Author: Martin Kramer

The importance of being Neal

On By Martin Kramer

This month, Mosaic’s founding editor, Neal Kozodoy, officially stepped back from his duties and handed the reins over to Jonathan Silver. He will stay on as editor-at-large. (Read more about the change here.) To commemorate his editorship, Mosaic asked several of its regular writers to reflect on what Neal has meant to them and what they accomplished together. Below is my contribution. Go here to read the contributions by Eric Cohen, Ruth Wisse, Hillel Halkin, and Meir Soloveichik.

Neal Kozodoy has been editing me for a very long time. I published my first review in Commentary in 1981, and my first full-length article in 1993, when Neal was number two there. I continued to write for Commentary during his editorship, and then I followed him to Mosaic.

There, since 2014, I’ve published, by last count, 31 pieces, each one an editorial dance with Neal. I keep returning to him for a simple reason: Neal vastly improves everything he touches. That makes him a magnet for serious writers, who become addicted to his sound judgment.

I’ll offer just one example, but a telling one. Neal edits with a reader’s eye. Authors, especially academic ones like myself, tend to write for other authors. But when Neal edits, he becomes an advocate for readers who aren’t authors, and who certainly aren’t academics.

This was obvious at Commentary, a mass-circulation print magazine. But when Neal moved to Mosaic, I thought to myself: “Ah, here’s a chance to slip into a more scholarly mode. Internet publications have hyperlinks! Now I can do what I could never do at Commentary: provide a pyrotechnic display of my erudition, through elaborate links.”

And so I did. I wrote a monthly essay, my first, laden with hyperlinks, sending the reader to the source of every amazing fact and every remarkable quote. When Neal returned his edited version, he had worked his customary magic on the text. But much to my consternation, he’d cut out the vast majority of the hyperlinks.

I objected. After all, the advantage of the Internet over the paper journal is its marvelous ability to source everything at a click. Why not exploit that advantage to the full? It was here that Neal shared with me the wisdom he’d accumulated not just as an editor, but as a reader.

To read an article on the screen, he explained, is a very different experience than reading it on paper. Yes, the text is more readily accessible, at any place and on any device. But it’s embedded in a medium which, by its nature, is rife with distracting temptations. The reader is never more than a click away from straying off in another direction.

One never knows where that exploration might lead, and that is the Internet’s appeal. But if an author is to keep his reader with him for the duration of an extended essay, it’s crucial to banish temptation, in the guise of the flashing hyperlink. Such a link isn’t comparable to a footnote in a printed text. That footnote won’t send the reader very far away—just to the bottom of the page or the back of the book. But a hyperlink may send that same reader to another world, perhaps never to return.

It’s not just that Neal was right—he usually is. It was his philosophy: we must write for readers, not for writers; and the reader, like the proverbial customer, is always right. As an editor, Neal is the author’s ally, but he is also the reader’s best advocate.

I later republished that first Mosaic essay in a paper book. There it has 125 footnotes, and that’s where they belong. As hyperlinks, each one would have been a landmine, ready to go off under my own foot. Ever since then, in my writing for Mosaic and elsewhere, a hyperlink has to make a very strong case for inclusion. Only a handful do.

Not every editor has successfully transitioned from paper to pixel. Neal did, because he grasped something timeless about authorship and readership: it’s a romance. It flourishes best in a quiet room, behind a closed door. Mosaic, his concept and creation, has become a model for delivering long-form writing in a medium engineered for distraction. It is a work of pure genius, and only he could have invented it.

Free online course! Declaring Israel’s Independence

On By Martin Kramer

“We hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.” That declaration by David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv on Friday afternoon, May 14, 1948, the Fifth of Iyar, 5708, is the most significant and consequential sentence uttered by a Jew since antiquity.

