 as a statement of what makes America American, James Bryce’s masterpiece, 

, made its debut in 1888. It has been regularly republished — if not necessarily read — ever since. Between 1910 and 1917 alone, it was reprinted nine times. Almost a century later, electronic editions are freely available online.

What makes a classic a classic? Over the course of two volumes and 123 chapters, the author surveys virtually everything Americans do in public, with a particular soft spot for buttons — feminism, higher education, immigration, race relations — that remain as hot now as they were in his own time. Chapter 108 addresses American oratory. “The House of Representatives has at no period of its history shone with lights of eloquence,” the author notes. Chapter 119 addresses the pleasantness of American life. “It is impossible not to be infected by the buoyancy and hopefulness of the people,” the author reports. Those were the days.

chapter eight, “Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents,”

 has consistently stood out in the crowd. Its title alone — a statement, not a question — has been catnip for commentators ever since Benjamin Harrison (who was never accused of being a great man) beat Grover Cleveland in the Electoral College. This side of “Cruelty and Clemency, Whether it is better to be feared than loved, or vice versa,” chapter 17 of Machiavelli’s 

, it is hard to think of another to match it. Even without the chapter title, the section has earned a place of honor as an uncommonly qualified observer’s answer to an unstated but perennially interesting question of American governance.

Half favorite uncle, half interested visitor to the zoo, Bryce’s measured tone is reason enough to read 

. Like the rest of us, he missed a few. “I need not say that I am and always have been opposed to the Women’s Suffrage,” Bryce told a friend, the historian Goldwin Smith, in the high summer of the movement. In fact, Bryce was a firm supporter of women’s education — but it still had some way to go, he declared. A political liberal in Britain, he understood the importance of the enfranchisement of classes, but he neither would nor could regard women as a class.

Whether as a historian, jurist, parliamentarian, diplomat, or mountain climber, he was nonetheless among the more far-sighted public figures of his time — even literally. "You all know the spot at which Wisconsin Avenue intersects Massachusetts Avenue,” he observed in 1913 as he prepared to leave Washington after six productive years as Britain’s ambassador to the United States. “At that point of intersection, just opposite where the Episcopal Cathedral is to stand, there is one spot commanding what is one of the most beautiful general views of Washington.” 

The National Cathedral now towers over the site

, but at the time of Bryce’s writing, its construction had just begun. “All that land is being now cut up, and after two years nobody will ever see that view again except from the tower of the cathedral when erected,” he noted presciently. “Can it be saved?" The answer was effectively no, Undersecretary of the Interior 

 in 1965. But it was at least possible to dedicate Bryce’s “little open space triangle” as Bryce Park.

A different testimonial to Bryce’s views and vision, a bronze bust by Sir William Reid Dick, who later did an FDR for London’s Grosvenor Square and a Lady Godiva for Coventry, has meanwhile graced the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol since 1922, the year of Bryce’s death. “Most Americans,” wrote Bryce, considered the Senate “one of the successes of their Constitution, a worthy monument of the wisdom and foresight of its founders.” Of hundreds who pass the statue every day, few are likely to notice, and fewer still to recognize it. Its expression can be read as dignified and statesmanly, but a plausible alternative reading suggests more sorrow than anger.

Still, for most of us, chapter eight, with its emblematic title, is not only his most significant monument, but a welcome counterweight to the quadrennial crush of caucuses, primaries, blogs, podcasts, talking heads, 24/7 news cycles, algorithm–targeted mailbox stuffers, e-mail solicitations, and dinnertime phone calls we live with today. Much of Bryce’s argument, in fact, looks disarmingly familiar.

Given the constraints on the presidency — term limits, limited authority, and few resources to reward both friends and the faithful — Bryce seems pleasantly surprised that the institution works as well as it does. With 

 still resounding in his time (in ways likely to resonate with a generation that 

), he devotes several pages to the baroque eccentricities of the Electoral College.

