America Post-Election
Bush got a mandate and the satisfaction of not being an accidental president. Everyone came out and voted, and plenty more voted for him than Kerry. The Republicans were the more disciplined party in the campaign, and the Democrats were in comparison a bunch of factions who get together every 4 years to try and elect a candidate. I was heartened to see such wide participation, no matter who won. We don’t want another electoral college crisis here, with the winner of the popular vote losing the election. The Democrats made a mistake in rigging the primaries so that Kerry could lock up the nomination so early in the game, when so many of them were clearly uncomfortable with him. I didn’t know whether God was voting for Kerry or Bush but I figured that whoever won was His choice. So now we know. The world had best (and is already) adjusting to this reality and figuring they have no choice but to deal with him these next 4 years. There is a danger of an overconfident Bush picking the wrong fight and risking blow-back, but this danger is also a bargaining chip for Bush because it tends to keep players in check when they don’t know what he might do next.
People voted for Bush even though they are not happy with Iraq or the economy. They preferred Bush’s resoluteness to Kerry’s flip-flopping and they like Bush’s values. This is unusual and a condemnation of the worst type to the Democrats. They have a real problem; they are perceived as the party of special interests and factions such as unions and blacks. They need to start talking about God and morals and all the things liberals hate talking about. If they act according to habit, they will do this for about 6 months and then revert to their old habits because that’s what they do every 4 years. It is a big mistake. America is a religious country, even more so than Europe and the Republicans are making gold out of talking it up and letting the Democrats act like atheists. (An interesting sidebar which shows that not all is as it seems: The most liberal states have the lowest divorce rates, while the most conservative ones have the highest rates. This is an intriguing point on the moral issue of marriage, which turned votes in this election.) Hypocrisy or not, the Democrats risk becoming a minority party in America; Senators are walking away from their positions because they are tired of being in the minority. One reason that Kerry has his name on so little legislation is that for the majority of his career he has been in a minority party and you can’t have your name on legislation that way.
What I would like to see happen is to abolish the electoral college. It is the worst part of the American system. It is wrong that my vote in New York is worth less than someone’s in Florida. In Manhattan, 80% of the vote went to Kerry. If I were a Bush voter, I have no reason to show up knowing that I can’t make a difference. Everyone should feel that one person one vote means something; we all pay our taxes according to the same system and we should all feel a stake in the outcome. It is not democratic this way, and the original reasons for the electoral college 225 years ago no longer apply.
I have decided to become optimistic, and have gone from cash back into equities. I bought some American companies, such as Exxon, which has done nothing except appreciate in value, but mostly I bought foreign index funds such as Brazil, India and Australia. Australia in particular has also had an excellent record of growth for the past 15 years and will sell lots of raw materials to China. I am also buying Euros because it seems obvious that the American government doesn’t care that everyone knows that they are pursuing a weaker dollar in order to reduce the trade deficit.
Post-Arafat Situation
Moslems start their most festive season today, and they have an additional reason to celebrate. I’ve never heard a nice word about Arafat and a new dawn beckons. I accept responsibility for the last 2 days of delay before announcing his death; I wouldn’t let them pull the plug until after I had won the office pool as to time of death. My piece of the action came to $30. I never expected to make money betting against him, so I bet the latest date plus a day.
We now know that Arafat was clinically dead the previous week; his cabinet was told so the previous Thursday. Did he have AIDS? Whoever loses the power struggle will eventually tell. Meanwhile, his wife lives on a floor of the Bristol Hotel in Paris at $16,000 per night and will get $22 million per year as a pension from the Palestinian Authority.
Let’s just ponder the headline: Arafat ‘Still Alive’ But Funeral Preparations Underway: Funeral Ceremony to be held in Cairo on Thursday; Burial planned for Ramallah on Friday. This from last Wednesday’s Jerusalem Post.
Arafat, who figured himself a prophet like Moses or a Saladin, didn’t reach the Promised Land because he tried to hit the rock rather than talk to it. Arafat traded possible assassination but immortality for irrelevance in a surrounded compound for the last 3 years of his life and died anyway as a buffoon with such headlines as the one above. It took several countries to negotiate a week to figure out where to bury him and his wife was trying to make sure nobody came after the money. He took with him to the grave billions of dollars that could have built a state and his wife will spend each night just to sleep what 2 families would have to work a full year to earn. He didn’t bring Palestine to anyone, and had he lived longer he would have only brought his people even more despair.
