THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

The Origin of Modern Terror and Crumbling Western Values

 

John Chuckman

Do you ever solve problems by ignoring them? Most of us would say that is not possible, yet that is precisely what western governments do in their efforts to counteract what is called “Islamic terror.” Yes, there are vast and costly efforts to suppress the symptoms of what western governments regard as a modern plague, including killing many people presumed to be infected with it, fomenting rebellion and destruction in places presumed to be prone to it, secretly returning to barbaric practices such as torture, things we thought had been left behind centuries ago, to fight it, and violating rights of their own citizens we thought were as firmly established as the need for food and shelter. Governments ignore, in all these destructive efforts, what in private they know very well is the origin of the problem.

Have Islamic radicals always existed? Yes, we have records through the history of British and French empire-building of strange and fearsome groups. It appears every large religion has a spectrum of believers, always including at one end of the spectrum extreme fundamentalists. They are not a new phenomenon anywhere, so why has one group of them, in the sands of the Middle East, become part of our everyday awareness?

It is also nothing new that young men become hot-blooded and disturbed over what they regard as attacks upon their kind. Western society’s record of crusades, religious wars, colonial wars, and revolts, a total likely having no equal in the histories of the world’s peoples, offers countless examples of young men being angered by this or that circumstance and joining up or running off to fight.

George Bush told us today’s terrorists hate our freedom and democratic values, but like virtually every utterance of George Bush, that one was fatuous, explaining nothing. Nevertheless, his is the explanation pounded into public consciousness because governments and the corporate press never stop repeating versions of it, the Charlie Hebdo affair and its theatrical posturing over free speech being only the latest. Theatrical? Yes, when we know perfectly well that most of those who marched at the front of the parade in Paris are anything but friends of free speech.

All backward peoples are uncomfortable with certain western values, that being the nature of backwardness, and backwardness is a defining characteristic of all fundamentalist religious groups – Hasidic or ultra-Orthodox Jews, Mennonites, Roman Catholic Cardinals, cloistered nuns, Sikhs, and many others – who typically choose modes of dress, rules to obey, and even foods to eat having little or no relationship with the contemporary world and science. Of course, that is their right so long as they are peaceful and law-abiding.

Any fundamentalist group, pushed by more powerful people from outside their community, is entirely capable of, and even prone to, violence, and all human beings are capable of violence when faced with abuse and injustice. Centuries of religious wars and terrors in Europe about such matters as how the Mass is celebrated prove the proposition and should be held as a warning, but they are forgotten by most, if they were ever known. The tendency towards violence continues today amongst many fundamentalist faiths. In so relatively small and seemingly homogeneous a society as Israel, there are regular attacks from ultra-Orthodox Jews against the country’s worldly citizens or against fair-minded rules about such pedestrian matters as women riding buses or walking on a street. The attacks become quite violent – punching, spitting, burning down homes, and killing sometimes – and all go against what we call western values, but because the scale is fairly small, and our press also has a constant protective bias concerning all things Israeli, these events rarely make our mainline news. They must be found on the Internet.

It took Western Europe literally centuries to leave behind such recurrent and violent themes as witches and the need to burn them alive, the Evil Eye, casting out demons, execution for differences of belief, and countless other stupidities which characterized whole societies and destroyed lives. And if you want to go still further back, go to the Old Testament, a collection of ancient writing packed with violence, superstition, prejudice, and just plain ignorance, which Christians and others even today regard as containing important truths for contemporary life. Human progress, at least in some matters, takes a very long time indeed.

