Letters From a Young Contrarian

by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, March 18, 2013

Though he acknowledges the role Netanyahu plays in maintaining Jordanian stability, he is not optimistic about Israel’s future. King Abdullah is known as an advocate of two states for two peoples—Israel secure in its pre-1967 borders, Palestine to be established in Gaza and the West Bank—but when I asked him in January how much time he thought was left to implement this idea, his answer surprised me. “It could be too late already for the two-state solution,” he said. “I don’t know. Part of me is worried that is already past us.”

If it were too late, what would that mean?

He responded with a single word: “Isratine.” That’s a neologism popularized by the late Muammar Qaddafi to describe his vision of a joint Arab-Jewish state. If Israel doesn’t agree to a Palestinian state quickly, Abdullah said, “apartheid or democracy” will be its choice. “The practical question is, can Israel exert permanent control over Palestinians who are disenfranchised ad infinitum, or does it eventually become a South Africa, which couldn’t survive as a pariah state?”

There are some Israelis, I said, who value Israel more as a Jewish state than as a democratic state. “The only way you’re going to have a Jewish part is if you have a two-state solution. That’s the Jewish part,” he said.

I asked him whether he believed President Obama wants to work on Middle East peace. “That’s the million-dollar question,” he said. He added that John Kerry clearly does. “We have a second-term president,” Abdullah said, suggesting that only a president in his second term has the maneuverability, and the experience, to oversee an effective peace process. “This is the last moment. Can it be achieved in four years? Are we too late? After four years, it’s over.”

by Dylan Bergeson, The Atlantic, February 28, 2013

Today, Greenberg estimates the majority of funding for excavations in Israel and Palestine comes from religious sources. As a result, he said, researchers are plagued by financial pressure to produce religiously significant discoveries. Recent years have seen multiple claims of finding Noah’s Ark, the secret location of the Ark of the Covenant, and most recently, a fraudulent ossuary that was claimed to contain the bones of Jesus’ family.

…Price believes that DNA from charred goat bones he discovered at Qumran will prove a genetic match for the leather skins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He theorizes that the bone deposits are in fact evidence of an ancient ritualized feast that anticipated the coming messiah. Many of his supporters take the claim further, saying Price has hit on evidence of the Last Supper—an interpretation he is careful to distance himself from, though he won’t deny the possibility. “You can see where this is heading,” Greenberg said. “There is no way he can set up a scientific structure of proof. If you find bones you can say anything about that.”

As he spoke, Greenberg set down his empty mug. “Somebody could find this coffee cup and say the Prime Minister of Israel was here.” He listed off proofs: “He drinks coffee. We’re in Israel. Maybe he is known to come to this cafe.”

“Science doesn’t work by building up a house of cards and trying to prove it,” Greenberg said. “Science works by ruling out all possibilities until only one is left.”

“The Republic of Kosovo is an irrefutable reality,” the nascent country’s President Atifete Jahjaga declared on Sunday, the fifth anniversary of the Balkan nation’s independence from Serbia. “We, the people of Kosovo, have begun a new chapter in our history, the chapter of peace, understanding, cooperation and mutual respect.”

As noteworthy as this universal and fraternal message is the person who delivered it. Atifete Jahjaga — the former Deputy General Director of the Police of Kosovo — is the country’s first female President, elected by the Parliament in April 2011 as a consensus candidate supported by the center-left Democratic Party, center-right Democratic League, and centrist New Kosovo Alliance. President Jahjaga is Western-educated, a speaker of three languages (including Serbian), and a Muslim with a secular appearance. Politically, she is very much pro-American and in favor of European Union membership.

President Jahjaga is wholly representative of the sort of nation the Kosovar resistance movement stood for and international involvement has helped to foster. NATO military intervention helped to secure Kosovo, and a continued international presence in the form of KFOR, UNMIK, and EULEX has aided the creation of a secular, pluralistic, democratic, and unabashedly pro-Western constitutional republic with a majority Muslim population.

