Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: Can Israel Survive?

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom. Will Israel survive? That question hasn’t really been asked since 1967. Then, a far weaker Israel was surrounded on all sides by Arab dictatorships that were equipped with sophisticated weapons from their nuclear patron, the Soviet Union. But now, things are far worse for the Jewish state.Egyptian mobs just tried to storm the Israeli embassy in Cairo and kill any Israelis they could get their hands on. Whatever Egyptian government emerges, it will be more Islamist than before — and may renounce the peace accords with Israel.One thing unites Syrian and Libyan dissidents: They seem to hate Israel as much as the murderous dictators whom they have been trying to throw out.The so-called Arab Spring was supposed to usher in Arab self-introspection about why intolerant strongmen keep sprouting up in the Middle East. Post-revolutionary critics could freely examine self-inflicted Arab wounds, such as tribalism, religious intolerance, authoritarianism, endemic corruption, closed economies, and gender apartheid.But so far, “revolutionaries” sound a lot more like reactionaries...

James Renton: Palestine's UN Bid: Lessons from the History of Zionism

James Renton is Senior Lecturer in History at Edge Hill University and the author of The Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance, 1914-1918

Walter Russell Mead: The “Christianist” Nightmare: It’s Just A Bad Dream

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest.Recently I posted a short piece saying that the specter of a “Christianist” takeover of the United States is a figment of overheated imaginations, mostly on the left.  Every few years a leftie journalist dabbles in right wing websites and obscure theological debates and emerges with horrifying tales of totalitarian Dominionist plots to turn the United States into something like the dystopian world of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.Andrew Sullivan thinks I am blind to the inquisitorial realities of Republican politics today.  Writes Sullivan:

Samuel Moyn: Face the Nations

Samuel Moyn, who teaches history at Columbia University, is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History.It’s further proof of the law of unintended consequences. This week’s showdown over the creation of a Palestinian state is playing out at an institution some of whose most fervent early adherents hoped would be a vehicle for transcending nationalism entirely. Indeed, though the United Nations—a collection of all the world’s nation-states—played a critical role in the establishment of the State of Israel in the late 1940s, a group of Jews committed their lives to building a world organization that would be focused instead on protecting individuals from state power rather than making new states.Influenced by the state-sponsored barbarism of the Holocaust, these Jewish activists believed that the nation-state should be supplemented by a system of international, not state-based, human rights. And the United Nations would be the body through which this new world order would be birthed.

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama’s Predictable Scandals

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.The media finally conceded the Obama administration to be inexperienced and inept, reminiscent of the Carter administration — but, they maintained, not possibly involved in any corruption. Then suddenly scandals erupted on nearly every conceivable front: the crony-capitalist half-billion-dollar loan guarantee to a now bankrupt Solyndra; the Fast and Furious gun deal, in which, in lunatic fashion, the U.S. government sold deadly automatic weapons to Mexican drug-cartel killers; the administration’s pressure on a four-star general to fudge his testimony as a favor to a big campaign donor whose suspect company, LightSquared, was doing business with the Pentagon; and the politically inspired dropping of investigations by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott: Why (and how) to tax the super-rich

Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott are professors of law at Yale and the authors of "The Stakeholder Society."President Obama is right to insist on the "Buffett rule": Millionaires should not be paying income tax at a rate lower than their secretaries'. But correcting this inequity is only a small step toward fairness. The more serious inequality problem facing the United States involves overall wealth, not just income. While the top 1% of Americans earned 21% of the nation's income, they owned a staggering 35% of the wealth in 2006-07, the most recent year for which statistics are available. We should be taxing that wealth directly, and not merely focusing on million-dollar incomes....

Michael Kazin: If Republicans Love States’ Rights So Much, Why Do They Want to Be President?