Sharon has outlived him and had the satisfaction in the end of running circles around him. Israel will be around for the next 100 years. Time to get with the program.
One reason to be happy Bush is president — since Arafat is dead, there is a window of opportunity that needs experienced people in the White House. If Kerry was coming in, there’d be nobody home for at least the next 9 months. Remember it takes a new president a good 6 months to get his team in place and to get up to speed. If the Palestinians move forward decisively, Bush will push Israel to reciprocate (and already is doing so). On the other hand, it is good for the Palestinians to realize that if they don’t, Bush will not push Israel far and maybe not at all. What this means is that the Palestinians ultimately realize that they have to deal with Israel, in order to get the Americans to play ball. Just like Sharon knows that he has to do things with the Palestinians since the only address that counts is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. This is a good thing, because in the past, when Arafat figured that the Americans would deliver the Israelis no matter what he did, he kept finding himself coming up with nothing.
Assad wants to deal with Israel. Sharon has to decide when and if to deal with him. Some have said that it would be smart to deal with Syria first; however, Sharon might not have enough political capital to deal with the Golan and Gaza at the same time.
What will the Israelis do? I think that Sharon will continue with his plans of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and building the fence until such time that the Palestinians compel him to do otherwise. Sharon has wide political support in Israel and most of the country agrees on the essentials of his program. They are very clear-headed about the opportunities and risks ahead. They know they must make concessions in order to have peace, but right now they feel there is no address to negotiate these concessions and that concessions alone will not get them legitimacy with the Arab world. If unilateral withdrawal is a concession, it is not meant to be. It is being done for the convenience of the Israelis, not the Arabs. Most Israelis think that the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world still want to drive them into the Sea, and it is clear to me that the burden right now in a practical sense is on the Palestinians to convince the Israeli public that there is someone worth talking to. The Left was decimated by Arafat’s walkout on Camp David and most of them think that there is no real support among Palestinians for a two-state solution. They are not going to be convinced just because Mr. Abbas says he is committed to it, especially when he is being threatened just 2 days after Arafat’s funeral (OK so the militants were not trying to assassinate him, only to “warn” him).
It is important that Arabs realize that the current reality is more complex than saying that the Israelis are plain old arrogant and intransigent under Sharon. The reality is that the Israelis don’t believe anymore that there can be peace. The fence that is being built is the most popular thing an Israeli government has done in 50 years; the approval rating for this project ranges between 85% and 100%. The first and main reason is that it works almost 100%. Even though it is a horrible thing to do (and many Israelis feel this way), the alternative was worse. There is a feeling that the fence is, more than anything else the Israelis have ever done, forcing the Palestinians to confront the realization that they can never beat the Israelis with terrorism and that they will lose everything over the long haul unless they change. If the recriminations within Arab society have begun now, they will mount exponentially once the wall is complete.
Let’s take a look at the deepness of feeling in Israel about the Gaza disengagement plan. Daniel Gordis, a leading Jewish intellectual commentator, spoke in New York this week and mentioned how his 6th grade daughter was ostracized for being pro-disengagement in a class vote on the subject. Other girls said they wouldn’t sit in the same room with her and boys sent her vile e-mails. Consider that Sharon intercepted people on their way to Menachem Begin’s house demonstrating against the withdrawal from Yamit and promised them that he would send them to Gaza instead. The rate of suicide, divorce and prescription drug use among this population is much higher than the national norm. Now, 25 years later, he is the one telling them to leave. If you had buried your kid in Gaza who was a victim of Arab terrorism and now you are telling this parent to dig up the grave and bury him somewhere else, you might understand when this person says Over My Dead Body, and I’ll shoot you if you come anywhere near my kid’s grave. After the Holocaust and the last 50 years of wars the Arabs started, when do the Jews stop running, they ask?
