JOSHUA LIPSON
Joshua Lipson '14 is a columnist and was the Senior World Editor of the Harvard Political Review in 2012. An avid follower of international politics and foreign policy, he blogs about Middle Eastern affairs, with a focus on the Israeli. He hails from New Jersey, but traces his roots back to the desert hinterland of ancient Canaan. Josh balks at conventional political labels, looking to science rather than philosophy as the inspiration for his opinions. As a junior at Harvard College, he is currently studying Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Mind, Brain, and Behavior. Politics aside, Josh enjoys sailing, poetry, world music, and fine scotch whiskey. He speaks Hebrew, Arabic, and Spanish, and plays a killer game of Bananagrams.



Housing Day and Harvard’s Liberal Paternalism

Harvard March 25, 2013 8:37 am

From the glut of t-shirts, face paint, and other strange totemic adornments on view during Housing Day in and around Harvard Yard, it’s safe to assume that most freshmen are at least sort of happy about the river gods’ decisions. However, I speak from experience in saying that much of their enthusiasm, though healthy and well-advised, is essentially forced: any given year, less than 10% are sorted into the house of their choice, a figure that makes your average state-school housing lottery look like an efficient allocator of preference.

This was not always the case. The underlying principle of Harvard’s system until 1997 was market competition—sometimes sordid, sometimes isolating, but always reasonably efficient.

Despite its attempts to correct for self-segregation and perceptions of exclusivity, the semi-random housing lottery we know today has no place for diversity of personal residential priorities and sensibilities. Two years ago, a conservative friend of mine enamored of the aesthetic of old Harvard beseeched the river gods to land him in Eliot, while a socialist friend turned on more by the egalitarian ethos of Harvard’s post-Georgian buildings dreamed of Mather. In a perfectly ordinary case of Housing Day randomness, the traditionalist opened his door to Mather’s postmodern gorilla of a mascot, the socialist to be banqueted and feted under a green clock tower for the remainder of freshman spring.

Although ghosts of this era of autonomous, culturally continuous houses are known to stir during fete and drag night seasons, the reasons Harvard freshman generally have for favoring one house or another are quite functional and easy to appreciate: one prefers convenience, another prefers spacious living quarters, another is mad about quality of community. In sum, Harvard’s kind fifteen-year-old attempt at social engineering has categorically failed, purging houses of their distinctive cultures while at the same time sending students to live exactly where they don’t want to—forcing open new chasms in quality of life between those who got what they wanted and those who did not.

Nonetheless, culture at Harvard was keen to adapt: Housing Day evolved as a focal point of the campus calendar, progressively adding on-the-Yard pep rallies, vuvuzelas, and night-before activities along the way. And so Harvard College’s first great tradition of the millennium was born: collective totemics galvanized identities chosen at random, while giving the dejected a sort of metaphysical reason to learn to “love the one you’re with.”

Within the last three years, the College administration has taken up an audacious fight against the very traditions its past paternalistic interventions forced into being. In a charming, hardly fatal activity redolent of a bygone era when Harvard still tolerated fun, freshmen descended to the river to launch paper boats in a burnt offering to the housing gods; brimming with house spirit and conviviality, upperclassmen in each house invited them to make memories over a moonlit drink or snack. As freshman in the spring of 2011, my blockmates and I were allowed to engage in River Run more or less unmolested; although the College had successfully put the kibosh on boat-burning, we were defiant and quick-footed enough to launch our idolatrous vessel while successfully evading the cops.

Fast-forward two years: in a move that I could hardly believe, this week’s Housing Day saw the administration post ID-checking guards at the entrances to each upperclassman house, turning away any and all members of the Class of 2016 with the threat of disciplinary action. An official Class of 2016 Housing Day t-shirt- (and likely cupcake-, mug-, and gingerbread-)decorating party was held from 9 to 11 in Annenberg instead, reflecting administrators’ strange belief that what students really want more of is supervised space for sober activities.

The rationale for University Hall’s policy isn’t all that foreign: technically speaking, Harvard campus has a zero-tolerance policy for freshman drinking, and something liability-worthy is just bound to happen when 1,600 alcohol-fueled freshmen are loosed on the river and quad. Although I would suggest it in the College’s interest to treat students like adults and expect adult behavior in turn, I cannot dismiss their concerns offhand. What I deplore is their counterproductive, insulting policy response: attempt to scare and physically deter freshmen into submission, while at the same time pedantically branding River Run a “fake tradition” (the irony being that Housing Day proper is no less newfangled).

Not only does this approach encourage dorm room vodka binges over well-paced beverage consumption and wall-scaling over ordinary swipe entry, but it also does violence to one of the few traditions left intact in a Harvard culture increasingly defined by administrative paternalism, social stratification, and pre-professional ambivalence toward community. For all that Harvard has been since 1636, undergraduates today have very little concept of the College as more than just an old Ivy League school where the Roosevelts and Kennedys went. In trampling Fair Harvard’s informal cultural treasures, University Hall must tread carefully—lest it succeed in cementing the College’s newfound reputation as the Ivy League’s UChicago: Where fun comes to die.

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The Middle East’s Demographic Haves and Have-Nots

Middle East - World March 11, 2013 10:49 pm

amman panorama

One-state, two-state, three-state, or however else amateur final status negotiators envision the future political geography of Israel-Palestine, one pivotal element that few think to mention is that any arrangement will, by necessity, be extraordinarily high-density. On the eve of World War I, the Massachusetts-sized territory housed a modest population of 700,000 souls; by partition, that figure had risen to nearly two million. A few generations later, the population of Israel teeters at the cusp of eight million; remarkably, some four million Palestinians are packed into the combined territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But as the combined population of the two societies approaches double that of their geographical equivalent in Massachusetts (a comparison exacerbated by the fact that nearly half of Israel is limited to low-density settlement by desert), population growth remains an object of nationalistic zeal, not a trace of Malthusian concern in sight. Despite the worrisome internal demographic shifts entailed by its policies, Israel’s pro-natalism is regarded as a weapon in the zero-sum war over who will hold a majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. On the Palestinian side, the persistence of traditional social structures and the absence of a strong, independent state have kept birth rates yet higher, with the once-sparsely populated Gaza Strip spiraling into Dhaka-level rates of high-poverty urban density.

The unique political salience of population growth in the fate of the Israel-Palestine problem has kept the two cramped societies insulated from a wave of demographic transition, one that has radically transformed the traditionally hyper-fertile societies of the Middle East into bastions of low-to-medium urban population growth. In 1960, your average Syrian woman could expect to give birth to 7.47 live children; your average Egyptian woman, 6.65. By virtue of the breakdown of traditional rural life in favor of mass urbanization and the aggressive intervention of secular socialist governments, comparable figures for half a century later stood at 2.93 and 2.73, respectively. Following similar patterns, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Tunisia stand in the same range at present; starting from a comparably high position in the 1960s, Turkey, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Iran have seen even more precipitous declines.

Despite the preponderance of this demographic trend, which reached its inflection point during the 1990s, Israel and the Palestinian territories stand apart among the exceptions to the rule, flanked by Yemen, Iraq, and Jordan. Within this rubric, Israel’s case is exceptional: measured by the IMF at a per capita GDP of some $31,467, its fertility rate of 3.03 stands far above those of such similarly-wealthy societies as Japan, Spain, and Italy. Five to six times wealthier than Egypt or Syria, Israel has relied on an elaborate system of policy instruments and cultural nudges to outbreed the poor neighboring states with which it once clashed on the open battlefield.

More interesting, however, is the comparing of like to like in trying to appreciate what sets Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, and Palestine apart from their middle-income, non-oil Middle Eastern peers. The common factor for all, sans Jordan, is remarkably clear if not perfectly explanatory—Iraq, Palestine, and Yemen are the poorest three countries in the Middle East, “lower-middle income” exceptions to the region’s “upper-middle income” rule.

