In the news accounts on graduation ceremonies, the speeches of public figures are highlighted. This is not a bad thing. Important matters, more deliberately considered, are put on the public agenda. Thus, to take a key example, President Obama has used commencement addresses to present his deep assessment of the state of the union, as a recent report by NPR reveals. Obama, as the ceremonial speaker seriously reflects on the gap between past and future, assessing American promise and problems, using his full intelligence, free, or at least somewhat free, of the inside the beltway logic of official Washington and the popular media. A good thing, no doubt.

Yet, for me, significant oratory by Obama, and lesser public speakers, is not where the real action is on graduation day. Rather, I focus on the achievements of the graduates, our students and their promise, what they have said and done already, and where they may bring us. They help me understand the personal and the political, and all that lies in between. It is with this in mind that I am leaving my house this morning for The New School’s commencement, thinking once again about the relationship between promise and practice at The New School, specifically as it is revealed in the work of three new Ph.Ds.

Julie Tel Rav, a trained architect, turned sociologist, and a rabbi’s wife, used her broad creative and intellectual interests, and her communal experience to examine how the material environment influences ritual and everyday life of a religious community. In Set in Stone: The Influence of Architecture on the Progressive Amercan Jewish Community, she explores Jewish synagogues and community centers across the country, and how the built environment supports and undermines the goals of congregations. Particularly interesting is her thesis that the makers of the buildings seek to use physical space as a key support for Jewish ritual communal life, substituting space for time. This was her unanticipated finding, which emerged as her research proceeded. It was her discovery, which I found particularly interesting, as I have been exploring the relationship between the material world and the human world, and the way the human condition is specified in the social condition. I chaired Tel Rav’s committee, and have had, therefore, a great opportunity to learn from her.

I proudly served as an adviser on Lindsey Freeman’s dissertation committee (Vera Zolberg was the chair). I hope that Lindsey has benefited from my advice. I know I have learned a great deal from her scholarship and creativity in her dissertation: a study of the collective memory of the making of the atomic bomb in the (at first) secret utopian project in Oakridge, Tennessee, her hometown. Her study is to be published next year by the University of North Carolina Press as Longing for the Bomb: Atomic Nostalgia in Post-Nuclear Landscape. She analyzes the rise and fall of an atomic city: from top – secret war project, to post WWII memory center of patriotic heroism, to the ambiguities of the present day. This is a special kind of community study: focusing on the creation of the modern mythology about the bomb, moving on to nuclear nostalgia, and then to the struggle for meaning as myth and nostalgia fade.

One of the great interdisciplinary events at The New School for Social Research in the past decade has been an annual conference on memory. Freeman has been an important organizer. In her dissertation, she makes her unique contribution to “memory studies,” showing how imagination and memory shape ordinary everyday practice in an extraordinary place. The locals and the nation did indeed learn to build, live with and love the bomb, until the passion cooled.

Ana Mallen in her dissertation, Participatory Democracy and Social Polarization in the Times of Hugo Chavez, shows how the move from a corrupt liberal democracy to a promised participatory democracy, led to a rethinking of popular sovereignty, and the emergence of two mutually exclusive, antagonistic publics. Daily interactions, media representations, key political actors and the media combined to create a deeply polarized society. It is a dissertation in historical studies and sociology. The focus is on key turning points in the recent past and the way significant actions pushed forward polarization. Mallen concludes, surprisingly, with a community study of a district of Caracas that seemed to move against the polarizing trend (with an opposition leader using the ideology of Chavez to prevail over a Chavez supported candidate). Her account of the way the media wars and the civil strife interacted, leading to social polarization is without heroes and villains. She illuminated a complex story from multiple angles in a way that really informs.

Mallen’s committee included my New School sociology department colleague Carlos Forment, an eminent historical sociologist of civil society in Latin America, and María Pilar García-Guadilla, of the Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela, with whom Mallen had studied and worked with in Caracas on the Chavez phenomenon. As a non-expert, I was a little embarrassed to be the supervisor. Although Ana assures me that my approach to politics and media were a key to her work, my colleagues obviously had the historical knowledge to judge Mallen’s work that I lacked. That said, I realized at the defense that I actually have been understanding political developments in “the times of Chavez” quite well. This, of course, is thanks to talking to and reading Mallen over the years, as she has been developing her project. She has been my teacher as I have been hers. This is also true of Freeman and Tel Rav. That in fact is what advanced study and research is all about, what it ideally is, and where it quite often does lead.

The special mark of The New School: critical insight, careful social, political and historical investigation, and theoretical sophistication, beyond parochial clichés, worldly, socially and politically consequential: Tel Rav, Freeman and Mallen, along with many other New School students, have kept it alive in their work. I am grateful, and off to celebrate them for making an ideal, real.

When I’m in China, conversations with friends and colleagues often begin with their asking about the name of my university: Why is it called “The New School?” Most are not familiar with the university, but when I mention the name of John Dewey and the intellectual spirit associated with the university’s founding in 1919, there’s an immediate connection. Dewey traveled and lectured in China beginning in 1919, just as The New School was being established, and just as Chinese intellectuals were engaging in unprecedented forms of public engagement and education.

For Chinese intellectuals and students today, 1919 invokes the stirrings of the “New Culture Movement” and the foundations of the Chinese revolution more broadly. The New Culture Movement is closely associated with what became known as the “May Fourth Movement,” so named for the student protests in Beijing on that day in 1919 to reject the humiliating outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. The protest was over the terms that allowed Japan to retain territorial concessions that had been negotiated before the war by a discredited president of the fledgling Republic of China. (The Qing dynasty had fallen in 1911-12.) But the May Fourth Movement was less about geopolitics and much more about the vibrant intellectual pursuit and experimentation with new ideas–anarchism, Marxism, socialism, and much else.

John Dewey arrived in China just a few days after May 4, 1919, and would spend the next two years teaching and lecturing at Chinese universities. Dewey had been invited by his former student at Columbia, Hu Shih, by then a prominent leader in the New Culture Movement. Hu, like others in the movement, advocated the wholesale rejection of Confucian culture and practice–first and foremost the educational precepts that stressed the close engagement with Confucian and other classical texts. In its place, Hu and those who would become the presidents and chancellors of China’s leading universities adopted many of Dewey’s ideas about education and its roles in constituting citizenship, democratic practice, among much else.

Several scholars have examined closely Dewey’s China lectures and his writings from China there in 1919-1921. What impressed Dewey perhaps most was the self-organization and mobilization under way in Chinese society at the time. As he wrote (pp. 97-8) in one of several essays during his time in China,

American children are taught the list of ‘modern’ inventions that originated in China. They are not taught, however, that China invented the boycott, the general strike and guild organization as means of controlling public affairs.

