Providence PLI Special Edition 2019 by Providence Magazine

Special PLI Edition

A JOURNAL OF CHRISTIANITY & AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

The Philos Project is a dynamic leadership community dedicated to promoting positive Christian engagement in the Middle East. This community is centered on a growing network of city-based chapters located in North America and around the world. Philos equips a new generation of Western Christians to support friends in the region who share our vision for pluralism. We offer educational resources, immersive travel programs, and networking and advocacy opportunities that help Christian leaders understand and engage with important Middle East issues and support innovative projects that help advance liberty and justice on the ground.

Philos

Leadership Institute The Shepherd Becomes the King

ISRAEL AT 71

Special PLI Edition

MORE THAN PAWNS LUKE MOON

TO END ANOTHER WAR

ANDREW DORAN

ANATOMY OF A CONFLICT Robert Nicholson

The Forgotten Refugees Igor Sabino

TRANSFORMTAIVE SERVANT LEADERSHIP TIMOTHY MALLARD

PROVIDENCE Special PLI Edition

AD ORIENTUM TOWARD A NEW VISION IN THE MIDDLE EAST: By Robert Nicholson

LEADERSHIP TRANSFORMATIVE SERVANT LEADERSHIP By Col. Timothy Mallard

THE ANATOMY OF A CONFLICT THE SHEPHERD BECOMES THE KING

ISRAELS NEW LAW

NAKBA

EMPIRES OF FEELING AND FANTASY

ISLAM, CHRISTIANITY, AND THE END OF PALESTINE

THE SEVENTH DAY AND COUNTING

By Robert Nicholson

By Joshua Muravchik

SPONSORED BY

SYRIA On Syria

By Robert Nicholson

To End Another War By Andrew Doran

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The Institute on Religion & Democracy The Philos Project

Robert Nicholson Mark Tooley

EDITORS

EDITOR-at-LARGE

Marc LiVecche

MANAGING EDITOR Drew Griffin

DEPUTY EDITOR

REFUGEES More Than Pawns By Luke Moon

Iraqi Christians By Igor Sabino

Do Not Be Afraid By Olivia Enos

A Christian Case By Joseph Loconte

PHILOS FELLOWS

Mark Melton

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Joseph Loconte Luke Moon Keith Pavlischek

56 60

Faydra Shapiro

Juliana Tamoorazy

Julie Tegho

Khalil Sayegh

Mina Abdelmalak

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AD ORIENTUM

Toward a New Vision for the Middle East Robert Nicholson

The Middle East lies in the throes of a full-scale civilizational crisis. Scores of Sunnis and Shiites have declared war on the West in the name of Islam; in the meantime, they are slaughtering each other without shame. The simultaneous draw-down of U.S. troops, the rise of ISIS, the dismantling of the Syrian and Iraqi governments, the self-emancipation of the Kurds, and the imperial expansion of Iran have created new facts on the ground that dramatically complicate the next decade. Millions of people have been displaced, hundreds of thousands have been killed, and millions more have been physically and psychologically traumatized. The national borders created in the aftermath of World War I hover on the brink of collapse, and at this point there is a real question whether the region will ever go back to the way it was. If not, the next and most terrifying question is what new order will arise to take its place. By exploring the regional importance of organic communities – ethnic and religious blocs that have historically thought and acted as one – this essay aims to provide a conceptual first step toward that new order should the old paradigm finally break. It is these communities, I argue, that will form the basis for the new Middle East. 4

By protecting them and empowering them for self-determination where circumstances allow, the West can not only increase stability and freedom around the region but can also create new allies against the forces of tyranny. My goal is not to offer a comprehensive political strategy or to advocate for replacing the old map of the Middle East with a new one. Prudence is the watchword in all things. However, I do hope to interrogate old thinking and advance an innovative conversation about U.S. strategy in the region in the months and years ahead – including within the pages of this new journal. The conversation will be necessarily exploratory, even tentative. But sometimes the best way to play is with strategic modesty and the patient advance of runners in deliberate, methodical ways. There are only two things that are certain at this point: First, ignoring the Middle East is not an option. Let’s not even speak about terrorism. Right now the refugee crisis sweeping across Europe demonstrates that the problems of the Middle East don’t stay there, and that the West must deal proactively with the region or find existential threats in its own backyard. And

we cannot address the symptoms of the problem without seeking to eradicate the underlying disease. Forcing the West to swallow huge numbers of refugees will only result in a more monolithic and radicalized Middle East, a more fractured and frustrated West, and an ever-expanding gulf between the two. The solution to the refugee crisis, like so many other crises, is to address the problem at its root. Second, our current model doesn’t seem to be working. For over a decade we have worked hard to bring peace and democracy to Iraq. Today the country is riven by interethnic and interreligious conflict. Baghdad remains powerless in the face of territorial incursions by Iran, the Islamic State, and the Kurdish Regional Government. Why hasn’t America been able to succeed here? Why, despite all the blood and treasure, has Iraq remained so dysfunctional? It is clear that we don’t know the answer. And that, in and of itself, begs for a new approach. 2017 the centennial of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret pact struck between Britain, France, and Russia during World War I to apportion the shattered pieces of the Ottoman Empire among themselves after the conflict ended. This infamous agreement, implemented through a series of international treaties among Western states, constructed the map of the Middle East as we know it today. Prior to World War I the Middle East had always been a cosmopolitan mix of ethnic and religious communities that more or less looked out for themselves. Even during the episodic cycles of empires and caliphates, the bulk of everyday life took place in local units under the rule of local authorities. Group affiliation, whether religious, ethnic, or tribal, was the ultimate benchmark of identity. In the wake of Sykes-Picot, the peoples of the Middle East, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, were shocked by the new geographic and political upheaval. The newly-drawn countries, untethered from any underlying demographic reality, were viewed by the indigenous peoples as arbitrary innovations of Western powers wrought for their own benefit at the expense of the local inhabitants. The new political regime was, for them, simply the continuation of Western meddling and betrayal which had begun when the British and French governments reneged on their wartime promise that Arabs would re-

ceive some degree of political independence for their military partnership against the Ottoman Empire. Arab resentment against the Western powers would endure over the subsequent years only to crescendo when the French forcibly deposed Faisal bin Hussein, the would-be king of the “Arab Kingdom of Syria,” from his throne in Damascus in 1920. While calm eventually returned and the new states started to take on a life of their own, local inhabitants never forgot that these so-called nations were to a significant extent purely imaginary. They never could proclaim supreme loyalty to the governments that ruled them. And they could never elevate their new political identity over the interests of their native community. Nevertheless, United States foreign policy (like the foreign policy of every other Western government) continues to take these artificial states as given and seeks to make them stable democracies governed by principles of civil rights, freedom of speech, and free market economics. Every citizen gets one vote and the opportunity to participate in the political process. All men are given equal standing to pursue life and liberty under the beneficent gaze of blind justice. Yet this approach makes major assumptions about Middle Eastern society that don’t always hold. It assumes that Middle Eastern borders are meaningful to those who live within them. It assumes that the fundamental unit of Middle Eastern society is the individual, and not the ethnic or religious community into which those individuals are born. It assumes that religion can be kept in the tent, and that metaphysical concerns will always be trumped by economic self-interest. It assumes that historically-isolated communities of different faiths and tribes will pledge allegiance and sacrifice their sons for a state run by members of rival communities located hundreds of miles away. As the anniversary of Sykes-Picot approaches, it is clear that the system it gave birth to stands in jeopardy. Many Middle Easterners are returning to Islam as the source of cultural and political authenticity, casting off their arbitrary state identities and seeking to reestablish the caliphate that was dismantled by the Great Powers. Religious radicalization is increasing as Muslim communities argue over the true essence of Islam and compete to demonstrate their bona fides as messengers of Muhammad’s vision. Lay Muslims are caught in the middle of this firefight. Non-Muslim communities, heavily out5

numbered, face nothing less than an existential threat. I don’t have the answers that have eluded America and her allies in their struggle to bring stability to the region and set it on a course toward prosperity. But I do believe there is at least one basic principle that can help us understand the region as the region wants to be understood: the principle of organic community.

posite approach. The complications that result should not be surprising. Taking Lawrence’s observation to heart, US policymakers must recognize the abiding importance of group identities and the abiding mistrust that these groups feel toward each other. Regardless of the final strategic priorities, factoring these principles into U.S. policy will inevitably lead to more constructive ends.

The strategic questions are endless: Should Baghdad control Kurdistan? Will Damascus regain control of Raqqa? Will Tehran maintain its influence over the politics of Beirut? Government databases overflow with memos and policy papers addressing such questions, and yet we are no closer to regional peace than we were ten years ago.

The fundamental disease of the Middle East is a crisis of identity coupled with bitterness toward the West and a paralyzing fear of rival communities. Contrary to popular conceptions, the Middle East is not a monolithic sea of Islam or a swarming hive of hostile Arabs.

One possible explanation is that our policymakers are asking the wrong questions. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time. In his memoir The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence observed a unique difference between the views of Arabs and Britons during World War I concerning the preferred post-war order:

The problem of the foreign theorists—“Is Damascus to rule the Hejaz, or can Hejaz rule Damascus?” did not trouble [the Arabs] at all, for they would not have it set. The Semites’ idea of nationality was the independence of clans and villages, and their ideal of national union was episodic combined resistance to an intruder. Constructive policies, an organized state, an extended empire, were not so much beyond their sight as hateful in it. They were fighting to get rid of Empire, not to win it.

Lawrence had his finger on something important here. Westerners who work on Middle Eastern policy often look to create or reinforce multinational political entities with an underlying structure of rational authority. Middle Easterners, on the other hand, find legitimacy in their own local communities: Kurds with Kurds, Shiites with Shiites, Assyrians with Assyrians. Faith in the common weal is almost nonexistent. Fear of the other is ever present. Middle Easterners crave safety and independence for their group even at the expense of the state’s well-being. Westerners pursue the op6

T.E. Lawrence, It is a mosaic of religions and denominations, languages and ethnicities, cultures and subcultures that have intermingled but remained disparate for thousands of years. America should seek to play upon this reality, not struggle against it. The problem with U.S. foreign policy is that it tries to make the region look like America: a multinational melting pot that transcends group identities for the sake of a

rence’s observation to heart, US policymakers must recognize the abiding importance of group identities and the abiding mistrust that these groups feel toward each other. Regardless of the final strategic priorities, factoring these principles into U.S. policy will inevitably lead to more constructive ends. The fundamental disease of the Middle East is a crisis of identity coupled with bitterness toward the West and a paralyzing fear of rival communities. Contrary to popular conceptions, the Middle East is not a monolithic sea of Islam or a swarming hive of hostile Arabs. It is a mosaic of religions and denominations, languages and ethnicities, cultures and subcultures that have intermingled but remained disparate for thousands of years. America should seek to play upon this reality, not struggle against it. The problem with U.S. foreign policy is that it tries to make the region look like America: a multinational melting pot that transcends group identities for the sake of a greater good. A better policy would be to nudge the region toward the European model: a consortium of particularistic and self-interested nation-states that maintain their own ethnic and religious identities, perhaps under the banner of a larger transnational union. The American strategic vision, whatever its final form is, should work toward fostering a Middle East comprised of self-determining nation-states living in light of their heritage under the principles of freedom, coexistence, and rule of law. The peaceful character of these states will derive not from autocracy and fear, but from the populations’ shared sense of history and common vision for the future – in other words, from their desire to act out their collective will as a people. Talking in general terms about affirming and supporting organic communities in security and self-determination is easy. Drawing direct application to real-life circumstances is much harder. How could this new strategic vision be implemented without making the situation even worse and where should implementation start? First, with respect to how, implementation of this model should be done only where practicable. A mad dash to balkanize the Middle East and carve new states out of whole cloth will result in the same issues caused by Sykes-Picot.

“The best way to help persecuted Christians is to find a way to ensure their ongoing survival inside their historic

homeland. ”

Second, implementation should be phased to coincide with current realities. Proclaiming independence for Druze in Syria may not be the most useful first step toward securing that community’s future. Nativity takes time: A smaller, more interim arrangement may make more sense for the time being – a province or safe haven, for example, may have to be sufficient for now. Third, implementation should only happen where the would-be nation is committed to freedom and rule of law and is prepared to take on the responsibilities of self-government. Building a state without proper leadership will condemn these new polities to failure. Fourth, implementation should begin with those communities that first of all meet the above criteria and that are most urgently in need of outside assistance. Second, where to begin? Many people talk about securing independence for the Kurds as a natural first step in bringing stability to the region, and it’s a good idea overall. But there is another community facing an existential crisis whose plight should be especially meaningful to American Christians and anyone else who cares about protecting minorities in the face of religious persecution: that is, the Christian community scattered across northern Iraq and northeastern Syria. These Christians are facing nothing short of a genocide at the hands of the Islamic State and, to some extent, their Kurdish neighbors. In Iraq alone their numbers have diminished from 1.6 million in 2003 to just over 200,000 today. Lots of Americans are talking and writing about helping these Christians, but few have gotten past the most myopic of solutions. Humanitarian aid is of course critical, but aid money only goes so far. Schemes to evacuate Christians and resettle them in the West have attracted many supporters in recent months, but this strategy ultimately does more harm than good. Not 7

only does it concede victory to the Islamic State and eradicate the witness of Christianity in the region, it hurls impoverished and traumatized Christians into foreign lands with few resources or support. The best way to help persecuted Christians is to find a way to ensure their ongoing survival inside their historic homeland. And the best way to do that is to recognize not just their religious identity but their ethnic identity as well. These are not just Christians, they are Assyrian Christians descended from a pre-Islamic, Aramaic-speaking nation that has resided in Mesopotamia since well before the time of Christ. Also known as Syriacs and Chaldeans, the Assyrians see themselves as a distinct people. They have their own literature, art, and music. They have traditional dances and clothing. They have national heroes. This community stretches in a series of pockets – an “Aramaic archipelago” of sorts – from the hills of northern Israel all the way to the mountains of western Iran. Its nucleus, however, lies in the historic Assyrian heartland around ancient Nineveh (modern Mosul) and the plains that run along the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It was here that God sent Jonah, where Isaiah prophesied a restored Assyrian nation alongside Israel and Egypt at the end of days, and where early apostles preached the gospel. Today the Assyrians have been chased out of Nineveh and scattered across the world, but

Ethnographic map of the Nineveh Plain - 1910 Vs 2014

they long for the day when they will be free from the rule of Kurds and Arabs and can return to reestablish their ancient polity on their native soil. Whether an autonomous province inside Iraq, a homogenous Assyrian state erected on the Nineveh Plains post-Iraq, or a mixed “State of Mesopotamia” comprised of Assyrians and other friendly minorities, the idea of new political entity in northern Iraq has garnered more and more attention as of late. Working to help the Assyrians recover even a fragment of their ancient homeland would undoubtedly help secure their future in a collapsing Middle East. It would help preserve Christianity in its ancient homeland. It would undermine the Islamic State. It would help create a buffer between feuding Kurds and Arabs. It would create a safe zone for minority communities around the region to find refuge from persecution. And it would provide a new and likeminded ally for the U.S. and its regional partners in the struggle against totalitarian ideology. There are, of course, numerous complications. First and foremost are the external challenges: not least among them creating conditions on the ground that will allow an Assyrian polity to take root. This means destroying the Islamic State and crafting a multinational security structure that carries moral and spiritual credibility, a real sense of resolve, and a tremendous amount of resources from the international community.

“The American strategic vision, whatever its final

form is, should work toward fostering a Middle East comprised of self-determining nation-states living in light of their heritage under the principles of freedom, coexistence, and rule of law.” There are also internal challenges as Assyrians seek to move beyond a millennia of powerlessness and ready themselves for self-governance. They need rigorous training and assistance in areas of self-defense, political leadership, community- and state-building, education, and cultural and linguistic preservation. They need a vanguard of forward-thinking young leaders who are devoted enough and skilled enough to lead their community into the future. Such leadership is rare, but the Western community of nations could be very helpful in helping source it. Many skeptics will doubt the ability of Assyrians or any other Middle Eastern community to determine its own future in such a hostile and complex environment. But skeptics also doubted the prospect of Jewish political revival only a hundred years ago. Who could not help but laugh at young Jewish farmers and intellectuals working against all odds to push the concept of an independent Jewish polity located inside the Ottoman Empire and centered on the ancient city of Jerusalem? Today the Jews are living on their ancient homeland, speaking their ancient language, and surviving – even flourishing – among hostile neighbors committed to their destruction. The Assyrians are actually in a far better position today than the Jews were then, and there is no reason to doubt that the same process that resulted in a Jewish state could not likewise result in an Assyrian one. Indeed, there are numerous parallels between the two causes and lessons to be learned – a subject I hope to write about elsewhere. Israel herself may in fact be a good model for what the new Middle East could look like: a series of small, mostly homogenous nation-states with strong Western alliances and

innovative economies based on the twin pillars of freedom and law. As the “start-up nation” par excellence, Israel has acquired much hard-won experience about building and maintaining a progressive yet traditional society in a region where fear and violence remain the rule of the day. As I said at the outset, this essay is not a comprehensive strategy for U.S. foreign policy. It proposes only a more intentional move toward a mosaic-like Middle East comprised of self-governing and mutually interdependent nation-states built to coincide with the organic boundaries of ancient communities. The ideal may be difficult to achieve, at least for the time being. More realistic is the establishment of one or two such entities in the chaotic swirl of a collapsing Iraq and Syria. The ideal will always be qualified by reality and measured against the best interests of the United States. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to achieve what is most possible and closest to the ideal. Timing is key. Leadership is dispositive. But prudence must govern all. Questions abound. How can the U.S. pursue this strategy in the face of ill-disposed regimes like Iran and Turkey? Which communities should achieve independence and which should not? What are the determining factors? Who decides? What kind of regional security arrangement can be put in place to ensure interim safety for these fledgling polities as they make their way to a sufficient level of independence? How can we work with regional partners to ensure that our actions don’t appear as yet another attempt to impose Western ways? The point of this essay is not to answer these questions, but merely to raise them. Yet if asking the wrong questions has up to now contributed to the present quagmire, then asking better questions is no idle endeavor. Small ball can win the day.

