2, I posted "Power outage" about the apparent decline in home runs in baseball following the most recent crackdowns against steroid use by players. Since posting some early season data, the major league HR rate has risen to 40.7 at bats per homer (from 41.8 in April). That's still down significantly from the rate during the rest of the aughts.


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The Taboo

Political Scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt received a lot of heat for their recent work about the power of the Israeli lobby inside the United States.

Mearsheimer and Walt raised issues that are rarely discussed in the United States. Indeed. some describe this topic as "the third rail" of US foreign policy debate.

Now that the power of "the Lobby" has been made part of the US public debate, Israel's nuclear weapons program should also be scrutinized more publicly. Ordinarily, that subject is taboo.

Lew Butler (who used to chair the Ploughshares Fund) explained in an op-ed in the SF Chronicle, November 30, 2007:

Estimates are that there are probably as many as 200 [nuclear weapons] in the Israeli arsenal, including thermonuclear (hydrogen) ones.

What is surprising is that there is almost never any public discussion in the United States, and certainly none in the White House or the Congress, about these weapons.

...Clearly, the Bush administration is not going to talk publicly about our understanding, if any, with Israel about its nuclear weapons. And no member of Congress is rushing to get into a subject as politically delicate as this one. That leaves it to those of us in private life to begin the debate, for the sake of the United States and Israel.

Part of the reason nobody wants to talk about Israeli nuclear weapons is that any debate would quickly reveal American hypocrisy. How can the US put pressure on Iran or North Korea about their proliferation if it turns a blind eye to Israel?

The unspoken basis for U.S. policy about Israel's nukes seems to be that we don't want our enemies to have such weapons but we don't worry as much if our friends, like Israel, Pakistan and India, have them.

However, the lack of debate about Israel's arsenal occasionally causes US political leaders to make careless and immoral threats. Hillary Clinton's recent warning that she would "obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel led me to note the following in comments:

I don't know why Israel's nuclear force isn't sufficient to deter Iran's. Estimates suggest that it has 100s of deliverable weapons, some in the form of accurate cruise missiles on relatively invulnerable submarines.

Butler asks a set of related questions

Is there any understanding between Israel and the United States, its principal source of military aid, about their use? If so, does the understanding cover "no first use," similar to the policy advocated in the United States at the height of the Cold War? What would the United States do if Israel were ever under an attack that might lead it to a nuclear response? Has the United States ever talked with Israel about its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? For Israel, are the weapons more of a danger to its security than a defense?

I see no reason to avoid public debate about these issues.

An honest discussion about Israel's arsenal might lead the US to adopt policies that would reduce its hypocrisy. For example, achieving genuine nonproliferation in the Middle East might require Israel to abandon its reliance upon nuclear weapons. Alternatively, perhaps the US and the regional states could embrace some kind of mutual deterrence based on Iran maintaining a secure second strike force. Iran does not currently have a nuclear-armed ally willing to extend deterrence on its behalf.

How would the US respond if Russia announced that it would obliterate Israel if it used nuclear weapons against Iran?


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Clinton: When to obliterate Iran

I have some security question fors Senator Clinton. First, what policy choices should the U.S. pursue so as to avoid "doing something that would be reckless, foolish, and tragic."

CLINTON: Well, the question was, if Iran were to launch a nuclear attack on Israel, what would our response be? And I want the Iranians to know that if I am president, we will attack Iran. And I want them to understand that. Because it does mean that they have to look very carefully at their society. Because whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program, in the next 10 years during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them. That's a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to understand that. Because that, perhaps, will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish, and tragic.

Certainly, Dick Cheney was wrong pretending that deterrence cannot work against Iran.

However, it is morally reprehensible to talk lightly of obliterating a society. Would the U.S. really punish millions of innocent people if their government acted reprehensively? How could this be consistent with just war theory? Just think about proportionality for one moment.

Do all the Catholics in Pennsylvania who apparently voted for Clinton know about this?


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Iran: Deterrence vs. compellence

In regard to Iran, this story published in The Guardian on February 8 provides the most definitive denial of "war fever" that I've read yet from someone in the Bush administration:

president Bush has made it clear we have no intention of going to war with Iran," said Gordon Johndroe, the spokesman for the White House national security council.

Maybe Johndroe forgot what the President said when he was in Belgium two years ago.

The rest of the newspaper story is about Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's recent deterrent threats directed at the US:

"The enemies know any aggression will give way to a wide reaction from Iranian people toward them and their interests in all parts of the world," Iranian state television quoted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as saying...

"We believe that no one will make such an unwise and wrong move (to attack Iran) that would endanger their country and interests," Mr Khamenei said. "Some say that the US president is not the type who acts based on calculations or thinks about the consequences of his action. But even these people can be brought to their senses."

An Iranian naval commander apparently claimed that Iran has tested missiles that could sink big US warships in the Persian Gulf.

Would these kinds of threats be sufficient to deter the US from any kind of attack? Maybe. A nuclear weapon would work even better -- as North Korea would probably advise.

