We asked where the White House had succeeded or failed—on questions from the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Iranian nuclear program, from U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the region’s rising powers, like Turkey and Qatar.

Here’s the second batch. Read more—including Elliott Abrams and Robert Malley—in yesterday’s post.

‘Cairo: Part II’
Lokman Slim is a Lebanese publisher, filmmaker, and activist:

For those who benefited unequivocally from the previous administration’s Middle East policy, the ripples of uncertainty created by Obama’s pledges of a messianic “new start” were felt well before his inauguration, and even before his election to office. The dilemma President Obama would face was clear: how to prioritize salvaging the successes versus creating a changed image of America in the Muslim world. Although the Cairo speech of June 4 last year showed all the willingness to favor the second, it’s not clear that the speech’s recipients reacted to it as was expected. This lack of enthusiasm draws, partially, the limits of the all-out engagement policy.

Despite great sacrifices and numerous blunders made by the United States under his predecessor, Obama must face squarely the reality that from Lebanon to Iraq to Afghanistan a return to the status quo ante is neither possible nor desirable. Obama too eagerly lowered the flag of democracy in order to raise the flag of engagement. And while the former may have become viewed as a euphemism for military intervention, the latter has quickly become a euphemism for giving up. At the level of policy and diplomacy, this confusion must be erased—especially vis-à-vis those who continue to struggle for change.

We heard rumors in Beirut that a follow-up address focusing on political reform was in the pipeline—but this was never delivered. It’s high time for a Cairo: Part II.

‘A Zero-Sum Game’
Martin Kramer is the Wexler-Fromer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem:

“Power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.” Thus spoke Barack Obama to the U.N. General Assembly last September. This must rank with George W. Bush’s “bring ’em on” as an invitation to America’s adversaries to defy it. Bush later expressed regret that he said his words, noting that “in certain parts of the world they were misinterpreted.” Obama likewise may rue having spoken his.

In the Middle East, power is a zero-sum game, domination by a benevolent hegemon creates order, and the regional balance of power is the foundation of peace. It’s the pax Americana, and while it may be stressful to uphold it, the alternative is more stressful still. And as the impression of American power wanes, we are getting a foretaste of “post-American” disorder. A struggle has begun among the middle powers—Iran, Turkey, and Israel—to fill the vacuum. Iran floods Lebanon with rockets, Turkey sends a flotilla to Gaza, Israel sends an assassination squad to Dubai—these are all the signs of an accelerating regional cold war. Each middle power seeks to demonstrate its reach, around, above, and behind the fading superpower.

The response in Washington is to huff and puff, imposing settlement “freezes” and “crippling” sanctions. This is the illusion of power, not its substance. The Obama Administration is bringing the United States out of the Middle East, to a position from which it believes it can “contain” threats with diplomacy, deterrence, and drones. As the United States decamps, its allies will feel insecure, its enemies emboldened. The Middle East’s stress test has begun.

‘Less Political Capital’
Jacob Weisberg is the chairman of the Slate Group and the author of The Bush Tragedy:

Obama made the classic mistake of being optimistic about the Arab-Israeli conflict. He assumed that his predecessors hadn’t tried hard enough, or had gotten it wrong, and that his personal intervention could make the difference. What Obama failed to appreciate is how much the odds are stacked against any U.S. president changing the fundamental realities of the Middle East. If the conflict can’t be resolved—and for the time being, I don’t think it can be—it’s wise to avoid investing political capital in the issue.

Presidents have a tendency to do the opposite of what their predecessors do. Because George W. Bush had stepped away from the peace process, Obama was inclined to step into it. American presidents do need to keep up a certain level of pressure on both sides, both as a show of good faith throughout the region and because someday there may be a deal to be had. But my sense is that Obama let his enthusiasm about reversing Bush’s broken policies delude him into thinking he could fix something he couldn’t.

Sadly, the Arab-Israeli conflict has seldom looked more intractable. I think Obama has been very frustrated with the Netanyahu government, as are most sensible people. He has not been able to get significant concessions from Netanyahu on the settlements, an issue where he is completely right and the right is completely wrong. On the Arab side, Obama has also been unable to get any meaningful concessions from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Hamas, or Hezbollah. He can’t even get the conversation started, let alone broker a deal.

Obama quickly developed a reputation for being unfriendly to Israel, which is wrong and unfair. Israelis make assumptions about Obama’s political views that aren’t correct—that because he has Muslim family connections he must be instinctively anti-Israel. Or they associated him with the views of other African-American politicians, like Jesse Jackson. That view gets transmitted to American Jews, some of whom share the same prejudices. The perception that he’s not an instinctive friend of Israel has hurt him politically, and it’s hard to undo. In fact, I think Obama holds mainstream Democratic Party views about Israel—he is a reflexive friend and ally who is hostile to Netanyahu because Netanhayu doesn’t truly accept the idea of a two-state solution.

While I don’t think Obama is likely to walk away from the peace process or give up, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him de-prioritize it. If he could point to a success and say, for instance, that he got a settlement freeze from Netanyahu, he might be more willing to take additional political risk. As it is, he got nothing and made himself look bad with a very important political constituency, American Jews. Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod certainly appreciate this. If he learned anything from his initial experience with the issue, the president will invest less political capital in it going forward. (As told to Lee Smith.)

‘Grand Bargain’
Ramin Ahmadi is a founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center and has trained young Iranians in nonviolence workshops for a decade:

The debate over Obama’s Iran policy is between those on one hand who insist that the president has not given enough support to the Green Revolution and, on the other hand, those, mostly affiliated with Washington’s Iran lobby, who have blamed the president for not moving fast enough to normalize relations and secure a Grand Bargain. This argument reflects the fact that the Obama Administration lacks a coherent Iran policy.

In its early days, the administration appeared convinced that the Iranian regime was stable and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had the support of a majority of Iranians. Therefore, the only rational approach would be to pursue a Grand Bargain, involving a nuclear compromise in return for economic assistance and legitimacy for the thugs in Tehran. But if Washington’s Iran lobby had worked so hard on formulating this Grand Bargain, how was it then that Tehran seemed mostly uninterested?

Then came the thunder. The White House never saw Iran as a country on the verge of a great democratic upsurge, and Iran’s nonviolent Green Revolution shook the administration in Washington even more than the regime in Tehran. The Obama team had to reassess its understanding of the country. The administration had looked at Iran’s democratic revolution as an inconvenience, and yet it didn’t seem wise to make concessions to an appalling regime that was falling apart. The Green Revolution is a powerful display of “people’s power,” and yet it has not toppled the regime after a full year, effectively putting all the possible rapprochement initiatives on hold. It exposed the brutality and corruption of the regime in Tehran and the lack of a cohesive Iran policy here in Washington. It took Obama some time to voice any support for the Green Revolution and when he finally did, it was too little too late.

This is the second in a two-part series. Read part one.

It was the morning of May 22, 2000, when Israel’s 22-year presence in southern Lebanon was disintegrating before our eyes. Even more staggering was the fact that there wasn’t anything we could do about it. Within 48 hours, the previously unchallenged Israeli control of southern Lebanon had fallen apart. The Israeli-installed South Lebanon Army, Israel’s proxy that bore the brunt of the fighting against Hezbollah in the security zone for two decades, was withering away. One by one, almost every garrison in every sector was either being abandoned or evacuated. Without time to do anything but react, the Israeli army and government, which had always been firmly in control, suddenly found themselves helpless.

At a time when the United States is facing challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan in anticipation of eventual pullouts, the tenth anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon this week teaches us one very important lesson: how not to withdraw in the Middle East.

***

From the moment Ehud Barak became prime minister in May 1999, it had become clear that he intended to keep his campaign pledge to withdraw from Lebanon within a year. But he needed the army’s help to do so. “I need the time to reach an agreement,” Barak told senior officers in a meeting in early 2000, “and you will have to do your best to prevent a forced withdrawal.” As Moshe “Chico” Tamir, one of the top commanders in Lebanon, later wrote in his memoir, Undeclared War, the proposed mixed policy revolved around the flawed assumption that the fighting could go on as if there was no withdrawal while preparations for withdrawal would continue as if there was no fighting.

In response to this policy, brainstorming conferences were convened and meticulous plans drawn up. Orders were handed down in late April to begin executing a gradual withdrawal. Barak, who was pursuing peace negotiations with Syria at the time, had hoped that by summer an agreement could be reached that would facilitate a coordinated pullback.

Codenamed “Morning Twilight,” the initial plan called for an intensive though clandestine evacuation of non-essential equipment—ranging from kitchen utensils to workout treadmills—from forward Israeli garrisons in anticipation of transferring those garrisons to the SLA. But as often happens in war, the more elaborate the plans were the more worthless they would eventually become. Once the SLA got a whiff of what was happening, the only thing the IDF could do with the mountains of battle plans already disseminated was to throw them in the trash.

After a particularly deadly period of fighting against Hezbollah in the spring of 2000, the SLA, the weakest link in the IDF’s defense strategy, sensed that Israel’s days there were numbered and began to come apart. On the morning of May 22, hundreds of villagers carrying Hezbollah flags set out to march from Kantara to the nearby town of Taibe. Once there, they continued toward the heavily fortified garrison at the town’s outskirts, which only weeks earlier had been transferred from Israel to the SLA as part of its gradual withdrawal. The SLA troops didn’t even bother to resist; they fled, thereby enabling Hezbollah to achieve through non-violent measures what they had never been able to do through fighting: take an Israeli garrison.

Ironically enough, the storming of Taibe—with flags, not guns—set in motion a series of events that within 48 hours created a completely new reality on the ground. One by one, SLA units began to evacuate their outposts, with Hezbollah and its hordes of supporters storming in to take their place and instantly coloring the reoccupied garrisons in Hezbollah’s yellow-and-black flags. The IDF decided that evening to evacuate its western command located in the village of Bint-Jbeil. From there, things only got worse.

At daybreak on May 23, the decision to withdraw had finally filtered down through the ranks. A mere 24 hours after the SLA had begun to dissolve, IDF brass decided that without their presence, the security zone was unmanageable; there was only one logical solution left: a complete and unilateral withdrawal of all Israeli forces, to be implemented that night. So unexpected had the decision been that even top commanders like Tamir, who oversaw the entire eastern sector, had actually suggested their subordinates go on leave just days before, in preparation for a withdrawal they assumed was weeks—not hours—away.