This might not seem like much, but consider the situation in the months after the liberation of Kosovo from Serbian president Slobodan Milošević’s grasp. The rape and ethnic cleansing of Kosovo had meant the deaths of several thousand Kosovar Albanians, as well as the organized and systematic rape of women, the forced deportation or displacement of over 90 percent of Kosovars, and the physical destruction of property, including the flattening of entire villages. The sole of aim of Milošević’s campaign was to rid Kosovo entire of its Albanian identity, secure the territory as part of Greater Serbia, and, as a consequence, re-secure his bloody and absolute control of his country.

Read on: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/why-kosovo-still-matters/273341/

by Jack Hamilton, The Atlantic, February 14, 2013

Mitchell had made great music before Blue. Ladies of the Canyon, released the previous year, was a gorgeous document of the late-’60s Laurel Canyon music scene that yielded the biggest hit of her young career, “Big Yellow Taxi.” But Blue was nonetheless a breakthrough: For all its personal moments—and it’s worth noting that the album’s most “personal” song, “Little Green,” isn’t about a man at all, but rather Mitchell’s own daughter—Blue was Mitchell’s way into music that transcended her life to become about yours and everyone else’s. “Songs are like tattoos,” sings Mitchell on the title track, an alluringly haunting statement on the relation of music and audience, who draws the tattoo and who is made to wear it.

There’s something generous and a little tragic to this, and for all its moments of desire and joy that are symptoms of being in love, Blue is gripped by that dull and abiding sense of fucking up that’s often a symptom of the same. In a 1979 interview Mitchell said of Blue, “I came to another turning point—the terrible opportunity that people are given in their lives. The day that they discover to the tips of their toes that they’re assholes. And you have to work on from there. And decide what your values are. Which parts of you are no longer really necessary. They belong to childhood’s end.” “River,” the darkest holiday song this side of “White Christmas,” exemplifies this. Caroling, Christmas trees and ice skating—embodiments of innocence all—become the remnants of loss, the kind that comes when someone finally sees us for who we are, every time except once, maybe, if we’re lucky.

Blue is a confessional that implicates us in its crimes, and in doing so ever so slightly absolves us of our own. And if at times it holds a brutal mirror to our collective inadequacy, it’s not without its fairy tales. Immediately after “River,” as if from some other world, comes the album’s most unabashedly joyous song, “A Case of You.” It’s one of Mitchell’s most beloved compositions, covered by artists ranging from Diana Krall to Prince. There’s a moment at the top of its second verse, the one that begins “I’m a lonely painter / I live in a box of paints,” when the entire track seems to suddenly swell and almost burst, a beautiful shock of intensity that recedes almost as soon as it appears. And in that one heart-racing, vanishing instant everything makes sense, because if we can only find our way back to that, that moment, that feeling—to find that would mean to be happy forever.

by Armin Rosen, The Atlantic, February 11, 2013

Palestinians have long understood that a western-style standard of living was possible in their part of the world. They knew that places like Rawabi already existed minutes from their own homes, but didn’t think that the quality of life epitomized by hilltop settlements and cities in Israel — places they weren’t allowed to visit without an official permit from the military — was accessible to them. 

During our phone interview, Masri talked about the astonishment that Palestinians feel when they visit the construction site. “When [Palestinians] come to Rawabi, and they go through the showroom and they see what we have planned for them, and they see it actually being built, they say, ‘Wow, this can’t be for us. This is not for us. This is too high of a standard for us because we are supposed to live miserably under the occupation’. Then they come to the other side of the showroom and see the city being built, and reality starts sinking in.”

It’s a type of living closely associated with the Palestinians’ neighbors in Israel. “They know very well that just a 20-minute drive away, there’s a community with a much higher standard of living. And that community happened to be one representing the occupier, quote-unquote the ‘enemy.’ But they would love to live like that. And that’s why when they come to Rawabi some of them don’t believe this is for them initially. The first thing that goes through their mind is that this could be for the Israelis.”

But it is for them. Rawabi’s significance could lie in something more mundane than basic issues of sovereignty and control in the West Bank. It lies in the common, human desire — powerful on either side of the Green Line — for a comfortable and dignified existence.

