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A history lesson: Part III

Watching C-Span 2 --"BookTV" on the weekends-- I stumbled (again) across a must-read book on the Israeli - Palestinian conflict, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan.  But before I get to the book, a couple of observations.

First, it should be clear that what's happening in the Middle East, Iraq included, is a repercussion, long delayed, of British colonialism.  But in a deeper sense, the violence engulfing the region is Hitler's legacy.  Israel, it is said, was born of the Holocaust, the endgame of Hitler's "Final Solution" for the Jews.  The irony is stark, because now a new holocaust, with all the ethnic and religious trappings of the original, holds the Middle East in its blood-soaked grip.

Secondly,  America's complicity in Israel's assault on Lebanon and Gaza is directly proportional to amount of weaponry it supplies the Israeli government. We're continually reminded of Iran's support of Hezbollah, but the extent of U.S. military aid to Israel is rarely mentioned with any specificity in the American press.

Here are some of those specifics from Greg Mitchell of Publisher and Editor:

"Space does not allow a full accounting of U.S. arms shipments to Israel in the past year, but to cite just one current budget line: '100 Guided Bomb Units (GBU-28) that include: BLU-113 A/B penetration warhead.' That only cost $30 million. Another budget line for $319 million cites '5,000 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) tail kits.'

"These can be dropped from the air by some of the 102 F-16 aircraft sent to Israel since 2001 (price tag: over $4.5 billion). And those aircraft will stay in the air, thanks to emergency approval last week by the U.S. for $210 million in JP-8 jet fuel to go to the Israeli military. Israel also has from the U.S. over 700 M-60 tanks, 89 F-15 combat aircraft, missiles and bombs of all kinds and scores of attack helicopters."

In all, military aid to Israel since Bush took office comes to $10.5 billion.

But back to the book.  The Lemon Tree attempts to humanize the seemingly endless and intractable conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis by looking at it from both Arab and Jewish perspectives.   As history, that approach should open the eyes of the average American, who, as Tolan maintains, are familiar only with the Israeli narrative, thanks primarily to the best-selling book, Exodus, and the subsequent movie starring the blue-eyed Paul Newman.  But what about the Palestinians?

Here's a excerpt from Tolan's post to TomDispatch, "The Palestinian Catastrophe, Then and Now", summarizing the salient points of his book:

"The Arab-Israeli war of 1948, known in Israel as the War of Independence, is called al-Nakba or the Catastrophe by Palestinians. For generations of Americans raised on the heroic story of Israel's birth, especially as written by Leon Uris in Exodus, there is no place for al-Nakba.  Yet this fundamental Palestinian wound, and the power of its memory today, cannot simply be wished away. ...

"I've come to understand that the Nakba is as fundamental to the Palestinian narrative as the Holocaust is to the Israeli one. It is not possible to grasp the depths of the current tragedy, to say nothing of the fury and despair of the Arabs, without understanding the roots of the Palestinian catastrophe. ...

"The refugees from Ramla and Lydda arrived in exile, transforming the Christian hill town of Ramallah into a repository of misery and trauma. One hundred thousand refugees crowded into school yards, gymnasiums, convents, army barracks, or slept in olive groves, caves, corrals, barnyards, and on open ground along the roadsides. They would, in the end, join more than 600,000 other refugees to form an ever growing, ever more desperate Palestinian diaspora.

"In the coming years, the rage, humiliation, loss, and longing for home of the exiled refugees would coalesce around a single concept: Return. This, in turn, helped build what the Palestinians would call their liberation movement, whose tactics ever since would be considered the heroic acts of freedom-fighters by one side, and terrorism by another."

If you don't read the book, at least read the linked post.  It may soften some of the hard-line positions taken by those who, like the letter writer in today's Oregonian calling Arabs "sharks smelling blood in the water", believe there is no justification for the Palestinian response to Israel. 

By the way, my friend Mike Miller recommends another book to those who seek a greater understanding of the Israeli -Palestinian conflict -- The Iron Wall, by Avi Shlaim. 

Charles "The Bell Curve" Murray: No Child Left Behind is a flop!

The cornerstone of Bush Administration educational policy, No Child Left Behind, is now taking flak from the right.

Here's what the American Enterprise Institute's Charles Murray had to say about NCLB in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal:

"The case that NCLB has failed to raise test scores had been made most comprehensively in a report from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, released just a few weeks ago. ... NCLB has not had a significant impact on overall test scores and has not narrowed the racial and socioeconomic achievement gap."

He further criticizes NCLB for the same reasons I do --its obsession with standardized testing dangerously narrows the focus of public school instruction.  The schools his children attend, for example,

"...have turned themselves inside out to try to produce the right test results, with dismaying effects on the content of classroom instruction and devastating effects on teacher morale. We actually lost our best English teacher to the effects of high-stakes testing. 'I want to teach my students how to write,' he said, 'not teach them how to pass a test that says they can write.' He quit."

