I met Dr. Asaf Romirowsky in New York City on 10 April 2014. I have been a subscriber to his writings(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20121102)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20121114)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/20130420). As for the late Professor Barry Rubin, please refer to my previous postings(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily2/archive?word=%22Barry+Rubin%22)(http://pub.ne.jp/itunalily/?search=20519&mode_find=word&keyword=Barry+Rubin)(http://d.hatena.ne.jp/itunalily/archive?word=%A5%D0%A5%EA%A1%BC%A1%A6%A5%EB%A5%D3%A5%F3). (Lily)
1. Japan Times（http://www.japantimes.co.jp）
U.S. Mideast envoy Indyk quits after peace deal bid, 27 June 2014
AP
WASHINGTON; U.S. special Mideast envoy Martin Indyk is resigning after nearly a year of unsuccessful efforts to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, Obama administration officials said Friday.
The officials said Indyk’s departure, and his return to his previous job at The Brookings Institution think tank, is expected later Friday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The State Department declined to comment.
A former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Indyk was appointed to the envoy post last July by Secretary of State John Kerry when he announced a resumption in peace talks with the goal of reaching a settlement within nine months. However, the negotiations collapsed before that target date amid what Kerry and other U.S. officials said were negative steps taken by both sides.
With the peace process in hiatus, it is unclear whether Indyk will be replaced. His deputy, Frank Lowenstein, will assume the envoy position on an interim basis, the officials said.
Indyk’s resignation marks the second time the Obama administration has lost a Mideast peace envoy following a failed bid to bring the parties together. Former Sen. George Mitchell stepped down from the post in May 2011 after two years of frustrating efforts to get negotiations going.
The latest effort, in which Kerry and Indyk had invested significant time and energy, collapsed in March when Israel and the Palestinians each backed out of pledges they had made when the peace talks resumed. Each side blamed the other for the breakdown. The Palestinians accused Israel of reneging on a promised prisoner release and continuing to construct Jewish settlements on disputed territory, and the Israelis accused the Palestinians of seeking greater U.N. recognition. The Palestinians then formed a unity government backed by the militant Hamas movement, which Israel refuses to deal with.
Indyk, 62, had taken a leave of absence from his job as vice president and foreign policy director of Brookings when he was appointed envoy on July 29, 2013.
At the time, he thanked President Barack Obama and Kerry for “entrusting me with the mission of helping you take this breakthrough and turn it into a full-fledged Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.”
“It is a daunting and humbling challenge, but one that I cannot desist from,” Indyk said then.
Prior to joining Brookings, Indyk had served as former President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Israel and was a key part of the 2000 Camp David peace talks. He was also a special assistant to Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council from 1993 to 1995. And he served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the State Department from 1997 to 2000.
2.The Times of Israel
Out in Left Field, 27 June 2014
by Dr. Asaf Romirowsky（http://www.romirowsky.com/14973/out-in-left-field）
Twenty years after the Oslo peace process, and now with the collapse of the recent negotiations mediated by John Kerry, Jewish American leftists groups are still trying to figure out what "peace" means. But the problem is that they can't agree on what the current reality is in the first place.
The late Middle Eastern historian Barry Rubin noted that,
"Philosophical idealism means deriving conclusions about the world from the mind rather than material evidence. If one simply asserts that certain ideas are "fair" and "just" these must take precedence. Therefore, the fact that the left's program had failed so miserably and that liberal programs weren't working becomes irrelevant. What's important is that they should work and eventually – with enough time, money and effort – they will do so because they right. That's why the phrase is political correctness and not factual correctness."
Rubin's observation describes the unshakable devotion of the Jewish American left to the idea of Oslo and a negotiated peace. Peace is just and inevitable. But they ignore its failure and instead cling to the notion that settlements are the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The result is more wishful thinking, that even now Hamas may change its colors under the Palestinian unity government. Of course, more money is needed to invest in this righteous process. And pressuring Israel is a necessity; Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is legitimate but only against settlements and their products.
The cognitive dissonance displayed by the American Jewish left highlights their own unease regarding values that clearly do not mesh with the realities of the Middle East. The belief that the "occupation" is the defining prism through which everything about the Palestinians is explained and all their actions justified has become near absolute. Occupation justifies "resistance," that is to say, terrorism.
In contrast, such lovers of Zion have a difficult time grappling with the "harsh" Israeli reality under the leadership of "hawkish" governments. We witnessed this when J Street finally condemned the recent kidnappings of the three teenagers in the West Bank by stating, "J Street condemns in the strongest terms the kidnapping of three teenagers last week in the occupied West Bank." The "occupation" is why the teens were kidnapped, and other kidnappings that have taken place throughout Israel are ignored.
The "truth" in this narrative also stands in contrast to the mainstream Israeli Left, which does support concessions for real peace yet is not ignorant regarding realities which demand strong, decisive action against constant threats.