Our world has more backward people than most of us can imagine. The news does not feature their extremes and savageries because it serves no political purpose. In Africa, for example, we find practices and beliefs utterly repellent to modern minds: the practice of senior village men raping young girls as an accepted right, the genital mutilation of 3 million girls annually (an African, not an Islamic, practice), the hunting down and butchering such “strange” people as albinos, their parts to be eaten as medicine, and many others. In India, a country well on its way to becoming modern yet one with a huge backward population, we have practices such as marrying off mere girls to old men rich enough to pay dowries to poor parents. At one stroke this enriches the parents and relieves them of the burden of a child, a female child too, always viewed less favorably.  The practice generates a large population of widows when the old husbands of girls married at, say, twelve die. These women are then condemned to entire lives as widows, never allowed to remarry, required to dress and eat in certain ways, and basically shunned to live in squalid equivalents of old folks homes., living entirely meaningless lives. India also has the practice of “bride burning” where new brides who are deemed unacceptable for various reasons become the prey of the groom’s family, literally being burned alive. There are many other barbarities in that society too, including “honor killing” and young women who are made inmates in certain temples to serve as glorified prostitutes.

Our press assiduously avoids much of the world’s horrors as it focuses on “Islamic extremism,” and politics are the only explanation for the bias. The press theme of Islamic terror and indeed real incidents of terror grow from a reality always taken for granted, never debated, and certainly never criticised: the elephant in the room, as it were, is Israel’s illegal and agonizingly long occupation of the Palestinians.

It may be not be important to our press and governments that Israel holds millions as prisoners, crippling the lives of generation after generation, or that Israel periodically strikes out in every direction – Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank – causing the deaths of many thousands, or that Israel is seen to bulldoze people’s homes and sacred monuments with complete impunity, but it very much matters to many millions of Muslims in the world, and some of them, fundamentalist men, strike out against it just as young men everywhere have sometimes struck out against keenly-felt hurts and injustice.

In western countries, under the hard influence of America, a country in turn under the hard influence of the world’s best organized and financed lobby, the Israel Lobby, we have come to regard Israel’s behavior as normal, but it is, of course, not normal, not in any detail. What is normal about holding several million people prisoner for half a century? What is normal about bulldozing homes and literally stealing the land upon which they stood? What is normal about declaring an honestly elected government as criminal and treating its people as though they were criminals? What is normal about limiting people’s opportunity to earn a living or to import some of the needs of life? What is normal about killing nearly a thousand children, as Israel has done just in Gaza, since 2008?

Pretending that Israel’s behavior is not the major cause of what screams from our headlines and news broadcasts has reached absurd levels. America has only vastly compounded the problem of Israel’s organized abuse of a people: it and its silent partners have destroyed Iraq, destroyed Libya, are working hard to destroy Syria, have seen to it that Egypt’s tens of millions again live under absolute government, ignore countless inequities and barbarities in secretly-helpful countries like Saudi Arabia, and carry out extra-judicial killings through much of the region. All of it is carried out on Israel’s behalf and with Israel’s cooperation. Can any reasonable person not see that this vast factory of death also manufactures countless grievances and vendettas? The stupidity is on a colossal scale, rooted in the notion that you can kill your way out of the terrible consequences of terrible policies.

In America, paid political shills (Newt Gingrich was one) have campaigned about there being no such thing as a Palestinian. Others (Dick Armey was one) have said that millions of Palestinians should be removed, all their land left conveniently to Israel. That last is an odd thing to say, isn’t it, considering there are supposed to be no such thing as Palestinians? And just what country would take millions of “non-existent” Palestinians? Obviously no politician with even pretence of integrity would say such things, and how can intelligent and successful people like America’s Jews take satisfaction in hearing politicians reciting such embarrassing scripts? But this is a good measure of the way intelligence and sound thinking are scorned in American politics. How can you achieve anything worth achieving without intelligence and sound thinking? You cannot, but that doesn’t stop American Presidents and Secretaries of State from carrying on the world’s longest-running dumb show, something called the “peace process.” The sombre, moose-like figure of John Kerry is photographed playacting at statesmanship while American-supplied arms just keep killing thousands of innocent people.

THE PARADOXES OF ISRAEL

John Chuckman

The creation of Israel marked the application of a peculiarly nineteenth-century solution, the founding of a state based on ethnic or religious identity, to an ancient problem. The problem was, of course, anti-Semitism, something that has dogged the Jewish people for centuries and which reached its full, nightmarish expression in The Holocaust.

But The Holocaust was itself the ultimate, nightmarish expression of nineteenth-century nationalism. Germany for Germans – Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies representing unwelcome grafts from other civilizations if you will.