Note also that Khamenei said "enemies" because he's well aware of Israel's latest open efforts to beat the war drums. The LA Times, reported Israel's attempts to compel action on February 7:

Israeli officials have begun an unusually open campaign to muster international political and economic pressures against Iran. They warn that time is growing short and hint that they will resort to force if those pressures fail to prevent Iran's development of an atomic weapon.

Israeli leaders fear that an Iranian bomb would undermine their nation's security even if Tehran never detonated it. That Israel has its own nuclear arsenal would not counteract the psychological and strategic blow, they believe.

Israel began secretly preparing in the early 1990s for a possible air raid on Iran's then-nascent nuclear facilities and has been making oblique public statements about such planning for three years.

What is new is Israel's abandonment of quiet diplomacy to rally others to its side.

Israel has been making hostile threats against Iran fairly overtly since at least fall 2004.

As any student of Thomas Schelling would warn, it is much more difficult to compel than to deter.

Since there's some dispute about how much threat Iran is to Israel, they might want to rethink their strategy.


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National aspirations

Avery guest-blogging for Rodger

Believe it or not, my world cup post and my two posts on the Israeli-Palestinian situation are connected in an important way.

They give little (actually, no) weight to national identification or aspirations as a legitimate source of motivations. My world cup rooting rules are explicitly anti-patriotic, and reject team loyalty from one game to the next. It all depends on single-game matchups. This seems to me to be the right attitude; whether I could sustain it in the event that Canada were playing, I'm not quite sure, but that's a question about moral motivation, not about moral rightness. (I deny, as should you, that the two are related in a simple way.)

Similarly, my first post on Israel supported the Palestinians' national aspirations on grounds that the Palestinians are living under the Occupation, not because national aspirations are in themselves worthy of respect. This approach, again, meshes with what I take to be the right motivation in each case; I argued for this in an article (pdf behind a paywall) published in the Journal of Political Philosophy last year.

But having just passed Canada Day and US Independence Day, and especially given that throughout those two long posts I said nothing about Israelis' putative right to their own national homeland, I thought I owed some explanation of my views on national aspirations.

I grew up simply assuming the rightness of the Israeli cause, broadly speaking. My mother is Israeli and traces her roots there back to the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Pretty much her whole family is still there; she left in 1966 and I was born in Canada in 1972. We were not hardcore, but I do remember, as a kid, sending my cousin little drawings of maps of Israel with her house in Haifa on the map, and the maps always included the West Bank and Gaza as though they were unproblematically part of Israel. When I went to camp in 1984 it was a camp run by Hashomer Hatzair, the Young Guard, a leftist Zionist youth group. In my high school newspaper, in 1991, I published an article called "Can Israel's position be justified?" in which I tried to justify Israel's response to the First Intifada by going through some Whiggish history of the previous century. In college I was part of the Progressive Zionist Caucus and even co-chaired the Campus Israel Coalition one year. While studying in Cairo in 1994 I got into a heated argument on the subway with one of my peers regarding whether Zionism was dead. (I was arguing the negative.) Another friend of ours got very stern and said, "there are some things you just don't talk about in public here." I was in the process of a long evolution.

I always considered myself a Zionist, though in recent years I endorsed only the weak sense--the idea that the national aspirations of the Jewish people are no less legitimate than those of other nations, and hence the State of Israel has a right to exist. Zionism in this sense does not seem to me to entail chauvinism. To the contrary, I have long thought that any defensible form of Zionism is compatible with--indeed, under the current circumstances, requires--commitment to a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the establishment of two coequal states on the land of the 1947 partition.

Eventually, I ceased to believe in the viability of the two-state solution. Part of this had to do with genuine revulsion at Israeli policy ever since the beginning of the Second Intifada. Former Prime Ministers Barak and Sharon made Israel very hard to love, even for those of us for whom love for Israel is second nature. (Half of us have gone into denial, the other half into guilt. The third half have just stopped identifying.)

But part of it was based on longer-term considerations. On the one hand, the non-contiguity of the two Palestinian territories is a concern, but may not be as serious as some people think. Part of it is water, which is already a major problem and does not seem to have much prospect of getting simpler, although maybe large-scale desalination really would be viable. Part of it is the settlers. I kind of think that they shouldn't be forced to move, that if they want to be a minority in Palestine they should be allowed to stay as a minority. Of course things would change around them; but no state, including Palestine, has a right to be ethnically pure. (Indeed, one often hears a parallel drawn between Israel and apartheid South Africa; without commenting on the analogy, I would just observe that, once free, South Africa did not evict all the white people, and would have been wrong to try.) Nor do the settlers have a right to live under the jurisdiction of the Israeli government if they are residents of another state. Finally, part of it is Jerusalem. If Jerusalem has to be under shared sovereignty, then clearly shared sovereignty is possible; so there's no need to pretend that exclusivity is a necessary condition.

