US
Uri Friedman examines some Bush era U.S. intelligence predictions for 2015:
Nine months before the September 11 attacks—and just days after the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount, handing the presidency to George W. Bush—U.S. intelligence officials published an 85-page prediction for what the world would look like in 2015. It's a world that seems familiar in some ways, and utterly foreign in others. And it's a world in which power is diffusing and decaying—reflecting one of the most significant trends of 2014 and perhaps the coming year as well.
James Fallows offers an interesting analysis of the lack of acquaintance between the American people and its military:
Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public… Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.
Israel
Eitan Haber takes a look at the changes that the Likud ‘princes’ – the sons of the leaders of Israel’s national camp – have been going through in recent years:
When the princes' generation rose to power, the generation gap was revealed. While the fathers' generation burnt with the ideological fire it brought along from years of mutiny at home, in the Jewish leadership, during the British mandate, the princes were born into the government and realized – sometimes the hard and bloody way – that their parents' dreams (“There are two sides to the Jordan River, this one is our and that one too”) were unrealistic, impossible.
David Brooks has an intriguing take on Netanyahu’s unique brand of pessimistic leadership:
To me, his caution is most fascinating. For all his soaring rhetoric and bellicosity, he has been a defensive leader. He seems to understand that, in his country’s situation, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The costs of a mistake are bigger than the benefits of an accomplishment. So he is loath to take risks. He doesn’t do some smart things, like improve life for Palestinians on the West Bank, but he doesn’t do unpredictable dumb things, like prematurely bomb Iran. He talks everything through, and his decisions shift and flip as the discussions evolve.
Middle East
Ghazi Hamad, the deputy foreign minister of Hamas, tries to understand the reasons behind the Palestinian leadership's failure to achieve its long-term goals:
It is true that we, as Palestinians, fought and struggled, presented an amazing model of sacrifice, and created revolution after revolution, intifada after intifada. We knocked on the doors of the international community and prowled the streets of world capitals in search of support. Many applauded us at international forums and we received “theoretical” recognition as a country. But where is the practical result on the ground? Where is the Palestinian expansion – after 65 years – versus the cancerous occupation? Where are the foundations of victory and liberation that we release as empty slogans?? Where is the source of deficiency given these great sacrifices and tremendous lengths of political effort?
Benham Ben Taleblu discusses Iran’s ‘greatest fear’ – a relatively watered down ‘American’ version of Islam:
“American Islam” isn’t the Islam practiced by Muslims across the United States. Rather, it is what the Islamic Republic perceives to be a depoliticized perversion of the true faith, devoid of the revolutionary sentiment that guides the Islamic Republic. As Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei lamented in 2010, “American Islam means ceremonial Islam, an Islam that is indifferent in the face of oppression.”
Jewish World
A new book by Jack Jacobs traces the Jewish influences in the works of the famed thinkers of the Frankfurt school (piece by Benjamin Ivry):
Although professional writings before their exile from Germany were not explicitly about Jewish matters, “Dialectic of Enlightenment” and “The Authoritarian Personality,” also co-authored by Adorno, would be “deeply colored by the desire to elucidate and confront hatred of Jews,” Jacobs reminds us.
In 1937, in a letter to the German Jewish literary scholar Hans Mayer, Horkheimer claimed that anti-intellectualism “represents sexual envy and resentment of a pleasurable attitude toward life of which one doesn’t feel oneself capable. Hatred of the Jews has always been hatred of thinking, and naturally the Jews themselves are also in large measure animated by this.”
And Here is an excerpt from historian Anita Shapira’s new biography of Israel’s first PM, David Ben-Gurion:
Despite his enthusiasm over the vision of imminent Jewish sovereignty, he accepted the reservations of his colleagues, especially Katznelson, who thought the partition to be proposed by the Peel Commission would probably be far less advantageous than Ben-Gurion’s. Nevertheless, he asserted that when the possibility of a Jewish state, even a tiny one, was on one side of the balance, and on the other the de facto annulment of the pro-Zionist clauses in the Mandate instrument—that is, a moratorium on the national home—he preferred the first. But deep in his heart he did not see partition as the lesser of two evils: for him the vision of a Jewish state that suddenly seemed achievable was a dream come true.
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