Michael Kazin is the author of the new book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. He teaches history at Georgetown University and is co-editor of Dissent.Whatever their differences, the leading Republican candidates all swear that they love states’ rights. If elected president, Rick Perry vows to “try to make Washington as inconsequential as I can.” Mitt Romney declares his faith in the Constitution, which, he says, declares that the government “that would deal primarily with citizens at the local level would be local and state government, not the federal government.” Michele Bachmann “respect[s] the rights of states to come up with their own answers and their own solutions to compete with one another.” With lots of help from the Tea Party, the Tenth Amendment which, not so long ago was familiar mainly to constitutional lawyers and scholars, may now be as popular as the First or the Second. But, what this resurgence of federalism overlooks is not just the historical consolidation of federal power but also the inanity of attempts to reverse it.

Nick Turse: How Washington Creates Global Instability

Nick Turse is a historian, investigative journalist, the associate editor of TomDispatch.com, and a senior editor at Alternet.org.   His latest book is The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books).  You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on Tumblr, and on Facebook. This article is a collaboration between Alternet.org and TomDispatch.com.

Tim Stanley: The Tea Party Isn't Anti-Intellectual -- They Just Don't Like Disasterous Ivy-League Policies

Dr Tim Stanley is a research fellow in American History at Oxford University. He is working on a biography of Pat Buchanan. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.

Daniel Martin Varisco: A Plot Against All the Yemeni People

Daniel Martin Varisco is professor of anthropology at Hofstra University.The protests against the regime of Ali Abdullah Salih have persevered in Yemen for some nine months with no end in sight that does not result in the past tense of “Irhal” for Salih. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Yemeni citizens have joined the protest, some living in tents in a makeshift Freedom Triangle. For the most part, given the length and extent of the protests, there has been no violence from the protesters and limited attacks on them. The times that troops loyal to Salih have fired on protesters have only encouraged more protests. But the past couple of days have become ugly. As reported today, at least 21 have been killed a day after 26 were shot dead in Sanaa. Here is the report in Al Jazeera:According to reports, Monday’s deaths occurred as snipers fired upon passers-by and peaceful protesters demonstrating at Change Square.“Help me, oh my God look at his slaughter!” said the father of a boy who died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Max Hastings: There’s No Romance Left in Espionage

The writer is an FT contributing editor. The British are indulging in one of their periodic bouts of spy fever, such as no other nation enjoys so much. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is triumphantly launched as a movie, almost 40 years after the novel’s publication, when the Cold War was still pretty chilly. David Cameron’s visit to Moscow has reopened the six-year-old controversy about the London murder of dissident Alexander Litvinenko. There are red faces at M16 following the discovery in Libya of documents that expose a cosy relationship between the Gaddafi regime and Vauxhall Cross. In intelligence matters, the British people get themselves in a considerable tangle about where reality ends and fiction begins.

Joshua S. Goldstein: We're Winning the War on War

Joshua S. Goldstein is a professor at the School of International Service at American University, winner of the International Studies Association "Book of the Decade" award, among others, and a research scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he lives. In the first half of the twentieth century, world wars killed tens of millions and left whole continents in ruins. In the second half of that century, during the Cold War, proxy wars killed millions, and the world feared a nuclear war that could have wiped out our species. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the worst wars, such as those in Iraq and Sudan, kill hundreds of thousands. We fear terrorist attacks that could destroy a city, but not life on the planet. The fatalities still represent a large number and the impacts of wars are still catastrophic for those caught in them, but overall, war has diminished dramatically. Can the world, step by step and with ups and downs, actually reduce the amount of war violence taking place? Can it move down the scale of war over time? Actually, this has been happening already for decades.

Efraim Karsh: Where is the Palestinian Ben-Gurion?

Efraim Karsh is research professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, director of the Middle East Forum (Philadelphia ) and author, most recently, of Palestine Betrayed....Contrary to the received wisdom, Israel was established not by a UN General Assembly resolution but through the unwavering determination of the Zionist leadership, or rather David Ben-Gurion, shortly to become Israel's first prime minister, in the face of mounting international skepticism regarding partition (in March 1948 the US administration effectively backed down from the idea) and doubts about the new state's ability to fend off both Palestinian violence and a pan-Arab attempt to abort it at birth.In doing so, Ben-Gurion could rely on an extraordinarily resilient and vibrant national community, armed with an unwavering sense of purpose and an extensive network of political, social and economic institutions built over decades of pre-state national development.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Urban Schools Search Amiss for the Next 'Savior' Superintendent

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”Who will lead America's ailing city schools out of the wilderness, and into the promised land?Across the urban landscape, that’s the question on everyone’s lips. From Atlanta and Philadelphia to Kansas City and Seattle, over a dozen major cities are searching for a new school superintendent to solve their perennial woes: poor attendance, chronic violence, and low academic achievement.