But for the most part it's the demographics that do it for me, and the fact that the demographics threaten to undermine Zionism anyway. The so-called "demographic time bomb" that Israel faces is that given birth rates, Palestinians will outnumber Jewish Israelis within a generation. But it is even possible that within several generations Israel proper will have more Palestinians than Jews--especially if Palestinian refugees return to their ancestral homes after a permanent peace deal. At that time, Israel will face a dilemma. It must either adopt a written constitution that gives special status to Jews--the Fiji option--or accept that the Jews no longer have a state in the sense that Zionism intended--the "liberal utopia". The liberal utopia obviously means the end of Zionism, even in the weak sense. What of the Fiji option? Even though Joseph Carens' book convinced me that this might be justifiable, it is not much better. For under the Fiji option, Israel would be a state where Jews were a specially protected minority. Again, the exact situation from which Jews hoped Zionism would deliver them.

At any rate, the demography is going to force Israelis to start thinking existentially about the nature of the relationship between the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Given that they're thinking existentially anyway, here's a solution they should consider.(Please take what follows as a thought-in-progress. Note that in its general outlines it's not original with me.)

I think the best bet is a confederation covering all the land partitioned in 1947. Some of the provinces might be explicitly religious or ethnic in orientation, whether Muslim, Palestinian, Jewish, Mizrahi, etc.; some would be undifferentiated. The national government would be constitutionally committed to the principle that the state has two coequal founding peoples, but at the same time would permit special treatment, within bounds, in particular provinces. How to arrange this specifically is not simple. But it could avoid many of the problems raised earlier--water would be a domestic concern rather than an international one; demographic shifts over the generations would not force a choice between democracy and a Jewish national homeland; Jewish settlers would not have to be removed from settlements and the settlements would not have to be destroyed; Jews would not need to fear a Palestinian right of return. On the other side, Palestinians would be equal participants in a state on their own territory. They would give up no more, and perhaps less, than they propose to give up under a two-state solution.

At any rate, if you don't get bogged down in the identity politics--the fact that, under this proposal, there would not be a unitary state of Israel controlled exclusively by Jews, or of Palestine controlled exclusively by Palestinians--this solution seems to me to respect and uphold the national aspirations of the Jewish people and so to be Zionist in that sense.

Does this mean that I really think national aspirations are okay? Would I have rooted for Israel in the World Cup? It should now be clear where the two issues differ. I don't endorse national aspirations, but unlike "liberal utopians," I don't want to pretend that they'll just go away if you wish hard enough. And the fact that a just solution accommodates national aspirations that aren't about to go away--for instance, by giving people someone to cheer for at the World Cup--is not in itself a reason to reject that solution.

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The Israeli invasion of Gaza

Avery guest-blogging for Rodger

My overlong post on Reuven Kaminer the other day suddenly seems like a case of denial. Currently, the Israeli military (Israel Defense Force, or IDF) is engaged in an incursion into Gaza that has knocked out power, terrorized the population, and created a serious risk of a humanitarian catastrophe as water cannot be purified.

Counterpunch has one take; the New York Times (login required) has another in the Sunday paper. The Observer reports that a deal is near.

Which raises the question, a deal on what? As readers probably know, this incursion--which has included attacks on the offices of (Hamas) Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and the capture of Hamas MPs--is ostensibly about freeing a single captured Israeli soldier.

It's possible that this is true. Ron Arad, an Israeli pilot captured in Lebanon in 1986, became a household name. Like the US right wing, the Israeli right needs to perceive itself as holding the moral high ground, and the willingness to sacrifice greatly to rescue a single Israeli captive feeds this need. Prisoner exchanges of years past involved hundreds of Palestinians for one or two Israelis, and rather than ask themselves why they were holding hundreds of Palestinians whom they were willing to free for such strategically trivial reasons, Israelis (and Zionists elsewhere, such as Canada, where I grew up) congratulated themselves on their respect for human life (in contrast to the Palestinians', of course). It looks like the same sort of trade is in the offing this time, and no doubt Israel and its allies will congratulate themselves again.

The likelihood that this is the real motivation would be enhanced if there were growing internal dissension in the IDF. This is very possible. The refusenik movement, which I mentioned in the Kaminer post, is growing--albeit mostly under the radar due to convenient overuse of psychiatric discharges and other administrative tricks, rather than courts-martial, for anyone who refuses to support the Occupation. On the other side, IDF members know that, should the settlements ever be abandoned, the IDF will be the ones quite literally dragging settlers kicking and screaming from their homes in the West Bank. So if political and moral opposition to the Occupation, on one side, combined with political and moral opposition to ending the Occupation, on the other, now has added to it genuine fear of capture and possibly torture in Hamas's hands, the IDF might be afraid of losing the capacity to act at all.

So it is, then, possible that Israel is doing this for the very reason it claims; that this is a mess of its own making is just a bitter irony for which the people of Gaza are suffering.

Nonetheless, I think that freeing the captive is at most a secondary aim. What I'm about to suggest is conjecture; judge it with that in mind.