Its late-twentieth century patterns of political economy shattered by the American invasion in 2003, Iraq is considerably poorer and less stable (if freer) than it was at its 1999 peak, as measured by per capita GDP. Buffeted against nearly a decade and a half of crippling sanctions by a top-flight supply of petroleum resources, the Mesopotamian state was within recent memory wealthier than either Syria, Egypt, Jordan or Morocco. Nevertheless, Baghdad has seen far less of a decline in total fertility over the last two decades than any of the other major Arab states did over the course of the nineties alone—suggesting the possibility that its rentier-fueled society, like those of the rich Gulf sheikhdoms, was under no pressure to modernize demographically under the reign of Saddam. The collapse of the efficient, if brutal Iraqi political economy of yore has seen fertility remain high, a pattern likely to persist as the wrecked state struggles to recoup past levels of modest wealth and development.

The Palestinian situation runs deeper; four and a half decades of Israeli occupation, two previous decades of statelessness and displacement, and a wave of self-destructive terror in the early 2000s have prevented the crystallization of a well-centered, economically self-sufficient Palestinian polity from emerging. Despite recent surges in West Bank urban economic growth and two decades of post-Oslo international largesse, the Palestinian territories have been unable to break the Malthusian trap—a problem exacerbated by the scarcity of land available to Palestinians for settlement and self-government. The ironic reality is that for Israel’s impressive feats of demographic turnaround, the Jewish state is losing its zero-sum demographic struggle to its own policies of military occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip, which have hampered the emergence of strong indigenous institutions and prevented the Palestinians from properly reaping the fruits of economic growth. Contra Mitt Romney, the Palestinian cycle of high fertility and poor economic performance is a matter of institutions, not of culture—one that must be broken for the sake of a sustainable Palestine and a secure Israel.

I won’t delve too deeply into the intractable structural factors that leave Yemen at a regionally record-holding fertility rate of 5.09 children per woman or place it among African rather than other Arab states in developmental terms. Suffice it to say that the same factors that have prevented effective political centralization or modernization in the Arabian Peninsula’s far southwest—a rugged landscape, recent political unification, a history of civil wars and tribal insurrections, and a shallow history of integration into the global economy—have a lot to do with the failure of Yemen to come close to demographic transition. For this constellation of unfortunate reasons, the way forward for Sana’a is much harder to project than those for Baghdad and Ramallah, where the root causes are plain to see and international involvement has been deep and sustained.

In the wake of the first revolutionary movements of the Arab Spring, Western commentators the world over realized just how ardently the Middle East’s motley map of polities and societies defy generalization. On deeper questions of demography and economic development, the same holds true. As the world community struggles to craft an approach to the post-revolutionary Arab states, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Sunni-Shiite fault, it would be wise to understand what Middle Eastern populations look like, beyond the typical maps drawn in different shades of green.

Photo credit: arabglot.com

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What Israel Can Learn from the Canaanites

Middle East - World February 18, 2013 8:26 pm
Flag of the mid-20th century Canaanite movement.

Flag of the mid-20th century Canaanite movement.

Until the election-night surprise of Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party’s second-place finish, a different canonical story dominated the coverage of Israel’s 2013 election season. In late 2012, domestic and international outlets seized upon the rise of Naftali Bennett, whose clean-shaven, high-tech image recast national-religious annexationism as the new cool among young conservatives.

Unfortunately, more attention was paid to Bennett’s American-inflected charm and boyish good looks than to his telling branding campaign: a redesign of Israel’s hard-right National Union and National Religious Party under the inclusive, simple-to-remember banner of “The Jewish Home.” The power of adapting a country’s raison d’être as political slogan is not to be underestimated: most Jewish Israelis, however sympathetic to the national-religious agenda, are at least basically on board with the legally-enshrined concept of the state as a “Jewish Home”.

However, the story of Naftali Bennett’s successful sloganeering (measured though it was on election night, with the party scoring 12 of 120 seats) is not simply one about the effective use of well-worn tropes. Rather, “The Jewish Home” represents a potent reaction against the century-long assertion of Israeli identity as separate from and superior to Jewishness—a harbinger of great consequences for the political and cultural future of Israel.

Contrary to popular belief, the founding idea of Israel as a Jewish state was bitterly contested from the start—as nativists bent on creating a Hebrew-speaking “new Jew” clashed with traditionalists who carried a Diaspora sensibility about what it would mean to build a Jewish polity. A few decades into the argument, a few radical voices on the secular right staked an even bolder claim: that the new Hebrew-speaking society in Palestine should embrace its classical Levantine roots, pursue integration within the Arab Middle East, and sever ties with the conditioned cowardice of the Diaspora.

Led by such men of letters as Yonatan Ratosh, A. G. Horon, and Aharon Amir, these “Young Hebrews”—known by popular pejorative as “Canaanites”—envisioned a big, brave Israel at ease with its Arab neighbors and its Middle Eastern environment. In today’s Israeli political climate, however, the Canaanite idea is taken for a contradiction in terms. Since Israeli voters’ razor-thin rejection of Shimon Peres’ vision for a “New Middle East” in 1996, successive governments of both the right and center-left have doubled down on “fortress Israel”—internally dynamic, but sealed off hermetically from its natural neighborhood.

As the rise of Bennett’s “Jewish Home” and the Likud’s “Jewish Leadership” faction evince, the contemporary right seeks to couple a security policy of hyper-fortification with a retreat from secular Israeli elite culture in favor of something resembling a Third Jewish Commonwealth. The center-left is equally to blame: though open to disengaging from the Palestinian territories and allergic to theocracy, its standard-bearers in Tel Aviv and Herzliya are blissfully unaware of their Levantine neighborhood, preferring to imagine Gush Dan as a Hebrew-speaking strip of prime real estate somewhere in Iberia or Florida. The overwhelmingly secular Ashkenazi constituency behind Yair Lapid’s electoral upset is complicit, whether openly or coyly, in a Lapid family legacy of disdain for Mizrahi influence on Israeli culture—exemplified by the otherwise laudable Tommy Lapid’s famous calls against the Levantinization of Israel, a country which happens to be located in the heart of the Levant. When Tzipi Livni preaches the importance of securing an amicable divorce from the Palestinians, one wonders whether she hopes that by signing a peace treaty and acceding to territorial realities, Israel can check out of the Middle East’s great sound and fury once and for all. Of additional import, neither approach to the future of Israeli political culture has much of a role for Arabs, who comprise a fifth of the country’s citizenry and are unlikely to be persuaded into mainstream participation in an Israel ignorant of its Levantine environment.

Broadly speaking, contemporary Israel has a lot to learn from the Canaanites. Although nativist Hebrews would be happy with many developments in Israeli society over the course of the last half-century—the emergence of a Mizrahi majority, the vibrant renaissance of Hebrew language and literature, and the development of an internationally successful Israeli brand independent of Diaspora Jewishness—there is certainly a lot about which to be concerned.

Given the overlapping deficiencies of Israel’s right-wing and left-wing political cultures, the absence of a Canaanite voice in the national discourse bodes poorly for the development of a genuine, lasting security for Israel that cannot be bought with military spending and intelligence alone. Next to the question of military survival, the primary challenge of Israeli nation-building in the twentieth century was that of kibbutz galuyot, the ingathering and assimilation of Diaspora Jewish populations from around the world into a cohesive society on the Mediterranean’s eastern shore. Aside from military and territorial imperatives, the next great challenge of Israeli nation-building will be getting 6 million Jewish Israelis, half of them of European cultural origins, to feel comfortable in the Middle East. And yet tens of billions of security dollars and hundreds of miles of concrete barrier later, Israeli political culture is no less anxious than before—producing electoral stunners by Jewish-before-Israeli right-wingers and secular European escapists alike.

If Israeli movers and shakers are willing to learn from the Canaanites (whose originally far-right spokesmen pragmatically joined the pro-peace left after 1967), they can hope to move beyond the “fortress Israel” paradigm and toward a genuine, regionally-integrated sort of security. For the first time in its history, Israel would be able to turn its economic dynamism outward toward its natural backyard—becoming an engine for development and liberalization through trade and exchange. This must inform how policymakers handle a two-state solution, if sane enough heads prevail to allow for it: it must require guarantees of normalization with Arab neighbors, and mustn’t fall into the “divorce” trap as proposed by members of the center-left.

