In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

 
More on the Rabbi Sacks fracas. If I were him, I'd be livid, and I'm not sure who I'd be angrier at: the left-wing press for twisting my words or the right-wing press for jumping to conclusions and engaging in outrageous attacks. This whole story is making me angrier and angrier the more I think about it.
posted by Noah at 8:17 AM

 
It's Thursday, which means I'm supposed to talk about the parshah of the week. But I just got back from a friend's son's bris (circumcision), and I haven't had a chance this week to do much studying. So I'm going to keep it short.

This week's parshah is a double: Nitzavim (parshiot are named for the first substantial word of the parshah; this week's first line is "Today all of you are standing before the Lord your G-d" - Nitzavim means "standing"), and Vayelech (which means, "and he went"). Nitzavim is Moses' summation of the essence of G-d's moral message; Vayelech relates the passing of his authority to Joshua, the establishment of the Masoret, the tradition, that stretches from Moses through Joshua down to the present day. If President George Bush has a favorite parshah, it's probably Nitzavim. Here are the key lines; you'll quickly see why:

For this commandment that I command you this day, it is not hidden from you, and it is not far away. It is not in the heavens that one might say, "who can ascend for us to the heavens and take it for us, that we may hear it, and do it." And it is not across the sea that one might say, "who can cross the sea for us and take it for us, that we may hear it, and do it." For this thing is very close to you, in your mouths and in your hearts, that you may do it. See, I have placed before you this day life and good, death and evil. . . I call heaven and earth to witness this day against you, that I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse - choose therefore life, that you may live, you and your descendants. [D'varim 30:11-15, 19]

This is the core of Judaism, it seems to me. There is good and there is evil. Good is life, and blessing; evil is a curse, and death. We have a choice between them. The choice is not always easy, but it is usually simple. And the choice we should make is clear.

I'm not going to tie little insights about these parshiot together in a pretty bundle (perhaps I think how to do it tomorrow, in which case I'll edit this). For now, I'm going to point to two midrashim that are meaningful to me:

(1) Why does Nitzavim begin with that first line - why does it begin with Moses telling the people that they are standing before G-d today? I mean, to begin with, the people are not in any particular sense standing before G-d on that day; they are no longer at Sinai, but now stand at the entrance to the Land of Israel. An Aggadic explanation cited by Rashi is: after the prior chapter's horrible curses, the people wondered, who could withstand these horrors? So Moses begins this discourse saying: you who rebelled so frequently in the desert and provoked G-d to anger, see, you are standing today before the Lord your G-d. Rashi goes on further to explain that the "day" referred to is not this particular day but the "day" that encompasses eternity - i.e. not only the daylight, but the 24-hour day that includes the night (the periods of suffering); in both periods, into eternity, you stand before the Lord your G-d.

(2) Before Moses hands authority to Joshua, he tells the people that he is going to his death, and not to enter the Land with them. And he takes Joshua with him into the tent where he received revelations from G-d during the time in the desert, and the pillar of cloud descends as usual. And there is a Midrash describing Moses' behavior when Joshua assumes authority that I have always found touching. In the Midrash, Moses is quite reluctant to die, and asks G-d to be able to continue, only subordinate to Joshua, the new leader. And G-d relents. So Joshua sits down to teach Torah, and Moses sits at his right hand and participates in the discussion. And then Joshua enters the tent to receive the divine revelation, and when he emerges Moses asks him what G-d told him. And Joshua replies: all through the desert, did I ever ask you what G-d told you in the tent? Then Moses says to G-d: let me die, for I would rather die than commit such a grievous sin as to be envious of Joshua's position.

It's a beautiful two parshiot; read 'em.
posted by Noah at 10:08 PM

 
Well here's come encouraging analysis about the prospects of an American invasion of Iraq. I'm encouraged.
posted by Noah at 3:36 PM

 
Well the Jerusalem Post seems to have a different view of Rabbi Sacks' comments. I maintain my view: that he did not say that Israel's policies are immoral or that Israel is doing anything other than defending itself, only that in the long-term a continuous state of warfare - particularly the sort of warfare currently ongoing - is morally corrupting. I don't see a problem with that statement. I think Rabbi Sacks' words have been manipulated by media like Ha'aretz in order to make him a supporter of the "peace camp" (better described as the "surrender camp") which I do not believe he is. And nothing in his statements as I have been able to obtain them has convinced me that he has become one.
posted by Noah at 12:00 PM

 
Hard to know how accurate any polls of the Palestinian population are this Survey is nonetheless revealing. Some key results:

ATTITUDES TOWARDS WAR:

* 92% support armed attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians in the territories.
* 52% support armed attacks on Israeli civilians in pre-67 Israel and 53% would oppose any cease-fire that involved ending these attacks.
* 76% believe violent attacks will continue, regardless of whether there will be a return to negotiations by both parties.
* 71% say violence has achieved Palestinian rights in a way that negotiations could not.

ATTITUDES TOWARD PEACE:

* 57% say reconciliation between Israelis and Palestians will never be possible or will take generations.
* 71% believe peace is impossible or "definitely impossible."
* 63% would oppose an end to incitement against Israel and Israelis even after a peace agreement was signed and Israel recognized a Palestinian state.
* 88% would oppose teaching children in school to recognize Israel even after a peace agreement was signed and Israel recognized a Palestinian state.
* 62% would not invite an Israeli colleague to their homes and 64% would not visit an Israeli colleague's home even after a peace agreement was signed and Israel recognized a Palestinian state.

How much more is there to say?

posted by Noah at 11:14 AM

 
People who think Israel can be defeated, read this interview with the current Chief of Staff. This supposed right-winger is a kibbutznik and a liberal, by his own admission. And I have rarely heard such clarity of vision from anyone - he gives Donald Rumsfeld a run for his money. Read it.
posted by Noah at 10:09 AM

 
There's been a lot of interesting stuff about Sudan from a guest-blogger on Joe Katzman's Winds of Change. I have to first of all give the guy credit for going to Sudan; Sudan is not exactly Martha's Vinyard. He comes back with extremely positive impressions of the Sudanese people, and very optimistic about the prospects for peace in that country. I'm still skeptical, but it's a perspective I hadn't heard before.

Sudan is a weird case in that the Islamic revolution there was imposed from the top down, by a military clique who took power in a coup d'etat. That's very different from Iran, where the revolution was popular, or Afghanistan, where the Islamists took power in after winning (mostly) a civil war, or Saudi Arabia, a religiously severe traditional monarchy that has been increasingly radicalized by the clergy on which it depends for legitimacy. It's probably most comparable to Pakistan in the Zia years. (Pakistan was founded on the notion of a secular Islamic identity, whatever that is, but under zia this took on an increasingly religious and Islamist cast, as the dictator threw his lot in with the Deobandi Islamists already popular in much of Pakistan and with the Saudi- and American-funded jihadists amassing to do battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan.) It is possible, therefore, that the regime itself could make a clean break with its prior ideology, and realign with the West. However, I don't see why this would necessarily bring peace to the South, which was brutalized by civil war from well before the advent of Islamist government in Sudan.
posted by Noah at 9:46 AM

 
Good interview with Daniel Pipes by John Hawkins. Instapundit points to it.
posted by Noah at 9:10 AM

 
Ha'aretz has an article about Mubarak's warnings to the U.S. not to attack Iraq. But note what's important about his statements: (1) U.S.-Egyptian relations are strong and good, and strategically critical, and will not be changed. (2) America is doing everything it can to try to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In other words, Mubarak thinks his position is strong and that the dominant ideas that have governed Egyptian thinking since Sadat kicked out the Soviets remain in place. This is in marked contrast to Saudi Arabia, where the leadership shows every sign that it views its own position as precarious, or Syria, which appears to be governed by either a moron or a lunatic or both.

I hate to constantly be saying nice things about Egypt, because it's a nasty, corrupt authoritarian country. But it is a fact that Egypt has acted forcefully to repress militant Islamist groups on its territory, which is not the case for other American allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is also a fact that Egypt's government has made no threats against Israel throughout the Oslo war. Indeed, Mubarak has repeatedly reiterated that Egypt has no intention of or interest in conflict with Israel. And while he has been forceful in criticizing the Israeli government and Sharon personally, he has been consistent in calling for both sides to stop fighting and return to the negotiating table. The Egyptian government's official posture has certainly not been pro-Israel, but is probably in par with, say, Canada's, and probably better than Sweden's or Belgium's, which is pretty good for an Arab state. And it is also a fact - too infrequently commented upon - that Egypt has one of the most legitimate regimes in the region, in that Nasser's coup was widely and deeply popular, and no one questions that the current government is Nasser's legitimate heir.

I've compared Egypt to Mexico in the past, and I still think the comparison is apt. Nasser's coup put Egypt in the vanguard of post-war anti-European and anti-colonial revolutionary states. Mexico's revolution did much the same for that country. Both states have strong national identities that stretch back for centuries; neither is a post-colonial patchwork. Both states have been one-party dictatorships since their respective revolutions, with endemic problems of corruption and state violence; both have been devastated by socialist and autarchic economic ideas; and both have become increasingly oriented towards and dependent on the United States. Mexico's economic and cultural interchange with the United States resulted in the emergence of a new, democratic, middle-class, pro-American force to rise within the country, politically embodied in the PAN, which captured power from the PRI for the first time since the Mexican Revolution in the last Presidential elections. Egypt has not undergone a similar change, both because of the failures of its leadership, the distance from America's cultural influence, and the over-emphasis on military might that is a regional malady. Nonetheless, Egypt remains the best - indeed, the only - hope for democratization in the Arab world. The United States was right to press for the release of Saa Eddin Ibrahim precisely because there is hope for that country, and the hope resides in men like him, patriots unafraid to seek freedom for their countrymen, not from foreign phantoms but from domestic tyranny.
posted by Noah at 6:34 PM

 
An interesting piece from First Things: Jihad and Just War. The point being: there is an Islamic theory of just and unjust wars, and the Islamists have obliterated it as they have obliterated all subtle distinctions in Islam. Kind of how Communists obliterated all ethical distinctions within Western philosophy, so that "human rights" could be the justification for mass-murder and a state of terror.