It is true that a solid majority of Israelis favor withdrawing from Gaza, and they will. The majority feel it is a waste of their children’s lives to be defending territory that will be given up in a matter of a few years, and they don’t want their children doing the horrible things that have to be done in order to keep this territory given the fact that they have to deal with a million Arabs surrounding a few thousand Jews. But, as you can see, this is not a debate over an abstract issue just because Gaza is a backwater; it deals with real people, their lives and their feelings. The debate inside the country is being conducted on a very personal and nasty level, and some fear that people will get violent over it. It is not a trivial matter. Gordis says that Sharon needs to do something he hasn’t done — to act like the father of the nation and make a few speeches exhibiting that he feels the pain of both sides of this issue, and to spur dialogue in the country among the people. Gordis says Sharon should withdraw and tell the country to sit in mourning for the “heros of Gaza” in order to show their solidarity with these people after a withdrawal. Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and journalist, says the Israelis should have a massive anti-terrorist operation before withdrawing so that it will not appear to be a withdrawal from weakness, as the Lebanon withdrawal was. But overall, says Halevi, one shouldn’t think that Israel is losing this war — in fact, it has been nearly won and therefore this is as good a time to get out as they will have. Interestingly, both Halevi and Gordis have referred to the past 4 years as a war, and not as an Intifadah. Israelis have come to see the past 4 years as a war that they had to win. It became a war to reclaim the public space and to not allow themselves to be terrorized. They feel at this point that they have won it, and that people are no longer afraid to go out on the streets. Tourism is definitely returning to earlier levels.
So don’t expect Sharon to come around offering a bunch of concessions. First, if he does, he is afraid that he will just weaken whomever he is talking to. It is like Nixon asking the person he endorses if he would rather that Nixon come out for or against him. We have all learned a few lessons from Oslo; one of them is that it is not for the Americans or the Israelis to get caught up in trying to fashion their Palestinian partners or to get involved in internal Arab affairs. Let the Arabs decide for themselves how they want to deal with the Israelis. Don’t take sides and don’t get caught up in the desire to strengthen the moderates against the radicals. If the Arab street wants peace, the radicals will come down from their tree (and they do). What the Israelis should do is not make things difficult for the Palestinians any more than is necessary and to give them a fair chance to succeed at holding elections and getting their act together. Sharon will do this; he likes to give people enough rope to hang themselves and make it clear that there are no excuses for non-performance. Nevertheless, I’m not sure why it matters that fair elections require the absence of Israeli troops (in fact, I would venture a guess that Palestinians troops are more likely to intimidate voters). If the Israelis withdraw before elections and there are terrorist attacks, it will reduce Israeli support for anything, so I’m not sure that letting the leash go at this moment in time is really in anyone’s long-term interests. (I’m interested in hearing opposing views on this, in case I’m missing something.)
A few broad strokes from Gordis and Halevi, who both spoke in New York this week and offered excellent analysis: The psychological dimension of peace: The Jews offer a bridge to the future for the Arabs of the Middle East village. They left the village and returned to it with ideas and knowhow. The Arabs offer the Jews the feeling that they are part of the neighborhood, and not alien transplants. A fundamental question for Israelis is whether the future of Israel is all about real estate, or what you do with your real estate. I am told that among youth, there is a longing to connect to God. Top bands are going spiritual. Secular youth want to know about God, and a good number of religious youth are tired of the rabbinate. Rabbi Shapira, a former chief rabbi who told soldiers to oppose orders to evacuate settlers from Gaza, was criticized because his 4 children did not go into the army. According to the assistant rabbi of the Jewish Center in New York, the chief rabbi of a major Yeshiva called Shalavim, wrote a letter to students that if they had problems with orders to call up their rabbis from the field and that they would try and get them moved to other units. For most people, this is heresy, and even the Bible says you have to listen to the general when given a military order. The idea of having kids in the army pick up cellphones and call their rabbis when they get an order they don’t like is anathema to the idea of military discipline. This further proves my earlier statement that the Gaza debate threatens to tear away at the fabric of society and that this is an important reason that Sharon, the only man in the country strong enough to steer a course and to stick with it, is vital to anything that this country will do in the near future and that everyone must deal with him if they expect anything to happen. But in a broader context, the center of the country is moving toward a new expression of religion and it remains to be seen how political sovereignty will be dealt with in this context, says Halevi.