LEADERSHIP

Christ washing the feet of the Apostes. Mosaics in monastery of Hosios Loukas

Principles of Transformative Leadership Col. Timothy Mallard

Authentic servant leadership should and can be of vital strategic interest to the republic and thus the world. In inculcating this ideal by their example into the geopolitical institutions of the nation, Christian leaders of deeply-held conscience and authentic character can shape the decision-making apparatus of the state, though in a formative and not coercive manner. This is certainly true in my vocational realm in the profession of arms, but, given today’s “whole of government” mindset to strategic problem sets, it should also be applicable in all diplomatic, informational, economic, financial, intelligence, and legal venues of the state. Indeed, when any strategic leader at this level fails morally or ethically while in his or her duties, the accompanying loss of trust both inside and outside the bounds of the state corrodes all healthy democratic functioning. In contrast, when such a strategic leader succeeds in living out an ethic of authentic servant leadership, the nation and world are ennobled, and democratic functioning is immeasurably strengthened for all. What are some basic principles for living out a vocation as a servant leader? Of course, scholarship on organizational culture is awash in arti10

cles, books, or posts addressing the “buzzword” of servant leadership. What is it? How does one do it? What effect does it have, permanent or temporary? Where is it found, or how can it be taught? This plethora of questions indicates that servant leadership is both intriguing yet difficult to employ. Were it the opposite, whole business schools would build their curriculum to pass on such a crucial stratagem and form such leaders. Our struggle to grasp after this ideal indicates that we are somehow both far from discovering it yet deeply desirous that it would nurture our broken, ethically impoverished world. As a corrective, I suggest a return to first principles, for there is no doubt that transformative servant leadership has been repeatedly associated with the life and witness of Jesus of Nazareth. To both a temporal and eternal end, then, I want to posit five principles for servant leadership (vice values, norms, or worse yet rules) from Jesus’ earthly ministry that inform our challenge. First, transformative servant leadership is predicated on not prudentially assessing outcomes but on the servant leader living out faith by eschewing all thought of cost or reward

(Mark 10:29-31). Jesus commands His disciples to be committed to the task of kingdom building, even at the risk of losing all meaningful human expressions of connection (families of origin, marriage and children, earthly wealth). However and ironically, Jesus does add a word of warning: do conduct a prudential calculation that such a commitment will bring attendant and unforeseen (but not wholly incomprehensible) further results of persecution, rejection, and perhaps even death. If one becomes an authentic servant leader, the world may and perhaps will reject him or her, but the Christ will not; rather, Christ will accept the witness of the transformative servant leader to the kingdom and proffer an eternal reward that stands beyond human systems of reasoning or calculation. Second and relatedly, the transformative servant leader does not afford himself or herself the mantle of leadership; rather, he or she acts only in willing obedience to God’s decisive calling to lead, and for no other reason. Any other motivation is a temptation to false humility and, ironically, an expression of the first and greatest sin of pride. Servant leadership is thus always an exercise in deep humility to God’s calling to obedient discipleship (Luke 22:41-42). Some might say that the Christological context of Jesus’ ministry establishes an unattainable standard for any subordinate human leader within the Body of Christ, a type of impossible ideal which only Jesus can fulfill. However, I contend that as with all of Jesus’ earthly public ministry—both His teachings and His actions—there is an implicit, divine recognition that though the standard is perhaps impossible to reach amidst a fallen world, it is nonetheless one toward which we must strive. Obedience to God’s calling is the sine qua non of Christian discipleship and vital for transformative servant leadership. Third, the transformative servant leader always acts intentionally for the other and not the self. In this particular principle is demonstrably found the ideal of lived service, or perhaps the fulfillment of the Christian expression (and standard) love of agape. As Christ would demonstrate on the cross, love must be manifested in tangible action and with the specific intention of serving another and his or her deep need, never the leader’s self-interests (Luke 19:10). Thus, inextricably linked to the prior principle of obedience is the principle of motivation; the servant leader always acts with and for the vest-

ed interests of others. This is so whether others have any cognitive recognition of their need or, presuming they do, have voiced such need in penitent request. Moreover, the servant leader acts for others despite the risk to himself or herself which the process of serving may entail. Fourth, the transformative servant leader acts with an awareness of genuinely leading both church and community. While not motivated by aggrandizement or adulation, a true servant leader must be cognizant that he or she is actually leading others (John 10:27). In my ministry context in the US Army, the institution focuses on leader development as a core task that is vital to the success of the force, so success in battle for the whole is predicated on the successful exercise of leadership by the one. Leadership is thus both the art and act of motivating a group of followers to achieve a specified end that only the whole can attain. Why Christian seminaries and divinity schools so often fail to teach this basic premise of leadership is a mystery, for there is no doubt that the profession of ministry is predicated—as with our Lord—on the task of actually leading not only the church but also the polis, or the civic community. Leader awareness of this contextual reality is critical to success. Finally, the fifth principle of transformative servant leadership is that it always exercises fidelity to the name and nature of God and arises from the leader’s continuing relationship in Him. This ideal can be categorized as a healthful subordination, where the servant leader continually remains aware of his or her spiritual poverty and need for God’s enduring provision (Matthew 4:10). However, I contend that it is more than simply an assessment of receiving that which may be necessary to accomplish an accepted task. Rather, the servant leader must act in reflectivity as to how his or her actions communicate and honor both the name and nature of the God he or she professes to serve and on whose behalf he or she professes to act. Moreover, a conduit for remaining grounded in fidelity to God is for the servant leader to continually cultivate an ongoing relationship with God. By His example, Christ was teaching us that our task in public ministry will always be done in faithfulness to the God who called us and only in an abiding relationship to Him, just as He continuously exercised with His heavenly Father. If all of this sounds radically different than what

we hear in our contemporary consumerist ethos, it is. However, the Christian ideal of transformative servant leadership is both an inversion of contemporary secular models and yet patently effective in its exercise. That is why I have continually referred in this essay to transformative servant leadership, for this task healthfully grows both the leader and the led and achieves radical kingdom growth. This is done by never calculating either cost or reward by human standards; obeying only the call of God; acting always for the interest of the other and not the self; remaining cognizant of the task of actually leading both church and, by extension, community; and, honoring both the name and nature of the God we serve and abiding in relationship to Him. Jesus of Nazareth both embodied these principles in His earthly life and ministry and established them as enduring guides for future servant leaders of the faith. Consistently and rightfully employed, these principles are both sacrificial yet ennobling for the servant leader, countercultural and transformative for both church and community, and an enduring, hopeful temporal and eternal witness to the power of God in redeeming His creation.

Chaplain (Colonel) Timothy S. Mallard, Ph.D., is a career US Army Chaplain of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church now stationed at the Pentagon. He has deployed to combat operations as a Battalion, Brigade, and Division Chaplain and is the incumbent Command Chaplain, United States Army Europe, and 7th Army.

Why Christian seminaries and divinity schools so often fail to teach this basic premise of leadership is a mystery, for there is no doubt that the profession of ministry is predicatedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as with our Lordâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;on the task of actually leading not only the church but also the polis, or the civic community. Leader awareness of this contextual reality is critical to success.

PHILOS FELLOWS

FAYDRA SHAPIRO Faydra Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew with a lifelong interest in Christianity. She is the founding director of the Israel Center for Jewish-Christian Relations, and holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies. Faydra began her career as a university professor in Canada in the department of Religion and Culture, where she worked for 13 years. Her first book won a National Jewish Book Award in 2006. Faydra also writes regular academic articles and popular op-eds on Jewish-Christian relations and is passionate about her mission to create a greater understanding between Jews and Christians. Her most recent book is Christian Zionism: Navigating the Jewish-Christian Border. Faydra is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Tel Hai College where she continues her research and academic writing. She was born in Canada, and proudly returned her family to their ancestral homeland of Israel in 2008. Faydra lives happily with her husband and many children in a tiny hilltop community in Galilee. 13

THE CONFLICT

A Memorial Marker from the Garden Cemetary on Mount Hertzl

The Shepherd Becomes the King:

I n ter pr e tin g 70 Ye a rs o f I s ra e l i I nde pe nde nc e Robert Nicholson

The proclamation of Jewish independence on May 14, 1948, may have been the most epic reversal of history ever recorded. Eighteen centuries after the Romans expelled their forefathers and only three years after the Holocaust, a tiny group of 750,000 Jews—less than half the current Jewish population of New York City—declared sovereignty in their ancestral homeland against a tidal wave of opposition and Arab invasion from all sides. Rarely in history does one find a cause so evidently moral. Israel’s founding was at once a victory for justice, a triumph for freedom, and a crushing blow to antisemitism. It was a story of David against Goliath. But 70 years later, things are different. Israel isn’t David anymore. Though still tiny, this nuclear state and regional hegemon is one of the most successful and dynamic countries on the planet. New facts demand a new approach, and too few voices are taking the next chapter of the State of Israel seriously. 14

Hundreds of millions of people around the world still loathe the Jews and the Jewish state. A thousand miles from Jerusalem, the Iranian ayatollahs are working hard to achieve Israel’s immediate destruction. One hundred miles away in Lebanon and just 50 miles away in Gaza, Hezbollah and Hamas are doing their best to assist. All around the world, agents of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement are trying to isolate and weaken the Jewish state through nonviolent, but no less insidious, means. Israel will have enemies for the foreseeable future, but that old fear of being “wiped off the map” has faded and has been replaced by an unshakable confidence. This new national confidence is a source of both consternation to her enemies and occasionally concern to her allies. Israel’s allies, who are accustomed to caring for the poor and endangered Jew, are adjusting to the new reality that David can fend for himself. David the weak shepherd has become David the mighty king, and many of his best friends still

don’t know what to do with that. The most obvious conceptual revolution has been Israel’s status in the Arab world. In recent years, as a consequence of shared concern over Iranian expansion, Israel has established a growing network of friendly ties with Arab neighbors. Since 1979, Israel has made peace with Egypt; since 1994, with Jordan. One year before that, Israel began working with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to create the Palestinian National Authority, the first experiment in Palestinian self-determination in all of history. Anyone who remembers the events and rhetoric of 1948 would be shocked by the change of tone among Arab leaders toward Jerusalem. Last September, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi stood before the UN General Assembly and inveighed against Palestinian leadership, calling on them “to overcome [their] differences and not to lose opportunities and to be ready to accept co-existence with the other, with Israelis in safety and security.” In late April of 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman reportedly told an assembled group of Jewish-American leaders, “In the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given. It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.” Just last week, as Iranian missiles fell from Syria onto northern Israel, Bahrain Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa went on Twitter to support Israel’s “right” to defend itself. Clearly, this is not the world of universal Arab opposition into which Israel was born. Beyond the Arab world, things are looking also looking up. In his first year in office, President Donald Trump has spurred the United States to become more pro-Israel than ever, moving its embassy to Jerusalem, canceling the Obamaera Iran Deal, and launching retaliatory missiles at Israel’s enemies in Syria. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meanwhile is working hard to forge deeper ties with Russia, China, India (even going so far as to spark up a budding bromance with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi), and many key African and European countries. On the diplomatic and cultur-

al fronts, Israel has never been more accepted than it is today. The selection of Israeli singer Netta Barzilai as the winner of the Eurovision song competition on Saturday only underscores a general opening toward Israel from countries around the world.

“In just one lifetime, the

Jewish state has gone from rags to riches. So how should we think about engaging Israel in light of such dramatic changes? ”

Israel’s external displays of strength are equally matched by its internal fortitude. No longer is it the struggling, resource-poor country of hungry immigrants that it was in 1948. Today Israel’s economy is one of the most dynamic in the world, on track to grow by around 3 percent through the end of 2019. Unemployment is lower than it has been in years. Life expectancy is up. Unlike many developed countries, Israel’s population growth is well above replacement rate. Israel has recently discovered and begun exploiting a massive natural gas field offshore, and its pioneering work in desalination, irrigation, and wastewater treatment has taken the country from water shortage to water surplus in just a few years. In just one lifetime, the Jewish state has gone from rags to riches. So how should we think about engaging Israel in light of such dramatic changes? First, we need to keep in mind what Israel actually is. Outsiders often reduce the country to two-dimensional images of the “Holy Land” or the “frontline against terror” that ignore the 8.5 million people who actually live there. Israel is, above all else, an exercise in Jewish self-determination and security; we support Israel because we support the Jewish people, not the other way around. Israel is also home to almost two million non-Jews, a myriad assortment of Arab, Druze, Aramean, Armenian, and Syriac citizens who care just as deeply about its future as the Jews do. Our friendship with Israel means understanding Israel’s essential humanity. 15

Second, we should recognize that hatred of the Jewish state remains strong in many quarters. The war isn’t over, and the timeless reality of antisemitism demands constant vigilance. Hubris, self-deception, and destruction lie in wait for those who mistake calm for capitulation. Third, we should begin looking at Israel as a model of entrepreneurial ingenuity that can benefit others through its hard-won knowledge. Much has been made about Israel as the “start-up nation” whose innovative economic techniques can be adopted by other developing countries. Less talked about has been Israel’s success in the social and governmental realms. How to manage the problems presented by immigration, poverty, and post-traumatic stress? How to ensure freedom and pluralism amid deep ethnic, religious, and ideological differences? How to uphold rule of law against the corruption and capriciousness of political leaders? How to balance the demands of liberalism and democracy with the need to preserve cultural mores? These are all challenges that Israeli leaders have studied and, in many cases, met with incredible solutions. As Middle Easterners look for a way out of their current quagmire, and as we in the West seemingly move toward a post-liberal future, we should be examining these case studies and looking for models that work. Fourth, we Christians should see Israel as a gateway to the Hebraic tradition that lies at the root of our faith, a tradition that often gets buried beneath our denominational preferences and ultra-modern sensibilities. Though hardly a religious country—only 20 percent of its people identify as orthodox—Israel nevertheless serves, through its history, geography, and demography, as a point of departure for Christianity and Western culture more broadly. If “saving the West” involves any kind of return to the transcendent vision that first made our civilization great, then Israel and its people offer an obvious entry point, a living link that helps us reclaim the original context of our faith. Lastly, we need to get beyond the old paradigm of “supporting” Israel and explore the possibilities of partnering with the Jewish state to advance shared values and interests. Of course, we support Israel—that’s a given. But the most interesting way to engage Israel in the future won’t be face-to-face, reaching down to give the Jews a hand; it will be side-by-side, standing shoulder-to-shoulder as we work to address 16

each other’s challenges, promote pluralism in the Middle East, and act out that old adage that Jews and Christians take so seriously: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” It may be hard for those raised on the constant alarmism of the Israel-in-crisis narrative to cope with the fact of Israel’s success. But wise friends will see that the Jewish state’s most exciting years still lie ahead. In one of its more aspirational paragraphs, the Israeli Declaration of Independence reads: We extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East. Seventy years on, thanks to Israel’s growing strength and acceptance, these aspirations act ally have a shot at becoming reality.

PHILOS FELLOWS

JULIANA TAIMOORAZY Juliana Taimoorazy is the founder and president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council and a senior fellow of the Philos Project. As a senior fellow at the Philos Project, Juliana is the advisor on the issue of persecuted Christians in the Middle East, developing policy, authoring columns, and speaking around the globe to raise awareness. As a young woman in 1989, fleeing religious harassment in Iran, Juliana was smuggled into Switzerland and Germany before receiving asylum in America. In 2000, she obtained her Master’s degree from Northeastern Illinois University. Today, through her activism, speaking engagements and regular media appearances, both in the U.S. and internationally, Juliana has tirelessly shared her personal story and promoted the cause of Iraqi Christians throughout the world. She will soon be releasing a book sharing her personal experiences and the plight of her people, called “Daughter of Nineveh.” 17

THE CONFLICT

The Israeli Knesset

Israel’s New Law:

A Tale o f Two N a t i o n - S t a te s Robert Nicholson

The Palestine Basic Law (2003) defines Palestine as part of the Arab world and Arab unity as a singular goal of the Palestinian people. The law also defines Arabic as Palestine’s official language, Jerusalem as its official capital, and Islam as its official religion. This basic law serves as a temporary constitution for the Palestinian Authority until a sovereign State of Palestine is established. In the meantime, the law governs daily life inside the West Bank and to some extent Gaza. On July 19 the Israeli Knesset passed a similar basic law. After hours of heated debate, a majority of the 120 members of Israel’s chief governing body passed the Nation-State Law that “establishes Israel as the historic home of the Jewish people” with a “complete and undivided” Jerusalem as its capital and Hebrew as its official language. Basic laws in Israel are special laws that have constitutional status until such time as Israel incorporates all of them into a final constitution. Reaction to the bill was swift and mostly negative, not least of all because twenty percent 18

of Israel’s population is not Jewish. A bevy of Jewish and Arab members of parliament condemned the law as racist. The Israeli Druze population, a unique minority known for its fealty to the state, directed rare but unmistakable outrage at Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem issued a statement of special concern saying, “The law might not have practical effects, yet it sends an unequivocal signal to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, to the effect that in this country they are not at home.” The Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Muslim World League condemned the law in similar terms. The two basic laws cut to the heart of what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about. They deserve careful attention because, whether Israeli or Palestinian, they serve to guide two societies living alongside each other as neighbors in the Holy Land. Very little of Israel’s new Nation-State Law is actually new. The mere statement that Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people

is hardly novel; it’s what Israelis have been saying since 1948. In fact, the best critique of the law may be that it doesn’t really do anything besides stir up unnecessary trouble. The one section that could be considered an innovation is “Section 4: Language” which declares Hebrew as the sole official language of Israel, relegating Arabic to the status of “special.” The provision seems to contravene seventy years of Arabic’s place as an “official” language of the state. As the country’s single biggest minority, Arabs are naturally displeased. It is unclear whether the semantic shift from “official” and “special” will lead to any meaningful change in practice. The law explicitly states that it shall “in no way derogate from the status given in fact to the Arabic language before the application of this Basic Law.” Only time will tell if Netanyahu’s government, or any subsequent government, will take steps to curtail the rights of Arab citizens. For now it seems unlikely that anything will change on the ground or that Arabic will lose its favored place in Israeli public life. Most criticism of the law is focused on Israel’s coupling of ethnic (Jewish) and national (Israeli) identity. For anyone raised in a liberal democracy like the United States, the idea that a state could be labeled as the unique home of particular people who hold a special right to self-determination is unthinkable. Nothing in the American, Canadian, or French experience has prepared us for such parochial thinking. But identifying a state as the home of one ethnic or national group isn’t all that novel either. I recently spent some time in Croatia, a state whose constitution was drafted to serve the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural needs of the Croatian people. Other constitutions ensure that Ireland is for the Irish, Poland for the Poles, Slovakia for the Slovaks, Spain for the Spanish. Asia and Africa are filled with similar examples. It seems that most states prefer some kind of ethnic distinction; liberal democracies like ours are actually the exception.

and Costa Rica are Roman Catholic. Bulgaria is Orthodox. Norway is Lutheran. England is Anglican. It’s all pretty standard stuff. Whether defined as ethnic or religious, the Jewish identity of Israel finds parity in the Arab and Muslim identity of Palestine. And if Palestine can be Arab in every way, why can’t Israel be Jewish? Citizens of liberal democracies who know that they are in the world’s minority will not be bothered by states that maintain religious or ethnic preferences even if they find those preferences hard to understand. Their eyebrows will raise only when those states start to curtail the rights of minority citizens who don’t identify with the majority. Israelis and Palestinians don’t need to apologize for affirming the ethnic and religious character of their states. But it’s important to point out that the Palestine Basic Law and Israel Nation-State law only make sense in the context of a two-state paradigm. The Jewish state of Israel cannot swallow the Palestinians; the Arab state of Palestine cannot destroy the Israelis. Both are too numerous, too nationally-minded, and too tenacious to disappear. Efforts to reinforce the identity of one should be paired with similar efforts to recognize the identity of the other. The real question here is whether the basic laws of Israel and Palestine will harm the ability of Arabs and Jews to live as minorities in the other’s state. Will Arabs continue to live as equal Arabic-speaking citizens in Israel? Will Jews be allowed to live as equal Hebrew-speaking citizens in the future State of Palestine? These are the questions we should be asking now and in the future. Beyond the rhetoric, they are the only questions that really matter.

