This is an arena where vehement partisans are honored as “journalists,” where ability to speak languages or engage in cultural interaction counts for nothing, and where rich and powerful patrons make reputations rather than any real knowledge. New York Times columnist David Brooks slammed me for not having recognized Ariel Sharon’s potential as a peace-maker with the Palestinians and for not seeing how positive the Iraq War was for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. I was routinely denounced by David Horowitz, who used to be an insufferable leftist in the 1960s when he edited Ramparts and now is an insufferable right-winger, but who knows nothing at all about the Middle East. (And what he thinks he knows is wrong.) Marty Peretz, who married into the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and then used his wife’s money to buy and ruin The New Republic, turning it into pro-Contra, pro-war rag, was annoyed to see me on television because of his vast fund of knowledge about Arabic hollow verbs. Michael Oren, a bad, partisan historian and Israeli army reservist (who fought in the Gaza War), who revived the Gobineau Orientalist tradition in his book on the U.S. and the Middle East — and who is now the Israeli ambassador to Washington — weighed in against my receiving an appointment to the Yale History Department. Princeton-trained Martin Kramer until recently of Tel Aviv University, who recently advocated using the Gaza blockade to force small families on the half-starving Palestinians, made a cottage industry of snarky and mostly false remarks about my writing. He has a relationship with the so-called “Middle East Forum,” which runs the McCarthyite “Campus Watch,” and which was part of a scheme to have me cyber-stalked and massively spammed.

More recently I have provoked the ire of a burly former Israeli military prison guard at the notorious Ketziot detention camp during the first Intifada, who is among our foremost journalists of the Middle East and given a prominent perch at The Atlantic magazine — Jeffrey Goldberg.

Horowitz and the others routinely just make up entire passages and attribute them falsely to their victims. You always think you can defend your position in an honest debate. You aren’t prepared the first time someone says, “How do you justify your spirited defense of Pol Pot?” Horowitz had someone string together a series of statements I never wrote and published them in a book on the supposed 101 most dangerous professors. (As if anyone is more dangerous to our Republic than a lying right-wing demagogue.) What I really mind is that he never sent me so much as a t-shirt. Also, students still don’t seem sufficiently impressed by the title to get their papers in on time. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, who had supported the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front’s attempt to take over the Algerian government, accused me of being pro-Islamist and then just made up entire sentences he claimed I had written, which he was forced to retract because I had not.

Likewise, Jeffrey Goldberg just now accused me of wanting “to deny to the Jewish people a state in their ancestral homeland.” The fact is that, A) I’m generally sympathetic to the states recognized as United Nations members. But, B) wounded romantic nationalism of Goldberg’s sort is a pathetic remnant of the twentieth century, which polished off tens of millions of human beings over wet dreams about “blood and soil.” There isn’t any “blood” or “pure” “races,” and human groups have no special relationship to territory. My complaint about the treatment of the Palestinians is that they have been left stateless and without citizenship or rights. I’m not a Palestinian nationalist who insists that they return to what is now Israel (though they should receive compensation for lost property if they don’t). The Germans weren’t always in Germany (in fact they are relative newcomers), and they aren’t of “pure blood,” and the 200,000 Jews in contemporary Germany — some of them Israelis — have as much right to be there as anyone else. Most Germans and most Ashkenazi Jews have a relatively recent female common ancestor. As a species and subspecies, we are from southern Africa, and that only about 100,000 years ago. If someone is nostalgic for the Old Country, they should try Gabarone, Botswana.

Israeli Army Cpl. Jeffrey Goldberg then corrects my assertion that he has no vision of the future of the Palestinians by saying that he has advocated for a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital.

So let me say up front that I did not in fact think Goldberg would go quite that far, and that I apologize for getting him wrong.