The core argument: there are two kinds of just war within traditional Islamic thought. The first is a war led by the legitimate leader of the House of Islam against the infidel in order to expand the House of Islam. This war has detailed ethical guidelines similar to Western notions of jus in bello or just conduct in war: no targeting of civilians, no conduct of war by irregulars, etc. In the case of Islam, this kind of war - aggressive but ethically limited war to expand Islam - is technically no longer possible because there is no legimate leader of the House of Islam since the end of the Turkish sultanate (and, arguably, since the Mongols trampled the last Kaliph of Baghdad to death; or, if you're a Shiite, since the early days of Islam when the true line of descent from Muhammad was usurped.) The point is, this kind of jihad could not be undertaken by individuals ever in the history of Islam, but only under proper authority, and even then it was subject to strict ethical controls.

The second kind of just war is a defensive war: where an enemy army has invaded and there is no time for the legitimate ruler to organize a proper defense, the entire community must undertake that defense. Since the invaders constitute an army, all of them are fair game; since an Islamic army is not available to fight them, civilians must conduct an irregular defense, acting as guerillas. This, also, has its parallels in Western history; the French resistance to the Nazis, the American Continental Army's resistance to the British, the Haganah of the pre-state yishuv in Israel, all engaged in irregular, guerilla warfare against an invading enemy army, and all are considered legitimate by most Westerners.

What the Islamists have done is take the norms of guerilla war originally designed for use against an invading army and apply them to any situation of conflict between a Muslim and non-Muslim power, whether or not that non-Muslim power is an invader, whether or not that power is an army. Moreover, it is not only every individual in the local community who has the responsibility for communal defense, but every Muslim around the world who can, on his own authority, take up arms to fight a lawless war against any infidel power he considers to be an "invader" - or any Muslim power he considers to be "in league" with the infidels. Thus, the Jewish State of Israel, the Indian control of Kashmir, the civil wars in Bosnia and Kossovo, the Egyptian peace with Israel, the presence of American soldiers in Arabia - all these are invasions of the House of Islam by infidels, which justify any Muslim using any amount of force against any individuals or groups associated with the infidels in order to repel the invaders.

Such a philosophy is clearly a logical deduction from the original idea of jihad. It is a logical deduction in the same way that Pol Pot's ideology was a logical deduction from the principles of the Enlightenment. After all, if human progress is possible, and if government is justified by the good it does for the citizenry, and if Marxism has persuasively critiqued existing society as oppressive and doomed, then it is perfectly justified to kill one out of every five members of society in order to totally remake that society along just lines. That's logic of a sort, the same logic that the Islamists use.

posted by Noah at 4:53 PM

 
Go James! You tell 'em.
posted by Noah at 3:56 PM

 
Here's an interesting news item, from the Jerusalem Post: 80,000 Palestinians emigrated from territories since beginning of year. Meanwhile, I note that, according to the Israeli Absorption Ministry that over 18,000 Jews have moved to Israel in 2002. That's way down from the average from 1992 through 2001 of about 70,000 per year, but (a) you'd expect the number to be down 'cause we're running out of Russian and Ukrainian Jews - immigration is up from Western Europe, North America and South America, and down dramatically only from the former Soviet states; (b) you'd expect the number to be down, because there's a war on; (c) 18,000 coming in is still a whole lot higher than 80,000 going out. It's also on-track to being a better year than 1989, and only down 25% from last year, which in turn was only down about 25% from the prior year - again, not bad considering there's a war on.

The demographic case for a strategic withdrawal from the territories is still compelling. There are 1 million Arabs in Gaza and 2 million in Judea and Samaria, and their birth rate is prodigious. But changes at the margins do matter. In that regard, observe the following projection for how Israel could bring in half a million additional Jews in the next decade:

FRANCE & WESTERN CONTINENTAL EUROPE: The situation in France is well-known. While the majority of French Jewry is strongly French-identified and secular, a growing minority has been radically alienated by the French government's unconcern about Arab violence against Jews in France and about growing Muslim unrest in France generally. There are about 600,000 Jews in France, 200,000 elsewhere in Western Europe (excluding Britain). About 1,000 Jews have emigrated to Israel from France this year through July, a year of particularly brutal war. Tripling that rate would mean bringing about 1% of French Jewry to Israel per year, or 60,000 over a decade; a somewhat lower rate for the rest of Western Europe would mean 75,000 Jews total for the region.

LATIN AMERICA: There are about 250,000 Jews in Argentina, 130,000 in Brazil, 40,000 in Mexico, 35,000 in Venezuela, 30,000 in Uruguay and 15,000 in Chile, for a total of about 500,000 across the region. Apart from Mexico and Chile, every country on this list is in severe economic and political crisis. Argentina specifically has also experienced a huge surge in anti-Semitism. Moreover, most of these communities have extremely high Zionist consciousness. This year through July, over 3,000 immigrants have come from Argentina, a greater than 1% immigration rate during a time of war. At 2% per year for the decade, and assuming a comparable rate of immigration from the rest of the region, that's 100,000 Jews over the decade.

FORMER SOVIET UNION AND EASTERN EUROPE: It's really hard to know how many Jews there are left in this region. The data I'm working with, from the Jewish Virtual Library are estimates from 1998, which should be accurate for most of the world but not for Israel or the former Soviet states, given the rapid rate of migration between the two. Numbers are particularly hard to come by for this region for several reasons. First, who counts as a Jew? Halachic Jews are thin on the ground at this point, but there are many people who have some Jewish ancestry, and there are strong economic incentives to recognize this ancestry and come to Israel. But will these people identify as Jews and assimilate once there? A good question. Currently, there are probably 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who are not halachically Jewish. However, the overwhelming majority would probably convert if this were easier to achieve. The Israeli rabbinate takes a very strict view of the criteria for conversion, which is the main reason that this population remains non-Jewish. Only a small minority actively refuses to assimilate to Judaism. Assuming I'm right about all this, and assuming - big assumption - that the Israeli rabbinate can muster the the political will to solve the conversion problem, we still have the question of how many potential immigrants there really are. In that regard, I'll note that not only the Jewish Agency, which has an incentive to find people even who aren't there, but also Chabad Lubavitch, the chassidic Orthodox group that has done the most to establish a Jewish religious presence in the former Soviet Union, continue to find people interested in reclaiming a Jewish heritage. Taking an optimistic view of the remaining Jewish population in the former Soviet Union, there are probably 1 million Jews of some sort left in the former Soviet states and in Eastern Europe, mostly in Russia and the Ukraine. (I'm discounting the totals I get from the 1998 figures by about 200,000, to account for immigration since that date and over-counting.) This year through July, 10,000 immigrants have come from the Former Soviet Union, down from 27,000 in a comparable period in 2000. Post-war, the annual total should rise, but it has to decline over time because of sheer lack of candidates, so let's assume the current war-depressed rate is a good average for the decade. That's 20,000 per year, or 200,000 over the decade.

THE ANGLOSPHERE, EX-US: There are about 300,000 Jews in Britain, 360,000 in Canada, 100,000 in South Africa and 100,000 in Australia, for a total of 860,000 Jews. Most of these Jews are happy and comfortable. Unlike in France, the Jews of Britain do not fear for their safety, in spite of Muslim restiveness in that country, for several reasons, including: the comparatively small size of the Muslim population there; the fact that Jews and Muslims do not live close to one another; the fact that British Jews have been resident in the country longer than most French Jews; and the fact that the British government has not been notably hostile to Jews and Israel in the way or to the degree that the French government has. Jews in Canada and Australia are securer still. However, in both Canada and Australia, and to a lesser extent in Britain, aliyah has been increasing from the growing traditionally religious portion of the Jewish community. Moreover, both the Canadian and Australian communities have very strong Zionist feelings. South Africa is a special case in the Anglosphere, where the likely fate of the Jewish community is tied to the prospects of the country generally. The Jewish community has largely stayed put through the recent difficulties faced by that country - indeed, South Africa has seen immigration from Israel, as Israelis are less unnerved by the security situation in South Africa and appreciate the physical freedom and the ethnic and geographic diversity of the country. All that said, if things deteriorate in South Africa there is a good chance of high immigration to Israel. Assuming 10% of the community is traditionally religious, and that 1% of that community immigrates per year, plus 0.1% of the remaining Jewish population, that's about 15,000 Jews over the next decade. Not a huge number, but every bit counts.