He also appreciates why and how the dynamics of campaign ticket-building may favor vice presidential candidates who 

advocate shooting wolves from helicopters

. “The trivial and mechanical parts of his work leave too little leisure for framing large schemes of policy,” he notes, “while in carrying them out he needs the cooperation of Congress, which may be jealous, or indifferent, or hostile.” No president before or after Bryce would likely quarrel with that. “Yet it has often been the fashion in America to be jealous of the president’s action,” he adds a few sentences later, “and to warn citizens against what is called ‘the one man power.’”

While he considers policy failures the fault of the individual leader, he has no illusions about the fault lines in both the institution and the electoral process. The “ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity,” he notes en route.

Aspiring candidates, as he sees it, are strongly tempted to avoid making enemies or, to put it less charitably, to pander. Every four years, an election campaign screws up governance from midsummer to November — and what Bryce referred to was an inconvenience extending over one year, not the two we now take for given. “There is some political education in the process,” he acknowledges fair-mindedly, “but it is bought dearly, not to add that business, and especially finance, is disturbed and much money spent unproductively.” Classics don’t become classics for nothing. Prescient again, he notes that term limits systemically lead to government by lame duck, a problem not associated with kings and prime ministers.

Classics don’t become classics for nothing.

So why was it that great presidents seemed to have vanished with the founding fathers, with nothing to match them again till Lincoln? “Who now knows or cares to know anything about the personality of James K. Polk or Franklin Pierce?” he asks demonstratively. “The only thing remarkable about them is that being so common place, they should have climbed so high.”

A major reason for America’s unimposing presidents, he suggested, was an unimposing political class. In France, he argued, public life was both accessible and exciting. In Germany, a highly professional civil service offered on-the-job training and respected careers in public administration. In Britain, the “burning questions” of political life attracted “many persons of wealth and leisure,” himself included. In America, on the other hand, “much of the best ability” went into business, not least, as the legendary Willy Sutton might have added, because that too was where the money was.

A second reason for endemic mediocrity, as Bryce saw it, could be found in “the methods and habits of Congress, and indeed of political life generally,” that offered so few opportunities to shine. It was ritually claimed that any boy could become president — so long, at least, as he was white and Protestant. To a point that was even true, But no reader of Henry Adams’s 

, one of America’s few notable political novels by an author who knew his Washington and considered government his family business, would necessarily see this as a strong case for a career in politics. Nor would readers of Horatio Alger. To a boy, his little heroes — Paul the Peddler, Ben the Luggage Boy, Phil the Fiddler, et al. — aspire to perform a heroic deed, get the attention of a Daddy Longlegs, and make good. What they don’t do is aspire to be speaker of the House or the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee.

Nearly a century before the coming of Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, or even Matt Drudge, Bryce saw a third reason why great men aren’t presidents: the stress of public life. “Fiercer far than the light which beats upon a throne is the light which beats upon a presidential candidate, searching out all the recesses of his past,” he observed. “Hence, when the choice lies between a brilliant man and a safe man, the safe man is preferred.”

Two more potential banana peels complete the list. The first was essentially personal: a potentially good president might not be a good candidate. As Lyndon Johnson famously said, you can’t be a statesman until you get elected. The other hazards were systemic. Did the candidate, irrespective of merit, come from a swing state or one with a heap of electoral votes? Was he a Roman Catholic? Until Kennedy, it was a net handicap. Was he black? Until Obama, it was hopeless. From Grant to McKinley, on the other hand, service in the Union Army was not only a plus, it was practically a prerequisite. Distinguished service in World War II was another asset — at least until George McGovern.

For all that, Bryce’s prognosis is bleakly hopeful. “Unfortunate the country that has no heroes,” says one of Galileo’s protégés in Brecht’s mid-20th-century masterpiece, 

. “No,” Galileo replies. “Unfortunate the country that needs heroes.” Bryce was already ahead of him by at least half a century.

Great presidents may be rare, he wrote, because great men — and women — are rare in politics. They may be rare because the system is uncongenial to their particular greatness. But they may also be rare, he concluded, “because they are not, in quiet times, absolutely needed.”

“Of Presidents since 1900, it is not yet time to speak,” he added in a prudent footnote. We can only wonder – but can probably guess - what he would consider it not yet time to speak of their successors a century later.