The nineteenth century was the boom time for nationalism in Europe. It really was the century that defined what many mean by the words nation and nationalism today. Modern Italy was born, modern Germany, Greece, and others. The idea of a nation state defined largely by a shared language and culture was a new development in the modern era where before empires and kingdoms regarded only the extent of their territory as important and often encompassed a great diversity of people. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, lasting right into the fierce age of nationalism was a true polyglot state.

Zionists in nineteenth-century Europe felt the same nationalistic influences and wrote of the rebirth of a Jewish state. After decades of faltering efforts, The Holocaust gave the needed impulse for this rebirth of Israel as a safe haven for Jews.

Oddly, early in the Third Reich, the Nazis had considerable difficulty agreeing on what defined a Jew for purposes of the infamous 1935 Nuremberg Laws. After years of preaching hatred against Jews during their rise to power, you might think the Nazis clearly understood exactly what the object of all that hatred was, but that proved not to be the case.

Under the compromise reached between various factions of the party, “three-quarter Jews,” those with three Jewish grandparents, were considered Jews. “Half-Jews,” those with two Jewish grandparents and two “Aryan” grandparents, were considered Jews only if they practiced the faith. “Quarter Jews” were considered as non-Jews. Attempting to rationalize the irrational always leads to absurd, not to say dangerous, results.

There was some resemblance in the Nazis’ formulations to those now-ludicrous efforts of scholastic doctors in the Middle Ages trying to settle such matters as a pinhead’s capacity for accommodating angels. Later, in the bloody torrents of the Christian Reformation and Counterreformation, efforts to draft such rules or formulas became deadly matters, determining who was a heretic to be burned alive.

And yet, in a bitter paradox, Israel perpetuates a version of this thinking. A conception of just who is a Jew is necessary because all those regarded as Jews have the right to immigrate to Israel and to receive generous assistance in settling there. But as with any such conception, it suffers disagreements and adjustments over time, a recent one involving whether to recognize certain African groups holding to ancient variations of Jewish belief. Moreover, inside Israel there are great disagreements about rules set by one group of Jews, fundamentalists, governing important parts of the lives of other groups of Jews, as say Reform Jews.

There is yet another paradox. How can a state, defined solely by the religious and/or ethnic identity of its citizens, function rationally in the emerging world of globalization? This question would not be pertinent were Israel a third-world place such as Afghanistan where a modern economy might not develop for a very long time. But Israel is in many respects a modern nation, integrated into the global economy, especially through its attachment with the United States, and subject to the economic and social forces operating on all modern states.

In the mid to late twentieth century, the very concept of the nation state in the advanced world underwent perceptible change that appears likely to generate still more profound change. The United States long legally barred Asian and certain other immigration to its shores. Australia right up into the 1960s had the reputation of not accepting black immigrants. These kinds of barriers to the movement of skilled and ambitious people, and there were many of them, now are frowned upon by all the advanced world. Human society has made some real progress.

Today, the economically-advanced states of Europe are becoming diverse in their population makeup. Whether it’s Turks in Germany or Arabs in France or Albanians in Italy, the European states are starting to follow the pattern of immigrant-founded states like Canada or the United States (and, yes, they are experiencing social turmoil always associated with this change). There are many reasons for this, including the settlement of millions of displaced persons after the war, generous policies in recent decades for accepting refugees from various conflicts, static or declining natural rates of population growth, fairly ready accommodation of third-world migration for jobs in periods of intense postwar growth, and the increased movement of people associated with foreign investment.

Over and above these changes in individual states, the European community clearly seems destined before very long to become a single federated state, whose many national groups will provide a population of great diversity.

The trend seems clear. A hundred or so years from now, no modern nation will look much as it does today. The nineteenth-century concept of a single ethnic group defining a state will have dated as badly as the sixteenth-century idea that marriage may alter a dukedom’s boundaries.

So what will be the future meaning and relevance of a state defined solely by a religious identity? There have certainly been other states of this nature in the world, but not ones that are a part of the advanced world. Theocracy is universally associated with backward places, places not subject to the economic, social, and political flows of an open society in a globalized world.