Dewey’s lectures were generally well received, in part because so many of the competing intellectual and ideological camps in China at the time could read his texts as supportive of their positions. But Dewey’s call for gradual reform over radical social change was seen as insufficient in the eyes of many among his audiences. Indeed, Dewey rightly predicted that Bertrand Russell’s arrival in China in the fall of 1920, to deliver lectures on Bolshevism, would far eclipse Dewey’s in their popularity. Mao Zedong never attended Dewey’s lectures, but would have been quite familiar with Dewey’s ideas from the intellectual circles in which he traveled the early 1920s. Many years later, Mao would proclaim that “Practice is the sole criterion of truth”– a quotation that “Maoists” in the 1960s would repress (along with Dewey’s ideas). Deng Xiaoping strategically revived Mao’s slogan in 1978, and it became one of the mantras of his developmentalist reform program that followed. Dewey’s works are widely read on Chinese campuses today.

These are notes not just for an obituary, but as well for a possible contribution to a broader celebration of Bill Miles’s life and work. I had the pleasure of working with him closely on his first two film projects, but we were friends for fifty years. He died on May 12th.

At the New York Film Festival in 1977, at a time when many held the military and even patriotism in low esteem, more than a few in the audience of generally anti-war film buffs found themselves moved to tears by the patriotic spirit expressed in the first film by African-American filmmaker William Miles, called “Men of Bronze,” about an infantry regiment from Harlem that, along with three others, served as an integral part of the French Army in World War I. That was because the U.S. Army wanted blacks to serve as labor troops, whereas the French needed reinforcements. For many in the audience it may have been the first time in a long while that a love of country had been tapped, and it was done by unwanted black troops in what, under Miles’s direction, became a startlingly good-natured, upbeat attack on American racism. The film went on to repeated broadcasts on PBS and led to Miles’s four-part history of Harlem’s first 370 years, “I Remember Harlem,” another classic of black history.

William Miles became a resident producer at Channel 13, covered many other forgotten chapters of black history from sports to space, and won numerous awards that include an Emmy, the Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia Award, an Oscar nomination, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. His work continues to be seen by PBS viewers, students, and schoolchildren around the country. He always regarded the children as his most important audience.

Bill was born August 19, 1931, on Harlem’s 126^th Street, directly behind the Apollo Theater. As a young kid, he helped the movie projectionist re-wind the films. A graduate of the Benjamin Franklin High School, he found work downtown in the shipping department of a distributor of educational films called Sterling Television. Next door was a company called Killiam Shows that restored and re-issued silent classics, where Bill learned the mechanics of film editing.

At 17, he had joined a National Guard unit in Harlem. It was only years later through the accident of an open door that Bill discovered that a “library” otherwise off limits seemed to be full of flags, helmets, and photos. He got special permission to take a look one weekend, and discovered that his National Guard unit had had an apparently glorious and heroic history, but now had a lot of dusty and curling photos. It was the direct descendant of the “369^th,” the Harlem Hellfighters of World War I. With the cooperation of a sergeant, Bill was able to organize a fund-raising ball in order to buy paint and picture frames to make the collection presentable. Among old newspaper clippings, there was a photo of a black soldier in Paris waving an American flag. Since Miles worked with archival films, he thought the flag waver might be on film somewhere.

When he had saved enough money, he spent his two-week vacation at the National Archives in Washington, and found the flag waver and a lot of other beautifully preserved 35mm film on the 369th. It took a couple of years to save enough to spend another vacation in D.C. and to purchase for starters a small sampling of this treasure trove in 16mm. But then came the skeptics, who, for a variety of reasons, especially during and just after the Vietnam War, saw little potential in the project. I was among them.

One day Bill accosted some elderly chess players on upper Broadway to ask whether by any chance one of them knew anyone who had been with the 369^th, and one of them did. And that’s when “Men of Bronze” started rolling.

Bill had also found in an office a few blocks from Killiam’s one of the regiment’s original white officers, Hamilton Fish II, who had later become a prominent Congressman. Fish had pushed through a bill to construct a monument to the black troops, but did not know what ultimately came of it. So Bill took another trip to Washington to visit the Battle Monuments Commission, which had no record of such a monument, but invited Mr. Miles to come down for a look. Cartons of 8-by-10s had been pulled out for him, and in a long-shot of an obelisk in France, Bill noticed a tiny spot near its base and then saw that this was a bas-relief of a French helmet. The Commission had assumed this indicated a French unit, but Bill knew that it had become the insignia of the regiment when it was incorporated into the French Fourth Army. The Commission had not quite finished giving the obelisk a scrub-down when Bill and I arrived to film it for “Men of Bronze.”

His later film “Liberators,” co-directed with Nina Rosenblum, documented the role of a black tank battalion in World War II that took part in the liberation of concentration camp survivors. The film was simultaneously premiered at the Apollo and on PBS as a catalyst for dialogue throughout the city during racial tensions in Crown Heights. Attacked by some for alleged inaccuracies, it won an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary.

Before and during his creative film work Bill, who lived with his wife Gloria and two daughters in Hollis, Queens, was an active member of local initiatives like the United Block Association (organized among other things to help those wives who cleaned offices to get home safely at night) and a summer basketball league for the kids. In 1995, prompted by the story of a young boy’s death in rural Nepal, Bill lent his support to fund-raising efforts to build a hospital where there had been none before.

Bill remained active, though retired, in preserving the history of the 369^th at the National Guard armory on 135th Street by the FDR Drive. And as long as his health permitted, he was a frequent speaker at showings of his films and numerous award ceremonies around the country. His instincts as a photo researcher really paid off one day when he was nostalgically browsing through Manhattan’s municipal archives of official 1930s photos of its streets. He found his own long-since demolished house behind the Apollo, and there in an upstairs window, looking out at the view, was his mother.

In an article in The New York Times last week, “Psychiatry’s Guide is Out of Touch with Science, Experts Say,” science reporters, Pam Belluck and Benedict Carey, describe an important new initiative by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the largest source of federal funding for mental health research. The new initiative criticizes the soon to be published fifth edition of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), offering a new framework for guiding research and focusing funding priorities in mental health research. Belluck and Carey’s article emphasizes the optimism and excitement shared by a number of prominent experts about the adoption of this new framework, known as the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). In order to understand the true significance of this development, it is important for us to have a greater appreciation of the broader context in which this important change is taking place. I am ambivalent, some significant problems are being addressed, but other problems may be exacerbated in this latest development in the politics of the sciences of the mind and the brain.

Towards the end of May, the American Psychiatric Association will release its new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). This long awaited update of the DSM (colloquially referred to by some as the “Bible of Psychiatry”) has been the focus of considerable prepublication controversy among mental health professionals and has been discussed extensively in important media outlets including The New York Times. Previous editions of the DSM have also received media attention. But DSM-5 has raised the intensity of the controversy to unprecedented heights, in part because of the widely publicized criticisms of psychiatry insiders including Allan Frances (the chair of the task force that developed DSM-4) and Robert Spitzer (who chaired the DSM-3 task force). Criticisms of DSM-5 are similar in nature (if not intensity) to those leveled at both DSM-4 and DSM-3. For example, claims for the degree of reliability of diagnostic categories are exaggerated, evidence regarding the validity of the diagnostic categories is limited, and experiences that are inevitable aspects of the human condition (e.g., sadness, mourning, anxiety) are increasingly viewed as symptoms of mental illness to be treated with medication.