The Violin: A Social History of the World’s Most Versatile Instrument 

and a former scholar at the Wilson Center.

shutterstock_124053223.jpg

Second only to Tocqueville in exploring what makes America American, James Bryce’s “The American Commonwealth” made its debut in 1888. One chapter title in particular sticks with us.

A question asked since 1888: Why can’t great men be president?

since its debut in 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB)

 is again due for congressional maintenance and repair. But this year’s outcome could well be a new model.

Time for the No. 2 pencils. Which of the following best describes NCLB?

a) What a new administration meant by “compassionate conservatism.”

b) Washington’s most ambitious experiment in public education since 

c) An object lesson, valid for both left and right, that all that’s needed to turn “test” into “testy” is a “y” — or “why.”

The answer, of course, is all of the above.

The Student Success Act, the follow-up generation of NCLB which the current House prefers

, leaves much of the federal role behind. 

The Senate’s take on the situation, the Every Child Achieves Act

, includes art and music, and allows for a fair degree of autonomy at the local level.

Either way, the rollout will be news. NCLB has been a beacon and an act of faith practically from conception. But it has also been an election year piñata.

So what else is new? Not much, actually. Innovations in their times, 

 extended the role of Washington as they extended access to college. 

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, NCLB’s ancestor

 with its roots in President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, was the first major piece of legislation to declare quality K-12 education as a national responsibility. Months after 1964’s Democratic landslide, the bill cleared the House with a bipartisan vote, 263–153, and sailed through the Senate, 73–18. Not one to pass up a bit of theater, Johnson then signed it into law in the one-room schoolhouse where he had learned to read.

Subject to reauthorization at five-year intervals, the 2001 version began where its predecessor left off. But this time, it emerged rebranded with 10-figure budgetary carrots balanced by tough-love accountability sticks. The 107th Congress was as different from the 89th Congress as the War on Terror was different from the War on Poverty, but great expectations and good intentions extended across the decades. A House of 221 Republicans and 211 Democrats supported NCLB, 384–45. A senate split 50-50 along partisan lines passed it by a towering 91–8.

As in 1965, commitment reached all the way to the top. 

President Johnson had been a teacher himself

President George W. Bush was married to one

 show Congressman John Boehner, then chairman of the House Education committee, with the late Senator Edward Kennedy in the obligatory scrum around the president’s desk. Both are beaming. This side of 

Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn

, it’s hard to think of another photo quite like it.

But just as in arms control, trust went with verify, and verify meant tests consensually acceptable to all interested parties — including parents, teachers, employers, legislators, and entire regions. By 2007, when NCLB again came due for overhaul, trust was showing signs of wear and verification had clearly become a challenge.

Resistance grew incrementally, but when it came it arrived with exclamation points. In 2014,

 92 percent of third- to eighth-graders in Boiceville, a small town in Ulster County, New York

, took the English test required by state law. A year later, a teacher-supported, parent-led coalition of the unwilling had reduced compliance to one in three.

 In a recent study by Harvard’s Equality of Opportunity Project

, Ulster County was in the bottom fourth of the nation’s 2,478 U.S. counties when ranked for upward mobility.

The battle over testing was no less arduous in comfortably affluent Montgomery County, Maryland, which ranks in the top fourth nationally. On the eve of the 2015–16 school year, the Montgomery County school board already wants to phase out middle school final exams, with high school finals next for the chopping block. The idea, the board argues, is to free up time for more consequential exams like SAT, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate — though it is suspected that their decision was colored by the district’s high failure rates on standardized math tests.

With Tea Party partisans and teachers’ unions shoulder-to-shoulder on one side, and business groups and the NAACP on the other, 42 states have already been allowed to

 opt out of at least some part of NCLB’s testing component

“You could write a really good history … about our tendency to go from one extreme to the other,” Robert Pondiscio, vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation,

. In the meantime, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the last survivor of the original Team Obama, continues to strive for the middle.

Michael Young coined the word “meritocracy,” a term he meant satirically. 
He would almost certainly find our current uncritical usage hilarious.

We can only wonder what doctoral candidates yet unborn will make of all this. But they might look to 

 for cues. First published in 1958, Young’s essay would go through eight paperback editions between 1961 and 1971, before vanishing unaccountably into the memory hole. Yet more than half a century later, it remains at least as much a dystopia for our times as 

Young even added to the language — “meritocracy” is his invention

. It was meant to be satirical; a self-taught sociologist with an uncommon sense of humor, he would almost certainly find our current uncritical usage hilarious.

