Tarak Barkawi of Cambridge. His point seems a bit radical and in need of much defending, but interesting nonetheless. It is not the conclusion that a realpolitik assessment of the situation would lead to.

I was raised with plenty of privilege and opportunity: my mother made good money as an electrical engineer for AT&T, my father found a good position as a university professor. My U.S. family has never known the worry of how we would provide a comfortable life for ourselves. And like so many other young Americans, particularly of the upper middle class breed, I was assured and believed that I could become anything. College started and by the time it finished, life was joyful – my Ivy League education had been stimulating, my adopted New Yorker status was heavenly, and I had a decent hope of finding the kind of job in my beloved city that would both please society’s standards and fulfill my heart’s need to help other human beings.

Yet it had all started to feel saccharine, trivial, self-absorbed, irrelevant, inconsiderate. The delicious food I ate and beautiful spaces I loved were created and sustained by the wealth of the rich country I lived in and the even richer city I adored. The resources and economic relationships that supported both of these were undeniably tied up with the lives of people around the world, people who could potentially lead a life and live in a country that would more resemble mine if my own country were willing to pay more for our imports and their labor—at the expense, I assumed, of partly diminishing our own material richness. I could not ignore the privileged position I occupied on the more comfortable side of this mutually dependent economic relationship, and I did not enjoy the guilt I felt for being there. I wanted to live somewhere where I did not have to feel that the way I live my life is so unfair to others.

I have long been particularly interested in the affairs of the world beyond my country’s borders, and in my arrogance I grew increasingly frustrated with daily conversations that revolved around the newest luxury technologies, famous people’s lives, local organic food options, Internet trends, and the like. I yearned to immerse myself in debates and struggles that aimed at asking and solving the big problems, problems in which life and death were at stake and whose solutions could bring true changes to the lives of people who are nowhere near as wrapped in luxury and opportunity as the people within my bubble in America.

I had been taught that my entire life’s education and upbringing were woefully narrow-minded: that the perspectives, values, and assumptions with which I and everyone in my circle were imbued were the perspectives, values, and assumptions of only a very small sector of humanity. There are many definitions of a good life, I began to insist; there are many ways to be a good and moral person. But what are they? Which should I choose? I wanted to be the best person I could be, not only the most informed and educated and intellectual, but truly the best combination of values and behaviors found in many different societies. I needed to observe, learn, and, when appropriate, imitate.

So, in seeking the challenge of being outside my comfort zone, of participating in the “real” debates and struggles, of changing myself, I chose to leave America.

I left. I lived in the West Bank for two years. I found it very challenging to always be outside my comfort zone; I found I sought out the familiar to live in and do and people similar to me to surround myself with. Sometimes I fought these impulses; often I did not. Still, I learned: about myself and about a new country and society. I enjoyed having the potentially insightful perspective of an “insider,” of someone living in a country so often misunderstood and misreported on. After a while, it got too hard: too unfamiliar, too solitary; I could not figure out how to be as active and productive and engaged as I wanted to be in such a different setting from the one in which I was formed.

I chose to return to America. And here I have been, showing my love to family and friends whom I have dearly missed, but also discovering that I have not escaped the opportunity for a transformative challenge.

There is much that is familiar and easy about living in America. Much of life is comfortable, enjoyable, and stimulating. But I have realized something that I had ignored in my wanderlust two years ago: it can be just as challenging to live in your own country as to move somewhere foreign. It can be as if not more difficult to grapple with your own country’s debates and troubles as to live somewhere very different from what you know.

There are many unique and wonderful things about the United States. But there is much that infuriates, exasperates, and puzzles me, probably again spurred on by my own arrogance. Again and again, our nation’s representatives publicly insult and disrespect their own compatriots because the latter are adherents of the Islamic religion. Fear and hate is not reserved for American Muslims but also targets, at home, American homosexuals and, abroad, any country that refuses to meekly obey our government and that engages in the same aggressive posturing that our own leaders do.

My past frustrations remain. We spend our disposable wealth on adult toys rather than on the poor or disadvantaged within our own society. Obsessed with growing our economy, we find the notion of living without two cars and a fully applianced, gadgeted home to be an unbearable burden. I do not sufficiently understand economics to know exactly what our lifestyles need to be in order to fund dignified lives for every member of our society, and there are many things that I myself could still do to lead a more generous and unselfish life here in America. But what I do know is that it will be hard to deal with the fear, hate, and insistence on personal luxury that too often seems to characterize this country. It will be hard for me to understand, to sympathize, and, if I continue to find it necessary, to change these things. These are goals that from where I stand today feel just as insurmountable as “solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” There are no tanks on the roads, midnight kidnappings, or racist laws (mostly), so it can be easy to feel that with these goals there is less at stake. The question of “stake” is perhaps one I should focus less on. But, I see now: the challenge of living as a true and engaged citizen in this country with all its imperfections will be formidable. It will require an active heart, a firm moral sense, persistent humbleness, and more determination and skill than I have ever shown before.

At least six people have been killed in a wave of sectarian bloodshed in the central province of Homs, including three people whose bodies were mutilated, activists and residents there said Monday.

Based on the content of the New York Times article quoted above, the use of the word “clashes” in the title seems to be misleading. Attacks on individuals (or “scores” of properties vandalized) due to religious sect are certainly worrying; but to characterize a select number of murders and attacks as “clashes” implies much more sectarian conflict than necessarily exists. The word “clash” connotes a greater movement of people, a riot, an event occurring with both sides present and sparring. Journalists need to be careful before they embrace these sorts of reductive and possibly exaggerated assumptions about the nature of ethnic or religiously-based conflict.