Even to a young, low-ranking officer like me, serving in one of the infantry battalions in the western sector at the time, it had become obvious that something strange was in the air. Evacuations naturally carry a scent of panic with them, and this case was no different. Dozens of trucks and tank transporters were gradually amassing near the border, clogging the main roads. The arrival of media hounds and a couple of enterprising snack trucks (an army’s got to eat) further contributed to the mayhem along the border.

Speeding across the road that runs along the border between Lebanon and Israel that morning as part of a reserve rescue force, I watched as my pastoral drive took a sharp turn toward surrealism. On the northern side of the border, it seemed like the Wild West had come alive: Mushroom clouds covered the rolling hills of southern Lebanon, and roaring shell bursts sporadically rocked the air as Israeli jetfighters and artillery barrages methodically demolished the recently abandoned SLA outposts.

The scenes at the border crossings were especially heart-wrenching: Scores of SLA soldiers and their families waited, patiently though anxiously, to enter Israel. Knowing it was a matter of time before Hezbollah would purge their villages of former collaborators, the loyal SLA soldiers, who only a few days before had been the unchallenged sovereigns of the region, had overnight become refugees with barely enough time to gather what was left of their lives and make their way to the border. It was there that I witnessed a timeless portrait: an army on the run, its soldiers with knapsacked kids in one hand and an AK-47 in another, flanked by wives holding Persian rugs and by old relatives carrying the coffee table.

The scenes would get even wilder as the day went on. Hovering just across the border, not far from kibbutz Zarit (where the two reserve soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were kidnapped six years later), a pair of Cobra helicopters could be seen unloading their anti-tank canons on a couple of beat-up civilian vehicles that had been trying to make their way up the road to the nearby Israeli garrison of Karkom. As it turned out, a few overzealous Hezbollah supporters, mistakenly thinking the outpost had already been abandoned, tried to occupy it. Unfortunately for them—and by any measure it was an unfortunate scene—not much was left of either cars or people once the Cobras’ guns fell silent.

At nightfall, all seven remaining garrisons within the security zone were successfully evacuated. Only a few weeks before, we had been repeatedly warned by anxious intelligence officers that “Hezbollah was going to pound” us on withdrawal. But with the exception of the Beaufort, there was surprisingly little fighting. According to one assessment, Hezbollah was so caught off guard by the rapidness of the withdrawal that it didn’t have time to prepare an attack. Just after 2 a.m., as the last convoys were making their way into Israeli territory, the abandoned garrisons, like a grand fireworks display, began to go up in flames: One by one they were blown up, with Israeli jets later coming in to finish the job.

The morning after was anything but festive. Coming into a formal debriefing, Tamir responded to then-Chief of Staff Gen. Shaul Mofaz’s “good morning” with a polite rebuke: “No sir, it’s not a good morning.” Although there were no casualties that night, a considerable amount of military equipment was left behind, only to serve as valuable propaganda tools for the media-savvy Hezbollah, which didn’t waste time displaying them in front of international camera crews. Tamir’s colleague, Col. Noam Ben-Tzvi, who was also a regional commander at the time, put it even more bluntly in a recent interview: “It wasn’t a withdrawal, and it wasn’t a retreat. We ran away, pure and simple.”

***

Since those fateful 48 hours, two competing narratives have developed to explain Israel’s befuddled withdrawal. The first, which continues to register with most Israelis, considers the event an historic inevitability that remains to this day Barak’s finest hour (an interpretation that Barak himself avidly supports and promotes). In contrast, the alternative narrative that has steadily gained momentum in recent years views the withdrawal as a strategic blunder that contains the roots of all of Israel’s problems since. The Palestinians in the West Bank, it is argued, inspired by Hezbollah, were emboldened to start the second intifada; Hamas was similarly invigorated to take control of Gaza and stage the rocket attacks on southern Israel that eventually led to Israel’s “Cast Lead” offensive; Hezbollah, backed by Iran, secured the confidence to kidnap on two different occasions Israeli soldiers from Israeli territory, the latter incident in 2006 providing the casus belli for the Second Lebanon War. Even Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah seems to have adopted this latter position. Speaking last weekend to mark the anniversary, he noted that “since the south was liberated, Israel began to experience one setback after another.”

Reading the Israeli newspapers, one can see just how widespread this alternative narrative of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon has become. Writing in Haaretz, former Likud Defense Minister Moshe Arens argued that the withdrawal “was the wrong move” and caused “fundamental change in the strategic balance in the area.” Similarly, Barak’s own deputy defense minister, Ephraim Sneh, claimed that by withdrawing, Israel was sending “a message of weakness” that “we run away from places where we bleed.” Both men directly attributed an erosion of Israel’s deterrence capabilities to the legacy of the withdrawal.

While such causal deduction is certainly tenable, even if we discount the significant drop in IDF casualties since 2000 (before the withdrawal the IDF was averaging 25 deaths a year), there are two main arguments often overlooked, that help justify the withdrawal.

The first is technological. The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline Glick’s recently complained that “without the security zone, Israel had no buffer between its civilian population and Hezbollah.” Such arguments, often made, consistently ignore the changing nature of the battlefield. After all, the gradual modernization of Hezbollah’s arsenal in the 1990s refitted the organization with longer-range attack capabilities that left Israel’s defensive strategies mostly obsolete. The security zone in southern Lebanon originally constructed to prevent terrorists from infiltrating into northern Israeli towns was becoming increasingly futile in countering rocket attacks. The IDF’s failure to sufficiently silence Hezbollah’s Katyusha fire onto northern Israel during the “Grapes of Wrath” campaign in 1996 already foretold this technologically changing reality.

Furthermore, not only did the presence of Israeli soldiers within the security zone not contribute to Israel’s ability to defend its northern border—the primary objective of the IDF’s presence there in the first place—but it eventually became a tactical liability by leaving the soldiers vulnerable to ever-increasing threats by anti-tank weaponry that Hezbollah was steadily mastering (in early 2000 seven Israeli soldiers were killed within days in different incidents from coordinated missile attacks). Avigdor Kahalani, the 1973 war hero and longtime Knesset member, ignited a public firestorm when he famously remarked that the soldiers had become “sitting ducks.”

However, the most overlooked argument in favor of ending the occupation of southern Lebanon remains the most obvious one: History simply could not tolerate it anymore. Arens, like many on the right, ridicules those who believe that the occupation of Arab territories is the core of Israel’s troubles. He may be right. But what he doesn’t understand is that such thinking is not simply a tenuous left-wing fantasy but the defining rationale of post-Cold War geopolitics. Like Arens, many of those still lamenting the withdrawal from Lebanon do so because they have not made the transition into the 21st century and prefer living in the pages of a Graham Greene novel in which “our men in Lebanon” were able to acquire and retain power the old-fashioned way: through the barrel of a gun.

For the soldiers—at least for me and those around me—there wasn’t any time to really ponder the larger ramifications of the event. It is not the duty of soldiers, as Tennyson famously reminded us, “to reason why.” Instead, sensing the opportunity to take part in the making of history, we succumbed to the euphoria of the moment, with little if any concern for what the future may hold. Old men after all are the ones who make wars; young men simply have to fight them.

Shutting the gates to Lebanon on that spring morning nevertheless left a bittersweet sensation. On one hand, service in Lebanon had been a rite of passage for an entire generation of Israeli men. It was the place where one could fulfill the Spartan experience that for good or bad has long since been an integral part of Israeli life. And yet, in those final glimpses across the border, it was difficult to erase all the bad memories that had been left behind there. Hundreds of men, boys actually, had sacrificed their lives, not to mention innocence, in a war that after 22 years of legitimacy had suddenly become illegitimate, virtually overnight. By withdrawing from Lebanon without securing anything that even resembled a victory, the question that remained—and still remains—on many of our minds as the adrenaline wore off, was not whether the sacrifice had been worth it; but rather, what had been its very purpose to begin with.

***

In retrospect, it’s clear that the problem with the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon was never one of content but rather of form: It had to be completed; the question was going about it the right way. And herein also lies a valuable lesson for any future U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East.

Withdrawals can never truly be successful, because they contain within them the mark of failure. Whether it was Napoleon’s Grand Armée staggering away from Moscow or the last American chopper launching off the embassy roof in Saigon, withdrawals are a military expression of political failure. Israel’s failure to obtain a political resolution that could ensure regional stability through an organized transfer of power to a sovereign entity (such as the Lebanese government or the United Nations) was therefore by far the most crucial mistake in its 22-year military operation in Lebanon—a mistake that can be traced back to Barak’s adherence to a strict timeframe (within a year of being elected he promised to withdraw). Although such promises are beneficial for internal elections, they are self-destructive in international relations. And indeed it was this pledge that pressured the government into making decisions the army was not yet ready to execute.

Southern Lebanon descended into chaos ten years ago this week because Israel allowed events on the ground to dictate political policy and not the other way around. Setting arbitrary deadlines, some would argue, is a recipe for disaster—one that can too easily be imagined in Iraq and Afghanistan—that would result in a power vacuum from which the eventual ascension of the radicals is all but assured.

Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for Maariv.

On the afternoon before the Passover seder of 1938, Shoshana, then 18, married David Raziel. No more than two dozen people attended the wedding, a simple ceremony held in a friend’s back yard, and after David and Shoshana were wed they had lunch with their parents and checked in to a Tel Aviv hotel. They had to register under a false name: David was a wanted man.

In an interview given a few weeks before her death, Shoshana recalled that her husband spent their wedding night hunched at the hotel room’s desk, writing. He was the leader of the Etzel, also known as the Irgun, a militant group that parted ways with the main defense force of the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine to pursue more radical, and frequently more violent, paths. He lived for the struggle.

A few months later, when David was arrested by the British police, Shoshana visited him in jail. She told the warden she was Raziel’s sister. If anyone knew the rebel had a wife, Shoshana realized, she, too, would be locked up. David was eventually released and resumed his command of the Etzel. He orchestrated the bombing campaigns of several large Arab markets, killing dozens of civilians and wounding many more. He targeted British officers. The Jews, he fervently believed, were fighting for their right to survive, and they had no business holding back.