But here are some problems with Goldberg’s position, nevertheless:

• He doesn’t seem to understand that simply having a vague notion that maybe a two-state solution is desirable (for the good of his vision of an ethno-nationalist state in Israel) is different from actively working for it and being willing to criticize publicly those leaders attempting to forestall it. It isn’t a talisman you can use to justify warmongering or bigotry. George W. Bush, after all, took the same position. In. One. Speech. I don’t see the sense of urgency and passion about this issue in Goldberg that was visible in his wretched so-called “journalism” about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which was riddled with ridiculous assertions about Saddam sleeping nude every night with Osama Bin Laden while playing with his miniature atomic bombs, and which Dick Cheney used to get up the horrific invasion and occupation of Iraq.
• Goldberg has not only not exactly been at the forefront of the peace movement, he has argued and agitated against doing anything practical to achieve this increasingly unlikely goal. He is the Rottweiler of ideologues when it comes to making sure that no Israeli policy is ever criticized by anyone without his branding the critics bigots and even genocidal. Since, as noted, Goldberg is possibly still an Israeli army reservist and actively served in the Israeli Army as a prison guard during the first Intifada or Palestinian uprising, I can’t understand why anyone takes him seriously when he lashes out at critics of Israeli policy. I mean, what would you expect? If an Arab-American had served in the Palestine Authority police, would anyone give him a perch at The Atlantic and routinely bring him on CNN to denounce critics of Mahmoud Abbas?
• Holding the leadership of a country harmless from civil society criticism guarantees that the leadership will not change its policies. Goldberg actually demanded that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not pressure the Netanyahu government to move in the two-state direction, on the grounds that pressure only sends Israeli leaders to their bunkers. Well, if you can’t pressure them, then I suppose you are waiting for the Likud Party and Yisrael Beitenu to volunteer to cease colonizing the West Bank and cease blockading Gaza. The United States routinely pressures other countries, including allies, over issues on which there is a U.S. interest. The U.S. pressured Turkey to let the 4th Infantry Division march through that country to Iraq. The U.S. pressured France to vote for a UNSC resolution authorizing the Iraq War. The U.S. is currently pressuring Japan not to close the bases on Okinawa. Why does Goldberg think the U.S. should treat the Israeli leadership with kid gloves?

  Me, I see Likudniks and Avigdor Liebermans at the head of a country with one of the world’s most powerful militaries and intending to implement policies likely to get Americans killed, and I intend to scream bloody murder.

• Does Goldberg have a plan “B”? Because his two-state solution is so 1993. The problem is, it is almost certainly past the point where any such thing is possible, given the size and extent of Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Goldberg admits that the only two likely outcomes of the current policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are apartheid or a one-state solution.

  Would Cpl. Goldberg like to specify which he would prefer, in case it comes to that (as it likely already has)?

The tiff between the U.S. and Israel is less important that the worrisome growth of tension between Palestinians and Israelis as the Israelis have claimed more and more sites sacred to the Palestinians as well. There is talk of a third Intifada or Palestinian uprising.

As part of my original posting, I mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians politically and territorially in the past century.

Andrew Sullivan then mirrored the map from my site, which set off a lot of thunder and noise among anti-Palestinian writers like Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, but shed very little light.

The map is useful and accurate. It begins by showing the British Mandate of Palestine as of the mid-1920s. The British conquered the Ottoman districts that came to be the Mandate during World War I. (The Ottoman sultan threw in with Austria and Germany against Britain, France and Russia, mainly out of fear of Russia.)

But because of the rise of the League of Nations and the influence of President Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about self-determination, Britain and France could not decently simply make their new, previously Ottoman territories into simple colonies. The League of Nations awarded them “Mandates.” Britain got Palestine, France got Syria (which it made into Syria and Lebanon), Britain got Iraq.The League of Nations Covenant spelled out what a Class A Mandate (i.e. territory that had been Ottoman) was: 

Article 22. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory [i.e., a Western power] until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.

That is, the purpose of the later British Mandate of Palestine, of the French Mandate of Syria, of the British Mandate of Iraq, was to ‘render administrative advice and assistance” to these peoples in preparation for their becoming independent states, an achievement that they were recognized as not far from attaining. The Covenant was written before the actual Mandates were established, but Palestine was a Class A Mandate and so the language of the Covenant was applicable to it. The territory that formed the British Mandate of Iraq was the same territory that became independent Iraq, and the same could have been expected of the British Mandate of Palestine. (Even class B Mandates like Togo have become nation-states, but the poor Palestinians are just stateless prisoners in colonial cantons).