Yossi Klein Halevi astutely observes that Israelis are "centrist [as] regards a Palestinian state as an existential necessity for Israel – saving us from the impossible choice between Israel as a Jewish and a democratic state, or the moral burden of occupying another people, from growing pariah status. But a centrist also regards a Palestinian state as an existential threat to Israel – risking rocket attacks from the Samarian highlands on the coastal plain, where most Israelis live, transforming greater Tel Aviv into Sderot, the besieged Israeli town bordering Gaza that has been on the receiving end of thousands of rockets over the last decade. A centrist has two nightmares about Israel's future. The first is that there won't be a Palestinian state. The second is that there will be."
The centrality of the settlements is really an empty issue, which deflects notice from the core issues that truly obstruct a negotiated settlement. There is little debate over the fact that – should a peace agreement be completed – there will be a redistribution of land. Most of the bargaining is about whether these exchanges will take the shape of a total phased Israeli withdrawal, or an exchange of land annexing the more populous Israeli towns to Israel for other land in the Jordan Valley or Negev desert. But this must be left to the parties to decide and not imposed by outside powers.
Overall, the on-going cognitive dissonance regarding peace in the Middle East is what drives American Jewish leftist groups such as JStreet and American for Peace Now to convince themselves and their supporters that a framework can indeed be parachuted into the Middle East employing BDS, however limited, as the vehicle to bring about a two state solution. It is an oxymoron to advocate that you want peace between Israelis and Palestinians and that boycotts will engender that peace. Ultimately, by doing so these groups themselves open the question regarding the continued existence of the Jewish state.
Evidence and research on the Middle East are no match for idealism and universalism. Consequently, the pervasive view within leftist circles when it comes to the Israelis and Palestinians is that it is their moral duty to quote Saul Alinsky to "organize the organized." A real peace is indeed the goal but a strong dose of reality is needed to help us get there.
3.Tablet（http://www.tabletmag.com）
Farewell to Fouad Ajami, Great Scholar of the Arabs, Truth-Teller, My Mo’allemA former student remembers the influential scholar and expert in Arab history, who died this week at age 68, 25 June 2014
by Samuel Tadros
Of all the pre-Islamic Arab legends, Zarqaa El Yamama’s story is perhaps the most tragic. A gifted woman with extraordinary eyesight, she warned her people of the coming doom in the form of an advancing army using trees as a cover. Her curse was similar to that of Greek Cassandra—her people never believed her. They paid a heavy price.
Fouad Ajami, who died this week at age 68, was a man of two worlds; a bridge between two cultures, and he spoke truth to both. His words were never welcomed in the cultural salons of Beirut and Cairo and are unfashionable today in the halls of power in Washington—in large part because words of criticism are never popular. He was a man excommunicated by his brethren. After all, he had committed the worst of sins: Instead of following the herd and blaming the ills of the region on the foreigner, he had written in the opening pages of his 1981 book The Arab Predicament that “the wounds that mattered were self-inflicted wounds.”
For those who continue on the old path, there is something especially threatening in the man who leaves the pack. He knows the old ways well; he had once made the same arguments, even taught them to others. Worse yet is the question his change of convictions poses: If it happened to him, if he now questions our revealed truths, does that make them weak or untrue? These are challenging questions. They are questions better left unasked. Old friends are soon turned into the worst enemies; sometimes the deeper the relationship the larger the wound and the bitterness it leaves.
Ajami’s detractors never measured up to the power of his arguments and the beauty of his prose. Instead they were left with name-calling. Unable to explain his new convictions, and the force with which he stood for them, they sought easier answers than engaging them; the man hated his people, he was a racist, he was hungry for power, he was a traitor. Words like “House Arab” and “Native Informant” were popularized by men who could not but stand in his shadow. They could never understand why a man who drank from the fountain of Arab nationalism would abandon it, and they never forgave him his betrayal.
His moment of truth came on a fateful early morning in June 1967. His abandonment of his old beliefs would take time and serious self-reflection, but his path was drawn as the dreams of a whole generation and region had come crashing to the ground on the hot sands of Sinai. The earlier humiliation of 1948 had left little impact, because it was so widely understood to be only temporary. But the shock waves of the Arab defeat 20 years later would resonate across the Arab world for decades. Luigi Pirandello’s character in search of an author, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had promised deliverance but brought nothing but sorrow. The brilliant Egyptian writer Tawfik El Hakim would go on to write The Return of the Consciousness after Nasser’s death, but the utter bitterness of the moment was captured by Nizar Qabbani in his masterful poem Marginal Notes on the Book of Defeat: “The summary of the problem, can be summarized in a phrase, We have worn the Crust of civilization, but the spirit remained Jahiliyya.”
It would be a downhill spiral from that point onward. The Lebanese civil war, the Hama massacre, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and worse—were all waiting around the corner. If Nizar Qabbani had screamed at his fellow Arabs, “I pronounce dead to you the thought that had led to the defeat,” Ajami with the careful hand of an excavator exposed the moral bankruptcy of that thought and of the entire political class of the Arab world.