UNITED STATES: There are between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 Jews in the United States, depending on how strict you are about defining a Jew. Historically, aliyah from the United States has been negligible. As a proportion of the Jewish community in America compared with other countries, I think it's the lowest in the world. Nonetheless, the sheer number of Jews in America is so large that even a small move in numbers could have a significant impact on overall emigration. Through July of this year, about 1,000 Jews emigrated to Israel. At 2,000 per year, that's 20,000 over the decade. Current numbers are actually up rather than down because of the security situation in Israel, and there's a new trend in haredi world particularly of uprooting entire communities and moving them en masse to Israel. I think there are real prospects for a dramatic increase in emigration. Assuming there are about 500,000 traditionally observant Jews in the U.S.A., a 1% per year emigration rate would yield about 50,000 immigrants to Israel. Assuming a 0.02% immigration rate from the rest of the population, and taking the broadest view of who is a Jew (6,000,000 total numbers, in other words), that adds another 1,000 per year or 10,000 over the decade, for a total of 60,000 from the United States over 10 years.

WILD CARDS: Since 1989, nearly 50,000 Jews came to Israel from Ethiopia. Prior to 1989, there was no expectation of Ethiopian immigration; in fact, no one thought there were even substantial Jewish communities in Ethiopia. Could there be another such unexpected group of Jews coming home Israel's future? The Bnei Menashe of India who have formally adopted Judaism number only in the thousands, but the tribe of which they are apart - which is suffering intense persecution - numbers over a million. Who knows how many other descendents of Jews among that tribe will choose to reclaim their heritage once it is seen as a passport out of a war-torn region? In southern Africa, there are the Lemba, a tribe of about 50,000 souls with a likely genetic link to ancient Israel's priesthood. Most of the tribe is Christian, but many are reclaiming their Jewish heritage. Again, the economic pull of Israel as a developed country could have a profound impact on this group's desire to reclaim that heritage. Then there are the Pathans of Afghanistan and Pakistan, all 15 million of them. There's no established genetic link in this case, and to date no move has been made on their part to "return" to Judaism. But if the reported cultural evidence of a link is accurate, the persistence of such customs in a severe Muslim environment suggests that, in a climate of greater freedom, some number of these people will decide to claim a Jewish connection. Again, it is likely that if this occurs, the majority who so choose will seek to move to Israel. I wouldn't assign a high likelihood to any of these speculative lost-tribe situations resulting in a large return to Judaism and immigration to Israel. However, there are enough of them, and the numbers in each case are large enough, that it's not crazy to assume that over the next 10 years there will be another "wild card" immigration comparable to the Ethiopian immigration. That's another 50,000 over a decade.

Here's how it adds up:

FRANCE & WESTERN EUROPE: 75,000
LATIN AMERICA: 100,000
FORMER SOVIET & EASTERN EUROPE: 200,000
USA AND ANGLOSPHERE: 75,000
WILD CARD: 50,000
TOTAL: 500,000

Assuming no natural increase in the Jewish population, and assuming that the Arab population of Israel and the territories grows at its current rate, and with no net outmigration by the Arab population, this leaves the Jewish and Arab populations roughly at parity. But all these assumptions are too conservative. Assuming the Jewish population grows naturally at 1/2 the Arab rate of natural increase - which doesn't seem such a stretch, what with the increasing family size among religious Jews, the increasing proportion of the Israeli Jewish population that is religious, and the fact that historically the Israeli Jewish population has had a natural positive rate of increase - that adds another 750,000 Jews to the population of Israel. Assume further that Israel is able to dispose of the Gaza strip somehow; no one in Israel contemplates incorporating it permanently into Israel, so the only question is who can take charge there who will not wage continual warfare against Israel from there. That removes a projected 1.8 million Arabs (up from about 1.2 million today) from the demographic equation. We stillhave to reckon with about 1.3 million Israeli Arab citizens (up from about 1 million today) and about 3 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria (up from 2 million today). In this scenario, the Jewish majority between the river and the sea, excluding Gaza, would be about 60%. That's not good, but it's better than most of the projections I've read, and not very different from what the ratio is right now.

But this may also be too pessimistic, because the Palestinian territories are not capable of sustaining their current rate of population growth. It's not much remarked upon, but the economic growth rate in the territories when under Israeli rule rivalled that of the Asian tigers. The Palestinians under Israeli rule accumulated more wealth than Arabs anywhere in the world apart from the underpopulated oil sheikdoms. That economic growth, along with remittances by Palestinians working in the Gulf, underwrote the dramatic population explosion in the territories. But that's gone now. There are no Palestinians working in the Gulf states, and Islamist welfare will likely be significantly curtailed if Israel reasserts control of the Palestinian population centers. And even if Israel reasserts direct control over the territories, and the security situation improves dramatically, the Palestinian economy will never again be as integrated with Israel as it was in, say, the 1980s. With lots of people and a collapsing economy, the territories should be exporting people steadily over the next decade - perhaps not at the rate of 80,000 per year (a rate which, by the way, would reduce the growth rate of the Palestinian population in the territories by 2/3), but nonetheless significantly.

Of course, even if Palestinian population growth is slower than anticipated, and even if my optimistic projections about Jewish population growth are borne out, the ratio between the Jewish and Arab populations is unlikely to get much better than it is currently, absent a dramatic change. All I'm saying, really, is that time is not so against Israel as the Arabs - and many Jews - assume. Israel's Jewish population could well keep pace with the Arab population of Israel, Judea and Samaria. We have, after all, seen this movie before: since the signing of the Oslo accords, which were undertaken partly because of demographic fears, Israel's population has expanded by nearly 1 million people, the vast majority of them Jews. That being the case, Israel does not need to act out of pessimism, either by running away behind a wall or by agreeing to a "peace" under fire. The current prime minister has long said that time is on Israel's side. It's not as simple as that, but if Israel can restore a reasonable level of security, and crush the terrorist organizations, she should not feel that then she has to sign the first piece of paper someone puts in front of her. In the end, Israel wants an agreement - for moral reasons, but also for practical ones. Israel does not want to rule a large, non-citizen Arab population, and she does not want to risk losing the Jewish state from demographic change. But Israel may not be as close to the demographic zero hour as is commonly assumed.
posted by Noah at 5:09 PM

 
Another follow-up article from Ha'aretz on Israeli Arab involvement in terror. Sugar-coat it how you like, folks, it's bad. Real bad.
posted by Noah at 1:38 PM

 
Follow-up from Ha'aretz on Rabbi Sacks. I call attention to two things. First, as should be clear from the quotes at the bottom of the article, Rabbi Sacks is far from unclear about the nature of the enemy. Second, it's clear that specific phrases he used are being pushed further than their plain meaning in an effort to enlist him in the peace camp. Sacks says that the situation of Israeli rule in the territories is incompatible in the long run with core Jewish principles. I would agree with him here. But that's rather different from saying that Israeli policies are themselves un-Jewish or anti-Jewish. One of his rabbinic critics points out that Israel's actions are in self-defense, and hence are moral, not immoral. But Rabbi Sacks can grant this, and still argue that Israel has to be attuned to the moral fallout of even justified policies, of the way in which the war - even if it is a just war - is corrupting the morals of the country. That complicates the picture; it doesn't contradict the justification from self-defense.
posted by Noah at 1:35 PM

 
I've liked Rabbi Jonathan Sacks for a long time. The conventional rap on him is that he's a purveyor of plattitudes - that he won't take a position on anything that anyone can definitively disagree with. I don't necessarily reject this view of him. I just think that religious leaders are not politicians. A preeminent part of a religious leader's job is to safeguard the continuity of tradition, and it's not obvious to me that this job is best discharged by taking firm stands on controversial issues.

So I'm neither shocked nor appalled by the recent interview in the Guardian in which Rabbi Sacks says that Israel's rule over the Palestinians in the territories is "tragic" and "incompatible in the long run" with core Jewish principles. Indeed, I would agree with him in this. He does not, however, go further, and argue for a particular policy prescription, because he knows he is not a general. His job is to say the following.

One, keeping the land is not commanded; it can be traded for peace. This is mainstream Jewish opinion; most of the halachic authorities in Israel and the diaspora have ruled similarly. Only the most radical interpreters of Rav Kook's legacy - who are, admittedly, dominant in the religious Zionist camp and increasingly influential in non-haredi Orthodoxy generally - argue that such trades are impermissable.

Two, saving life is a paramount value, and therefore it is not only permissable but commanded to withdraw from territory if that will bring peace. This is also uncontroversial. The key question is in the if: if Rabbi Sacks' father is right, and the other side does not want peace, and withdrawal will cost lives, then it is impermissable to withdraw. The religious opinion hinges on a realistic evaluation of the facts. That's how it should be.

Three, rule by force over another people is unethical in Judaism. You'd think this was a no-brainer, but it isn't - not because Judaism would indeed countenance such a thing but because very few rabbis are willing to opine on what Jewish law says about the general conduct of the Jewish state. The haredi rabbis by and large take the position that the state is not really Jewish; a Jewish state will only exist in the Messianic age. What Israel is is a state that governs a lot of Jews. As such, they seek to bend the state to the interests of those Jews - specifically, the Jewish communities they represent, the ultra-Orthodox communities. In addition to trying to get more resources out of the state directed to their communities, they often seek to have various halachic rules enacted in law - not because they extract some set of principles from halacha for how a sovereign Jewish state should be run but because they govern their own communities by halachic rules and enacting those rules in law would make that governance easier and allow for the further extension of their communities and their norms. The failure of most Jewish authorities to grasp the nettle of sovereign Jewish self-government is a major failure of the rabbinate of this generation, and one whose persistence poses real risks for both Judaism and the Jewish state. Therefore, I take it as a very positive thing for an authority like Rabbi Sacks to opine in this way. I will note, however, that once again we are talking about a religious ruling against the behavior of the government of Israel. What Rabbi Sacks is saying, in effect, is that withdrawal from the territories would be good from a Jewish perspective even if it did not bring peace, because forcible rule over another people is ethically wrong. Who can disagree? But if withdrawal would cause war, and not peace, that would still trump in Rabbi Sacks' view, since the saving of life is paramount.