In May of 1941, David kissed Shoshana goodbye. He was off on a routine mission, he told her, and would be back in 10 days. That Shabbat, Shoshana attended a synagogue and read Parashat Emor, the same parasha we read this week.

Ten days passed, then 20. Shoshana went to look for David in a number of apartments she knew the Etzel used as hiding places. He wasn’t there. Finally, she went to see David’s parents. His mother, Bluma, had little to say. “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” she mumbled. “May His name be blessed.” With that, she ripped a small tear in Shoshana’s blouse. At 21, Shoshana was a widow. She was also a few weeks pregnant with David’s child. The boy would live for only one day.

There was little left for Shoshana to do but fight David’s last battle. He had died in Iraq, she learned, on a reconnaissance mission for the British army. As soon as England went to war with Nazi Germany, David had reached out to his former enemies; he would immediately cease all anti-British terror, he promised them, and instead enlist to help defeat Hitler. A German plane bombed his convoy. He was buried not far from where he fell, in the Al Anbar province, west of Baghdad. For more than a decade, Shoshana pressed to have his remains exhumed and brought to Israel. It took two decades for David to finally come home; in 1961, he was given a state funeral and posthumously awarded the rank of major general in the Israel Defense Forces.

Many, myself included, take issue with Raziel’s predilection for violence, as well as with many of his organization’s tactical and strategic goals. But this week, the week of Parashat Emor, let us remember him.

The haftorah might serve as a useful guide. Speaking of the priests, it enumerates the clergy’s numerous restrictions and obligations: their hair neither shaved off nor allowed to run wild, wearing linen hats and linen breaches, steering clear of the dead, the divorced, and other impure sorts.

As we read the list, we have no choice but feeling somewhat sorry for these elected few. To perform ritual, to serve as intermediaries between God and man, they are thrust into a sort of divine holding pattern, veiled from life’s grisliness and wants and preserved without blemish. It even comes down to their food: “Anything that has died of itself or is fatally wounded,” the haftorah tells us, “whether it be bird or beast, the priests may not eat.” These elevated men must snack solely on sacrificial meat, the consecrated offerings of their lowly brethren. It may not make them holy, but it makes them pure.

David Raziel was certainly not holy. The bloodshed he’d orchestrated is a matter for historians to discuss. But he was not unlike the priests his wife would have read about in synagogue the weekend, 69 years ago, that he died in Iraq. The man who spent his wedding night writing revolutionary tracts, the man who left his young wife to sift the sands of a faraway desert for valuable intelligence, the man for whom there was nothing but struggle, that man was pure. Ordinary men and women would do well to fear and question his zeal; they must, indeed, examine the consequences of his actions and try their best to find more sober, peaceful paths to achieve their goals. But they must also never lose their awe for the David Raziels of this world, the mad priests with the bloodied hands and the pure hearts. For better or for worse, they are the ones who make history hurtle by.

And so, it was perhaps not the best time for reports to emerge that Petraeus had blamed Israeli intransigence toward the Palestinians for endangering the lives of American servicemen in the Middle East—at a reported Pentagon briefing early in March and again in congressional testimony on March 16. Jewish conservatives—including Max Boot—quickly scampered to defend Obama’s top Middle East commander.

This is a grand miscalculation, I believe, on the part of the American Jewish community’s conservative wing: While the Obama Administration works to prevent Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear capacity, Jewish conservatives are battling over whether they were right in 2005, when they urged the United States to take responsibility for Iraq’s political future.

Foreign Policy blogger Mark Perry, a former adviser to Yasser Arafat, reported on March 13 that Petraeus prepared a briefing for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen warning “that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM’s mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, [and] that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region.” Before a Senate committee on March 16, Petraeus said, “Clearly the tensions on these issues [with Israel] have enormous effect on the strategic context in which we operate in the Central Command’s area of responsibility.”

Perry’s report provoked a cagey half-denial by Petraeus to The American Spectator on March 25. “There’s a 56-page document that we submitted that has a statement in it that describes various factors that influence the strategic context in which we operate and among those we listed the Mideast peace process,” the general said. “We noted in there that there was a perception at times that America sides with Israel and so forth. And I mean, that is a perception. It is there. I don’t think that’s disputable. But I think people inferred from what that said and then repeated it a couple of times and bloggers picked it up and spun it. And I think that has been unhelpful, frankly.”

Yet as the Washington Times’s Diana West observed on March 25, the paragraph supposedly taken out of context by “bloggers” says substantially what Perry and others said it did:

Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile Al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbollah and Hamas.

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League blasted Petraeus’s Senate testimony as “dangerous and counterproductive.” He added, “Whenever the Israeli-Arab conflict is made a focal point, Israel comes to be seen as the problem. If only Israel would stop settlements, if only Israel would talk with Hamas, if only Israel would make concessions on refugees, if only it would share Jerusalem, everything in the region would then fall into line.”

It is one of the stranger man-bites-dog stories in the recent history of Jewish politics in the United States: Abe Foxman, a strident liberal and erstwhile Obama supporter, denounces a Pentagon official for putting Israel on the spot, while Obama’s neoconservative detractors insist that the incident never happened. Some of Petraeus’s admirers in the conservative Jewish camp excuse his remarks on the grounds that he has no choice but to repeat the Administration’s position. That would seem to provide all the more grounds to attack him.

Of course what Petraeus actually said or didn’t say is much less damaging to both U.S. and Israeli interests than the undisputed fact that the 100,000 American troops in Iraq have been tasked with the mission of supporting a government that may soon be headed by an overt ally of Iran, Ahmad Chalabi. “We are proposing the creation of a regional alliance among Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran,” the onetime neoconservative favorite wrote in The Wall Street Journal on March 5. As Joshua Muravchik, an erstwhile Chalabi supporter, wrote in a mea culpa on the World Affairs blog, “An alliance of this kind is designed to push the United States from the region and pave the way for Iranian and/or Islamist hegemony.”

Iran has gained political ascendancy in Iraq through intensive subversion efforts. According to senior military sources cited by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on February 25, “The Iranians allegedly are pumping $9 million a month in covert aid to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a Shiite party that has the most seats in the Iraqi parliament, and $8 million a month to the militant Shiite movement headed by Moqtada al-Sadr.”

Petraeus’s opinions about the Middle East carry less weight than those of his boss, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, who has been warning against an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear capability for the past year. In a March 16, 2009, interview with Charlie Rose, Mullen said: “What I worry about in terms of an attack on Iran is, in addition to the immediate effect, the effect of the attack, it’s the unintended consequences. It’s the further destabilization in the region. It’s how they would respond. We have lots of Americans who live in that region who are under the threat envelope right now [because of the] capability that Iran has across the Gulf. So, I worry about their responses and I worry about it escalating in ways that we couldn’t predict.”

A rough translation of Mullen’s remarks into civilian political language is that the quixotic notion of building democracy in the Middle East led the United States into an Iranian trap.

“I met [Chalabi] around the time of the first Gulf war,” Joshua Muravchik recounts, “and I gave him a copy of my recently published book, Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny. When I saw him next, maybe five years later, he said: ‘I read your book, but I don’t think your government has.’ I was of course flattered and amused. And I was enchanted by this articulate man from that other-planet of Baathist Iraq who professed the very same democratic beliefs central to my worldview.”

The neoconservatives never appear to have noticed that the Iranian leadership was just as keen on building democracy in Iraq as they were. When the American occupation forces held the constitutional referendum in late 2005 that is the putative foundation of Iraqi democracy, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei hailed it as “a great and blessed job” in an October 21, 2005, sermon. “The next important step in Iraq after the referendum is the general elections on which the occupiers are planning right now,” he said. Khamenei called for a truce in the sectarian war between Shi’ites and Sunnis, intoning, “These elements [extremists] are neither Sunni nor Shi’ite but are the enemies of both and Islam.”

Iran retained the capacity to inflict high levels of casualties on the United States throughout the Iraqi democratization campaign but chose not to use it. Instead, it withdrew some of its most exposed and volatile assets, including Muqtada al-Sadr, to Iran. The Iranians counted on the fact that the Americans would soon be gone—and that their proximity, staying power, and affinity with Iraq’s Shi’ite majority would allow the Islamic Republic to emerge as the dominant player in the country.

Were the United States, or anyone else, to bomb Iran’s nuclear bomb-making capacity, Iran has the capacity to retaliate in any number of ways—suicide bombs against U.S. servicemen, Silkworm missiles aimed at tankers in the Persian Gulf, rocket fire against Israeli cities. The consequences against which Mullen warned certainly would include Jewish lives; they might include American lives as well. Bombing Iran also might expose the weakness of an unpopular regime and make its overthrow more probable. Instability might enhance rather than detract from American influence in the region provided the United States had a government that knew how to navigate it.

Unlike the neoconservatives, who persuaded themselves that the warring tribes of a country invented by British cartographers would embrace U.S.-style democracy and become strong enough to repel the political advances of their powerful neighbor, the so-called realists prepared to accommodate Iranian hegemony over what U.S. strategists had once hopefully called the Arabian Gulf. In 2004, Robert Gates, now the secretary of Defense, and former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski chaired a Council on Foreign Relations panel on the future of Iran. They concluded:

From the perspective of U.S. interests, one particular issue area appears particularly ripe for U.S.-Iranian engagement: the future of Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States has a direct and compelling interest in ensuring both countries’ security and the success of their post-conflict governments. Iran has demonstrated its ability and readiness to use its influence constructively in these two countries, but also its capacity for making trouble. The United States should work with Tehran to capitalize on Iran’s influence to advance the stability and consolidation of its neighbors.

Gates and Brzezinski also showed understanding for Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons: “Given its history and its turbulent neighborhood, Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not reflect a wholly irrational set of strategic calculations.”

