Whither NATO?

The North Atlantic Treaty is, like most treaties, pretty dry and filled mostly with carefully chosen words. Here are a few of those words:

Article 5

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

Article 6

For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack: on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, on the Algerian Departments of France, on the territory of or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer; on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.

 So just what would happen if NATO member Turkey were to seek to invoke Article 5 in response to the recent attacks by Israeli Defense Forces commandoes on Turkish flagged vessels in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea?

For good or for ill, the future of the treaty may depend on the answer.

It sucks to be Israel [Updated]

When the internet and I were both somewhat younger, I learned what a "blog" was when I stumbled across an Israeli writer's website where he posted daily dispatches from Jerusalem, which, I soon learned, might as well be another planet. 

I engaged with this guy in the comments section and in email to try to get a handle on his version of conservative Israeli politics, and, although our exchange was civil and detailed, I don't think either of us managed to shift the other's attitudes about Israel's place in the world and the best way to address that country's unique problems.

I came to the conversation with a liberal bent, but I have to state clearly that my liberalism did not contain any prejudice about Israel per-se. It's fair to say that I inherited my politics from my liberal parents, and if you subscribe to the conservative worldview, you might say I was further indoctrinated by liberal higher-education institutions. During all this hippy-dippy neo-marxist brainwashing, however, I never received a brief on the correct attitude towards the state of Israel. (It might have been on the curricula. I must have skipped that day.)

What I did bring was a core faith--probably criminally under-examined, but currently still retained--in the core principles of the United States, some of which go back to its founding, including:

* Freedom of religion

* Equal rights for all people, regardless of ethnicity

And this was the cornerstone of my disagreement with my Israeli interlocutor. In retrospect I was naive and uninformed, but at the time I was astonished and somewhat shocked at his commitment to an ethnically pure democracy. All of the approaches I could suggest to his problems were grounded in my own ideals of post-ethnic statehood that--even though we're still struggling with it--my own country represents. 

It still seems now, as it did then, that there are only two ways to preserve a Jewish democracy in Israel. Either they must shrink by giving away land to the Palestenians, or they must resort to war crimes and/or institutional racism to keep the land under Jewish control. I'd like to think there's a third way, but I don't see it. 

But, personally, I have nothing invested in the existence of an ethnically pure state, of any type, anywhere in the world. It's just not something of value to me. And while I am fine with other's valuing it, I am not fine with my own country supporting war crimes or institutional racism to prop up such a state. 

And that's where I think you'll find most Americans my age or younger. And that is not good news for the Israeli project. 

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UPDATE: Mere minutes after posting that, I came across the following post by Kevin Drum.

In David Petraeus's famous phrase, How does this end? Unless something dramatic happens, it ends with Israel as a nuclear-armed pariah state. Where else can it go? Hamas and Hezbollah are never going to stop attacking, Israel's responses will continue to get deadlier and more hysterical, the West Bank will never be freed because no Israeli government can any longer cobble together the public support it would require to take on the most extremist elements among the settlers, and like it or not, Israel eventually becomes a permanently armed camp and an apartheid state. Israelis may have hated it when that's what Jimmy Carter called it, but even if it's arguably not quite accurate today there's very little question that it will be before long.

Unless something changes. But what? I guess it's possible that a crisis like this can prompt both sides to get serious in a way they haven't been for a long time, but there have been crises like this before and they haven't prompted anything of the sort.

So help me out here. Is there any glimmer of hope on the horizon at all? Or is despair the only rational response to all this?

... in which Jason alienates certain Jewish readers

Among Jews, a subtext of many debates about Israeli/Palestinian politics is the question of who gets to define Jewishness. Is it believers and militarists who believe that "Greater Israel" really is land "promised" to the descendants of Abraham and Isaac? Or humanists who take pride in Jews' diaspora history as "rootless cosmopolitans?" Who is more "in touch" with their Jewishness -- a secular Israeli or a practicing American? A peacenik, a kibbutznik, or a hawk?

Of course, like most debates over legitimacy and authenticity, these questions are reductive, silencing, and actually prevent people from understanding one another. The starting point for a political discussion on settlements, for example, or Palestinian statehood, should not be a definition of "appropriate" Jewishness. Why? Because fixating on that question, as Phil Weiss has written, makes it easier to elide the fact that the group of people primarily suffering right now -- and primarily culturally threatened -- are not Jews, but Palestinians.

That's not to say that we shouldn't make political arguments informed by our own understanding of Jewish values -- and do so proudly and assertively. I've done so myself. But the bottom line is that those who seek to police other people's Jewishness betray an ideological rigidity that is completely unhelpful in the current political moment. | TAPPED |

I'd go further, and say that applying the question of "Jewishness" to politics--while completely understandable--is straight up racist.