Will Israel pass through the twenty-first century, with all the revolutionary forces of globalization and a close attachment to the world’s biggest globalizer, the United States, remaining a small state defined by religious identity? Strictly from a theoretical point of view, this does not seem likely and may even prove impossible.

Will Israel instead become a fifty-first state of the United States? Despite frequent assertions that Israel is a sovereign state not answering to America, already, in many respects, Israel approaches such a status, de facto. The American government gives roughly five-hundred dollars a year for each Israeli citizen, an amount that more closely resembles the transfers of a federal government than foreign aid, plus a great many other forms of valuable assistance, including technology transfers, intelligence sharing, defense arrangements, loan guarantees, ready access to top leaders, and access to American markets – a package of benefits unlike that extended to any other nation. And the U.S. places no restrictions on a huge private flow of assistance and information, a practice it does not follow with a number of other nations.

Of course, under the American Constitution, the nature of many of Israel’s policies and the rules governing important parts of her social life immediately would be struck down as unconstitutional. But even if Israel does not become a fifty-first state, how can she ever have a meaningful Bill or Charter of Rights, something she does not now have, if her raison d’être is to provide a home essentially for one kind of people?

Now, advocacy of a Palestinian state also represents nineteenth-century thinking. This is a very small group of people with a very small territory of limited resources. Such a state’s population/resource ratio must necessarily be a weak one. The rational solution to the conflict would be a single state embracing all these people, yet this contradicts Israel’s concept of itself. Nevertheless, over the long term and reflecting global trends, can there be much doubt that that is exactly what ultimately will emerge?

The idea of Israel surrounded by a wall, a solution touted by some Israeli extremists, is subject to every point of rational criticism that applied to the Berlin Wall. For Israel and the Palestinian lands, like the two parts of Berlin, have too many natural and intimate connections to ever be truly separated from each other.

And what is the attraction of living in a garrison state holding an unwanted portion of the area’s population at arm’s length indefinitely? Without huge American subsidies, this would be almost impossible even today.

Of course, we have still the distinct possibility of the Palestinians being driven out of the lands remaining to them.

A report in The Daily Telegraph recently quoted an Israeli minister saying Mr. Sharon has a secret plan to annex about half the West Bank territories, leaving the Palestinian entity as a truly feeble foundation for a state. If true, this should surprise no one since the right wing of Israeli politics, despite constant publicity in the United States about a tenuous and undefined “peace process,” has always opposed the creation of a Palestinian state, has always desired to annex these territories, and has always desired to see the Palestinians pushed out.

A second recent report – or as it may well be, a second “trial balloon” – in The Sunday Telegraph has Martin van Creveld, an Israeli historian, saying that Mr. Sharon has a secret plan to push the entire West Bank population out of their homes and into Jordan under cover of Mr. Bush’s expected attack on Iraq, or in the event of a major terrorist attack by the Palestinians. This would be done, not by door-to-door fighting, but by a moving artillery barrage pushing two million people to refuge beyond the Jordan River. Of course, no Arab country is in a military position to effectively oppose such an action, and the situation of the Palestinians themselves is one of utter vulnerability.

This would not be without supporters, and influential ones, in the United States. Mr. Dick Armey, Republican of Texas, for example, in a recent interview managed to say he would support ethnic cleansing of the West Bank without ever actually using that ugly expression.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of the Jewish state is that today Jews live in many places of greater safety, stability, and comfort than Israel. In Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other places, Jews flourish as an integral part of society. This was not, of course, always the case, but it is now. So much so that it is a recurring theme amongst some American Jews that intermarriage with non-Jews, something quite common in America, represents a danger to Jewish identity.

The intellectual contribution of Jews to Western society has been profound, with thinkers in the twentieth century alone like Freud and Einstein contributing major parts of the century’s intellectual framework and ferment. So, too, the moral contribution of Jews with many great teachers and humanitarians. What a final, ugly paradox to see a man like Mr. Sharon, whose talents appear to be brutality and dissimulation, regarded as a leader of the Jewish people.