Many critics will dispute the claim that Jewishness is an ethnic identity, arguing that it’s a religious identity and therefore improper as the constitutional basis for a state. But even if Jewishness is not a true ethnic identity (and I would dispute that vigorously), there is nothing unique about a religiously-defined state either. Most Middle Eastern countries affirm Islam as their official religion. Malta 19

THE CONFLICT

Palestinian refugees, still from the film “1948: Creation & Catastrophe.

Nakba:

Ca tastro p h e a n d M o d e ra t i o n i n Pa l e s t i ne Robert Nicholson

This article about the Nakba including interviews with Mohammed Dajani and Sari Nusseibeh first appeared in the Spring-Summer 2018 issue of Providence’s print edition. The Dajani clan is one of the oldest and most respected Arab clans in Jerusalem with roots that go back to the first Muslim conquerors who came to the Holy Land from Arabia. These days, on top of their ancient identity, the Dajanis see themselves as Palestinians. Their memories are rooted in the Nakba, a failed attempt by Arab states to uproot the new Jewish state in 1948, which caused a massive exile of 750,000 Palestinians into surrounding countries. “Nakba” is an Arabic word that means catastrophe. I recently sought out Dr. Mohammed Dajani, one of the more well-known members of his clan, to discuss the future of the Palestinian national movement on the seventieth anniversary of the catastrophe. Dajani believes the best response to the Nakba is acceptance of, and coexistence with, the Jewish state.

Moderation is the only path to a viable Palestinian future and the best launching pad for the United States to engage with the conflict. But the history of moderation movements is spotty at best. Extremists tend to be better armed to win the day. I came to Dajani because I wanted to better understand the challenges that moderate leaders like him face inside Palestinian society. Do they have an audience? Do they have the vision and courage to lead the Palestinian people into the future? And how can US policy be redirected to assist them? I caught up with Mohammed Dajani at an outdoor café in the trendy Mamilla Mall just a few hundred meters west of the Old City of Jerusalem. Dajani has authored many books and thousands of speeches, but he is best known these days for a single study abroad trip that he led in 2014. The trip was unremarkable apart from the fact that the students were Palestinian and the destination was Auschwitz. The trip sparked outrage far and wide. Faculty members, politicians, and concerned citizens all unleashed their rage on this mild mannered

“A majority!” he answered. “Moderation has always been the main feature of Palestinian politics. In the 1950s and ’60s, there were two powerful trends pulling at Arab societies, communism and the Muslim Brotherhood, but Palestinians never aligned themselves with either.” The problem, he explained, was the extremist minority. He cited the 1938 assassination of a well-known ancestor, journalist Hassan Sidqi Omar al-Dajani, who was killed for his even-handed stance toward the 1937 British plan to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs. “Others were assassinated for the same reason,” he said, “causing many of the moderates to remain silent. But they have always been there.” “And you think moderates are still the majority?” Al-Quds University Professor Mohammed Dajani Daoudi

academic. How dare a Palestinian professor encourage his students to study the Holocaust. Dajani had a few supporters—his students and the university president among others—but his enemies were relentless. They called him a “normalizer” (a Palestinian slur for anyone who works with Israel), and some even threatened his life.

“They told me I was a traitor and that punishment for traitors is death,” Dajani told me over an Americano. “It was a personal vendetta. People said I was a CIA spy who was getting paid $42 million to impose ‘American Islam’ on the Palestinians.” He guffawed. “I told them don’t worry. Once the money comes in, you’ll get your check.” Dajani no longer works at Al-Quds University. The pressure was too great. He submitted his resignation and now focuses his time on promoting wasatia, or moderation, as a path to peace with Israel. “Doesn’t this episode tell us something about where Palestinians are at?” I asked. “It’s not like you visited the grave of Theodor Herzl. You went to Auschwitz.” He shook his head. “I don’t think it reflects the Palestinian culture or mentality at all,” he said matter-of-factly. “It was just a few bad apples promoting incitement and misinformation.” “Really,” I said, raising my eyebrows, “you think a minority of Palestinians are still moderate?”

“Here in Palestine we have three groups,” Dajani said. “There are around 10 to 12 Islamic parties who have around 8-10 percent of the people. On the other side, you have the secular parties who have around 25-30 percent. Neither [has] even half the vote. In the middle you have about 60 percent who are moderates. My goal is to engage these people and make sure they have representation. That’s the idea of wasatia.” He looked out across the café, suddenly sober. “Palestinians are moderate,” he said. “They just don’t have an address.” “What is moderation?” I asked. “I’m not a religious man,” Dajani replied. “I think of myself as a reformist. But I believe there are two Islams: radical Islam and moderate Islam. Both have the Qur’an as a reference point. Extremist Islam fights the other and denies the other’s religion and belief. Moderate Islam accepts the other and tries to live with him. “But I don’t mean moderation only in terms of religion. I consider collecting garbage from the street to be moderation. Standing up to an evildoer, this is moderation too. It is about taking responsibility for living together in peace. “That is why I’m trying to establish a peace university here in the land. To teach reconciliation as a profession, an art, a science. To build trust among people. To bring reform, not to Islam but to Muslims. To bring hope.” “Are Palestinians responding?” 21

“Oh yes,” he said, “mainly on Facebook. But many are too scared to say anything, even if they believe in my work.” “How do you get around that fear?” Dajani finished his coffee and sat back, wiping his hands with a napkin. It was the only time during our conversation that he seemed unsure how to answer. “It has to start with someone,” he finally said, “someone who has the courage to stand up and take the heat so that others can follow behind him.” He paused. “When I came back from the Auschwitz trip, I knew that I had to take the heat for my students. If I didn’t, it would all fall on them. But when I stood up, they felt the courage to stand up too.” “And what about your safety?” I asked. “I’m careful,” Dajani said with a smile. “I don’t go too deep into the West Bank. If I do, it’s only for a short time.” Laughing, he added, “In Arabic we have a proverb: If you don’t want nightmares, don’t sleep in graveyards.” *** A few days later, I went to visit Sari Nusseibeh at his East Jerusalem home not far from the Mount of Olives. He greeted me at the door in a brown blazer and jeans, looking a bit drowsy in the mid-afternoon heat under his mop of white hair. “Sorry I’m late,” I said, pointing to my phone, “Google Maps.” He waved away the apology and welcomed me out of the sun into the cool interior of his home. The stone floor beneath my feet was worn smooth by generations of Nusseibehs who had come before me. Their faces looked down at me from their black-and-white portraits on the walls. Like his old colleague Dajani, Nusseibeh is a distinguished Palestinian academic who belongs to a venerable Jerusalem dynasty. Historically, the Dajanis were custodians of King David’s tomb; the Nusseibehs were custodians of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Nusseibeh himself recently retired as a professor of philosophy and president of AlQuds University (the same university president who quietly supported Dajani against his detractors), and also served as the Palestinian Authority representative in Jerusalem until 2002. His most recent book, The Story of Reason in Islam, is a magisterial intellectual history of 22

“Moderation is the only

path to a viable Palestinian future and the best launching pad for the United States to engage with the conflict. ”

rationalism in Islamic thought from the seventh century until today. Like Dajani, Nusseibeh is a well-known Palestinian moderate. He led me to his parlor where we both sank into plush chairs across from each other. I explained that I was writing an article on the Nakba and wanted to hear his perspective. “I’m not sure what I can tell you,” he said, sighing. His face looked weary and inscrutable. “Let’s start with something simple,” I said. “Who are the Palestinians?” Actually, the question wasn’t that simple. Europeans have been using the word “Palestine” since the Bronze Age to describe the southeastern Mediterranean coast after an Indo-European people called the Philistines set up a colony there in the first or second millennium BC. Over time, “Philistine” became “Palestine”—a word used to describe a place, not a people. That Palestine carries a geographic meaning and not a national one has naturally presented some difficulties for the Palestinian national movement. “Palestinians are a salad,” Nusseibeh said, “a mixed salad, even. People coming from different places, some with Christian ancestry, some pre-Islamic, some post-Islamic, some more recently during the Crusades, some even more recently during the British Mandate. If you asked me did my ancestors consider themselves to be Palestinian, I would say most likely not. They saw themselves as Arabs, or Muslims who just happened to be living here.” Modern Palestinian identity, Nusseibeh explained, developed in reaction to Zionism.

“Only recently,” he said, “in reaction to the birth of the Jewish national idea, did they need to develop a Palestinian national idea in order to secure their own space in the same country.” And not all Palestinians reacted the same way. “Some of them managed to stay here and try to exist within the growing system that is Israel,” he said. “Some of them were either expelled or fled or left, first here and then later elsewhere, and tried to find ways to live in those different contexts including, for instance, thinking about returning to what they consider to be their homeland.” Nusseibeh leaned back in his chair. “The Palestinian struggle is just a reaction to the Zionist takeover of the country,” he said. “If you think about it, that’s all there is to it.” I asked whether the reactionary nature of Palestinian identity—that it emerged in direct opposition to another identity—in any way inhibits peace. That is, if being Palestinian means opposing Israel wouldn’t peace with Israel threaten the very foundations of Palestinian identity? “You take this too far in the wrong direction,” Nusseibeh replied. “People today identify as Palestinian. My great-great-great grandfather did not, but my grandchildren do. It’s quite strong now.” “But is there something to it?” “Peace doesn’t threaten our identity. Not real peace. Think about a neutral state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea—a state that isn’t Jewish or Arab, Israeli or Palestinian, but a state of all of its citizens. Palestinians would welcome such a state.” He looked for a reaction from me, knowing that he was proposing something outside the accepted orthodoxy of the conflict. “Identity is important in maintaining some kind of sense of history, self-recognition, and so on. But at the end of the day what you really need to do is address your daily concerns.” Nusseibeh is well-known for having Jewish friends and interlocutors, but he’s also angered many Jews by opposing the idea of a Jewish state. “What about Palestinian self-determination?” I asked. “What about a Palestinian state?” “It’s a recent thing,” Nusseibeh answered quickly, “this business about the Palestinian state. It’s not really something built in. It was

one way to think about how to address the concerns.” At first the Palestinians rejected any compromise with Israel, demanding the destruction of the Jewish state and a restoration of Arab Palestine. Only in the 1990s, after decades of armed struggle failed to produce results, did Palestinian leaders agree to recognize Israel in exchange for a shot at self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza. But the collapse of the peace process and outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 sent everything back to zero. “Now they see themselves as having failed,” Nusseibeh said. “They are going back to the idea of having one state, but very slowly.” “One Arab state?” “No,” he replied, “but not one Jewish state either. A state where Palestinians are given equal rights—not to be part of the Israeli state, but not to create a Palestinian state.” “So something in between?” “Yes,” he said, “at least for now, as a step for later on. Palestinians need certain things, communal things that stand for what they consider important components of their cultural history. At that level, there is a need to have some kind of identity with which you’re associated, but it needn’t go beyond that to become embodied in a political organization—unless it’s necessary. You can have another kind of system.” “But isn’t that what the Palestinian Authority is?” I asked. “Something in between?” Nusseibeh measured his words carefully. “Not exactly,” he said. “A lot of people look at the PA today and feel that it’s not giving us what we need. People are no longer very enthusiastic about the state. They are beginning to see that states are not magical means of satisfying one’s needs.” I had heard these sentiments before. Polling numbers bear out the disillusionment of many Palestinians, especially younger ones, with the Palestinian Authority and the growing support for a “one-state solution.” “But isn’t the hope that the PA will become a real state soon?” “The PA has been living, and making everyone else live, in the hope that a state is in the offing. But if the idea of a state just disappears,” Nusseibeh paused, “maybe that would make for a better situation all around.” 23

“That’s a radical idea. Are Palestinians ready for that?” “It’s hard to say,” Nusseibeh said. “Our public discourse is very self-righteous and enclosed. There isn’t enough leeway for people to just throw ideas out and play around with them. The situation is so intellectually tense that ideas like these are immediately looked at with suspicion. It’s very hard.” He told me about a time in the early 1980s when he was attacked for publicly suggesting that Israel annex the West Bank and Gaza and give the Palestinians equal rights. “It was a brilliant idea,” he told me, “but it was looked upon as something that was totally outside the line.” “What do you see as the qualities of an ideal Palestinian leader?” Nusseibeh was taken aback—perhaps it was a question he had never been asked. He cocked his head, thinking. “Someone with self-respect and dignity that I could be proud of,” he said, “even if I don’t always agree. Someone who is thoughtful enough, reasonable enough, dignified enough for me to feel good about. His top priority must be the betterment of his people, providing his people with freedom, their rights, and their dignity. He must be devoid of things like kleptocracy, corruption, and so on, and very willing to pass on the flame to the next in line through elections. Not pompous but humble. Imaginative, creative, having a vision that he can translate to the rest of the people, convince them, lead them along to the fulfillment of that vision—gently, using the art of persuasion. Certainly not by force or by fear or by coercion.” He paused for a long time. “What is a leader anyway?” he said, almost talking out loud. “Not necessarily someone who leads, but someone who has the capacity to lead. Very often, if things don’t need you…” His voice trailed off, his face melancholy. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “I think we should end here.” *** Palestinian moderates aren’t a theoretical category; they exist. An April 2018 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that half of Palestinians still support the peace process and the two-state 24

solution. A solid 30 percent believe in negotiations as the best path to peace. A further 30 percent accept the idea of Israeli Jews living as equals in the future State of Palestine. This group—what I call the friendly third—is ready to move beyond conflict and coexist alongside the Jewish people. But the problem isn’t the friendly—it’s the fierce. A full 35 percent of Palestinians reject negotiations and see armed action as the best way to achieve their national goals; 30 percent believe that the most important goal is obtaining the right for millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their forefathers’ 1948 towns and villages inside Israel proper; about 35 percent want Marwan Barghouti, a convicted murderer and terrorist, to be the next president of the PA; and a staggering 50 percent support violent attacks against Jewish civilians inside Israel. This social analysis should affect US policy. If Palestinian moderates are indeed the key to peace, American policymakers should be searching for ways to better identify and empower them. Most importantly, we must help them acquire the financial tools needed to hold back the fierce. Unfortunately, most of our attention has been spent on the political landscape—borders, settlements, and capitals—at the expense of the human one. Real peacemaking must begin on the street, and real Palestinians need leaders who will offer solutions to everyday problems. Maps mean nothing if no one accepts them. It is an open question whether the current leadership of the PA is truly moderate. While formally committed to the two-state solution, few of its leaders seem eager to actually achieve it. Palestinian negotiators have rejected at least two major Israeli peace offers since 2000, and the PA still subsidizes the families of terrorists who have committed attacks against Israeli Jews. These leaders may be moderate compared to Hamas, but perhaps they aren’t moderate enough. That’s the argument of the Trump administration, which has blamed PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) negotiator Saeb Erekat for ignoring the best interests of their people in the name of politics and payola. Trump’s much-discussed, still-unreleased “Deal of the Century” peace plan seems likely to contain measures that bypass Palestinian leaders through a bottom-up, economic approach to peace. Abbas and Erekat have responded preemptively by boycotting Trump’s plan be-

fore they even see it. Trump is right to push them. For too long the Palestinian governing class has gotten rich on the backs of its people, prolonging the conflict while reaping the rewards of international assistance. Trump is also right to focus on economic development that is aimed at the street level. Only visible improvements in daily life will convince the fickle and frustrated that the path to peace is worth pursuing. But there is a danger in undermining the establishment too quickly. Right now, there is no alternative network of moderate leaders ready to take its place. And Hamas, despite its own internal weaknesses, stands waiting in the wings while moderate leaders like Dajani and Nusseibeh remain scattered and powerless beyond the persuasiveness of their own rhetoric. Many of these moderates also embrace, like Nusseibeh, the idea of a one-state solution— the call to destroy the PA, erase the Green Line that separates Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, and pile all the Jews and Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea into one big state. On paper the idea sounds attractive; in practice, it is alarming. For those Palestinians who still crave some kind of national self-determination, it threatens the foundations of their identity. For Israeli Jews who still believe in the necessity of a Jewish state—and that is the vast majority—the demographic implications of the one-state solution will sound the death knell of the entire Zionist project. Hasty moves in this direction, without proper planning, are likely to spark chaos rather than contain it. Trump should ramp up economic assistance to the Palestinian people. He should find innovative ways to channel money past bloated bureaucracies and big NGOs to apolitical projects that help real people. Trump should also invest in building a network of Palestinian moderates—real moderates, especially in the middle and younger generations—that will serve as an incubator for talent, a bulwark against the anti-peace opposition, and an alternative leadership community ready to fill future positions in the PA or, worst case, step up to lead in the event of PA collapse. Reformers like Dajani have boldly stepped out to take the heat in the name of peace. But as it stands today, they are financially unable to empower the young leaders who would take up their mantle. The US can do something meaningful by identifying real moderates and linking them together with the assis-

tance needed to ensure lasting change. Both economic and leadership development initiatives should be paired for maximum effect. We cannot change Palestinian society, but Palestinians who embrace pluralism and peace most certainly can. Our main task is to help them. and a Muslim man enjoys this freedom no less than a Christian one. Christians who want to weaken the hegemony of Islam in the Middle East may launch any number of evangelistic initiatives and accept the risks that come with such work. But they cannot view US foreign policy as a tool in their toolbox or place the suppression of Islamic faith among our compelling national interests. On the contrary, such a foreign policy would be immoral and counterproductive. Only Muslims can decide the future of the Middle East. No one understood this better than Lebanese Christian diplomat and philosopher Charles Malik, who lived on the seam line between East and West. “The West must realize,” he wrote in a 1951 journal article, “and act on the realization, that in the end it is the one hundred million Moslems and Arabs of the Near East who are going to determine its destiny, and not any extraneous force.” Unless the American people are willing to sacrifice their sons to oppose that destiny indefinitely, they will have to, as Hamid argues, “accommodate Islam’s place in public life.” It is on us to decide how much of that we can deal with and how much we can’t—and, in the latter case, what we’re willing to do about it. The thought of a proud Islamic East may seem scary, but it will be scariest for those Westerners who lack a vision of their own religious roots. Middle Eastern civilization has something to do with Allah, and Western civilization has something to do with Yahweh— these are just historical facts. While neither our government nor our foreign policy is Christian, our people, our principles, and our history are undoubtedly so. Even Western secular values stem from Christian sources. American relations with the Middle East will be better when people on both sides acknowledge who they are. Yet while most Middle Easterners identify as Muslims and see us as Christians whether we observe the faith or not, we as a culture seem to be drifting further from our spiritual origins every year. This spiritual asymmetry between East and West presents a tangible challenge for the next century. 25

