Bringing the Middle East Back Home
Of course, the AOCs [American Orientalist Class] haughtily reply, it’s Trump who turned America into a third-world country—not us! But in fact, Trump, for all his flaws, was clear in his desire to perpetuate American uniqueness—hence his calls to overhaul immigration policy and border security. In response, the AOCs cried racism—advertising their own superiority to Trump and to their missionary predecessors.Arsen Ostrovsky and Richard Kemp: Annexation vs. sovereignty: Words matter
Except, while racism is a discredited 19th-century pseudoscience, cultural differences are entirely real. They are also hugely important in shaping everything from social structure to personality to political culture.
Yet America’s leveling ideologues are happy to ignore the mountain of evidence that contradicts their dogma—especially in the service of opposing Trump. The shunning of assimilation and the celebration of grievance-based tribalism as the core American value—which they attempt to enforce by judicial fiat, education, and social pressure—is both a threat to American democracy and a source of progressive political power. Instead of liberation from third world norms—the norms of the societies they came from—immigrants and their children are shackled to them and told that their value to American society resides in these continuing attachments. In school, their children are taught that America is sinful, and that the noxious communal grievance politics of their parents’ societies can be applied to America and layered onto the historical American rights based political culture. On the low end, this means conditioning a new generation of young Americans into sectarian competition and resentment, and block voting within the structure of the Democratic Party. On the elite level, thanks in part to the AOCs and their use of “voices from the region,” this validation is sharpened further and made into a source of authority that torques both American foreign policy and increasingly the lens through which American domestic politics is presented to Americans.
For the AOCs—and for Obama, who incarnated their tendency to see American uniqueness as shameful and vulgar—exceptionalism is a misguided relic of the sinful American past, which “can discourage comparisons with other countries, suggesting that the United States cannot learn from others.” Hence, the exultation in the notion that America’s street action is a mirror image of the mass protests of the Middle East. In fact, the idea of America as the Middle East allows the AOCs to bring all of the conflicting emotions that drew them to the region into harmony. America offers a new canvas on which the guilt and pity—and even the erotic attraction—that this class of Americans feel for those societies in which they’ve lived and worked can be re-enacted.
Perhaps more important than the chance for a do-over of the failed Middle Eastern adventures and thought experiments is the opportunity that applying Middle Eastern thought categories to America offers the AOCs for reconciling feelings of frustration with and contempt for their own country. Take, for instance, the leveling language in this tweet by a think tanker who works on Syria and al-Qaida, in reaction to his Syrian friend participating in protests in Washington, D.C. The Syrian friend’s participation becomes a “fight for our rights in #America—just a few years after he was forced to flee #Syria while demanding the same.” What better way to transcend the bitterness and depression of helplessly covering and identifying with the third-world societies where they've lived and worked, in which virtually all mass protests ended in failure? Now it can play out in America, and this time, it will succeed, against our own Trump-Assad!
The identification of Obama and the AOCs with ugly third-world security regimes like Iran and the failed societies of the region points to a larger leveling process that is currently at work in America. That process makes me anxious about the future of the great country to which I immigrated—in the hope of leaving the sickness of my former society behind me.
As Americans, we’ve gone from glorifying the politics of crowds, to celebrating the tribalization of American society and the elevation of the culture of grievance and self-pity. We accept that the function of the media is not to provide objective accounts of events but to act as a put-through mechanism for security agencies. We have entrenched the culture of conspiracy and turned institutions of government into instruments to paralyze the opposite party and disrupt the peaceful transition of power. These all are hallmarks of the politics of the Third World.
9/11 gave birth to a lost generation that threw itself into the Third World in search of redemption. Now, tragically, they have brought the Third World back home.
Those who use the above rulings to argue against Israel’s plan to “annex” parts of Judea and Samaria omit three crucial points, however.David Singer: European Union shamefully denies Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria
First, all apply to territory acquired by force or in an offensive war. The Six-Day War, in which Israel was compelled to defend itself from neighboring Arab armies seeking the Jewish state’s destruction, was defensive.
Second, in 1967, there was no “state of Palestine,” nor does such an entity exist today under international law. Therefore, Israel is not, and cannot, be annexing the territory of “another state.”
Third, and perhaps most importantly, all of the above negates the Jewish people’s inextricable connection to Judea and Samaria, which is rooted both in historical rights, and in undeniable legal ones.
One hundred years ago in April, after World War I, the allied powers gathered in San Remo, Italy and adopted an unprecedented resolution, for the first time ever entrenching the Jewish people’s pre-existing historical rights to the land as unequivocal legal rights under international law.
The San Remo Resolution, which followed the 1917 Balfour Declaration that called for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, formed the basis in 1922 of the adoption of the Mandate for Palestine.
The Mandate for Palestine, adopted by the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and the “grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”
Even Article 80 of the U.N. Charter enshrined the guiding principles of the San Remo Resolution—notwithstanding the dissolution of the Mandate—by holding that “nothing in this chapter shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.”
Therefore, even after the adoption in 1947 of the U.N. Partition Plan, and since then with all subsequent U.N. resolutions, the legal rights granted to the Jewish state at San Remo have been retained.
The frenzied rush by the European Union (EU) to condemn Israel’s restoration of Jewish sovereignty in 30% of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) reflects poorly on an organization which has adopted an exceptionally confrontational approach to the Jewish State.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has led the charge:
“We strongly urge Israel to refrain from any unilateral decision that would lead to the annexation of any occupied Palestinian territory and would be, as such, contrary to International Law”
So many false statements appearing in such a short sentence by this high-ranking EU official is breathtaking:
Israel’s action is not unilateral
Such action is being taken in tandem with President Trump following the outright refusal by the PLO to enter into negotiations with Israel on the basis of Trump’s detailed plan released on 28 January 2020.
70% of Judea and Samaria awaits the PLO – or any other Arab interlocutor such as Jordan – prepared to step up and negotiate on its future sovereignty.
Israel will not be annexing occupied Palestinian territory contrary to international law
“Annexing occupied Palestinian territory” means taking territory belonging to someone else to which Israel has no entitlement.
“Contrary to international law”: Israel will be applying sovereignty in 30% of Judea and Samaria pursuant to vested legal rights to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in this specific area conferred on the Jewish people by:
The San Remo Resolution and the Treaty of Sevres 1920
The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine 1922
Article 80 United Nations Charter 1945
The EU’s attempt to trash these existing Jewish legal rights in Judea and Samaria is extremely disturbing – since 20 of the 27 current member States of the EU – plus former member the United Kingdom – were among the 51 member States of the League of Nations that had unanimously included Judea and Samaria as part of the area in which the Jews were entitled to reconstitute their biblical Jewish homeland after 3000 years.