The Times article quotes, without comment, a Palestinian who claims that Israel's real reasons are to make Palestinians blame their own government and return to the Fatah fold. The person quoted to this effect, Omar Areny, says that this is backfiring, because Palestinians are supporting Hamas against this attack. So the Israelis are dense; as the Times paraphrases,

Even after so many years of fighting, Mr. Areny said, Israel had again misunderstood the Palestinian mind.

This strikes me as actually self-serving and, if anything, evidence that both The Times and Omar Areny have gotten Israel's real motivations completely backward in a way that makes Israel's motives look better than they are.

The Times-Areny explanation supposes that Israel wants to strengthen Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas against Hamas, perhaps so that Israel can have a negotiating partner for the next stages of the peace process. But the Olmert government has given no real indication that it wants a negotiating partner. To the contrary, Olmert is committed to a position of unilateralism if necessary, negotiation if possible. If he can ensure that negotiation is impossible, then he can act unilaterally.

Why would Olmert want to act unilaterally?

If there is no negotiating partner, Israel sets its own boundaries.
If there is no negotiating partner, Israel withdraws how it wants, when it wants, and from where it wants, leaving and destroying what it wants.
If there is no negotiating partner, Jerusalem doesn't get divided and the Palestinian right of return is never acknowledged or recognized. Refugees can be told to shove off.

If there is no negotiating partner, in other words, Israel gets to torpedo every single one of the 3 fundamental aspects of any viable solution, as laid out by Reuven Kaminer--return of all the land captured from Jordan and Egypt in 1967 (except by swap), shared capital in Jerusalem, and some improvement in the condition of the refugees. And it does so in a way that will convince most Israeli citizens and, perhaps more importantly, most Americans, that Israel has been the only reasonable "partner for peace" in the region. If Palestine becomes a failed state, that will just provide that much more opportunity for self-congratulation and crocodile tears from Israel and its allies.

Kaminer suggested that the Occupation will destroy Israel if it continues. Facing this prospect of destruction, Israel and its allies can choose either of two ways ahead. I fear the Gaza invasion indicates which way Olmert has chosen. I'm pessimistic that he can be forced back off this road and onto the path of negotiation. Indeed, it may well have been Hamas's incipient willingness to recognize Israel and come to the table that spurred this invasion in the first place.

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Reuven Kaminer on Israeli & Palestinian States

Avery guest-blogging for Rodger

Last week I went to hear a talk by Reuven Kaminer, one of the deans of the Israeli left. He comes from an amazing family; his wife, Dafna, is a founder of Women in Black, who hold vigils every week against the Occupation and settlements. His grandson just finished serving a two-year sentence for refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories. And Reuven is no slouch himself; he is a founder of the New Israeli Left, a member of the Democratic Front for Peace & Equality (one of the “Arab Parties” seated in the Knesset), a prolific author and activist.

This genealogy might lead one to think that Kaminer would be some leftist firebrand. Other people whose intellectual and political orientation is no farther left, such as Michel Warschawsky, scorn the pro-Zionist leftist movements such as Peace Now for being “Left Colonizers”; others, like the Haifa University professor Ilan Pappe, supports a 100% right of return for all Palestinian refugees to their homes in what is now Israel, and the abolition of ethnically identified states. Kaminer is a member of Peace Now recently had an important critique (scroll down 2/3) of Pappe published in the London Review of Books.

Despite having myself recently given up on my lifelong commitment to two states and come to the conclusion that a viable and just two-state solution is impossible, I came away thinking that Kaminer’s two-statism is the better position.

Kaminer argued that the Occupation—now in its 39th year—is destroying Israel and, if it continues, will eventually destroy the Jewish people. To get a sense of the Occupation’s fundamental impact on the state of Israel, it is well to remember that Israel was founded in 1948; it has been an occupying power for 2/3 of its existence. Nearly every Jewish Israeli male has served in the occupation, if not during his 3-year term of conscription, then while doing reserve duty. Obviously, it’s hard to say exactly what would be different if the Occupation had never happened. I don’t want to sound like a romantic, but when Israel was founded it aspired to be an egalitarian socialist society (albeit in denial about the displacement of Palestinians) with strong kibbutz and labor movements and relatively little emphasis on religion. It is now the most economically stratified country in the industrialized world, the kibbutz movement has been eviscerated, and, thanks in part to the settler movement, religion is one of the most important and divisive elements in Israeli politics. Arguably, the Occupation has become the central organizing feature of Israeli life.

According to Kaminer, every single viable solution to the conflict, no matter who proposes it, shares three pillars: 1. A Palestinian state on all the land captured from Jordan and Egypt in 1967 (or with alterations only if based on a swap); 2. Jerusalem as the capital of both states; and 3. Some improvement in the condition of the refugees.