What both Moshe Feiglin and Ali Abunimah both have right is that Israel/Palestine is a single land and a natural economic unit; though their mutual opposition to partition is stubborn and impractical, it is true that Israel and a future Palestinian state will have to get used to being closer neighbors than almost any other pair of sovereign states. Embracing elements of the Canaanite idea can make the difficult process at least a bit less daunting.

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Eugene Jarecki

Interviews February 17, 2013 3:29 pm

Eugene-Jarecki-2012I got hold of Eugene Jarecki, an acclaimed activist and documentary filmmaker, during a screening of his newest project, The House I Live In, at the JFK Jr. Forum. Alive with enthusiasm about correcting the problems of drug prohibition, he scoffed at time limits and spoke at length with us about the war he’s waging against the War on Drugs.

What set apart the experience of making a documentary about the War on Drugs from Why We Fight, or your other past works?

This film is different from other films I’ve made, because I have a strong personal connection to the subject matter through friends and extended family that I have whose lives have been very deeply touched by the War on Drugs. But there’s no question that I’ve made several films that take on large, systemic crises in America—conditions of injustice and exploitation and corruption, which have been the focus of my work—and the challenge here is a balancing act between that which is emotional and heart-wrenching and personal for me to think about, and that which is more analytical and political-philosophical in nature. And both need to be grappled with by the public, because if you make a documentary about a subject like this that simply lives in statistics and in political analysis or economic analysis, you make something which is mind-numbingly insensitive to the human content of the events. People’s eyes will glaze over and they’ll find it wonkish and detached. If you make something that’s only driven by the stories of those caught up in the drug war, you may deeply move people, but they won’t know about what—they won’t understand the roots of the problem that’s indicated by the unfolding of the human stories.

So the balancing act becomes one between the heart and the mind, between storytelling and factual delivery—and in the end you’re talking about something like infotainment, to give it a crass term of art—you’re trying to keep people engaged on a Friday night when they have other movie choices they could make, but you’re also trying to deliver important stuff for them to think about so that society can be made better. It’s in the weaving of those elements that the challenge of the movie lies.

Given that in today’s political discourse, a lot of the loudest criticisms of the War on Drugs are libertarian and rights-based, do you think that sort of misses the point of the issue and the various impacts it has on society?

When you have a crisis as profound as the human rights crisis of the War on Drugs in America, you don’t have the luxury to reject any sources of concern, so the interest of the libertarian right in what may seem like the violation of fiscal conservatism that lies with the War on Drugs—the interest of the Republican right, the libertarian right, have in the runaway economic waste of the War on Drugs—is a welcome component to any discussion in which the left figures to contribute concerns about the humanistic issues at stake.

So now what you have, thankfully, is now a new and more volatile moment in the drug war—the most volatile moment we’ve had—where the concerns about the right about fiscal conservatism and the concerns of the left about a more perfect kind of justice and the inhumanity of the system combine to create an unprecedented force for reform. When the libertarian right was whiling away in a wilderness of concern about runaway expenditure without being heard, and the left was talking about injustice in black America without being heard, they now hear each other and find common cause in a way that’s absolutely indispensable—because the center, as dominated by centrist Republicans and centrist Democrats, are profiteers in that system. They have a tin ear to anything but the most threatening chorus of concern.

And so the unification of the libertarian right and the progressive left on such issues of fiscal conservatism and justice may prove to be a tipping point force for getting those people to understand that there’s a cost to doing business as they’ve been doing it—an electoral cost, especially within the Republican Party. It’s one of those issues that’s fractured the Republican Party. Within Democratic circles, I’ve seen that Senator Feinstein of California, for example, is finding herself more and more isolated along the lines, when she sees people in judiciary activities in the Senate, like Orrin Hatch—who was once upon a time a strong bedfellow of hers in fighting for tougher drug laws—you even find that people like Orrin Hatch are softening quite a lot. You find a person like Senator Feinstein finding herself more and more alone, and no politician wants that. I think this is a welcome moment. I hear the libertarian concerns about the money, and I agree: what a ridiculous way of spending public funds, digging a hole in the ground and throwing into it your money and your people.

What do you think would be a real indicator that we’re at a tipping point in terms of ending the War on Drugs, in terms of legislation or popular activism?

There’s this old adage that came out of the South African revolution that says that all revolutions are impossible until they happen. And then everyone says, “Oh, it was inevitable.” You don’t know how to read the tea leaves when an Arab Spring is about to happen; nobody knew that Occupy was going to happen, or that the original Tea Party was about to happen. Things crop up and then suddenly feel inevitable when they didn’t beforehand, so I don’t know that we’ll know what the leading indicators will look like. I can tell you that certain key events in the last year speak volumes to me as serious indicators of the possibility of reform, but only if handling and perceived properly. So, Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana in the past year—not just medical marijuana, a major leap: they legalized marijuana, period. That’s a major step, because it doesn’t have that kind of nuanced caveat of the medical. It’s more of an endorsement of the notion that some form of drug legalization is more in the public interest than the reverse, more draconian sentencing for drugs than any other Western nation.

We also saw on election day a victory not about drugs specifically, but about the public view of the excessive incarceration of the nonviolent, which has become an epidemic in America. We incarcerate the nonviolent so excessively that it has produced the better part of our 700% increase in prison population since 1971. We can all agree that incarcerating nonviolent people for sentences that rival or outstrip the violent violates common sense. Since that is my discourse, what happened in California is extremely important for what I consider to be the immediate and winnable fight—which is, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Proposition 36, which means that Californians saw that Californian’s three strikes law was excessive, and excessively targeted the nonviolent with life sentences. Prior to election day, you would go to jail for life for your third strike, even if that strike were nonviolent or petty—like stealing a slice of pizza, in one case. Stealing tube socks, in another case. Denture cream, in another case. These cases are now famous, and they became famous enough because of the shame of it and the gross injustice of it, because down the hall from them are murderers who get out with a shorter sentence—that Californians put forward the idea that going to jail for life requires a serious or violent offense.

That’s an important step because it speaks to a public appetite for greater sanity in sentencing. It also speaks to a specific commentary on our runaway sentencing of our nonviolent. But third of all, for people who don’t care about injustice, but care about watching their dollars, it’s going to save the state of California $100 million minimum to make that decision, and other states hemorrhaging money from their budgets are going to be keen to hear that the California example can be applied in their state. You produce more perfect justice and you produce greater savings.

That marriage that we’ve seen happen on election day in three states between more sanity and more compassion and greater savings—the sum total of this is a picture which is encouraging to me, but only if handled correctly. Those three victories can work to the detriment of the drug war, if anyone takes excessive comfort from them that the war against the war has been won. These are just battles in the war to end the drug war. They have to be seen that way; if they’re overinterpreted, we’ll drop our guard—because reform is by no means on its way. Those were hard-won victories that took a tremendous amount of time to achieve, and more of that needs to happen in more states. So people around the country need to take no comfort from that other than that public opinion in other states will be equally inclined toward greater sanity. Any other comfort, like that the system will reform of its own accord or that the ball is already rolling—would be very dangerous.

I heard you acknowledge [Kennedy School Professor] Stephen Walt in the audience; to what extent has discussing this issue with the foreign policy and international relations community shaped your approach to portraying the War on Drugs.

Broadly in the foreign policy community, there’s no way to talk about the American drug war in a vacuum from the international relations crises that our wrongheaded approach to this has produced. What is happening in Mexico is what it looks like when a country like America leaves its drug problem, which is a health problem, unaddressed, by treating it as a criminal problem—which it isn’t—we have left the addiction problem to fester, and so our addiction problem in America has reached the highest level on earth, with the highest level of demand, which is causing our neighbor’s state to become a virtually failed state. Servicing our demand and the market associated with it has created a massively violent industry in Mexico that is destroying that country. So nobody would want the adoption of tax and regulate policies in America and an end to criminalization more than any person who wants peaceful progress in Mexico—because it is our wrongheaded repeat of the crime of prohibition in this country that has caused this sort of gangsterism in the first place. We learned our lesson with Prohibition, and decided to repeat it all over again with drugs, and it makes no sense.

The American domestic War on Drugs is by its very nature an international relations issue. If we were to solve the domestic injustice of this and the incongruity of it, it would by accident solve one of the major security issues we have, which is the security issue that’s bleeding over the border right now. Extraordinarily, how often do you have a domestic policy issue that is inherently an international relations issue? Amazing.