His choice of time and place has Orwellian resonances, too. With the year 2034 approaching, his narrator, identified only as “the author of this essay,” is desperate to figure out why a process that has so clearly served Britain’s national interest for nearly a century is apparently headed for a trainwreck, of all places, at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester.

 St. Peter’s Field was the scene of a historic demonstration

 in a country where only the Two Percent qualified to vote. With as many as 60,000 to 80,000 protesters gathered to demand parliamentary reform, local authorities called in the military to break up the crowd. The casualties included at least 15 dead and somewhere between 400 and 700 injured. Ever since, the melee has been known as “Peterloo,” an ironic reference to the climactic Napoleonic battle four years earlier.

While it’s tempting to read 2034, the date of Young’s impending general strike, as 1984 plus 50 years, nothing in the text confirms intent. But the choice of place, like Orwell’s, is an imaginary postwar Britain, extrapolated from current history. A couple of preliminary nods acknowledge the coming of universal elementary education and a professional civil service in 1870–71. But the Education Act of 1944 is Young’s launching pad.

For the first time, any kid with the right stuff to pass “The Test” — an allegorical equivalent of Britain’s eleven-plus exam — was entitled to a place at a college prep high school. The idea was in part equal opportunity and social justice. But it was also a hard-won awareness that bright young minds, irrespective of class, were a national security asset, as vital to postwar competitiveness as to the current war effort. From there on, it was full STEM ahead and the best for the brightest.

Within a generation, the investment in teacher salaries and generous teacher-student ratios had paid off in economic innovation and a spike in gross national product. Businesses scouted out high IQs the way sports teams hunt for ace players. In a world of postwar superpowers, little Britain was again a contender.

More and better tests screened candidates and allocated winners. Estate and capital gains taxes leveled the playing field. When rising wages tempted working-class kids to drop out, the obvious solution was pay them more money to keep them in school.

When those who could afford it continued to send their kids to the iconic boarding schools, the answer was simple: make the real public schools — known in Britain as state schools — so attractive that the so-called public schools could only hope to catch up. “So quickly did some of them learn,” Young’s anonymous author reports, “that Eton … was the first school to install a cyclotron, and Christ’s Hospital the first to send a parcel of boys to the moon.” Was each new graduating class better than the last one? Another easy one: forget seniority and lower the retirement age.

There were also consolation prizes for the losers. Workers were now called technicians. Late bloomers could apply for retesting every five years. Their schools encouraged handicrafts, gymnastics, and sports as both skill- and morale-builders. Parents who didn’t make the cut could console themselves that their children or at least their grandchildren would. A Pioneer Corps recruited people who really liked collecting garbage and delivering Meals on Wheels.

But none of this came without a price, and of course there were serpents in the garden. Automation had sinister consequences for skilled, and even more so for unskilled, labor. New tests could already pick winners in utero, making retesting redundant. Four generations of upward mobility left fewer and fewer qualified children behind. The law of diminishing returns levelled off the progressive improvement of graduating classes.

Then came the problem of income distribution. It was true that the economy was a thumping success. It was only fair that the best — that is, those who do the heavy intellectual lifting — should get the most. But investment levels had to be maintained if Britain were to remain the economic superpower it had become. That didn’t leave much wiggle room for raising minimum wages.

Yet all of these problems ought to be manageable, the narrator insists. So why is this a crisis now?

 For Young, who was still protesting the treatment of immigrant hospital staff on his deathbed

, this last part may have been the most fun to write.

The answer is a gang of three, respectively from left, middle, and right. On the face of it, they have little in common, but together they constitute a critical mass.

The left, a coalition of aging union secretaries and hippie graduates of the Oxbridge women’s colleges, insists that there is more to life than STEM and money, and that all jobs are created equal.

The middle is a women’s movement, upset in part by unequal benefits for equal (and more than equal) work but also by a eugenics campaign that encourages men with best-and-brightest IQs to consult the national eugenics registry before marrying their secretaries.

