[LINK] “A tale of two passports”

Efrat Neuman’s Haaretz article of the 15th of April describing how many Israelis who have ancestral claims to citizenship in one European Union member-state or another are trying to claims these citizenships, for reasons of personal advantage or security. Needless to say, it can be rather fraught, especially for Israelis whose ancestors–or who themselves–fled those member-states.

In the past few years, arranging a European passport has become a flourishing industry in Israel, with a plethora of websites explaining the rights one can expect to receive and explaining the factors that might facilitate the process. There are attorneys who specialize in the issuing of passports by different countries and check entitlement to naturalization, as well as translation and notary services.

The upsurge began about 10 years ago. Until then, most Israelis did not consider a Polish, Hungarian or Romanian passport to be of any value. These countries were not considered attractive targets for emigration, and their passport was no better than the Israeli one. But in 2004, 10 states were inducted into the European Union, mainly from Eastern Europe. The new member states included Poland, Hungary, Latvia and the Czech Republic. Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2007. Ever since, a Romanian passport, for example, is no longer considered merely a Romanian passport: Now it is a European passport that opens the door to life on the Continent, facilitating free passage between countries, easy movement of workers in EU member states ‏(subject to some restrictions‏), free university studies ‏(in some countries‏) or low tuition fees, entry without a visa to the United States and most other countries, and also commercial advantages.

[. . .]

Not everyone wants to receive a foreign passport, even if they meet the requirements. Seven years ago, when Romania joined the EU, Michaela’s children tried to convince her to apply for Romanian citizenship so that they, too, would benefit from citizenship and a foreign passport that would grant them free access to EU states. But she refused. As a Holocaust survivor whose family was expelled from the village in Romania where she grew up, she wanted nothing to do with the place where she was born and raised.

Not long afterward, the children traveled with their mother on a “family roots” trip to Romania. Her daughter recounts that after seeing up close the places where she spent her childhood and hearing at length what happened there, they for the first time identified with Michaela’s refusal to turn the clock back.

Similarly, the 60-year-old father of Gabi vehemently refuses to accept a foreign passport. However, after Gabi pressed and begged − on the grounds that it was worth having an option if something bad ever happened in Israel − his father reluctantly began the process. He traveled to the village in Romania where he was born to obtain his birth certificate, inquired as to the cost of submitting the request − and then regretted the decision.

Interestingly, the reason he gave was his children: He did not want them to have any incentive to leave Israel. Gabi’s father claimed that his own mother, who survived the Holocaust, had not relinquished her life and citizenship in Romania so her descendants could later do the same vis-a-vis Israel. The family disagreement has been raging for 10 years, and Gabi is still trying to persuade her father to change his mind.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Burgh Diaspora writes about the linkages between population and economic change.
• Centauri Dreams examines the discovery of stellar parallax and its use to determine the distance to the stars in the 19th century.
• The Dragon’s Tales examines computer models of the settlement of the Americas. The model of migration across Beringia remains intact, while transpacific migration can’t be excluded but can’t be supported by evidence, either.
• Eastern Approaches chronicles the ongoing ferment in Slovenia and the Czech immigrant history in Texas.
• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh warns that the seemingly inevitable slow-motion economic slide of Spain, trapped in the Eurozone and with an aging workforce, may be echoed more broadly.
• Language Hat comments on the NHL’s Punjabi-language broadcasts.
• Normblog’s Norman Geras assesses the moral implications of factories in Bangladesh in the light of the recent disaster (1, 2). More subtle and useful responses than a reflex action of shutting them down are needed.
• Torontoist details historical patterns of neglect of the site of Fort York.
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Eugene Volokh notes a court ruling in Israel which allows Jewish women to pray in front of the Western Wall without being arrested.
• Window on Eurasia notes the ruralization of Dagestan’s cities as the local Russian population leaves and rural migrants arrive, and the transition in Chechnya in the past decade towards a centralized and hierarchical culture under Kadyrov.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes UKIP’s desire to not bother researching and developing policy options on its own but rather borrowing them from established think tanks.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Behind the Numbers’ Carl Haub notes that several countries have seen their demographic transitions stall above replacement levels, notably post-Soviet countries but including outliers like Israel and Argentina.
• Beyond the Beyond’s Bruce Sterling describes the reception given to Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show in belle époque Europe.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster goes into detail about the implication of the discovery of hydrogen peroxide on Europa’s surface, and its implications for life in Europa’s oceans.
• Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram argues that while Margaret Thatcher may have managed to Americanize the United Kingdom, she certainly didn’t make it more egalitarian or meritocratic.
• Daniel Drezner wonders if the collapse of China’s overextended financial sector could have implications for the future of the Chinese government.
• Eastern Approaches has three recent posts of note: one regarding political maneuvering around arrests in an increasingly autocratic Ukraine; one from Hungary describing the resignation of a deputy governor of the Bank of Hungary, Julia Király, over concerns that the Orbán government’s populism could threaten the country’s future; and one from the Czech Republic, about an almost pleasingly non-catastrophic transition from one president to another.
• False Steps’ Paul Drye goes into detail about the orbital mirror proposed by some people in Nazi Germany. It would have worked, but just have been impractical.
• Geocurrents links to a map of endangered languages around the world.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer notes that official Argentine statistics might understate levels of poverty, but also notes that levels of poverty have improved markedly over the past decade. Why bad statistics, then?
• Torontoist blogs about a new tool library in the neighbourhood of Parkdale.
• A report from Towleroad: apparently it’s possibly to identify who, in a same-sex relationship, is more likely to be a top than a bottom and vice versa, on average.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Continuing on the Chelyabinsk meteor front, Bad Astronomy, Joe. My. God., and Towleroad all have more video and photos.
• 80 Beats confirms that cosmic rays–high-energy particle travelling the universe at the speed of light–are produced by supernovas.
• The Burgh Diaspora makes the point that higher density doesn’t necessarily translate to greater economic productivity.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster speculates about the consequences of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, pointing to the cargo cults of Melanesia.
• A Fistful of Euros’ Brent Whelan thinks that the left is poised to take over Italy in the coming elections.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig maps ethnicity and political parties in Israel.
• In a pair of posts at Lawyers, Guns and Money, the long-term consequences of the timber economy in northwestern North America are explored, among which is the presence of pot farmers opposed to legalizing marijuana.
• Torontoist reports on a pedestrians’ lobbyist group recently formed in Toronto.
• Window on Eurasia advances the argument of some that Russia is preparing to cut off the North Caucasus, severing the ties of these largely non-Russian districts and making them into satellites on the model of Abkhazia.