It put an end to 2,000 years of dispersion and exile, and announced the restoration of sovereign self-determination to the Jews in their own land. “We hereby declare” is the modern equivalent of the Biblical “Hineini,” an affirmation of presence, and an assumption of responsibility. And it is the key passage in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That declaration is the topic of my free online course “Declaring Israel’s Independence,” an educational program of the Tikvah Fund.

You’ll discover the rich history of the declaration, the heated debates surrounding its drafting, and the drama-filled back stories behind May 14. Watch these seven lectures, take your Israel-literacy to a new level, and become an expert in your own right in advance of Israel’s Independence Day next month. Enroll here.

And view the trailer:

The Trump plan: history doesn’t run in reverse

On By Martin Kramer

On February 5, Gregg Roman of the Middle East Forum interviewed me on the Trump plan for Israel and the Palestinians. I’ve written about it elsewhere; in the interview, I offer some further reflections. (If you prefer, click here to listen.)

MEF: What’s your take on the Trump peace plan?

Kramer: Well, the first thing you have to do is separate analysis of the plan from the partisan political atmosphere that prevails the United States today, and just look at the plan on its merits and limitations. I understand that’s hard to do, but it’s really important because otherwise, you’re letting your political prejudice influence your analysis, and we want to neutralize that.

The plan has three key levels of analysis that you could do. There are the assumptions of the plan; there are the principles of the plan; and there are the details of the plan. It’s important not to reverse the order of discussion and get lost in the details before you look at the assumptions and the principles.

The core assumption is that the end of the conflict is important. [Otherwise,] why have a proposal? There have been administrations that didn’t make a proposal. The Obama administration basically dropped the whole issue at one point, and focused elsewhere. The idea that resolving the conflict could have a positive effect on the US position in the Middle East and on Israel’s position in the Middle East, is the basic underlying assumption of this initiative.

There’s a bit of linkage here—in other words, it’s important because it connects with the way the US is perceived in the region and the way Israel is perceived in the region.

So that’s one core assumption. The second core assumption is that you can’t reverse history, history only goes in one direction.

And that’s reflected in the principles. Now there are two key principles here. One is that there’s no way that you’re going to see the massive movement of peoples or parts of peoples as a consequence of, or as an element in, any solution. What does that mean? Anyone who thinks that 80,000, or 50,000, or 20,000 settlers can be removed from settlements under any political constellation which is imaginable in Israel today, is simply dreaming. It’s not going to happen.

And the second, that anyone who imagines that the West Bank or Gaza could absorb other huge numbers of Palestinian refugees—really, descendants of refugees—from other countries, is also dreaming.

So everyone stays in place in this plan. And I think that’s a core principle.

Another core principle—and you can’t get around it—is that the United States remains committed to a two-state solution. It has been since 1947. Even a man now described as Israel’s best friend ever still cannot put a plan on the table that doesn’t highlight two states.

The rest are details. We can discuss the details; [but] I think that they’re the most flexible part of the plan. In fact, Jared Kushner indicated they’re all open to negotiation. I’d say that even includes Jerusalem; it certainly includes the borders that are proposed on the conceptual map.

So, in a way, it’s pointless to get lost in the details at this point. It’s much more important to focus on the assumptions and the principles.

MEF: So let’s talk about the conditioning of the Palestinian people before we even have any principles associated with the peace deal. Because as far as they’re concerned, anything that this president or Benny Gantz or Benjamin Netanyahu offers to them, they’ll say no. A hundred years of Palestinian rejectionism.

And I’m sure you’re familiar with the campaign that the Middle East Forum ran in Israel last summer, associated with our Israel Victory Project: the idea that you can only make peace with defeated enemies, those who recognize a sense of defeat. What’s your take on that idea? Do you think that there’s a way for the Palestinians to give up on sumud, their “steadfastness,” the rejectionism, sarbanut as it’s called in Hebrew, or are we in for this for another hundred years?