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The writing was on the wall when David Cameron opened his pitch for European Union reform by generously describing the United Kingdom as an “argumentative and rather strong-minded member of the family of European nations.” “We have the character of an island nation — independent, forthright, passionate in defence of our sovereignty,” the Prime Minister continued. “We can no more change this British sensibility than we can drain the English Channel.”

After essentially calling his country an awkward boor forever separated from the continent, there was only one direction his speech could go. Cameron demanded a full and complete E.U. treaty renegotiation, one which would create a “more flexible, more adaptable, more open” Europe, “fit for the challenges of the modern age.” British membership in the E.U. would then be put to the people in a referendum in 2017. If the outcome of these pan-European talks were favorable to the United Kingdom, Cameron would campaign for staying in. If not, he would have no choice but to “think very carefully” but whether to vote in favor of withdrawal.

Cameron’s threat to European solidarity and brotherhood could not have been more ill-timed, the speech coming one day after the 50th anniversary of the signing of the historic Élysée Treaty between France and Germany. The rude interruption to celebrations of European unity was a product of the pressure the prime minister has been put under by forces outside of his control: rebellious Euroskeptic backbenchers in his own party on the one hand; and the rise of the downright Europhobic (and, one might add, xenophobic) United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) on the other, which threatens to pick away at his party’s base of support during the upcoming elections.

Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/wait-the-sun-hasnt-set-yet-british-conservatives-great-power-delusion/272609/

The Argentine economy is struggling. The government is locked in a dispute with the IMF over the accuracy of its inflation and growth figures, the latter of which is reported to be as high as 25 percent. Protectionism and populism in the form of tariffs, import restrictions, nationalization of industry, and price controls are discouraging foreign investment and capital. Argentinian bonds are currently rated by Fitch as being just slightly above junk status, while the peso has plummeted in value against the dollar.

With growth slowing, inflation soaring, and crime on the rise, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is bearing the brunt of the people’s ire. Re-elected in a landslide in October 2011 without the need for a runoff, Kirchner saw her approval rating bottom out at a meager 30 percent last November. In October, 200,000 people marched through Buenos Aires protesting economic failings and systemic corruption, while in November the trades union — traditional allies of her faction, the Peronist Front for Victory — organized a 24-hour general strike and instituted road blocks across the city.

It is hardly surprising, then, that against this backdrop of economic and social tumult and strife that Kirchner would seek to bring up the Falkland Islands. Having once fought with Britain over that rocky archipelago of fishermen and sheep farmers in 1982, Argentina’s issues of sovereignty and self-determination have come to the fore again in a series of public confrontations with London.

Read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/falklands-redux-is-president-kirchner-south-americas-biggest-troll/267067/

by James Parker, The Atlantic, November 2012

Unfresh usage upsets Amis. (That sounds like a crossword clue.) “Herd writing, herd thinking.” Be vigilant, young word-slinger. Be moral. The journo-clunker, the stale mandarinism—root them out! In this regard, I have to say, I think he has improved me. He’s the reason I won’t write woefully inadequate or use any form of the verb limn; why I will never describe a person as drug-addled, a biography as magisterial, or a piece of high-tempo music as hyperkinetic.

Here’s the thing, though. The refusal to use drug-addled brings with it—entrains, as Amis would say—an obligation to come up with something else, something better. Drug-demented? Drug-bespattered? Burning heretically on his/her pyre of drugs? For me, a non-genius, this obligation is something of a strain. I tend to think in lumps, not in language. I have to translate my thoughts. And this word isn’t good enough, and that word isn’t good enough, and round and round we go … In this state, it can be hazardous to read Martin Amis—to suffer the thrills of envy (I want it!), larceny (Can I steal it?), resentment (Bastard!), all leading where? Ah, you know where: into a writer’s dark night, the meat-locker chill of professional despair. The ego, inverted. I might as well give up. Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton, watching Jimi Hendrix at The Scotch of St James in London, were (according to Townshend) so harrowed with fear and wonder that they found themselves meekly holding hands. The apprentice writer reads Martin Amis, and whose hand can he hold but his own? A circuit, a misery loop—down you go, in sobbing spirals. You’ll never be able to write “As the horses now nobly loomed …”