[LINK] “Marriage Made in Civil Heaven”

Zak Brophy’s Inter Press Service article describes the continuing absence of civil marriage in Lebanon, an intentional policy of the Lebanese state–as of most other Middle Eastern states, democratic Israel included–to prevent the emergence of a secular public sphere where religious sects would no longer be able to determine what sort of families get formed by who. Here’s hoping for change!

In Lebanon social and political integration is realised through sectarian affiliation; it is within the legal institutions of the 18 different religious sects that marriages are traditionally authorised. “It is really a different feeling when you feel like a human being getting married to another human being based on human rights and not on sectarian rights,” the groom, Nidal Darwish, tells IPS.

Darwish and his bride Kholoud Sukkariyeh tied the knot in a secret ceremony at her house with just her brother for a witness, and a notary to oversee the signing of the contract. But once their marriage entered the public domain it soon became a hot and controversial topic of discussion across the country. What may in many societies seem a trivial matter cuts deep into Lebanon’s social, political and religious fabric.

[. . .]

While the political community has come out split over the issue of civil marriage, there have been varying degrees of opposition from the religious establishments of different sects. The grand mufti of the Sunni Muslim community opposed the idea of civil marriage most virulently. He threatened in a religious edict, or fatwa, “Every Muslim official, whether a deputy or a minister, who supports the legalisation of civil marriage, even if it is optional, is an apostate and outside the Islamic religion.”

Civil marriages are not new per se to Lebanese couples. However, Darwish and Sukarriyeh broke the course set by thousands of other like-minded lovers who travel to foreign countries such as Cyprus or Turkey every year to tie the knot in a civil ceremony.

These marriages are recognised in Lebanon, and the Lebanese legal system can apply the civil marriage laws of the country in which the marriage was signed.

[. . .]

The dispute over the balance of religious and civil law in Lebanese society runs back to the very inception of the country and perhaps reached its apex in 2011 when tens of thousands of Lebanese, inspired by the successful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, took to the streets to protest against the sectarian system in its entirety.

The first civil personal status law was submitted to parliament in 1971 but was rejected, and the sectarian divisions within society only became further entrenched and exacerbated during the bitter civil war from 1975 to 1991.

In the wake of the conflict former president Elias Hrawi presented a draft law on civil marriage in 1998, which received the majority of votes in the cabinet. However, then prime minister Rafiq Hariri shelved the legislation and didn’t send it to parliament.