What advice would you give to organizations and people on the activist scene—Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, LEAP, for example—what would you say is the next priority to be focused on?
Aggregate. Aggregate is the word. It means, don’t let your actions happen in the egotism of isolation. We’re doing that with our film. More than ever before, we’re playing well with others. Make sure that you aggregate yourselves with like-minded and not so like-minded allies in a struggle—which means if there are Students for a Sensible Drug Policy on campus, and they haven’t reached out to the libertarian right on campus, they ought to have yesterday. Go visit rightoncrime.org and find out where the interests of the right wing lie in reforming the criminal justice system, and what a breath of air that would be for the public here, about right-left collaborations on a social issue. The enchantment of that is almost like the great ending of a movie; both baseball teams get drunk together, and you kind of want that.

On one level, it’s to make sure that they unashamedly make alliances and work well with others, and aggregate personally, so they become more in numbers. So that’s one thing. Another is to aggregate information: make sure that if you have a struggle in Boston, looking at stop-and-frisk in Massachusetts, that you’re putting that in the context of stop-and-frisk in New York City, and even stop-and-frisk in Romania. You want to understand what the patterns of behavior are, and what have been the movements against them, around the world. So Students for a Sensible Drug Policy here need to aggregate information about drug policy in Portugal over the last ten years—it’s been a raving success. Americans hate hearing about how they do it better in other countries, but at least we haven’t been hearing about Portugal like we’ve been hearing about Norway for decades; so let’s introduce Portugal and its numbers into the dialogue as a case study about what we have to learn from it and what we don’t have to learn from it.

Lastly, I would say, ships don’t pass in the night. The worst thing you can have is the power to have made a strong point lost because you missed the opportunity to join others or with a key event that you didn’t know what was happening—or if there’s another actor doing what you’re doing, and if you had just known about him, it would have not been just two voices in the wilderness, but two people yelling on a street corner, and that’s a lot more than one. So aggregate is a key aspect of movements to make social change.

And finally, students on campuses more than anyone else in this country have the capacity to lead change on these issues, because they have the most time on their hands, and incredible resources at their disposal for research and dissemination. Prestigious universities like this one carry a special cache, where what they speak matters. You get out on the outside world when these years are over, and what you speak means nothing. I went to an Ivy League school, and it all mattered. And the next day, it didn’t matter at all and I was back to square one. And I remember thinking to myself, “God, I wish I’d used those years more effectively”—when I was not only an available soldier in an army for good, but a soldier in the army for good with a giant megaphone. Now, I’m no longer able to be a soldier in the army for good because I’m working 20 hours a day and I’ve got to build a megaphone of my own. So students here need to aggregate, and aggregating includes aggregating their power—making more of themselves by the incredible apparatus that’s available here that isn’t available later.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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“There Is a Future”: Israel After the Upset

Middle East - World January 23, 2013 6:39 pm

Israel

Like most seasoned American disaffecteds, I was anything but excited about sitting through last year’s low-intensity Obama-Romney slugfest. Of much more significance than my night spent at Harvard Obama headquarters (correction: the IOP), I’ve had the fortune of being on the ground to experience two momentous Middle Eastern elections in the last seven months. Studying at Alexandria University this June, I watched from my balcony as hundreds of thousands of Egyptians lined the harborside Corniche to celebrate the first procedurally democratic election in their history—many having resorted to Mohamed Morsi as nothing more than the lesser of two evils. North and east a few hundred miles up the Mediterranean coast, I spent tonight in Israel’s breezy commercial capital—expecting a right-religious blowout, only to behold the most historic electoral upset in the country’s recent memory.

To be sure, Likud Beitenu, a joint list of Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, will walk away with the largest number of seats in the 19th Knesset: 31 out of 120, if the latest estimates hold. However, in light of the fact that the two parties entered the race with a combined 42, the results stand as nothing less than a severe drubbing. If they haven’t already, heads are expected to roll in the halls of Israel’s secular right-wing establishment. And far from the second-place finish for which they were angling—and which enthusiastic youth support suggested possible—Naftali Bennett’s high-tech, beardless brand of annexationism fared no better: 11 seats, something on the order of a tie for fourth place. In short: not including the ultra-Orthodox parties, which are mostly concerned with maintaining the state’s theocratic trappings and their own massive welfare allocations, the unsinkable Israeli right managed hardly more than a third of the total pie.

Having just returned from the unplanned bustle of Yesh Atid campaign headquarters, it is fair to say that the winner at Netanyahu’s expense is a strikingly handsome Yair Lapid, the son of the late secularist politician Tommy Lapid and a well-respected former news anchor at Israel’s Channel 2. Once written off as a mere personality cult, Lapid’s Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”) party seems poised to pick up 19 seats, whose occupants would include a former Shin Bet chief, an American-born Hopkins-educated Orthodox rabbi, two Ethiopian immigrants, and as many women as men. Decidedly centrist and concerned mostly with a bevy of domestic issues (religion and state, equality in national service, education reform), Lapid’s party is now poised to make or break the prospect of a third term for Netanyahu—in the turn of a black swan event that only Yesh Atid’s on-the-ground operatives claim in hindsight to have predicted.

Despite the great surprise of tonight’s results, most pundits aver that the most likely path forward is a shakier, more compromise-ready Likud-led government. This is with good reason; but, I would urge against jumping to conclusions. First, it is important to note that the media story on Likud Beitenu’s collapse remains woefully understated: because the terms of the Likud-Yisrael Beitenu merger stipulate a parting of ways after election day, Netanyahu and Lieberman’s parties will be forced to split a grand total of 31 seats. In what appears to be the least-reported statistic of the night, this would leave the Likud at 20: the smallest predominant party in Israel’s history, holding 1/6 of the Knesset’s total seats and just barely edging Yesh Atid and Shelly Yachimovich’s center-left Labor as the largest faction.

More than just a testament to Israeli politics’ descent into schizophrenic hyper-pluralism over the course of the last eight years, this fact could induce President Shimon Peres, endowed with the power to choose which party gets to build a ruling coalition, to defy the odds and hand the job to Lapid or one of his center-left counterparts. While the mathematics and popular narrative suggest this an unlikely scenario, it is important to note that Peres—a peace-driven veteran of the Labor Party—might be looking for an excuse to intervene against a prime minister he believes to have badly fumbled the Palestinian issue. If Washington is serious about resuscitating the peace process, it is likely that President Obama will be spending the first few days of his new term in talks with Israel’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning elder statesman, figuring out a way to configure a government sans Netanyahu.

As you wade through the next few weeks of dense post-electoral coverage, the concept to follow will be coalition-building, the means by which every Israeli government since 1949 has come to be. In the likelier (author’s prediction: modestly, not overwhelmingly) case that Netanyahu is granted the opportunity to build a coalition, he will have to choose two of three constituencies to include: Yesh Atid’s secular centrists, the Jewish Home’s hard-right annexationists, and Shas’ ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi ethnics. Forced into diplomatically destructive territory by a newly-minted farther-right Likud list, it is generally understood that Netanyahu—an eternal pragmatist—would prefer to rebalance his coalition toward the center than to embrace the full weight of the right-religious bloc. In the less likely event that Lapid is called to form a coalition, it will require the full cooperation of the entire center-left bloc, as well as either the admission of either an ultra-Orthodox party or the unprecedented inclusion of Arab-Israeli factions. And finally, a shift in just a few seats from the current projections could shake up the entire map.

Whatever configuration comes into power, the story of tonight’s upset can be reduced to one word: turnout. As concerted campaigns by the left-wing NGO Peace Now and President Peres suggested, Israel’s democratic outcomes have a tendency to skew rightward because of turnout disparities between settlers and the ultra-religious on one hand, and secular urbanites and Arab citizens on the other. Conventional wisdom failed to account for the possibility that these efforts, which targeted young, urban audiences, might actually make a difference—something reflected in today’s turnout rates, the highest since 1999 and markedly high in secular urban strongholds. Conversely, turnout in the Arab sector appears to have hit rock bottom—somewhere in the neighborhood of 40%—a factor that very well might have narrowly prevented a total upset by the center-left bloc.