The right, made up of new, high-IQ conservatives, is eager to make itself hereditary, but also anxiously aware that mobility can be downward as well as upward. It has therefore re-created private elementary schools to buffer its kids against competition from their technician contemporaries, while supporting a flourishing black market in babies with promising genomes.

The scenario ends with the author whistling in the dark. We can expect a bumpy ride, he tells us, but the status is reassuringly quo, with minimal risk that the train will leave the rails. As it turns out, the assurance is a bit premature.

What can we learn from the story? Time again for the No. 2 pencils.

c) Find a copy of Young’s little masterpiece in the nearest used book store, and send it to the candidate of your choice.

 The Violin: A Social History of the World’s Most Versatile Instrument 

Cover image from Young’s original book jacket

meritocracy222.jpg

The standardized testing craze — and backlash — brings to mind a forgotten masterpiece, 1958’s “The Rise of the Meritocracy.”

“Meritocracy” and the rise of standardized tests

Everything is very simple, said Carl von Clausewitz. But the simplest thing is difficult.

He was talking about war, but he could as easily have been talking about “The Eastern Question” — 19th century diplomatspeak for what to do about the Ottoman Empire. Or the geopolitical tangle 

Princeton historian L. Carl Brown would call “the most ‘penetrated’ diplomatic system in the world” 150 years later

. Or the nation-state called Israel and the non-state nation called Palestine.

Whether as egg or as chicken, any one of them was practically guaranteed to lead to the other. Already on the skids by the time Clausewitz died in 1831, the Ottoman Empire would eventually disappear. The Gallipoli campaign, a century ago this year, helped it on its way. For the British, who had hoped to force the Straits come to the aid of their Russian ally and seize the Ottoman capital, it was a disaster. But it was a nation-building triumph for the Young Turks, whose primary concern was Turkey, not the empire.

What the war didn’t accomplish, the diplomats did. The first troops landed at Gallipoli on April 25. Six months later, Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, invited Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, to join the war against the Ottomans in return for Arab independence. In 1916, Sir Mark Sykes, a Tory baronet with a claim to Middle East expertise, and François-Georges Picot, a French diplomat from a colonial family, drew up a very different postwar map. Two years before the war ended, it divided the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France with minimal regard for the Arabs who actually lived there.

In November 1917, with eyes on Russia and America, Britain’s foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour assured the infant Zionist movement through a proxy that His Majesty’s government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” A few weeks later, Edmund Allenby, a British general, entered Jerusalem, accompanied by French, Italian, and American military attachés. He was received by guards representing England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, India, France, and Italy. 

In 1922, the League of Nations awarded Britain a mandate to govern Palestine

In 1937, Britain’s Peel commission proposed partition of mandatory Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. A decade and another World War later, the United Nations General Assembly reaffirmed the proposal in Resolution 181. This time it was acted on. Israel declared its independence. The neighboring states declared intransigent opposition. Hostilities ended with a matched set of bilaterally negotiated armistice agreements. Pending a settlement that never came, an estimated 750,000 Palestinian Arabs took up residence elsewhere as refugees. Only Jordan offered them citizenship.

In 1967, the Security Council reaffirmed partition again in Resolution 242. In 1973, it reaffirmed it once more in Resolution 338. Though neither side was happy with it. Israelis said yes. Palestinians said no as they would again in 1979, 2000, and 2008. Abused and neglected by both sides, the Oslo Accords of 1993 withered and died on the threshold of the new century.

Yet it is also not true that nothing moves. In 2001, the Arab League’s Three Noes of 1967 — no peace, no recognition, no negotiations — gave way to an Arab peace initiative. DOA? There’s certainly a case to be made. But even after 14 years, Snow White awaiting her prince is at least worth a thought experiment. Cold though they may be, peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan remain in place. Palestinians, once extras in a movie produced in bickering Arab capitals now bicker for themselves, and at least intermittently with Israelis. “There were no such thing as Palestinians. … They did not exist,” 

Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir told 

 in 1969. Years have passed since Israelis last denied that Palestinians exist. Both Israeli and Palestinian majorities still accept the two-state principle, If only as the least bad option. Even Benjamin Netanyahu, 

who came out for two states in a much-quoted speech in 2009

, declared that he was still for it after 

declaring against it on the eve of the March 2015 election

Nearly a century after the passing of the Ottoman empire, its legacy and loss can still be seen and felt from the Mediterranean to the Khyber Pass. Since World War II, the region has done its bit to finish off the British and Soviet empires; turned the United States into history’s most reluctant Middle Eastern power, and upended at least two American presidencies.

