Monthly Archives: October 2014

An Israeli on Failure in Gaza and the Way Out

Posted on by

Assaf Sharon, a philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University, has an article in the New York Review of Books concerning the recent violence in the Gaza Strip and the only realistic way to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Below are extended selections from “Failure in Gaza”, which is available in full here:

“In Israel, endless controversy over Gaza has overlooked one question: How did we get here in the first place? Why, after a considerable period of relative calm, did Hamas resume rocket fire into Israel?”

“Before the current operation began, Hamas was at one of the lowest points in its history….In these circumstances, Hamas agreed last April to reconciliation with its political rival Fatah, based on Fatah’s terms. For example, the agreement called for a government of technocrats largely under the control of the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas.”

“But Benjamin Netanyahu viewed the reconciliation as a threat rather than an opportunity….He saw the reconciliation with Hamas as an opportunity to criticize the Palestinian president…. As soon as the reconciliation was announced, Netanyahu launched a public offensive against Palestinian unity and demanded that the international community oppose it….”

“Netanyahu could have chosen a different path. He could have used the reconciliation to reinforce Abbas’s position and further destabilize Hamas. He could, in recognition of the agreement, have encouraged Egypt to open its border with Gaza in order to demonstrate to Gazans that the Palestinian Authority offered a better life than Hamas. Instead, Israel prevented the transfer of salaries to 43,000 Hamas officials in Gaza, sending a clear message that Israel would not treat Gaza any differently under the rule of moderate technocrats from the Palestinian Authority.”

“The abduction of three Israeli youths in the West Bank on June 12 gave Netanyahu another opportunity to undermine the reconciliation…. Despite the statement by … the Hamas political bureau chief, that the Hamas political leadership did not know of the plans to carry out the abduction, Netanyahu was quick to lay the blame on Hamas, declaring that Israel had ‘unequivocal proof’ that the organization was involved in the abduction.”

“As yet, Israeli authorities have produced no such proof and the involvement of the Hamas leadership in the kidnapping remains unclear. While the individuals suspected of having carried out the kidnapping are associated with Hamas, some of the evidence suggests that they may have been acting on their own initiative and not under the direction of Hamas’s central leadership. Regardless of this, Netanyahu’s response, apparently driven by the ill-advised aim of undermining Palestinian reconciliation, was reckless.”

“Determined to achieve by force what he failed to accomplish through diplomacy, Netanyahu not only blamed Hamas, but linked the abduction to Palestinian reconciliation, as if the two events were somehow causally related. ‘Sadly, this incident illustrates what we have been saying for months,’ he stated, ‘that the alliance with Hamas has extremely grave consequences’. Israeli security forces were in possession of evidence strongly indicating the teens were dead, but withheld this information from the public until July 1….”

“On the prime minister’s orders, IDF forces raided Hamas’s civil and welfare offices throughout the West Bank and arrested hundreds of Hamas leaders and operatives. These arrests did not help to locate the abductors or their captives. Among the arrested were fifty-eight Palestinians previously released as part of the deal to return the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been a captive of Hamas since 2006.”

“As part of this ill-conceived operation against Hamas, Israel also mounted air strikes on Hamas facilities in Gaza. Apparently, Hamas did not take an active part in firing rockets for more than two weeks, although it did not prevent other factions in Gaza from firing. Only on June 29 or 30 did Hamas restart the rocket bombardment of Israeli territory, which it had not engaged in since November 2012. Israel retaliated against Hamas in Gaza and a vicious cycle began. Netanyahu lost control over an escalation he had instigated. In his badly misjudged eagerness to blame Abbas and punish him for reconciling with Hamas, Netanyahu turned a vicious but local terrorist attack into a runaway crisis….”

….

“Israel’s conduct throughout the crisis has been based directly on Netanyahu’s philosophy of ‘conflict management’, whose underlying premise is that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians cannot be solved, but can be effectively ‘managed’ for a very long period of time. This feeble, not to mention defeatist, assumption is not only wrong but also dangerous, trapping Israel in an illusion that is shattered time and again. ‘Control’ and ‘stability’ only exist between each inevitable round of violence. In fact, recurring rounds of violence are inherent to this approach.”

“’Conflict management’ means continued Israeli control over the Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank, with the inevitable reality of organizations and factions struggling to overthrow that control. Under the illusion that the conflict is being managed, opportunities for change provided by calm periods are squandered….” 