I urge you to stay tuned for more opinion and analysis as the 19th Knesset begins to take shape behind closed doors. At the least, expect me to argue that no Likud government, however tempered, can be expected to make serious overtures toward peace. In the mean time, enjoy the rush of an election result that, absent an Israeli Nate Silver, has thrown the entire Middle East punditocracy into chaos.

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Confessions of a Child Pundit

Election 2012 - United States November 5, 2012 9:55 pm

Like most of my colleagues, I plan on spending tomorrow night watching the returns with baited breath, matching state calls with my own personal forecast. And though it’ll be my first presidential election accompanied by Twitter, hard liquor, and neo-Georgian surroundings, the air will be heavy with a tangle of anticipation, jubilation, and dejection as old as the election night broadcast.

But compared to these cosmetic changes, there’s an important way in which Election Night 2012 will be different from all my other election nights. Given that I don’t have much patience for either candidate or major party, tomorrow night will be the first time I experience election night not as a glandular, world-changing battle between my side and the bad guys—but rather, as a cultural spectacle to be taken in with amused detachment.

Far from what most college friends imagine, I was a diehard Republican for eight prefrontally challenged years. One of my most vivid childhood memories concerns Election Day 2000, spent with my grandparents in their Monroe, New Jersey retirement community. I had already learned to forgive Grandma Sylvia for being a Democrat, but I’ll never forget the confused righteous anger I felt when Grandpa Stan, a lifelong conservative Republican, pulled the lever for Gore. “Why?” I asked.

“Because Lieberman’s Jewish.”

After struggling to get my bedtime extended, I fell asleep in the upstairs den at 9:30, particularly nonplussed by the announcement that Florida had gone blue.

The next morning, Grandpa Stan told me wryly over Grandma’s French toast that in fact, nobody had won. The electoral count hung at 249 to 246, with Florida, Oregon, and Wisconsin still in the balance—an ambiguity for which my little Manichean mind was not prepared at all. I half-convinced myself that it was all an act of grandfatherly ribbing, until arriving at school, where throngs of proto-Democratic New Jersey Jewish third graders awaited me with the awful news that Wisconsin had been called for Gore, leaving him within ten electoral votes of victory. My heart sank. I fumbled heavily over my times tables.

I followed along with my parents (Republicans of the most benign, reasonable variety) as days of uncertainty grew into weeks of Florida recount drama. As the last few counts drew Gore within hundreds of votes from the presidency, my mind began to conjure up images of—I don’t know what: murdered babies? Willie Hortons? A Soviet resurgence?—certain only of the fact it was too bad that old people in Palm Beach didn’t know how to vote, but rules were rules…

When Katherine Harris stopped the clock at 537, I thanked God and went back to being a normal third grader.

On the morning after Election Day 2004, I taunted our Democratic family friends on a trip up to Boston as it became clear that Bush had earned another term in office. Stu insisted that we’d be best to just turn the radio off, but I think he was kindly suggesting as much of my voice box. In 2008, when my Manichean conservatism was on its last limb, I watched in despair as Obama—whom I’d bet would wait another four years to even consider running—wiped the floor with my childhood political hero. One of two Republicans in a room full of equally Manichean little Democrats, I felt utterly devoid of the will to show up to my locker the next morning, the Sons of Light having been so badly routed by a newbie messianic claimant.

I care much less today. I’m amused by how despite the overwhelming similarities between the two candidates, so many smart people around me continue to labor under the illusion that It’s All Over If the Other Guy Wins. It’s quite clear to me that Barack Obama, a recipient of massive corporate funding, doesn’t want to reconfigure America into a command economy; it’s equally clear that Mitt Romney, whose wife has donated to Planned Parenthood, has no intention of imposing Christian shari’a in American wombs and bedrooms.

But it’s hard to blame people for falling prey to thinking about politics in ingroup-outgroup terms: it’s our nature, it’s fun, and it’s morally satisfying. Unlike in 2000, nothing electoral this year could lead me to the point of near-death from anticipation. I won’t have a chance to enjoy the adrenal ecstasy of 2004. And for better or worse, there will be none of 2008’s brooding, poetic self-assessment. If you can relate, at least take solace in the fact that you’ve grown up and become a little bit less animal than you once were.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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On Recession and Secession

Europe - Online - World October 9, 2012 7:40 pm

Foreign Policy is out with a superb online special feature titled “Who Won the Great Recession?”, featuring a diverse cast of eleven pieces with such esteemed bylines as Slavoj Zizek, Joseph Nye, and Tyler Cowen. And while there’s no shortage of soft-power indulgence in the lineup (McDonald’s; Hollywood; Cheapskates, Pessimists & Food Trucks), where the mini-series shines is in doing what Foreign Policy does best: foreign policy.

Joshua Keating’s “These 7 Countries” is a quick and dirty, data-packed survey of the few countries that can be soundly identified as better off now than they were four years ago—in the author’s estimation, South Korea, Poland, Canada, Sweden, Indonesia, Turkey, and Mexico. Yet despite Keating’s diverse portfolio, there is nary a BRIC in sight. Half a decade of recession has instead born out something much closer to Jack Goldstone’s “Rise of the TIMBIs“, a scenario in which “Turkey, India, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia…form more than just a cute acronym. They all share favorable demographics and democracy and are already large economies. Their GDPs combined have already surpassed that of China and will be much faster growing in the coming decades. Their combination of booming labor forces and political openness points to rapid increases in human capital and innovation that will propel these regional powers into global powers in the near future.”

Equally uncanny is the overlap between Keating’s list of recession-era winners and those in Foreign Affairs‘ landmark 1996 article, “Pivotal States and U.S. Strategy“. Writing at a moment when unipolar triumphalism was all the rage in American international relations thought, Chase, Hill, and Kennedy identified Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia as the strategic pivots of their respective regions: economically ascendant powers with ambiguous civilizational and geopolitical identities. As Mexico continues on its path to Latin American economic ascendancy (set to surpass Brazil on many metrics, despite the ravages of the drug war), Turkey dictates an independent course in the Middle East, and Indonesia grows to outpace the United States as the world’s second-largest democracy (and largest Muslim-majority nation), it’s worth recognizing “Pivotal States” for its remarkable prescience.

One thing I was disappointed to see missing from the Foreign Policy feature, however: secessionism. Although few adjustments to the global map have been made since the early 1990s (notable exceptions being independence for East Timor, Montenegro, South Sudan, and nominally speaking, Kosovo), the great recession has shaken both regional sovereignty arrangements and the territorial integrity of long-standing states rich and poor. Apart from the culmination of Alex Salmond’s national crusade in the form of Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum, Catalonia and Bavaria seem on the unlikely cusp of political showdowns over separation from Spain and Germany, respectively.

Miffed by their disproportionate contributions to irresponsible politicians in London, Madrid, and Berlin, these wealthy constituent-regions have turned toward ethnohistorical particularism in search of a way out of recession’s clutches. And while I wouldn’t count on a redrawing of Europe’s early modern borders any time soon, it’s quite likely that would-be secessionists will play a bigger role in determining the political conversation than most are willing to recognize. As they’ve demonstrated before, wealthy states will make as many concessions as they can in order to maintain territorial integrity—lest they come to know that disintegration isn’t just the province of failed states like Mali, Syria, and Sudan. They can thank the recession for that.

 

 

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Summer Dispatch

HPRgument September 22, 2012 11:22 am

Seventeen HPR writers discuss their summers interning in politics, traveling, volunteering, “going home,” and more.

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‘Passing’ the Summer in Egypt

HPRgument Posts September 8, 2012 11:37 am
“In the summer whole peoples visit one another
to spy out each other’s nakedness.
 Hebrew and Arabic, which are like guttural
stones, like sand on the palate,
grow soft as oil for the tourist’s sake.
 Jihad and wars of mitzvah
burst open like ripe figs.”
 
 —from “Songs of Zion the Beautiful” by Yehuda Amichai

Despite its tragic connotations in the American racial discourse, one of my favorite travel pastimes is ‘passing’ as one of the local majority. Parsing the plates of 1930s physical anthropology books by Ernest Hooton and Carleton Coon, I came to the conclusion at age eleven that I was a member of the Mediterranean subrace—a scientifically inaccurate conception, but evidenced in my dark eyes and hair, small build, narrow skull, and eventual pilosity. This summer, I had the privilege to travel several Mediterranean countries—Spain, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt—avoiding the touristic hassle by readily passing as native wherever I found myself.