Since 2001, alienated young Muslims have weaponized airliners, kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, devastated shrines from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush, and declared war on presumptive non-believers (including fellow Muslims). Only recently, a corps of zealots recruited from many countries has dismayed much of the world with historical reminiscences and theological fantasies that even fellow Muslims denounce. The sophistication of its fundraising and money-laundering operations might shock and awe a Mexican drug lord, and its videos, as professional as they are horrific, enjoy real time attention exceeding anything Gavrilo Princip ever dreamed of.

Since 2003, Iraq has repeatedly stared into the abyss, Libya has imploded, Syria has disintegrated, and Egypt has exchanged a tired old military dictatorship for a fresh new military dictatorship. Lebanon has regained its default position as a civil war waiting to happen. After 13 years of American intervention, attention, and cascades of money, 

Afghanistan has advanced at best from a black hole to 50 shades of grey

. Even Yemen, ordinarily as obscure as Paraguay, has become news fit to print.

Even as Iranian centrifuges continue to spin and wrecking balls of virtually every sort and size short of nuclear pound the house that Sykes and Picot built, the latest Israeli election, like the war in Gaza that preceded it, and the war in Lebanon that preceded that, only confirms what has been clear for more than half a century: The Palestine conflict can be relied on to draw a crowd like no other conflict on the planet.

To call it ‘unique’ is a generalization too far in a world where there are already enough national and territorial conflicts to go around. Sri Lanka, Cyprus, and Ireland show that even island conflicts have global potential. Both the construction and deconstruction of Yugoslavia set off shots heard round the world. India and Pakistan have gone to war four times since 1947, and the Kashmir conflict is still unresolved. Meanwhile, both parties have become nuclear powers. In 1982, Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands, a territory with fewer than 3,000 people and a half-million sheep. Only recently, China and Japan approached the flashpoint over islands with no inhabitants at all.

Yet the conflict once known as Arab-Israeli (and now more accurately as Israeli-Palestinian) remains a phenomenon unto itself, as seemingly indestructible as it is seemingly insoluble, with media spin, novelists, and even dueling archaeologists regularly deployed as weapons of mass instruction.

In 2007, Israeli restoration of an access ramp to archaeological excavations under the Temple Mount 

drew protests from as far away as Malaysia. 

In April 2014, Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official, took Martin Indyk, a senior American official, to Jericho

, where time is measured in millennia. His message in the 47th year of Israeli occupation was substantially the same as Shelley’s in “Ozymandias,” a sonnet first published in 1818.

Winston Churchill famously defined the Soviet Union as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Translated into Churchillian, today’s Palestine conflict could be defined as a nationality clash wrapped in historical and religious claims to an area the size of Vermont, where local, regional and global concerns fit one within the other like a set of 

With or without Jews, Palestine is the territorial hinge between the Arab world of the Nile and the Arab world of the Fertile Crescent. From ancient to modern times, from Assyria to Egypt, Italy to China, Britain to India, it has stood astride the Silk Road, bridged the Red Sea and Mediterranean, and flanked Suez. Long before the age of Mohammad, Mecca was already a natural entrepôt and business center, not unlike Doha and Dubai today. For the next 1300 years, the isthmus of Suez was a canal waiting to happen. With or without Jews, Jerusalem has been a midpoint between Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad; sacred to Jews since David, the city has been sacred to Christians since Jesus and Muslims since Mohammad. But invaders from Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar to Allenby and Abdullah never lacked for reasons to lay siege to it. Religion, rarely sufficient and often not even necessary, is only one of them.