An important aspect of the criticism is directed at the rapidly accelerating tendency to over prescribe medications for emotional distress with dubious effectiveness and potentially serious side effects. A more fundamental criticism of DSM-5 (also leveled at the previous two editions of the DSM) is directed at the disease model of psychiatry, which views emotional problems as similar in nature to physical illnesses such as tuberculosis, heart disease or cancer. Critics are also concerned about the potential for stigmatization of everyday problems in living.

The NIMH has held a series of workshops over the past 18 months, to develop the RDoc framework described in Belluck & Carey’s article. This has been motivated by factors including the intensity of the controversy about DSM-5, the accumulating evidence that the new generation of psychiatric medications is not delivering on its initial promise, and in all probability, the Obama administration’s avowed intention of investing 100 million dollars in the field of brain science research. This shift in NIMH policy has taken place so recently that there has not yet been an opportunity for extensive conversation within professional circles (let alone the popular media) regarding its pros and cons. A few informal exchanges I have read on professional listservs have an approving tone to them. There have, for example, been expressions of glee about what can be interpreted as a development heralding the demise of the entire DSM system, with all of its associated flaws and potentially pernicious side effects.

From my perspective, however, as a psychotherapy researcher and someone who has served on NIMH grant proposal review committees over the years, the policy change is nothing to celebrate. Although I have long been a critic of the DSM system, the changed policy and the framework for the new RDoC system make it very clear that the fundamental premise guiding future NIMH funding priorities is that the bedrock level of analysis is genetic, biological and brain science research. As Thomas Insel, Director of NIMH said in an interview conducted on Monday, May 6: “The goal of RDoC is to “reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms” (quoted in Belluck & Carey’s NY Times article, May 7, 2013). This is a perpetuation and expansion of a trend that has been taking place at NIMH for many years now, privileging the biological over the psychological, emotional and social. An important consequence of this trend has been that the proportion of NIMH funding allocated to psychotherapy research and other psychosocial interventions relative to the brain sciences has been consistently diminishing over time.

The new NMIH paradigm for research means that the amount of funding available for the development and refinement of treatments such as psychotherapy that are not targeted directly at the brain circuitry (although they do influence it indirectly), is likely to continue to shrink. I want to be perfectly clear: I do not question the potential value of brain science research. What I do question, however, is the single-minded emphasis on brain science research to the virtual exclusion of all other forms of mental health investigation. It is important to recognize that funding priorities shape the programs of research pursued by scientists, and thus the type of research findings that are published in professional journals and disseminated to the public. This in turn shapes the curriculum in psychiatry and clinical psychology training programs, which shapes the way in which mental health professionals understand and treat psychological and psychiatric problems.

In concrete terms the explicit NIMH policy shift is likely to mean that despite the large and growing evidence base that a variety of forms of psychotherapy are effective treatments for a range of problems, we are likely to continue to see a decreasing availability of the already diminishing resources that can provide high quality psychotherapy for those who can potentially benefit from it. People will suffer as a consequence.

P.S. “Shortcomings of a Psychiatric Bible”: critical notes on a New York Times editorial.

A May 12^thNew York Times editorial titled: “Shortcomings of a Psychiatric Bible” is both revealing and distressing. After briefly discussing the recent National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) decision to replace DSM-5 with their new Research and Diagnostic Criteria as a guiding framework for funding future research, the editors conclude with the following assertion:

“The underlying problem is that research on mental disorders and treatment has stalled in the face of the incredible complexity of the brain. That is why major pharmaceutical companies have scaled back their programs to develop new psychiatric drugs; they cannot find new biological targets to shoot for. And that is why President Obama has started a long-term brain research initiative to develop new tools and techniques to study how billions of brain cells and neural circuits interact; the findings could lead to better ways to diagnose and treat psychiatric illnesses, though probably not for many years.”

This conclusion reflects an unquestioning acceptance of what has become the received wisdom that further advancement of our understanding of both the etiology and treatment of mental health problems is completely dependent on our ability to accurately map out the associated brain chemistry and neural circuitry. This belief is in keeping with the disease model of psychiatry, assuming that both the underlying causes and relevant targets for treatment are biological in nature. This assumption was also one of the important factors that led to the major revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-3) by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 that laid the groundwork for the forthcoming fifth edition of the DSM that the NIMH is now abandoning, because of its lack of validity. NIMH is assuming that the failure to find relevant biological targets for psychiatry to focus on is the byproduct of a diagnostic system such as the DSM that cannot be assumed to reflect the way in which “nature is carved at the joints.” They are failing to consider the possibility of a more fundamental problem: the assumption that the underlying causes and relevant targets for treatment are exclusively biological.

It is one thing to hypothesize that psychological and emotional problems are associated with changes at the biological level (e.g., specific patterns of brain activity or levels of neurotransmitters) or that symptom remission is associated with biological changes. It’s another to assume that the fundamental causes of psychological problems are always biological and that meaningful improvements in treatment will only take place when we can directly target the relevant brain chemistry. While it may be the case that biological factors play a more significant causal role in some psychological problems (e.g., schizophrenia) than others, the assumption that the major causal factor for mental health problems is always biological is a form of simplistic reductionism. Nevertheless, the disease model of mental illness has become the dominant narrative in our culture – a narrative that the Times editors quite unfortunately have accepted in an unquestioning fashion.

Jeremy D. Safran, Ph. D. is Co-Chair & Professor of Psychology, New School for Social Research; an advisory editor to the journal “Psychotherapy Research” and the author of Psychoanalysis & Psychoanalytic Therapies (American Psychological Association Publications, 2012).

“There are more than 8 million ordinary objects in this city that carry within them a sense of its inimitable expression. They express its thundering diversity or a thorough particularity; they connect us to other places, past and present or moor us to the here and now; they enliven or aggravate daily life; they epitomize the city at large or hold true to one of its neighborhoods. They may be small, held, and mobile, or large, unwieldy, and stationary. Well-designed or just well-used, they live and survive, creating a ripple of small meanings.”

With this declaration my colleague, Radhika Subramaniam, the chief curator of Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, invited New School faculty, including me, to contribute to her unusual show at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery planned for this summer, “Masterpieces of Everyday New York: Objects as Story.”

Radhika hopes a diverse group — designers, artists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, writers and musicians — will identify meaningful material objects in everyday life and use them to tell the story of our city. I am intrigued. She has provoked me to think about my material environment and how it speaks to me, and the broader theoretical and political implications of this.

As the author of The Politics of Small Things, I also have special interest. My “small things” was inspired by Arundhati Roy’s in the novel The God of Small Things: gestures and interactions among people as they define and create their social world, constituting their freedom and dignity, and power. In contrast, Rahdhika is pushing us to think about things material, not human, given in nature and shaped by men and women.