This is the context in which to understand recent remarks by Mullen and Petraeus—professional soldiers handed a miserable mission by civilian authorities inspired by delusional democracy-promoting public intellectuals. They understand as well as Gates and Brzezinski did in 2004 that, given the U.S. posture in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nuclear Iran is the American exit strategy. An attack on Iran’s nuclear installations would tear down the whole Potemkin village of supposed democratization and lead to “unforeseen consequences.” The civilian leadership does not want these consequences; the public intellectuals have not begun to consider them; and in any case these consequences would lead to American casualties and ruin prominent reputations. It might be better for the world to take out Iran’s nuclear capability now—most Americans and most Israelis have told pollsters they think so—but it would not necessarily be better for Mullen.

One alternative to such nasty consequences is to encourage Iran to exercise its ambitions for regional hegemony “responsibly” and to tread lightly around its nuclear weapons program—trading the short-term appearance of stability for the prospect of a catastrophe in the medium term. This outcome was foreseeable from the beginning; the foreign policy establishment as represented by Brzezinski and Gates embraced it in 2004. “I do not believe any formal understanding is in place, but the probable outcome is that Washington will refrain from military action to forestall Iranian nuclear arms developments, while Tehran will refrain from disrupting Washington’s constitutional Potemkin Village in Iraq,” I wrote in Asia Times Online in 2005.

Meanwhile, Commentary bloggers cling to Petraeus for dear life. When the Washington Times’s Diana West dug out the noteworthy fact that Petraeus’s faculty adviser for a Princeton thesis in 1987 was Stephen Walt, of Israel Lobby fame, Max Boot shot back from his perch at Commentary, “I await West’s correction and apology for the numerous calumnies she has lodged against the most distinguished American military commander since Eisenhower.”

The Petraeus Affair has helped neutralize Jewish conservatives as a political force for the electoral season. The missteps of the Jewish right are a source of comfort to the White House. A prominent New York rabbi mused the other day that former Secretary of State James Baker said, “Screw the Jews, they don’t vote for us” while Obama says, “Screw the Jews, they’ll vote for us anyway.”

Some liberal Jewish leaders, though, are not as docile as the White House thinks they are. The ADL’s Foxman told Haaretz on March 20 that Obama’s mistreatment of Israel “might become a political football,” that is, a reason to ditch already beleaguered Democratic candidates in the November elections. “The majority of the American Jewish community is not happy with settlements,” Foxman explained. “But it also isn’t happy when the U.S. president tells the Israeli prime minister what to do. I think that in the beginning the president received advice that if you take the settlements issue public you don’t have anything to lose, because the American Jews don’t like settlements, and the Israelis as well, and this is a win-win. But the American Jews don’t like the American administration dictating to Israel what it should or shouldn’t do.”

It is clear to the mainstream Jewish leadership that they have profound differences with the Obama Administration and that they may have to choose between support for Israel’s security and their traditional liberal agenda in domestic politics. But the fight over Obama’s Israel policy will be fought out within the Jewish liberal mainstream because the politically conservative wing of the Jewish community has painted itself into a corner. There it sits, nursing its wounded reputation. The menu for the American Enterprise Institute’s dinner for Petraeus hasn’t been announced. I recommend crow.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things and writes the “Spengler” column for the Asia Times.

We don’t need to guess what exactly Petraeus thinks, because he was quite candid yesterday before a Senate committee. He disclosed that adding the territories to CENTCOM has been discussed but never formally requested. And he argued:

The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the [area of responsibility]. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.

Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hezbullah and Hamas.

In other words: Everything is connected, but Petraeus does not perceive the Palestinian conflict as having an overwhelming effect on other conflicts.

Military journalist and historian Max Boot confirms that Petraeus never made this request. Speaking to a military source, Boot reports that Petraeus really does believe what he told the committee and that he does not think the settlement question creates the U.S. military’s biggest challenges over there. “In other words,” Boot concludes, “the current crisis in Israeli-U.S. relations cannot be laid at the American military’s door.”

Is General Petraeus Behind Obama’s Dressing Down of Israel? [Contentions]
The Petraeus Briefing: Biden’s Embarassment Is Not the Whole Story [Foreign Policy]
Petraeus Throws Support to Mitchell Peace Efforts [Laura Rozen]
Earlier: Did Biden Link Israel to the Troops’ Safety?

Perry, who has lived and traveled in the Middle East for several decades, started talking to terrorists during the second intifada, when he built relationships with Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh, Abdul Azziz Rantissi, and Mahmoud al-Zahar. These contacts would eventually lead to Perry’s partnership with former British intelligence official Alastair Crooke of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, an organization that regularly meets with terrorists and arranges meetings with non-active Western policymakers and diplomats. Perry left Conflicts Forum in the wake of Iran’s June presidential election, when he and Crooke found themselves on opposing sides. “He wrote an article on the June elections that showed disregard for the demonstrators,” says Perry. “And I wrote a piece castigating the regime and showing admiration for the opposition.”

Still, Perry has not lost his enthusiasm for the Iranian regime’s violence-prone proteges, like Hezbollah. How, I asked him, can the Party of God be considered democratic if its forces overran Beirut in May 2008, when the democratically elected government made a decision that Hezbollah didn’t like? The government, explained Perry, “wanted to take away Hezbollah’s privileges, so they pushed back.” Apparently, the fact that Hezbollah members only killed a few dozen of their fellow Lebanese before handing over their positions to the Lebanese Armed Forces makes them democratic.

“I’m not a reconciliation freak,” says Perry. “I’m not a pacifist. The vulnerability of my book is that people may come away thinking that simply by talking or listening, the scales will fall from our eyes. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Sometimes, you sit down with them and you’re thinking, Holy cow—conflict is inevitable.” Still, he believes that Hamas may be willing to make a transition similar to that of the Iraqi insurgency and come to the negotiating table with Israel.

* * *

We are in the midst of a golden age of engaging with our enemies, and while the Obama administration still refuses to talk to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, the president’s key foreign policy goal is to reach out to their state sponsors, Syria and Iran. The White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan doesn’t want to talk to terrorists—not just yet, but he excitedly notes moderating influences within Hezbollah and suggests that it would be wise “to increase Hezbollah’s stake in Lebanon’s struggling democratic processes.”

Of course enthusiasm for democracy has little to do with the reasons why journalists and policymakers love talking to terrorists and their sponsors: Compared to boring democrats in suits, terrorists are hard men whose power and sex appeal issues from their willingness to use violence. Hence, they are attractive to Western media, and they know how to play the media. A famous terrorist like Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah is well aware that an interview with him is a form of currency, and he enhances the value of his interviews by granting them sparingly—and only to those who can be counted on to deliver a positive spin. It is hardly an accident that while Nasrallah has harsh words for the Jewish state, he likes to use Jews, like Seymour Hersh and Noam Chomsky, to convey his more polite-sounding messages. It’s good PR, and the attachment of Hezbollah’s Jewish messengers to their counter-ethnocentric mission makes it unlikely that they would ever risk making Nasrallah mad.

It was the conviction that there was altogether too much talking to terrorists that led some Lebanese friends and me to bring some American journalists and analysts to Beirut to speak with the other side of Lebanon’s political equation: politicians and activists who were not at present shooting at their countrymen or dragging the rest of the country to war. We had some successes, with articles placed in various U.S. media outlets, but we also came to recognize that even with the least hostile of interlocutors there are limits to the power of positive engagement.

First, we learned that it was difficult to control our message: We introduced one delegation member to Lebanese officials, journalists, intellectuals, and activists who detailed how, counter to what the delegation member believed, there was little similarity between Hezbollah and the Irish Republican Army. Still, even after a week’s worth of exposure to our arguments, he published an article contending that Hezbollah could be persuaded to put down its weapons in a process much like the one that disarmed the IRA.

We also learned that some Western reporters and analysts have such a deeply personal stake in their desire to understand “the other” that any suggestion that groups like Hezbollah might actually be motivated by a dangerous political ideology that has nothing in common with secular democratic norms is quite literally unbearable. One night at dinner, one of our hosts, an anti-Hezbollah Shia political activist, was criticizing the Party of God when a member of our delegation became anxious and annoyed. A researcher who has interviewed the leadership of other Islamist parties in the region, she snapped at our host and asked if he had “ever actually met someone from Hezbollah.” “Why yes,” replied the host, laughing. “I live in a Hezbollah neighborhood and have family members in Hezbollah, even Hezbollah martyrs.” Ideally, the messenger’s credentials would have at least persuaded her to listen to the message; instead, she got up and walked away from the table.

While the researcher in question was hardly displaying a devotion to open-minded inquiry, her behavior was founded on an undeniable truth: Talking to your enemy can be risky business. The greatest danger in talking is the possibility that you will be controlled by the other side’s message; or, if he’s yet more skillful, that your adversary will manage your perceptions to his advantage. Let’s consider Perry’s argument that the groups we should be talking to, like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iraq’s Sunni Awakening, have constituencies, believe in democracy, and play roles in governance, all of which distinguish them from al-Qaida.

Iraq’s Sunni tribes turned against al-Qaida in Iraq and made common cause with the Americans only when the foreign fighters started to spill tribal blood. Therefore, the tribal Awakening in Iraq was not an act of national resistance but a tribal reaction to interference by murderous outsiders. This distinction is hardly trivial since the Middle East is a region where national affiliation is only one among many possible types of identity, including sub-national affiliations like tribalism and supranational attachments like religion. Al-Qaida in Iraq also had a constituency, a regional and sectarian one. As long as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killing Iraqi Shia, an Al Jazeera audience approving of his bloody project confirmed that his constituency was actually quite large across the Sunni-majority Middle East. There are plenty of reasons not to talk to al-Qaida, but not because it doesn’t have a constituency.

It’s a mistake, says Perry, to see Hezbollah and Hamas as Iranian stooges, “just like we thought Ho Chi Minh received his marching orders from Moscow.” Like many American journalists and academics of a certain generation, Perry has a worldview that is shaped by the U.S. experience in Vietnam—and our adversaries are well aware of how we see the world and happy to exploit our tendency to extrapolate from past wars in parts of the world that have very little in common with the Middle East.

