The Rashomon effect

Some time late in July or early August I will receive a DVD from my friend Razi.

About the same time he will receive a DVD from me. The exchange of video discs has become a ritual we repeat every time we go on holiday together.

This exchange seems pointless; after all we tour together, Razi and Sarah and Roni and I, so why not use one camera to record our trip. However, since Razi and I are staunch individualists we continue to travel together and photograph separately. The results further justify our do-it-yourself obstinacy, namely the two discs are markedly different. At any given vantage point viewing a valley, river or waterfall we seek different angles. Invariably Razi will choose a viewpoint I fault immediately and he often wonders why I prefer a place he ruled out at first glance.

Razi is a “light” editor leaving most of his original footage untouched merely adding a title here and there. I’m heavy with the virtual editing scissors mercilessly cutting superfluous scenes. I like to add a little commentary and a bit of background music. Lets face it neither of us are aspiring Spielbergs and I doubt if we would ever upload any of our “masterpieces” to YouTube.

This “Rashomon effect”, the way we view things differently, brought to mind our current Israel-US crisis.

“This tiff actually reflects a tectonic shift that has taken place beneath the surface of Israel-U.S. relations.” says Tom Friedman “I’d summarize it like this: In the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for Israel — has gone from being a necessity to a hobby. And in the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for America — has gone from being a hobby to a necessity. Therein lies the problem.”

Roger Cohen adds another view “The Israeli leader toyed with Obama’s unequivocal call in Cairo last June for a ‘stop’ to Israeli settlements. He allowed the ill-timed announcement that 1,600 apartments for Jews will be built in East Jerusalem. Then, rather than scrap that, Netanyahu chose cheap cheers from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee with “Jerusalem is not a settlement.”

(I say cheap because everyone knows Jerusalem is not a settlement. That’s not the issue. The issue is that the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem is rejected by the rest of the world and any peace agreement will involve an inventive deal on its status. To build is therefore to provoke.)

Obama was not amused. He airbrushed Netanyahu’s White House visit. The message was clear: The Middle East status quo does not serve the interests of the United States (or Israel). When Obama says “stop,” he does not mean “build a bit.”

The Washington Post, or least Jackson Diehl sees an entirely different ME landscape. Criticising what he sees as “Pointless Poison.” He claims the Obama Administration’s assault on Netanyahu’s disregard for the US imposed building freeze in the West Bank settlements has tended to make Mahmoud Abbas more intransigent regarding negotiations with Israel.

“The Palestinian leader cannot be less pro-Palestinian than the White House. But Abbas cannot climb down from his position so easily -- which means that, for the second time in a year, the Middle East peace process has been stalled by a U.S.-engineered deadlock.” Diehl quotes Middle East analysts Robert Malley interviewed by Glenn Kessler in The Washington Post, “U.S. pressure can work, but it needs to be at the right time, on the right issue and in the right political context. The administration is ready for a fight, but it realized the issue, timing and context were wrong.”

A few days ago Journalist Ben Smith referring to “Obama's Mideast gamble,” in Politico said, ” Obama’s willingness to cross swords with the Israelis comes at a domestic political cost: The pro-Israel group AIPAC released a letter Friday with the signatures of three-quarters of the members of the House, pressing the administration to retreat from public confrontation .” Then Smith reaches the pivotal point in his argument, “The question facing Obama is whether he will be able to turn a perception of increased ‘evenhandedness’ into an Arab engagement in the peace process that the administration sought, but did not get, last year.”