“So long as Hamas is willing to use terror against innocent Israeli civilians and so long as it refuses to recognize the State of Israel, it will not be a ‘partner’ for peace. But it could be partner to interest-based agreements requiring it to modify its behavior, as many academic and security experts claim. In fact, despite Netanyahu’s being the most vocal opponent of dialogue with Gazan terror organizations, it was he who reached two agreements with Hamas: the 2011 Shalit deal and the 2012 agreement that ended Operation Pillar of Defense…” 

“A long-term resolution with respect to Gaza requires changing its political predicament. The only sensible way of doing this is to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, a state whose existence would be negotiated with the Palestine Liberation Organization under Abbas’s leadership. As part of a comprehensive political agreement, Hamas is very likely to agree to a long-term truce, as its representatives have repeatedly said.”

“In 1997, its founder and spiritual leader Ahmad Yassin suggested a thirty-year hudna (truce) with Israel. In 2006, one of its leaders, Mahmoud al-Zahar, proposed a ‘long-term hudna’. Earlier this year, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas functionary in the West Bank, reiterated the organization’s willingness for a hudna and said the organization was willing to accept a peace agreement with Israel if a majority of Palestinians supported it. In 2010, in an interview with a Muslim Brotherhood daily circulated in Jordan, Hamas’s political leader Khaled Mashal expressed pragmatic views and willingness to reach an agreement with Israel. In late July, he [said] ‘We want peace without occupation, without settlements, without Judaization, without the siege’.”

“All these proposals were contingent on ending the Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. They received no response from Israel. Although a Palestinian state contradicts Netanyahu’s ideological commitments and conflicts with his own political interests, a state is clearly in Israel’s interest….”

“The historic conflict with the Palestinians will not be settled by a single agreement. Reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians—overcoming decades of bloodshed and hatred—will require a long process of acceptance and forgiveness spanning years and probably decades. The armed conflict, however, can certainly be ended. Israel has already ended armed conflicts with several neighboring countries: with some, like Egypt and Jordan, it achieved comprehensive peace agreements; with others, it agreed to other kinds of accords.”

“An agreement can be reached with the Palestinians, too: the terms are known and the price is fixed. Whether it is reached or not is a matter of political will on the part of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Unfortunately, Israel’s current leadership will do anything to avoid this choice, to the detriment of both peoples.”

“The war in Gaza is, fundamentally, not about tunnels and not against rockets. It is a war over the status quo. Netanyahu’s ‘conflict management’ is a euphemism for maintaining a status quo of settlement and occupation, allowing no progress. The Israeli opposition must distance itself from this hopeless conception and other countries need to reject it. Both must be done forcefully and before violence erupts once more, and force becomes the only option—yet again.”

The Criminals Who Poison Our Elections

Posted on by

Anybody with the sense God gave a goose understands that Republican efforts to stamp out voter fraud are really an attempt to reduce the number of Democratic voters. Here’s what’s been happening in Georgia:

[The Republican] Secretary of State publicly accused the New Georgia Project in September of submitting fraudulent registration forms. A subsequent investigation found just 25 confirmed forgeries out of more than 85,000 forms—a fraud rate of about 3/100ths of 1 percent [in decimal terms, that’s a rate of 0.000294].

Meanwhile, a group of civil rights lawyers filed a lawsuit claiming that thousands of registration forms submitted this summer still haven’t been recorded in Georgia’s voter database, “nearly all of them belonging to people of color in the Democratic-leaning regions around Atlanta, Savannah and Columbus”. State and county officials, however, said they have already processed all of the applications sent to them by the October 6 registration deadline, and anyway, there is no state law that requires properly-submitted registrations to be processed by any particular date. A local judge has declined to intervene, citing a lack of proof that the registrations have gone missing.

Then there is this detailed report from Al Jazeera America:

Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb…

At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison.

How does this Crosscheck program work? You can appear on the list as a suspected felon if your first and last name matches the first and last name of someone who voted in another state:

The actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored [such as Jr. or Sr.], even birthdates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected.

A statistical analysis revealed that African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans appear on the list much more often than their percentage of the population would indicate, while white Americans appear less often. The reason is that there is less variety in the names of certain ethnic groups, and among those groups are African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, groups that all tend to vote for Democrats. (By the way, you can enter your own name at the Al Jazeera America site and see if you’re right to vote may be challenged.)