“Of course this was not legal but Hariri was was controlling the government to serve his position and the sects,” Tony Daoud, civil society activist with local NGO, Chaml tells IPS.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bag News Notes reacts to two photos reflecting the debate on gays in Scouting in the United States, one showing two proud parents with their two happy gay Scout sons, the other an anti-gay protesters standing in front of a crowd of silent Scouts.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster reacts to the news that a significant number of red dwarfs might support Earth-like worlds, noting that an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri–the dimmest and most distant member of the Alpha Centauri trinary–hasn’t been excluded.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that rhetoric on Iran has become so clichéd one may as well automate blogs about the ongoing crisis.
• At False Steps, Paul Drye considers Soviet plans in the 1980s for a successor to the Mir space station, noting that some design elements made it into the International Space Station.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s DJW argues that complementarian views of gender are wrong and destructive for men and for women, not least because it forces real people to conform to abstract–even unreal–ideologies.
• New APPS Blog’s Mohan Matthen wonders about the implications of Judith Butler’s support for the Brooklyn College conference on divestment from Israel.
• Norman Geras is rather unfair in thinking that Judith Butler opposes Jewish self-determination. It would be more accurate, given her support for diaspora communities, for her to argue that she doesn’t think Jewish self-determination should come at the expense of others.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer argues that fracking is going to be delayed if not blocked outright in Europe by the wastewater “flowback” produced by the process.
• Torontoist’s Kevin Plummer describes the sensational trial of Carrie Massie, an English servant in Toronto who, in 1915, shot her employer Charles “Bert” Massey after he allegedly tried to sexual assault her. (She got off.)
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes that Russian opposition to recognition of the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States is continuing to harden.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bruce Sterling, at Beyond the Beyond, takes a look at the applications of statistical analysis to the study of literature. (Apparently Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott were hugely influential.)
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster describes the latest on the nascent planetary system of TW Hydrae, a very young orange dwarf two hundred light-years away.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that the current informal global structures charged with managing international finances are actually working well.
• Eastern Approaches argues that anti-Americanism specifically, and xenophobia more commonly, is becoming normative in Russia, as demonstrated by recent laws passed covering everything from adoption to the mass media.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Scott Lemieux notes the irony of torture advocate Alan Dershowitz criticizing a conference on the Israeli occupation held in a New York City college as immoral.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen notes ads funded by the British government in Bulgaria and Romania actively trying to discourage potential migrants.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín points out the problems with the evangelical Christian campaigns against the sex trade, suggesting that they often fail to pick up on vital nuances (like, say, what the women involved actually want).
• At New APPS Blog, the threats against the conference mentioned at Lawyers, Guns and Money above–held at Brooklyn College–are detailed, and a call to support the college made.
• Window on Eurasia suggests that the plan by Uzbekistan’s government to shift the official script from Cyrillic to Latin will discourage reading generally and hit the provinces hard.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• BCer in Toronto and Liberal Party stalwart Jeff Jedras is happy that the NDP is encountering controversy on the national unity front.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster notes, briefly, exoplanets with retrograde orbits around their stars (revolving around their suns in a direction opposite their suns’ rotation).
• Cosmic Variance’s Julianne Dalcanton wonders if Google+ might have a future as a social network for niches, like young people who want to social network independent of their parents.
• Daniel Drezner notes that even Israeli hawks think Iran is several years from developing nuclear weapons. Why do some Americans choose to think otherwise?
• The Global Sociology Blog reviews Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, a book on Scientology that’s an expansion of Wright’s earlier article in The New Yorker.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan posts some personal research suggesting that speakers of Austro-Asiatic languages in South Asia are historically recent immigrants.
• Norman Geras posts excerpts from a Matthew Parris article in The Times pointing out, contra Argentine claims of British colonialism re: the Falklands, that Argentina’s own very white population is a product of its own genocidal state-building imperialism in the 19th century.
• Torontoist’s Steve Kupferman notes that Ana Bailão, my city councillor, has pled guilty to charges of drunk driving, paying a thousand dollar fine.
• Inspired by Aaron Swartz, the Volokh Conspiracy’s Orin Kerr starts a debate as to what the prosecution should do if a defendant becomes suicidal.
• Window on Eurasia posts an article suggesting that the Circassian diaspora is caught between two very strong globalization currents, one Westernizing them the other Islamizing them.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling considers the grim future of e-book readers. Why a dedicated reader when a generalist tablet would do just as well?
• Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams summarizes a paper by one Duncan Horgan examining the efficiencies of different propulsion methods for interstellar probes.
• Far Outliers’ Joel compares early modern English and Spanish expansion, arguing that each imperial power began by colonizing an adjacent area (Ireland in the case of England, al-Andalus and the Canaries in the case of Spain).
• The Global Sociology Blog argues that the political concept of “traditional family” should die a quick death in the face of the diversity of real families.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen suggests that German hostility to American-style immigration policies favouring low-skilled workers explains why robotic mowers are more successful on the German market–capital substitutes for labour.
• At The Power and the Money, Doug Muir makes predictions about the future of Syria. He expects Assad’s defeat after a long drawn-out battle, and bad things happening thereafter.
• Registan’s Nathan Hamm is unimpressed by the quality of the PR consultants hired by the fame-seeking daughter of Uzbekistan’s dictator, Gulmara Karimova.
• Torontoist describes how, in 1993, a lawyer on the 24th story of a Bay Street tower ran into a window panel and fell out, to his death. True story.
• Understanding Society examines what assumptions underlying talking about the “social sciences” as the “human sciences”. (Emphasizing the importance of history and the interpretive nature of human sciences as contrasted to the empiricism of natural sciences is key.)
• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Kontorovich contrasts and compares Israel settlement policies on the West Bank with Turkish settlement policies in North Cyprus, making a case that Turkish settlement is a more substantial effort.

