The talk these days centers on the question: Is President Barack Obama tough enough? And the answer is that it all depends what you mean. You can be resolutely tough and your stand may lead to a good outcome or you can fake a tough stand and you’ll probably get nowhere. Being a lawyer, Mr. Obama knows that when you have a good case, you tend to be resolutely tough wherein you’ll have a good chance at getting what is owed to you in a dignified way. But when you have a bad case you tend to bluff your way hoping to intimidate the opponent and perhaps confuse the judge but the gamble may not work. What follows is the tale of a real life situation which illustrates these points.
As per habit Israel has warned that if the world holds her accountable for the acts of terror she inflicts on the unarmed people of Palestine, such move will affect the peace process in the Middle East. Despite the fact that this is blackmail as glaring as blackmail can ever get, America fell for the ruse whose real intent is to prevent peace from happening not to speed up its advent. The occasion for pulling the ruse this time is the UN Report on Gaza which was prepared by Justice Richard Goldstone. The work clearly demonstrates that Israel’s behavior has set humanity back hundreds of years which is what Alan Dershowitz had promised us on a previous occasion.
Indeed, Dershowitz said that Israel reserves the right to commit every crime that anyone has ever committed, and Israel lived up to the promise once again as she has always done. This time Israel did it by killing Palestinian women, children and men indiscriminately then killing the animals on which they fed so as to starve the people she did not kill immediately. In doing this, the Israelis imitated the crimes committed by the early settlers in North America, those who wiped out the buffalo on which the natives fed to starve the ones they did not kill immediately.
And now Israel says that to question her actions by taking the Goldstone Report to the Security Council of the United Nations will make her torpedo the Middle East talks which aim at making peace with the Palestinians. Well, this too is a ruse that observers of the Middle East are familiar with. The fact is that the Israelis do not want a peace treaty with the Palestinians because it will legally and permanently define Israel’s borders. What they want instead is to continue living with the murky state of no-war-no-peace which allows them to nibble at Palestinian territory. They call this nibbling natural growth and they plan to keep on growing like a cancer till they chew up what is left of the Palestinian body. In the meantime, they will pretend to negotiate so as to see what concessions everyone is willing to make then work on the Americans to get them those concessions without giving anything in return. This is the Talmudic way of showing how smart you are; if smart enough to be called a rabbi even if you’re not one.
Incapable of understanding how the murky world of satanic talmudism works, the Americans fail to see that playing Israel’s game has the effect of turning the White House, the State Department, the Treasury and the Pentagon over to Alan Dershowitz and to all those like him. As for the US Congress, no one needs to worry about this one anymore as it has been chewed up by the Dershowitz Doctrine which metastasized in its bosom like a virulent cancer. If the Americans can be made to understand any of this, they may finally do what they ought to do. And to get an idea what that is, I relate an experience I once had to live through.
One Sunday morning long ago I received a phone call at home from a student I had while teaching at a “tough school” where the administration was more backward than the students were hopeless. I had left my job by mutual agreement having gotten ill and deciding it was time to do something less stressful than teach. The student that called me said he was speaking on behalf of the other students in my former two classes because they felt they were drowning without me teaching them, and they wanted me to help. Of all the ideas discussed, the caller suggested that I open a school and take in the 40 students or so in the two classes.
But that was a private school where students who did not make it in the regular system went to learn a trade. Their parents were paying as much as 7,000 dollars – now worth 12,000 -- to give their kids one last chance at making it in life. The amount of money involved was so big I was troubled by what the move will do to the parents who were paying and to the school that will lose the income if I took the students away. Besides, the students had a contract with the school and I was not sure how this will impact me legally. Thus, I needed the advice of a lawyer on that Sunday morning before deciding on anything. I told the student I’ll call him back as soon as I have something further to say on the subject.
I looked for a lawyer in the Yellow Pages and made a number of phone calls but only a handful answered. One who seemed to have what I was looking for in a lawyer took the time to put me at ease and I appreciated that. I went to see him in his office the next day as he was at a ten minutes walk from where I lived. Eventually this man became not only my lawyer but also my friend as he turned out to be a good human being. His name was Ralph Cohen, a well known figure in Montreal and apparently the friend of everyone. When he died, most radio and television stations in town mentioned his passing and many people missed him including me.
When I went to see Ralph the first time, I noticed how easily he could make things happen as he seemed to know everyone in town. He picked up the phone and started to work on the file in my presence. Two days later he had done all that was necessary to protect me and the students, had registered the corporation under which I could operate a private school and had found the space where to open the school. Thanks to him I was in business before the end of the week and everything went well. Things continued to go well for two more years till the time came to renew the covenant for the space I was leasing.