It’s not unreasonable to think that our struggles in the Middle East have as much to do with rising Islamic identity over there as they do with collapsing Christian identity over here. “You in the West cannot, in your dealings with the East, wash your hands of Jesus Christ,” Malik wrote in another essay. “He will not let you go, and in the eyes of the East, whatever else you are, Christ is already counted to you. Let him therefore be counted for justice and truth and righteousness.” *** The US government cannot endorse religion in its statements, policies, or actions, but it can make room for innovative religious engagement by clerics, scholars, and leaders in civil society. This engagement should begin by recognizing the real differences that separate Islam and Christianity and seek to build understanding and respect despite those differences. Many interfaith efforts start by affirming commonalities and end up frustrated by persistent disagreements later on. Much better, it seems, to candidly articulate disagreements at the outset and find areas of convergence down the line. This approach requires a spirit of mutual, even if at times begrudging, respect. This kind of public diplomacy isn’t a silver bullet, but it will be far more effective than our current portfolio of foreign aid, covert operations, and occasional regime change. Malik says it best: “Unless the West comes to the East with its deepest and most authentic convictions unashamedly held, practiced, and proclaimed, then let me tell you in all frankness; the East is not going to be impressed by the West.” I suggest the creation of an unofficial working group comprised of conservative Christian and Muslim leaders who are unashamed of their faith commitments and are interested in discussing, and disagreeing on, major questions of public import in an honest and respectful way. The relational bonds and conversational outcomes will help both sides understand each other’s concerns both in this country and abroad. Over time this working group can also become a resource, sounding board, and advisory body for policymakers and diplomats who work on US engagement with the Middle East and the wider Islamic world. Christian leaders must lead the way. But to do so they must abandon the patronizing language of interfaith dialogue and prepare to go deeper, to disagree, and to disagree grace26

fully. Furthermore, they must recognize that Christianity is not an American or European religion but a Middle Eastern religion, and they should be open to the possibility that contemporary Christianity has lost some of its native sensibilities in its journey westward. They should admit the possibility that the Middle East may have something to teach them about the original context of their own faith, and that this renewed self-understanding may help them bridge the gap with their Muslim peers. “When the West returns to its best self,” Malik writes, “our problems in the Near East will be solved—and not ours alone.” I think he’s right. Plunging into another century of Middle East policy without addressing the spiritual asymmetry between our two civilizations will only end in more frustration. I have seen America in contrast with many nations and races. My profession took me into many foreign lands under many kinds of government. I have worked with their great spiritual leaders and their great statesmen. I have worked in governments of free men, of tyrannies, of Socialists and of Communists. I have met with princes, kings, despots, and desperadoes. I have seen the squalor of Asia, the frozen class barriers of Europe. And I was not a tourist. I was associated in their working lives and problems. I had to deal with their governments. And outstanding everywhere to these great masses of people there was a hallowed word—America. To them, it was the hope of the world. America: the hope of the world.

THE CONFLICT

Empires of Feeling and Fantasy Robert Nicholson

In an August 2017 edition of The New Yorker, Hussein Agha and Ahmad Samih Khalidi offer a grim eulogy for the Palestinian national movement. “Palestinians are sliding toward the unknown,” they write. “The contemporary Palestinian national movement—founded and led by Yasser Arafat and embodied by the P.A., Fatah, and the P.L.O. over the past half century—is reaching its end.”

The Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik believed that Arab states would never be as prosperous as Western states until they embraced a more scientific and objective approach to reality. He admitted that the encounter with empiricism would cause “whole empires of feeling and fantasy and prejudice and poetry…to crash down,” but believed it was necessary for the long-term well-being of the Arabs.

This is hard reading for someone who still hopes for a healthy Palestinian state as a means to end the conflict. But I speak with Palestinians often, so I know that Agha and Khalidi are right.

The Palestinian national movement is one such illusory empire. Constructed on poetry and prejudice and generations of fantasy, it too must come crashing down so that it can be rebuilt, this time on a more solid basis.

The basic telos of Palestinian identity is the liberation of Greater Palestine (not just the West Bank and Gaza but all the land that comprises modern-day Israel) and the return of its refugees. But what happens when Palestinians realize that neither goal is achievable? They will either deny the fact, stagnate, and fall deeper into desperation; or they will accept it, move on, and rebuild their movement from the ground up. Fearing the first, Agha and Khalidi call for the second. So do I.

THE THREE YOUNG MEN who slipped into the Old City of Jerusalem before dawn on July 14, 2017, were all members of the same Arab clan and citizens of the State of Israel. Their name was Mohammed Jabareen—all three of them— and they brought two rifles and a pistol in a bag from their homes in the northern Israeli city of Umm al-Fahm. Their plan was to kill Jews and kick off a regional conflagration that would advance the liberation of Palestine. 27

Just before 8 am, they gunned down two Israeli police officers near the entrance to the Temple Mount complex. The officers were Druze, not Jews, but wore the uniform of the Jewish state, and that was enough. Pursued by Israeli security forces, the Jabareens fled into the complex, where they died in a hail of bullets as shahids, martyrs for their people. How could the Jabareens have possibly thought killing Israeli police officers would advance their cause? Didn’t they realize these senseless murders would make Israelis even more vigilant? Didn’t they understand that Palestinian violence has never worked since the time of the British Mandate? Apparently not. But the Jabareens aren’t alone. And it isn’t just self-defeating violence that hinders the Palestinian cause. Agha and Khalidi point out two more defects. The first is the weakness of Palestinian identity. Currently, there is no “unifying Palestinian bond” that can “forge a truly national enterprise out of highly localized components.” As the 1948 generation dies off, young Palestinians are wondering what the cause is all about. Is it about resistance? Negotiations? Religion? Real estate? There isn’t a clear answer. “Without ‘armed struggle,’” Agha and Khalidi write, “the national movement had no clear ideology, no specific discourse, no distinctive experience or character.” The PLO formally abandoned the armed struggle and the liberation of Greater Palestine in the 1990s for the establishment of a smaller state inside the West Bank and Gaza. But the spectacular failure to achieve even that more limited goal has pushed many young Palestinians back to the original vision. “The conflict may be dragged back to its historical origins as a struggle over and across the entire Holy Land,” suggest Agha and Khalidi, “reopening old wounds, inflicting new ones, and redefining how and if the conflict will be resolved.” The Jabareen attack, committed by Israel citizens who grew up speaking Hebrew, might be indicative of such a blurring of the 1948/1967 narratives. The second obstacle is the lack of political pragmatism. The Jews have always accepted something over nothing (Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann famously declared his willingness to accept a Jewish state “even if it’s the size of a tablecloth”); Palestinians have consistently preferred nothing over something. From Haj Amin al-Husseini and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam to Yasser 28

“The basic telos of Palestinian

identity is the liberation of Greater Palestine (not just the West Bank and Gaza but all the land that comprises modern-day Israel)” Arafat and Ismail Haniyeh, the basic Palestinian position has been to sacrifice oneself and one’s people in a blaze of glory before conceding one point of the political program. Palestinian culture gives the word shahid mythical power, making gritty compromises like the 1947 Partition Plan and other peace deals impossible to contemplate. Far better to die in purity. If martyrdom is the greatest Palestinian virtue, tatbi’a, or normalization, is the greatest Palestinian sin. A normalizer is a Palestinian who accepts Israel, cooperates with Israel, or suggests that Palestinians should get used to a Jewish state living next door. Professor Mohammad Dajani of Al-Quds University was accused of tatbi’a in 2014 when he brought his Palestinian students on a study trip to Auschwitz. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was accused of tatbi’a that same year when he dared to lament the Arabs’ rejection of the 1947 Partition Plan. This basic inability to cope with the fact of Israel is a major obstacle that needs to be overcome. “[Y]esteryear’s conventional nationalism and ‘national liberation’ are no longer the best currency for political mobilization and expression in today’s world,” explain Agha and Khalidi. Palestinians must “adapt their struggle and aspirations to new global realities. “Nationalism itself has changed,” they continue. “Palestinians need to search for new means of expressing their political identity and hopes in ways that do not and cannot replicate the past.” AND YET, I SAY, the liberation of Palestine is still possible. President Abbas raises an eyebrow: “How so?” Admit mistakes. The starkest difference between Israeli and Palestinian political culture is self-criticism. Israelis never stop criticizing each other and their policies; Palestinians almost never do, at least in public. As someone who leads study tours on both sides of the Green Line, I can vouch for the glaring contrast be-

tween the two. Forget Greater Palestine. It’s over. Israel is not going anywhere and is getting stronger. That doesn’t mean a new political entity called Palestine cannot emerge: that is, a smaller state of the Palestinian people in some part of historic Palestine, just as Israel is a state of the Jewish people in some part of historic Israel. Accept that, and get your people to accept it. Forget the refugees. Or rather, forget the idea that the 800,000 refugees from 1948 and their millions-strong progeny will ever return to the State of Israel. You can throw those old keys away. The refugees belong in their country of residence or in the new State of Palestine. Accept that. Be pragmatic. You’re not going to get what you want. So start asking yourself what is a “something” Palestine, a Palestine the size of a tablecloth. Create a state that you can be proud of for the sake of your children and grandchildren. The Jews have accepted less than they wanted. You should too. Punish violence and incitement to violence. This is simple enough. Embrace tatbi’a. You must deal with the Jews; you must befriend them. Terrorizing their civilians won’t scare them away; it will do the opposite. If independence and coexistence are your goal, they are not your enemy. Normalize. Concede. Compromise. Live. Accept Jewish citizens. The current position of the Palestinian Authority is that the future State of Palestine will be free of Jews—Judenrein, as der Führer used to say. This is a position that Christians like me cannot endorse. Jews are an ancient people who belong there as much as you do. Just as 20 percent of Israelis are Arab, there is no reason that 20 percent of Palestinians shouldn’t be Jewish. Settlers should be able to stay if they want to become citizens. Embrace their love of the land. The real Palestinian martyr will be the one who stands up and delivers this bold message to his people, even if he is killed immediately afterward. The death of this prophet, unlike the death of the Jabareens who threw their lives away for nothing, will ignite a new spirit of truth among right-thinking Palestinians that, God-willing, WalterofRussell Mead they will fan and use to raze the old empires the mind and to build anew.

29 Source: Unsplash

THE CONFLICT

Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Islam, Christianity, and the End of Palestine Robert Nicholson

The international community pretty much agrees on the preferred solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: two states for two peoples living side by side. On the ground, Jews and Arabs are less certain. A recent Pew study found that Israeli Jews are not convinced that an independent State of Palestine will ever live at peace beside Israel (43% yes/45% no).Israeli Arabs are only slightly more hopeful (50%/30%), while Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza—the population actually able to build a Palestinian state—are far more negative. According to an April 2016 poll from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR), about half of all Palestinians oppose the two-state model in principle, and roughly 60% believe that the concept is no longer viable. Only 30% want to preserve the Oslo Accords at all.

ic Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza—will soon be dead. And if that happens, the population most likely to suffer will be the small and already-beleaguered Palestinian Christian community.

This philosophical gap between international diplomats and local communities bodes ill for the future of the peace process. Diplomats will keep pushing, and people on the ground will keep resisting. If the situation doesn’t change, the concept of Palestine—a secular, democrat-

Conventional wisdom says that the main obstacle to peace is Israel’s preservation of Jewish settlements inside the West Bank. These settlements, we’re told, inhibit the establishment of a viable State of Palestine. Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran cleric from Bethlehem and author of Faith in

Many articles have been written on the imminent collapse of the two-state paradigm, usually with a focus on the growth of Jewish settlements. Far less has been written about attitudes and conflicts inside the Palestinian territories themselves—conflicts between secularists and Islamists, Muslims and Christians, those who want to coexist with Israel and those who want to destroy it. Yet it is these conflicts that are most likely to decide whether Palestine lives or dies, and if it lives, how Palestine will treat the Jews and Christians who are living nearby.

“The Palestinian Authority is a mess. No less than 80% of its citizens believe that their government is corrupt. Only 17% believe there is freedom of the press.” the Face of Empire, echoes this opinion: “The Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank has made the aim of establishing a Palestinian state a de facto impossibility.” The cancerous evil of settlements is a constant theme in Palestinian Christian rhetoric. A group of distinguished clerics gathered at the Carter Center in April 2016 for a conference called “Pursuing Peace and Strengthening Presence” where they announced, “The continuing expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands increasingly dims the hopes and realistic prospects for a two-state solution and is a major threat to peace.” Another seminal Palestinian Christian document, Kairos Palestine, repeats this theme: Israeli settlements ravage our land in the name of God and in the name of force, controlling our natural resources, including water and agricultural land, thus depriving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and constituting an obstacle to any political solution. So says conventional wisdom. But anyone with a cursory knowledge of the region’s history knows that Jewish-Arab conflict in the Holy Land predated the birth of Israeli settlements by at least fifty years; that Jews accepted the two-statesfor-two-peoples formula as early as 1947; that Arabs didn’t accept it until the early 1990s; that 95% of the Palestinian population already lives under the control of an indigenous Arab government, the Palestinian Authority (PA); that even using maximum estimates, Jewish settlers make up only 12% of the population under the PA; and that in Israel, by contrast, Arabs make up about 20% of the population. It is hard to take seriously the claim that settlements prevent peace. And yet Palestinian Christians continue to raise that standard, and only that standard, using it to drive a wedge between

their Western co-religionists and the State of Israel. Gatherings like those at the Carter Center and Christ at the Checkpoint, a biennial evangelical conference in Bethlehem, have worked hard to convince Christians in the US and Europe that settlements are the main impediment to peace. The end of Palestine may be near, but if Palestine dies it won’t be because of settlements. One need only glance at recent polling data to see that the biggest obstacles to statehood are disunity in Palestinian society, outrage at Palestinian leaders, and a fundamental aversion to the idea of a Jewish state living next door. Many Westerners don’t know that Palestinians already have a government of their own. Even fewer know that the Palestinians actually have two governments: the Fatah-controlled PLO in the West Bank and the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Hamas in Gaza. These two governments hate each other, despite the best efforts of third party intermediaries. Everything else aside, Palestine will never rise if these two factions don’t reconcile and cooperate; or, better yet, if the PLO can’t defeat Hamas and expunge them from the territories completely. But more on that later. Life under both Palestinian governments is hard. The April 2016 PCPSR survey found that one half of West Bank Palestinians and twothirds of Gazans describe their living situation as “bad” or “very bad.” About one-fifth of West Bankers and half of Gazans want to emigrate, mostly (70%) because of poor economic and educational opportunities, religious extremism, or the absence of freedom and security. By contrast, only about 20% want to leave because of the Israeli occupation. The Palestinian Authority is a mess. No less than 80% of its citizens believe that their government is corrupt. Only 17% believe there is freedom of the press. Public approval for President Mahmoud Abbas has dropped to 36%, and two-thirds demand his resignation. Shockingly, only 45% of Palestinians see the founding of the PA in the 1990s as an accomplishment. More (48%) see it as a burden. Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority of Palestinians (76%) feel that the Arab world doesn’t care about them at all. Feeling poorly led at home and abandoned abroad, the Palestinians are more and more inclined to commit desperate acts. 31

The penchant for violence remains strong in Palestinian society. Majorities in both the West Bank and Gaza support the prospect of an armed intifada and believe that it would help advance Palestinian national rights in ways that negotiations cannot. About 60% support random stabbing attacks against Jewish civilians— yes, civilians—in Israel. Most worrisome is the fact that Palestinian millennials, the so-called “Oslo Generation,” are the least supportive of the two-state solution, most likely to support an armed intifada, and most supportive of stabbing attacks against Israeli civilians. The Palestinian tendency toward violence flows from a basic opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. To most Palestinians, the State of Israel (all of Israel, not just the pre-1967 version) was created by the West to solve Europe’s Jewish problem and disempower the Arabs at the same time. An overwhelming majority believes that Israel’s ultimate goal is to annex their territories and deny their rights or expel them. For this reason, a full 60% say that even after the creation of a State of Palestine and resolution of all outstanding issues they will not recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people. Trained to see Israel as a colonial outpost filled with Europeans, this group finds the idea of “normalizing” relations with the Jews fundamentally repugnant. For most Palestinians, Jewish settlements in the West Bank are just the tip of the imperial spear. What prevents peace in the Holy Land is not Israel’s policies but Israel itself. Palestine needs to be purified, brought back to its status quo ante. Only then will the Palestinian people regain the freedom they once enjoyed. Palestinian Christians agree with their Muslim brethren about the intrinsic immorality of Israel. The Kairos Palestine document affirms that, “The West sought to make amends for what Jews had endured in the countries of Europe, but it made amends on our account and in our land. They tried to correct an injustice and the result was a new injustice.” “It was, after all,” writes Mitri Raheb, “the British Empire that planted Israel in the Middle East, and it is the Western world that continues to sustain Israel militarily, financially, and ideologically. This is what I call … empire.” Raheb rails against the “myth of a Judeo-Christian tradition” and its “subtle colonial ideology.” 32

“ The Palestinian tendency toward violence flows from a basic opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.” He argues that the Jewish people of today were invented in the late 19th century and cleverly linked to the Jews of biblical times to strengthen the colonial project. “This,” he writes, “is precisely the crux of the problem: the natives of the land have been made strangers in order to make room for an invented people to occupy the land.” On a recent trip to Bethlehem, I heard similar rhetoric from Raheb’s colleagues at Christ at the Checkpoint (CATC), a Western-facing billboard for Jesus-infused Palestinian nationalism and ground zero for a small but vocal group of Palestinian evangelicals who are working hard to undermine Christian support for Israel. While plagued by a few radicals, most of the CATC crowd are more docile than other Palestinian activists: they condemn terrorism, reject anti-Semitism, and call for peace with Israel. They tend to vote on the right side of public opinion surveys and are quite possibly the most Zionist Arabs in the Middle East. It’s a fact that often gets them labeled as normalizers by their angry neighbors, which in turn forces them to talk tougher in order to reinforce their ever-precarious street cred. That said, the CATC conference in March 2016 was an offensive overreach. The theme was “The Gospel in the Face of Religious Extremism,” and in tedious sessions like “Christian Zionism as Imperial Theology,” the organizers sought to draw comparisons between Islamic terrorists, Jewish settlers, and Christian Zionists. Straw men were aplenty. Attendees heard about hordes of shofar-blowing evangelicals who support settlements in the name of eschatology and endorse Israel’s oppression of the indigenous church. But these straw men only served to create a new “other” for justice-minded Christians to hate.