Rabbi Sacks does go on to say that, in his opinion, Israel will need to give up all or virtually all the territories to achieve peace. This is his opinion, not a religious ruling, but it is an opinion to be respected, given its source, even though I think he's dead wrong. I also think he is right to talk with fundamentalists on the other side who explicitly reject the existence of the state of Israel (with his important caveat that these not be individuals who kill their opponents, which rather narrows the field). After all, we need to convince some of these people and their followers if peace is ever to be possible. But I would add an additional qualifier: these interlocutors must be acting in good faith. There is no point in meeting with someone for whom religion is politics by other means, which in turn is war by other means. There are religious extremists who are sincere, but there are many for whom power is their god, and there is no point in talking to such people. I don't know the particular Ayatollah he met with, but the scale of corruption of the Iranian regime does make it important to know with whom one is dealing. It is one thing to talk to a Taheri, another to talk to a Khamenei.

The Guardian is going to make much of this interview, but I don't think it means much. I don't think it represents a change of view by Rabbi Sacks, and I don't think he's taking any different view from, say, Rabbi Michael Melchior, Chief Rabbi of Denmark and a member of the current Israeli government and a dove. Moreover, I don't think he's taking a different religious position on the territories than that taken by Rav Ovadiah Yosef, spiritual leader of Israel's Shas party, or most other non-Kook-ite halachic authorities.
posted by Noah at 11:07 AM

 
The news about the arrest of 7 Israeli Arabs involved in terror is terrible, absolutely terrible. It is ruining my day.

For those who are unaware, a little background on demographics. Israel has about 6 million citizens, of whom about 1.2 million are Arabs. This Arab population includes Muslims and Christians, but does not include Jews from Arab countries, who along with their descendents constitute more than half the Jewish population of the country. Israel's Arab citizens are able to fully participate in the political life of the country; the main way in which they are distinguished from other citizens is that they do not serve in the armed forces (though Druze, Circassians, Bedouin and other ethnic minorities do so serve).

In addition to these Arab citizens, there are approximately 1 million Arab residents of the Gaza Strip, which is largely under Palestinian Authority control, and 2 million Arab residents of Judea and Samaria, nearly all of whom live under Palestinian Authority control but in territory which is something of a patchwork, partly controlled by Israel and partly controlled by the P.A. Furthermore, there are about 250,000 Arab citizens of Jerusalem who, as legal residents of the city, are able to vote in municipal elections and participate fully in the life of the city, but they are not citizens of Israel and do not participate in national political life.

Prior to Oslo, Israel's Arab citizens, by their own testimony, suffered from something of a split personality. On the one hand, they considered themselves Israelis, voted in Israeli elections, took part in the economic and cultural life of the country, etc. On the other hand, they were Arabs, had relations in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and elsewhere in the Arab world, and had difficulty identifying with Israel as a Jewish state. I suspect that, if you had an honest conversation with your average Israeli Arab in 1985, he would have said that Israel should not be a Jewish state but a bi-national state, and that the occupation of the territories had to be ended, but that regardless he was a loyal citizen of the state and expected to be treated as such.

Since Oslo, this has changed, radically. During the "good" years, there was an increasing identification by Israeli Arabs with the Palestinian Authority. This was most pronounced in Jerusalem, where the Arab residents were not citizens of Israel, but it was a trend observed throughout Israel. The Arab population seemed to have internalized three facts.

First, that Israel had recognized the PLO and Palestinian nationalism. This meant that they, as Arabs of Palestine, were the most "legitimate" residents in Israel. Why, then, was Israel a Jewish state, and not an Arab state, or at the worst a bi-national state? Their historic critique of Israel was given a new edge by Oslo.

Second, that Israel was withdrawing from the territories in part because it was unwilling to contemplate absorbing such a large Arab population. If Israel was to remain a Jewish state, it would have to have a majority of Jews who controlled the national life. What did such a message mean for them, destined to be perennial minorities? If they were, it seemed, always going to be a distinct and separate minority in national life, perhaps they needed an outside power to look out for their interests - such as a Palestinian state?

Third, that Israel was withdrawing from the territories in part because it was weary of conflict. As in the P.A. territories, this suggested that Israel could be influenced by force. If such a strategy could be employed in the territories, why not in Israel proper?

So identification with the Palestinian Authority increased dramatically just when Oslo appeared to be working. Just as peace was supposedly dawning in the territories, Israel's Arab citizenry was becoming increasingly restive and unhappy with the modus vivendi within Israel. This resulted in a great deal of hand-wringing on the part of Israel's major political parties. Labor, Likud and even Shas (the major ultra-Orthodox party) tried to curry favor with Arab voters by promising more services, greater integration, and so forth, all with a view to buying that population's affection. These efforts failed miserably for three reasons. First, the promises were rarely, if ever, fulfilled. Second, they did not speak to the cause of alienation: the conviction that Israel's Jews intended to keep the Arab citizenry down, and that this plan could be altered by force. And third, because of a series of events that dramatically angered the Arab population of Israel.

During the "bad" years, several events happened to enrage Arab citizens of Israel. Most importantly, the forceful crackdown by the Barak government on mass Arab protests that resulted in the killing of several Arab protesters convinced much of the Arab population that Israel considered them, citizens though they may be, as no different from the Arabs of the territories. Another important event was the withdrawal from Lebanon, in which Israel disgracefully abandoned their South Lebanese Christian allies. This further convinced those Arabs most inclined towards Israel that, in the end, the Israeli government cared only about Jews, and would sell everyone else down the river. Meanwhile, of course, the P.A. was unrelenting in unleashing propaganda aimed at the Arab population of Israel, making the case that Oslo was a trick by Israel to carve up the Palestinian population into South-African-style homelands and actually increase Jewish settlement in the territories.

Which leaves us where we are today. Israel's Arab citizenry is still, I suspect, largely loyal in the sense that it would not actively collaborate with the enemies of Israel. But even this degree of loyalty is increasingly fragile. Israel's Islamic movement is growing; Nazareth is being actively Islamicized and the political support for radical Islamic groups is growing. Israeli Jews increasingly treat the Galilee as potentially hostile territory. The collapse of trust is going to have severe economic consequences for the Arab sector, far overwhelming any attempts by the government (if the government actually makes these attempts) to improve that sector's economic situation. Arab Israelis decreasingly participate in the political life of the country. The Arab parties are dedicated to the elimination of the Jewish state through legal means, and the Arab citizenry boycotted the last elections for Prime Minister (as Jerusalem's non-citizen Arabs overwhelmingly boycott the municipal elections in that city).

These trends will get much worse if proposals to withdraw unilaterally from most of Judea, Samaria and Gaza and retreat behind a wall are carried out. Israel's Arabs will have confirmation of the entire thesis outlined above: Israel doesn't want Arabs among them and, if the Arabs make enough of a fuss, Israel will flee from them. The logical response to their considerable grievances would be for Israel's Arabs to launch an intifadeh in the Galilee, demanding either the end of the Jewish character of the state or substantial regional autonomy - or, perhaps, demanding the right to vote to secede from Israel and join the P.A. on the other side of the wall.

Will they also get worse if Israel re-occupies the P.A.-administered territories on a permanent basis, and eliminates the P.A.? That depends. If the Israeli reconquest is absolutely forceful, things may die down for a time, but the problems will resurface with a vengeance not too long thereafter. Israel cannot, for any length of time, rule another people by force, and Israel's own Arabs will increasingly identify with their brothers in the territories so long as they are so ruled. The only thing Israel can do to mitigate this risk is to think seriously about post-reconquest political arrangements that could actually work long-term. As I have argued many times, the only such arrangements that are plausible involve a formal role for Jordan as the guarantor of the interests of the Palestinian population within Israel. Within that broad concept, there are two possible solutions: annex the territories to Israel and make the Arab residents citizens of Jordan, or give Jordan a formal role in the governance and security of the territories, parts of which will be autonomous Palestinian enclaves but not an independent state. Either solution would require a very close cooperation between Israel and Jordan, cooperation that would of course impinge on Israeli sovereignty and freedom of action. It would also require a degree of regional acceptance of Israel that has never been manifested, even in Jordan. I'm not saying such a solution is likely. I am saying that anything else could bring disaster - either civil war within the pre-67 borders of Israel or the forcible expulsion of much of the Arab population of the territories, and regional war.

Israel thought it could get rid of its Arab "problem" by giving up the territories. But the Arab "problem" is the problem of Palestinian nationalism, which is incompatible with the existence of the state of Israel, for both practical reasons (there is no room for two independent and viable states between the Jordan and the sea) and ideological ones (if Palestinian nationalism is legitimate, then Israel's founding was a usurpation of Palestinian rights). By withdrawing from the territories and legitimizing Palestinian nationalism, Israel has imported that nationalism into pre-67 Israel. Defeating that nationalism has therefore become all the more important.
posted by Noah at 6:51 PM

 
Bloggers could probably save themselves some time by installing a script that automatically blogs Mark Steyn's latest column wherever and whenever it appears.
posted by Noah at 12:08 PM

 
Paul Cella points my attention to a really good piece in Policy Review: Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology by Lee Harris. To summarize the argument: most supporters of the current war on al Qaeda (e.g. Victor Davis Hanson) and most of the opponents (e.g. Noam Chomsky) share the assumption that the massacres of 9-11 were the opening salvo in a war. That is to say, they were operations undertaken to achieve concrete objectives. Harris argues that this may not be the case; that the terror attacks may have been ends in themselves, undertaken not to achieve concrete objectives but to make the perpetrators (and their surviving comrades) feel like victors. That the attacks were, fundamentally, theater rather than policy, the outgrowth of a psychological fantasy ideology rather than a logical ideology aimed at achieving power.

