West of Eden: Weltanschauungsschmerz

As the price of oil falls, so does the Iranian riyal, so that people have increasingly less money to buy increasingly expensive things; Peter Kenyon's NPR story paints a picture not so much of starvation as a constant grind of gradually worsening hardship and a sense that it will never get any better without a lifting of US and international sanctions against the country's economy, which won't ever happen, they fear.

Because Republicans and the Israel lobby don't want it to happen, of course. I've got a theory about that, which is that those people would like to see the Rouhani government defeated and a more conservative government in place in Iran; they'd like to see the relatively progressive forces fail—they'd rather have the return of mouth-breather Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who is apparently mounting a comeback attempt), why? To preserve their world-view. Because the way things are gives them a perfectly clear sense of who is good ("We are!") and who is bad ("Them!") and being forced to rework that would be so unpleasant. They literally can't bear the prospect.

Mausoleum of the poet Saadi (ca. 1210-92), Shiraz, via Wikimedia Commons.

Speaking of sanctions, Richard Silverstein yesterday:

Earlier today, several DC news outlets began running accounts of secret White House deliberations regarding imposing sanctions on Israel for its continued building of settlements.  Pointedly, no U.S. official has denied the rumors.  Haaretz appears to have first reported this story.  But in its reporting it never mentioned the word “sanctions.”  Instead, it mentioned more mundane terms like taking stronger action.

The DC press corps and the rightist pro-Israel media has interpreted this as Obama is considering sanctions.  So it’s hard to know what the real intent is here.

So far, the actions suggested don’t constitute sanctions in the conventional sense: refusing to veto anti-Israel Security Council resolutions and cutting off certain financing and support to settlements.  They are more tangible expressions of anger.  But nowhere near formal legal action.

Silverstein is not too impressed with what this sounds like, an attempt to influence upcoming Israeli elections by frightening the apathetic moderates into voting for centrist parties, Labor and Kadima I guess, and making Netanyahu's position a little more difficult. He thinks it would be a lot more meaningful if the US made these gestures in response to bad Israeli actions, in Gaza or in the settlements, for moral rather than political reasons, and so do I.

Certainly if there's any way the US government can stop American funding of the illegal settlements it should do so regardless of the political situation in Israel, and it's a colossal embarrassment that Israel has full control over the US vote in the Security Council, internationally counterproductive, allowing Russia and China to treat the US as hypocritical whenever we complain about their cynical votes, and just plain wrong.

I'd add that it's also unlikely to work at influencing the elections or having any effect on the Israeli government at all, though that's not a reason not to do it. And actual sanctions, as opposed to these suggested gestures at merely doing the right thing, might work still less. Even the best planned sanctions rarely if ever work unless there is a majority population in the sanctioned country that agrees with the purpose. As in South Africa. For Israel, as for Russia, the majority seems attached to the government's religion-tinged terror-mongering, and the case for sanctions depends on how deep that attachment might be.  (Timothy Garton Ash just offered an unconventional case for the ongoing sanctions on the Russian Federation: that they may be successful because they're not aimed at "regime change".)

Indeed the best thing to do about Israeli politics would be a lifting of sanctions—on Iran. We should be leading people everywhere to rethink their world-views, from the New York City Police Department to Tehran and Moscow, but in Jerusalem most of all.

The Children of Adam

The children of Adam are limbs of one body,
gems cut from a single essence.
When time wounds one limb,
the others are unbalanced.
If you cannot feel some of another's pain
perhaps you should not call yourself human.

—Saadi Shirazi