And indeed I have been thinking about such matters recently, taking part in The Politics of Materiality Conference at The New School, listening to an intriguing lecture by Nicolas Langlitz, “Homo Academicus Among Other Cooperative Primates,” attempting to make sense of the research and writing of Bruno Latour, pushed by a number of my challenging students, aided by attending Iddo Tavory’s class lecture last week on “Actor Network Theory,” featuring Latour. All this is about what is sometimes called post-humanism, not exactly my accustomed cup of tea, but worth a tasting. I glean insights, but as with all “isms,” I am skeptical.

With this in mind, I chose and am considering my “masterpiece,” what I think of as “Mike’s Memorial.” In fact, it is a miniature sign, an industrial sticky label: “Michael Asher, Monroe, N.Y., September 11, 2001” placed on a tile in a subway corridor, under the west side of Union Square Park, between 14 ^th Street and 16^th Street. The typed letters on the label are wearing out. A few years ago, I used my pen to restore my friend’s name. Mike’s label is part of a modest 9/11 memorial, on the tiles in the corridor, a label for each of those killed on that fateful day.

The memorial was created by John Lin. I have had trouble finding out much about it, I would really appreciate if someone who reads this tells us more. What I know is what I have been seeing for years and how I have responded.

I walk along the corridor, and not outside in the park, only when the weather is harsh, when I decide I want to remember or want to show a friend or colleague, not often. Few take note of the piece, probably no one but me inspects carefully Mike’s name.

The memorial remembers quietly. I know Mike’s family’s loss is first personal, as is my loss of a dear friend. This memorial understands that. I know that the American response to the 9/11 attack led to extraordinary suffering. Wisely, the memorial abstains from grandiose patriotism. I know that some, the critically inclined, many of my friends, students and colleagues strongly criticize American excesses, but sometimes they forget the suffering and trauma we have experienced. This memorial remembers. I sometimes over the last twelve years have felt lonely thinking about this the way that I do, but then this memorial reminds me that I am not alone, that the person who made it and those few who seek it out, chance upon and appreciate it are with me.

Latour, if I understand him correctly, would have the subway memorial be an actor in a network that includes me, Lin and other “actors” who appreciate his work, including a moving video by Sandi Bachom I found depicting the memorial,  that includes my handiwork. I rather think, student of Hannah Arendt that I am, about the video and the memorial as material artifacts, of human making, creating the setting within which humans act and interact. Latour’s approach reveals connections and developments which are otherwise invisible, clearly an advance. But the approach also minimizes the distinctiveness and special responsibility of human action.

The artists who have made these works are speaking to each other, their works speak to each other, and we respond. The works challenge us to make sense of our world. They constitute the setting for our action, for which we are responsible. “Mike’s Memorial” did not repair itself, the repair required my pen, and, crucially, it also required my decision to use it. The politics of small things includes small material things, and the capacity to speak and act in response to them, always with the potential that we may act together and change the world. Understanding that potential, being responsible for it, is what I get from Arendt and not the post–humanists.

I plan to report on the June opening of “Masterpieces of Everyday New York: Objects as Story,” perhaps joined by colleagues. I will then explore how I believe my book The Politics of Small Things and the memorial in the Union Square subway corridor are in dialogue, recognizing mourning, challenging and humbling those who pay attention, constituting the potential power of their concerted action.

To skip this introduction and go directly to read Jeff Weintraub’s In-Depth Analysis “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?” click here.

I was sure in the lead up to the Iraq War that it wouldn’t happen. It seemed obvious to me that it made no sense, and I couldn’t believe that the U.S. would embark on such foolishness. One of my big mistakes, obviously. While Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden and American capacity to wage two wars, one clearly by choice, seemed to be a huge strategic mistake, the war proceeded and escalated, and we have paid.

Nonetheless, I did understand why deposing Saddam was desirable. His regime was reprehensible. I respected those who called for opposition to its totalitarianism, from the informed Kanan Makiya to my Central European friends, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, et al. I even said so at an anti-war rally.

Yet, connecting the means at our disposal with the desirable end of a free and democratic Iraq seemed to me to be an extraordinarily difficult project, and I had absolutely no confidence that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Company could pull it off. How could my intelligent friends who supported the war not see that? I actually had a number of heated public discussions with Michnik about that.

Once begun, I hoped that the intervention would be short and sweet, and hoped that a democratic transition could be managed, but as we now know these hopes were frustrated. From every point of view, the war was a disaster: for the Iraq, the region, the U.S., and the project of democracy, and the way the war was fought, as it was part of a purported global war against terror, compromised American democratic principles. As time has passed many of the early supporters see all this and have changed their judgments, and those who haven’t, such as John McCain, choose not to focus in their speech and action on the question of entrance into the war, but rather on the exit, the so called surge, which they purport explains limited American successes.

But I am curious: what have become of those who as a matter of principle supported the war? And what have become of their arguments? A few brave souls have stuck to their positions. To have a richer understanding of our recent past and to reflect on the challenges of the day, I think it is worth paying attention. Thus, today’s In-Depth post: Jeff Weintraub’s “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?”

To read Jeff Weintraub’s In-Depth Analysis, “Some Partial, Preliminary & Unfashionable Thoughts Toward Reassessing the 2003 Iraq War – Did Anything Go Right and What Were The Alternatives?”click here.

There are clearly some good grounds for holding those views (as well as a lot of bad, dishonest, intellectually lazy, and morally evasive ones); and for anyone who supported the war, like me, the past decade has often been a morally harrowing time (or should have been, at least). But I remain convinced that the question was more complicated than that in 2002-2003 and is still more complicated today.

Nor, I would like to believe, do I say that merely to cover my own ass (morally and analytically speaking) with a mealy-mouthed unwillingness to face up honestly to the moral and intellectual issues involved. Back in 2002-2003 I thought (and said quite explicitly) that there were good and bad arguments on both sides of the question (with more bad ones than good ones on both sides), and I think that’s still true now … though any serious discussion would also have to take account of what has actually happened in the past decade. (I could no longer simply repeat all the arguments I made back in 2002-2003 without serious revisions or modifications, but making a full-scale public recantation, as some other one-time supporters of the war have done, wouldn’t be honest in my case either.)

I have been struck, in particular, that the vast bulk of recent discussions expressing the “anti-war” groupthink, which is rarely challenged, are marked by two massive omissions.

=> First, while they properly emphasize the terrible results of the war and its aftermath for Iraqis, for Americans, and for others, they almost never consider the actual and probable costs—human, economic, geopolitical, etc.—of the alternatives to war that were realistically available in 2002-2003.  In fact, now as in 2002-2003, almost none of the people expressing the “anti-war” consensus even try to outline or propose, let alone defend, any serious alternative policies that they think could and should have been followed to deal with the very special problems posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq a decade after the 1991 Gulf War.

