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Sunday Reads: 4 years of devastation in Syria, Netanyahu’s ‘tragic hero’ aspect

[additional-authors]
March 15, 2015

US

Walter Russell Mead argues that, while Obama administration has been handling certain aspects of the Iran situation rather well, there's a vital aspect of the story they don’t seem to get:

The President may have handled the P5+1 talks reasonably well, but that is only part of the job. The President has failed to understand that in reality he is engaged in P5+1+3 talks: in addition to the five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council and Germany (the original P5+1), Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. Congress need to be in the loop.

Joshua Muravchik believes that only war is the answer to Iran’s nuclear ambitions:

Yes, there are risks to military action. But Iran’s nuclear program and vaunting ambitions have made the world a more dangerous place. Its achievement of a bomb would magnify that danger manyfold. Alas, sanctions and deals will not prevent this.

Israel

Nahum Barnea muses on what he sees as Netanyahu’s ‘tragic hero’ aspect and on the fatigue many Israelis associate with his public persona:

But at the same time, another process has taken place, one that has far more electoral significance – Israelis are tired of Netanyahu. They have exhausted him and he them. After nine years as prime minister (three and four and two), and 22 years in the headlines, the magic has gone. He can take comfort in the fact that this phenomenon happened to those far greater than him, David Ben-Gurion for example, and under far more difficult circumstances. Netanyahu's attempts to reinvent himself as the grand old man, as a responsible adult, have failed.

Aaron David Miller discusses 5 things to watch in the Israeli elections:

For better or for worse, this election turns on how Israelis feel about the prime minister. Since firing his foreign and finance ministers last year, Mr. Netanyahu has sucked up all the political oxygen, whether on matters as weighty as Iran and a Palestinian state or issues as absurd as the cost of takeout food or redecorating his residence. For a rising politician, this would be heaven. But Bibi is playing on the back nine. The good news for him is that, though the gap is narrowing, more Israelis still consider him a suitable prime minister than the youthful and untested Mr. Herzog. The bad news is that Bibi is a well-worn, known commodity.

Middle East

Richard Spencer and Ruth Sherlock point out that the 4-year old war in Syria still shows no sign of abating, even though it receives no headlines these days:

Now even beheadings are too routine to make the front pages, unless they are of foreigners. Syria’s neighbours, the Gulf states and some western nations are now waging war on Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and al-Qaeda, but the original casus belli, the fight between President Bashar al-Assad and his majority Sunni population, drifts on, unabated.

According to James Denselow, at this stage the international community’s approach to Syria should focus on Syrian people's humanitarian disaster more than on the dying state's politics:

Syria, in any sense as to the country it was, is dead and as we mark the 4th anniversary of the Middle East's most bloody conflict in a generation it is time to foster a new approach for the future. The focus must shift from the future of Assad and the relatively minor, though hugely profiled, role of ISIL towards a more strategic focus on the beleaguered Syrian people.

Let us not forget that the average time spent as a refugee is now pushing 17 years. With this in mind, new modes of representation are needed for Syria's refugees and internally displaced that would give them better agency over the future of their lives. In essence, a “third way” of politics that avoids the prism of being seen solely as pro or anti-regime.

Jewish World

(Jewish) Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt offers a well-written account of his visit to a Shakespeare conference in Teheran:

If I went to the Iranian Shakespeare Congress, it would not be with the pretense that our situations were comparable or that our underlying values and beliefs were identical… A simple check online showed me that one of the scholars who signed my letter of invitation had written, in addition to essays on “The Contradictory Nature of the Ghost in Hamlet” and “The Aesthetic Response: The Reader in Macbeth,” many articles about the “gory diabolical adventurism” of international Zionism. “The tentacles of Zionist imperialism,” he wrote, “are by slow gradation spread over [the world].” “A precocious smile of satisfaction breaks upon the ugly face of Zionism.” “The Zionist labyrinthine corridors are so numerous that their footprints and their agents are scattered everywhere.”

Bible scholar Ronald Hendel responds to Mosaic’s monthly essay and gives his take on the historical evidence for the Exodus:

In other words, the exodus, which didn’t happen as a single punctual event, has been happening continually for thousands of years. It is how the people of Israel, from the early Iron Age until today, has narrated its emergence out of the shadow of slavery and into existence.

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