Unlike some Arab immigrants, Ajami was truly at home in America. He fit into his adopted country and fell deeply in love with it. He was grateful for the opportunity it had given him, and he believed in its virtues and in the good its power could deliver. His detractors claimed that in coming to America he had abandoned his roots and identity and never looked back; others argued he was as insecure man, torn between East and West, always attempting to belong. Their criticism said more about their own fears and insecurities than his. Ajami was anything but insecure. Had belonging been his quest, he could have quite easily bowed to the accepted wisdom of academia that passes in New York’s Leftist circles for originality and telling truth to power and made it his home, his bright star shining among their intellectual shallowness. Those who assumed that becoming American meant completely forgetting where one came from, knew little of America and even less of Ajami. Like the Jewish American, the Polish American, and the Irish American immigrant, Ajami had found liberation and a chance in the new world, but he never forgot where he came from and the misery of those he had left behind. He had parted ways with the old ways and hatreds of the region, never allowing them to haunt him in his new home or to consume him with their darkness, but he retained his love for the region.
I met Ajami for the first time in October 2010. As a student at Georgetown distressed with the state of Middle East studies in American universities, I had emailed him asking for his advice on my quest for a doctorate. We met a week later, and for the next three hours a bond was created. I like to think that he saw a younger, though less brilliant, version of himself in the student sitting in front of him, that he saw a similarity between my ideological transformation because of Sept. 11 from an Arab nationalist to a conservative, and his. For the next four years, Ajami became my teacher, mentor, and editor of two books, which he invited me to write.
Ajami was remarkable because he became a full American and loved this country as anyone could love it, but that never lessened his passion for what he had left behind. He knew well the region’s ills, the pains it gave those who cherished it, and God knows it gave him nothing but pain. But he always believed the peoples of the region deserved better, and he was unabashed in championing their cause and their yearning for freedom. For those who languished in the horror that was Saddam’s prisons, for those who perished under the brutality that is Bashar al-Assad, there was no greater champion than Ajami.
No place in the Arab world escaped Ajami’s examining eye and critical scholarship, but perhaps the place he felt most passionate about after his homeland was the land of the Nile. It was on Egypt that Ajami wrote his superb Foreign Affairs article in 1995, where he brilliantly described its late dictator as “a civil servant with the rank of President” and which remains the best examination of the country’s predicament and as true today as it was then. In The Sorrows of Egypt, Ajami had lamented that “At the heart of Egyptian life there lies a terrible sense of disappointment. The pride of modern Egypt has been far greater than its accomplishments.” He described himself in that article as “an outsider who has followed the twists of the country’s history and who approaches the place with nothing but awe for its civility amid great troubles.”
The country’s pains were his. In an email in September 2013 he had written me: “To paraphrase Yuosef Qaid—;what is happening in the land of Egypt? What has become of the Egypt we knew? What will stop Egypt’s drift toward unreason and catastrophe? It is really frightening to observe and listen and to read Egypt. I spent years as you know studying that country. It nearly killed me in 1995 with a digestive problem and yet I still loved the place but now this Egypt I cannot recognize.”
Ajami was not fooled by the newest promise of salvation offered by the latest army general. The last lines in my book Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt were written by Ajami: “Today, after the revolution and its hopes and disappointments, Egypt finds itself in a world it knows all too well—faith in the deliverance offered it by one man. The hope is now invested in a military commander, Abdul Fattah el-Sissi. It is dictatorship by demand, as it were. The country has been here before. For two decades, 1954-1970, Gamal Abdul Nasser gave Egypt its moment of enthusiasm and then led it to defeat and heartbreak. It would take a leap of faith, and luck beyond what history offers, to believe that this faith in a redeemer will yield a better harvest than the one before it.”
Ajami’s last book, The Struggle for Mastery in the Fertile Crescent, was published this week. In the last pages of his book he returned to a theme so dear to his heart, the fate of the Arab world’s Shia. The last sentence in the book is: “It would be a singular tale of loss and sorrow if Hezbollah, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and the newly empowered warlords in Iraq, were to sully Shiism with their dark deeds, taking away from it the sense of mercy that was always its guiding light.”
The novelist Abdul Rahman Munif ends his depressing novel East of the Mediterranean with those lines: “I want to follow Ragab’s method itself: To push things to their end, then perhaps something would happen.” Ajami did not wait for something to happen. He stood against the miserable fate of the peoples inhibiting the Arab world. He stood against the loss and sorrow that would befall his people. He stood tall, and at times he stood alone.
The world will mourn the death of a brilliant scholar. Obituaries will attempt to capture the gifted man, but they will fall short. For me, I will remember the magnificent scholar who took a young man under his wing and mentored him for four years. I will remember the kindness, the encouragement, the generosity he showed me.
Farewell, my Mo’allem. Farewell my friend. Farwell to the complex and extraordinary Fouad, the American, the Shia, the Lebanese, and though he wouldn’t have liked it, the Arab as well.
・Samuel Tadros is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and a contributor to the Hoover Institution’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He is the author of Motherland Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity and most recently Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt, both edited by Fouad Ajami.
