Stay true to the dreams of thy youth

Below are a series of blog posts from the world-renowed political scientist Stephen Walt. As the epitome of a realist, and a giant in the field, he offers some interesting perspectives.

Each blog is a "thought experiment" helping readers to more deeply reflect on the current war occurring in Gaza.

His blog can be found here.

What if Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War?

Sun, 01/04/2009 - 5:22pm

Here's a thought experiment:

Imagine that Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War, leading to a massive exodus of Jews from the territory of Israel. Imagine that the victorious Arab states had eventually decided to permit the Palestinians to establish a state of their own on the territory of the former Jewish state. (That's unlikely, of course, but this is a thought experiment). Imagine that a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees confined to that narrow enclave known as the Gaza Strip. Then imagine that a group of hardline Orthodox Jews took over control of that territory and organized a resistance movement. They also steadfastly refused to recognize the new Palestinian state, arguing that its creation was illegal and that their expulsion from Israel was unjust. Imagine that they obtained backing from sympathizers around the world and that they began to smuggle weapons into the territory. Then imagine that they started firing at Palestinian towns and villages and refused to stop despite continued reprisals and civilian casualties.

Here's the question: would the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?

Here's another: would the United States have even allowed such a situation to arise and persist in the first place?

Another "thought experiment"

Tue, 01/06/2009 - 4:48pm

Several readers took issue with my "thought experiment" asking how the United States would have reacted if the Arabs had won the Six Day War and if Israeli Jews had faced similar conditions to the Palestinians in Gaza and had responded in a similar fashion.

It's a thought experiment, folks, not history, and my aim was to challenge the moral certainties and tribal loyalties

But if you don't like that "thought experiment," here's another, offered by philosophy professor Joseph Levine at University of Massachusetts: what if Hamas was hiding out among the civilian population of Tel Aviv, and attacking Israel from within? Would the IDF be using massive force to eradicate them? Unless you think that Palestinian and Israeli civilian lives are not equal, what justifies the current policy? that normally dominate debates on the whole Israeli-Palestinian morass. Obviously, it's child's play to identify differences between the hypothetical that I sketched and the way history actually turned out, though I didn't see how any of the ones raised in the comments invalidated my basic point. But it is hardly far-fetched (let alone anti-Semitic) to imagine Jews engaging in acts of resistance against an oppressor. That's what I would expect any group to do, regardless of their ethnic or religious background. It is precisely what the Zionists did against the British during the Mandate period, and it was Irgun leader (and later Prime Minister) Yitzhak Shamir who wrote that "neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat."

Israel is hardly unique in placing a higher value on its own citizens' lives than it places on the lives of others, and we should not forget that U.S. forces have caused plenty of civilian casualties in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." But that doesn't make it right, and there are good reasons to question whether it will even be effective in this instance.

Thought experiments (one last time) and a reply to David Rothkopf

Thu, 01/08/2009 - 9:16am

Courtesy of Philip Weiss's blog, here is another thought experiment from New America Foundation's Daniel Levy. Note: it's not a transcript; it is Weiss's summary of a portion of a conference call that Levy conducted two days ago:

[Levy] said: We all hear, oh, the U.S. would do the same thing if Canada or Mexico were firing rockets at us. We would have a duty to respond. And yes, I think, Israel has a duty to respond, Levy said.

But then he went on to explode that analogy, and get at the core issue: Lack of Political Sovereignty. Canada and Mexico are states. Palestinians have no state. Remember, he said, that Gaza is just 4 percent of the Palestinian territories. The other 96 percent are still occupied. They have been for 40 years. And imagine that the 4 percent had been under siege, since they were unoccupied 3 years ago. And the occupied parts were crisscrossed with checkpoints and colonies.

Would it really be that surprising if in Canada or Mexico there was a hardline opposition that took over the government? And was deeply opposed to the occupier? 'I'll leave that to your imagination.'"

It bears repeating that the real value of these analogies (or "thought experiments") is not to justify any particular course of action (although plenty of politicians have been using them that way). Reality is too complicated for that, and its usually easy to argue that a particular analogy doesn't fit the concrete case one currently confronts. Rather, the real purpose is to help us examine the facile, good-versus-evil stereotypes and conventional assumptions that constitute much of the discourse about difficult political issues, and especially the Israel-Palestine conflict.