I’ve raised those issues in the past from time to time (e.g., here & here), and they still strike me as valid.  For the moment, I will just reiterate some of the relevant points from a post I wrote in 2005.

[...] I did not support the war because I expected rosy outcomes. Instead, I became (and remain) convinced that the war was necessary and justified primarily because I became (and remain) convinced that, by the end of the 1990s, all the realistically (as opposed to wishfully) available alternative options led almost certainly to politically catastrophic and morally appalling consequences.

The key point was that, by the end of the 1990s, the whole sanctions-&-containment system cobbled together in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War was becoming increasingly unsustainable (politically, diplomatically, and also morally), not least because it had been systematically and deliberately undermined by a range of governments acting in loose collusion with the Iraqi Ba’ath regime, and by 2000 or so it was on the verge of terminal disintegration. The perceived economic & political interests of a number of key states, reinforced by a massively successful propaganda campaign which convinced large sectors of public opinion across the world that US-imposed sanctions were starving Iraqi babies, all pushed in that direction. (How many opponents of war in 2002-2003 had previously been urging a policy of tightening up sanctions and continuing them indefinitely?)  [....]

Thus, for these and other reasons, simply doing nothing and assuming that the status quo would automatically continue indefinitely was not a realistically viable option. Inaction would also have been a choice with serious and unpleasant consequences.

(Michael Walzer, who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was one of the few opponents of the war who recognized this problem and faced it squarely. Walzer proposed a third option—an escalation of the “little war” that the US and its allies had already been waging in Iraq since the 1991 armistice. But it’s not clear that this was really a viable option in 2002-2003; and, at all events, it’s not an option that most opponents of the 2003 Iraq war, in the US or abroad, would actually have been willing to pursue.)

[B]y the middle of 2002, there were really only two realistically available outcomes—military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein & his regime, or a victory for Saddam Hussein & his foreign backers. The latter would have been a prelude to the final disintegration of the sanctions-&-containment system, a disintegration which in practical terms would have been irreversible. In realistic terms (and I mean realistic, not “realist”), those were the genuine options—in my possibly fallible but firm opinion—and any serious discussion of the issues surrounding the 2003 Iraq war has to begin by facing up to this reality.

Now, some people might argue that the collapse of containment would have been no big deal, or at least that the consequences couldn’t possibly have been as bad as the consequences of military action that we’ve actually seen. I believe that’s wrong.  [JW: And the current death throes of the other Ba'athist regime, in Syria, only reinforce the point that we can't simply take that assumption for granted.]

Most of the discussion of Saddam Hussein’s missing “weapons of mass destruction” have had a certain irrelevance and unreality from the start. The size of his existing stockpiles was never the key question. Most informed analysts (including all the major intelligence services), however much they disagreed on details, generally agreed that Saddam Hussein had active nuclear, biological, & chemical weapons programs. (It was German intelligence, not the CIA, that said in 2001 that Saddam was probably about 3 years away from getting nuclear weapons.) It turned out they were all wrong, and the whole thing was a fantastically successful bluff on Saddam’s part—though the only reason we know this is precisely that the Iraqi Ba’ath regime was overthrown—but, fundamentally, so what? This was just a matter of timing. Once containment had collapsed and Saddam Hussein was out of the box, he would have been ready and eager to resume his NBC weapons programs. (Scott Ritter, for example, explained this all quite cogently in 1998, before he experienced his strange conversion over Iraq.) It would no doubt have taken Saddam Hussein a while to get a nuclear weapon, and perhaps some stroke of luck in the meantime might have prevented this, but otherwise it was just a matter of time. In the medium term, given everything we know about the nature and history of the Iraqi Ba’ath regime and Saddam Hussein’s own history and inclinations, one could expect renewed military adventurism, another of his catastrophic miscalculations, and a bigger and more destructive war down the line.

In the relatively short run, one predictable and almost certain consequence of the collapse of containment would have been another genocidal bloodbath in Iraqi Kurdistan—which, it is quite safe to predict, no one would have lifted a finger to stop. Perhaps I have some kind of strange psychological quirk, since the genocidal mass murder of ethnic minorities seems to upset me more than it does some other people, but I think the prevention of this genocidal bloodbath has to be seen as one argument (among others) in favor of taking serious action against Saddam Hussein & his regime. [....]

And so on. I don’t want to leave the impression that these are the only likely and predictable catastrophic consequences that would have followed the imminent collapse of the sanctions-&-containment system, but it would take a while to lay them all out in detail, and those will do to suggest the key background considerations.

I waited all through the debates of 2002-2003 for opponents of the war to offer any half-way honest and plausible alternative to military action that took these realities seriously, and that offered a plausible likelihood of preventing the consequences I’ve just outlined. I never heard anyone offer any such proposal that struck me as even remotely realistic or convincing—which is part of the reason I decided that, on balance, the war was necessary and justified.

I’m still waiting. Here’s what I said to Sam Rosenfeld & Matthew Yglesias back in 2005 (in response to their American Prospect piece, “The Incompetence Dodge“), and I would offer the same challenge today to readers who subscribe to the now-hegemonic “anti-war” consensus:

Political judgment requires making choices between a range of realistically available options, based in large part on an assessment of the likely consequences of different courses of action. Your piece argues, in effect, that many of the negative consequences of the decision to take military action against Saddam Hussein & his regime in 2003 were readily predictable and, in fact, highly likely. OK, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’re right.

That’s not enough. The relevant comparison has to be with the likely consequences of other possible courses of action available at the time (including inaction). So, to reiterate, what do you think would have been a superior alternative back in 2002-2003? Can you identify and defend a realistically available, morally acceptable, politically workable alternative course of action whose likely and predictable consequences would have been less disastrous than the ones we’ve actually seen so far?

This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. If you or anyone else could (hypothetically) present such an alternative scenario that I found at all plausible & convincing, then I might be forced to reconsider whether my support for the war (trepidations and all) was actually intelligent or justifiable. In the absence of such an account, then it seems to me—rightly or wrongly—that your discussion fundamentally begs the question.

=> Second, people who take it for granted that the war and its consequences were an unmitigated disaster for Iraqis tend to focus exclusively on Arab Iraq.  They almost uniformly ignore Iraqi Kurdistan.  It’s understandable why they would do that, and the Arab part of Iraq does account for about three-quarters of Iraqis … but any assessment of the 2003 Iraq war and its consequences that ignores Iraqi Kurds is obviously incomplete, misleading, and less than fully honest.  It’s not just that the actual outcomes in Iraqi Kurdistan have been (on balance, and under the circumstances) remarkably good … but also that the probable consequences of the realistically available alternatives to the 2003 Iraq war (which would almost certainly have included the final disintegration of the whole sanctions-&-containment system, which had been unraveling at a rapidly accelerating rate, followed pretty soon by another genocidal bloodbath in Iraqi Kurdistan, as I noted earlier) would have been especially awful for Iraq’s Kurdish population.