You may recall Murray as co-author of The Bell Curve, a book which questioned the intellectual capacity of African Americans.  More recently, he's written a book on the reform of the welfare state.  A self-described libertarian, Murray is big on individual freedom and personal responsibility.  And, of course, school choice. 

In that sense, Murray's critique of No Child Left Behind is somewhat circumscribed, limited to its failure to raise the test scores that NCLB arbitrarily defines as the sole measure of school success.  His assumption is that the end goal of NCLB is to raise test scores.  Skeptics from the left (like me) say the focus on test scores is a ruse.  The real purpose of NCLB is to use test scores, at best limited measures of school learning, to undermine the credibility of public education.  And to usher in an era of school choice and school privatization.

The U.S. Department of Education is dong all it can to promote school choice within public districts.  This website published by the feds, and the numerous grants available to local districts to foster school choice, including Portland, make that clear. 

Charles Murray correctly identifies the weakness of the test-based No Child Left Behind Act.  As an advocate of school choice, however, he may ultimately be pleased with the end result of the school accountability movement.

The coming school closures

Here's a question for Vicki Phillips and the Portland School Board:

If  "schools with high numbers of nonwhite and poor students" continue to lose enrollment to wealthier neighborhood schools and magnet programs, will they be closed?  And if so, what will happen to their students?  In a public system, they have to go somewhere, don't they?

That's the conundrum facing a district that's hitched it's wagon to school choice and an open transfer policy, ostensibly to make the district more attractive to "middle class" parents.  I may be wrong, but one of the unintended consequences of unfettered school choice may well be the utter decimation of Portland's neighborhood schools.  And that would be a tragedy for a city renowned for its neighborhoods and its livability. 

Unless of course you believe in the fiction of "virtual" neighborhoods, dependent not on where you live, but where you congregate with like-minded people.  As in magnet or charter school communities.  That notion radically redefines both public education and neighborhood.  It's a step backward from the democratic notion of the "commons."

Here's how I see things working out should the district stubbornly continue its allegiance to school choice, to minor "efficiencies", and to the business model of education:

PPS will close two more "underperforming" high schools, most likely Jefferson and Franklin, or possibly Marshall.  It will close up to ten more "underperforming" and underenrolled elementary and/or middle schools, leaving approximately 65 buildings suitable for the looming Phillips'-backed K-8 reconfiguration.  If the eight remaining high schools accomodate 12,000 students, that leaves about 33,000 students to be divvied up by the 65 K-8 schools.  According to my math, that comes out to about 500 students per building.

I have nothing against the K-8 model, nor do I think 500 students per building is a particularly unworkable number.  But since neither asssure the sort of educational reform Vicki Phillips says is her foremost concern, the real problem, for me, is the loss of neighborhood schools, the kind kids can walk to.

Another is that the district will still have to deal with its low SES and minority students.  I don't see any kind of equilibrium ever being reached as long as school choice is in play.  Some schools will still "outperform" others, and the demand for "better" schools will continue unabated.   That does not bode well for the future of public education in Portland.
 

ACE is back!

ACE is the Academy of Character and Ethics, once proposed by Vicki Phillips and the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church as a perfect alternative school adjunct to the reconfiguration of Jefferson High School.

That was after an ACE charter school application was rejected by the school board.    Now the school, once backed by Gates Foundation money, and for all I know still is, yet again wants the district to issue it a charter.   Maybe the third time's a charm. 

According to the Oregonian article, ACE intends to use a canned curriculum called Wisdom for Life.  I don't know, but that doesn't sound much like the touted "college prep" program the district attempted to sneak into Jeff. 

I guess we'll find out in November. 

More on "A history lesson"

My post on the hostilities in Lebanon was characterized by one commenter as "idiotic... argumentation". 

Let me reclarify my position:  I am neither pro-Arab nor anti-Israeli.  I am anti-war, meaning that I oppose the eagerness with which the current Israeli and American governments use military force as a substitute for diplomacy.    Furthermore, the "arguments" are not mine.  They're the considered analyses, rarely reported in American media,  of people who know far better than I about what's happening in Israel, Lebanon, and the Middle East. 

That said, here's an update on the original post, all from Israeli, or Israeli ex-patriot, sources, including the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem:

First, here's Ira Chernus, paraphrasing or directly quoting many of the writers in the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz:

The cause of this war -- and all of Israel’s problems -- is its refusal to negotiate an end to the occupation of Palestine .

“Israel has no option in the long run other than withdrawing from the territories and from the occupation. … Israel's interest is for the Palestinians to live a life of plenty and well-being.”