The first map thus shows what the League of Nations imagined would become the state of Palestine. The economist published an odd assertion that the Negev Desert was ‘empty’ and should not have been shown in the first map. But it wasn’t and isn’t empty; Palestinian Bedouin live there, and they and the desert were recognized by the League of Nations as belonging to the Mandate of Palestine, a state-in-training. The Mandate of Palestine also had a charge to allow for the establishment of a ‘homeland’ in Palestine for Jews (because of the 1917 Balfour Declaration), but nobody among League of Nations officialdom at that time imagined it would be a whole and competing territorial state. There was no prospect of more than a few tens of thousands of Jews settling in Palestine, as of the mid-1920s. (They are shown in white on the first map, refuting those who mysteriously complained that the maps alternated between showing sovereignty and showing population.) As late as the 1939 British White Paper, British officials imagined that the Mandate would emerge as an independent Palestinian state within 10 years.

In 1851, there had been 327,000 Palestinians (yes, the word “Filistin” was current then) and other non-Jews, and only 13,000 Jews. In 1925, after decades of determined Jewish immigration, there were a little over 100,000 Jews, and there were 765,000 mostly Palestinian non-Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine. For historical demography of this area, see Justin McCarthy’s painstaking calculations; it is not true, as sometimes is claimed, that we cannot know anything about population figures in this region. See also his journal article, reprinted at this site. The Palestinian population grew because of rapid population growth, not in-migration, which was minor. The common allegation that Jerusalem had a Jewish majority at some point in the 19th century is meaningless. Jerusalem was a small town in 1851, and many pious or indigent elderly Jews from Eastern Europe and elsewhere retired there because of charities that would support them. In 1851, Jews were only about 4 percent of the population of the territory that became the British Mandate of Palestine some 70 years later. And, there had been few adherents of Judaism, just a few thousand, from the time most Jews in Palestine adopted Christianity and Islam in the first millennium CE all the way until the 20th century. In the British Mandate of Palestine, the district of Jerusalem was largely Palestinian.

The rise of the Nazis in the 1930s impelled massive Jewish emigration to Palestine, so by 1940 there were over 400,000 Jews there amid over a million Palestinians.

The second map shows the United Nations partition plan of 1947, which awarded Jews (who only then owned about 6 percent of Palestinian land) a substantial state alongside a much reduced Palestine. Although apologists for the Zionist movement say that the Zionists accepted this partition plan and the Arabs rejected it, that is not entirely true. Zionist leader David Ben Gurion noted in his diary when Israel was established that when the U.S. had been formed, no document set out its territorial extent, implying that the same was true of Israel. We know that Ben Gurion was an Israeli expansionist who fully intended to annex more land to Israel, and by 1956 he attempted to add the Sinai and would have liked southern Lebanon. So the Zionist “acceptance” of the UN partition plan did not mean very much beyond a happiness that their initial starting point was much better than their actual land ownership had given them any right to expect.

The third map shows the status quo after the Israeli-Palestinian civil war of 1947-1948. It is not true that the entire Arab League attacked the Jewish community in Palestine or later Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. As Avi Shlaim has shown, Jordan had made an understanding with the Zionist leadership that it would grab the West Bank, and its troops did not mount a campaign in the territory awarded to Israel by the UN. Egypt grabbed Gaza and then tried to grab the Negev Desert, with a few thousand badly trained and equipped troops, but was defeated by the nascent Israeli army. Few other Arab states sent any significant number of troops. The total number of troops on the Arab side actually on the ground was about equal to those of the Zionist forces, and the Zionists had more esprit de corps and better weaponry.

The final map shows the situation today, which springs from the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and then the decision of the Israelis to colonize the West Bank intensively (a process that is illegal in the law of war concerning occupied populations).

There is nothing inaccurate about the maps at all, historically. Goldberg maintained that the Palestinians’ “original sin” was rejecting the 1947 UN partition plan. But since Ben Gurion and other expansionists went on to grab more territory later in history, it is not clear that the Palestinians could have avoided being occupied even if they had given away willingly so much of their country in 1947. The first original sin was the contradictory and feckless pledge by the British to sponsor Jewish immigration into their Mandate in Palestine, which they wickedly and fantastically promised would never inconvenience the Palestinians in any way. It was the same kind of original sin as the French policy of sponsoring a million colons in French Algeria, or the French attempt to create a Christian-dominated Lebanon where the Christians would be privileged by French policy. The second original sin was the refusal of the United States to allow Jews to immigrate in the 1930s and early 1940s, which forced them to go to Palestine to escape the monstrous, mass-murdering Nazis.