I think 2 and 3 are obvious to most people who are thinking about “final status” issues, and 3 even seems understated, but it’s important to see that it doesn’t require the demographic change—the return—that seems implicit in recognizing a Palestinian “right of return” to their pre-1948 homes. As Yasser Arafat insisted, such a right can be acknowledged and symbolically recognized, for instance, by paying people reparations and giving them full political rights in a state of their own. Just as Jews have a right of return not to anywhere in the world that they have been driven from, nor even to the so-called “Land of Israel” (aka “Greater Israel”), but rather, to the territory of the State of Israel, so Palestinians may have a right of return to the territory of a State of Palestine. The mistake is to understand "return" as literal, rather than in the sense of "an ingathering of the exiles."

The key issue is #1—a separate Palestinian state. Kaminer’s argument was political rather than moral (but see below on this “rather than”). He insisted that opposition to the two-state solution is a dead letter, and we’d be best off recognizing this. Opposition to two states comes from two directions. Right-wing opposition comes from religious groups: Jews who want exclusive Jewish control of the whole territory west of the Jordan river; Islamists who want exclusive Muslim control. Kaminer pointed out that secular Palestinians in the Territories are overwhelmingly two-staters. In the current flare-up between Fatah (Mahmoud Abbas) and Hamas, Kaminer noted that Abbas has a trump card: he can call a referendum on whether there should be a two-state solution. Hamas knows that such a referendum would pass overwhelmingly, and Hamas’s position would be democratically rejected by the Palestinian people. On the Israeli side, Kaminer argued that former PM Ariel Sharon’s forcible expulsion of the settlers from Gaza was a political earthquake, because previously Israelis had thought the settlers had a veto on any policy. What Sharon achieved was to marginalize the settlers and make their eventual eviction from at least much of the West Bank seem inevitable. So the future on both sides looks dim for the forces of right-wing rejection.

But what about left-wing one-statism? Kaminer first pointed out that this is a 5% solution, and that, as noted a moment ago, the Palestinians aren’t willing to put their national aspirations on hold until this can be achieved. This was something of an ad hominem challenge to the left: you say you support Palestinians, but they don’t share your view. So what sort of support is that? I found this hard to argue with, I must admit. But that wasn’t all. Kaminer discerned and rejected two “utopias”. The first is “the socialist utopia”: the workers of both nations will rise up and create a socialist society that does not recognize national differences. Both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism would dissolve. (Back when I was in college, the ISO used to argue for this, except they revealed their true colors by calling for a “pan-Arab working class uprising.” Sorry, kids, if you reject nationalism you actually have to reject nationalism. Well, that’s the ISO for you. I would say “they meant well,” but I don’t know if that’s true.)

The second utopia, current on the left, is “the liberal utopia”: just wait for the inevitable demographic shift due to birth rates, and eventually 51% of the population of the region will be Palestinian, and Zionism will be eliminated at the ballot box in one fell swoop. Apart from the fact that this “strategy” requires Palestinians to wait another generation for a significant improvement in their political lives, it also ignores that, as Kaminer puts it, democracy isn’t sufficient to put power in the hands of the people at large. Jewish Israelis will presumably continue to dominate major institutions and corporations; the liberal utopia promises only a magnified version of the stratification familiar from so many elite democracies around the world.

The two utopias must, Kaminer argued, be rejected. I found this pretty convincing. But I asked him (mine wasn’t the only or the best question, but it interests me, so I’m going to mention it here) whether there wasn’t going to be a third, “neo-liberal utopia”—the sort of thing imagined by Israeli so-called doves like Shimon Peres, who imagine a Middle East modeled on the European Union, with superhighways and water pipelines and a regional labor market serving global capital. Isn’t the two-state solution essential to this vision, since it makes the welfare of the Palestinians someone else’s problem, while global capital gets on with its business? Relatedly, won’t the two-state solution increase the likelihood of a major international struggle over water?

Kaminer didn’t say much about the neo-liberal utopia, but he suggested that the regional water problem could be resolved easily if even a small percentage of the money spent on arms and security could be diverted to solving it. (I imagine he has in mind large-scale desalination.) Is he just waving his hands? Perhaps. But we in water-rich North America could start the ball rolling by recognizing water as a human right.

I thought Kaminer’s most striking achievement was to use political solutions as a way to rise above moral solutions. That sounds like a paradox. But by now, “moral” solutions (like the various utopias) not only insist on significant alterations of the map and of people’s mindsets on both sides, but also contain serious risks that even if they are achieved, they’ll be at best only marginally better than the political solution, which is less risky and can be achieved sooner. Fortunately, a negotiated two-state solution has majority support on each side, and one-staters on the left can recognize this as, at worst, a reasonable second-best. And maybe they’ll even overcome their utopianism and see it as a first-best, in light of the central fact that that’s what is desired by the majority of the people who are under occupation.