In intelligence work, the effort to sort through the disinformation of your adversaries is called counterintelligence. This is one of our intelligence community’s famous weaknesses, but the issue runs much deeper than the flaws of Washington bureaucracies. Americans value transparency, in part because we are incapable of sustaining any other mode for very long: We believe in the absolute divide between lies and truth, and we think that the truth is always more productive and interesting. That belief is a dangerous liability when talking to your adversaries. The Obama administration’s engagement policy is premised on the notion that diplomacy is preferable to bloodshed. However, more often than not, diplomacy in the Middle East is an instrument of warfare, one that can be used to stall, exact concessions, or confuse the other side.

Information warfare is the art of splitting your opponents on issues that you have selected for them to fight over. For instance, Perry writes, incorrectly, that, “the most serious claim leveled against Hezbollah [is] its reported ‘virulent anti-Semitism.’ ” Obviously, the most serious claim leveled against Hezbollah is that it’s a terrorist group—one whose members are responsible for the deaths of thousands, including Lebanese citizens, U.S. soldiers, and diplomats, as well as Israelis. Omitting the fact that Hezbollah is alleged to be responsible for killing 85 people in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Perry devotes several pages to a quasi-theological debate in the U.S. media about whether Hezbollah really hates Jews or not.

As far as Hezbollah is concerned, the argument over whether the organization’s desire to wipe Israel off the map is truly a form of anti-Semitism is a godsend, because it distracts the press from the actual threat that the organization poses to U.S. interests. The fruits of this rather deliberate rhetoric of distraction can be seen every day in the press, as well as in more sophisticated discussions by policymakers and analysts. Having been fed a diet of this stuff, it is no accident that the U.S. intelligence community’s dangerously inaccurate assessment of Hezbollah reads like a Conflicts Forum press release. Hezbollah, the document asserts, “which has not directly attacked US interests overseas over the past 13 years, is not now actively plotting to strike the Homeland.” What this sentence somehow elides is the obvious fact that America’s allies are our chief interests abroad; these allies include not only Israel and Lebanon, but also Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Kuwait, and Azerbeijan, all countries where active Hezbollah cells have been rolled up in the last two years. Add to this Hezbollah’s involvement in “direct” attacks on U.S. military personnel in Iraq, and we have a clear picture of an American enemy with an international reach.

Hezbollah’s anti-Semitism is not particularly important when evaluating the threat that the organization poses to U.S. interests. But Hezbollah’s well-documented hatred and fear of Jews (recently the group demanded profiling at Beirut airport for “Jewish-sounding” names) cuts to the heart of the problem of talking to terrorists regardless of their public statements and past behavior. If what your dialogue partners have said and written in the past doesn’t matter, then talking is not a method of gathering information; rather, it is a matter of personal dogma, an active affirmation of faith in the innate decency of all mankind. As theology, this is weak stuff. As a principle of American foreign policy, it defies belief.

But Mark Perry thinks otherwise. “Here we are refusing to talk to the great moderate middle in the Middle East,” Perry says of his interlocutors in Hamas and Hezbollah. “Maybe the environment isn’t right with Hamas right now; I think it is.”

Actually, it would be more accurate to say my family exploded into exile, atomizing in the process. Some members landed in Israel, some in Iran, and some in North America; my immediate kin escaped first to India and then eventually to the United Kingdom. The dynamite involved was—as is ever the story with Jews—racial hatred, which played itself out in the Iraqi political arena as an inability to resolve escalating tensions between Arab Nationalism and Zionism.

My family was far from alone in being shattered. Iraq’s entire Jewish population—a community with roots in Mesopotamia that pre-date the birth of Islam by a millennium—was unceremoniously ejected from the country between 1950 and 1951. But first the Iraqi government had “denaturalized” the Jews, effectively making them refugees in their own land and rendering them defenseless against marauding gangs eager to harm Jews in a kind of skewed quid pro quo for the displacement of Palestinian Arabs.

The improved security prevailing in Iraq over the last two years has resulted more from the increased deployment of U.S. troops known as “the surge” than from any deep rapprochement between the country’s religious and ethnic factions. Once the Americans leave, the security situation may quickly deteriorate. I am thankful that I managed to make it safely into Iraq and back home to London in 2004. At the time I was researching a memoir about my grandmother’s life in Baghdad. I felt compelled to go there, driven by a determination to visit the land of my ancestors and to find out whether any ghostly traces remained of my family’s past, or of the wider Jewish community that had so hastily departed, leaving jobs, homes, community property, and business concerns to their own uncertain fate.

I knew that Saddam Hussein had gone on a series of vengeful campaigns of property destruction in the 1970s and 1980s and that numerous synagogues had been razed. (Baghdad once boasted 65 synagogues, which were obliged by law to be less conspicuous along the city skyline than Baghdad’s mosques.) I also knew that the houses and riverside villas deserted by fleeing Jews in 1950 and 1951 had long ago been repossessed, bought on the cheap at government auctions held after liquidators had completed their inventories of frozen Jewish assets. Still, I’d heard that in the Old City one could find cigarette-shaped indentations in the doorposts of houses, to which mezuzahs, long ago pilfered for their silver, had once been nailed, and Stars of David ingeniously incorporated into a building’s brickwork: empty spaces and silent traces, hinting at prior occupancy.

I was to be disappointed in my quest for concrete evidence of Jewish habitation. The Old City is shaped like a clenched fist, with narrow streets and alleyways threading round endless turns that invariably lead you back to where you started. Along with my guide, I spent a day fruitlessly exploring; the old city was protective of its secrets. Not one mezuzah tray nor Star of David was in sight. As we hunted, I cursed my ignorance of my ancestral past and chastised myself for not interrogating elderly relatives about their lives in Baghdad when opportunity allowed. Now, of course, I see each spasm of self-reproach as a reminder of history’s propensity to slip from our grasp even as we cling to preserve it.

My day in the Old City was not entirely lost, however, in that my guide managed to locate the old, and now abandoned, Jewish Community Office on River Street, offering the Muslim caretaker a little baksheesh to smooth our way inside. We found two dusty rooms, each filled with a heap of upturned office furniture resembling a bonfire in waiting. Along the walls, bookcases with smashed glass doors housed ledger books documenting community business of various kinds. I pulled out one tattered and dusty volume, bound in peeling red leather, wanting to take a closer look, whereupon my guide explained, heartbreakingly, that the carefully scripted lists I found in its pages were logs of marriages in the community. By now the caretaker was leery of our unexplained presence and insisted that we leave.

What has since become of the ledgers and marriage registers is unclear, since current reports claim that only eight Jews are left in Iraq today, and no one else could conceivably have an interest in preserving them. When I visited in 2004, the Jews numbered 22, and none of them had visited the Community Office since a Palestinian gunman let loose a hail of bullets in the mid-1990s, killing two Jews and two Muslims before escaping into the crowded streets of the Old City.

Battered by years of persecution, followed by war, then sanctions, then more war, the Jews I found surviving in Baghdad were not the kind of people to mobilize and regroup, to insist on their rights, or to call to account the powers that be. They were anxious only to keep their heads down, so as not to attract unwanted attention, and to go about their business as quietly as possible. That business—insofar as it related to their faith—was to maintain religious observations at Baghdad’s last standing synagogue, the Meir Tweg Synagogue in Betaween, and to tend the Jewish cemetery in Sadr City, which had suffered bomb and fire damage in the fighting of 2003.

I visited both the synagogue and the cemetery when I was in Iraq. The former turned out to be a stupendously grand edifice; two stories high and occupying a full housing block; it had clearly been built to hold a substantial congregation. The central chamber, containing the ark and bimah, was hung with giant chandeliers, while thick Persian rugs lay on the pews. The ark once held the sum of Baghdad’s Torahs, each encased in carved silver, but on my visit there were only 13 scrolls left. The rest had been stolen in an impromptu raid by the secret police in the 1980s and most likely ended up among the haul of Jewish artifacts found by the allies in 2003—artifacts that had been left to languish in a sewage-filled basement at secret-police headquarters.

The cemetery was where I felt most at home in Iraq, surrounded by the silent and comforting presence of my ancestors. The brick tombs were being repaired with funds that came, circuitously, from the Jewish Agency, and their Hebrew engravings, many of which had been badly eroded, were being airbrushed, chemically fixed, and preserved. I presumed that my grandfather was likely buried there, though I quickly gave up trying to find his grave after I recalled that the Jews used to bury several bodies in vertical graves. Instead, I sat down beside an anonymous grave and wondered at the miracle that allowed a fragment of my heritage to remain.

The remaining Jews of Baghdad could not be said to constitute a community. They were merely a tiny remnant of a once-great people, and they now find themselves marooned in a sea of anti-Jewish hostility—isolated, frightened, and largely forgotten. Meeting and talking with them, I found it difficult to believe that Jewish people had joyfully thrived in Iraq. Even in the middle of the last century, when their number had fallen from an historic high of several million to just 150,000, Jews still made up one-third of the population of Baghdad.

The first half of the 20th century witnessed a Golden Age for Jews in Iraq, beginning when statehood granted them full citizenship instead of second-class, or dhimmi, status. Iraq’s Jews clamored to contribute to the country’s early political and cultural flowering. They took up seats in Parliament and advised Arab ministers. They populated the officer class in the army, served in the judiciary, and were particularly active members of Baghdad’s café society. The community produced novelists and poets who wrote in Arabic, founded literary magazines, and established intellectual salons. Iraqi Jews invented the classic musical form known as the Maqaam. They formed several orchestras. One of Iraq’s most popular singers, Selima Murad, was a Jew.

The tragedy is that, in the end, none of this history counted for anything. Up against a powerfully antagonistic political milieu, the community collapsed. The injury that compounds the tragedy is that even now Iraqis are engaged in erasing Jewish history, as if determined to pretend it never happened. Since 2003, Iraqi authorities have repeatedly promised to preserve and maintain the nation’s many Jewish shrines, including the tombs of Ezekiel, Ezra, Daniel, Nehemiah, Nahum, and Jonah. Yet nothing has been done. As for the most magnificent of these sacred sites, the carved tower that marks the tomb of Ezekiel at Al-Kifl, the Antiquities and Heritage Authority has announced that a huge mosque is to built there, and already Hebrew inscriptions and ornaments are being removed from the site as part of the “renovations.”