The map attracted so much ire and controversy not because it is inaccurate but because it clearly shows what has been done to the Palestinians, which the League of Nations had recognized as not far from achieving statehood in its Covenant. Their statehood and their territory has been taken from them, and they have been left stateless, without citizenship and therefore without basic civil and human rights. The map makes it easy to see this process. The map had to be stigmatized and made taboo. But even if that marginalization of an image could be accomplished, the squalid reality of Palestinian statelessness would remain, and the children of Gaza would still be being malnourished by the deliberate Israeli policy of blockading civilians. The map just points to a powerful reality; banishing the map does not change that reality.

Goldberg, according to Spencer Ackerman, says that he will stop replying to Andrew Sullivan, for which Ackerman is grateful, since, he implies, Goldberg is a propagandistic hack who loves to promote wars on flimsy pretenses. Matthew Yglesias also has some fun at Goldberg’s expense.

People like Goldberg never tell us what they expect to happen to the Palestinians in the near and medium future. They don’t seem to understand that the status quo is untenable. They are like militant ostriches, hiding their heads in the sand while lashing out with their hind talons at anyone who stares clear-eyed at the problem, characterizing us as bigots. As if that old calumny has any purchase for anyone who knows something serious about the actual views of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, more bigoted persons than whom would be difficult to find. Indeed, some of Israel’s current problems with Brazil come out of Lieberman’s visit there last summer; I was in Rio then and remember the distaste with which the multi-cultural, multi-racial Brazilians viewed Lieberman, whom some openly called a racist.

The controversy over the mehadrin or “strictly kosher” bus lines through Haredi areas began a decade ago when the government-subsidized Egged bus company decided to compete with the private companies that were already servicing these parts of town. Not only are female passengers required to sit in the back third of the vehicle, they face withering looks and vocal insults from men if they board the buses wearing “immodest” clothing, particularly trousers. 

Moving women to the back supposedly ensures the ”purity” of the men in front, and women who ignore this masculine imperative do so at their own risk. In 2006, a woman claimed to have been “slapped, kicked, punched and pushed by a group of men who demanded that she sit in the back of the bus with the other women.” In 2007, a group of five Haredi men beat an Ultra-Orthodox woman and a uniformed IDF soldier for sitting next to each other. When police cars arrived on the scene, a crowd of Haredi men punctured their tires, allowing the attackers to escape. In another typical story,  

A pregnant woman got on the 318 midnight bus from B’nai Brak to Rehovot. She sat in the front because of motion sickness, explaining this to the other passengers. One Hareidi man stopped the bus by standing with one foot outside and one on the step up so the driver couldn’t close the door. The woman finally fled into the street in the middle of the night. The other passengers went looking for her and found her under a tree, humiliated, hurt, and refusing to re-board.

Israel currently has as many as 63 segregated bus lines making 2,500 trips a day.

(Brooklyn residents may be reminded of a similar controversy last year concerning bike lanes through a Hasidic area of Williamsburg.)

In May 2008, Israel’s High Court of Justice asked the Transport Ministry to establish a committee to investigate the legality and appropriateness of the segregated lines.Tensions have mounted in recent months, culminating in Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz’s decision at the end of January to continue the segregated bus service on a “voluntary basis”: “The public transportation operators should be allowed to put up ‘conduct suggestion’ signs that provide an explanation and a request from the passengers to sit separately — while stressing that there is no obligation to do so.” Apparently people will be allowed to enter at both the front and the back and then “choose for themselves” where they wish to sit without any input from government authorities.