AMERICA’S PATHETIC LIBERALS

John Chuckman

You might think from the way the progressive press laments Al Gore’s decision not to run for President again that there had been a genuine loss to liberalism in America.

But that’s not quite the way I see it. Although few candidates ever came better groomed for high office than Mr. Gore, it is his performance in the 2000 presidential election that must be lamented.

Yes, he won the popular vote – teaching a new generation of Americans that being elected is no guarantee of winning under the arcane and anti-democratic provisions of America’s 18th-century Constitution. But with an opponent like George Bush, Mr. Gore should have won that vote by a large enough margin to make the entire business of Florida and the Supreme Court irrelevant. He should have, as they used to say, “mopped the floor with” an opponent as inarticulate, unimaginative, and with such a questionable background as Mr. Bush. But he didn’t.

I remember, once or twice, hearing some tough words from Mr. Gore and thinking perhaps he had found his voice, only to be quickly disillusioned over the next day or two. Well, what could you expect from someone who chose to open his campaign by speaking about family values?

My God, we’d had an earful of that tired, insincere, and exploitative theme from Republicans over the previous couple of decades. You might say Mr. Clinton’s impeachment was the family-values impeachment, spearheaded, as it was, by a Republican leader who was sleeping with a staff member and a gross, pompous old phony who used to go nightclubbing with someone else’s wife.

I know some will say the impeachment was about honesty, but, please, where is there recorded a single honest word from Mssrs Gingrich, Hyde, Thurmond, Helms, Armey, DeLay, or Gramm?

Of course, apart from being the phony family-values impeachment, it was an embarrassing demonstration of incompetence. All that massive effort and expense without so much as having taken a head-count on the likelihood of success?

Mr. Gore’s ineffectual campaign never touched this clap-trap and hypocrisy. He was afraid to do so, even though he had a record as one of the straightest arrows in Washington. He simply ignored a massive, steaming heap of garbage that had been left on America’s front lawn in Washington. Yet, he managed to blame Mr. Clinton for his loss.

It is with no regret whatever that I wave good-bye to Mr. Gore, not that I believe there is another at-all-likely candidate of any real merit waiting for his or her chance. (Note: I include her despite knowing that over vast stretches of America this is as grievous an error as denying the self-evident truth that all women should wear frilly aprons and bake cookies, a la Tipper. She won’t be missed either. Is there not something hopeless in that ridiculous nickname for a middle-aged person?)

Now we have Mr. Lott’s remarks about Strom Thurmond. Suddenly, there is a deluge of articles and comments about how terrible his words were, about how Republicans are in bed with racists. Well, Mr. Lott has a very long record, and Mr. Thurmond has an even longer one. The greatest disgrace concerning these men is that a large body of Americans has voted repeatedly over decades to keep them in high office. Perhaps, most ridiculous of all, American liberals seem to forget that Mr. Thurmond started as a Southern Democrat.

In the 1930s, Eleanor Roosevelt prodded the great Franklin to speak against the horrible lynchings of black people in the South, but the President felt that politics would not permit this. Southern Democrats were a key part of his political coalition, and Southern Democrats were segregationists, and far worse in a number of cases. So Franklin kept quiet on lynching, and, in some Southern states, lynchings continued to be occasions for family picnics. I can’t resist pointing out the historic family-values connection here.

The evolution of the contemporary “Southern strategy” in American presidential elections is based on little more than the fact that the same people who used to be Southern Democrats (the Republican party having become anathema in the South for more than a century after Mr. Lincoln’s “evil” Civil War) switched to being Republicans after the Civil Rights movement and Mr. Johnson’s “evil” voting-rights legislation of the 1960s. Such is the slow path of progress.

Poor Trent forgot himself and will now likely pay the price. Neanderthal Republican hacks like columnist Jeff Jacoby already have the kettle to the boil for rendering Lott’s hide, a fact which should alert us that some deeper political reason lies behind these rare Republican chest-thumping displays over principles of decency. Again, I will wave good-bye with not a twinge of regret, although sure in the knowledge that no better person waits to take his place. I can’t help feeling scorn over American liberals’ satisfaction at Lott’s pathetic statement – pathetic, that is, when weighed in a balance against a lifetime’s work in the cause of backwardness and stupidity.