After seven weeks of taking my third year of Arabic in Alexandria, I’ve realized just how much it helps to be an olive-skinned male when living in Egypt. That is to say, until I open my mouth to reveal a tongue proficient in formal Arabic only, I’m lucky to escape the strange mix of exuberance and scorn afforded Western visitors.

But as pleasant as it was to walk Alexandria harbor’s Corniche and blend into the crowds among its mosques, fuul stands, and crumbling Italian revival facades, there was a hint of dread in the ethnic-passing business it entails. When it came time to explain that I’m American, Egyptians were always quick to remark that I must be Arab, or better yet, almost-Arab—accurate enough, but problematic when the almost-Arab is Jewish, in a country where Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (with a star of David oozing blood on its cover and John McCain inexplicably in its center), and a litany of other homespun tutorials in anti-Jewish thought grace the front shelf of every corner bookstore.

As a short-term Jewish resident in Egypt, one is taught to answer “Ana yahudi” rarely, if ever. When my professor, a motherly muhajiba of fifty-something, asked the inevitable, “Yes, but where is your family from?” I felt safe enough to answer obliquely, “Ana yahudi.” Good, she assured me, but that’s a religion—“You remind me of al-Andalus, Spanish and Arab. Are you Spanish?” In a classroom where all Semitic religions were thoroughly respected but Israel was mentioned only in satanic caricature, I decided not to play my typical card about Jewish nationality. For eight weeks, I passed as Andalusian from morning to afternoon bell.

When I returned to New Jersey last week, the passing came to an end as I settled back into my normal routine as an ethnically obvious Josh from Monmouth County. But I’ll terribly miss being accidentally called George, spending pocket change on falafel, marking 2 AM with the aural assault of motorcycles blaring trashy Arabic music around the harbor, and experiencing Egypt’s beautiful language and culture on the daily.

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Morsi Wins: Alexandria’s Electoral Celebration

Middle East - World June 24, 2012 5:18 pm

Post-electoral bliss on Alexandria’s Corniche.

Despite growing up to witness the turn of a millennium, history’s single-bloodiest attack on American soil, and the election of the first black president, it took me nearly twenty years and oceans away from home to truly take part in my first collective moment of baited breath—countdown, crowded room, grainy television and all.

Having arrived in Alexandria on Wednesday as part of Georgetown’s intensive summer Arabic program, my last few days have perversely revolved around a single political announcement in a country in which I’ve yet to spend a week (and whose street dialect, far removed from the standard Arabic I’ve learned, is almost entirely inaccessible). My parents succeeded in begging me to scrap my planned election-time Cairene adventures in favor of Jordan’s relative quiescence; some paranoid Harvard bureau has been pounding my inbox on the daily just in case I happen not to be reading any news at all.

I settled into our hotel to find a dozen and a half other Middle East news junkies, our walks the harbor and first five-hour Arabic classes seething with the anxiety of a generalized concern for international events made suddenly material. Whatever the outcome—Morsi victory and a military coup, Shafiq victory and a revolutionary reprise—our director promised an ‘interesting experience’, surely full of the threat-induced bonding that organizers of new groups eagerly seek out.

Let out of class early, ferried across town in chilled, padded taxis, and summarily forbidden from leaving the hotel, we congregated in front of the TV set at 2:30 over falafel, fuul, and shwarma. Macbooks aglow, Twitter pages refreshing, rumors from Al-Ahram, Jerusalem Post, and Russian state news abuzz. A mild verbal dig when I, forming a distinct minority, announced my reluctant preference for Shafiq. To no one’s surprise, forty minutes of extra wait time. And yet when the head of the election commission finally appeared on Al-Jazeera, replacing the frenzied whir of Tahrir Square feeds with the soul-crushing staidness of state election commissions. As zero-hour drew near, even my much-ballyhooed heart, not too keen on either candidate, found itself beating hard at the prospect of Egypt’s democratic moment.

Some time after 4, Muslim Brotherhood standard-bearer Mohamed Morsi was finally crowned the runoff winner of the first free presidential election in Egyptian history. Despite what was suggested by early vote tallies released last week, most Egyptians I spoke to were convinced that the election would be called in favor of Ahmed Shafiq, a prime minister under Mubarak and the evident favorite of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces. Regardless of whether a Morsi victory bodes well for Egypt’s future, it’s at least clear that the election was decided legitimately—if SCAF had blatantly intervened, it would have surely have been in favor of Shafiq.

For the last six hours, downtown Alexandria’s streets have hummed with the honking of car horns and billowed with the waving of Egyptian flags. As I finish this sentence, the Corniche—Alexandria’s main seaside drag—has swollen with the ranks of tens of thousands of celebratory Egyptians, whose masses have slowed the city’s notoriously pedestrian-unconscious cars to a slow grind. The human electricity outside our balcony, wedged between city and sea into a single stream of current, is hard to turn away from. In hysterical, human moments like these, it is easier to get swept away than ever.

In trying to be a good realist, I will try not to. Much of this will entail spelling out worst-case scenarios over the next few weeks, tracking such possibilities as an implacably hardline Muslim Brotherhood, an outright SCAF takeover, and a resurgence of political violence in the midst of all the exuberance. But amid Arabic homework and the second half of Infinite Jest, I won’t forget to keep abreast of hopeful indicators from the streets of Egypt’s Mediterranean port.

Look forward to a rollicking seven weeks.

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Saving Israel with Secularism

Middle East - World May 14, 2012 5:27 pm

My morning routine usually takes me to Foreign Policy, whose online magazine’s phenomenal sampling of analysis and expert opinion keeps my World editor gears moving. Like any student of international affairs, I have taught myself to read these selections dispassionately—reserving special caution for the issues I expect to set me off. But on rare occasion, my brakes fail.

Today, I awoke to a punch in the gut. Somewhere in the middle of Joshua Keating’s commentary on a recent University of Chicago sociology study on atheism and religiosity around the world, a disturbing revelation written off as a footnote: “Israel saw the largest increase in belief in God (23 percent)”. To most readers, there is nothing particularly incongruous about thinking of Israel and God in the same breath: after all, Israel is the Jewish state, its capital city is a focal point of three religions, and its Iron Age name is literally suffixed with divinity (El, the Canaanite-Hebrew word whose Arabic synonym is Allah).

I have always had to explain to schoolmates: “No, not everyone in Israel walks around in black hats. In fact, it’s one of the most atheistic countries out there!” Watching the American religious right tout a fanatical, shallow love of a biblicized Israel, I have long wanted to show Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann on a tour of the robust Euro-debauchery that gives Tel Aviv its charm. Despite Israel’s immutable significance in religious imagination and its lack of separation between church and state, the revived Jewish society has always been fundamentally secular at its cultural and political core.

As the years go by, it looks increasingly as though I’ll have to revise my story. Keating mistakenly explains Israel’s religious revival as the result of an “influx of ultra-Orthodox Jews”. If he has the right definition of influx, this explanation is patently false—most recent immigrants to Israel are secular types from the former Soviet Union. Neither can it be explained in terms of the contemporary American religious narrative—unlike the individualistic ‘born-again’ movement some might imagine, it’s exceedingly rare to hear of secular Tel Aviv hipsters leaving the clubs for a life of pietistic self-denial in nearby Bnei Brak.

Rather, Israel is growing more religious as a result of the state-subsidized mass breeding of a once-tiny, now-burgeoning ultra-Orthodox community. It’s no secret that the Jewish state has been bucking global trends in reproduction: because of pro-natalist campaigns to maintain Israel’s demographic heft, the country’s fertility rate of 2.96 children per woman far outstrips all of its socioeconomic peers. And although the secular Jewish elite has ventured forth in search of a reproductive holy grail—a higher secular Jewish birthrate—the greatest gains have been accrued to the ultra-Orthodox community.