I'm going to quote the heart of his argument at length:

In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself.

But the concept of belief, as it is used in this context, must be carefully understood in order to avoid ambiguity. For us, belief is a purely passive response to evidence presented to us — I form my beliefs about the world for the purpose of understanding the world as it is. But this is radically different from what might be called transformative belief — the secret of fantasy ideology. For here the belief is not passive, but intensely active, and its purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it. It is, in a sense, a deliberate form of make-believe, but one in which the make-believe is not an end in itself, but rather the means of making the make-believe become real. In this sense it is akin to such innocently jejune phenomena as “The Power of Positive Thinking,” or even the little engine that thought it could. To say that Mussolini, for example, believed that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire does not mean that he made a careful examination of the evidence and then arrived at this conclusion. Rather, what is meant by this is that Mussolini had the will to believe that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire.

The allusion to William James’s famous essay “The Will to Believe” is not an accident, for James exercised a profound influence on the two thinkers essential to understanding both Italian fascism in particular and fantasy ideology in general — Vilfredo Pareto and Georges Sorel. All three men begin with the same assumption: If human beings are limited to acting only on those beliefs that can be logically and scientifically demonstrated, they could not survive, simply because this degree of certainty is restricted only to mathematics and the hard sciences — which, by themselves, are not remotely sufficient to guide us through the world as it exists. Hence, human beings must have a large set of beliefs that cannot be demonstrated logically and scientifically — beliefs that are therefore irrational as judged by the hard sciences.

Yet the fact that such beliefs cannot be justified by science does not mean that they may not be useful or beneficial to the individual or to the society that holds them. For James, this meant primarily the religious beliefs of individuals: Did a man’s religious beliefs improve the quality of his personal life? For Pareto, however, the same argument was extended to all beliefs: religious, cultural, and political.

Both James and Pareto viewed non-rational belief from the perspective of an outside observer: They took up the beliefs that they found already circulating in the societies in which they lived and examined them in light of whether they were beneficial or detrimental to the individuals and the societies that entertained them. As a botanist examines the flora of a particular region — he is not interested in creating new flowers, but simply in cataloguing those that already exist — so, too, James and Pareto were exclusively interested in already existing beliefs, and certainly not in producing new ones.

But this was not enough for Sorel. Combining Nietzsche with William James, Sorel discovered the secret of Nietzsche’s will to power in James’s will to believe. James, like Pareto, had shown that certain spontaneously occurring beliefs enabled those who held these beliefs to thrive and to prosper, both as individuals and societies. But if this were true of spontaneously occurring beliefs, could it not also be true of beliefs that were deliberately and consciously manufactured?

This was a radical innovation. For just as naturally existing beliefs could be judged properly only in terms of the benefits such beliefs brought about in the lives of those who believed in them, the same standard could now be applied to beliefs that were deliberately created in order to have a desired effect on those who came to believe in them. What would be important about such “artificially inseminated” beliefs — which Sorel calls myths — was the transformative effect such myths would have on those who placed their faith in them and the extent to which such ideological make-believe altered the character and conduct of those who held them — and certainly not whether they were true.

Sorel’s candidate for such a myth — the general strike — never quite caught on. But his underlying insight was taken up by Mussolini and Italian fascism, and with vastly greater sensitivity to what is involved in creating such galvanizing and transformative myths in the minds of large numbers of men and women. After all, it is obvious that not just any belief will do and that, furthermore, each particular group of people will have a disposition, based on history and character, to entertain one set of beliefs more readily than another. Mussolini assembled his Sorelian myth out of elements clearly designed to catch the imagination of his time and place — a strange blend of Imperial Roman themes and futurist images.

Yet even the most sensitively crafted myth requires something more in order to take root in the imagination of large populations — and this was where Mussolini made his great innovation. For the Sorelian myth to achieve its effect it had to be presented as theater. It had to grab the spectators and make them feel a part of the spectacle. The Sorelian myth, in short, had to be embodied in a fantasy — a fantasy with which the “audience” could easily and instantly identify. The willing suspension of disbelief, which Coleridge had observed in the psychology of the normal theatergoer, would be enlisted in the service of the Sorelian myth; and in the process, it would permit the myth-induced fantasy to override the obvious objections based on mundane considerations of reality. Thus twentieth century Italians became convinced that they were the successors of the Roman Empire in the same way that a member of a theater audience is convinced that Hamlet is really talking to his deceased father’s ghost.

Once again, it is a mistake to see in all of this merely a ploy — a cynical device to delude the masses. In all fantasy ideologies, there is a point at which the make-believe becomes an end in itself. This fact is nowhere more clearly exhibited than in the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.

Any attempt to see this adventure in Clausewitzian terms is doomed to fail: There was no political or economic advantage whatsoever to be gained from the invasion of Ethiopia. Indeed, the diplomatic disadvantages to Italy in consequence of this action were tremendous, and they were in no way to be compensated for by anything that Italy could hope to gain from possessing Ethiopia as a colony.

Why invade, then? The answer is quite simple. Ethiopia was a prop — a prop in the fantasy pageant of the new Italian Empire — that and nothing else. And the war waged in order to win Ethiopia as a colony was not a war in the Clausewitzian sense — that is to say, it was not an instrument of political policy designed to induce concessions from Ethiopia, or to get Ethiopia to alter its policies, or even to get Ethiopia to surrender. Ethiopia had to be conquered not because it was worth conquering, but because the fascist fantasy ideology required Italy to conquer something — and Ethiopia fit the bill. The conquest was not the means to an end, as in Clausewitzian war; it was an end in itself. Or, more correctly, its true purpose was to bolster the fascist collective fantasy that insisted on casting the Italians as a conquering race, the heirs of Imperial Rome.

To be a prop in someone else’s fantasy is not a pleasant experience, especially when this someone else is trying to kill you, but that was the position of Ethiopia in the fantasy ideology of Italian fascism. And it is the position Americans have been placed in by the quite different fantasy ideology of radical Islam.

As a major, major fan of William James (and Pareto is pretty great, too; I'm not familiar with Sorel), I find this analysis particularly persuasive. For Harris, the import of his anaylsis for our conduct of the war is simple. If al Qaeda is not a rational actor, but operating on the basis of fantasy, then it cannot be fought to the point merely of victory (ending the enemy's ability to do serious harm, or achieving the enemy's surrender) but must be fought to the point of extermination. That indeed follows logically from his argument. But I want to tease out a couple of distinctions that I think are important for the conduct of the war, and that somewhat qualify his conclusions.

First, I would agree that 9-11 was an act of theater, with al Qaeda as the director and actors in the drama, and America's symbols as the set and props. But who was the audience? There are three possibilities, not mutually exclusive: America, the Muslim world, and al Qaeda itself. Harris, while surely agreeing that all may be true in part, argues that the primary audience for 9-11 was al Qaeda itself. I don't think that is quite right; I think the primary audience was the Muslim world. I definitely agree that one purpose of the attacks was the self-glorification of the attackers and their comrades, an effort to convince themselves of their own power and importance. As such, they would be comparable to, say, the crimes of the Bader Meinhof gang or the Weathermen: violence that could not possibly be connected with political objectives, violence undertaken for the sake of violence itself, undertaken by a group of people utterly out of touch with reality. And its important to note that these terrorists did nothing to move their larger societies in their favor. But I think Hitler's beer-hall putsch, or the spectacular acts of terror perpetrated by the PLO through the 1970s and 1980s are better examples. These acts were not, in themselves, capable of catapulting the perpetrators into power. But they were part of a strategy intended ultimately to achieve just that, by means of infecting the larger society that the perpetrators sought to take over with the fantasy that already governed the perpetrators' behavior.

This has consequences for how we proscute the war. If al Qaeda is talking primarily to itself, then the overwhelming focus of the war should be on preventing that group from gaining additional military assets, surrounding and isolating it, and physically eliminating its members. If, on the other hand, al Qaeda is talking primarily to a much larger audience of Muslims, then a major part of the war should be devoted to innoculating the larger Muslim world from infection. That effort, in turn, must involve our own use of theater: to impress on the Muslim world the power and resilience of America, and the folly of al Qaeda. We would have to do this because if we didn't and al Qaeda's theatrical attacks had their intended effect, we'd see copy-cat organizations emerging throughout the Muslim world, a disease metastasizing too quickly for us to pursue a policy of cordon-and-eliminate.

Second, and more fundamentally, I would like to draw two distinctions that cut across the fantasist/rationalist division that Harris makes. They are: between radical and conservative powers, and between good and evil powers.

I've talked about the distinction between radical and conservative powers before, but I want to elaborate a bit here.