Instead, Iraqi Kurdistan is now autonomous, secure, and thriving.  And depending on the contingencies of regional geopolitics, there are good prospects for that situation to continue.  Iraqi Kurdistan tends to get a lot less attention from the news media than Arab Iraq, but an article in the current issue of the Economist sums up some of the good news.

The relative order, security and wealth enjoyed by the 5m residents of Iraq’s three Kurdish provinces [JW: see the maps at the end of this post] are the envy of the remaining 25m who live in the battered bulk of Iraq, and of others too. Since 2011 some 130,000 Syrian refugees, nearly all of them ethnic Kurds, have been welcomed in as brothers; the UN says that number could reach 350,000 by the year’s end. From the east come Iranian Kurds eager to work on the building sites that bristle across a territory the size of Switzerland. [....] Iraq is now Turkey’s second export market after Germany, with 70% of that trade directed to the Kurdish part; 4,000 trucks cross the border daily.

It was not always like this. Surveying a dusty vista of tents at Domiz, a camp housing more than 50,000 destitute Syrians outside the booming city of Dohuk, an Iraqi Kurd shrugs and says, “Twenty years ago this was us.” He is referring to the aftermath of the Anfal, a campaign in the late 1980s by Iraq’s then-leader Saddam Hussein to crush a Kurdish uprising. It left at least 100,000 dead, destroyed 4,000 villages and created 1m refugees.

Since the American-led invasion in 2003 Iraqi Kurds have rebuilt villages, raised GDP per person tenfold, maintained law and order and turned the peshmerga into a formidable army. Daily blackouts may plague Baghdad, but the KRG exports surplus power to adjacent Iraqi towns. Divided at home, the Kurds have united to deal successfully with the federal government, securing good terms in the 2005 constitution and high office in the capital. [....]

So long as most of Iraq’s oil output came from the south, and so long as it controlled export pipelines, Baghdad held the upper hand. But Kurdistan turns out to have a lot of oil. [JW: Under Saddam Hussein, of course, Kurdistan's oil reserves were a curse, not a blessing--helping to motivate savage repression by the Ba'athist regime, ethnic cleansing and forced Arabization in the oil-rich area around Kirkuk, etc.] [....] Squabbles with Baghdad have led to repeated shutdowns of the main pipeline to Turkey, but growing volumes go by tanker truck, solidifying a budding Kurdish-Turkish alliance that would have shocked both peoples only a few years ago. [....]

Another straw in the wind:  In March I happened to notice a piece in the Washington Post, written by someone who headed an interdenominational religious delegation visiting Iraqi Kurdistan, which was willing to declare unequivocally that Kurdistan has been “an Iraqi success story“.

There are actually at least two Iraqs. Because it continues to make headlines, most Americans are familiar only with the southern region and its capital city, Baghdad. The northern region is rarely in the news. By every measure, it is a success story.

And—this is significant—not just for the Muslim majority.

Iraqi Kurdistan has been an autonomous region since 1991, when the United States and its allies in the first Gulf War declared the “Northern No-Fly Zone.” The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has used that security shield to create one of the few safe harbors for religious freedom and pluralism in the Middle East. Remarkably, this liberty extends beyond simple freedom of worship. The KRG has rebuilt seminaries and churches, supported church-related schools and welcomed Christian refugees from southern Iraq and Syria.

This is an impressive achievement in a region with a tragic past and an uncertain future. [JW: Elsewhere in the Middle East, the remaining Christian minorities are almost all shrinking or disappearing, and are often subject to violent persecution.]

Of course, there are a lot of things wrong with Iraqi Kurdistan.  By Scandinavian standards it doesn’t measure up very well on a lot of social, economic, or political criteria.  But by Middle Eastern standards, which are more appropriate, it looks pretty good in terms of both present conditions and plausible prospects. And in assessing the overall consequences of the 2003 Iraq war, those outcomes should also count in the balance.

=> Again, this post doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive retrospective assessment of the 2003 Iraq war and its significance.  The relevant issues are sprawling and complex (and the ones I’ve mentioned above are only part of the Big Picture), so I need to reflect on them a bit longer.  But in the meantime, I offer these unfashionable thoughts for people to consider. More on all of this soon, perhaps…

This post, along with descriptive maps, also appears in Jeff Weintraub’s Commentaries and Controversies.

Last week, Adam Michnik returned to The New School and gave a provocative lecture, “After the Election of Pope Francis: What Paths for the Catholic Church?” In his talk, more about the Church and democracy in Poland than about events in Rome and the Catholic Church as a whole, the renowned Polish intellectual highlighted the two different paths taken by the Church in current public debates: the increasingly popular fundamentalist approach, termed “Integralism,” resistant to the recommendations of openness formulated at the Second Vatican Council, and the marginalized liberal approach, termed “Progressivist,” adopted by the liberal-oriented Catholics. Michnik worried that Pope Francis would be on the wrong side of this debate, or on the sidelines, given his ambiguous at best relationship with dictatorship in Argentina. The talk addressed pressing issues in Poland. Michnik, as usual, was bold in his presentation. It has broad implications beyond Polish borders, which I appreciate. Yet, I also have a question. For, I think Michnik misses a crucial point, concerning Poland, and also concerning the Pope and the Catholic Church and the need to address religious fundamentalism.

Michnik pointed out that the integralist and the progressivist paths emerged as part of the Catholic Church’s struggle for power to shape public debate in post-1989 democratic Poland. To his great dismay, instead of strengthening the Church’s liberal voice, open to the new issues that the newly democratic country had to face as it opened to the outside world, the Church has become dominated by simplistic conservative and nationalistic arguments, which reinforce hostile attitudes toward all that is unfamiliar or strange. As a consequence, the church has fostered a destructive divide between “us” and “them,” which cuts across Polish society. According to Michnik, a significant role in disseminating the fundamentalist message is played by “Radio Maryja” and “TV Trwam.” These media outlets, owned by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, a controversial Catholic priest often accused of promoting xenophobia and anti-Semitism, are widely popular in small towns in Poland.

Michnik did not have a simple answer to his question, “What Paths for the Catholic Church?“ His overall argument centered around the Polish Church’s reluctance to accept any form of criticism, and he expressed concern that Pope Francis, with his beautiful gestures towards the poor will not address the threat of Catholic fundamentalism in Poland and beyond.

I did not have a chance to push Michnik a bit on the role Pope Francis may play in the continuing conflict between the liberal and fundamentalist factions in the Church. It relates to a topic I am studying, popular Catholic practices in post-1989 Poland. It seems to me that Francis’s gestures towards the poor have greater potential power than Michnik recognizes. They could build a bridge between the radical claims of the Polish “integralists” and the “progressivists” in the ongoing Polish Catholic debate by crossing the divide between popular and elite opinion. The integralists present radical, one-sided and often simplistic visions of reality in which Catholicism should prevail, while the  progressivists take into account the numerous competing values found in earthly life, but the sophisticated arguments they formulate are incomprehensible to many. In other words, I would have liked to have asked Michnik if he felt that Pope Francis could create a bridge through his message of radicalism in humility.