The best writers in Ha’aretz know that some day Israel must give up its bullying, and that means giving up its illusions: the fiction that Israel is an innocent victim, merely responding to unprovoked aggression, and the vain hope that brutal force can restore an insecure bully’s wounded pride. As long as that lethal brew of illusion dominates Israel’s public mind and mood, Israeli bombs will keep on killing in Lebanon and Gaza, and the victims will fight back, endangering Israeli lives too.

Then Israeli novelist Etgar Keret,  quoted by Chernus in the New York Times:

Among Israeli Jews, Keret wrote, after the attack on Lebanon began, “there was a small gleam in almost everyone’s eyes, a kind of unconscious breath of relief. … We long for a real war to take the place of all those exhausting years of intifada when there was no black or white, only gray … ."

Finally these accounts from B'Tselem of human rights violations by Israel and the Israel Defense Force:

Over the past week,  Israel has killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians in its attacks against targets in Lebanon . There is a concern that at least some of them were disproportionate attacks, which constitute war crimes. In addition, Israel has launched deliberate attacks against civilian infrastructure throughout Lebanon , such as bridges, the Beirut international airport , the electricity supply and fuel reservoirs.

***********************

B'Tselem's initial investigation indicates that, during an incursion by Israeli forces into Beit Hanun, in the northern Gaza Strip, on 17 July 2006, soldiers seized control of two buildings in the town and used residents as human shield.

**********************

Two years ago today [9 July 2004], the International Court of Justice, in The Hague , gave its advisory opinion on the Separation Barrier [the "Fence"]. The judges held that building the barrier in the West Bank violates international law. Thus, the court held, Israel must tear down the sections that stray from the Green Line, cancel the accompanying permit regime, and compensate Palestinians whose rights were violated by the barrier.

And there are countless other examples.  All, of course, may be redundant.  War and the threat of war to achieve political goals inevitably lead to crimes against humanity. 

"Charitable" tax scams

Here's what happens when you work for an administration that doesn't believe in government:  You feel free to fleece it!  The government, that is.  By evading taxes.

Take the case of Mike Leavitt, George W. Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services.  Leavitt and his family have personally profited from the "charitable" foundation he set up to the tune of  millions of dollars  --$1.2 million in tax write-offs, and perhaps another half a million in "loans" from the foundation to Leavitt-owned companies.

How much did the Dixie and Anne Leavitt Foundation donate to charity?  (It is ostensibly a tax exempt charitable foundation, after all.)  In 2002 and 2003, the Foundation, with assets of $9 bilion dollars,  donated a total of $101,399, mainly to organizations  near and dear to the Leavitt family -- the Mormon Church, Southern Utah University, and another "charitable" foundation, the Southern Utah Foundation.  And who knows where Southern Utah Foundation money ends up.

Here's the problem in a nutshell, as Senators Charles Grassley and Max Baucus explained in a letter to George W. Bush:

"There is no question that working families are disturbed by these types of stories that keep appearing in the papers about wealthy people who take a big charitable deduction to get a significant tax break yet retain control of the funds, benefit from that control, and little to nothing actually goes to real charities doing important work... . "

Taxpayers should be more than disturbed when rich guys like Leavitt set up their own tax-exempt "piggy banks".  They should be outraged.  What Leavitt doesn't pay in taxes, we end up paying.

The Leavitt tax scam is reminiscent of the improprieties of an earlier cabinet secretary, Samuel Pierce, head of Housing and Urban Development under Ronald Reagan, our first notable anti-government President.   Pierce was accused of funneling HUD money to his cronies, but somehow avoided indictment.

Hopefully Leavitt's looting of the federal treasury will be dealt with more successfully.  But don't hold your breath.

A history lesson

Let's get one thing straight.  I'm neither anti-Israel nor anti-American.  I'm anti-war, which puts me at odds with the American-Israeli militarism posing as foreign policy we're currently witnessing in Lebanon.  As Norman Solomon wrote,

"The United States and Israel. Right now, it's the most dangerous alliance in the world."

So at the risk of being accused of anti-Semitism, or worse, of being "soft on terror", let me provide  a little historical perspective, something that's completely absent from the accounts we read in the American press or see on cable TV.   Or in the political posturing emanating from liberal Democrats in Congress --like Nancy Pelosi, who co-sponsored a resolution with Republican John Boehner "condemning Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran."

Alexander Cockburn provides an outline of the recent history of Israel's role in the rise of Hezbollah, and of Hamas, dating back to 1982, the year it invaded Lebanon to displace Yasser Arafat's PLO:

"With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.

"The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine."

Israel's long occupation of Lebanon was ended by the iron law of "unintended consequences":

"Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators."

Cockburn reminds us of subsequent Israeli policies which ultimately enabled the political rise of Hamas, including

• Building illegal settlements in Palestinian territory
• Building a "fence" to separate the Arabs from the Jews
• The confiscation of Palestinian water rights

And many other abuses all justified in the name of defending the country from "terrorist" attacks.