Possibly because I work with options, I tend to look at the whole world from the perspective of an options trader. (And I wind up sounding a lot like Malcolm Gladwell.) A holder of options stands to benefit enormously from a large positive move, but has a limited downside in the event of a large adverse move. Therefore, a holder of options wants the volatility of the underlying asset to increase; this increases the magnitude of potential positive events, but doesn't change the magnitude of loss if negative events transpire, and thus increases the holder's expected gain. Because of this, even events that decrease the expected value of the underlying asset (for example, events that make negative outcomes more likely) may be positive events for an options holder if they increase the volatility of the underlying asset sufficiently that the increase in potential value of upside events is great enough to overwhelm the greater likelihood of downside events. Finally, all options expire on a given date, so options holders need their hoped-for events to happen within a given span of time. The more time goes by, the less value their options have.

In options speak, the holder of options is "long gamma" and "short theta." (Gamma is the derivative of delta, which is in turn the amount that the value of an option changes with each incremental change in the value of the underlying asset. If you are long gamma, that means that your exposure to the underlying asset increases as the asset appreciates, and decreases as the asset depreciates. In other words, your gains accelerate as the asset goes up, and your losses decelerate as the asset goes down - in the case of a call option, in any event. Theta, meanwhile, is the rate of change of the value of the position with the incremental passage of time. If you are short theta, that means that your position value declines over time. Anyone who borrows money is short theta, because he is paying money every day until he pays off the loan; anyone who lends money is long theta.)

Radical powers are like holders of options, while conservative powers are like sellers of options. Radical powers have little to lose, but could benefit greatly from the right kind of change, if the change is sufficiently dramatic. Absent such a change, the radical power will decay and eventually collapse. In many cases, therefore, it makes sense for these powers to instigate change of almost any sort, even change that is objectively self-destructive, because by destabilizing the situation a radical power may create opportunities to dramatically increase its power, which is worth more than the objective loss of power caused by the action.

What I want to stress is that this is rational behavior on the part of the radical power. Thus, al Qaeda's leaders, behaving rationally, may have reasoned that it was very likely that they would lose their base in Afghanistan as a result of the attacks on America. But, they may have said, Afghanistan is of limited value; indeed, we've gotten about as much as we can possibly get out of it, having trained a generation of terror leaders and planted them abroad. We've run the country into the ground economically, and eventually we'll face resistance, either from within our own ranks or from the warlords or from ethnic minorities - memories of how we ended civil war will fade, and the reality of Afghanistan as it is will set in. So we need to radically increase our power. It's worth the likely loss of Afghanistan if a dramatic attack on America causes a revolution in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan - or if America's own invasion of Afghanistan achieves this. Even if the odds are that we'll reduce our own power and strengthen America's hand by these attacks, the attacks will unsettle the situation, and we'll be in a position to seize any opportunities that present themselves.

Similarly, Yasser Arafat heads a radical power that rationally reasoned that war - even a war they were more likely to lose than win - served their interests more than peace. Peace would mean confronting the degree to which the promises that the PLO made have fallen short of reality; peace would mean facing a destroyed economy, a rump mini-state utterly dependent on its neighbors, Israel and Jordan, and the utter loss of international significance. Far better to launch a war, and hope that instability will present opportunities to radically increase one's power - even if the likeliest outcome is the loss of what power one has.

That's the rational reasoning of radical powers. Conservative powers are in the opposite position. Rather than holders of options, they are like sellers of options, or holders of debt. Every day that goes by without dramatic change benefits them, because their assets are income-producing not wasting assets. Anything that radically upsets the international order has a good chance of hurting them - and even if it's more likely to help them than hurt, it's unlikely to help them overwhelmingly because of their already strong position, but it could do serious damage to valuable assets.

I want to stress that this divide between radical and conservative powers does not correspond to the difference between good and evil powers. Saudi Arabia, a nasty regime since its inception, has historically been a conservative power. Any change is dangerous to the regime, which has valuable, income-producing assets (oil fields, control of Mecca) and little to gain from disorder. The weaker Saudi Arabia becomes internally, however, due to population growth and productivity declines as well as the sheer boredom of its effectivelyimprisoned subjects, the more radical the regime must become, and therefore the more dangerous to itself as well as to others. On the flip side, from the beginnings of the yishuv to 1967, Israel was a radical power. Israel faced enormous odds against its success from the beginning, and there were strong forces in the international system arrayed against it. World War I resulted in the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate; World War II, however devastating it was for the Jewish people as a whole, ultimately benefitted Israel both by increasing its Jewish population and creating a unique political context in which the international community would bestow its blessing on the new state. After 1948, the state was acutely vulnerable to attacks from the outside, which could be conducted with minimal cost to the aggressor states. Israel therefore engaged in aggressive cross-border reprisals, and two dramatic wars (the Sinai Campaign and the 6-Day War) that were defensive in origin but aggresive in their conduct. But none of this means that Israel was an evil power; in fact, all through the period of the yishuv and down to the present, Israel has been extremely sensitive to the moral restraints on warfare, certainly in compared with its neighbors but also in comparison with many western powers (Algeria, anyone?) who have been apt to criticize Israel for its policies.

The participation in a fantasy ideology is orthogonal to both of these other considerations: both to the radicalism of the power and to its evil. I offer two examples as proof. First, Israel was, in addition to being a radical power, one dominated by a fantasy ideology. If the founders of the yishuv had ever considered the odds, Israel would never have come into being. Zionists came to Israel, settled the land and built the state as participants in a host of collective fantasies. Had the Zionists merely sought refuge from anti-Semitic Russia or, later, Germany, they would have been focused on trying to get to America - as many of their non-Zionist fellows were and did. Socialist, nationalist and religious fantasies - or, to use a less pejorative term, myths - powered the enterprise of Zionism from the beginning. And again, this does not make Zionism an evil enterprise by any means.

As a second example, I point to the British Empire. As David Cannadine argues persuasively in his book, Ornamentalism, a major factor both animating the British Empire and enabling its success was the theater and pageantry of it all. This was both consciously and unconsciously designed to make best use of the existing traditional authorities in the societies Britain sought indirectly to rule, but it was equally consciously and unconsciously designed as a project to occupy the Tory elements in British society with less and less obvious place in an increasingly bourgeois, mercantile society. The fantasy of a feudal order served the conservative cause of social stability in the midst of economic at home and stable, inexpensive rule abroad.

So fantasy ideologies can serve both evil and good powers, and both radical and conservative powers. As important as it is to recognize that we are up against an enemy whose political strategies are at least as much theatrical as Clauswitzean, and that the enemy may seek disordered change for its own sake rather than as part of a directed and controlled plan, it is more important for us to remember that the enemy is evil. Harris calls Bush's identification of the enemy as "evildoers" as a bit of fantasy ideology of our own - and he means that positively. And he's right about that. But it's also accurate. We will be tempted to decide that our war is being waged against some other force that caused this evil - religion, either in general or Islam specifically; or poverty and underdevelopment; or undemocratic regimes; or what have you. But we shouldn't lose sight of the basic value judgement: the people who perpetrated the massacres of 9-11 are evil. Those who help them are evil. And if we can't wipe evil off the planet, we should have no compunction about any actions we take to destroy it utterly when it threatens us.
posted by Noah at 12:02 PM

 
Smart article by Grover Norquist (I know, I know) about how President Bush's high approval ratings are useless to him.
posted by Noah at 3:15 PM

 
Some additional thoughts about Denise Majette's victory apropos of this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

A lot of folks have been focused on how so much of the black "civil rights" leadership in this country came out for McKinney, and how her father made anti-Semitic charges after his daughter lost. But the story here isn't that there's a new problem in black-Jewish relations, or that Jewish money stole a black election, or that Arab money isn't reported in the press but Jewish money is, or anything like that.

Here's the story: McKinney lost her race in a district that is more black than it has ever been, and in a district with a bigger black middle class than ever. These voters were less interested in hearing about Jewish conspiracies and less interested in Jesse Jackson's opinion and more interested in voting out a woman they felt no longer represented them because her views were not theirs.

Majette's victory is a great victory for black Americans. The people ruled. It's a very optimistic turn of events. And we who thought McKinney was a disgrace, and who supported her opponent, should give credit for our side's victory where it is due: to the common sense and patriotism of the 4th District's voters, most of whom are black Democrats.
posted by Noah at 12:28 PM

 
There's a lively debate going on over whether there will be a Hashemite restoration in Iraq, and whether doing so would be a good idea or not. (See, for example, here for the case that it may be in the planning, here for case that it would be a good idea, and here for the case against.) I think it's worth stepping back a bit to examine the key questions, which get conflated in much of the discussion.

What is the purpose of a king? We in the United States, the world's longest-lived republic (Q: is that right? was Switzerland a republic before 1874?), have a natural aversion to monarchy. But monarchy is the most enduring form of governance on the planet, with a far more successful history than self-government. Stable republican government is harder to achieve for two reasons. First, in a republic, the people rule. For the people, a heterogeneous mass, to rule, they need to think of themselves as a collective. This is not so hard in a small territory like Athens or Venice, but much more difficult in a larger territory or with a population that divided into distinct ethnic, class or religious groups. The United States is virtually unique in having crafted such an effective unum out of our pluribus, and we have the genius of James Madison to thank for it more than anyone. In any event, for a country like Iraq to operate as a republic, the people must think of themselves collectively as Iraqis, and it is not obvious that this is the case; they may think of themselves as Arabs, Kurds or Turkmens - or Sunnis or Shiites - before they think of themselves as Iraqis. Second, a republic can only be maintained by a patriotic elite that has the people's allegiance - a natural aristocracy, in Jefferson's terms, to replace the hereditary aristocracy of monarchical regimes. Does such an elite exist in Iraq? It seems unlikely.