“The mark of any healthy society is its ability to reflect on its own shortcomings and resolve to do better.” As in previous years, self-criticism was completely absent. The speakers blustered on with seemingly no awareness of Palestinian public opinion, heaping all the blame for their sorrows on Israel and none on themselves or their leaders. Though “speaking truth to power” was a major theme, the organizers invited dignitaries from the PA to attend the conference and cheerfully applauded them. The mark of any healthy society is its ability to reflect on its own shortcomings and resolve to do better. Unfortunately, CATC reflects a broader lack of self-reflection in Palestinian society that has until now prevented a real vision for the future to take root. It’s a problem that Palestinian Christians must address head-on. And fast. Palestinian Christians may be outspoken in their nationalism, but they’re not stupid. They may shout their bona fides from the housetops, but they do so as self-aware minorities (less than 2%) in an overwhelmingly Muslim society. They see their population rapidly shrinking in relation to their Muslim neighbors. They see the rising popularity of Islamist movements like Hamas and disturbing levels of sympathy (25%) for the Islamic State. They know that Article 4 of the Palestinian Basic Law, the country’s proposed constitution, promises that the future State of Palestine will be an Islamic polity governed by the principles of Shari’a. Meanwhile, they see what is happening to their Christian brothers and sisters in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. They know that they are different, and that when push comes to shove that difference could get them killed. Christians inside the territories are hostages in their own society. In private conversations, many express fear toward Muslims, positive feelings toward Jews and Israel, and envy for Arabs citizens living inside the Jewish state. Many even hope for the collapse of the PA so that the West Bank can once again be reinte-

grated with Israel. But Christians’ fear of Muslim neighbors and a desire for equal status are nothing new. In fact, it was this motivation that caused Syrian and Lebanese Christians to pioneer the Arab nationalist movement a century ago. By emphasizing the Arab rather than Islamic character of their societies, these Christian intellectuals and their Muslim contemporaries succeeded in razing the caliphal model of Middle Eastern governance and laying a new, non-sectarian foundation for political life in the region. The problem with Arab nationalism was that it was artificial—there was never a pan-Arab nation, only a regional mosaic of ethnicities and cultures that happened to speak Arabic. Hostility against Israel (and its inverse, solidarity with the Palestinians) thus became a key ingredient for unifying the disparate peoples who flocked under the movement’s thin ideological banner. To be an Arab nationalist was to hate Israel and its imperial backers. No questions. But the Arabic language and anti-Zionism were not enough to sustain the movement, and its inherent weakness was exposed when leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, and Saddam Hussein had no choice but to brutally suppress Marxist, Islamist, and non-Arab national movements that challenged their legitimacy. It was the only way to keep a lid on things and maintain the façade of Arab unity. And so began a cycle of government crackdowns and popular uprisings that have continued across the Middle East until recent times. Today Arab nationalism is all but discredited and dead, having been replaced by Islam in the 1970s and 1980s as the more authentic source of cultural identity and political community. The would-be State of Palestine is one of the last places where secular Arab nationalism still survives. But it doesn’t go unchallenged. In fact, the Palestinian quarrel over the two-state solution reflects a larger quarrel in the region between those still clinging to Arab nationalism and those turning back to various forms of political Islam, the historic baseline of Middle Eastern political life. The rivalry between old-guard PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas and upstart Hamas CEO Ismail Haniyeh exemplifies this ideological and generational conflict in a microcosm. Middle Eastern Christians will always prefer Arab nationalism over political Islam, and it 33

isn’t hard to see why. Palestinian Christian advocacy stems from the same impulse that motivated early Arab nationalists like Michel Aflaq, George Antonius, and Ibrahim al-Yaziji: the desire to live in a society that protects and treats them as equals. But the catastrophic failure of the PA to foster a free society and compete with the rising tide of Islamism only underscores the broader failure of Arab nationalism. Many Palestinians feel that the two-state solution isn’t just unworkable, it’s undesirable. The possibility that Palestine will be overrun by those seeking to establish an Islamic state overtop the ruins of yet another nationalist regime (think Syria, Iraq, Libya) is a frightening one indeed. This fear drives some Palestinian Christians to work even harder in the name of secularism. It drives others toward the “one-state solution”: a single, binational Jewish and Arab “state of all its citizens” between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. This proposal, which is increasingly popular on the Palestinian street, is symptomatic of a basic (though ironic) trust in Jewish governance over the Islamic alternative. For Jews, the one-state model is almost always a non-starter as it effectively means the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Salvaging the vision of a secular Palestine living peacefully beside a secular Israel remains the best solution for all parties. But Palestinian Christians who carry that vision must abandon their obsessive focus on Jewish settlements as the cause of all evil and address the outrage and despair that grips the Palestinian street. The appeal of Islam is too strong to let this outrage go unchecked, and only a more compelling vision will win the day. Secular society offers the best and most authentic future for Palestinian Christians, but that society will only arise when their leaders frame it in positive terms. No longer can they construct Palestinian identity as a negative reaction to Jewish aggression. They must articulate what Palestinian society is for, not what it is against. Better yet, they must explain what Palestinian society is and what it’s all about. What happens after Israel uproots the settlements? What happens when all political issues are settled? The fact that a significant majority of Palestinians still plan to deny Israel’s existence means that their leaders have serious work to do—work that 34

“Salvaging the vision of

a secular Palestine living peacefully beside a secular Israel remains the best solution for all parties.”

has absolutely nothing to do with Jewish settlements. Palestinian Christians and their secular Muslim colleagues must revive the imaginations of their people and make the case for a proud but peaceful Palestinian nationalism that posits religious freedom and peaceful coexistence as cardinal virtues. The life or death of Palestine depends on their success. Palestinian Christians face only two alternatives in the long-run: seek asylum elsewhere, possibly in Israel; or learn to survive in an Islamic state. Neither time nor demography are on their side, and now is the moment to make difficult choices that will lead to tangible gains. Only a strategy that begins from a positive vision of the future will prove worthwhile. We in the West who care about the Palestinian church must encourage its leaders to take the right path.

THE CONFLICT

Israel Defense Forces Archives. Paratroopers Zion Karasenti, Haim Oshri, and Itzik Yifat stand in awe at the newly-captured Kotel, or Western Wall, on June 7, 1967. This image would become iconic for Jews around the world.

The Seventh Day and Counting:

T he Elusive Pe a c e o f t he S ix D ay War Joshua Muravchik

On May 13, 1967, Anwar Sadat, the then-Speaker of Egypt’s National Assembly, returned from a visit to Moscow to pass along to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser a bit of intelligence that the Kremlin had revealed to him. Israel, it said, was mobilizing forces on its northern border to attack Syria. This “intelligence” was completely false, and to this day we have only contending theories about the Kremlin’s motives in concocting it. But it set off a chain of events unforeseen by any of the actors, including especially the Soviet government, which came away one of the episode’s big losers. Within a day, Arab officials were publicly repeating the accusation, although Israel’s leaders strenuously denied it. Israel even invited Soviet representatives to join them for a flight to the border to see for themselves that no Israeli forces were massed, but the offer was spurned. Within two days, however, tanks could be heard rumbling through Cairo, and Egyptian forces began to flood into the Sinai desert. Cairo Radio broadcasted:

The existence of Israel has continued too long. We welcome the Israeli aggression. We welcome the battle we have long awaited. The peak hour has come. The battle has come in which we shall destroy Israel. Then, Nasser demanded the withdrawal of the UN Emergency Force. These soldiers had taken up positions on the Egyptian side of the border with Israel as part of an agreement settling the 1956 Sinai War. Israel had seized the entire peninsula but evacuated it in exchange for the placement of the UN force and the lifting of Egypt’s 1951 ban on Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran. (The Straits, a narrow waterway through which Israel could reach the Indian Ocean, were legally international waters, but they were bordered on one side by Egypt and readily controlled from there.) UN Secretary General U Thant promptly complied with Nasser’s demand, having little other choice since most of the forces came from India and Yugoslavia, two close allies of Egypt. A few days later, Nasser announced that Egypt was renewing its blockade of Israeli shipping through the Straits of

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Tiran, which under international law constituted an act of war. These belligerent acts were reinforced by a drumbeat of incendiary broadcasts and proclamations. Nasser boasted that “[t]he armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel…while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation.” And he warned that if war came, “Our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.” Would it come? Egypt’s main official newspaper, Al Ahram, said it was “inevitable.” Likewise, other Arab officials made similar boasts; for example, Iraq’s President Abdul Salam Arif said, “Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the map.” Ahmed Shuqairy, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, echoed this phrase, adding piquantly, “no Jew will be left alive.” Israel, meanwhile, sent appeals for peace in public statements and through diplomatic channels. A major radio address by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, perhaps the least charismatic of that country’s leaders, sounded so conciliatory and was delivered so haltingly as to project fear. Itzhak Rabin, then the young and dynamic chief of staff of Israel’s armed forces and later a celebrated prime minister, disappeared from sight for a few days. It was said he had overdosed on coffee and cigarettes. It is now generally acknowledged that he had a nervous breakdown, although he recovered in a few days.

struck first was likely to win. The country still hoped to avoid war, but the Arab mobilization on its borders and the blockade of the straits constituted a casus belli, not only in a strict legal sense but for practical reasons, too. Like so many other countries, Israel depended on imported oil, and that oil necessarily came mostly from the east, meaning through the straits. And, too, Israel could not withstand a prolonged mobilization of forces since, unlike the Arab armies, Israel’s consisted mostly of mobilized civilians. If they were mobilized for long, the economy would grind to a halt. President Johnson appealed to Israel to bide its time while he organized a flotilla of ships from the U.S. and several allied countries to sail through the straits and break the blockade. But after days passed, it became apparent that Washington had no luck in assembling any participants. Meanwhile, another ominous event occurred. Jordan had long been the most moderate of the Arab states. King Hussein’s grandfather and predecessor, Abdullah, had been the sole Arab leader prepared to accept a compromise with the Zionists. For this he had been murdered before the eyes of the then-teenaged Hussein. The

Israel was indeed afraid. It had prevailed in its war of independence of 1948, but one percent of its people had perished. It had triumphed again in the 1956 Sinai campaign, but with the tactical advantage of taking the initiative and with Britain and France having its back. Now, the Arabs had the initiative, and no one had Israel’s back. In those first decades of Israel’s life, Israel’s main patron and arms supplier was France, while the United States, unlike today, attempted to be evenhanded in the Israel-Arab conflict. But when Israel’s envoy met urgently with French President Charles de Gaulle, he warned that France would withdraw support if Israel fired first. De Gaulle embargoed further arms deliveries to Israel, even of those already bought and paid for. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, his hands more than full with the Vietnam War, also warned that Israel would not have America’s support if it initiated hostilities. But Israel’s military planners calculated that whichever side 36

King Hussein of Jordan (left) and Egyptian President Gamal Nasser smile after signing a mutual defense agreement in Cairo on June 1, 1967. Four days later, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egyptian forces as they mobilized on its border, starting a war that led to the defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, and changed the Middle East forever.

boy, who soon acceded to the throne, continued his grandfather’s moderation but was cautious about offending more militant Arabs and inviting his grandfather’s fate. Now, in the heat of the moment, Hussein flew to Cairo, patching over longstanding antagonism with Nasser, and announced that he was placing Jordan’s military under Egyptian command. For Israel, the fat was now truly in the fire, and early on June 5, ignoring ongoing Western appeals for patience and claiming falsely that the other side had opened fire, Israel struck. Its target was the Egyptian air force. Although Israel was outnumbered in personnel, guns, tanks, planes, and other weaponry, it held clear advantages in the élan of its soldiers and in intelligence. In particular, Israel’s commanders knew exactly where Egypt’s air forces were stationed, the times its planes would be on the ground, and even the hours Egyptian pilots would be busy breakfasting. In that first wave of strikes, Israel’s bombers all but destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground and thus determined the war’s outcome. Egypt’s superior tank numbers counted for little while Israel controlled the skies over a vast desert battlefield with little place to hide.

While focusing on Egypt, its most powerful enemy, Israel held Syria at bay and attempted to keep Jordan out of the fight altogether. Placing hopes in King Hussein’s disposition to moderation, Israeli officials appealed to him through American diplomatic channels, promising not to attack Jordan if he did not attack. Had he heeded them, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the old city, would still be part of Jordan today. But Hussein ordered his forces into the fray. Perhaps he believed Nasser, who called to tell him falsely of great Egyptian victories at the war’s outset and to urge him to get in on the spoils. (Hussein’s early gesture of placing Jordanian forces under Egyptian command had been all for show; they remained firmly in his hand.) Or perhaps he sensed that Nasser was lying but calculated that it would be less costly to absorb defeat in the field than to incur the suicidal ignominy of abandoning the Arab cause. Jordan’s offensive unleashed the war’s closest-quarter battles, the most costly ones for Israel, and the ones of most portentous result, as Israel’s soldiers wrested East Jerusalem and

the surrounding area from Jordan. Emblematically, Jewish soldiers danced with Torah scrolls before the Western Wall, this remnant of Judaism’s holiest site returned to Jewish hands after two millennia. Then, with quiet on the Egyptian and Jordanian fronts, Israel turned to Syria, which had, with Soviet connivance, triggered the war. Syrian guns atop the 2,000-foot-high Golan Heights habitually shelled Kibbutz Ein Gev immediately below as well as scores of other farms and settlements within artillery range. Fighting up this steep and rocky incline was a daunting military challenge, but by this stage momentum and confidence, as well as air power, rested entirely with the Israelis while on the other side morale was sinking. Once at the summit, Israeli forces fanned out to occupy a swath of elevated plain of perhaps 500 square miles. When fighting concluded on this front, the guns of the Six Day War fell silent. Of course, the guns didn’t just fall silent. Rather, firing ceased in accordance with a resolution of the UN Security Council. Resolution 242, introduced by the United Kingdom and supported by the United States, affirmed in its preamble “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” then called on “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territory occupied in the recent war” and the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.” What this all meant was that the Arabs had to make lasting peace with Israel, accepting its presence within the region, while Israel had to withdraw from territory it had seized from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, territory far larger than Israel as a whole had been at the war’s outbreak. There was, however, a nuance to the text. The Soviet representative proposed inserting the word “the” before the phrase “territory occupied in the recent war.” But the resolution’s sponsor rejected that amendment, and it was dropped. The intent of the sponsors was that Israel should withdraw from some of the occupied territory, probably from most of it, but not necessarily from all of it. Israel’s representative, Abba Eban, a man from the dovish side of the Israeli spectrum, deplored 37

Israel’s prewar borders as “Auschwitz borders” because they left the country only nine miles wide at its center and thus painfully exposed to attack. Moreover, those borders had little legal dignity, having derived from the ceasefire lines of the 1948 war that had never been codified into any treaty. From Israel’s view, its victory in a war in which the other side had threatened its annihilation justified its insistence on redrawing the map to make itself less vulnerable. And what about the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”? Well, for one thing, that language was only in the preamble, perhaps a statement of general principles rather than a binding determination. And, too, there is perhaps a modicum of difference between offensive and defensive war. Is acquiring territory in the course of self-defense the same as acquiring it “by war”? Scarcely more than twenty years earlier, the borders of Europe were redrawn especially to the benefit of the USSR, but these acquisitions in the course of self-defense were little challenged (even though the largest Soviet acquisition came at the expense of Poland, which was a victim and not an aggressor). The intent of the resolution was to lay the groundwork for a negotiation in which Israel would pull back in exchange for Arab recognition and peace. When an interviewer asked Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Dayan, what comes next, he replied that he was “waiting for a phone call” from Arab leaders to launch the bargaining. But that call never came. Instead, the Arab League met in Khartoum two months later and issued a defiant declaration: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel.” In short, just as the war had disappointed the hopes of the Arabs to be rid of Israel, so it disappointed Israel’s hope the Arabs would be forced to come to peace terms.

[1] Like every Israeli, he had served in the military and, as a tank commander, was active in the reserves. Redheaded and slight of build, he was warm, outgoing, and playful, and exuded the confidence characteristic of post-1967 Israel. He told me that if the Arabs started another war, Israel would win in fewer than six days, but if the Soviets joined them in combat it would take a few weeks. A year later, Egypt, having sent Soviet advisors packing, launched an attack in coordination only with Syria. It was Yom Kippur, and Israel, taken by surprise and thinly defended, was nearly overrun. My lovely friend Tzvika, so I learned later, was quickly mobilized to the front. His tank paused somewhere in the Sinai, and Tzvika emerged from the turret to survey the battlefield. As soon as he did, an Egyptian sniper’s bullet tore through his neck, killing him instantly, a heartbreaking token of that brief moment of Israeli hubris that followed the great victory of 1967. Israel survived in 1973 thanks to the individual heroics of young soldiers who held off vastly superior forces while Israel’s citizen army mobilized and thanks also to a massive emergency airlift of American arms ordered by President Nixon. Although Nixon was later revealed to have spoken disparagingly of Jews, he was a savior to Israel. When Kissinger proposed proceeding cautiously and secretively with the shipments, Nixon overruled him, saying, “It’s got to be the works… We are going to get blamed just as much for three planes as for 300.”

It did, however, establish Israel’s military superiority. The country was never again to appear so vulnerable as it did on the eve of that conflagration. Indeed, the pendulum was to swing in the opposite direction. Israelis, so filled with fear during the run up to war, now grew complacent.

Israelis later spoke with wonder and gratitude for the air bridge of C-5s and C-141s, immense transporters that disgorged a desperately needed resupply of arms, tanks, and even of fighter planes. Planes were airlifted within planes like massive matryoshka dolls. Such ponderous shipments required refueling en route, but no European country would allow the American planes access. Indeed, they even denied overflight rights until Nixon twisted the arm of our most vulnerable ally, the anachronistic military regime of Portugal, which granted refueling stops in the Azores.

This was personified for me by Tzvika, the diminutive nickname for the common Israeli name, Tzvi. In 1972, I led a delegation of Young Socialists from the U.S. on a tour of Israel hosted by the youth section of Israel’s ruling Labor Party, and Tzvika was one of our hosts and guides.