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On the AUT boycott

Avery guest blogging for Rodger

Recently, the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to boycott two Israeli institutions, namely, Haifa University and Bar Ilan University. The statement from the AUT executive is here
A number of people whose judgment I respect have joined a petition opposing the boycott. The petition formally endorses the AAUP's condemnation of the boycott, asking other scholarly organizations to join in that condemnation. Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has posted informative briefs against the boycott, although J. David Velleman's at Left2Right seems to me to blur important distinctions.
All this by way of introduction for some thoughts on this boycott.
First, the boycott is targeted specifically at two universities, not at Israeli universities generally. It targets them for their associations with colleges on Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Velleman, for one, mistakenly blurs this distinction. Nonetheless, it does bear mention that a college in the West Bank could have either of three relevant characters: it could be a Jewish or Israeli college in a Jewish settlement; it could be a Palestinian college such as Bir Zeit; or it could be one of the colleges set up by religious/missionary organizations such as the LDS church, which has a branch of BYU in East Jerusalem. The first question, then, is why association only with the first kind of college is problematic. It could be because the very settlement in which the college exists is illegal even by Israeli law, in which case the AUT would be in the rather odd position of boycotting colleges for failing to uphold Israeli law. But if the very settlement is legal by Israeli law and illegal only in the sense and to the extent that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal (and this is subject to much debate that I leave aside right now), then we may ask why the AUT has singled out only Israeli/Jewish colleges rather than also include institutions such as BYU-Jerusalem Center. The question is not whether Israeli institutions rather than, say, American or Chinese ones should be boycotted (more on that below); it's why associating only with one kind of West Bank college should be considered intolerable behavior.
A second question is how the AUT understands its decision. Here the executive statement is pretty revealing. The first paragraph refers specifically to two universities to be boycotted; the second paragraph tables a proposal to boycott a third university (my mother's alma mater, Hebrew University of Jerusalem); the third paragraph reads as follows:

Council delegates also agreed to circulate to all local associations a statement from Palestinian organisations calling for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions.