In the absence of these things - an authentic nationalism and a natural aristocracy recognized as such by the people - a republic is likely to flounder. When it flounders, one or another class or group will act to seize power - either to destroy or to protect the republic. The three most common variants of the above are: party dictatorship, military coup and ethnic civil war. (These are not mutually exclusive.) The brief Russian and Chinese republics were ended when Communist parties seized power; the Weimar Republic ended when the Nazis seized power; the broad-based Iranian revolution and the republic it inaugurated was very quickly transformed into a one-party clerical dictatorship. In Egypt, Iraq and Syria, one-party dictatorship was the outgrowth of a military coup. By contrast, in Turkey, the military has a defined constitutional role as protector of the republic; if regular democratic processes appear to threaten the longevity of that republic and its constitution, the military is supposed to step in. This is also how the military saw its role in the Chilean, Argentine and Uruguayan military dictatorships.

The monarch, as symbol of the nation, provides a prop to a less-than-robust sense of national identity. A people divided in many ways, unused to thinking of itself in collective terms, may nonetheless agree on a shared allegiance to a single man and his family. While a monarch may be capricious and corrupt, he is also less likely to operate completely without a check on his power than are the military or a single dictatorial party, because there are, in most cultures, old traditions that structure a monarch's power - and, moreover, a monarch rules by the power of deference and tradition, and therefore will perforce have to defer to some extent to other kinds of traditional authority, lest he undermine the basis of his own rule. This is not the case for the military, who typically rule in the name of national emergency, which would justify virtually any extremity, or a dictatorial party, which typically rules in the name of an absolutist ideology that happily uproots all other forms of authority before it.

For a monarch to function this way, however, these sources of authority - traditional deference and a natural relationship with other local traditional authorities - must also exist. Is this the case with the Hashemites in Iraq? Probably not. The Hashemites are revered by the Bedouin who are the dominant group in much of Jordan (though a minority of the total population, due to the large Palestinian Arab population in and around Amman). But they have no natural base of support in Iraq. Prince Hassan, if installed as king by a conquering American army, would be legitimate not because of his own claims but because of the power of that army.

But then, this would be the case for a republic as well, or for any other government installed in Iraq. Before we go in, we should get this through our heads: Iraq has no legitimacy as a nation, and therefore any state will be illegitimate. The current one-party dictatorship rules on the basis of terror. It has no legitimacy. The various military regimes that followed the fall of the Hashemite dynasty did the same. The Hashemites ruled by the blessing of Great Britain. Before that, Iraq was under the thumb of the Turkish Empire for centuries. For much of its history before that, Iraq has been under the thumb of various Persian empires. There's not a lot of history of Iraqi self-government, including indigenous monarchy, and little sign of national self-consciousness.

So I would have to argue that our supporter and our critic of the idea of monarchy for Iraq are over-stating the case. To the critic, it is anathema to get involved in "colonial" adventures choosing the government of other countries. But how, then, is war with an enemy like Iraq to be pursued? Take it as a given that Saddam Hussein's regime is a threat to America. How are we to address it? We will have no choice but to install a government in Iraq; we will be there, and our troops will be the power behind whatever government takes shape. I don't think that's colonialism; we're not interested in settling Iraq with Americans or stealing its resources. But it is a fairly extreme form of intervention in the internal affairs of another country, and I don't see an alternative to it. Our supporter of monarchy, meanwhile, vastly overstates the potential benefit of a Hashemite king. How great a force was Hussein of Jordan for a "liberal Islam" after all? And he, having the strong support of a major ethnic group in his country and having survived many challenges to his rule, was, by the end, far more legitimate than his brother, Hassan, could ever be as king of Iraq.

Iraq is going to be an enormous mess after we conquer it. We will be taking care of it for decades. It will be a much uglier job than the reconstruction of Germany or Japan. We have got to get used to this fact, and not expect a quick trip home for the boys right after the war. Iraq has a large middle class that is well-educated and largely unaffected by radical Islam. It has potential. But it is not a nation, and no one knows how to build a nation. More likely than not, we will know we have succeeded in our task when the Iraqis, without violence, vote to throw us out of their country some decades hence, as the Filipinos did in the 1990s.
posted by Noah at 12:11 PM

 
A really excellent opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the folly of the Mitzna boomlet. Which I suspect is already starting to fade.

Israel is still living this terrible paradox: its people are strong but its leadership is weak. I can count on one hand the Israeli political leaders I admire: Natan Sharansky, Beni Begin (who at this point isn't a political leader anymore), who else? I think Michael Melchior is a good guy, an important symbol, but he's got no influence at all. Sheetrit, Shalom, Meridor all seem like decent people, but not the sorts of people who could inspire one. I have considerable respect for Yossi Sarid of Meretz, even though I think he's wrong. For that matter, I had a lot of respect for Barak, even I think he drove the country straight off a cliff. But Ramon? Beilin? Yael Dayan? These people are supposed to be Labor's leaders; can anyone take these people seriously? And how much respect can one have for a Netanyahu or any of his old cronies, the Hanegbis and Libermans and the like.

Labor is now structurally a minority party. It has not adjusted; it hasn't figured out who it is. Mitzna, I've argued before, is a walking argument that Labor should become a Liberal party: pro-business, socially very liberal, and generally dovish but flexible - most important, a party not expected to embody the national consensus on anything but pushing the consensus in a particular direction, whether from within the government or without. That's a plausible future for the party. It's a future that, if the party is true to such a vision, and has any integrity (a real question) should put Shinui and Democratic Choice out of business, and could be a reliable junior partner to the majority party or, when that party stumbles, make a bid to form a government in coalition with a Social Democratic party to its left. Mitzna could help make that transition for Labor, but not if he runs as a "peace" candidate, as the Great White Hope who will make the situation disappear by virtue of being a good kibbutznik general, a guy from the right sort of background, "one of us" - the born to lead.

Israel's much bigger problem is that Likud has not yet grown up to become the majority party. Likud is, at its heart, a populist party, and populist parties have a hard time becoming majority parties. But Likud is - or will be, after the next election - the party of Israel's majority. Likud will probably run in an alignment with Yisrael B'Aliya (Sharansky's party) and with Gesher, and will take big bites out of Labor and Shas (and completely absorb the Center Party). And, unlike the elections of the 1990s, this big shift will be permanent. One of the things I heard on my visit to Israel, in a lecture by an Israeli professor of political science, was that Israeli voting patterns have historically been quite stable, and driven largely by demographics. Now, suddenly, there's a huge dislocation of voters who were sure in their political orientation, accompanied by a general shift to the right. I think it's pretty conservative to estimate that a Likud alignment gets 40 seats in the next Knesset (that's roughly 20 currently, plus 5 from Labor, 5 from Shas and 10 from Yisrael B'Aliyah, Gesher and Center together). 50 doesn't seem at all out of reach. A Labor alignment, meanwhile, could easily not break 20 seats. Likud is likely not only to win the next elections but establish itself as the predominant party in the country, the new establishment. But it has great difficulty placing itself in that position, psychologically, of being anything but the coalition of the outsiders, fighting the establishment.

Until the situation is resolved - not necessarily permanently, but into some kind of stable modus vivendi - Israel will effectively be not a two-party system but a one-party system. An opposition running on fantasy solutions to a difficult situation will be obliterated at the polls. To be a plausible opposition, Labor will either support Likud or will have to come up with coherent alternative policies on the security front, and it has shown no signs of doing the latter. To become a plausible partner for Likud means either becoming a "me, too" Likud-lite party or coming up with a plausible alternative identity, such as being a Liberal party. Or, Labor can join Meretz on the fringes, leaving the country to be governed by a coalition of Likud, the religious parties and the far-right. Those are the choices, really. Does Mitzna understand that? Does anyone in his party understand that?
posted by Noah at 5:27 PM

 
If it's Thursday, it must be time to study Torah - specifically, the parshah of the week. Second week in a row - I'm on a roll.

This week’s parshah opens with a description of the bikkurim, the offering of first fruits. In the days of the Temple, all the Jews of the Land would ascend to Jerusalem and bring the first fruits of their farms and orchards as an offering to G-d. During the joyous period from Shavuot to Sukkot – at the time of year in which we find ourselves right now – the people bringing the bikkurim offering would recite a few of the verses of this parshah beginning with verse 5: “Arami oved avi – A wandering Aramean was my father.

This phrase should be familiar to us from another place. The passage forms the central part of the Passover haggadah (where the phrase is translated as "An Aramean sought to destroy my father" - a reference to Laban and his dealings with Jacob). In the haggadah, these verses are expounded upon at length in a commentary that, to me, has often seemed to lack a clear thrust or purpose. Moreover, it is unclear why these verses were chosen, given that they are not about the Exodus or the Passover sacrifice but about the offering of first fruits, which occurs on Shavuot.

Rav Riskin has an explanation for the choice, which I will quote at length since links to the piece I'm quoting from seem to keep going cold.

Whereas the usual textual rendition at the conclusion of Maggid reads,''In every generation, it is incumbent upon the individual to see himself (lirot atzmo) as if he came out of Egypt,'' Maimonides' haggadah texts reads, “In every generation, it is incumbent upon the individual to show himself (leharot atzmo, play-act) as if he himself is now coming out of Egyptian bondage'' (Laws of Hametz and Matzah 7,6). Apparently for Maimonides history must not only be remembered but it must be internalized, a process which can only take place by every individual attempting to experience in his life-time now what his ancestors experienced then. By placing ourselves within the pages of the Bible, the pages of the Bible become an inextricable part of our beings; transference in deed becomes transference indeed!