Why were America’s allies so uncooperative? Because they were desperately afraid of the oil boycott that the Arabs unleashed in conjunction with the war. But the shift of European countries away from friendliness to Israel toward embrace of the Arabs had begun already in 1967

coffee shops of Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus, much as radical Islam was to do a generation or two later. One strain of this ideology was Ba’athism, which came to dominate Syria and Iraq, but there were others, too, and the leading exponent of Arab nationalism was Egypt’s Nasser, who was the most popular leader ever in the Arab world—and remains so to this day. The first task of Arab nationalism was to eliminate Israel, and the Arabs’ ignominious defeat in 1967 was seen above all as a humiliation of Nasser. Indeed, he resigned as president before street crowds, probably in part ginned up by Egypt’s intelligence agents and in part spontaneous, beseeched him to resume office. Resume he did, but all the air had gone out of the balloon of Arab nationalism. This deflation made space for the reassertion of other nationalisms among the Arabs, and in particular for the birth of Palestinian nationalism. Until this point, Palestinian nationalism scarcely existed. At most it had been a thought tossed out by miscellaneous Arab thinkers now and again since World War I, but it had gained no traction.

with de Gaulle. The consummate realpolitiker, de Gaulle made plain that French interests must come first, and these dictated aligning with the side that had greater numbers and resources. Until 1967, France had been Israel’s primary patron and armorer; but in the aftermath of that war, the United States and Israel drew close, and France became a champion of the Arabs. In the years following the Six Day War, other Europeans began to follow Paris’s lead, spurred by their fear of terrorism. The upsurge of international air piracy, bombings, and other forms of terrorism was another indirect consequence of that war. Over the preceding decades, the dominant idea in the Arab world had been pan-Arabism, also called Arab nationalism. If all Arabs would join in a single omnibus state, they could regain a place of power and glory among the nations of the world. This was the hot idea of the time, firing the imaginations of young people in the

True, the Palestine Liberation Organization had been formed in 1964. But it was not founded at the initiative of Palestinian Arabs, but rather of Nasser. He appointed the PLO’s first head, Ahmed Shuquairy, a pan-Arab factotum who had served at various times as a diplomat for Syria and Saudi Arabia and an officer of the Arab League. The PLO’s purpose was not the liberation of “Palestinians,” but rather of Palestine, a territory unacceptably occupied by the Jews. The PLO’s founding document made no mention of a Palestinian state or Palestinian sovereignty. One of the miscellaneous thinkers who had hit on the idea of Palestinian nationality was a young teacher who had grown up in Cairo and lived now in Kuwait, Yasser Arafat. He became the leader of a small group in Kuwait of men whose origins were in Palestine, and they called their group “Fatah.” It published a newsletter propounding the idea of Palestinian nationality, and in 1967 some of its numbers traveled to the front to join the brief fight against Israel. Their military contributions were nil, but enabled them afterwards to don a cloak of bravery while most of the Arab armies were in disgrace. So marginal had Fatah been that it had been ex39

cluded from the PLO, but in the war’s aftermath it was admitted and by 1969 had taken over, with Arafat becoming PLO chairman. It set to work fostering a sense of Palestinian identity among the Arabs of Palestine, in part through propaganda and in part through “propaganda of the deed,” that is, spectacular acts of international terrorism in the skies and across Europe and the Middle East. These hijackings and killings drew the world’s attention to the Palestinian cause, brought fame on the perpetrating groups, stirred the blood of Palestinian Arabs, and served to intimidate Europeans and moderate Arabs. The most famous of these acts was the 1972 attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in which eleven Olympians were slaughtered, and its aftermath reflected tellingly the temper of the times. Of the eight perpetrators, five died in a shootout with German security personnel, while three were taken into custody. The trio was held for all of a month before being exchanged in an airplane hijacking that the German government appeared to have collaborated in staging. Arafat’s deputy, Abu Iyad, explained, “German authorities, moved by a sense of guilt or perhaps out of cowardice, were clearly anxious to have the captured Fedayeen off their hands.” The German reaction was far from atypical. The New York Times reported in 1973, “Although most Arab terrorists responsible for hijackings, kidnappings, and the seizure and execution of hostages over the last few years have been captured or have given themselves up, few have suffered meaningful punishments.” Rather than combat Palestinian terrorists, Europe took the tack of appeasement. This expressed itself not only in the treatment of arrestees but also on the diplomatic level in a move away from support for Israel to an embrace of the PLO. This appeasement may have served to deflect terrorist acts away from European soil, but it also served to legitimize terrorism, which became a growing international scourge in the decades that followed. Through all these years, and one horrifying act after another, the UN has never been able to agree on an international convention against terrorism, despite much trying and a particularly strong push in 2005 by then-Secretary General Kofi Annan. The reason is that the Muslim states, determined to maintain the legitimacy of Palestinian terrorism, have insisted that terror40

“ Through all these years,

and one horrifying act after another, the UN has never been able to agree on an international convention against terrorism...

”

ism must be defined by the validity of the cause rather than the nature of the act. In recent times, Arab and Muslim terror, albeit not Palestinian, has come back to bite Europe ferociously. It was not only by intimidation that the Palestinian cause gained adherents, but also by ideology. Arafat’s predecessor and sometime mentor as leader of the Palestinian Arabs was Haj Amin el-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem. In World War II, al-Husseini aligned closely with Hitler, basing himself in Germany, doing propaganda broadcasts from there, and even traveling in Europe to recruit Muslims for an SS brigade. In the 1970s, however, Arafat, guided by Algerian revolutionaries who had vanquished France, repositioned the Palestinian cause from Right to Left. He made pilgrimages to Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow, and the PLO claimed a place alongside the Viet Cong and other Communist and revolutionary guerrilla movements across the “Third World.” The Soviet Union, although having lost the romantic appeal it enjoyed in the 1930s and 1940s to younger Communist regimes in Cuba and Vietnam, nonetheless still commanded an unmatched worldwide network of propaganda resources. These were now deployed in calumniating Israel. As their role in instigating the 1967 war with false tales illustrated, the Soviets were already aligned against Israel. But the outcome of the war redoubled their antipathy, expressed in a crude and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign against the bugaboo “Zionism.” Its capstone was a resolution pushed through the UN General Assembly in 1975 by the Soviets and the Arabs condemning Zionism as “racism.” The reason behind Moscow’s venom was that along with Nasser and the Arabs, the Kremlin was the war’s big loser. The Arabs were equipped with MiG aircraft and other Soviet arms, while Israel deployed French Mirage jets and other western equipment. Israel’s overwhelming victory was seen to signify the inferior quality of

Soviet weaponry. The harm to the Soviets went beyond this humiliation. Israel’s against-the-odds triumph lit a spark among Jews in the Soviet Union, who numbered a few million. Because religion, especially the Jewish religion, had been suppressed and derided in official propaganda for fifty years, few of these Jews worshipped or had much knowledge of Jewish faith or culture. But they knew they were Jews; indeed, the regime forced them to know because the identity “Jew” was stamped into their internal passport, a document every Soviet subject had to carry. A movement was kindled among them to explore their Jewish identity, to study Hebrew, and, most astonishing, to move to Israel. The Soviet Union did not allow its citizens to leave, but this marked it as more repressive than non-Communist dictatorships and blackened its reputation as the Jewish demand to emigrate brought it to light. Despite the refusals and arrests, the movement of Soviet Jews seeking to go to Israel grew, nurtured by support from Jews abroad. It became the first substantial protest movement in the history of the Soviet state and ate away at the sinews of totalitarianism. Israel’s victory even served as inspiration to nonJews under the Soviet yoke. Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had each been subjected to Communist rule by the Soviet army at the end of World War II. Hungary had rebelled, and Poles had rioted against Communism, though these risings were each time brutally quashed. For the most part, they were kept in thrall through the aura of Russian and Communist invincibility, conveying relentlessly the message that opposition to the status quo was hopeless. Now, however, little Israel had thoroughly defeated much larger opponents who were seen as Soviet surrogates. This planted the idea that resistance was not hopeless at all, however much it might seem against the odds. Indeed, the Czechs peacefully but massively rebelled a year later. And the Poles mounted repeated waves of resistance through the 1970s, culminating in the rise of Solidarity.

to his son, creating a dynasty that has presided over the destruction of that country. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, its ramparts weakened by the protest movements of Soviet Jews and Eastern European dissidents that the war had aroused. Security Council Resolution 242, the fruit of that war, remains the basis on which hopes for an eventual peace between Israel and the Arabs rest. Those hopes were partially fulfilled when the remarkable Anwar Sadat, who had carried the Kremlin’s poisoned “intelligence” of May 1967, succeeded Nasser and, after making one more war, opted decisively for peace. In the 1990s, Israel offered Syria the return of the Golan Heights, but the deal foundered over the division of the narrow sliver of land separating the heights from the Sea of Galilee. Given recent events in Syria, it is unlikely any Israeli government will ever renew the offer. Also in the 1990s, Prince Hussein signed a peace treaty with Israel, but he had already ceded claim to the West Bank and East Jerusalem to the PLO, thanks to the “climate of terror” that the PLO had created (in the boastful words of Abu Iyad). Peace with the Palestinians remains the elusive piece needed to bring this century-long conflict to an end. But the Palestinians are also at war with themselves. One faction—Hamas—swears it will never make peace with Israel. The other— Fatah, now led by Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas—says it wishes but refuses to negotiate. The Six Day War reshaped the conflict, but sadly its final resolution remains somewhere over the horizon. Joshua Muravchik is a distinguished fellow at the World Affairs Institute and the author of, among other works, Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel.

Thus, all of the initiators of the Six Day War had reason to regret their acts. Nasser was to die of a heart attack in 1970 without ever having recaptured his former prestige. The Syrian regime was overthrown in 1970 by its Defense Minister, Hafez al-Assad, who eventually passed power 41

PHILOS FELLOWS

JULIE TEGHO Julie A Tegho is a Lebanese researcher on Middle East modern history with a special emphasis on Lebanon. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in History at UniversitĂŠ Saint Joseph de Beyrouth on the Lebanese wars (1975-1990). Her thesis focuses on the Battle of Zahle (April 1981- June 1981) and the experiences of the Lebanese Resistance against the Syrian Army presence in Lebanon. Teghoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s goal is to tell the Oral History of the Lebanese wars from the vantage points the fighters and militants in the Lebanese Resistance, and ordinary people caught in the cycles of violence.

SYRIA

International Syria Support Group (ISSG) that was seeking to broker an end to the Syrian civil war when the 25-member group met in Vienna, May 2017

On Syria:

T he V irtue s o f L imit e d E nga g em en t Robert Nicholson

Last week’s announcement that the Trump administration will be pulling troops out of Syria has prompted a flurry of hostile commentary against the president’s abandonment of allies, his kowtowing to Russian interests, and his misunderstanding of what “defeating ISIS” actually looks like. This is all commentary with which I agree. But there is no doubt that President Trump believes his decision was made in the best interests of the American people – and he’s not alone. On December 20, he channeled Americans on both right and left when he tweeted, “Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East, getting NOTHING but spending precious lives and trillions of dollars protecting others who, in almost all cases, do not appreciate what we are doing? Do we want to be there forever? Time for others to finally fight…..” A motley crew of Democrats and Republicans rose in acclamation of his decision.

There’s a kernel of truth in what Trump says: Our current policy in the Middle East has indeed stagnated. But that just means a smarter policy – not retreat. President Trump is making a major mistake. Redeploying American forces out of Syria could increase violence in the short term as Assad moves to reconquer the eastern portion of the country. It will expand Russian, Turkish, and Iranian influence in the proximity of our allies Israel and Jordan. Worst of all, it sends a clear message to the world that America feels no loyalty to its allies. The Kurdish, Syriac, and Arab soldiers who fought with us against ISIS – soldiers who have now been abandoned to the predations of local enemies – are just the most recent casualties of a US superpower that seems to have lost its identity on the world stage. It isn’t just that we’ve forgotten our values; we’ve forgotten our interests, too. Trump shares the belief of many Americans that maintaining 2,000 US troops in eastern Syria is akin to being the “Policeman of the Middle East” and gives us 43

nothing tangible in return. The problem is that Americans can’t see the world for what it is, and American policymakers aren’t explaining it to them. Very few, it seems, understand the concept of limited intervention. *** REMEMBER AMERICA’S ATTACK on Syria in 2018? No, you probably don’t. The news cycle is moving fast these days. Let me refresh your memory. Back in April the United States, Britain, and France launched a combined missile strike against the Syrian government in response to a chemical attack that had killed 70 people. The strike gave rise to the usual excesses on social media, and if you didn’t know any better you might have thought we were either overthrowing Assad and installing a new democracy or standing by while he gassed his own people. It seemed like everything was at stake, or nothing, depending on who you asked. The core of the debate was whether the US was right to launch a limited intervention against Assad’s chemical weapons program: a discreet volley of 107 missiles that degraded but did not destroy his regime. Limited interventions are low-cost, small-footprint military operations that take place when America gets involved somewhere in the world and does less than everything but more than nothing. Much of our current military activity falls in this category. Lots of people had a problem with this apparent half-measure. Some wanted more. Others wanted much less. “Either win the war or stay out of it,” seemed to be a common sentiment. The concept of limited intervention is hard for Americans to grasp because we have trouble talking about limited anything. If we’re going to fight, we want to win. And we don’t want a technical knockout. We want the other guy splayed out on the floor. World War II spoiled us. Our big debut on the international stage brought us a definitive victory over an obvious evil, yet such epic confrontations are uncommon these days. We crave battles of Troy-like proportions, but the world keeps giving us suicide bombers in “man-jammies.” The disparity between our overwhelming power and our failure to achieve definitive victory is a 44

source of constant frustration for the American people. How can we be so strong yet so impotent in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria? One president after another has tried to explain what we’re doing in these far-flung locales, but they never seem to win in any of them. And if we can’t win, why are we still fighting? The American people want to know. Someone needs to give an answer. In an era when definitive victories are less and less common, this answer is more important than ever. Indeed, the failure to craft meaningful domestic narratives is one of the biggest holes in US foreign policy strategy. Democratic countries need the support of their citizens to maintain a consistent posture abroad, and that support is most necessary when launching military interventions in foreign countries. Most Americans aren’t interested in big ideas from international relations theory or sermons about axes of good and evil. They want clear answers that make sense. Limited intervention is helpful here. But, like anything else, it needs to be properly explained. ANY FOREIGN POLICY explanation should begin by accurately describing what the world looks like in late 2018. Whether we know it or not, we live in the world America built. When we defeated fascism and communism in the twentieth century, we took our place at the head of the safest and most prosperous international order in history. This worldwide network of friendly countries backed by American economic and military power is, simply put, the American neighborhood. Note that America controls a neighborhood, not an empire. Neighborhoods are shared communities where each family manages its own property. Empires differ in that one family claims ownership over the properties of everyone else. The American neighborhood has fences. The Roman Empire did not. That doesn’t mean that everyone in our neighborhood is happy or agrees with us. We happen to think that liberal democracy offers the best model to organize human society, but others disagree. We hope they see the value of our approach and adopt it as their own, and we spend lots of time and money to persuade them, but we don’t rampage around the neighborhood forcing other people to think like us. We ask: “Are you neighborly? Can you live here peace-

fully alongside the rest of us?” Our belief is that Second, America isn’t the only estate in the working together will eventually influence un- neighborhood. There are other estates, some free states to evolve in a positive direction. less savory, that spend their time plotting to take over. These rivals are rarely driven by asIf every country is sovereign over its own prop- pirations for freedom and justice. Theirs is an erty, how is this neighborhood controlled by ambition far more naked and arguably more America? Two ways. The first is our massive fi- sinister than ours. They rarely pretend to have nancial and military power. In a community of other people’s interests in mind. regular-sized houses, America is a sprawling estate. And although it lies on the furthest edge of town, its sheer size makes it the neighborhood’s natural center of gravity. Its industries tend to be more advanced, its people more educated, and its security forces (in the absence of a neighborhood police force) more capable of keeping the community safe – informally, of course. The second way we control the neighborhood is through our prestige, that intangible respect given to someone because of their reputation for success or influence. In a community of self-interested families, America stands out as unique. We’re also self-interested (and don’t apologize for that), but we are known for building our estate on big ideas like freedom, equality, and justice. We don’t always live up to those principles, but everyone knows that there is at least one family in the neighborhood who aspires to them. Power and prestige – these two forces put America at the head of the world community. Diminish either one and our influence begins to shrink. Some Americans think that shrinking our influence around the world is precisely what we should be doing these days, but what they don’t know is that shrinking our influence won’t make things more peaceful. It will actually throw the neighborhood into even more disarray. *** THE PROBLEM is twofold. First, whether they admit it or not, families in the neighborhood have come to depend on us. Our economic and military might has, over time, become the cornerstone for the neighborhood’s prosperity. Any change in our position – even the perception of a change – sends tremors across the community. When America looks weak, plans change, businesses fold, and families scramble for other means of securing their future. We didn’t intend for things to be this way. It’s just what happened when we amassed more power than everyone else.

“World War II spoiled us. Our big debut on the international stage brought us a definitive victory over an obvious evil, yet such epic confrontations are uncommon these days. “

The greatest threat to the neighborhood is instability, and the greatest source of instability is the drawdown of American power. It is important to note that our rivals are weaker than us. Their only hope is to occupy voids that result from our neglect. As soon as we pull back from any part of the neighborhood, these adversaries rush in to offer assistance to families left reeling from our sudden disinterest. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but our rivals are dying for one. The truth is that we never needed to “win” in Syria or anywhere else. We’ve already won. Our foreign policy objective is to preserve what we already have: to maintain, to not lose, to eliminate empty spaces that rivals can fill. The world is already organized according to our interests and it’s in our interests to keep it that way, even if it means spending a little time and money. Right now our enemies can’t win. They can harass the neighbors, lob bottles over fences, run dirt bikes across the village green in the hopes that we’ll lose our cool. But they only succeed if we lose focus and retreat inside our gates, abandoning the neighborhood to the jungle. *** THIS IS WHERE limited intervention matters, both as an actual policy tool and a compelling rhetorical image for the public. It’s not about 45

winning; it’s about balancing power to make sure our enemies don’t win. It’s not about containment, it’s about sustainment. Measured and thoughtful interventions abroad like those in eastern Syria can help increase order and justice in a chaotic world by protecting the neighborhood against entropy and decay. It can keep our enemies, and our friend’s enemies, at bay. And because we operate from a position of strength, we can accomplish a lot with little. Minor expenditures on our part can produce devastating losses for adversaries who stand in a weaker position. We spent a little over $150M on the missiles we fired against Syria (by comparison, in 2016 USAID distributed ten times that amount to countries for environmental assistance alone). What we got in return – the degrading of Syrian military assets and a warning shot across the bows of Russia and Iran – was well worth the marginal cost. There is also something to be said for the periodic use of force just to show the bad guys that you’re not to be trifled with. The United States is a country of goodwill, but too much goodwill can be a bad thing. Unscrupulous actors take advantage of well-intentioned people, and good intentions must be backed up by visible strength if they ever hope to be effective. Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes this point in his book The Black Swan when he writes, “You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk.” Limited interventions will keep us out of costly, unwinnable fights. In that regard, it is a concept that should resonate with the American people. No one wants a repeat of what happened in Iraq. For that reason, policymakers and politicians should explain to the American people why limited intervention is precisely the right tool for our 21st-century fights. The mission will not be accomplished, by definition – or rather, it was already accomplished in 1945, or maybe in 1991. By moving away from the language of victory (e.g. “winning in Syria”) and recognizing that victory is already ours, Americans will evaluate individual hotspots in the context of a bigger picture. This will foster clarity in the collective mind, manage our expectations, and dispel illusions about what we can and cannot accomplish in the world.

Maintaining order is less sexy than hoisting a flag over Iwo Jima, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Order is a prerequisite of justice, and good neighborhoods are the foundation for a better future for all who live within them. There are still many strategic, legal, and moral questions to be answered. We obviously cannot fill every void and block every rival. Where and when do we engage? Interventions, military or otherwise, must still be the exception in a neighborhood of fences. Hard power should always be used sparingly. We must respect the sovereignty of other states even as we strive to uphold human rights. We must battle the temptation of empire, that call to constantly meddle in other people’s affairs, but we must recognize that we are the strongest family on the block and our interests and values call for keeping it that way. Once we recognize this, we must communicate it to the public. Few Americans know why we do what we do in the world, which is why so many call for abandoning the world to its own devices. It is on our leaders to explain why keeping up the neighborhood matters. I suspect that they’ll find in the American people a ready audience.