My new FP blogging associate David Rothkopf objects to my initial thought experiment, which asked whether U.S. policy might be different if the Israeli and Palestinian situations were reversed. In doing so, he demonstrates how hard it is for some people to retain their objectivity and rhetorical poise on these issues. He accuses me of being on an "jihad" against Israel (note the loaded language), and claims that I've joined an "anti-Israel lobby" whose ranks include former President Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

I'm flattered to be placed in such distinguished company, but here Rothkopf is committing the all-too-common error of assuming that critics of certain Israeli policies (and critics of the current "special relationship") are "anti-Israel." In fact, the special relationship (i.e., the policy of nearly-unconditional and uncritical support) is increasingly harmful to the Jewish state, as it makes it almost impossible for the United States to oppose Israeli actions that are misguided (such as settlement-building, or Israel's ill-founded strategy in the Lebanon War of 2006). The United States would be a better friend to Israel if we had a more normal relationship, and if U.S. leaders could talk more openly about these issues.

As for Carter, consider what former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami writes in his excellent book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace:

Carter did not hesitate to criticize Israel publicly, threaten her and even put pressure on her. As it turned out, it was this kind of President—George Bush [the elder] in the later 1980s is another case in point—who was ready to confront Israel head on and overlook the sensibilities of her friends in America that managed eventually to produce meaningful breakthroughs on the way to an Arab-Israeli peace" (p. 167, my emphasis).

The current President Bush is often described as the most "pro-Israel" President in history. Yet his policies have helped make Hamas stronger and more popular, and his cheerleading for Israel’s ill-advised war in Lebanon in 2006 ended up costing more Israeli lives and left Hezbollah in a stronger position in Lebanon. His policies also facilitated settlement expansion and made a two-state solution harder to achieve, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 ended up improving Iran's strategic position, which is hardly good for Israel. All this reinforces a point I made a few days ago: it is high time to redefine what "pro-Israel" means.

More analogies and thought experiments (not mine)

Sat, 01/10/2009 - 3:12pm

I had not intended to devote this much space to Middle East issues when FP launched this new site, but events in the region have made that resolution rather hard to keep. Here are a few more "thought experiments" (not mine).

First, over at Mondoweiss, Jerome Slater of SUNY-Buffalo offers his own Swiftian alternative history of the situation. Find it here.

Second, from Israel, Uri Avnery presents a typically sharp-edged set of historical alternatives. I don't have a link to it yet, but here's a short excerpt of a longer column:

NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town's inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as "hostages" and exploit the women and children as "human shields", they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured."

And finally, via e-mail from a correspondent in Florida, yet another thought experiment from a rather different perspective:

Here is an analogy you may find interesting... very real...and a little closer to home.

If after the second World War - all the Germans were evicted from Germany - litteraly [sic] - their population decimated - their people scattered

As the Germans were away (the brandenberg gate still standing there, and the main city is still called Berlin) the French and the Poles then move in and create a country called "FrancoPol".

As the Germans find themselves without a home, always labeled the "The Hitler people" - they are shunned, killed, and scapegoated - even after 1800 years

After @ 1800 years, the Germans realise that the only way to survive, and thrive again, would be to return home to Germany...

So they begin to settle small tracks of land in "FrancoPol"...their lands thrive, and they are happy - their goal is to restore Germany - all of it

The Francopolians are not very happy about seeing the Germans again, they call them "Settlers" and "Occupiers" and begin to kill them...

The Germans begin to fight back, and repell attacks, and yes, begin to "reclaim" more German land - always accused of stealing "francopolian" land

The UN decides to split the land between the Germans and the francopolians - the Germans Accept - the Francopolians dont - and continue to attack them

As the more land comes under German control, the Francopolians do everything they can to destroy this re-born Germany..but to no avail..

As the German people finally return to Berlin, reclaim it, rebuild it, makes it live and thrive again...

Would the Germans be "Occupiers" of Berlin?

Would the Germans be "Colonisers" of Berlin?

Would the Germans be "Usurpers" of Berlin?

Comment by me: There are plenty of obvious ways one could challenge each of these "thought experiments," but I still find them useful spurs to our thinking. This is a subject area where people's views frequently get etched in stone -- and all the more so when violence is raging and the PR machines are working overtime -- and that makes it even more important to look for devices that force us to think more carefully and critically.