Maimonides' reading has a further change that I believe is fraught with crucial implications. In our haggadot, the paragraph''In every generation it is incumbent upon the individual…'' concludes,''It was not our ancestors alone that the Holy One blessed be He redeemed, but He also redeemed us along with them, as it is written,''And He took us out with them in order to bring us and give us the land which He swore to our fathers' (Deuteronomy 6, 23).'' Maimonides reading adds:''And concerning this does the Holy One Blessed be He command in the Torah, ‘And you shall remember that you were a slave'; that is to say, as if you yourself were a slave, and you have come out into freedom and you have been redeemed.'' (Maimonides, ibid). In other words, for the seder night it is not sufficient that you re-experience the exodus from Egypt; you must also re-experience the goal of redemption, the entry into the Land of Israel.

Now we understand why the Mishna (Pesachim 10) insists that we explicate the Biblical paragraph Arami Oved Avi on the Seder night, a portion found in the Book of Deuteronomy (26), rather than the more to-be-expected verses from the Book of Exodus, the initial source for Egyptian servitude and freedom; the reason is evidently because Arami Oved Avi is recited by the individual bringing his first fruits to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, Israel – and it therefore links the seder participant to true redemption as he stands at the Temples' altar. This is likewise why we connect Passover to Shavuot with the counting of the Omer; Shavuot is after all the Festival of the First Fruits, a ceremony pertaining exclusively to the Jerusalem Temple.

There is an important difference between the text in D'varim and the text in the haggadah, however. The text recited at the Temple on the occasion of the first fruits offering concludes with verses 9 and 10: “and He (G-d) brought us to this place, and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And now, behold, I have brought the first fruits of the land, which thou, O Lord, hast given me.” These last two verses are omitted from the text in the haggadah. The haggadah ends with the Exodus.

This might, of course, seem appropriate, since that is the theme of Passover; why shouldn't the haggadah end there, then? But this highlights the question: why were these words chosen in the first place? Rav Soloveitchik has an explanation for this omission, which runs counter to Rav Riskin's interpretation above. He argues that the Exodus and the entry into the Land are two fundamentally different events – that the Exodus points toward Sinai rather than towards Eretz Yisrael.

The Bikkurim text of Arami oved avi extends over six verses, concluding with a refernce to Yishuv ha’aretz and the Bikkurim. In the Haggadah, however, the last two verses are omitted and the recitation concludes with “And the Lord brought us out with a mighty hand,” etc . . . [T]he omission of Yishuv ha’aretz is perplexing . . . The purpose of the Exodus was to create “a kingdom a priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:6). Pesach and the Revelation at Sinai are bound to each other because the full purpose of the Exodus was only realized at Mt. Sinai. Physical liberation without a spiritual identity would hardly be considered a fulfillment of God’s promise to the Patriarchs. Indeed, Moses’ assignment was to lead the Exodus and arrange for the Revelation, and nothing more. “And this shall be your sign that it was I who sent you. When you have freed the people from Egypt, you shall worship God at this mountain” (Exod. 3:12). It was not his mission to bring them into the Land, as indeed he did not. Eretz Yisrael was their singularity as a people, and the verse pertaining to Yishuv ha’aretz was therefore omitted.

But why then does was this text, which seems to point up the connection between the Exodus and the Land, chosen as the center of the haggadah? We have a paradox: an explanation that satisfies as to why the bikkurim text was chosen for the haggadah is unsatisfying as an explanation of why the last verses are omitted; and an explanation that satisfies as to why the last verses are omitted is unsatisfying as an explanation of why the bikkurim text was chosen in the first place!

One answer may lie later in this parshah. In chapter 27 verses 2-3, we read: "On the day that you cross the Jordan to the land that God your Lord is giving you, you must erect large stones and plaster them with lime. When you then cross over, you shall write on them all the words of this Torah. In this manner you shall come to the land that God your Lord is giving you, the land flowing with milk and honey that God, Lord of your fathers, promised you." The bikkurim text glosses over the giving of the Torah, taking us directly from the Exodus to the settlement of the Land. But our parshah doubles back, and restores the Torah to its rightful place. For we are not to enter the Land in the spirit of the Exodus, but in the spirit of Sinai: our first act is to record the Torah on a public monument. Only later, when the Land is settled and we bring its fruits, do we look back to the Exodus and G-d's mighty hand in bringing us out, starting us on the journey to the Land, and we give thanks.

The bikkurim text is to be recited in full once we are actually in the Land, once the Temple is built and the first fruits are brought. But this will not happen until the installation of the Torah in the Land. If the haggadah included the complete bikkurim text, it would be operating from the perspective of the completion of this process, whereas in fact the Exodus is only the beginning. Moreover, it would suggest that the process is completed entirely by G-d's mighty right arm, as was the Exodus. But if the process of completion depends on the installation of the Torah, then it is partly dependent upon our actions, our merit, and not only on G-d's actions.

The narrative arc of our festival cycle goes: Pesach-Shavuot-Succoth. This can be paraphrased as: Freedom-Law-Redemption. First, we must be freed from slavery. This is not something that depends on our merit; this is our natural right as beings animated by the breath of G-d. Next, we must receive the Law. This is the purpose of our freedom: not that we should follow our own appetites rather than Pharaoh's, but that we should bind ourselves to G-d's purpose. (See my earlier thoughts on freedom and the law here.) Next, we enter the Land, which is both a literal event and a metaphor for the coming of the Messianic Age. This is the purpose of the Law: to bring about a world whose operations are in tune with the divine purpose. (There is a midrash to the effect that creation begins with the word b’reishit because “reishit” or first, is another way to refer to the bikkurim, or first fruits. By this reading, the purpose of the creation of the entire universe was the mitzvah of the bikkurim offering – and making this offering is the completion of purpose of creation!) Reciting the complete bikkurim text in the haggadah would collapse this narrative into simple dependency on G-d; by truncating the text, we are forced to hold our breath, waiting until today for the text to be completed.

At the end of our parshah, after uttering a long series of horrible curses, Moses makes the following famous and enigmatic statement: “You have seen all that G-d did in Egypt before your very eyes, to Pharaoh, to all his servants, and to all his land. Your own eyes saw the great miracles, signs and wonders. But G-d did not give you a heart to know, eyes to see and ears to hear, until this day.” What does this mean? At the Exodus, at Sinai, at the time of all these wonders the people could not understand, and yet today they do? What is special about today?

What is special about today is that today, in our text, we stand on the cusp of entry into the Land, the cusp of completion. But today, as we read our text, we are in the month of Elul, on the cusp of the Days of Awe, and this is also special. The narrative cycle of Freedom-Law-Redemption is interrupted in the Jewish calendar by the Days of Awe and the Day of Atonement. And this, too, is not an accident. During the Days of Awe we face the prospect of our mortal completion, and in response seek to make a complete repentance. This is the proper time for completing the bikkurim text, not at the Seder table. If we included the full text in the haggadah, perhaps we would think that G-d’s mighty hand and outstretched arm had achieved our complete redemption in the days of our ancestors. By chopping off the text, the haggadah highlights to us that there is more to come. The bulk of that “more”, the commandments of the law, is revealed at Sinai. But the completion of the task, the first fruits offering of joyful thanksgiving, is saved until the cusp of entry into the Land, and so our attention is held until we complete the verses today. In our day, we cannot offer first fruits at the Temple. But we can offer something far more valuable. My favorite prophet, Hosea, exhorts the people in a time when the sanctuary was debased to offer “parim s’fateinu” – literally the bulls of our lips – as offerings instead of bulls of flesh. The bulls of our lips are words of repentance. The most holy offering we can make is not the first fruits of trees but the first fruits of repentance. The use of the truncated bikkurim text in the haggadah connects the season of our liberation to the days of our repentance, when we truly can complete the work of creation.

posted by Noah at 12:34 PM

 
A belated thanks to Joe Katzman for the link, and to all his readers for following it here. Hope it hasn't been a disappointment!
posted by Noah at 6:10 PM

 
John Podhoretz has invented a new game: imagine movies other than Flashdance being remade into surfer flix like Blue Crush. He suggests Wuthering Heights and Stage Door for starters, but really, the possibilities are endless.

CITIZEN KANE: Charles Foster Kane devoted his life to building monuments to his own magnificence, only to find, at the end of the road, that none of it mattered. He had everything a man could possibly want, but what he wanted, what he could never have again, was that simple thing that gave him so much joy as a child, that simple surfboard . . .

CASABLANCA: Rick's been out of the game for years, ever since that rigged contest in Spain. Now he runs a parasailing outfit catering to tourists while his old girl and fellow surfing champ moons over that parapalegic (but still charismatic) ex-surfer Laszlo. But when the Columbian drug lords (what do you want, Nazis?) move in on the surf scene . . .

THE RED SHOES: Like virgins sacrificed to the volcano, aspiring surfer-girls are thrown into the firm but warm embrace of Boris, acknowledged master of the board. But can Victoria complete her training after falling for Boris's undisciplined but extremely blonde assistant surf-master . . .

E.T.: A space alien crash-lands in Hawaii and is adopted by a local human child, who teaches him to surf . . . wait a second: didn't Disney just do this one?

Other ideas?
posted by Noah at 3:24 PM