Month: December 2015
The snowball starts rolling
NATO has sent Montenegro its much-coveted invitation to join the Alliance, most likely at the Warsaw Summit July 8-9 next year. This is in many ways a small matter: Montenegro is a country of 620,000 people with a military force of fewer than 2000. It is no threat to anyone, least of all Russia, and no big addition to NATO capacities.
It is nevertheless significant. First because Russia saw fit to oppose NATO membership for Montenegro, first through bribery and later through support for unruly anti-government demonstrations. These efforts to block Montenegro’s NATO accession will continue, making it a test of will between Moscow and the West. If Moscow loses, Western spirits will be raised.
Those raised spirits will include people in other Balkans states who want their countries to join NATO. Moscow fears that Montenegrin accession will be a step onto a slippery slope that will lead to Macedonia, Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia all joining the Alliance. The Russians are correct, which makes the Montenegro decision a key one for the region.
Macedonia, though now stalled by its internal problems and long blocked by Greece, has already sent its troops to fight in Afghanistan integrated with US forces. It has recently decided to send a few more. Its eventual accession to NATO is inevitable. Ditto Kosovo, which still lacks a fully fledged security force and faces the hurdle of four non-recognizing NATO members. But Kosovo’s citizens are all but unanimous in wanting membership in a club that saved it from Serbian attacks.
Serbia and Bosnia are less obvious cases. Resentment of NATO bombing among Serbs in both countries is still strong. But sooner or later Belgrade and Banja Luka will come around the way Germans, Italians, Japanese and others bombed and even occupied by the United States have. Surrounded by NATO members, it will make little geopolitical sense for Bosnia and Serbia to align themselves with Russia or even to remain “neutral.” The Serbian chief of staff told me a decade or so ago that his country’s military, which already participates in NATO’s Partnership for Peace, would adapt itself to Alliance standards. Bosnia’s now unified army has been built from scratch with assistance from the US and NATO. The most secure place for Bosnia and Serbia will be inside the Alliance, not outside it.
None of this threatens Russia. Even taken all together the Balkans armies pose no serious challenge to Moscow. What Balkans NATO membership threatens are Russia’s efforts to divide and weaken Balkans states and limit Western influence in southeastern Europe. That for me is a good thing. Montenegro has started the snowball rolling. Dobrodošla, Crna Goro!*
*I’ve corrected a grammatical error made in the original posting. Apologies!
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Arabs casting votes, not stones
On Wednesday, the Palestine Center hosted Member of Knesset Aymen Odeh, the chairman of the Joint List, to give a talk entitled ‘Palestinian Citizens of Israel Lead Toward Justice, Freedom, and Equality. The Joint List is a political alliance of the four Arab-dominated parties and currently the third-largest faction in Israel’s parliament.
Odeh makes an argument for changing Israeli public opinion and politics through Palestinian citizens’ action and participation. Palestinian citizens of Israel constitute 18% of the population, and therefore possess some electoral weight when working together. After 1948, it was important for the Palestinians who remained not to get stuck in nafsiyyat al-Nakba – a Nakba mentality. Early activists, especially in the Communist Party, pushed back against the government, for instance during celebrations for the 10th anniversary of Israel’s founding, in an effort to instead cultivate a mentality of ‘confrontation and challenge’.
There is thus a legacy of Palestinian political action in Israel. Odeh moreover continuously highlighted the themes of “remaining” and citizenship. Palestinians, in his formulation, are a national minority, but a minority stemming from an indigenous population, a portion of whom is now under occupation in their own country. The Joint List is thoroughly politically committed to ending that occupation, but they – and the minority of Palestinian citizens – do not want to isolate themselves from the rest of Israeli society.
The method is political and social action, including the more gradual and nebulous approach of changing Israeli public opinion about the situation in the West Bank and Gaza. The Joint List faces considerable challenges, including balancing the many different political leanings of the members of the alliance. It also faces deliberate slander from Netanyahu, who has called Arab members of the Knesset “ISIS,” and attempts from the religious right to exclude them from politics.
The Joint List is also committed to advocating for other underrepresented or marginalized groups in Israel, such as Mizrahi Jews and disabled persons. The aim is to use the full 18% to maximum effect, but also to collaborate with other groups in Israeli society. The imperative is to advance a moral alternative to the status quo to for all of Israel’s citizens.
Odeh drew comparisons with other historic struggles, particularly with the civil rights movement in the US. He finds more sympathy with the method of Martin Luther King, Jr., than with Malcolm X, at least until the latter changed his politics later in life. For Odeh, the joint struggle of both white and black Americans toward a more just and equal society was the most effective orientation. The Joint List has its work cut out for it, but it may be that its members can use this method to good effect in advancing the causes of justice and equality in Israel, too.
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Princeton’s problem isn’t just Wilson
Woodrow Wilson was a key president in Princeton’s rise as a serious university, a reformist and progressive Governor of New Jersey, and an internationalist President of the United States, one who led the country into a successful intervention in World War I and championed self-determination of oppressed peoples as well as making the world safe for democracy. He was also an unrepentant racist and white supremacist, one who refused to speak out against lynching of black people, segregated US government workers and excused the behavior of the Ku Klux Klan.
Princeton has long deified Wilson, whose name graces one of its major dorms as well as its school of public and international affairs. When I was a doctoral student there (yes, I got my PhD at Princeton), the head of my program made it clear that Wilson was an ideal to which we all needed to aspire, even if our lowly beings could never hope to achieve such perfection. I knew nothing of Wilson at the time. His lofty status being far above my dreams, I ignored the paragon. It was the Vietnam war era. Princeton’s then motto, “in the nation’s service,” sounded more like a threat than a virtue.
Now Princeton’s motto is “in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.” That change should have made Wilson’s racism harder to ignore. But the reexamination has awaited instead the protests of some of its current black students, who are asking for his name to be removed from its most privileged perches.
I have to confess that opinion in my family is divided. Its three African American members (remember the one-drop rule, increasingly outmoded but still appropriate when discussing racism) are for keeping his name where it is. One thinks the students unjustified in wanting it removed because it is part of the hostile environment Princeton presents to black students. Just wait, he says, until they get to the real world, when things will be worse. Better to prepare for the hostility at Princeton, as Michelle Obama did.
Another thinks the Wilson name should hang around Princeton’s neck like an albatross, one it will have to explain to every incoming freshman. Why make life easy for an institution that was always known as the ivy closest to the south? The third doubts the wisdom of cleansing our history of its hypocrites. What will become of “greats” like Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal with inalienable rights but still kept slaves (and only freed the ones he had sired upon his death).
My own feeling is that fifty odd years is long enough for a racist and white supremacist to grace the lintels of one of America’s greatest academic institutions. He was a product of his times. Let him retire and give way to someone more worthy according to the standards of our times. Of course that will not be a governor or a president. Princeton will just turn around and sell the naming rights to the highest bidder. If you’ve ever read a Princeton alumni publication, you know that could involve a very large quantity of money. Or maybe a free mash up would do: the Woodrow Wilson/Louis Farrakhan school of public and international policy? After all, Farrakhan did a lot of good in America’s prisons I am reminded, despite his anti-Semitic racism. Let that hang around Princeton’s neck to balance out Wilson.
I suppose that’s the problem: I can think of a lot worse names than the existing one. The way the world works, Princeton is likely to get one of those. There isn’t likely to be a “good” solution. But I suppose the conversation, as we like to say these days, will be a useful one. After all, the issue really isn’t Wilson, it is the history of race in America.
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