Benny Morris: Is Israel Over?

Benny Morris is an Israeli historian.Israel is under assault. On Sept. 20 the Palestinian Authority plans to unilaterally declare statehood and go to the United Nations for recognition. This is a rejection of all efforts for a peaceful compromise. In its wake will come waves of Palestinian violence. And yet this is just the latest manifestation of an embattled Israel that is being threatened from the outside—by Muslim Arab states and societies, Egyptians storming the Israeli Embassy, a nuclear-arming Iran (with its local sidekicks, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hizbullah in Lebanon), and a besieged President Bashar al-Assad in Syria—and from the inside by domestic upheaval that led to the largest mass protests in the country’s history.

Fouad Ajami: The Ways of American Memory

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and co-chair of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.The most amazing thing about remembering 9/11 was that there was hardly anything said about the assailants.  We recalled the horror, but generously.  Perhaps now and then, I thought, too generously.  The American capacity to forgive and forget is without parallel. A source of pride and strength, but perhaps on occasion for worry as well.Nothing was said on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 of Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, of the 19 Arabs who assaulted America on that day of grief. Nothing was said of the radical Islamist preachers who had filled the air with sedition and bigotry in the decade prior to 9/11. And those financiers and “charities” who had sustained the jihad were entirely forgotten. The regimes that had winked at the terror – the enablers the peerless Charles Hill called them – were given a pass as well.  The grief was remembered in the manner akin to recalling a natural disaster. Tragedy was the word most invoked as we called back that day.

Niall Ferguson: Texting Makes U Stupid

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, was published in November.The good news is that today’s teenagers are avid readers and prolific writers. The bad news is that what they are reading and writing are text messages....

Philip Jenkins: After al-Qaeda ... Hijackings and Suicide Bombings Didn’t Start, and Won’t End, With Islamists

Philip Jenkins, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of Images of Terror and Jesus Wars.NEW PRESIDENT DECLARES VICTORY IN WAR ON TERROR—Patriot Act to be Repealed—Department of Homeland Security for Dissolution.This will not be a headline in 2013, or anytime thereafter, because by its nature the War on Terror can have no end. If you are fighting a war, then you can envisage a victory in which the opposing force is destroyed. In the case of terrorism, particular movements might decline or vanish—and happily, al-Qaeda itself is on a downward trajectory—but terrorism as such is not going away.

Juan Cole: Ten Years After 9/11, Do the Arabs Value Democracy More than We Do?

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of MichiganThe September 11 attacks have been revealed as a last gasp of a fading, cult-like twentieth-century vision, not as the wave of the future. They were the equivalent of the frenetic dashing to and fro of a chicken already beheaded. Al-Qaeda’s core assumptions have been refuted by subsequent events and above all in 2011 by the Arab Spring.

Walter Russell Mead: Snail Mail Spam Subsidies Stuttering Towards A Stop

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American InterestThe USPS is one of the great surviving examples of the blue social model and, not surprisingly, it is going down the tubes.  Technological change has made its original mission of delivering vital information and private correspondence obsolete.  Judging by what comes in through the mail slot at the stately Mead manor these days, the primary job of the postal service appears to be the delivery of the snail mail equivalent of spam.Snail spamming is an expensive business to be in; the USPS loses billions of dollars each year so that advertisers can send out billions of pieces of spam at below market costs.  In fairness, e-spammers should demand an equivalent subsidy; shouldn’t non-prescription Viagra dealers and Nigerian con artists get the same kind of help from a benevolent government that the Publisher’s Clearinghouse gets for junk mail?...