The decision has split Israel along its familiar religious fault lines. Rebbetzin Yocheved Grossman from the Ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, who heads a lobbying group calling itself the “World Women’s Lobby for Halakhic transportation,” welcomed the minister’s decision, which she said respected “hundreds of thousands of women who wish to maintain a normative lifestyle.” She went on to say that “This is not religious coercion, but our way of life — from kindergarten to marriage –that should be respected. If the municipality considers the Haredi public and operates separate public parks — there is no reason why public transportation should not be that way. We are coming only from a position of understanding. Even the gentiles in New York accept this.” For Grossman and her supporters, segregation on the basis of sex is nothing less than a basic human right. In an interview last spring, she asked “Why can’t you respect the Haredi person, who is essentially your brother? A smoker would not light a cigarette if he thinks this would disturb the people around him, so why not be considerate on this issue?”

Anat Hoffman of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who has publicly demonstrated against the bus policy herself, disagrees:

The suggestion that a voluntary arrangement can be enforced is very funny. … I think the countdown started today about segregation as a religious expression in the Jewish state. … It’s a slippery slope. If signage makes it kosher, then next we are going to find segregated post offices, HMOs and sidewalks, all of which we already know examples of. Either the court will decide that this has no room in the public sphere and we will not go down the slippery slope, or the court says signage makes it all right and we’re going to float with these signs down the slippery slope and become a very extreme variety of Judaism. God help us if that is the case.

The mehadrin buses have become a cause célèbre across the country. In January a number of organizations established a hotline where women could call and complain about discrimination. Two weeks ago, in a campaign called “A stop in time,” young activists in Jerusalem, Raanana, Holon, Tel Aviv, Beersheba, and Tiberias plastered leaflets on bus stops and bus windows warning against a segregated future for Israel. “This bus stop is mehadrin kosher,” the poster says. “Thus, men enter and sit down in the front; women and all the rest [i.e. blacks and minorities] — to the back.” The leaflet displays an ironic kashrut stamp showing that the bus line has been classified as kosher “with the oversight of the transportation minister and subsidized by the State.”

Minister Katz does not have the last word in the matter. In February a three-member Supreme Court panel issued a restraining order on new mehadrin bus lines, stating that the term itself (“going beyond the letter of the law”), “might apply to Chanukah candles, kosher laws or an etrog, but apparently does not necessarily mean that whoever is mehader in the laws of modesty and inter-gender mingling is also mehader in the laws of respect to others.”

But what has spawned this sudden obsession with segregated buses in the first place? According to a remarkable editorial in the Jerusalem Post by an Ultra-Orthodox Sanhedria resident last year, the demand for private kosher bus services, which the Egged company is now encroaching on, may have more to do with profit than with prophecy. “From outside, in the secular world, it seems as if it is all about these things you may call fundamentalism. This is indeed how it started. But today, inside the Haredi society, it is mainly a matter of earning a living. People here ask, ‘Why should we renounce such an opportunity for profit, especially in these days of economic turmoil, and leave the profit to Egged?’”

And yet you might wonder why this story is such a big deal. It’s true that the mehadrin buses represent only a fraction of transportation lines in Israel, and only around nine percent of Israeli Jews identify themselves as Haredi. And yet, in this increasingly fragmented country the “kosher bus” flap may indeed prove to be as divisive as the Old South’s “separate but equal” policy. At stake are the future of Israel and Judaism itself. Opposition leader Tzipi Livni presented the progressive case in a letter to the street protesters on Saturday, saying: “This is not an internal issue for a certain segment of the population … I see this struggle not only about transportation but also as a struggle for the character of Israel as a free, Jewish and democratic nation. … Those who push women to the back of the bus wish to prevent them from being seen and from taking an equal and central place.”

Or, as Israeli blogger Miriam Woelke wrote last year,

Why do I have to sit in the back of a bus just because some men cannot behave themselves and get immodest thoughts into their minds? Is this my fault ? Such men don’t need a bus with separate seats but a psychologist. … The whole discussion has two sides but I tend more to feeling like second-class or even garbage by being seated in the back. It is just like women have a disease and need to be separated and I wonder [how] our foremothers, Beruriah, Devorah, Rashi’s daughters or other great women would respond to this.

Livni and Woelke can talk all they want, but it doesn’t sound as if the other side is listening. Saturday’s demonstrators were met by a group of Haredi counter-protesters, who were bused in from the Mea Shearim district for the occasion. Their message? “Separation is a blessing.”