[LINK] “Are the Palestinians Ready to Share a State With Jordan?”

Daoud Kuttab’s article in The Atlantic suggesting that a Jordanian confederation with the West Bank might be a partial solution to the Palestinian impasse strikes me as unlikely, not least because even if a West Bank state–presumably viable, with adequate land and resources for its population–was federated with Jordan, the question of what to do with Gaza would remain. The 2008 downing of the Egypt-Gaza border fence and more recent rapprochement doesn’t mean that Egypt is going to take up Gaza as a protectorate.

In the summer of 1993, I was granted a rare scoop as a Palestinian journalist: an exclusive interview with the prime minister of Israel at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, the first ever given to a reporter working for a leading Palestinian newspaper. Midway way through the one-hour meeting, I asked Rabin for his vision as to the ultimate political status of the West Bank and Gaza in 15 or 20 years. Rabin, who at the time, we later discovered, had approved the Oslo back-channel, took a puff at a cigarette given to him by one of his aides, and answered that he envisions It being part of an entity with Jordan.

I remember this response almost 20 years later, and at a time now when the Oslo Accords — which Rabin signed on the White House lawn in September 1993 — have all but been declared dead by all parties involved. Mahmoud Abbas, who signed the Memorandum of Understanding with Israel on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that fall, is now on the verge of leaving political life with no clear successor for him or for the Palestinian Authority that has been established in parts of the West Bank since the agreement’s implementation in 1995.

The failure of this approach has led some to suggest other avenues of breaking up the logjam — the result of U.S. President Barack Obama’s lack of political will and the failure of the rest of the world to pick up the pieces without U.S. involvement. It is in this political limbo that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finding itself toying with an old-new formula: A role for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

In a meeting with members of the Ebal charity in October, which is made up of Jordanians of Palestinian (Nablus) origin and hosted by Jordan’s speaker of the upper house, Taher al Masri, Jordan’s Prince Hassan bin Talal opened up the issue. In the speech, recorded and posted on the jordandays.tv website, the prince stressed that the West Bank is part of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which includes “both banks of the [Jordan] River.” He added that he “did not personally oppose the two-state solution,” but that this solution is irrelevant at the current stage.

The October 9 talk received little attention until a former PLO leader repeated the idea, albeit in a different tone. Farouk al Qadoumi, one of the founders of the PLO’s Fatah movement, gave an interview to the London-based Al Quds Al Arabi, in which he suggested the return of the West Bank to Jordan as part of a federation or a confederation. Qadoumi, who opposed the Oslo Accords and has refused to step foot in the Palestinian Authority areas, has little clout in the PLO, and at one time accused Abbas of being behind the poisoning of the late Yasser Arafat. Qadoumi’s statement was quickly opposed by the secretary of the PLO, Yaser Abed Rabo, who called it “naïve.”

But earlier this month, Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported that Abbas informed several PLO leaders “to be prepared for a new confederation project with Jordan and other parties in the international community,” and that his office has already issued reports that evaluate “the best strategies to lead possible negotiations with Jordan” toward “reviving the confederation.” He has reportedly asked PLO officials to prepare themselves to pursue this strategy. This report, if confirmed by official sources, could be a watershed moment for the Palestinian national movement, and the highest profile endorsement of this persistent proposal.