Cockburn is, of course, an unabashed "leftist",  So for those who would object, here's another account of the events that led up to the recent hostilities, this from Zeev Maoz, formerly of Tel Aviv University --which, I remind you, is in the capital city of Israel.  Maoz' thesis is this:

"Much of what takes place between Israel and the Hizballah in Lebanon is an outgrowth of Israel's follies and strategic errors since its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Israeli troubles with the Palestinians exhibit the same pattern."

He concludes thusly:

"What can be done? First, it is essential that Israelis open their eyes to reality and conduct a fair and unbiased assessment of the effects of their own past and present policies on their current problems. It is easy -- and perhaps politically expedient -- to place the blame on the other side, but if history has something to teach Israelis, it is that this practice does not advance Israeli interests or improve its situation."

Nor, I might add, American interests, despite the ramblings of George W. Bush, the crazy utterances of Rick Santorum, the incessant saber-rattling of Bill Kristol, and the vacuousness of the national media.

Rick Santorum is insane!

I know this because in a speech at the National Press Club, Sen. Santorum, (R)- Pennsylvania, claimed that all Iranian university students were required to learn the fine arts of suicide bombing.  More specifically, as a requirement for admission to a university, students had to learn how to don a vest of explosives. 

I ask you, does that sound even remotely plausible? 

In his defense, Santorum did say one sensible thing.  He said it's a mistake to label our involvement in the Middle East as a "War on Terror."  I agree with that.  But his counter  explanation for our battle against evil Arabs is as almost as loony as a the claim of suicide bomber training at Iranian universities:

Our enemy is not terrrorism, says Sen. Santorum.  It's Islamic Fascism!  And the goal of those fascists is to destroy not only Israel, but to lay waste to American civilization itself! 

The folks at Human Events loved that part of his speech:

"Santorum’s speech, which was delivered to capacity crowd, was a desperate plea for America to wake up. Though Islamic fascists have made no bones about their intent to destroy Israel and America, many in the U.S. are having a difficult time grasping that basic fact."

James Zogby of the Arab American Insitute saw it differently:

" 'One can read this stuff on any number of extremist Web sites,' said Zogby... .

" 'It's a lot of recycled rhetoric from a number of groups that have been, I think, dangerously close to preaching a clash of civilizations, and I don't think it displays a real understanding of all of the ways that we interact with the region,' said Zogby."

Polls show that Santorum is behind in his race for re-election.  Some people, I guess, will say anything to hold on to a Senate seat. 

But libertarians aren't all bad

Sure they dislike government and taxes.  But libertarians also generally oppose military interventions in places like Iraq.

And they seem to have it in for neoconservatives, especially the big kahuna of neoconservatism, Bill Kristol:

"For Kristol to proffer the notion — with a straight face — that bombing a foreign country is the way for us to get its citizens to overthrow their government is nothing short of astonishing. The neocons have reached a new, dark low in terms of intellectual integrity."

Speaking of Kristol and the neocons, Jim Lobe writes that Israel's intervention in Lebanon  provides neoconservatism a "major opportunity to regain influence lost as a result of setbacks in Iraq... ."

Lobe's piece appears on a site that's long been bookmarked on my list of favorites, the appropriately named Antiwar.com.

More school news: Libertarians and vouchers

Apparently libertarians are not in favor of school vouchers as a method of promoting private school choice.  At least not Andrew Coulson, Director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. 

On the other hand, Coulson has no use for government-run public schools, either.  No way, no how. 

So what's the problem with vouchers?  According to Coulson, with government money --and vouchers are government money-- comes government control, and that's a very, very bad thing to libertarians.  Nor do vouchers promote true competition between schools, because the private school sector "does not constitute a competitive market."  And for Coulson, market-based competition is key to a sound system of school choice.  Coulson even wrote a book about it, in which he concludes:

"Competitive educational  markets have consistently done a better job of serving the public than state-run educational systems."

Instead of vouchers, Coulson proposes the use of tax credits at the state level to promote market-based school choice.  There are two problems with that approach. 

First, tax credits would only benefit people who pay enough in taxes to cover their educational expenses.  Second, tax credits, like vouchers, transfer money from the government to the private sector --directly.  That's fine and dandy for libertarians who don't like government anyway, but such a proposal would never pass muster with those who have a more benign view of the role of government in society. 

Coulson is a smart guy, but he deliberately miscontrues the value of public schools as a democratizing force in our democratic society.  There's a fundamental value in rubbing shoulders in common schools with people whom one might otherwise never meet, or even realize exist. 

The sectarian, special interest alternative that Coulson supports is, by its very nature, fundamentally undemocratic.