I’d like to interview Osama Bin Laden to get his response to this statement in the speech. Oh, wait…

Link

worth investigating, though he rings of traditional Western liberalism with no ‘customization’

But the people do not sing for freedom. If living history means experiencing the greater currents of global transformations, those which fundamentally turn a people’s life into something with enough that is unrecognizable from before to declare “our world has changed to something new,” then history is not lived outside of the places where people sing in hopes of a future rather than in remembrance of a past.

Songs in a place whose revolutions have ended speak of daily life, loves, and traditions. Music is such all around. But when a place has songs that yearn for a changing horizon, its people are living history, though it may be a history hovering, and they are living a history that is felt in the heart.

For our whole world is changing: a cosmopolitan city that once housed Italians and Jews in its peripheral neighborhoods now hears the music of Moroccans and Somalis seeping from its brick building windows. Changes to a city rhythm from reductions in crime breathe life to public leisure spaces but they do not cut to the heart.

Life in the Holy Land was a shorter menu. Options were less, foci were fewer, landscapes were sparser. Light greens, grays, whites, and browns colored the city and urban imaginations. Flowers pepper the springtime but always give way to the light greens, grays, whites, and browns. Angles are sharper, surfaces are worn, objects scatter not in homes but only in trash heaps. Questions and answers are rehearsed but profuse, meal times are sacred, to imbibe is to share.

A people’s exhausted yearning yields song, sorrow, and a hope for a better future. Debates are impassioned and harken to ever-cited past injustices, frustrations circle round, original arguments are abandoned for emotional despair due to an overwhelming wrong.

Dangers of romanticization abound. But life seems deeper. The books that ask the great questions and make the great commentaries are difficult to find. Public debates are less commonplace. But talk goes on in the home, in the place of worship, in the confrontation with the foreigner.

Having left The Holy Land, problems seem shallow. Human life is more colored and creative, for having moved on from history, we can now focus on the individual’s many expressions. In The Holy Land, art is trapped in tragedy. The very militarism and consumerism we bewail tempers and warms our lives. We are trapped in a sin-inducing paradise of our making, doomed to criticize with little chance of wanting out.

Cynicism continues but history and the greater human striving is contained to isolated examples or to the written page. I will follow from outside, someday to return, perhaps always the spectator.

Both Yosse and Miller see the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be greatly overinflated in assessments of regional politics and the U.S.’s standing in the world. Aaron David Miller, who focuses on the importance (or lack thereof) of the conflict on wider US foreign policy aims, ends up spending most of his article making the point that the U.S. is not currently capable of pushing a peace settlement on the two parties; this claim is not entirely useful or relevant to whether or not the conflict should be the prime concern of US policy in the Mideast. He only briefly mentions that Iraq, Afghanistan, the unspecified effects of the September 11 attacks, and Iran “might prove” more instrumental in determining the U.S.’s “fate, influence, power, and security.” Domestic issues, such as today’s confidence-defeating economy, are only previously mentioned as sources of distraction for U.S. presidents who choose to take on “the peace process.”

Yosse’s strong rhetoric and focus on attacks, be they political, armed, or diplomatic, against Israel demonstrate his loyalties and imbue his argument with a tone more defensive than objective. Nevertheless, his arguments about how regional politics and domestic Arab realities would have persisted had Israel never come into the picture (or if it were to be removed from it, a scenario I will never support though I refuse to equate “Israel” with “necessarily Jewish majority state”) prove mostly sound. The exceptions lie in certain of his pronouncements about the historical conflict between Syria and Lebanon, and the former’s occupation of the latter, that would have persisted even had the State of Israel never been founded. Syria’s invasion of Lebanon after the Israeli invasion of the same was at least partly motivated by a desire to counter Israeli force and presence. Furthermore, his assertion that the newborn Arab states of Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and perhaps even Iraq would have seized Palestinian territories among themselves at the end of the British Mandate had the Jews not fought for it is only not supported with sufficient or sound evidence to support this historical speculation. Though these nascent Arab countries had differing military strengths, there is no reason to necessarily assume that these colonies and mandates would have torn at Palestinian territory any more than they did not tear at each other’s’ lands in actual history.

Let us then disregard Yosse’s superficial historical speculations and examine on his claim that the absence of Israel would either not much change current Arab realities or that it would not much improve them. The basis for this claim is much stronger. The forces of demographics, resource-based economies, and American interventions in its own interests have played a much more significant role on the political, economic, and social situations in the current Arab world. The average Arab citizen does not harbor a lot of love for Israel, nor is it likely that they strongly would approve of their government having good relations with a country seen to be so aggressive against fellow Arabs. Nevertheless, the more immediate questions of income, access to education and health care, the cruelties of a police state, and national sovereignty are what most determine the sentiments of Arab citizens toward their own governments, other countries in the region, and the United States. The role of the United States in either promoting or combatting the above is key in determining the stance of the Arab world towards America; to abandon its blind support of what Arabs see as Israel’s colonialism would certainly help the U.S.’s image—but this alone would not be sufficient to truly engage the Arab world and its citizens as partners.

The glaring exception to the above is Lebanon. The presence of Israel has surely affected the politics and stability of this country so often torn asunder.

In the end, it is primarily the Palestinian people, all 11 million of them, whose lives would be drastically different had the State of Israel never come to exist or if it were to be removed from the Middle Eastern arena today.