SYRIA

A pair of U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles fly over northern Iraq early in the morning of Sept. 23, 2014, after conducting airstrikes in Syria. These aircraft were part of a large coalition strike package that was the first to strike ISIL targets in Syria. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Matthew Bruch/Released)

To End Another War:

Safe Zones, Humanitarian Intervention, and American Interests Andrew Doran

The Trump administration wasted little time in quelling fears of American isolationism last week when it announced its support for the creation of safe zones in Syria. Immediately (and predictably), the Russian government expressed concerns, which should also do much to quell rumblings that President Trump is some kind of Russian puppet. This bold initiative is a likely indicator of the administration’s approach to the Middle East generally, and is apparently predicated on some assumptions not shared by many in the foreign policy establishment.

ni population by the Shia-dominated central government, which contributed directly to the rise of ISIS in the Anbar and Nineveh provinces. Another example is the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which has committed terrible crimes against Syria’s Sunnis. The notion that the Tehran-dominated governments of Damascus or Baghdad could enjoy the support of their Sunni populations any time in the foreseeable future is implausible. So how can the sectarian conflict be brought to a conclusion? The only workable model is decentralization.

The first apparent assumption is that Syria, like Iraq, is not a cohesive state, let alone a nation-state. The conflicts in both countries are rooted in the reality of sectarian division, which has contributed to protracted violence. Americans take pluralistic societies for granted, overlooking the fact that Western societies generally have at least shared conceptions of the common good. This has too often blinded policymakers to the political implications of deep, intractable sectarian divisions. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the alienation of Iraq’s Sun-

September 2016, Chris Seiple, Robert Nicholson, and I wrote in The American Interest: Federated, decentralized models of governance will be necessary to restore stability to Iraq and Syria, as well, most likely, to Libya and possibly Yemen. Safe havens, autonomous regions, and buffer zones will also necessarily be formed to protect vulnerable populations and redevelop communities devastated by conflict. This kind of approach offers a third way to communities—particularly Sunni 47

communities—too often forced to choose between hostile, Tehran-[controlled] militias and governments in Baghdad and Damascus and violent extremist organizations like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Jabhat al-Nusra. The central governments of Iraq and Syria each control perhaps a third of the geographic territory of the states they actually claim. Both have significant Sunni Arab and Kurdish populations: In Syria the former are perhaps just over half the population; in Iraq the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is largely autonomous. These are but two realities in terribly complicated countries that are decentralized in practice if not in fact. Greater local control by Sunnis of predominantly Sunni regions of Iraq would have likely have precluded ISIS’s expansion in 2014—a kind of Sunni Awakening of a preventive, rather than reactive, nature.

“It is often said of late that the American people are weary of the burdens of global leadership. This is not accurate.” The need for decentralized governance in Iraq was anticipated more than ten years ago by Leslie Gelb and Senator Joe Biden. They even provided a working model for Iraq: The 1996 NATO-UN intervention to end the genocidal violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, safe havens had been established, but were undermined by the reluctance of the UN to permit its peacekeepers to use force. In consequence, safe havens actually contributed to the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims, most poignantly at Srebrenica in 1995. It was the Srebrenica massacre that prompted U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke to force the hands of many leaders (including President Bill Clinton) to intervene and end the conflict. Srebrenica also taught the multinational Implementation Force in Bosnia to upgrade its mission—implementing the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords—from “peacekeeping” to “peace-enforcing.” This proved significant. Not only was there no repeat of Srebrenica, the peace in Bosnia has held for more than two decades. It is, quite simply, the most successful intervention model of the last generation. 48

To be clear, each case—Bosnia, Syria, and Iraq— is sui generis, with its own distinct challenges. However, the commonalities are numerous. Each state came into existence after being carved out of larger political constructs. Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later the multi-ethnic, multi-religious fiction of Yugoslavia. Iraq and Syria were carved out of the Ottoman Empire, roughly along the lines set forth in the (now rightly infamous) Sikes-Picot Treaty. The sectarian divides simmering beneath the surface were suppressed for a time by rigid, highly-centralized authoritarian regimes that sought—through Communism and Baathism, respectively—to unify through secular ideology but proved themselves to be oppressive and ultimately incapable of governing. The organizing rationale of the centralized, totalitarian regimes was overcome by ethno-religious sectarian identities and interests; the faux states carved out of empires themselves dissolved. The sectarian conflict in each subsequently claimed the lives of a quarter-million people or more. Only Bosnia has succeeded in realizing decentralization and stability. It is a model that policymakers have only reluctantly begun to examine. In 2013, I argued that the late Richard Holbrooke’s vision to end the conflict in Bosnia was a model for Syria. Calls for an intervention in Syria and Iraq of the kind that took place two decades ago in Southeastern Europe have been met with various responses. Some have argued that Bosnia was a failure because (two decades hence), pluralism hasn’t taken root in Bosnia; others haven’t been able to get beyond ad hominem attacks directed at Holbrooke, so despised was the man by his peers and underlings. Yet he foresaw that the humanitarian intervention in Bosnia would also serve long-term national security interests: Mujahedeen, many trained in Afghanistan, were active combatants in Bosnia. Holbrooke understood that protracted sectarian conflict provided a training ground for terrorists. The Obama administration, in contrast, did nothing to end the Syrian conflict, thereby permitting the flourishing of ISIS and Al Qaeda’s affiliates as well as the ruthless prosecution of war by Bashar Assad against insurgents and even Syria’s civilian population. The best argument against a Dayton-type model for Syria (and Iraq) is that it would require U.S. leadership and therefore boots on the ground. It is this question that will confront the Trump administration: To what extent will U.S. advisors and troops be required to oversee the creation

of safe zones in Syria? This is the task for policymakers at State and the Pentagon in the weeks ahead. It is to the Dayton Accords and the multinational intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996—not Lebanon in 1983 or Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011—that these policymakers should look. It is almost certain that the risks for U.S. troops would be greater than in Bosnia. However, the long-term benefits of taking a crucial first step toward concluding the civil war in Syria outweigh the cost of a limited U.S. commitment there. It may be that the creation of safe zones in Syria will not come into existence; that conflict will continue in Syria for years to come; that no decentralized models of governance will be implemented in Syria; and that Syria will be a haven for terrorists rather than vulnerable civilians. It is also possible that Iraq’s Sunnis will remain alienated from a Shia-dominated central government while smaller ethnic and religious minorities, such as the Christians and Yazidis of the Nineveh Plain, will remain a low priority for both the Iraqi and U.S. governments. But there is a model available for humanitarian intervention—the Dayton model for Bosnia—and this model has been successful in promoting peace and stability where sectarian conflict had all but destroyed a government’s capacity to govern its people. Decentralization was the answer there. It is the answer in Syria and Iraq. The alternatives are, of course, well known. Afghanistan and Somalia come to mind. Most of Syria and Iraq are little better today as it is.

It is still very early, but it is nonetheless encouraging to see the Trump administration take a step toward restoring a balance of principle and prudence to U.S. foreign policy. In the days and weeks ahead, the administration would do well to articulate the relationship between the creation of zones and U.S. national security interests, explaining both the risks and the reward to the American people. It will do much to restore confidence in America’s restored leadership in the world, rather than disengagement. - Andrew Doran writes about U.S. foreign policy and human rights in the Middle East. He is on the board of directors for In Defense of Christians, an advocacy group for Christians in the Middle East. He previously served on the executive secretariat of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO at the U.S. Department of State.

It is often said of late that the American people are weary of the burdens of global leadership. This is not accurate. Calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Germany, Japan, Korea, or even Bosnia or Kosovo have been infrequent and few. It is the Middle East that has exasperated the American people. But this is because U.S. policies were advanced with a blindness to the fact that the region is beset with premodern, often tribal identities that supersede any sense of state or nation. The remedy proposed—procedural democracy—was naïve, imprudent, and resulted in much bloodshed. The Trump administration appears to apprehend the limits of procedural democracy in states divided by sectarian interests. Thus rooted in reality, the possibilities for advancing national security and humanitarian interests—and the two are in fact related—may be a cause for cautious optimism. It begins with calls for decentralized governance in Syria and further decentralization in Iraq. 49

PHILOS FELLOWS

KHALIL SAYEGH Khalil is a Palestinian Christian born and raised in the Gaza Strip. Growing up, Khalil was filled with bitterness towards the Jewish people after witnessing Israeli air strikes in his neighborhood and being taught that Israel was responsible for all of his suffering. As a member of Gazaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s small Christian minority, Khalil was frequently harassed for his faith which caused him to struggle with his identity and place in Palestinian society. After the 2008 war between Israel and Hamas, Khalil moved to the West Bank where he was exposed to the power of the gospel for the first time. As he started following Christ, Khalil was able to love his Jewish enemy and remove the bitterness he felt towards those Muslims who had mistreated him. Khalil knows firsthand how hatred can blind us from seeing the humanity of the other. A proud Palestinian who loves his people and stands with them in the midst of suffering, he nevertheless believes that real peace can come only when Palestinians root out the negative perceptions of the Jewish people that are so pervasive throughout their society. For this reason, Khalil is working to change minds by educating his neighbors to see the good the other -- whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. Khalil recently completed his studies at Bethlehem Bible College and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Biblical Studies. 50

REFUGEES

A young refugee boy in the Za’atari Refugee Camp in Northern Jordan, 2018

More Than Pawns:

Wh at True L ove Fo r Re fuge e s Look s Li ke Luke Moon

Heartfelt stories filled the news. The Egyptian family, having sold everything was now stranded at the airport. The Syrian Christian family who didn’t speak English well enough sent back to Turkey. It was all terrible and frenzied. Reason was nowhere to be found. Nobody seemed to have actually read the executive order. Those that did read it were confused. Since when is reducing the acceptance of refugees from 85,000 to 50,000 a ban on refugees? How are 90-120 day delays forever? Why is it moral to accept 100,000 refugees, but immoral to accept 50,000? The executive order never mentioned the seven nations given extra scrutiny. It never mentioned a ban on Muslims. It even carved out provision where the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) could prioritize religious minorities who are most vulnerable to persecution. Nobody seemed to care. Each side locked in their own information silo raged. Funny videos

on social media gave way to memes picturing either dead refugees or dead victims of terrorists. Christians, who had days earlier been fervently arguing that we can’t legislate morality were suddenly demanding the government not restrict anyone who wants to come to the US, because “Jesus was once a refugee.” Simultaneously, those who marched for Life on the day of the EO found themselves attacked for not raging against Trump over temporary restrictions on accepting refugees from 7 nations, 4 of which are undergoing a civil war. Typically apolitical pastors and church leaders found themselves trying to articulate a position that would not alienate some member of their congregation. Most failed. Many unwilling or unable to articulate why as Christian, we can advocate for Christian refugees to be prioritized. Unsurprisingly, some of the most vocal Christian critics of the new executive order were those organizations that receive millions of dol51

lars from the federal government to settle refugees. Lost in the noise was the very positive movement on the establishment of safe havens in the Middle East. For years, numerous organizations, including the one I work for, have been advocating for safe havens where ethnic and religious minorities would be safe from the ongoing sectarian wars. As people marched to bring refugees to the US, president Trump was speaking with leaders of Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Jordan about how to help refugees stay in the region and stay safe. For me, loving refugees means not using them as political pawns. It means with limited resources and limited slots available that I advocate that the government prioritize the most vulnerable refugees first. It means working towards the establishment of safe havens. It means the US should stay engaged to help end the conflicts that has caused the refugee crisis in the first place. Finally, it means the government continues to uphold its obligation to execute justice and protect its citizens and the church upholding its obligation to be a prophetic witness and agent of mercy.

Zaatari is a refugee camp in Jordan, located 10 kilometres east of Mafraq, which has gradually evolved into a permanent settlement; it is the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest camp for Syrian refugees. It was first opened on 28 July 2012 to host Syrians fleeing the violence in the ongoing Syrian Civil War that erupted in March 2011.

REFUGEES

Evening falls, and temperatures drop in Za’atari refugee camp, Jordan, on November 21, 2012.

Iraqi Christians:

T he Forgott e n Re fuge e s Igor Sabino

In recent years, the protection of refugees and forced migrants has been a growing issue on international society’s agenda. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in 2016 more than 65 million people around the world were displaced from their homes. Of these, over 20 million are refugees, and approximately 40 million are internally displaced. The main causes of these displacements are civil strife and political instability in countries of the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. About 55 percent of all refugees in the world come from Syria (5.5 million), Afghanistan (2.5 million), and South Sudan (1.4 million). These numbers are quite significant, and it is not without reason that they have drawn so much attention from the international community, especially after the great flow of Syrians and Afghans seeking asylum in European countries. It is estimated that since 2015, 35,000 unaccompanied children, mostly from these two nations, sought refuge in Germany. However, even though this is a very urgent situation, especially concerning the

victims of the Syrian Civil War, international leaders must not ignore the complete picture of the humanitarian crisis facing the world today, including the plight of persecuted religious minorities such as Christians. According to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, religious persecution is among the reasons that can make someone eligible for refugee status. Anyone who is forced to flee their country of origin because of a well-founded fear of persecution based on their religion may apply for international protection as a refugee. Although this is a principle of international law, in practice it has been largely neglected. This is what has happened with many Iraqi Christians. Despite the fact they are among the nearly 65 million forcibly displaced in the twenty-first century, their stories and their suffering remains forgotten and neglected by the international society. As previously highlighted by Baroness Caroline Cox and Ewelina U. Ochab in the Summer 2017 issue of Providence’s print edition, with the 53

emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq in 2014, Christians have had little choice but to convert to Islam, be killed, or flee. Most chose the last option and, as a result, became internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan or fled to neighboring countries such as Jordan and Lebanon. These countries, however, are not signatories of the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol and therefore are not internationally required to recognize these Christians as refugees. As a result, many of them, especially those in Lebanon, began to live as irregular migrants without access to several fundamental civil rights. In the fall of 2016, I visited some of the Christians in Beirut who left Mosul in 2014. With the support of the UN, they originally fled to Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan. There, they could have remained as IDPs or go to a neighboring country and seek asylum in the West through the UNHCR resettlement program. Nevertheless, this process could take years. Even so, the living conditions in Erbil were becoming increasingly precarious because of the great increase in the number of IDPs fleeing ISIS. They therefore preferred to move to Lebanon and from there seek asylum in Western countries. Two years later, however, these Christians still had no prospect of receiving asylum. Holding kneaded UNHCR forms and with tears in their eyes, they told me how difficult it was to be a Christian refugee in Lebanon. They were unable to work legally and were taking informal jobs to survive, even though they received half the salary paid to a Lebanese. Their children could not attend school, and medical care was a luxury that they could not afford. Thus, despite all they had suffered in Iraq, life in Lebanon was not very promising. Faced with this situation, they wondered if the UN or Western countries could do anything more for them. Some even complained that countries like Canada and the US were receiving more Syrian Muslim refugees than Christians who were victims of religious persecution. Their biggest disappointment, however, was the fact that they felt abandoned by Western Christians. Last summer, I could hear similar complaints from other Iraqi Christians. This time in Amman, Jordan. There, things were a little bit different. Although the government guaranteed the refugees some rights, the country was overcrowded with Syrians and because of this could 54

not offer any help to Christians. The situation was hampered by the fact that the aid offered by UNHCR was directed mainly towards refugees living in camps. This option, however, was not available to Christians, who didn’t live in camps because of the fear of further religious persecution by the Muslim majority who lived there, as mentioned by Faith McDonnell in an article at Providence’s website. These facts clearly demonstrate the need for international society to rethink its policies regarding the protection of refugees and other forced migrants, especially concerning the religious minorities. As Alexander Betts and Paul Collier argue in their book Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System, the UNHCR should modify its strategies. At the same time, Western countries must develop new forms of regional governance in refugee protection in regions such as the Middle East, where most countries have not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Finally, it is imperative that Christians in the West remember their brothers around the world and be willing to help them. Many of these Iraqi Christians want to be resettled as refugees in Western countries. Others, however, want to stay where they are and keep the Middle Eastern Christian traditions alive. Many of those who had become internally displaced are starting to return to their cities after the territorial losses ISIS has suffered. To accomplish this, however, in addition to prayers they also need political action and financial resources. The UNHCR and the international leaders may even neglect these Christians due to the many other humanitarian needs around the world. But we as Christians are called to remember that “if one member suffers, all suffer together.” We cannot forget these refugees. — Igor Sabino is the Executive Secretary of ANAJURE Refugees, holds a B.A. in International Relations from State University of Paraíba (UEPB) in Brazil, and is currently an M.A. student of International Relations there. Follow him on Twitter here: @igorhsabino.

PHILOS FELLOWS

MINA ABDELMALAK Advocating for religious freedom and equality in Egypt and the wider Middle East by cultivating indigenous Christian leaders who can change their societies from within. Mina was born and raised in Egypt and received a law degree from Ain Shams University in Egypt. He worked as a legal researcher for the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth (EULY), a Cairo-based, non-profit organization, which promotes classical liberalism among Egyptian youth. He supervised a program within EULY on the status of Coptic Christians in Egypt. Mina regularly speaks for and leads advocacy initiatives with the Philos Project.

REFUGEES

Rawaa, 21, a mother of three from Aleppo, draws water from a storage tank in her tent at an informal tented settlement for Syrian refugees in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, in July 2014.