Unlike the first time when the lease was two pages long, this time it was made of something like 60 pages. There were a few things in it I did not like so I negotiated the changes whereby I made a few concessions to obtain a few from the landlord. The back-and-forth took a number of days while I was discussing the renewal of the license for the school with the Ministry of Education which, among other things, mandated a valid lease. The Ministry set a deadline for me to meet and the landlord came to know about it. His behavior began to change and I felt he was now dragging his feet. I got this feeling because every version he presented to me after each round of negotiations contained the concessions that I had made but none of what he made to obtain my concessions. I deduced that he wanted to take the negotiations up to the last minute then force his version of the covenant on me. It was a murky sort of game that rang bells with me.
To guard against the possibility of being cornered, I looked for another place to which I could move the school at a moment’s notice if worse came to worse. Luckily, a private school where I once taught had moved to another space and the old place was now vacant. I spoke with its landlord and explained that I may have to move at a moment’s notice. He said I could do anything I wanted because his nephew was once in my class when I was teaching in that very space. The boy had graduated, was now working and was making good money when the expectation was that he will lead a life of truancy, drugs and maybe jail. The landlord felt he owed me one and was eager to pay me back.
As I feared, things got steadily worse with the other landlord the more that we approached the Ministry’s deadline. I gathered the students who were a different batch from the one that started me off two years previous, and I told them what was happening. I expected them to protest the disruption but they surprised me by doing something nice. Some of them had parents who owned a business and they assured me they had the trucks and the manpower to move the school to the new place in two hours or less. All I had to do was give the word.
The day came and I had not signed the covenant so the students who were in their twenties and able bodied brought the trucks, their friends, some of their parents’ employees and they started to move the school. The landlord called the police and we had a three person conversation: the officer, the landlord and myself. The landlord wanted the officer to arrest me for moving out illegally. I said I was paid up to the end of the month which was days away, I had no lease to keep me beyond that date, I had a civil dispute with the landlord concerning the new lease and this was not a criminal matter. If something criminal was committed, it was the act of calling the police on a false pretense which is what the landlord did. If someone should be arrested, it will have to be the landlord. The officer gave the man a dirty look and the landlord walked away without saying another word.
A few days after I moved out, I started receiving letters from the old landlord asking me to pay for this or that, something I was inclined to do to put the matter behind me even though I did not owe the money. But knowing the character of the landlord, I decided not to respond right away so as not to get on a slippery slope with him early on and be surprised again and again with new demands. But the landlord precipitated the thing when he sent me a letter threatening legal action if I did not pay within 5 days. This is when I decided to go see my good friend Ralph Cohen.
Now picture this. The landlord was the son of a prominent Jewish businessman in Montreal who started small and built up an empire of stores, real estate and shopping centers. He was of the same age as Ralph Cohen and the two had lived in the same neighborhood while growing up. They went to the same schools, attended the same synagogues and were invited to the same Bar Mitzvahs. The son who was my landlord regarded Ralph as his uncle and Ralph reciprocated the sentiment. This reality alone gave me mixed feelings about the wisdom of taking the case to Ralph but I had no choice but to count on him diffusing the situation so I took the chance.
Walking into his office I wondered how this soft spoken, gentle human being will divide his loyalties and be fair to both sides. I soon got my answer when, upon hearing what happened, Ralph did something I never saw him do before; he expressed genuine anger. He became angry with the landlord especially that the latter called the police instead of asking him to intercede. Then, Ralph Cohen my lawyer instructed me not to pay this man one red cent and further told me to write back to him and say so. Now Ralph let me in on a little secret; he said I should end the letter by advising that if the landlord takes legal action, I shall oppose it vigorously. What this meant in the jargon of legalese, said my friend, is that I shall counter sue. After all, as he carefully explained to me, I sustained damages due to the landlord’s delaying tactics so much so that I was forced to move out just hours before the deadline set by the Ministry of Education. As instructed, I sent that letter to the old landlord and he never bothered me again.
There is a lesson here for the Americans: When you deal with characters like these, the mistake you must avoid making is to believe that you can get on a slippery slope with them, catch their hand in time and pull them up before they reach the level of the gutter. What will happen instead is that they will drag you down to the gutter which, you must understand, is their natural habitat. Thus, what you must do is act decisively against their maneuverings right from the start so as to maintain control of the situation throughout your engagement with them.
To this end, my advice is this: Let the Goldstone Report go to the Security Council and vote for it. Halt all cooperation with Israel until she stops the settlement activities and begins to dismantle some. But if Israel insists on building new settlements, treat her like the rogue state that she is and implement the sort of sanctions that will hurt. If this does not work, start bombing.
This is what it means to be tough the useful way. If and when America takes this stance, the winners will be the people of America, of Palestine and of Israel. And the whole world will be a better place for it.