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Sunday Reads: Learning from Obama’s ‘biggest mistake’, How to make US Jews more engaged with Israel

[additional-authors]
April 17, 2016

US

Dominic Tierney discusses Obama’s comments on his mistakes in Libya and draws some conclusions about “the American way of war”:

In the American mind, there are good wars: campaigns to overthrow a despot, with the model being World War II. And there are bad wars: nation-building missions to stabilize a foreign country, including peacekeeping and counterinsurgency. For example, the U.S. military has traditionally seen its core mission as fighting conventional wars against foreign dictators, and dismissed stabilization missions as “military operations other than war,” or Mootwa. Back in the 1990s, the chairman of the joint chiefs reportedly said, “Real men don’t do Mootwa.” At the public level, wars against foreign dictators are consistently far more popular than nation-building operations.

Gen. David Petraeus offers some ‘big ideas’ to help with the fight against radical Islam:

Partners from the Islamic world are of particular importance. Indeed, they have huge incentives to be involved, as the ongoing struggles are generally not clashes between civilizations. Rather, what we are seeing is more accurately a clash within a civilization, that of the Islamic world. And no leaders have more to lose should extremism gather momentum than those of predominantly Islamic states.   

Israel

Donniel Hartman discusses, following Elliott Abrams and Daniel Gordis, the great challenge of making Israel meaningful to US Jews:

Like Abrams and Gordis, I doubt whether a critical conversation of Israel will alone inspire commitment. I do know, however, that an uncritical conversation of Israel, which advocates for the celebration of Israel as it is, instead of challenging one and enabling one to think about the Israel one wants, will make such a commitment impossible. A change in Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, Israeli Arabs, and the place of liberal Jewish values in Israeli society, will not alone foster a new engagement with Israel. However, without such a change in policy or at the very least without the existence of an expansive space to work to change these policies, no such engagement with Israel will occur.

Martin Kramer takes an interesting look at Israel and the Iraq war (which directly responding to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s allegations against “the lobby”):

In the end, Israel acquiesced in the U.S. threat perception, which didn’t align with its own. Influential Israelis also publicly helped to bolster the arguments made by the Bush administration. As in 1990-91, Israel again prepared to do something totally foreign to it: to absorb an Iraqi strike, perhaps with non-conventional weapons, while forgoing retaliation. And during the war, Israel showed exceptional restraint toward the Palestinians. Not for a moment did it contemplate mass expulsion of Palestinians under the cover of war in Iraq—something Mearsheimer, in a display of true ignorance, thought quite possible at the time.

In short, Israel performed as an ideal ally and perfect client. Over the decades, this is precisely how Israel has built its credibility in Washington and across America—not through the machinations of the “Lobby.”

Middle East

Hanin Ghaddar writes about the disappointing lack of Palestinian support for the Syrian people:

While it is demanded that Syrians side with the Palestinians at every turn, the Palestinians are not required to support the Syrian people. When they do, they support the Syrians individually, never as a group or through a communal initiative. Not only that, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has recently expressed support for Russia’s military intervention in Syria, including air raids used to prop the regime. And no one objected.

Thanassis Cambanis paints a very grim picture of Syria’s future prospects:

Despite talk of a “regime” and “opposition,” Syria today is a mosaic of tiny fiefs. The government has ceded control of stretches of land to Iran, Russia and Hezbollah. Its opponents range from the apocalyptic Islamic State to a coterie of tiny insurgent groups led by local warlords reliant on foreign donors. On all sides of the conflict, warlords mark territory with armed checkpoints. These low-level bosses have tasted power; it’s hard to imagine they will readily submit to any national government.

Jewish World

Liza Schoenfein takes a look at why the Conservative movement has overturned an 800-year-old Passover ban on rice and legumes:

Yet another factor, cited in both papers, is that some traditional concerns surrounding kitniyot are simply no longer problems. Now that we buy our grain in the supermarket, sealed in packaging and carefully labeled, any fear that a bit of wheat flour might make it into cornmeal or rice flour, or be mistaken for it, is mitigated.

Earlier in the week, Liel Leibovitz penned a well-written argument for why we must accept that Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism:

The first lesson is that it’s time to do away with the anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism debate. Whatever its intellectual merits are, or were, it’s largely irrelevant in an environment scorched by the flames of prejudice masquerading as thought. To ponder minute differences when students are fulsomely supporting the sort of stuff that would’ve made Henry Ford blush is like debating nautical safety long after the iceberg has been introduced to the Titanic’s hull.

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