Now the question is, why would this third paragraph be relevant? The point is not that it would be wrong to boycott all Israeli universities (more below), but that it is striking to see the two distinct issues juxtaposed without any appearance that the AUT realizes that they are different issues. This gives cause to worry that the boycott as passed is a form of synecdoche, and hence, that the reason for the particular boycott was just a convenient thing to grab onto.
Let's distinguish 3 questions: 1. Are boycotts ever permissible; 2. Is it ever okay to boycott academics/intellectuals; and 3. Is this boycott in particular permissible.
1. It seems obvious to me that boycotts are permissible. I, for one, engage in them all the time. I participated in the boycott of Taco Bell when the Coalition of Immokalee Workers called for it; I participated in the boycott of the conference hotel at the 2005 Pacific APA.
2. But what about when boycotts target academics or intellectuals? A number of commentators have suggested that this is the real problem with the AUT boycott: the AAUP's statement in particular singles out the academic freedom issue.
This seems to me to be a red herring. A boycott or other activity may impede academic freedom, but that is not sufficient for wrongness. Boycotts of Apartheid South Africa, for instance, extended to artists and academics, and this seems to me to have been the right decision. First, academics are typically among the privileged in their society; it would be perverse and perhaps elitist to exempt the privileged from boycott, simply on grounds that what they produce is knowledge rather than widgets. Second, in the case of apartheid, any action that normalizes the state--including easy congress with members of its state-funded institutions of higher learning--is intolerable. To boycott Apartheid South Africa was to say that the ruling cadre there was not so much a government as a gang of thugs. So for these two reasons I think boycotts that extend to cover academics are not necessarily wrong. Third, academics are sometimes in a protected position to dissent from the intolerable behavior being boycotted. Putting pressure on them to do so is not obviously wrong.
Of course, this last point has been singled out by the AAUP, Velleman, and others because the AUT has apparently placed a political litmus test on exemption from the boycott. But this seems wrong to me. Consider the CIW boycott of Taco Bell. Imagine a single franchisee had declared support for the CIW and decided to get all his tomato products from local independent farms or from unionized farms. Would it be wrong to exempt this franchisee from the boycott? Surely not. If anything, the action of such a franchisee puts him at greater risk than an academic who merely opposes Israeli policy. The better exemption test would have been for academics who circulate petitions opposing association with the specific West Bank college in question. But Velleman and the AAUP are not criticizing the AUT's exemption on grounds that political opposition is insufficient!
For me, the kicker on this issue seems to be this: as with the third paragraph of the AUT statement mentioned above, Israeli policy generally is simply not the relevant issue. The boycott is not explicitly about that at all; it's about association with a particular college in the West Bank. Why would opposition to the Occupation be an exempting condition for that? An academic could oppose the Occupation and still engage in the putatively intolerable behavior, and thus be exempted from boycott by the AUT. So my objection to the exemption criterion is not that it's a political litmus test, but that first such a litmus test sets the bar too low, and second, such a litmus test is irrelevant to what the boycott is about. Here is a further reason to worry that the boycott is not really about what it claims to be about.
3. We've seen that boycotts in general are at least sometimes permissible, and that boycotts targeting academics are not always wrong. So let's consider this boycott in particular.
We need a further distinction: a) whether one should endorse the boycott as such, and b) whether the AUT somehow acted wrongfully in enacting the boycott. The questions differ in that one could disagree with or refuse to participate in the boycott but understand why it was imposed, and see the reasons for doing so.
On the narrowest reading, one could answer 3a by endorsing this boycott. One could agree that the Judea & Samaria College should be boycotted, and that other universities (Israeli or otherwise), insofar as and because they associate themselves with that College, should be sanctioned or boycotted. And on this narrowest reading, I think, the answer to 3b is clearly no: even if you support the Occupation and indeed are the president of Judea & Samaria College, you could still recognize that there's nothing wrongful about enacting the boycott. That is, you could recognize such a boycott as a reasonable response to a moral judgment with which you disagree.
In other words, there is an Ideal Boycott that, I think, it would be reasonable to endorse and unreasonable to condemn, even if you disagreed.
But the AUT boycott is not the Ideal Boycott. Broadening the reading a bit, one would still wonder what made that particular West Bank college intolerable, in contrast with, say, BYU Jerusalem Center. Further, one might wonder about the blurred lines between opposition to the Occupation in general, and opposition to this particular college, that seem to creep into the boycott statement as well as the exemption policy. And from this broader perspective, I think the answer to 3a is mixed: you might endorse the boycott with some reservations, because after all there does seem to be something worse about Judea and Samaria College than about BYU-Jerusalem Center, and you might regard the former as a particular affront to the peace process, etc. But even if you endorse the boycott from this perspective, I think the answer to 3b is that the AUT has indeed done something wrongful, and that is, not the boycott itself, but the reasoning. The AUT has needlessly conflated issues in a way that would foreseeably alienate a lot of people (including many AUT members) and make it difficult for sympathetic people to want to endorse the boycott. So in other words, it would be not unreasonable for members of the AUT to both participate in the boycott and condemn the AUT for botching it altogether.
Now let's take the broadest perspective. It might be thought that singling out Israel is a particular instance of badness, and that one should more quickly be condemning other universities that engage in intolerable activities, such as, say, MIT, which does a lot of military research, or Berkeley, which runs nuclear weapons labs. Or maybe more to the point, why not Arizona State University, which is on land stolen from Mexico. Or any Chinese university that has any programs in Tibet.
The answer to this is complex. It is not wrong to be selective in boycotts or punishment. If persons A, B, C, and D all commit act X, and I boycott only A, I have not obviously done something wrong. In the first place I might not have any relevant leverage over the others. Or I may not be able to get enough people to join the boycott against any but A. Or A may be a particularly big fish. For instance, the CIW boycotted Taco Bell because Taco Bell was the biggest single purchaser of Immokalee tomoatoes, and Yum!, the parent company, is the biggest fast-food conglomerate. So being selective is not itself a problem. The problem is, on what grounds is the selection accomplished. And here, I'm less confident. I suspect the reason for not boycotting MIT, Berkeley, and ASU is that they're US universities, and the US is very powerful.
There's a general problem here from the philosophy of punishment. Last I heard, only some 2% of murderers get sentenced to death in the US. Whether this is wrong depends on why the other 98% are exempt. If the reason for the exemption is that they have mitigating circumstances and the 2% have aggravating circumstances, then the selectivity is not wrong in itself. But what if the exemption is based on the fact that the other murderers have Mafia connections, and the DA wants to avoid starting a war with the mob. Then we have mob rule. And I fear (back to the AUT case now) that the reason that American universities are exempt from boycott is that the AUT wants to avoid antagonizing their powerful and rich American colleagues. In which case we have academic mob rule.
Now back to the questions. Again, depending on one's reasons, it would be conceivable, at this point, to (3a) endorse the boycott with the qualifications and hemming and hawing that are appropriate in light of the fact that (3b) the AUT has acted in a way that seems to me to be wrongful. In particular, I suspect that both the real reason for the boycott and the real reason for singling out those particular universities are unmentioned and unmentionable because disgraceful. This is particularly true in the case of academics, not because academics should never be subject to boycott, but because one of the worse things an academic can do qua academic is to justify decisions on the basis of false or deceitful reasons.
So to conclude:
I. It would be wrong to endorse the boycott without comment or qualification.
II. It would not necessarily be wrong to endorse the boycott, subject to qualifications, hemming, and hawing; this seems to depend on one's own politics and the extent to which one thinks the boycott is likely to put pressure on the Sharon government to prevent expanding or entrenching settlements, etc. My guess is, not much. But to each her own.
III. It would, conversely, not necessarily be wrong to oppose the boycott, but at the same time I think a number of the reasons given by Bertram, Velleman, and the AAUP seem to need unpacking or rethinking.
IV. Whether or not you endorse the boycott, it seems to me that the AUT has made an awful mess of it. Worst of all is the consistent blurring of lines between the specific institutions and the general policies/country as the object of rebuke; this seems to me to constitute a misrepresentation of the reasons for the boycott that may be either careless or deceitful. Either way, it smells.

Europe Unhappy with Bush Administration -- Again

A lot of bloggers, including Abu Aardvark, have noted the very serious implications of the Bush deal with Sharon the other day. Basically, the US is tossing aside decades of policy and writing off Arab public opinion.