Michnik presented the conflict as a stark clash between the liberal, open-minded intellectuals, on the one hand, and  on the other, the fundamentalists: defenders of pre-Vatican II traditions who want to see the Church as the ultimate institution, founded by God, superior to secular life. In this context, the opinions and gestures of the new pope which emphasize humility instead of rapacity—including the desire of the Church to monopolize the discussion on values—seem particularly important, as they fall in right in the middle of the conflict in the Catholic Church in Poland.

The increasingly marginalized Polish “progressivists” described by Michnik, are intellectuals. I believe this very fact alienates them from popular debate dominated by the “integralist” approach. For many Catholics progressivists’ discussions are not intelligible, too subtle and too boring. The intellectuals speak over the heads of many. Yet many Catholics turn to the Church to give them clear definitions of the meaning of the surrounding world. The “integralists,” on the other hand, present a clear, one-sided vision of an age-old Polish-Catholic unity, which has to be protected in a dangerous, secularizing reality that lacks moral values. Michnik hinted that this propagated, imagined vision not only is a tool of maintaining power in the Polish political debate; what is more, this particular vision seems better suited to an authoritarian, rather than a democratic, regime.

Pope Francis does not look like a “progressivist,” but his call for a poor Church may hurt the Polish fundamentalist vision of the Church, whose opulence and unquestionable power in society is presented as justified by tradition (and God). The Pope’s simple message may be heard by the many traditionalist Polish Catholics uninterested in intellectual discussions, but who nonetheless are troubled by the Polish Church’s increasingly visible deadly sins of pride and greed. “Let us never forget that authentic power is service,” the Pope said in his homily. But will this message come through? And does this “service” include open discussion on the contemporary role of the Church, not limited to the hermetic debates of intellectuals and one-sided claims of the traditionalists?

Before the peace process, during the peace process, and after the peace process appears to have collapsed, the conflict between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians has persisted. Try as the principals may to imagine a solution, often with considerable agreement about its basic contours, as was envisioned in the Geneva Accord, there seems to be no way to get from here to there, no alternative to the injustice of the way things are, no exit.

It is within this maze that we respond to the latest news: the surprising results of an election, in which the ruling party has been humbled, and once again a centrist party has emerged from nowhere, followed by Obama giving a moving speech on his first official visit to Israel, also once again, one of his best. The more things change, the more they stay the same?

It does indeed seem that nothing changes. I, thus, especially appreciate how Deliberately Considered contributors, Michael Weinman, Hilla Dayan and Nahed Habiballah have pushed themselves to provide independent critical perspective (see here , here, and here). Though they hold different positions, I am struck more by their common sensibility, their pursuit of the normal as a realistic though perhaps utopian project. Their differences are marked, but of less significance. I think that perhaps it is their common sensibility that might be the basis for common political thinking and acting against despair.

Weinman observed the most positive side of the election. He doesn’t approve of “the winner,” Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid (“there is a future”) Party, but he thinks there was hope in the election results, a suggestion of a possible future:

“Let me be clear: I am no fan of Lapid, I wouldn’t have voted for him in January had I had the chance, and I haven’t liked him on Facebook, either. But I do recognize that he represented and represents the hope of many young and youngish people that Israel can be ‘a normal country.’”

This may be clear to Dayan, but she takes exception. On my Facebook page, she noted; “my biggest disagreement with Michael Weinman is that I do not believe Israel could ever ‘go back’ to being a normal liberal democracy, since it never was. From it’s inception it had the twin pillars of democracy and dictatorship…” For her the election was profoundly disheartening. The radical promise of the Israeli protests of 2011 was lost:

“The summer of 2011 was a moment when hundreds of thousands poured to the streets to demonstrate against … Israel’s business oligarchy. This seemed to have the potential to lead to an even broader, more threatening mobilization against the existing order. It didn’t happen. No serious opposition to the reign of the neoliberal hawkish right emerged from this outburst. The 2011 protest did not generate any visible crack in the tectonic structures of Israeli politics.”

Dayan demonstrates in her post how political freedom and repression are the two sides of the Israeli polity. “The irrelevance of the occupation to the Israeli voter in these free and democratic elections must be understood as being painstakingly manufactured. The occupation grinds on as if taking place in an unrelated, autonomous universe.”

This is harsh stuff, so harsh that I misunderstood it. I read Dayan’s post as implicitly supporting a one state solution as the only way out. But she corrected me: “I am not for ‘one state’ but for democratisation, in whatever form (be it federal, bi-national, power sharing, what have you).” A wise position: I fully agree, and I imagine so would Weinman.

Habiballah might also, although her view of the conflict comes from a very different place, as she put it in her title, it is “from both sides of the wall” and really up close and quite personal. She views Israeli politics as a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, living in Amman, visiting her parents home bi-weekly, just on the wrong side of the Wall (very much a wall and not as it is sometimes euphemistically called by apologists as a separation fence), a wall and separation that has fundamentally disrupted the normality of her life as she precisely describes. As she moves from her present residence to visit family, and as she thinks about her family home cut off from Jerusalem and her native grounds in the Nazareth area, she is constrained, with her dignity compromised each way she turns.

Habiballah on the elections:

“Palestinians living in Israel might have been perceived by many during the election period as apathetic, but I think what could be more appropriate is a state of alert. They have lost confidence in the democratic nature of the state. This feeling is strengthened with proposing new laws by government officials and sometimes passing such laws in the Knesset (such as the law of allegiance which requires all citizens to pledge allegiance to the state as a Jewish one). This result is the further alienation of Palestinians living in Israel from the rest of the society and jeopardizes their right to exist in their home country.”

Living with dignity in ones home country, (Habiballah), seeking democracy by any means possible: one state, two states, federated states or anything else (Dayan), living a decent middle class life, the aspiration of the typical Lapid voter, “Riki Cohen,” the Israeli Jane Doe (Weinman), but also the aspiration of the typical Palestinian who wants to securely be at home in her own land (Habiballah), these are struggles for normality. This is the common sensibility that cuts across the Palestine – Israel divide.

Sometimes the normal appears as the utopian. This is when it is of critical importance, something I came to know in Central Europe in the good old bad days of the Soviet empire. I think an open publicly shared commitment to and struggle for this utopia, among Palestinians and Israelis, is the precondition of a “Peace Writ Small,” perhaps the only way out of the maze.

Suspecting that Michael, Hilla and Nahed don’t see themselves as holding a common view, particularly as I have suggested it, I look forward to their responses.

As my partner and I were taking what has become our routine journey (twice a month) from my parents’ home in Al-Ram (between Jerusalem and Ramallah) to the Sheikh Hussein Bridge heading for Amman-Jordan, he raised an interesting question. Noting that the State of Israel has devoted so much energy and resources to “protect” itself through occupation, the separation wall and check points, he wondered whether Israelis foresee a solution, or do they believe that the current situation is a final solution? Our bi-weekly trip to the bridge provides the context for this question.