What the Palestinians should expect from all this is to not insist on a final status agreement at this point in time. They won’t get from Sharon what they would have gotten from Barak 4 years ago. The better course is to get their act together first, and then go for an interim agreement with a promise of what could be achieved at the end if conditions are met for a period of time. Meaning for example, that they could get a certain result in the West Bank and Jerusalem if they keep the peace in their own state in Gaza for the next 5 years. There is no sane person on the Israeli side who is about to let Palestinians run anything in Jerusalem when the impression of Ramallah and every other city in the West Bank is a bunch of gun-toting thugs in jeans going around knocking each other off. It would be better not to ask for it right now when it is impossible to conceive that they will get it. A foot in the door is achievable, and if they build up trust over time, they can and will get more. Israelis will want to let go of these territories and they can probably get pretty close to what Barak offered, once they believe that the Palestinians are reliable partners. The problem with Oslo was that it promised better times for good behavior, but it didn’t state what the end result would be. The fix here is to state the end results, so that people understand why they should behave.
I am not intending to make these statements in an arrogant manner to say to the Arabs that they should sit still and get what the Israelis will kindly offer them. The fact that I spent a good amount of time discussing how Israelis feel and no mention at all about what Arabs feel is not meant to be ignorant or biased. We all know what Arabs feel about this, and that to them it will be intensely ridiculous to consider concessions in a process of which, at best, 78% of historic Palestine will be Israeli even if the Israelis return to 1967 borders, that the Arabs will forego the right of return, and there will be no capital in Jerusalem for the near-term. The Israelis see themselves as cutting their losses in order to make peace, and the Palestinians will be doing the same. It matters very little what the parties think about all this; the question is what will they do and if their future will be better than their past. It will take both parties to make anything happen and right now the Israelis hold more cards in this arena than the Palestinians do and we all realize that Israel represents the will of a democracy that cannot be subverted; therefore, the burden is to convince the people to give up their cards and therefore it was my intention to closely examine what they think in order to understand how to deal with them. My intention here is to say that this is what the market will bear, that the events of the last 4 years mean that the clock cannot be turned back to August 2000, that there is a lot of internal housecleaning to be done as a prerequisite to talking to the other side of this dispute (meaning the Palestinians have to prove that they are a unified people capable of agreeing to something and abiding by it and that they mean in Arabic what they say in English), and that everyone is going to recalibrate their positions now that we have the luxury for the first time in 4 years of thinking about discussing these issues seriously.
We all have to keep talking, monitoring and exchanging ideas, and to see over the coming weeks and months how this calculus changes. Let’s first see how elections go, and what the people of the territories tell their leaders they want. The more reformist the authority, the more likely there will be progress.
I personally am optimistic (which I suppose is a benefit I have from not living there, and I know this is one of my faults); I think that the People on both sides of the issue want things to work out, that the Palestinians know what they have to do, and that the Israelis will reciprocate exponentially when they feel they are dealing with people in good faith. Arafat never convinced even those on the Left that he was dealing in good faith, such that even Europe wrote him off in practice even if they sucked up to him for public consumption. I feel that everyone understands that what is needed is not just a letter agreement, but some sort of reconciliation that takes into account the feelings of people. At this point in time, I am negating people’s feelings in favor of what the market will bear in order to get things going when it is clear there is no goodwill to be found; a final agreement will instead have to reach out and touch people and validate their feelings (ie: mutual apologies or requests for reconciliation more so than dollars will be the currency of choice here), in order to do what peace with Egypt and Jordan has not, which is to take root on a personal level. Whatever you think about the quality peace with Egypt and Jordan, the fact is that Israelis don’t get killed on those borders, and for Israelis the peace is a good reality, even if it is not warm. Israelis have the experience of knowing that peace is possible and that deals can be kept, if there are willing partners.
What to Do About the UN
The reason the UN is a problem for the US and Israel is that non-democratic countries have a say in it (a decisive say in the General Assembly), and therefore the UN doesn’t project democratic values so much as the values of the countries that have a say in it. For instance, Arafat was hosted by the UN. The Dalai Lama can’t get in the door. It’s hard to talk about Sudan since the Arab League is more interested in supporting an Arab government than in solving the problem. People here feel the hypocrisy of it all, and just don’t feel that the UN is a legitimate entity anymore.
This is a case where it’s broke, so don’t fix it. The long-term solution is that the UN will be a debating club for the world, but the purpose of the UN, which was to promote democratic values throughout the world such as human rights, should be fulfilled by a new body to be composed of member states from countries that share democratic values. If we at least agree to call things by their names, we will do a better job of managing our expectations of the various institutions and making them work as intended.