Do Not Be Afraid:

Help is on t he Way Olivia Enos

Marvin Lahoud, a 26 year-old volunteer with a Lebanese church serving Syrian refugees, was in charge of food voucher distribution. On this day, Marvin discovered that one of the refugee families returned to Syria leaving him with an extra voucher to distribute to another family. He scanned the wait list. The first family he called—also returned to Syria. The second family didn’t answer the phone. Further constraints led Marvin to dismiss the third and fourth families from the wait list. Marvin finally decided to make his way over to the house of the fifth family. A little boy stood at the entrance of the basement space his family called home, looked up at Marvin, and smiled. Matter-of-factly the Syrian boy said, “Come in. We were expecting you.” Marvin looked at him—puzzled. He hadn’t told anyone he was coming; much less contacted the Muslim Syrian refugee family. How could they have known he was coming? 56

The young Syrian boy’s mother beckoned Marvin into their home and asked the boy to explain. “Yesterday”, the little boy said, “I had a dream that was so vivid I thought it was real. I was walking on the shore of the sea and saw a man standing in the sea with water up to his knees. He was clothed in a bright white robe. His face shined so bright, I couldn’t see the details of his face. His hands were noticeably tender. I asked him who he was. He said, ‘I am Jesus.’ I said, ‘What do you want?’ Jesus said, ‘I want you to believe in love, have faith and keep hope.’ And Jesus continued to say, ‘Do not be afraid. Help is on the way. Tomorrow, a man will come over called Marvin and he will help you and your family.’” And now you are here, said the mother to Marvin. *** Marvin is the personification of help on the way. And he is just one of many Lebanese Christians serving the growing community of refugees in Lebanon. Lebanon, a country no larger than the

state of Connecticut, is home to 4 million people, at least 1.5 million of whom are registered Syrian refugees. Unlike Turkey or Jordan, there are no formal refugee camps in Lebanon, only informal tented settlements where millions of refugees reside. The Lebanese government refuses to repeat its experience with Palestinian refugees, where to this day Lebanon houses over 400,000 third and fourth generation Palestinians in ghetto-like conditions in formalized refugee camps. Syrian refugees sit amongst tents in an informal tented settlement in the village of Gaza, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. 10 February 2014. Photo: Dalia Khamissy/UNDP, via Flickr. Syrian refugees sit amongst tents in an informal tented settlement in the village of Gaza, in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon. 10 February 2014. Photo: Dalia Khamissy/UNDP, via Flickr. Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in dire conditions. Food is scarce, despite stipends from the World Food Programme, assistance from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and help from humanitarian organizations like World Vision and others. Informal tented settlements are just that—informal tents with car tires on top to keep the tarp, a meager replacement for a roof, above their heads. In more updated tented settlements, NGOs come to lay concrete or gravel to help mitigate the effects of mud and water that invade the refugees’ homes during the rainy seasons and the snowy wintry months. Day in and day out, Syrian refugee families do their best to eke out a living. It is often impossible for men to work due to the difficulty in acquiring a work permit from the Lebanese government. Instead, many families resort to sending their children to work in construction, agriculture, or local stores. And child labor has become a necessity to make ends meet. Under these conditions, whole generations of Syrian children are missing out on vital education. When asked what they hope for their children, Syrian families say that that they want nothing more than for their children to get a good education and have a bright future. Many families acknowledge that local schools and humanitarian organizations have made schooling available to their children, but they regret that they must forego school in favor of survival.

Some families dream of returning to Syria, while others deeply desire to resettle in third countries like the United States, Canada, or Germany. But hope of a return to Syria and of resettlement is slim. The war rages on in Syria, and worldwide statistics from the UNHCR report that less than one percent of refugees are ever resettled in third countries. *** In the midst of such dire circumstances, civil society and church communities in Lebanon are providing necessary assistance to Syrian refugees. And the fulfillment of many refugees’ dreams rests on the generosity and sacrifice of countless individuals deciding to serve their community. Resurrection Church in Beirut, Lebanon has welcomed Syrian refugees into its church. The church provides a number of services, including schooling for Syrian children, marriage counseling for Syrian refugee spouses, and food and blankets for anyone who comes knocking. Pastor Hikmat Kashouh, who serves as the senior pastor at Resurrection Church, says that welcoming Syrian refugees, regardless of whether they are Christian or Muslim, into his church has required a process of reconciliation and forgiveness due to the long history of conflict between Syrians and Lebanese. But the congregation, now more than 1,000 people, today openly welcomes Syrian refugees. It is a miracle that Lebanon hosts any Syrian refugees at all. While it shares a border with Syria, relations between the neighbors in the not-todistant past were bloody. Just eleven years ago, the two countries were at war with one another, and Lebanon is still recovering from its own civil war in 2006—the vestiges of bygone bombings still dot the countryside. Stories likes Resurrection Church are not uncommon in Lebanon. Many other individuals and organizations have mobilized to serve Syrian refugees. Rosette Mansour (formerly Rosette Lahoud), mother of Marvin, has her own story of reconciliation with the Syrian people; her own story of promise that help is on the way. Rosette recalls back to the war between Lebanon and Syria when she was pregnant with her daughter, and Marvin was only 10 months old. 57

On October 13, 1990, bombs were going off all around them. All of their neighbors had fled, and now Rosette, her former husband, son, and unborn child were faced with a difficult decision: stay and risk being killed or flee their home. Deciding to flee, they hopped in their car and drove speedily toward what they thought were Lebanese troops. Evacuating their car, they ran toward the troops. The troops were not Lebanese, but Syrians who subsequently seized them and other innocents fleeing Lebanese. The Syrian troops lined up the Lahouds along with two other Lebanese. “Turn around!” yelled the Syrian soldiers ordering Rosette to hold Marvin above her head before they shot her. “It did not occur to me to pray ‘God save me’ because there was no way that we could escape…I just prayed, ‘God, take my life before the life of my family. I cannot tolerate seeing my family dying in front of me,’” recalled Rosette. Within moments, there was a big explosion. Rosette opened her eyes thinking she had died and gone to heaven. It all happened faster than her mind could imagine or grasp. But a Lebanese army tank had come up behind Rosette and her family and bombed and killed or maimed every single Syrian military man who just moments before nearly killed the entire Lahoud family. While Rosette and her family survived the brutal war, they were not left unscathed but with deep scars and searing pain in their hearts. For a long while, Rosette could not even stand to see or hear Syrians. When Syrians began fleeing to Lebanon, she prayed to God requesting that she could just serve the Syrian refugee population through prayer, but God was calling her to serve more directly. After her son started ministering to Syrian refugees, she decided to go along to a visit with a Syrian refugee family. On her first visit, she met a 23 year-old Syrian refugee widow and her brother. The brother asked Rosette and others from the aid organization, Why do you love us? Why do you care for us? We killed you. We kidnapped your children. We occupied your land. We were your enemies. Why do you love us? Rosette recalled her colleagues saying, It is not because of our strength, but because of God’s love in our hearts. 58

Ever since, Rosette has dedicated her life to serving Syrian refugees and their families. Her story is one of great forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation and is an inspiration to all considering how best to love and serve their neighbor—even the neighbor they have good reason to hate. The current refugee crisis is one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of the day. Today, the United Nations estimates that there are over 65 million displaced persons worldwide; the highest number of displaced persons since World War II. Of that, the UN believes that there are close to 5 million registered Syrian refugees. Each one of these families are in need of basic necessities including food, water, and shelter. But most importantly, Rosette noted, they are in need of community—a listening ear that will take heed of their trials and in some cases just listen. There is a role for government, private citizens, and civil society to play, not just to listen, but to take concerted action to provide relief for the hurting people of war-torn Syria. Resettlement isn’t the only means of support, however. In a forthcoming paper, The Heritage Foundation evaluates the durable solutions most relevant to providing relief in the midst of the most significant refugee crisis the world has experienced in over five decades. As witnessed in Lebanon, however, government solutions alone won’t meet one of the most pressing needs this crisis presents: the need for community. There is an especially important role for the global church to play in supporting the widow, the orphan, the alien, and the oppressed—of which Syrian refugees form a significant percentage. The need for community is deep, and the church has a long history of providing community where it is needed most. The needs are big, and timing is urgent in the midst of the Syrian refugee crisis. Hopefully, when we are called upon we can say with assurance: Do not be afraid. Help is on the way. Olivia Enos, research associate in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation, specializes in human rights and transnational criminal issues. These include human trafficking and human smuggling, drug trafficking, religious freedom, and other social and humanitarian challenges facing Asia.

REFUGEES

Tech. Sgt. Traci Keller with a child after during the delivery of emergency response vehicles through the Denton Program at La Aurora International Airport, Guatemala City, Guatemala, April 20, 2018. The Denton Program was a Department of Defense transportation program that moved humanitarian cargo, donated by US-based non-governmental organizations to developing nations to ease human suffering.

A Christian Case:

For Humanit a r ia n I nt e r ve nt i on Joseph Loconte

Beginning in 1921, a mostly man-made famine ravaged the Soviet Union and quickly became one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in Europe since the Black Death. Roughly three million people perished during the early winter months of 1922. In desperation, the communist government of Vladimir Lenin turned to the United States for help. America responded. Nineteen thousand American relief stations were set up from the Ukraine to Siberia. By horse, camel, truck, and railcar, the American Relief Administration delivered more than half a million tons of food, clothing, and medicine. It employed about 120,000 Russians. At its peak, the program fed 10.5 million Russians a day. It is estimated that the United States rescued at least 10 million people from certain death by starvation.

This historic episode in international relations raises a number of questions concerning US patterns of global engagement. Why, for example, did the United States intervene in this way on behalf of a political enemy? The most important reason goes back to the concept of American exceptionalism. It is the idea that the United States has a unique role in promoting and defending human rights and democratic freedom around the globe. American exceptionalism is the belief that Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s political ideals and institutions owe a great intellectual debt to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that we must conduct our foreign policy in light of our moral obligations. Herbert Hoover, who oversaw the rescue operation in the Soviet Union, reflected on the impact of US engagement on the world stage: I have seen America in contrast with many nations and races. My profession took me into many foreign lands under many kinds of gov-

ernment. I have worked with their great spiritual leaders and their great statesmen. I have worked in governments of free men, of tyrannies, of Socialists and of Communists. I have met with princes, kings, despots, and desperadoes. I have seen the squalor of Asia, the frozen class barriers of Europe. And I was not a tourist. I was associated in their working lives and problems. I had to deal with their governments. And outstanding everywhere to these great masses of people there was a hallowed word—America. To them, it was the hope of the world. America: the hope of the world.

The American Creed in Action Like no other nation on earth, the United States has established its global leadership in the defense of human rights. It was the United States that took the lead, 74 years ago, in creating the United Nations, whose charter was to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women.” It was the United States that insisted upon an international tribunal, the Nuremberg trials, to judge the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. America rejected the call for mass executions or show trials. Indeed, the United States set a new standard for punishing crimes against humanity. Robert Jackson, the lead prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg trials, said this in his opening statement: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” It was the United States which led the effort to establish an international bill of rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that has become the Bible for the modern human rights movement. Consider the observation s of Charles Malik, the Lebanese ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights who helped draft the Universal Declaration:

The American spirit of freedom, tolerance, largeness of heart, and profound respect for individual human beings permeated and suffused our atmosphere all around… We imbibed this spirit in restaurants, in the streets…but above all in dealing with and talking to American men and women of every stripe and on every social level. I cannot imagine a document on human rights and fundamental freedoms of the importance and breadth of our declaration arising in our age without the sustaining support of this spiritual background. I cannot imagine the declaration coming to birth under the aegis of any other culture emerging dominant after the Second World War. America as the indispensable nation in the defense of human rights: this is part of our political DNA.

The Responsibility to Protect Thus, it was not surprising that in 2005—in response to the acts of genocide committed in places like Rwanda—the United States embraced a new principle of intervention to defend human dignity. It became known as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). As described in the UN’s “World Summit Outcome” document, member states of the United Nations have a “collective responsibility to protect” people from genocide and other human rights abuses. It is the proposition that there is a collective responsibility to protect people from genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity—even if it means military intervention. Overwhelmingly approved by the UN General Assembly in 2005, R2P insists that nations cannot hide behind the UN Charter and “national sovereignty” in order to wage war against their civilian populations. The signatories to the doctrine agree to take “collective action…should peaceful means be inadequate” to protect populations at risk of gross human rights abuses. Here is a universal norm, morally binding on all member states. And it draws its intellectual strength from the Christian just war tradition. That tradition begins with the God-given worth of every human life, and then insists on the state’s obligation to defend that life against 61

harm—using force if necessary. Indeed, the UN’s criteria for military engagement follow precisely those articulated by Christian theologians beginning with Augustine: the motive must be to prevent human suffering (right intention); means short of force must be judged as unlikely to stop the aggressor (last resort); the military option must be proportional to the threat (proportionality); and the consequences of action must not be worse than inaction (reasonable prospects). This is classic Christian just war theory. What possible reason would the United States—given its unique political history—reject a principle for military intervention based on one of most transformative Christian ideas in the history of the planet? If you don’t like Augustine or Aquinas as advisors to US foreign policy, then you are left with Machiavelli.

A Feckless United Nations Nevertheless, the question remains, why should the United States take upon itself a unique role in implementing the R2P doctrine? First of all, this responsibility cannot be left to the United Nations. Second, we have a national interest in punishing human rights violators. Let’s first consider the United Nations. It was the abject failure of the United Nations to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing throughout the 1980s and 1990s that produced the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Liberals claim that the UN Security Council is the only legitimate authority to implement the doctrine. This is manifestly absurd. The just war doctrine depends upon a legitimate political authority to implement it. Protestant thinker James Turner Johnson, a leading just war theorist and Providence contributing editor, says the United Nations has a history of dysfunction in this regard. “The structure of the UN is such,” he writes, “that clear purpose and effective command and control are virtually unimaginable.” Think about it: The 15-nation UN Security Council is a mix of democracies and dictatorships. It grants veto power to thuggish, auto62

cratic regimes that, by definition, have little regard for the basic human rights of their citizens, including Russia and China.

US National Interests Even if the UN cannot be relied upon to intervene to prevent gross human-rights abuses, why should the burden fall to the United States? Because it is in our national security interests to take on this responsibility. When President Trump in 2017 ordered airstrikes to punish Syria for a chemical weapons attack that killed and injured scores of civilians, he was criticized by conservatives such as Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy argued that Bashar al-Assad’s use of a weapon of mass destruction—which targeted innocent men, women, and children—involved “no vital American interests.” No vital American interests? Amid the brutally destructive Wars of Religion during the seventeenth century, Protestant thinker Hugo Grotius wrote On Laws of War and Peace (1625). “Though there may be circumstances, in which absolute justice will not condemn the sacrifice of lives in war,” he argued, “yet humanity will require that the greatest precaution should be used against involving the innocent in danger, except in cases of extreme urgency and utility.” Here is a political principle, based on Judeo-Christian ethics, which has helped to protect countless civilians from the savagery of war. When did conservatism decide that the United States has no interest in upholding a universal moral norm that has helped to prevent the West from descending into a permanent state of barbarism? When, exactly, did the humanitarian ideals of the Western tradition become irrelevant to the conduct of American foreign policy? What happens when atrocities against civilian populations are ignored by the civilized world? History provides the answer: we get more atrocities, more international aggression. Just ask the Jews living in Germany in the 1930s, the Cambodians under Pol Pot in the 1970s, the Iraqi Kurds under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. In the case of Syria under Assad, what have

we seen since he first launched his campaign of terror against his own people—without any meaningful consequences? We have seen continued attacks on civilian populations, with chemical weapons and barrel bombs, the targeting of hospitals and humanitarian aid workers, the widening of the civil war, a refugee crisis not witnessed since the end of the Second World War. Allow genocide to go unchecked, and you will get more of it: you will get the collapse of a universal moral principle and a threat to the entire international order. And there are no vital American interests at stake?

When Intervention Saves Lives & Restores Order Nikki Haley, former US ambassador to the United Nations, summarized the issue this way: “When the United Nations consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action.” Critics of US humanitarian intervention claim that it will only make matters worse, as the intervention in Libya did under the Obama administration. But Ambassador Haley has a good deal of US diplomatic history on her side.

Within weeks, a million Kurds fled the region, with nearly one thousand people dying each day. The UN Security Council approved humanitarian assistance for the Kurds, but it never authorized the no-fly zones established under President George H.W. Bush. From April to September 1991, Operation Provide Comfort flew over 40,000 sorties, relocated 700,000 refugees, and restored many Kurdish villages destroyed by the Iraqi military. Over the next decade, US and British pilots took anti-aircraft fire from Iraqi forces, shot down Iraqi planes, and successfully defended the no-fly zones. Today the Iraqi Kurds are among the most pro-Western allies in the Middle East, and arguably the most effective fighting force against the Islamic State. Their survival and contribution to stability in the region was the result of a humanitarian mission that, according to the realists, involved no vital American interests. The United States prevented the mass slaughter of an entire ethnic population. Why? Because it drew upon insights embedded in centuries of moral and political philosophy—and was true to its creed.

No Holiday from History

Take, for example, the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo: the US-led bombing campaign that brought an end to the ethnic cleansing of the Yugoslav Wars. It lacked UN approval. Political realists saw no important US interests at stake—not even naked aggression and a humanitarian disaster within Europe’s borders could stir them. Well, the realists looked morally bankrupt once peace and security were restored to the region.

The United States has the power, like no other force on earth, to protect the innocent from great evil. It has the capacity to send a message to lawless regimes. The message: they cannot always evade the moral laws that govern civilized nations.

Consider also the American and British intervention on behalf of Iraqi Kurds after the First Gulf War. The Kurds of northern Iraq rebelled against Saddam Hussein in 1991, after his army was defeated and kicked out of Kuwait by the US-led coalition. But the Iraqi army cracked down on the rebels and was prepared to exterminate the entire population—having used chemical weapons against them with impunity during the Iran-Iraq War.

Conservatives, and Christians, ought to know and care about these ideals, which have done so much to promote international peace and security. Remember the American Creed, those self-evident truths expressed by thinkers from John Locke to James Madison: a belief in the God-given worth and equality of every human being, in natural rights, in the right to live in freedom, in liberty of conscience, government by consent of the governed.

It is a message that is consistent with America’s vital national interests—and with its most cherished political and religious ideals.

In 1793, when Thomas Jefferson was serving as America remains, in the words of Abraham secretary of state, he said that US foreign pol- Lincoln, “the last best hope of earth.” icy should be guided by “the moral law of our nature,” meaning our moral obligations, under God, to act with justice and equity toward our neighbors. Joseph Loconte is a senior editor at Providence and an associate professor of history at Here is a political philosophy, rooted in the Bi- the King’s College in New York City. He served ble, that serves a purpose larger than that of as a human rights expert for the 2005 Conthe United States. In the ceaseless struggle begressional Task Force on the United Nations, tween civilization and barbarism, America has contributing to its final report, American Intipped the scales toward civilization, toward freedom and justice. In many ways, it has orga- terests and UN Reform. His most recent book nized its national life—its economic, military, is the New York Times bestseller A Hobbit, a Wardrobe and a Great War. and moral resources—toward this end.

Are we still up to the task? The United States is not without its many sins and shortcomings. But it is not without virtue. What happens when a society lacks any capacity for empathy or willingness to sacrifice to save others from a great evil? It not only betrays the moral ideals of its political creed. It ceases to qualify as a civilized society.

What are we prepared to do? We need a revival of something like the Christian realism that emerged in the 1940s with Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr. Modern liberalism, Niebuhr complained, has “little understanding of the depth to which human malevolence may sink and the heights to which malignant power may rise.” He wrote, “Some easy and vapid escape is sought from the terrors and woes of a tragic era.” But there is no easy escape from the terrors of our age. There is no holiday from history. There is no “global community” prepared to defend the innocent against the ravages of dictators and butchers and jihadists. But there remains a United States: the most powerful force for democracy and human rights in the history of our civilization. Here is a global power created out of the ashes of two world wars, framed by a political system grounded in natural rights, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

THE REGION

THE STATE

THE WEST BANK

Providence PLI Special Edition 2019

Articles inside

TOWARD A NEW VISION FOR THE Middle East