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Elliott Abrams: Sari Nusseibeh and Palestinian Moderation

Israel’s difficulties in making peace with the Palestinians are nicely revealed in an opinion piece by Sari Nusseibeh published by Al Jazeera English last week.
Nusseibeh is often viewed as the most moderate of all Palestinian moderates. Typically, in the New York Times Leon Wieselier called him “a deeply admirable man” and wrote of his “liberal nationalism” and his “humane understanding.” He is president of Al Quds University, holds a Ph.D. from Harvard, and has long been viewed as a leading peace activist.
So Nusseibeh’s new article “Why Israel can’t be a ‘Jewish State’” is worth a look...
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Nusseibeh then proceeds to an argument so extraordinary that one blushes to see this “deeply admirable” and “humane” man write it down. If Israel is recognized as a Jewish State, he says, it follows that Israelis will kill all the Arabs who live there.
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Nusseibeh, the man of “humane understanding,” a philosopher by training, ends by saying that calling Israel a “Jewish State” would necessarily “arouse fears among Palestinians and Arabs about being ethnically cleansed in Palestine.” One may assume that in that phrase he refers to Israeli Arabs as well as those of the West Bank and Gaza, so he is not only warning of “ethnic cleansing” but engaging in some linguistic ethnic cleaning of his own here: he is referring to Israel as part of “Palestine.”
Now, one can argue as Nusseibeh does that Israel should not seek to be a “Jewish State” and should call itself a democratic state with a Jewish majority. What is shocking about Nusseibeh’s view is not that conclusion but the arguments he makes to support it, which proceed from polemics and straw men through double standards and finally reach the accusation that a Jewish State would be a murderous state, ethnically cleansing and eliminating its non-Jewish citizens. This is perilously close to the accusation, made by the kind of Palestinian that Nusseibeh is supposed to loathe, that Israel is a Nazi state.
Thus the state of the “peace process” in October 2011. A leader of the Palestinian “moderates” writes articles that make him sound like Khaled Meshal, Hassan Nasrallah, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his description of Israel.

FP: And Abrams does not even mention that it's the Arab side, not Israel, that rejects the presence of any Jews in a Palestinian state, that it's the Arabs whose culture and religion call for ethnic cleansing of Jews, and whose history, unlike Israel's, records implementation of such.

Claire Berlinski: Timur Kuran and the Rise of Corporations

Timur Kuran, author of The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, gave an outstanding presentation at the Mont Pelerin Society Conference. It shed a lot of light--to my way of thinking--upon many of the most vexing aspects of modern Turkey:

Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism. Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life--including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange. By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up. And there is no quick fix today. Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies--all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history--will take generations to overcome.

You can read the first chapter here. The great pleasure of hearing him speak or reading his work is the encounter with someone who has a sense that history began well before the second Bush Administration. So many people fail to grasp that.
One of his key questions is this: Why did the Islamic world fail to develop the concept of a corporation, that is to say, an entity designed to encourage investment and profit-sharing and separated from tribal and family loyalty? Why did this notion arise in Great Britain, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland? The answers he proposes are fascinating.
A passing thought: Economic history isn't over. Wouldn't it be interesting to know what economic historians will say, a thousand years from now, about the impact of institutions that are only now coming into being? Who knows which ones will really change things?

FP: The absence of corporations may have held the Middle East back, but their apogee in the West is surely bringing it down. As long as they were consistent with true capitalism—competition and minimal political interference—meaning they were small enough to not affect the market individually or via the government—they were beneficial to Western society. But once they got institutional power via size and the corporate welfare state, they proved lethal.

China and Russia veto UN resolution condemning Syria

The European-drafted resolution had been watered down to try to avoid the vetoes, dropping a direct reference to sanctions against Damascus. But Moscow and Beijing said the draft contained no provision against outside military intervention in Syria.
The US envoy to the UN said Washington was "outraged" by the vote.
The result is a huge blow to European and US efforts on the Syria issue, the BBC's Laura Trevelyan in New York says.

FP: The cold war revenge: China and Russia neutering a collapsed West. The PostWest (see next).

Putin calls for 'Eurasian Union' of ex-Soviet republics

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called for a "Eurasian Union" of former Soviet republics along the lines of the European Union.
Mr Putin, who recently announced he is running for president, said the bloc would become a major global player. He said Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan were already going ahead with economic integration.
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"It would be naive to try to restore or copy something that belongs to the past, but a close integration based on new values and economic and political foundation is a demand of the present time." He said a "Eurasian Union" would "build on the experience of the European Union and other regional coalitions". Mr Putin said the aim was to "create real conditions to change the geopolitical and geoeconomic configuration of the entire continent and have an undoubtedly positive global effect".
Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan have already formed an economic alliance that removes customs barriers. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have said they are studying the possibility of joining the scheme. Russia has long called for stronger co-operation between ex-Soviet nations...

FP: Well, based on what Europe is currently undergoing, that’s not a good system to copy. I have a feeling they’re gonna do better than Europe, and at its expense. The PostWest.