When I talked to Samir Shahrabani, one of Baghdad’s last Jews, he reflected soberly. “We have high tower in the desert,” he said. “Each day this tower sinks, one inch by one inch. One day we will have nothing. This is how we are.” He was talking metaphorically, of course, but in light of the plans to “renovate” the shrine of Ezekiel his words take on a sharper meaning. Today there are eight Jews left in Iraq. One day, in the not too distant future, there won’t be any.

Marina Benjamin, a journalist living in London, is the author of Last Days in Babylon, a memoir about her Iraqi grandmother and the lost Jewish community of Baghdad.

That there is currently no peace is partly a function of Israel’s unwillingness to give up the Golan Heights. But, really, blame for the enmity can probably be primarily laid at the feet of Syrian intransigence. Problem is (as I mentioned last Friday), that intransigence toward Israel has not stopped its newly important neighbor Turkey from seeking closer ties. It has not even prevented the United States from attempting to cozy up to Syria—America, which hopes to send its first ambassador to Damascus since 2005, would love a Syria that is less in Iran’s orbit and is cooperative in trying to maintain stability in neighboring Iraq as U.S. military forces withdraw.

A Haaretz correspondent notes, “Syria is a key country along a new axis being formed in the Middle East, which includes Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. The backbone of this axis is economic, security, and diplomatic cooperation that would replace the old axis of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.” A smart Israeli leader would view the region in a more classically realist way, the correspondent adds, and work extra hard to achieve peace with Syria:

Israel, which is used to examining the region through a lens that counts Hezbollah’s missiles and Hamas’ explosive barrels sent to sea, and which considers the prisoner numbers in the Gilad Shalit deal the crux of the security threat, is blind to the region’s strategic developments. The expression “we want peace,” which is void of substance, cannot even begin to express the folly and shortsightedness of Israel, which is shrugging its shoulders at a chance to reach peace with Syria, if for no other reason than to prevent a damaging blow from this new axis.

To this end, we need a statesman, not a comedian. The leader who can make Israelis understand that peace with Syria does not mean eating humus in Damascus but is an existential interest, no less important than blocking Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Peace With Syria As Vital As Stopping Iran’s Bomb [Haaretz]

Earlier: Israel and Syria In Crisis

Meanwhile, half a world away, the invaluable contents of the Iraqi Jewish Archive, recovered by U.S. troops in May 2003 from a flooded basement, are in storage near Washington, D.C. The Iraqi government wants them back, and it is worth pausing on what the head of the country’s national archives had to say in response to concerns that Iraq’s Jewish artifacts do not belong in a country with maybe a dozen Jews left in it: “Iraqis must know that we are a diverse people,” he said, “with different traditions, different religions, and we need to accept this diversity.”

Erasing Ezekiel’s Jewish Identity [JPost]
Iraq Urges U.S. to Give Back Iraqi Jewish Archive [AP/Haaretz]

We will leave the final word here to Bob Dylan and his 1983 song “Neighborhood Bully,” which, as Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg has noted, was penned in response to the international outcry that followed the Osirak raid:

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized,
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad.
He’s the neighborhood bully.

‘Israel Must Compensate Iraq For Osirak’ [JPost]

Related: Subterranean Homesick Blues [Jewcy]

After repackaging the new undershirts, old New Yorkers, phone cards, Speed Sticks, DVDs, and extra flight suits, I spotted the siddur. It’s small enough to fit into the palm of my hand. The black leatherette cover is stamped in gold and reads, in Hebrew and English:

PRAYER BOOK

FOR JEWISH PERSONNEL

IN THE ARMED FORCES

OF THE UNITED STATES

I’ve seen the siddur before; it was shipped to Scott during his last tour by the Jewish Welfare Board’s Jewish Chaplains Council, which certifies Jewish chaplains and lay leaders and looks after Jewish servicemembers. The irony of shipping a Hebrew prayerbook to Iraq right before the High Holidays did not escape me. I’ve read several features about Jewish personnel celebrating religious festivals at bases throughout the Middle East since this war began, and there is sometimes a whiff of triumphalism in these tales. It’s almost as if, these accounts suggest, by wrapping tefillin in Kabul, or reading the Torah in Basra, American Jews are reclaiming something that was taken from us. I understand the excitement, and am grateful that Jews in Muslim countries can gather as Jews—this after a long history of treatment as second-class citizens before being stripped of their possessions in 1948 and abruptly expelled from many of these countries.

But for me, sending my husband a siddur was simply sad. It wasn’t a triumph but a tragedy that he was going to be away from me, our six-year-old son, and our four-year-old daughter for more than a year. And yet I was glad he thought to include the siddur, if it brought him solace. It also comforted me to know that several Jewish organizations already had his new mailing address. We’ve marked many Rosh Hashanahs and Yom Kippurs apart (along with countless other holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries), but the Jewish Chaplains Council has sent him everything from dried apples and honey sticks to Hanukkah gelt to chocolate-covered matzoh; the Aleph Institute, a Lubavitch organization that serves Jewish military personnel and prisoners (no kidding), also shipped generous Sabbath and holiday packages.

After my memoir about being a military wife was published last spring, I received dozens of emails from individuals asking how they can send even more holiday cards and packages to Jewish troops. Our story was warmly received, especially by those whose relatives served the nation in earlier wars. We seemed to confirm their hope that a younger generation of Jews continues to contribute to the country that made our success (and successful assimilation) possible.

Exact numbers on Jews in the military are hard to come by, because the military does not routinely report statistics on service members’ religious practices, and discrepancies exist among the organizations that do keep track. According to rough Defense Department estimates, there are currently 4,000 Jews in all of the services combined. A recent Military Times poll found that Jews comprise about one percent of active-duty military members, and just over two percent of the National Guard and Reserves. The director of the JWB Jewish Chaplains Council, Rabbi Harold L. Robinson, a retired Navy Admiral, points out that these figures don’t add up. (He believes it is likely that Jews under-report to DoD authorities and that many see Judaism as an ethnic identity rather than a religious identity.)

By contrast, during World War II, when the draft was in place, self-identified Jewish military members served at rates consistent with their ratio to the total population—around 3.5 percent of the total Armed Forces during that conflict, with numbers reaching 550,000. Institutional support was also much higher: 311 Jewish chaplains served on active duty during World War II. (“I enlisted immediately after Pearl Harbor,” wrote Rabbi Judah Nadich, the first Jewish chaplain to serve in the European theater. “At that time, I was a rabbi in Chicago, and I thought, if a rabbi should not be in the war, then who should?” ) Today, only 20 Jewish chaplains have answered the call to active duty, and almost 40 more serve through the Reserves or National Guard. This is of grave concern to the Jewish chaplains corps, and only partly because fewer chaplains means that the spiritual needs of fewer Jews can be served. Just as worrisome is the idea that in the future there may not be high-enough ranking Jewish chaplains who can suggest military policies that take into account the sensitivities of Jewish personnel.

Thinking about Jews in the American military reminded me of another siddur, which I unpacked earlier this summer following our cross-country move. It is bound in brown leather, and states, in black block letters (no Hebrew):

ABRIDGED PRAYER BOOK

FOR

JEWS IN THE ARMY AND NAVY

OF THE

UNITED STATES

Its copyright—Jewish Publication Society, 1917—tells only part of the story of its origin. We’re not sure how it came into our family, though Scott and I both suspect it may have belonged to a great uncle who served in World War II. It omits much that the newer edition of the siddur incorporates, but what it includes is far more telling. The current edition, for example, has the standard personal prayers, some of which are relevant to the military. There’s the the “Prayer for Moral Strength,” “Prayer on Starting a Journey,” “Memorial Prayer for Servicemen,” and “Prayer for Our Country,” along with extensive services, blessings, psalms, and hymns. The older siddur, however, includes “Confession on a Death Bed,” “Memorial Prayer for Those Fallen in Battle,” and the entire burial service, as well as the songs “America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “Hail! Columbia.” It’s no less Jewish, but far more overtly American. Perhaps Jewish servicemembers in those days felt they had to prove their patriotism, or perhaps these texts simply helped an immigrant population learn unfamiliar but important national anthems, which more seasoned Americans memorized in school. In any case, looking at the newer siddur after perusing the old one suggests a lessening in intensity of the expression of Jews’ Americanness. It also points to a greater comfort level in a hyphenated identity.

I decided to make a nest for both siddurs in the package I was preparing for Scott. I smoothed out a section of his flight suit, lay the books on top, and prepared to tape the box shut. Then I noticed a tiny booklet underneath a pile of his papers. The Aleph Institute’s contribution to the canon of Jewish-military literature is the smallest of all, physically—a 2-inch-by-3-inch stapled, camouflage pamphlet called “Courage & Safety Through Faith and Trust in G-d: A Message to the Jewish Serviceman.” According to the introduction, it’s based on a talk with Rabbi Joseph I. Shneerson, who was the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe and died in 1950. (The pamphlet was originally published during World War II, and reissued after September 11.) I placed it next to the siddurim, and covered all three with the sleeves of Scott’s flight suit, as if in an embrace. But something nagged at me. I picked up the camouflage booklet again, and reread the section entitled “Faith—The Basis of Confidence.” It begins:

The degree of hope and confidence possessed by a Jew depends on the strength of his faith. The very faithful Jew is always full of hope, and consequently he is calm and courageous under the most trying circumstances.

Recently a reporter interviewing me about Standing By, my memoir, asked, toward the end of our conversation, if my faith helped me overcome the formidable challenges of my husband’s last deployment.

“You mean faith in God?” I asked, surprised. I write about and reflect upon religion quite a bit, especially the idea of faith in a time of war. These ideas are even more relevant now that I’m preparing to read the ominous words of the U’Netaneh Tokef, the High Holiday prayer asserting that God will decree who will live and who will die. Strangely, her question had never crossed my mind.

“Of course,” she answered.

“I believe in God,” I said, carefully, not wanting to lie or sound arrogant. “But I have faith in the training the military has given my husband and his squadron, and it gives me the confidence to know that they can handle any challenge.”

She was quiet. I was quiet. It was, obviously, the wrong answer. Then again, I’m neither calm nor courageous under these trying circumstances and maybe that explains why.