Kramer: Look, let me first begin by making a minor correction to the way you described the plan. You called it a “peace plan.” It’s not a peace plan, it’s a partition plan. And a partition plan doesn’t have to be accepted—no partition was ever accepted by the Palestinians—in order to have historic effects. The 1947 plan by the United Nations, which was accepted by the Zionist movement, and was rejected by the Palestinians, still had transformative historic effects: creation of the State of Israel.

What characterizes a partition plan, is that basically it’s a proposal of a third party, looking from the outside, that has some authority, whether it be the British in 1937 when they proposed a partition plan, or the United Nations in 1947, or the United States today. So in a way, the importance of the plan transcends whether either of the parties accepts it.

And I don’t think that the Palestinians can accept it, or will accept it, given the state of their myth-making in their political vision. There are plenty of elements in the plan which Israel really can’t accept either, although Israel will accept the assumptions and the principles without accepting necessarily the details.

But that doesn’t mean that the plan won’t have an effect. The question is, even if the plan is never implemented (and it will never be implemented in all its details), what will be its historic effect?

What will be transformative here for the Palestinians is that they will begin to understand that history only runs in one direction, and the world is moving gradually to an accommodation with the facts of history. The Palestinians haven’t done that. And the reason they haven’t—part of the reason—isn’t just because they’re hidebound. It’s because the world has told them again and again that history can be reversed. Even the United States at various times has told them that history can be reversed. When people stop telling Palestinians that history can be reversed, that is the beginning of wisdom for the Palestinians. That’s the effect of the plan.

And that’s why the plan is so important. It begins with the United States, it will percolate to other states in the West and Arab states, and the Palestinians will begin to understand that their demand for the reversal of history has no support from anyone else.

MEF: You write, in an article that you wrote on the 102nd anniversary of the Balfour plan on October 31 of last year, regarding this issue, that the declaration “did clearly mark the beginning of the end of the Jewish problem as Weizmann and the Zionists understood it: a total absence of power that left the Jews as wanderers, vulnerable and weak.” What will it take to realize, on the Palestinian side, that there is a vacuum of power there, they have no legitimacy in the eyes of many Arab states (in the eyes of the Arab populations, maybe)? They have no ability to tell their leaders what to do unless they openly revolt and even if that happened, the IDF might come in and save those leaders who are providing sort of a Faustian bargain for security as it relates right now to, at least, the West Bank. And they’re suffering; their brand is crisis. How do we get the Palestinians to realize, like the Jews realized—I guess it was 1948, seventy-two years ago now—that the gig is up, you’ve lost, it’s time to develop your own polity not based on rejecting another. How do we get there?

Kramer: Well, you just did it yourself. You have to begin to tell them the truth. Now coming from Martin Kramer, or from you, it will have no effect on them whatsoever. But when they start to hear it from the very same quarters which historically and traditionally have been supportive of their demands, then that will begin to have an effect.

And that’s why, as I’ve argued elsewhere, what’s really important, [in order] for the Trump plan to have that historic effect, [is that it] be marketed to the Europeans, to the Russians, to the Arabs, so that while they may not endorse it—in fact, very few of them will openly endorse it and many will reject it—they will begin to echo some of the assumptions and principles that are in the plan, and go to the Palestinians and say: “Look, we understand why you reject the plan, it’s full of flaws, and so on and so on. But the basic assumptions and principles have some validity.” And when the Palestinians begin to hear that from friends—not from you and me but from their friends—then that will have an effect.

Much of the responsibility for the predicament of the Palestinians today lies not just on them but on their friends, or would-be friends, or supposed friends, who lied to them, misled them and promised they would deliver to them on fantasies, which were completely detached from reality.

I think Jared Kushner wouldn’t see the Trump plan as some unilateral American act. Even the Balfour Declaration was cleared with all Britain’s allies in advance, as I showed that in an earlier study. It was like a Security Council resolution in practice. The US has put this plan on the table. Now what it has to do is, not to get the endorsement of the full plan from anyone, but get other parties to echo elements of its assumptions and principles, and play those back to the Palestinians.