The deal conflicts with longstanding international understandings about occupied territories. Shared norms have long precluded states keeping territory acquired in war.

International norms matter -- the US and Israel cannot simply decide by themselves that Israeli settlements built on occupied territory are legitimate and can remain in place. Other great powers might not be keen on the precedent -- and of course there are competing claims for the land.

Today, the European Union has declared that the so-called "roadmap to peace" remains central so far as the EU is concerned, and they wish to see issues such as the occupied territory and the "right to return" negotiated by all the parties -- including the Palestinians.

Clearly, as many of its members did in regard to Iraq, the EU again intends to challenge American unilateralism:

EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten warned the world community had to repair "an awful lot of damage" arising from a historic US policy reversal announced by President George W. Bush this week.

And French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier warned Bush to "respect" Europe, saying the quartet was not a "one-man show".

Bush dropped a political bombshell by backing Sharon's plan for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip -- coupled with the retention of permanent settlements on the West Bank.

The president's declaration reversed three decades of US foreign policy, which had consistently labelled the Israeli settlements an obstacle to peace.

"The Union reaffirms its belief that the roadmap represents the only route to achieving such an outcome," said a statement issued at the end of a two-day meeting.

Bush also endorsed Sharon's contention that Palestinian refugees driven out of their homes when the Jewish state was created in 1948 had no right to return.

But in their statement, the EU ministers recalled that the bloc "will not recognise any change to the pre-1967 borders (created by the Six Day War) other than those arrived at by agreement between the parties".

"The Union emphasises that no declared views on the possible shape of a final settlement can pre-empt the negotiation of that settlement."

The ministers added that a Middle East settlement "must include an agreed, just, fair and realistic solution to this question" of refugees.

British Foreign Minister Jack Straw claims that the Bush administration remains committed to the roadblock, but lots of people now doubt that after the deal this week.

Bush foreign policy really is disastrous. The US has unpredented military power, but that does not afford it the right to assert anything it wants in world affairs. As Iraq demonstrates daily, using that military force to achieve desired goals can be quite difficult. And other great powers can make life miserable for the US when they are sufficiently perturbed. After all, the US wants their cooperation in the UN on Iraq over the next six weeks.

Incredible.

This Seems Like a Very Bad Idea

There's a very disturbing story from the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau yesterday, "In Tikrit, U.S. destroys homes of suspected guerrillas." The US is borrowing dubious counter-insurgency tactics from Israel:

In a tactic reminiscent of Israeli crackdowns in the West Bank and Gaza, the U.S. military has begun destroying the homes of suspected guerrilla fighters in Iraq's Sunni Triangle, evacuating women and children, then leveling their houses with heavy weaponry.

At least 15 homes have been destroyed in Tikrit as part of what has been dubbed Operation Ivy Cyclone II, including four leveled on Sunday by tanks and Apache helicopters that allegedly belonged to suspects in the Nov. 7 downing of a Black Hawk helicopter that killed six Americans.

Family members at one of the houses, in the village of al Haweda, said they were given five minutes to evacuate before soldiers opened fire.

Why is this a bad idea? Well, as the Palestinian experience suggests, it motivates new insurgents:

On Monday, angry residents of al Haweda, where three of the destroyed homes were, said the tactic will spawn more guerrilla fighters and perhaps spark an Iraqi uprising similar to the Palestinian intifada in the West Bank and Gaza.

"This is something Sharon would do," said 41-year-old farmer Jamel Shahab, referring to the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. "What's happening in Iraq is just like Palestine."

Even the US State Department has criticized Israel's past actions:

The State Department's 2002 human rights report, released in March, said such policies "left hundreds of Palestinians not involved in terror attacks homeless." In September, department spokesman Richard Boucher criticized Israel for destroying a seven-story apartment building in Gaza during a raid on a suspected Hamas militant.

There was no official reaction in Washington.

A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested Monday that the tactic was not sanctioned in Washington.

This is the US military's justification on the ground in Iraq:

The operation is expected to continue through Wednesday, said Col. James Hickey, commander of the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division.

Hickey said the four homes were destroyed on Sunday because enemy fighters lived and met there. Leveling the homes will force the fighters to find other meeting places, he said.

"Those four people used those houses as sanctuary, and we're not allowing them to have sanctuary," Hickey said.

"We're going to turn the heat up and complicate their battlefield," driving them into the desert, he said. "There they will be exposed and we will have them."

In the article, White House's Scott McClellan refers to the fighters as terrorists, but that is inaccurate so long as they are attacking US forces. It's an occupied country and they are attacking their occupiers. Given the questionable legality of the US attack in the first place, the insurgency might even be legal under international law.

I'm certainly not condoning the violence on either side. The US needs a non-violent approach to Iraq. Soon, I'm going to blog about exactly that.

Hint: Several years ago I participated in a project directed by Christian Ethicist scholar Glen Stassen on just-peacemaking.