Alison Buckholtz is the author of Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War.

This stuff is straight out of John le Carré. We hope to have more on it in the coming days.

EXCLUSIVE: Defense Analyst in Spy Case Was FBI Double Agent [Washington Times]

Berkowitz also sketches possible regional consequences of a preemptive strike. Iran could order Hezbollah to attack Israel. It could encourage independent terrorist groups to go after synagogues or other Jewish sites in Europe. It might disrupt Persian Gulf shipping lines. And it could cause further chaos among Shiites in Iraq. He rejects the notion that the recent Iranian elections and their brutal aftermath might affect Israel’s calculus: Could the recent spectacle of brave Iranian dissidents taking on the Khamenei regime actually embolden an Israeli effort to forestall an atomic theocracy?

It’s been an interesting recent news cycle for these what-ifs. Vice President Joe Biden told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that the United States “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do,” a comment many interpreted to be a green-light to Israeli preemption. And although today’s Jerusalem Post leads with a story explaining that President Barack Obama in no way supports or condones an attack, that’s a minor footnote compared to what Eli Lake at the Washington Times has uncovered: that Netanyahu hasn’t even asked the president’s permission.

Israel would ideally like Washington’s consent to attack because it would like access to Iraqi airspace, which affords the fastest flight-path to Iran and which the U.S. still controls. But its bombers can also reach their targets via less direct routes, like over Saudi Arabia, which the London Times reported last week has told Israeli officials it wouldn’t object to flyovers. Remember that George W. Bush nixed Ehud Barak’s plan to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites in 2008. If Netanyahu never asks permission, Obama can never say no.

Bibi’s Choices [Weekly Standard]
Israel Declines to Ask U.S. to OK Iran Attack [Washington Times]
Saudis Give Nod to Israeli Raid on Iran [London Times

In 2008, the FBI reported that “[m]ilitary experience—ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces—is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement,” says reporter Matt Kennard. He adds: “In white supremacist incidents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI identified 203 veterans.” And it’s probably getting worse, as the growing need for new soldiers to fight the war in Iraq has led recruiters to overlook signs, such as swastika tattoos, that might indicate potentially violent racism. This may be new evidence of the “Obama Effect”—a theory posited by a criminologist that having diversity in the White House has led to an upsurge in white supremacy.

Or, as Geoffrey Millard, an organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War, says, it could be that “the military is attractive to white supremacists … because the war itself is racist.”

Neo-Nazis Are in the Army Now [Salon]

Shabi makes one thing clear: if you are one of those Jews, you adamantly refuse to call yourself an Arab, or even an Arab Jew. In her last chapter, titled “We Are Not Arabs!”, Shabi recalls riding an early-morning bus to Kiryat Shmona, a majority-Mizrahi town near the Lebanon border. She gets into a conversation with three women who, like her, come from Iraqi Jewish families. They are pleasantly surprised to find that she can speak Arabic, and they share their enthusiasm for Arab culture: one woman “lives in central Tel Aviv and speaks Arabic constantly, listens to the music, adores the great singers like Fairuz and Farid al-Atrash. She has all the Arabic channels on TV an declares herself to be in love with the language. . . . She relates that she is happy in Israel, of course, but that she was happy in Iraq too.”

But then she goes on to say things the left-leaning Shabi—who was born in Israel but spent most of her life in England, where she works as a journalist—does not like so much. All of her glorious hybridity does not stop the woman from thinking that “the Arabs themselves, they are killers. They like to die, she says; you see their mothers on TV, wishing for their son’s death if it means they also kill Jews.” Struck by the irony that she is saying all this in Arabic, Shabi demands, “Aren’t you also an Arab?” This sends the friendly conversation “screeching into a dark alley. ‘Of course I’m not Arab!’ she fires back. ‘I’m Jewish! Of course we are different!’”

Shabi reports this encounter honestly, even though it presents a rather large obstacle to her book’s thesis. For Shabi believes that reclaiming the Arab-Jewish identity of so many of Israel’s citizens—40 percent of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi, down from an actual majority in the 1970s—is the only way to save the country’s soul. Writing with a combination of grievance and idealism familiar on the Western left, but not as often heard from Israelis themselves, Shabi decries the marginalization of Mizrahi culture and the economic injustice that keeps Mizrahis poorer and more likely to end up in jail. She attacks the founders of Israel, the European Zionists, who failed to integrate Arab Jewish immigrants into the new society. She quotes the most disaffected Mizrahis she can find, like Shlomi from Ofakim, who greets an Independence Day display of flags by saying, “My children will never raise the Israeli flag, never!” Shlomi goes on to add that the Ashkenazis brought the Holocaust on themselves: “anti-Semitism doesn’t come from nowhere, something causes it.”

This is obviously a fringe viewpoint, not to say a lunatic one, and Shabi is a little too eager to make voices like Shlomi’s sound legitimate. She looks fondly, for instance, on Israel’s Black Panthers, an extremist Mizrahi-rights organization that incited a major riot in 1971. (Golda Meir famously dismissed its members as “not very nice boys.”) This tendentiousness is a pity, because the actual facts Shabi gathers are sobering enough. It becomes easier to understand why some Mizrahis would look to Eldridge Cleaver for inspiration when you learn that, “in 1970, 78 percent of all adult Jewish and 93 percent of all juvenile Jewish offenders were Mizrahi.” Even today, Shabi writes, “the majority of university professors and students, TV presenters, Supreme Court justices (all but one, in fact) have Ashkenazi surnames; the glaring majority of university cleaners, market stall traders, TV buffoon characters, and blue-collar criminals are Mizrahi in origin.”

So are most residents of Israel’s “development towns,” impoverished places on the periphery of the country. These towns were created to house Arab-Jewish immigrants in the 1950s by an Ashkenazi Labor establishment that did not consult them about where they wanted to go. As is the nature of things, these towns have only become more disadvantaged as time goes on. Shabi writes penetratingly about the way kibbutzes—the pioneer settlements of European Jews, which enjoy great prestige in Israel—control the best agricultural land, to the detriment of development towns that have no place left to develop. In the 1990s, when kibbutzes were allowed to rezone their land for commercial purposes, they reaped a huge private windfall, even though almost all the land in Israel is technically owned by the state.

This ethnic cleavage can have major repercussions in other ways, as well. Especially since the invasion of Gaza, there has been much coverage of the town of Sderot in the American press; close to the Gaza border, it is a constant target of Hamas rockets. But I do not remember having read that Sderot is a development town with a population that is 70 percent Moroccan. Shabi quotes a Sderot storekeeper named Haim who believes that this is why the government sees the town as expendable: “Polish people, they wouldn’t let it pass in silence. They are Ashkenazi, so they are strong and they are connected to the country, to our government.”

All of this material will be eye-opening for many American Jews, though it is common knowledge in Israel itself. Indeed, “the ethnic demon,” as it is called in shorthand, is a frequently debated subject in the press and in politics. Yet Shabi tends to play down the evidence that Israel’s ethnic divisions are gradually improving. The state has now had a Mizrahi president, Moshe Katzav, and even a Mizrahi head of the arch-Ashkenazi Labor Party, Amir Peretz. Culturally, the current generation of Israelis is much more open to Middle Eastern influences than the pioneers, who tended to look down their noses at Jews who looked and talked too much like Arabs. (Shabi collects many damning quotes to this effect from the heroes of early Israel, including David Ben-Gurion, who said that the Middle Eastern immigrants arrived in Israel “without a trace of Jewish or human education.”)

Where We Look Like the Enemy falters is in its rose-colored vision of the distant past and the potential future. Like many a child of immigrants who grew up on tales of the old country, Shabi tends to see her ancestors’ lives as a lost paradise, ignoring the reasons why they might have wanted to leave it behind. But it is one thing to wax rhapsodic about Basra date syrup—“brown, thickly sweet,” eaten drizzled on fried eggs—and another to suggest that Jews, like dates, can only flourish in Iraqi soil: “Now they, just like the smuggled palms, were sowed into the alien, new soils of Israel. And this land, they say, seemed unaccountably hostile to Middle Eastern and North African Jews—so they didn’t grow right, either.”

The suggestion that the Jews were better off in Babylon ignores the fact that, whatever might have been the case in the time of Cyrus the Great, in 1948 they voted with their feet—nearly the entire Iraqi Jewish community left the country after Israel was founded. Nor is it a good argument against the Jewish state that, as one Iraqi Jew quoted by Shabi has it, “If Israel had not been established, nothing would have happened to the Iraqi Jews.” Just ask the Kurds and the Shiites whether they think Iraq has been an oasis of diversity in the last 50 years.

Nor does Shabi seem justified in hoping that Mizrahi Jews, once reawakened to their Arab cultural identity, will finally be able to make peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world. Shabi quotes a Moroccan-born Likud party official to this effect: “We the Sephardis, if they had placed it in our hands to make peace with the Arabs, we would have done it, we would have succeeded better than the Ashkenazis because they don’t have the mentality to speak with the Arabs.” Not only does this talk of an Arab mentality sound like just the kind of thing Shabi would despise, coming from an Ashkenazi politician, and not only does it represent an obvious case of wishful thinking. Most important, it ignores the fact that it is precisely the Mizrahis who have flocked to the most hard-line political parties in Israel, Likud and Shas. Sadly, coexistence does not always lead to amity—a fact that We Look Like the Enemy demonstrates, but would prefer to forget.

For journalist Ariel Sabar, Aramaic has always been more than a linguistic relic used in reciting the Kaddish or Kol Nidre. Sabar’s father, Yona, grew up speaking Aramaic in an isolated Kurdish-Jewish enclave in northern Iraq. Yona moved to Israel in 1951, just after his bar mitzvah, an underprivileged refugee in a new country full of them. A disciplined and determined young man, Yona went to university and then graduate school, before becoming a professor of Near Eastern languages at UCLA. In Los Angeles, with his accent and old Chevette, Yona was completely different from the fathers of Ariel’s friends, and as a teenager Ariel rebelled against what he saw as Yona’s bumpkin ways. But when Ariel became a father himself, he decided to learn more about Yona’s unlikely journey from the mountains of Kurdistan to the leafy streets of Los Angeles.