If you’ve watched enough Fox News, you might conclude that the hordes of Democrats who poison our elections by illegally voting in more than one state don’t use the same birthdates or Social Security numbers when they register to vote in this state and that, so why bother matching on those criteria?

Or you might infer that America does indeed have a criminal element bent on interfering with the electoral process. Unfortunately, the most crafty and dangerous members of this criminal conspiracy are Republican officials whose job it is to administer elections.

PS — Paul Krugman wrote an excellent column the other day called “Plutocrats Against Democracy”. I suggest reading the whole thing, which isn’t very long. It ends this way:

But now you understand why there’s so much furor on the right over the alleged but actually almost nonexistent problem of voter fraud, and so much support for voter ID laws that make it hard for the poor and even the working class to cast ballots. American politicians don’t dare say outright that only the wealthy should have political rights — at least not yet. But if you follow the currents of thought now prevalent on the political right to their logical conclusion, that’s where you end up.

The truth is that a lot of what’s going on in American politics is, at root, a fight between democracy and plutocracy.

Professor Krugman is an optimist. He thinks the plutocrats haven’t already won.

Time Flies and Stuff Happens

Posted on by

Jim Holt has written a nice article on that eternally perplexing subject: the nature of time. As expected, it left me properly perplexed.

Consider this passage:

Events judged to be in the past by one observer may still lie in the future of another; therefore, past and present must be equally definite, equally “real.” In place of the fleeting present, we are left with a vast frozen timescape—a four-dimensional “block universe”… Nothing is “flowing” from one event to another. As the mathematician Hermann Weyl memorably put it, “The objective world simply is; it does not happen. Einstein, through his theory of relativity, furnished a scientific justification for a philosophical view of time [called] “eternalism.” Time, according to this view, belongs to the realm of appearance, not reality. The only objective way to see the universe is as God sees it: sub specie aeternitatis [“under the aspect of eternity”].

But wait (if it’s appropriate to use that term). What is the ultimate fate of the universe?

Ever since its birth in the Big Bang, some 13.82 billion years ago, the universe has been expanding. If this expansion continues forever … the stars will burn out; black holes will evaporate; atoms and their subatomic constituents will decay. In the deep future, the remaining particles … will spread out into the void, becoming so distant from one another that they will cease to interact. Space will become empty except for the merest hint of “vacuum energy”. Yet in this future wasteland of near nothingness, time will go on; random events will continue to occur; things will “fluctuate” into existence, thanks to the magic of quantum uncertainty, only to disappear again into the void….But there is another possible cosmic fate. By and by, at some point in the far future, the expansion that the universe is currently undergoing might be arrested—maybe by gravity, maybe by some force that is currently unknown. Then all the hundreds of billions of galaxies will begin to collapse back on themselves, eventually coming together in a fiery all-annihilating implosion.

Well, you might ask, which is it? Does time belong to the realm of appearance, not reality? Or has the universe been expanding for 13.82 billion years?

Is it correct to say the “objective world simply is; it does not happen”? Or should we say that stuff happens all the time?

Holt is probably correct when he says that “most physicists … agree with Einstein that time’s passage is an illusion; they are eternalists.” Here’s how the “Time” article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines eternalism:

Eternalism says that objects from both the past and the future exist just as much as present objects. According to eternalism, non-present objects like Socrates and future Martian outposts exist…, even though they are not currently present. We may not be able to see them at the moment, on this view, and they may not be in the same space-time vicinity that we find ourselves in …, but they should nevertheless be on the list of all existing things.

The idea here is that the history of the universe may be thought of as a series of events on a continuum that stretches from the past to the future, but which never includes a moment that is “now”. We can say that one event is earlier or later than another (e.g. the Big Bang is about 14 billion years earlier than December 1, 2014), but it’s wrong to think that the moment you or I perceive as “now” has any special significance, so far as the universe is concerned.

It’s as if the timeline of the universe were a long, straight line between points A and B. Between A and B there are many other points, but none of them is more real than any other. Instead, each point on the line and each moment in the history of the universe (and every object that has ever existed or ever will) exists in the very same way.

