Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Have Bush and the Neocons Ruined it for the Israelis?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] The Israeli propaganda blitz around their attack on Gaza has been greeted with uncharacteristic skepticism by the American public and even by some of the mainstream US press. Even the Jewish American community is uneasy about this one, in a way perhaps unparalel

Lawrence Davidson: Whose Interest Defines National Interests?

[Professor Davidson is author of the just-published Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest. He teaches history at West Chester University.] Why is it that most Americans pay little attention to foreign policy? For instance, over the last eight years we have seen the awful consequences of foreign policies that support dictators, supply the weapons for war crimes against the Palestinian people, launch invasions of sovereign nations under false pretenses, and ea

Jonathan Zimmerman: Don't pay the first lady

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" (Harvard University Press).] I've always liked Michelle Obama. She is smart, sophisticated, accomplished and poised. Based on what we've seen so far, she'll be a terrific first lady. But that doesn't mean we should pay her for it. As Barack and Michelle Obama make their way to the White House,

Martin Kramer: Israel's Gaza strategy

[Mr. Kramer, the author of Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now an Olin Institute Senior Fellow at Harvard. Click here for his blog.] In the fog of war, it isn't just the truth that falls casualty. So does common sense. Quite a few pundits seem to think that Israel lacks a strategy in Gaza. But unlike the Lebanon war of 2006, this war has been planned in advan

Juan Cole: Gaza 2008 ... Micro-Wars and Macro-Wars

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have entered the age of micro-wars.The first wars that Israel fought with its Arab neighbors were conventional struggles in which infantry, artillery, armor and air forces played central roles. Israel's enemies had few effective tools in t

Anne Hendershott: How Support for Abortion Became Kennedy Dogma

[Ms. Hendershott is a professor of urban studies at The King's College in New York. She is the author of "The Politics of Abortion" (Encounter Books, 2007).] ... Caroline Kennedy knows that any Kennedy desiring higher office in the Democratic Party must now carry the torch of abortion rights throughout any race. But this was not always the case. Despite Ms. Kennedy's description of Barack Obama, in a New York Times op-ed, as a "man like my father," there is no ev

Ira Chernus: The Paradox of Israel ... Regional Super Power and the Largest Jewish Ghetto Ever Created

[Ira Chernus is professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.] Trying to understand the psychology of a people at war is a lot like trying to find the bodies buried under a bombed-out building. For more than 40 years, I've been watching my own Jewish people in wartime, repeating the same self-defeating pattern over and over. Most Jews say that they want Israel to be mo

Victor Davis Hanson: The world reacts

I spent today reading accounts of Gaza —NY Times, AP, Reuters, etc. There are no terrorists, just militants. Not much about past rocket attacks on Israel — most everything on the crowded conditions of Gaza. Iranian aid is rarely elaborated on; stories about quiet Arab support for defanging Hamas are likewise rare; common is the buzz about protests in Europe. In reaction, I jotted down the following random thoughts. Gaza as Monte Carlo, perhaps Hong Kong, or is it to be Switzerland o

Juan Cole: Top Ten Good News Stories in the Muslim World, 2008

We all too often focus only on negative developments, and while it is understandable for people to keep their eyes on impending calamities, obsessing about the bad sometimes causes us to miss good news. We see a lot of that even with regard to the US. For instance, there has been a 23% decline in violent crime over the past twenty years in the US, but people who watch a lot of television (especially, I presume, police proce

Juan Cole: What a Just Settlement of the Palestinian/Israel Conflict Would Look Like

For those of you who wanted more extended background reading on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, see the SHUR working paper on Israel, Palestine and democratic possibilities. Here are the report's policy recommendations: ' The historic land of Palestine belongs to all who live in it and to those who were expelled or ex

Akhil Reed Amar and Josh Chafetz: How the Senate Can Stop Blagojevich

Does the Constitution allow the Senate to refuse to seat Roland Burris, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's surprise appointee? In a word, yes. Here's why. Following English parliamentary tradition and early Colonial and state practice, the framers made the Senate its own gatekeeper and guardian. Each house of Congress is "the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own members," according to Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution. At the founding, Senator

Alan Brinkley: Learning from FDR's mistakes

[Alan Brinkley is provost and Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia.] Does the New Deal provide a useful model for fixing our own troubled economy? In many respects, yes. The frenzy of activity and innovation that marked Franklin Roosevelt's initial months in office--a welcome contrast to the seeming paralysis of the discredited Hoover regime--helped first and foremost to lessen the panic that had gripped the nation. And, during the prewar years of his presidency, Roosevelt'

Neve Gordon and Jeff Halper: Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

[Neve Gordon is chair of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008). Jeff Halper is director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. His latest book is An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel (Pluto Press, 2008).] Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by British a

Victor Davis Hanson: Life at New Animal Farm Won't Be All That Bad

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.] By July, we will come to feel that 2009 will be one of the most upbeat years in our history, as what used to be the news media∗ begins to get behind Am

Julian Zelizer: Time for Democrats to stress ethics

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books. Zelizer writes widely on current events.] Congressman Charles Rangel's fate hangs in the balance as a report concerning the Ways and Means Committee chairman

Michael Oren and Klein Halevi: Palestinians Need Israel to Win ... If Hamas gets away with terror once again, the peace process will be over

[Mr. Oren is a fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Mr. Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Shalem Center's Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies.] A quarter century has passed since Israel last claimed to go to war in the name of peace. "Operation Peace for Galilee" -- Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon -- failed to convince the international public and even many Israelis that its goa

Daniel Pipes: Israel's War on Hamas ... A Dozen Thoughts

1) Arab-Israeli warfare is not the conventional battle to control territory of old. Since 1982, the primary goal in this theater is to persuade the world of the righteousness of one's cause. (I.e., who has the more affecting casualties?) 2) Palestinians have proven themselves more competent at the p.r. battle than the Israeli government, winning public support everywhere — with the lone but decisive exceptions of Israel and the United States. 3) Secondarily, Hamas's def

Leor Halevi: Excommunicating Dead Terrorists

[Leor Halevi, professor of history at Vanderbilt University and winner of the 2008 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for his book,"Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society."] Recently the Muslim Council of India sent an important message to the world's Muslims. It asked one of the country's largest Muslim graveyards, Marine Lines Bada Qabrastan, where unclaimed bodies are often interred, to deny burial rites to the nine men who died after terrorizing Mumbai. Refusal t

Daniel Pipes: Insight into Obama's Middle East Policy?

[Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]Two events earlier this month summed up differing views of George W. Bush's Middle East record.In one, Bush himself offered a valedictory speech, declaring that"the Middle East in 2008 is a freer, more ho

Benny Morris: Why Israel Feels Threatened

[Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author, most recently, of “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.”] MANY Israelis feel that the walls — and history — are closing in on their 60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched the Six-Day War and destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. More than 40 years ago, the Egypti