Of course, thanks in part to Mr. Gore, we now have a President for whom competence is not even an issue. He is the first Disneyworld-diorama president, capable only of looking as though his plastic-coated, mechanical jaw actually makes the sounds coming from his computer chips. He has earned a place in history though, having demonstrated that the presidency itself is now a Constitutional institution of questionable relevance. The druid-priests to imperial plutocracy who scurry around the White House keeping his servomotors running and downloading new sound-bites onto his chips – the creatures actually now running America – could do just as well or badly if the Bush display were packed up and stored away in the Smithsonian’s basement.

Perhaps most pathetic is American liberals’ constant looking to the Democratic party as savior. Many progressive sites on the Internet display counters with the number of days remaining in Bush’s term. “Ex-cuse me!” as many Americans annoyingly say when making a rude point, but are we talking about the same Democratic party that has not said a word about mistreatment of prisoners, torture, and murder since 9/11?

Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy, while lacking the Appalachian-throwback character of Mr. Bush’s, was often belligerent, often badly conceived, and largely reflected the same set of interests. Dare I also mention Mr. Johnson launching into what was to become the holocaust of Vietnam? Or the charming Mr. Kennedy trying repeatedly to assassinate Mr. Castro, beginning the flow of troops to Vietnam, creating the corps of professional thugs called the Green Berets, and nearly engulfing the world in nuclear war? Or Mr. Truman’s dangerous fiasco in Korea? The same jingoistic, imperialist impulse remains dominant.

But I suppose there is relief in longing for a friendlier face like Mr. Clinton’s. That way you can feel a whole lot better about what is going on. And it still will go on, no matter whether Bush remains or not.

From the world’s point of view, there is actually some painful merit in Bush’s holding office. I believe already, without the President’s crowd fully realizing what they’ve done, forces have been set in motion for historic realignments in international affairs. Bush’s Texas-barbecue-and-lethal-injection crowd is driving all civilized nations on the planet to reconsider aspects of their relationship with the United States, something that likely will have profound consequences over the next few decades.

WHAT SHARON WANTS

John Chuckman

What was the point of the Israeli army’s reducing Mr. Arafat’s compound to ruins, firing shells that came within the smallest margin of error of killing him? Everyone outside the hermetically-sealed thought-environment of Israel and Washington recognizes Mr. Arafat is no more responsible for the violence of Hamas or Hezballah than Mr. Bush is responsible for a disturbed gunman now terrorizing America’s capital city.

Of course, the question is rhetorical. The reason for the destruction is clear. Mr. Sharon has always exhibited personal animus against Mr. Arafat. He never mentions his name without the rhetorical equivalent of pronouncing a curse. The acts of Hamas or Hezbollah gave Mr. Sharon the excuse to humiliate and frighten him, hoping to destroy him as a political force and push him into exile. There cannot be the slightest doubt Sharon would prefer assassinating Arafat, as he has assassinated so many dozens of others opposing him, but even the unthinking Mr. Bush recognizes the immense strategic blunder of doing that.

With Arafat gone, Sharon could start the last thirty-five years over again. That mystical, nebulous mechanism called the “peace process” could start again – decades of stalling and quibbling, ignoring every United Nations’ resolution while Israel relentlessly inches eastward, absorbing the homes and farms of others – the search for peace through slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

Not that the creation of settlements has ever stopped while Mr. Sharon destroyed both the Oslo Accords, that landmark diplomatic achievement he always held in contempt, and much of the West Bank and Gaza. It would be just so much easier to continue with an opponent who does not have the ear of the world’s statesmen and who has not done everything politically possible to reach a reasonable settlement. It is so much easier to curse Arafat, broadcast his weaknesses, and ignore the fundamental claims he represents.