For emphasis he quotes Stephen Gordon, a Mideast scholar at the Brookings Institution. “The administration has used [the Jerusalem conflict] as an opportunity to bring back the settlement issue and to show that they’re willing to talk tough on settlements. I think that has sent the signal that, yes, we are committed to the peace process; yes, we are going to be evenhanded; and, yes, we recognize that this conflict is important to people in the Arab world.”
Ben Smith quotes David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration trade official.
“I think, inadvertently, Netanyahu enabled the White House to restore a little bit of momentum to the idea that they are going to approach the Middle East problem in a new way,”
Politico’s Foreign policy correspondent Laura Rozen highlights the internal debate inside the Obama Administration. Although she bases her news item on unidentified sources her analysis sounds reasonable. “White House Middle East strategist Dennis Ross is staking out a position that Washington needs to be sensitive to Netanyahu’s domestic political constraints including over the issue of building in East Jerusalem in order to not raise new Arab demands, while other officials including some aligned with Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell are arguing Washington needs to hold firm in pressing Netanyahu for written commitments to avoid provocations that imperil Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and to preserve the Obama Administration's credibility. “

It’s not unusual that on the question of the settlement building freeze Israeli commentators differ in the way they view the situation. Dov Weisglass, who served as senior advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his special envoy to the Bush White House, stated in an interview with Haaretz security reporter Avi Issacharoff, “Throughout the latest crisis between Israel and the United States, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's assertion that no previous Israeli government has frozen construction in East Jerusalem has been repeatedly mentioned. ... In fact, all American governments have made the same demand of all Israeli governments, apart from on one occasion: The letter of understanding penned by former U.S. president George W. Bush that recognises the principle of settlement blocs. Now, the U.S. is finally putting this demand into effect.”

Weisglass stays “in touch” with key people in US administrations and the US Jewish community. He maintains that “Netanyahu's government is backtracking on all fronts and offering nothing to the Americans or the Palestinians. ... “Obama's reaction is not a result of his victory in passing health care reform. The American president doesn't need to be strong to offend an Israeli prime minister over a matter such as settlements. ...”

"Netanyahu should have taken into account the change within the American Jewish community." Speaking .of American Jews he said, "Their support for Israel is decreasing and they will defend Israel in the face of the administration only on matters where there is a real threat to Israel. I have serious doubt that U.S. Jews see the Netanyahu government's territorial aspirations in Judea and Samaria [West Bank] and the Palestinian neighbourhoods in Jerusalem as an existential matter."

Weisglass’ opinion seems to contradict the letter released by AIPAC claiming that three-quarters of the members of the House have pressed the administration to tone down the public confrontation with the Israeli government.

It remains to be seen how determined President Obama is regarding the follow through over the building freeze.

Journalist/author David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker about “Special Relationships”, a view on how he evaluates the way we regard the US political arena.

“For decades, mainstream Israeli politicians have taken pride in their fingertip feel for the subtleties of American life and politics. Israeli diplomats know the meeting halls of the Midwest almost as well as they do the breakfast room at the Regency Hotel. So it has been disturbing to see, during the 2008 Presidential race and after, that some right-wing members of the Israeli political élite, along with some ordinary Israelis, often seem to derive their most acute sense of Barack Obama from Fox News and the creepier nooks of the blogosphere”…. “Polls and conversations with right-leaning Israelis have long reflected a distrust of Obama and a free-floating anxiety about what they imagine to be his view of the world—specifically, his indifference to Israel.” Remnick concludes, “In Obama, however, many Israelis think that they are dealing with an American leader who, as one official put it, “has no special feeling for us.” Obama’s customary cool feels icy.”

In a reference to the Ramat Shlomo episode Remnick says, “It reached its sad nadir last week, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, Hagai Ben-Artzi, declared on Israeli radio that Obama was an “anti-Semite.” No one, not even Netanyahu, should be denied his right to an idiot relation, but the remark is less readily dismissed when one recalls reports (later denied) that the Prime Minister himself has referred to David Axelrod (whose West Wing office featured an “Obama for President” sign in Hebrew) and Rahm Emanuel (a civilian volunteer in the Israeli Army during the first Gulf War) as “self-hating Jews.”

The Rashomon effect doesn’t necessarily describe the current crisis only.

An examination of almost every conflict of interests with the US shows that journalists and think-tank analysts adopted different stances and gave differing accounts of the particular event.

This mishmash of views certainly doesn’t make it easier to reach a conclusion.

Perhaps I have quoted too many sources and have confused more than I have clarified. To make amends I can do no better than quote Robert Frost -

“Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who think they talk sense.”

Have a good weekend.

Beni 1^st of April, 2010.