Since Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion struck a detail on the eve of Israel’s independence with what he saw as a dying religious minority—allowing them exemptions from army service, a separate state-funded school system, and trappings of theocracy in the civil state in exchange for their acceptance of Zionism—the numerical strength and political clout of the ultra-Orthodox community has taken off. But as I’ve written before, we’d be deeply mistaken to think of ultra-Orthodoxy in Israel as comparable at all to religious traditionalism in the United States. Judaism, whose legal-ritualistic framework bears little similarity to the faith-based creeds of Protestantism, cannot be enjoyed primarily as an individual experience; in Israel, your level of religiosity is almost inextricable from your social identity, neighborhood of residence, and political alignment.

So when Tom Smith’s study, “Beliefs about God across Time and Countries”, shows young Israelis to be far less atheistic and more certain about God’s existence than old Israelis—at variance with the trend in Ireland, Chile, the United States, Russia, and almost every other country—the numbers do not depict some sort of evangelical revival of Orthodox Judaism among the masses. Rather, they are the product of differential birth rates, with the seculars at the heart of Israel’s art, poetry, and political thought falling behind. Although old Israelis are far less religious than old Americans, young Israelis (a staggering proportion of them from the ultra-Orthodox community) have begun to overtake young Americans in their devotion to a higher power. To what I can only imagine would be the deep dismay of Herzl, Bialik, and Ben-Gurion, Israel is now one of the few most devout countries in the OECD.

If you are expecting a rapture any time soon, this is cause to be heartened. But the Smith numbers should be sounding alarms for Israeli policymakers and secular advocates of Israeli culture. For one, they signal an age in which a growing proportion of the population elects not to teach its children about democratic values, global engagement, gainful employment, and secular science—in other words, the transformation of Israel into what Israelis accuse its neighbors of being.

More tangibly, they tell a story already well-known to political economists: while one sector of Israeli society is contributing vigorously to the global exchange of capital and ideas, another, reliant on the dole, is wallowing in some of the First World’s worst developmental conditions. As the two separate societies become set in their respective cultural ways and comfortable with their respective economic situations, the prospects for reconciliation continue on a trend to oblivion.

But I won’t refrain from value judgments: it is the rise of religious fanaticism in Israel that poses the greatest threat to the country’s future. In such a contested space as the biblically-based Land of Israel, growing certainty in the existence of a personal god who is concerned with human affairs justifies self-defeating, morally problematic ideas about West Bank settlement expansion and the peace process in general. As the religious ranks have swollen, the level of access these delusional ideas have to policymaking channels has only increased.

Luckily, brave voices of liberal Zionism like Gershom Gorenberg and Peter Beinart have set out on a polemical campaign to warn the Jewish community of Israel’s policy mistakes before the dream of a lasting Jewish democracy à la Herzl becomes untenable. However, they fail in offering too narrow a diagnosis of Israel’s problems. Yes, the inability to achieve peace with the Palestinians represents a fundamental threat to Israel’s existence. But equally damning, independent of threats to state coffers or the peace process, is the rising religious tide in Israel—something to which Gorenberg and Beinart, both self-identified Orthodox liberal Zionists, are reconciled in some form.

All else aside, somebody needs to speak up for the secular Hebrew culture that produced the Haganah and parliamentary democracy, Tchernichovsky’s sonnets and Amichai’s love poems, Tel Aviv’s symphony orchestra and gay pride parades, the Weizmann Institute and Hebrew University. A growing proportion of Israelis, sadly, would prefer to go without all these Hellenistic trappings, travel back two thousand years, and give alleged assimilationists like us a hard drubbing. But as Jonathan Haidt reminds us, we seculars are generally terrible at arguing our message: we are less sure of ourselves, less group-oriented, and less inclined to hyperbole than our religious brethren. Something has to give.

Yair Lapid’s entry into politics on the platform of an end to religious privilege is a step in the right direction. If Binyamin Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz can muster the support to overturn the Tal Law, there is some hope for a national conversation on the proper place of religion in Israeli public life. But above all, Israel’s waning secular majority needs the support of liberals, secularists, and Zionists around the world—lest they lose the soul of the country they struggled to build. The stakes are far greater than the difference between belief and disbelief in the existence of God.

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The Imperfect Liberalism of Better Angels

Cafe B&A Posts March 20, 2012 6:31 pm

Sympathetic to his ideas or not, it is next to impossible to deny Steven Pinker’s matchless gift for writing popular psychology books that are at once incisive, stylish, and empirically weighty. Luxuriantly curly hair aside, there’s no excuse mistaking him for the less cerebral Malcolm Gladwell. And as a better writer, Pinker has attracted a more interesting set of critics—who, owing to the deeply interdisciplinary character of The Better Angels of Our Nature—come from all angles at the Harvard psychologist’s bold, unifying thesis.

For instance, I’d venture a guess that many Pinker detractors find immediate fault with a supposedly scientific thesis that cannot be fully separated from the moral exuberance it provokes. That is, given that few readers of popular psychology books are heartless automatons or preliterate warrior-patriarchalists, it is fair to assume that most of Pinker’s readers are happy to hear that violence has declined. And as a psychologist, it is fair to assume that Pinker is acutely aware of confirmation bias. Whether in spite or because of it, Better Angels proceeds with an argument about violence that tinges the descriptive with an ample helping of liberal humanistic normativity.

In the process, Pinker grapples with both the empirics and philosophy of enlightenment liberalism, calling to account certain sacred cows, but missing the point on a handful of others. By noting examples of both kinds, I want to raise the question of what Better Angels—a watershed book in so many ways—means for the liberal worldview.

Read broadly, Better Angels fits squarely in the liberal canon: classical liberals, American left-liberals, and international relations liberals can all find themes to draw on in Pinker’s documentation of how human nature can be perfected, how governments can act in service of that goal, and how patterns in human cultural evolution can be generalized and universalized. Most of the arguments advanced to this end are supported by exhaustive historical research and nuanced, compelling findings from psychology.

To be fair, Better Angels makes a laudable effort from time to time to break with the tropes of liberal moral rationale. In no uncertain terms, Pinker explains that political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was right—that man’s first task on the road to civilization is the mortification of desires that make up at least half of his nature. And Mike Cotter details the book’s surprisingly conservative claim about the relationship between reduced policing and violent crime in the 1960s.

But unfortunately, there’s a serious slackening of argumentation when it comes to framing particular subjects that have become matters of sensitivity to modern-day liberal ideologues. Although I write from a pro-choice perspective, Pinker’s conventionally liberal treatment of abortion seems starkly out of step with his very broadly construed thesis about the decline of violence. After generalizing the historical reduction of war deaths, religious obscurantism, child spanking, meat eating, and homophobia into a single phenomenon, he wavers over whether to claim that abortion is a comparable manifestation of violence. Upon closer reading, it appears that he does: a typical graphic on page 428 depicts modest-to-steep cross-cultural reductions in abortion between the 1980s and 2003—even admitting “abortion is seen as something to be minimized.” Yet unlike in cases involving children’s and animal rights, Pinker avoids passing moral judgment here, effectively admitting, against his own principles of universality, that abortion is too political an issue to be judged in the positive light of his thesis.

Additionally, for all its repute as an interdisciplinary bonanza, Better Angels makes a minimal effort to hear the mounting debate in human genetic science over whether the dawn of civilization might have been accompanied by natural selection for society-changing psychological traits. Of course, the suggestion reeks of the sort of biological determinism and racial implication that liberals try to avoid at all costs. In both the text and in personal correspondence, Pinker has made the fair point that out of an abundance of cultural and historical explanations, there is no need to invoke genetic changes to explain man’s first great pacification. While he is practically correct, his focus on solely the argument of Cochran and Harpending’s The Ten Thousand Year Explosion and his undervaluing of the Neolithic Revolution’s transformative depth makes for a weak investigation.

A 2010 study in Social Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, for example, demonstrated a strong correlation between population frequency of the G allele of 5-HTTLPR, a region in a gene that codes for serotonin production, and the level of cultural collectivism within that population. At some point, the Europeans and Asians might have developed different cultural norms about order, identity, and violence as the result of a single-step genetic mutation. While correlative results are never certain, it is hard to justify omitting such a study among many when attempting a thorough survey of violence’s human history.