Ariel Sabar spoke with Nextbook about his new book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (Algonquin, 2008), in which he weaves together Yona’s story with the larger history of Kurdish Jews.

Photo courtesy of Ariel Sabar.

Sasson Somekh in 1997, when he was director of Israel’s cultural center in Cairo

Sasson Somekh was born in Baghdad in 1934 to a well-off middle-class Jewish family. As he explains in the first volume of his memoirs, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew, published by Ibis Editions, he spent most of his childhood wanting to become a poet. Baghdad at the time was an important center of Middle Eastern literary modernism, but though the young Somekh had meant to climb the Arabic Parnassus, history and politics got in the way.

With the founding of the state of Israel and the rise of Arab nationalism, life in the Arab world became untenable for Oriental Jews, and no community suffered more than the Jews of Baghdad, where the farhoud of 1941 claimed 180 lives. As tensions increased over the following decade, the city’s Jews scattered, some—such as the father of the two boys who would go on to build one of the world’s most famous advertising firms, Saatchi and Saatchi—made their way to London, others to the United States, and many, like Somekh, to Israel.

He landed in 1951 at the age of seventeen and quickly mastered Hebrew, which earned him his first academic job at the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Somekh continued his studies at Oxford, where he earned a PhD in Arabic Literature with the famous Egyptian scholar Mustafa Badawi. As Somekh explains, with a smile, “I told Badawi right off that I was an Israeli, and he said, ‘Who asked you?’”

His 1968 dissertation was on the Egyptian novelist—and only Arab ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature—Naguib Mahfouz. During Somekh’s tenure in Cairo as head of the Israeli Academic Center (1995–1998), he and the novelist solidified a friendship that had begun fifteen years before and would come to cost Mahfouz much criticism in Arab nationalist intellectual circles. “He alienated all the Egyptian critics by saying the only person who understood him is this Israeli,” Somekh says.

Save for a stint at Princeton during the 1980s, Somekh has taught for more than thirty years at Tel Aviv University, where I sat down with him recently on a warm January afternoon to talk to him about Iraq, Iraqi Jews, and his life in Israel.

What do you remember about the Baghdad of your youth and the Jewish community there?

It wasn’t a big city, maybe half a million, but it was a bustling city with the Jews very much in evidence, active in banking, export and import, and railroad station masters—most station masters were Jewish. The Jews learned French and English and this made them useful to the British. English was regarded by the middle class as more important than Arabic, and I was so fascinated by the beauty of British books, the windows of the English bookstores, like Mackenzie’s. So, the British looked for people to work with and they found the Jews, which I don’t think ever really caused problems with Muslims. I never heard this—that we were considered lackeys of the British.

As for the Muslims, the Jews were closer to the Shia in many ways. The Shia have a thing about all non-Muslims, they will touch nothing that has been touched by a non-Muslim, but the Jews used to work with the Shia and employed them. So some of the Shia wouldn’t go to the mosque on Fridays, which is the customary day for Muslims to go to prayer, because the Jews needed them. For instance, the Shia would light fires for Jews on Friday nights—so the Shia went to the mosque Saturday instead.

What I’m trying to say is that there was a modus vivendi between Muslims and non-Muslim minorities. We knew things had changed when you would walk through the streets and they started to say “Zionist” instead of “Jew.”

There was really no strong Zionist movement in Iraq. Some young Jews drifted towards communism, and a few others to Zionism, but these slogans about building a new life on a kibbutz didn’t impress me. If anyone ever thought of leaving, it was to the U.S. or England.

Then what made you move to Israel in 1951?

I went to Israel because I was afraid the police were going to take me away. I wasn’t a communist but I had leanings that way and my friends were, and the police had taken some of them away. I was only seventeen, so I went to court to say I was eighteen and was allowed to go to Israel and my parents arrived three months later. Iraq was very much changing at the time.

This was a decade after the farhoud?

Yes, 1941 was a real massacre, it was horrible. The Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, had come to Baghdad that year and lived not far from us; I used to see him and his men. He incited everyone against the Jews of Baghdad, who were not Zionists. He would appear on radio—“you Jews are snakes,” etcetera—and the simple people believed him. There were lots of Palestinians who had come to teach in Iraq, we needed so many teachers, and these were often under the guidance of the Mufti and his men, and this poisoned the atmosphere further. So, in 1941 there were 100,000 Jews in Baghdad and possibly 20,000 whose houses were attacked. But during the war, the British brought prosperity and the Jewish community forgot about that pogrom. That started to change in 1948 because of tensions over the war in Palestine when soldiers came back angry at Jews. With these new tensions in the air, the Jews remembered those days of the farhoud. The pro-Nazi party, al-Istiqlal (Independence) hinted at another farhoud, saying the Jews should get out before it happened to them again. It was not their official policy, but we heard it.

The real turning point was in 1948 with the hanging of Shafiq Adas, a rich Jew who was a friend of the Prince Regent. He was hanged in Basra, accused of buying scrap from the British and sending it to Israel. So Jews started to leave and the Muslims who were partners with Jews before were scared now, and a good life for the Jews was no more in the offing. Most of our neighbors were leaving and selling their property. My parents were not crazy about the idea of moving to Israel. My father was fifty and didn’t like the idea of such an adventure.

You got to Israel and had to master a new language. Is this what derailed your career as a poet?

No, I read Gershom Scholem’s book on Sabbatai Zevi. Up until then I wanted to be a poet, but this book made me want to become a scholar. The story was exciting—the whole Jewish nation had been excited by this seventeenth-century messiah—but it was the scholarship that excited me. This man Scholem picked up all sorts of secondary material and from this made the greatest story I ever read in my life. So I became a scholar. My first job was as scientific secretary to the Academy of the Hebrew Language. They advertised for a secretary in the paper, after I had just finished a degree in Hebrew linguistics. It was the greatest day in my life, an A+ in that subject. And in my interview they wanted to know how I managed it. They asked, “How did a newcomer master the language like that?” So I got the job, ten years exactly after I first came to Israel.

After a few years, they sent me to Oxford because Israel needed Arabic professors and I was chosen.

What can you tell us about contemporary Iraq and the Americans’ project to bring democracy to the Middle East?

To say that Iraq is like this or that is beyond me at this point; it all changed. During my time, the Shia intelligentsia were largely secular. They were either communists or secular. I believe these people still exist, these critical minds, but the dilemma is that for the first time in history the Shia are ruling the country, and they are opposed by the Sunnis, including al-Qaeda, so the Shia can’t be against the Iraqi government, even if they want to, and they have to abide by compromises with the religious establishment all the time.

Do the Arabs want democracy? I know that when they come to Israel they are stunned by this country, how it works. When Sadat came to Jerusalem, he went and spoke to all the factions in the Knesset, including the communist faction that had one Arab and one Jewish member, and both complained to him about Israel. Sadat put his pipe in his mouth and said, “How beautiful is democracy.”

I am sure the U.S. has made mistakes, but no one could avoid them in Iraq. Some Iraqi intellectuals, in the U.S. and elsewhere, did their best, but they didn’t understand the structure of that society now. My friend Khaled Kishtainy wrote an article in al-Hayat saying that maybe we have to encourage the Jews to come back to Iraq because when they left Baghdad went into ruins and Israel took advantage of their talents. I wrote him and said, “I admire you, but who will come back?” My children don’t know Arabic, like most of the children of Iraqi Jews. So, who is there? Where are all the Baghdadi Jews?

Imagine hearing a concert of Gregorian chant at your local synagogue, or traditional Judeo-Iraqi liturgical songs performed at a church.

Recently, South Florida audiences had the chance to have both experiences, when these musical forms were combined in concerts held at two local synagogues and a church. The experiment was the brainchild of Patrick Dupre Quigley, artistic director of the Coral Gables chamber choir Seraphic Fire, in collaboration with cantor George Mordecai of Temple Emanu-El, in Miami Beach. The result was perhaps more radical than either man had imagined, and also quite mesmerizing, as Alicia Zuckerman reports.

Photo © iStockphoto.com/Bridgewood Design

When Jessie Graham first arrived in Sulaymaniyah, a Kurdish town in northern Iraq, she thought it would be best to keep her religious identity a secret. As an American she was already suspect; why complicate things?

Only a month into her stay, Jessie changed her mind. It was April, she was homesick, and she hated the idea of Passover going by without some kind of observance. So she outed herself, telling her Kurdish nationalist boss she’d like to host a small dinner party to celebrate an important Jewish holiday. Next thing she knew, he’d slaughtered a lamb for the occasion—enough meat to serve at least a dozen guests. Thus began preparations for the first seder to be held in Sulaymaniyah in decades. Jessie tells the story.

The shop, as it happened, was not exactly a shop, but the work of Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who took the name “Davisons and Co.” from his grandfather, Nissim Isaac David, who once ran an import-export business in Baghdad. As to why Rakowitz is importing Iraqi dates? Amanda Aronczyk tells the story.

Michael Rakowitz at his store on Atlantic Avenue

The thousands who do serve must negotiate how to meet their individual needs—kosher food, time to pray—and also to fit in with their comrades in arms. And what Sergeant Marx tells his superior still holds: “Some things are more important to some Jews than other things to other Jews.”

Spc. Joe Kashnow: Almost Intact Kashnow always wanted to serve his country. He lived out his dream, and now has to bury his leg. Listen >> Read the transcript >>

Pfc. Joe Goldman: Frum From Birth Goldman joined the military to escape his Orthodox upbringing, but he found many parallels—and value in what he rejected. Listen >> Read the transcript >>

Maj. Yonel Dorelis: That Others May Live Dorelis would still choose football over Hebrew school, but dangerous missions give him a sense of redemption. Listen >> Read the transcript >>

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Jessie Graham is a radio reporter and producer based in New York.

Nextbook Resources

Reading List: Soldiers’ Stories

Essay: V-Mail by Seth Gitell

Other Resources

Jewish Soldier Foundation

Jews in Green

Jewish Chaplains Council

National Museum of American Jewish Military History

Jewish War Veterans

Jews in the Civil War

Ours to Fight For: American Jews in the Second World War