Mr. Arafat has not been one of the world’s shining statesmen. Nor has his administration in Palestine been marked by the most enlightened practices. But he is, unquestionably, dedicated to peace. He does, despite ups and downs, represent some of the most important interests of his people. And he has shown remarkable courage and tenacity, Sharon’s efforts to remove him having only showcased these qualities before the entire world.

A lot of people in the United States still do not understand that it has always been the policy of extreme parties like Mr. Sharon’s Likud to annex what they call Judaea and Samaria – that is, what is left of Palestine, home to a couple of million Arabic people. Even at the time of the original Camp David Accords, the late Mr. Begin kept muttering those names, Judaea and Samaria, into President Carter’s ear.

A reader recently wrote me about a television documentary on Palestine. He mentioned a settler, who like all the settlers are newcomers who have pushed out residents from places they have lived for centuries, being asked about the Palestinians. Her answer was they should all leave and go where they belong.

Go where they belong? According to this belligerent view, they belong on the other side of the Jordan River, or, indeed, anywhere but in their own homes and on their own farms in the West Bank. I can only wonder whether a person holding such views has ever given a moment’s thought to the reality of shoving two million people out of their homes and into small, poor countries that are not remotely-equipped to deal with massive migration?

The largest internal migration in American history, and perhaps the largest in world history not associated with war, was the great black migration of tenant farmers from the rural South to industrial jobs in the North during the mid-twentieth century. It involved about 6 1/2 million people over several decades. This vast movement of people generated tremendous social difficulties that remain unsettled in the world’s richest country, a land that is many, many times the size of any of Israel’s Arab neighbors.

So how could anyone reasonably expect such a solution in the Middle East? The answer is that reason has nothing to do with it. Israelis with these views simply want the Arabs gone. If you don’t hear echoes of Milosevic, you aren’t listening.

Until Mr. Bush, this idea, its potential for “bad press” clearly recognized, had been little advertised or promoted in North America. Now, it has received some publicity, perhaps offered as “trial balloons.”

Mr. Rumsfeld – in one of his most regrettably-Hitlerian expressions since insisting that Taliban prisoners, after their surrender at Kunduz, should be shot or walled away for good – recently spoke of the spoils belonging to the victor in the Middle East.

That redoubtable American ally, General Dostum, of course, took Rumsfeld at his word about the prisoners. Hundreds of them, after being hideously suffocated, lie in mass graves. One can’t help asking whether American generals are now to apply Mr. Rumsfeld’s spoils-principle to Iraqi oil fields?

Another Republican moral giant, Mr. Dick Armey – not known for charity towards the less-fortunate of any society, even his own – recently chimed in that pushing two-million or so people out of the West Bank would be acceptable to him. Hell, what’s a couple of million Arab lives, right?

And now, the Rev. Jerry Falwell – fundamentalist politico and hate-entrepreneur, a man whose tailored suits are bought with the proceeds of a relentless hate-campaign against a former President, a former First Lady, and all gay people – has added his scholarly opinion that the prophet Muhammad himself was a terrorist. One can almost hear the unspoken link, so why would his followers deserve to live in the Holy Land?

These public statements provide an excellent measure of the moral tone set by Mr. Bush’s administration. America’s long, on-and-off romance with fascism has been stoked back to a warm glow (for background, see my earlier article, “Flirting with Fascism”). Each of these statements should have been loudly condemned by a President with any conscience. Instead, hate-speech is tolerated.

Well, Mr. Sharon now also is building a wall, a truly massive undertaking. Authoritarian personalities and movements seem always to like walls. This one will be a grand re-creation of the Berlin Wall, complete with a strip of no-man’s land, good portions of it at the expense of Palestinian farmers.

This may be what Sharon had in mind when he made statements months ago, contradicting every act and breath of his adult life, that he supported a Palestinian state. One can only imagine what he had in mind with those words, something surely bordering on the nightmares of the gulag. The wall is likely part of his vision. A rump-state, walled off from all natural connections with its neighbor, with every movement in or out controlled, is certain to fail. It would be a state in a bottle. The idea represents a freshening-up of the late Gen. Dayan’s thinking when he said, years ago, that the Palestinians would be made so miserable they would choose to leave.