In my reading of Better Angels, whose case for an optimistic liberalism I found generally compelling, these examples forced me into a dialogue with a text that I found imperfect. I’m afraid, however, that between the lovingly uncritical embrace of Pinker by many admirers and the wholesale barrage by some opponents, there is little room for a critical but favorable take on Better Angels’ implications for society. To have an honest conversation about what Steven Pinker’s far-ranging insights mean for the relationship between ethics, policy, and human nature, we have to abandon the sacred cows that Pinker chooses to spare.

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The Better Angels of Our Nature

Books & Arts - Cafe B&A March 20, 2012 3:53 pm

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HaDag Nahash: Holy Land Funk Comes to Somerville

Books & Arts - Music March 12, 2012 5:19 pm

HaDag Nahash performing in Somerville, MA

Trans.: We’ll shut our eyes
To what’s happening under our noses
And pretend that everything’s alright
We’ll bring out a beer from the fridge
And drive off to a different channel

How much longer?

The Boston-based expats swoon; these lyrics are their life.

Since the release of its first album in 2000, the band HaDag Nahash has been one of Israel’s most eloquent curators of left-wing disillusionment and despair in a post-Rabin era. In the small East-Mediterranean country, terms like “left-wing” and “right-wing” have nothing to do with how you feel about abortion or taxes, but instead serve as the bookends of a cultural spectrum anchored to the uniquely Israeli question: what do you want this state to be?

Israel’s modest hip-hop culture is no exception: the scene’s two predominant acts represent radically different dispositions on state and society. Most commercially successful is Subliminal, who is in political terms the Kid Rock of Israeli hip-hop–and only somewhat better musically. And then there’s HaDag Nahash, a tighter and smarter act, but something of a chimera (literally: their name, a spoonerism, means “The Fish Snake”). Despite their popular branding as a hip-hop group, they’re at least as much funk; their elegant tracks are built around choruses, hooks, and lilting saxophone solos.

The night I encountered the group, they were being featured at Johnny D’s in Somerville under the auspices of the Boston Jewish Music Festival, a multi-week affair I can only imagine was filled with schmaltz and family-friendly power pop about latkes and hamantaschen. After a few minutes of chatter from the music festival’s organizer, the band assumed positions, rubbed out a few chords, and launched into “Ma She-Ba Ba (What Goes Around Comes Around).”  A relatively flat song by HaDag Nahash standards, leaderless and easily muddled through, the ditty did nothing to demonstrate the artists’ sincerity about life in the Middle East. By contrast, “Ma She-Ba Ba” is most famous for its appearance in the critically-panned 2008 slapstick comedy flick You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

But then salvation took the stage in the form of a small number: “6”, the 2010 album that put HaDag Nahash in the league of master musical syncretists like Balkan Beat Box and Alabina, arrives in the band’s setlist. Frontman Sha’anan Street commandeers the microphone, begins croaking some occultic-sounding lyrics in English, translates them back into Hebrew, and explodes into the hook-laden, hyper-Middle-Eastern “Shir Nehamah (Consolation Song).” The casual fans, mostly American-Jewish college kids, puzzle over the novelty; “6” hasn’t yet made it into the popular HaDag Nahash canon. The equally sizable diehard crowd, on the other hand, made up of twenty-something expats and myself, goes wild. Street works through the album for a while, covering driving songs like “Ani Ma’amin (I Believe)” and “Lo Maspik (Not Enough),” the latter an invective against hi-tech consumerism. After some initial awkwardness, the dance floor becomes a meshugganah carnival of half-baked funk and Middle-Eastern moves.

The concert finally taking on an organic character of its own, HaDag Nahash heaps on the showmanship. Before the sublime, conga-inflected funk track, “Ma’arbolet Shel Hol (A Vortex of Sand),” Sha’anan explains: “Today we’re celebrating Purim. But a few hundred years before that, we left Egypt for the land of Canaan. And what continent is Egypt on? That means we all have some African deep down.” Exhorting the dancing Hebrews, he concludes, “I want to see it!” Meanwhile, in “Statistica”, a trenchant social satire assembled around fake statistics, they replace Tel Aviv with Boston when singing that one of every seven men in the city is a closeted homosexual.

By the end of the night, they take a turn for the serious–which is how I like them best. The floor breaks into paroxysms over the first chord of “Shirat Ha-Sticker (The Sticker Song),” a notorious hit penned by leftish Israeli author David Grossman stringing together bumper sticker slogans around the haunting refrain, “How much evil can we swallow?” Many fans know most of the lyrics, and there’s a special breath of enthusiasm in singing. “A halakhic state–and now the state has gone” (pun lost in English). But it is otherwise a very strange, tongue-in-cheek specimen of song. For Israeli left-wingers like HaDag Nahash, giving even an ironic voice to words of right-wing political bile is no small task–especially with lines like “Bibi is good for Jews”, “Let the army get angry”, and “Justice for the Oslo traitors!”

Joining in on the lyrical subversion is not difficult for me, especially with such punchy chords and a sympathetic crowd. Yet as soon as I know the next line that’s coming, I stop dancing and close my mouth. I can’t sing “Death to the Arabs,” no matter how overt the irony. I’m frozen out of my celebration. By the time I finish processing the experience, they’re onto my favorite song, “Lo Frayerim (Not Suckers).” It’s an uptempo song with a downbeat message of political exasperation, punctuated with calls of “How much longer?” Among slides of the trombone and cries of the electric guitar, I find I can get back to dancing.

 

Addendum: The correct lyric in “Shirat Ha-Sticker (The Sticker Song)” is “Death to values,” which in Hebrew is a single sound (or phoneme) off from “Death to Arabs.” Although the latter slogan is not an actual bumper sticker to anyone’s knowledge, it is how the author heard the line in the din of the concert.

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A Destructive “Solution”

Harvard February 28, 2012 3:21 pm
Joshua Lipson is the Senior World Editor of the Harvard Political Review.  He and Beth are co-presidents of Harvard Students for Israel, writing on behalf of the group. The Harvard Political Review is a nonpartisan political review and a platform for student writing at Harvard. Watch this space for a letter of response from the organizers of the One-State Conference.

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This weekend, various on-campus organizations will be sponsoring a “One-State Conference,” which calls for the creation of a single state for both Israelis and Palestinians. Although the conference touts this proposal as a viable resolution to the ongoing conflict, we are gravely concerned that a one-state “solution” would both mean the end of Israel as a sovereign state and create the circumstances for a human rights catastrophe.  Despite claims to the contrary, the creation of a binational state would be both radical and antithetical to genuine peace.

The one-state idea marks a departure from the well-established premise of “two states for two peoples,” a solution supported by a strong majority of both Israelis and Palestinians. Support for a binational state is ignorant of the undeniable fact that Israeli and Palestinian societies are drastically different in terms of economic development, political orientation, and cultural identity—a situation which would not change with the removal of a political border. Given the two sides’ history of mutual hostility and resentment, the creation of a single state will likely lead to violent ethnic conflict, a result desired by none but the most radical elements in the region. As a result, a majority of experts across the political spectrum agree that despite difficulties in reaching an agreement, a two-state solution is far preferable to a one-state non-solution.

We unequivocally support the right of all Harvard students to political expression. However, we are disturbed by the one-sided nature of this particular conference, whose program is assembled around a radical idea without providing a balanced discussion of the alternatives.

Dean David Ellwood of the Harvard Kennedy School shares our concerns: “I was deeply disappointed to see that the initial list of speakers for this student conference was so one-sided. I very much hope this will change. Without the balance of divergent views that characterize the most enriching discussions, the credibility and intellectual value of any event is open to question.” In the same letter, Dean Ellwood makes clear that Harvard by no means endorses the views or political aims of the One-State Conference.

We completely reject the premise of this conference, which runs counter to the very existence of a Jewish state as enshrined in international law. Accordingly, we ask the Harvard community and all supporters of peace to recognize the implications of this “solution” and decry such calls for the dismantlement of a sovereign state. Our group urges you to continue to engage in constructive dialogue, and to lend your support to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other viable and mutually agreeable initiatives toward peace.

Signed,
Beth Drucker and Josh Lipson
Co-Presidents, Harvard Students for Israel

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