Nevertheless, as Holt goes on to say, some physicists are “presentists”. So are some philosophers (as well as most “normal” people who have ever thought about the issue). Presentists believe that “now is a special moment that really advances…; this would still be true, they believe, even if there were no observers like us in the universe”. In the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia:

Presentism is the view that only present objects exist. … According to Presentism, if we were to make an accurate list of all the things that exist … there would be not a single non-present object on the list. Thus, you and the Taj Mahal would be on the list, but neither Socrates nor any future Martian outposts would be included.  

I confess that I find presentism much easier to understand than eternalism. In fact, eternalism sounds sufficiently crazy that there must be extremely good reasons for very smart people to believe it.

Is every object and every event in the history of the universe equally real, so that the biggest triceratops who ever lived and the dinner you’re going to have next New Year’s Eve are just as real as the chair you’re sitting on? Holt says Einstein answered that question and the answer is “Yes!”:

What Einstein [showed] was that there is no universal “now.” Whether two events are simultaneous is relative to the observer. And once simultaneity goes by the board, the very division of moments into “past,” “present,” and “future” becomes meaningless. Events judged to be in the past by one observer may still lie in the future of another; therefore, past and present must be equally definite, equally “real.” In place of the fleeting present, we are left with a vast frozen timescape—a four-dimensional “block universe.”

Maybe that’s the conclusion to be drawn from the scientific evidence. On the other hand, quoting the Stanford Encyclopedia again:

Perhaps it can be plausibly argued that while relativity entails that it is physically impossible to observe whether two events are absolutely simultaneous, the theory nevertheless has no bearing on whether there is such a phenomenon as absolute simultaneity.

Thinking about what might be the case beyond our powers of observation may qualify as metaphysics rather than physics, but it seems to me that change is a fundamental feature of the universe, time is the rate of change, and wherever and whenever changes occur, time is passing. My “now” is different from your “now” in the same way that my “here” is different from your “here”. But each “now” marks a real point in time (a point in the overall history of the universe), just like each “here” marks a real point in space (the universe’s overall expanse).

Eternalism, however, treats time as if it’s one more spatial dimension, a dimensioin in which all locations are equally real. I don’t think time is like that at all. Some moments (or temporal locations) were real, some will be real, and when a moment becomes real, it’s now. Not merely from our perspective, but in reality.

Anyway, that’s my opinion. If you and I aren’t more real than Socrates or the 75th President of the United States (whoever she turns out to be) in a very significant sense, meaning that we exist and they sure don’t, well, this isn’t a universe I want to spend time in.

Ebola, Obama, Republicans, the Usual Nonsense

Posted on by

From Evert Cilliers, writing at the very good Three Quarks Daily site:

What is it about Ebola and America? We have fewer cases than you can count on one hand of this horrible disease, among a nation of 300 million plus, and we’re freaking out as if ISIS has landed and beheaded everyone in Congress (not a bad idea, actually, they’d be doing us all a favor).

And now our President has gone and appointed an Ebola czar. What is this new Czar supposed to do? Go and comfort the families of the one dead from Ebola and the couple of others now in hospital? Big job. Jeez, why is our President acting like a scare-mongered wimp himself? He is supposed to be the grownup in the room. One would expect him to say something like this:

“My dear Americans,

Take a chill pill. Ebola is not a threat to our nation. The Republican Party is a bigger threat, the way they stand against raising the minimum wage for our folks who need to get food stamps even though they’re working all day. Why do Americans who actually work have to earn so little that they can’t even feed themselves? And why are we subsidizing Walmart and McDonalds who pay their employees so little they need food stamps? Walmart is costing you over $6 billion a year out of your taxes you pay in public assistance to their employees. Ebola is the last of our problems. Ignore it. I do. No need to act like a bunch of hysterical wimps. Let the GOP do that. They’re good at being wimps. It’s the other side of their coin. They act like wimps because they’re bullies. So why don’t you go out in November and vote against them? I need Congress back on my side so we can actually make some laws that will benefit the American people.”

Unless you’re a nurse with an Ebola patient, which you’re not.

More from Mr. Cilliers at Three Quarks Daily.

Political Corruption in America, Then and Now

Posted on by

Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham University. She recently ran against Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, a quixotic venture if her goal was to become the Governor of New York. Her more realistic goals included calling attention to Cuomo’s political shenanigans, highlighting ways to improve our politics and maybe selling a few copies of her book (we all have to eat).

