Sunday Reads: The new Syria deal, Sexual misery in the Arab world, Bernie Sanders & Jewish pride
US
A. Wess Mitchell and Jakub Grygiel examine the ‘probing’ technique that America’s rivals have been using to test its strength and its reactions:
Probing has been the strategy of choice for America’s modern rivals to challenge the existing order. Over the past few years, Russia, China, and, to a degree, Iran have sensed that the United States is retreating in their respective regions—whether out of choice, fatigue, weakness, or all three combined. But they are unsure of how much remaining strength the United States has, or of the solidity of its commitments to allies. Rather than risking direct war, they have employed low-intensity crises to test U.S. power in these regions.
Eli Lake writes about the mixed messages the US has been sending about the Iran sanctions:
Smith's testimony illuminates a paradox of Obama's post-deal Iran policy. On the one hand, the agreement lifts a number of sanctions on Iran's banks and companies, and even has language encouraging investment in its economy. Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, emphasized this element of the deal last month when he visited London, Paris and Rome and signed new investment deals worth billions of dollars. Telling European companies they cannot provide ground services for Iran's second-biggest airline would undermine the goal of reintegrating Iran into the global economy.
Israel
Aviad Kleinberg argues against the Knesset’s suspension of Arab Israeli MKs from the controversial Balad party:
The true test of a democracy is not protecting those who curry favor in the public eye, but rather the ability to protect those who are anathema to the state. This does not excuse the support of terrorism, as terrorism is a form of illegal activity. However, it does include the right to visit the families of terrorists. And therefore also the right to a minute of silence, certainly if one accepts the claim that the Balad Knesset members had a moment of silence not for the actions of the terrorists, but to show respect as fellow Muslims. The other members of Knesset have the right to condemn them, the right to refuse to work with them – but they do not have the right to silence and censor them. Yet that is exactly what the Knesset Ethics Committee is doing.
And Ben Dror Yemini tackles the same issue from a different perspective:
If a member of France's National Assembly had dared visit the Sint-Jans-Molenbeek neighborhood in Brussels, the home of some of the November 13 Paris terror attack perpetrators, and observe a minute of silence with the families of the murderers, he would have had to flee directly to Syria. He'd only be able to return to France in handcuffs. Excuses like “you have to understand the cultural context” would have been rejected out of hand. But MK Ayman Odeh dares complain about Israeli democracy. He's got some nerve.
Middle East
Kamel Daoud discusses the grave effects of sexual misery in the Arab world:
Today sex is a great paradox in many countries of the Arab world: One acts as though it doesn’t exist, and yet it determines everything that’s unspoken. Denied, it weighs on the mind by its very concealment. Although women are veiled, they are at the center of our connections, exchanges and concerns.
Fred Kaplan examines the pluses and the minuses of the Syria deal:
… in the medium-to-long run, the failure to unseat Assad will undo any temporary cease-fire (which is the most that anyone is claiming for the deal anyway). The agreement does reiterate earlier timetables for a “political transition” to “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance” as well as free elections and the drafting of a new constitution. But the terms of this transition—the participants in the government, the rules of elections, the drafters of a constitution—are far from settled.
Jewish World
Anthony Berteaux reports on an anti-Racism students' conference that quickly turned into a grand display of anti-semitism:
At a conference facilitated by peers who they believed were fighting the righteous battle against racist speech and hate crimes, Mokhtarzadeh and Rosenberg heard anti-Semitic statements that were met with applause and approval—statements like “the state of Israel pays Jews to move to Israel to join the army and kill Palestinians” and even “you shouldn’t buy Ben and Jerry’s because they’re Jewish and have a shop in Israel.” But perhaps the most painful, and upsetting portion of SJP’s presentation was the section called “Intifada: Peaceful Uprising.”
Michael A. Cohen muses on Bernie Sanders’ lack of Jewish pride:
In the end, it seems that a Jew winning a presidential primary is not something that seems to many Jews to be all that surprising or notable, which means there isn’t much fear of anti-Semitism, but perhaps not much sense of pride either. Present in Sanders’s candidacy, one might say, is both the curse and comfort of assimilation.