My parents’ home is on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which under normal circumstances could have been a natural expansion of Jerusalem. It could have been a desirable suburb in a normal setting, as it has access to the northern exit, making a northern trip swift. This was a plus when my father decided to buy that plot of land, as he is originally from the Nazareth area, and we used to make the trip up north almost weekly to visit family.

With the continuing Palestinian Israeli conflict and the resulting decision by the Israeli government to build the wall, Al-Ram neighborhood was one of the areas that suffered. To make matters worse, the State of Israel has an Industrial zone (“Atarot”) opposite our neighborhood, which means that they needed access to it. As a result the “Wall” was erected in the middle of the street dividing it into two parallel streets and declaring one side of it as Israeli and part of Jerusalem while the other side as Area B. (Area B: The Oslo II Accord of Sep. 28th 1995 has created three “temporary” distinct administrative divisions of the Palestinian territories thus creating what have become areas A, B and C. According to Oslo Accord, Area B is Israeli controlled but administered by Palestinian Authority.)

This arrangement meant that we no longer have the convenient access of the northern route and now in order to leave our neighborhood and reach Jerusalem, we have two options. The first is Qalandya checkpoint, the main checkpoint that separates Ramallah from Jerusalem; this means killing plenty of time (delay on a good day is at least half an hour and reaches up to a few hours) each day as this checkpoint is always congested. It also means exposure to utter humiliation, as one is physically faced by the formula of ruled and ruler, occupied and occupier, the powerful and the weak, oppressor and oppressed. The Israeli Member of Knesset Adi Kol got a taste of this humiliation recently when passing through Qalandya checkpoint.

This confrontation on the checkpoint is utterly debilitating for Palestinians as it has become a norm and one must abide by the rules (stop at the white line, do as is asked…) or else the experience might get worse, or the time that it takes could be prolonged. It should be noted that this checkpoint is used mainly by Palestinians Jerusalemites holding an Israeli residency cards and drive Israeli cars, or Palestinians with permits to enter Israel.

The second route is via the settlement road. Such roads scattered throughout the West Bank connect West Bank settlements with Israel. Palestinians with the proper Identity cards are allowed to use those roads. At the connecting points between the settlements road and Israeli roads (those that are located in Israel proper) there are checkpoints, which ensure that Palestinians of the west Bank do not use Israeli roads.

The “Hizma” checkpoint which is on the northeast part of Jerusalem is a more forgiving one since most who take it are Jewish settlers. It is, thus, smoother. The trip is longer, but usually faster, becuase the checkpoint authorities are more lenient since most of the travelers are Israeli settlers. Unlike the Qalandya checkpoint, not all cars are stopped for inspection, only suspected Palestinians are usually stopped (women with Muslim headscarves or Men who look “Palestinian”).

Luckily, we are almost never stopped at this checkpoint, Yet, each time I pass, I dispair, knowing I was able to cross because I have hidden my identity (in the sense of the term used in its shallow and crude form; in other words as categorized by others or in its stereotypical form).

As we leave Jerusalem and head north through Highway 6, we are driving along Palestinian cities of the West Bank, such as Qalqilya and Tulakrm. The wall separates the Palestinian and Israeli areas and from the Israeli side the wall looks like a fence (nice looking walls with colorful facades with flower bushes and trees adorning its side).

So many Israelis drive through this road and probably only a minority think what the wall means to the lives of the Palestinians on the other side; they probably prefer to think that it is only a line that separates the Israeli side from the Palestinian while in fact the wall is wrapped around areas to enclose, isolate and separate one Palestinian area from the other.

For many Israelis the issue with the Palestinians is only one factor of state policy and of what the State of Israel is; true it is occupying another people, but in Israel proper the State stands on the pillars of democracy and equality. They may recognize a small minority who is non-Jewish and is affected with some inequality procedures, judging this, though as only a minor matter.

Being in the country from February till now is difficult for someone who is not an Israeli-Jew; first came the elections, which are constant reminders of how Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship are irrelevant to the State and its democratic mechanisms. Many Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship have surrendered to the fact that their voice in elections do not count because even for leftist parties a coalition with Arab parties is not an option. Especially now as we are witnessing a move to the right in Israeli politics, Palestinian parties have to accept being in the opposition, a role they are accustomed to take. This means permanent marginalization, and the marginalization of those who have elected them.

This year’s election was not that different from previous ones. It is true that now we have Yair Lapid’s new party emerging as second with 19 seats, which promoted itself as an advocate of “Social Justice.” Many perceive the party’s success as a response to the massive protests of summer 2011. It is true many of his campaign slogans had a social tint to them and catered for the majority of the citizens of the State (Middle Class) such as “Our children will be able to buy apartments” and “we will pay less for electricity and water.” Yet, without ambiguity Yair Lapid and his party advocate a Jewish State and of Jerusalem undivided as the capitals of that state.

It is interesting to see how the political map has changed in the past two decades; now the Jewishness of the State of Israel is perceived as a right. Most Israelis do not question what this means and how or whether it can work with the democratic nature of the state. It is also interesting to see how the Palestinian issue has become an external problem; the same as Israel’s relation with its other neighbors, but not as one that is intricately embedded in the state’s very nature.

The Palestinians living in Israel will never be fully-fledged citizens of the State of Israel and it is for this reason that I hesitate to put a hyphen between Palestinian and Israeli. The Palestinians living in Israel have been diluted into Arab-Israelis as if they are brought from the different parts of the Arab world and do not have their own culture and identity which was only some decades ago a part of the whole Palestinian culture and identity. Even though many have accepted this categorization in order to integrate within Israeli society, the matter of the fact is that they are not and cannot be a part of the Israeli society. The election, the recent holidays Yom Hazikaron “remembrance day,” Yom Ha’atzmaot “Independence day” are constant reminders that Palestinians in Israel are at best a nuisance or at worst a threat. Palestinians and Israeli Jews live parallel lives within the state; sometimes the paths of an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Israeli intersect at work, in a restaurant, on the street, but they do not share a healthy social environment.

Palestinians living in Israel might have been perceived by many during the election period as apathetic, but I think what could be more appropriate is a state of alert. They have lost confidence in the democratic nature of the state. This feeling is strengthened with proposing new laws by government officials and sometimes passing such laws in the Knesset (such as the law of allegiance which requires all citizens to pledge allegiance to the state as a Jewish one). This results in further alienation of Palestinians living in Israel from the rest of the society and jeopardizes their right to exist in their home country.

As we learned from history, totalitarian regimes provide their citizens with limited horizon, with an impotence to see alternatives to the status quo, and they constantly affirm that the government knows best. As a result, citizens usually succumb to the State apparatus and focus on their own business. I am not saying that Israel is a totalitarian country, but its recent transformation should worry all of its citizens. The rights of Palestinians are infringed upon constantly, and recent developments should worry women, secularist and whoever cherishes the democratic nature of the state.