The book is Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United. The snuff box was a diamond-encrusted gift that Louis XVI gave to our ambassador to France. “Citizens United” is the recent Supreme Court decision allowing corporations and other organizations to influence elections as much as possible by spending unlimited amounts of money.

From a review of Corruption in America by the journalist Thomas Frank:

Today’s [Supreme Court] understands “corruption” as a remarkably rare malady, a straight-up exchange of money for official acts. Any definition broader than that, the justices say, transgresses the all-important First Amendment. Besides, as Justice Anthony Kennedy announced in the Citizens United decision, the court now knows that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” — a statement that I guess makes sense somehow in law-land but sounds to the layman’s ear like the patter of a man who has come unzipped from reality….

Our current Supreme Court, in Citizens United, “took that which had been named corrupt for over 200 years” — which is to say, gifts to politicians — “and renamed it legitimate.” Teachout does not exaggerate. Here is Justice Kennedy again, in the Citizens United decision: “The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach. The government has ‘muffle[d] the voices that best represent the most significant segments of the economy.’ ”

You read that right: The economy needs to be represented in democratic politics, or at least the economy’s “most significant segments,” whatever those are, and therefore corporate “speech,” meaning gifts, ought not to be censored. Corporations now possess the rights that the founders reserved for citizens, and as Teachout explains, what used to be called “corruption becomes democratic responsiveness.”

Being “unzipped from reality” aptly describes much of our politics, including a series of decisions by our Republican-dominated Supreme Court.

Did it matter that the Supreme Court helped George Bush get elected in 2000, which made it possible for him to be reelected in 2004? David Cole, writing in the New York Review of Books, reminds us:

… when Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor announced her retirement and Chief Justice Rehnquist died in office in 2005, President Bush, not Al Gore or a successor, had the privilege of appointing two new justices and shaping the Court for years to come. Had a Democratic president been able to replace Rehnquist and O’Connor, constitutional law today would be dramatically different. Affirmative action would be on firm constitutional ground. The Voting Rights Act would remain in place. The Second Amendment would protect only the state’s authority to raise militias, not private individuals’ right to own guns. Women’s right to terminate a pregnancy would be robustly protected. The validity of Obamacare would never have been in doubt. Consumers and employees would be able to challenge abusive corporate action in class action lawsuits. And Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which struck down regulations on corporate political campaign expenditures and called into question a range of campaign spending rules, would have come out the other way. But it was not to be.

Returning to Thomas Frank’s review of Zephyr Teachout’s book, it’s hard to believe that political lobbying used to be shameful, even criminal, not a multi-billion-dollar industry:

Once upon a time, lobbying was regarded as obviously perfidious; in California it was a felony; and contracts to lobby were regarded as reprehensible by the Supreme Court. Here is a justice of that body in the year 1854, delivering the court’s decision in a case concerning lobbyists and lobbying contracts:

“The use of such means and such agents will have the effect to subject the state governments to the combined capital of wealthy corporations, and produce universal corruption, commencing with the representative and ending with the elector. Speculators in legislation, public and private, a compact corps of venal solicitors, vending their secret influences, will infest the capital of the Union and of every state, till corruption shall become the normal condition of the body politic, and it will be said of us as of Rome —omne Romae venale [in Rome, everything is for sale].”

Well, folks, it happened all right, just as predicted. State governments subject to wealthy corporations? Check. Speculators in legislation, infesting the capital? They call it K Street. And that fancy Latin remark about Rome? They do say that of us today. Just turn on your TV sometime and let the cynicism flow.

And all of it has happened, Teachout admonishes, because the founders’ understanding of corruption has been methodically taken apart by a Supreme Court that cynically pretends to worship the founders’ every word. “We could lose our democracy in the process,” Teachout warns, a bit of hyperbole that maybe it’s time to start taking seriously.

Considering how money pollutes our politics, and how gerrymandering, vote suppression, low turnout (especially among the young and the poor) and the Constitution itself skew the results, the idea that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy, doesn’t sound hyperbolic at all.  

Nevertheless, quixotic or not, I’m still going to vote in a couple weeks for the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate (he’s sure to win) and the House (she’s sure to lose), as well as for bail reform and more environmental funding. It’s the least I can do.