Measured in millennia, today’s Palestine conflict is actually a relative youngster. Jews have never ceased to be a part of the Middle Eastern landscape, even though the last nominally independent Jewish kingdom capitulated to the Romans a few decades before the Common Era. From the middle of the 8th century to the end of the 15th, Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted in Spain. For centuries, Jews, Turks, and Arabs coexisted in the Ottoman empire. From the Romans to the Ottomans, Aleppo was a center of Jewish scholarship and commerce. In 1900, Jews comprised a quarter of the population of Baghdad. In 1948, there were an estimated 140,000-150,000 Jews in Iran.

Long forgotten, there might have been an exit ramp or at least an alternative scenario to what we now know as the Palestine conflict before it even began. 

In 1903, the British proposed the establishment of a “Jewish settlement or colony” in Uganda

. The Zionist Congress, the movement’s governing body, voted 295-178 to dispatch a committee to look into the proposal. But it sank like a stone two years later when the group reconvened in Basle, and declared Palestine the only possible Jewish national home. The tug of war has been with us ever since.

Like geography, resources are a crucial part of the big picture. Cotton for the mills of Britain and France led to British foreclosure on a hopelessly indebted Egypt in 1882. Oil for Britain’s Royal Navy on the eve of World War I came next, with long-term consequences for Iran, the region, and the world economy. With coal’s steady retreat, the Middle East, with up to two-thirds of the planet’s known oil reserves, remains the world’s energy supplier.

Unsurprisingly, the geography that favored commerce also favors diversity within diversity; a maximum of 

. At least a dozen local or imported languages are spoken daily in 18 countries by at least two dozen nationalities and ethnicities. It’s not for nothing that the tower of Babel is a formative myth. Irrespective of venue, archaeological museums confirm that armies — native and foreign, tribal and imperial — have criss-crossed the region, from Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, and Greeks, to Napoleon, Rommel, Nasser, and Sharon. Benchmarks of regional history dot the landscape: the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the only survivor of the Second Temple; the Arch of Titus in Rome, commemorating the conquest of Jerusalem and the Temple’s destruction, stands as a victory lap in stone.

Religion, of course, adds still more faces to the geopolitical polygon. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the great monotheistic religions, share Middle Eastern roots and theological DNA. Though each established a global presence early in its millennial history, each has remained spiritually and physically attached to its regional roots.

Both in and beyond the region of their birth, these religions have inclined to conflict. Within a century of Mohammad’s death, Islam established itself from Spain to India, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. His successors split irreversibly over the succession. For 200 years, West European crusaders, hellbent on hostile takeover of Christianity’s birthplace, inflicted mass mayhem on Jews and Muslims. From 1517 to 1648, European Christians turned their fratricidal attentions to one another while Ottoman armies advanced on Vienna. In the 1850s, Catholic French and Orthodox Russians insisted that each had a more legitimate claim to Jerusalem than the other. Their claims helped ignite the Crimean War.

In 1898, Germany’s Wilhelm II visited Jerusalem to dedicate the city’s second Protestant church. Before leaving, he received Theodor Herzl, who hoped the kaiser might lobby the Turkish sultan on behalf of infant Zionism. Instead, Wilhelm proclaimed himself protector of the Muslims en route home via Damascus. In the 1930s, for lack of secular alternatives, Palestinian Arabs looked to a cleric for leadership: Haj Amin al-Husseini, the deeply anti-Jewish, anti-British Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. 

Husseini, in turn, looked to Hitler’s Germany and spent the war years in Berlin

Despite fond hopes, practical indifference or well-intentioned ignorance by the heirs of Sykes and Picot, Syria and Iraq are one more tutorial on what can happen in a political ecosystem where the secular nation-state remains the exception, and religious identity is a surrogate for national identity. In both countries, as well as Egypt, Christians are now an endangered species, while relations between Shi’a and Sunni, Iran and Saudi Arabia, increasingly recall early modern Europe’s Thirty Years War, with no Treaty of Westphalia in view at the end of the tunnel.

With 5 million people and 18 recognized religious communities, Lebanon alone is a walk-in tutorial on the facts of regional life. Beginning in 1975, sect battled sect and proxy battled proxy. Israelis arrived in 1982 to battle Palestinians in a joint venture with the Maronite Christians only reluctantly acknowledged by both sides. By 1990, when the war ended, the body count was estimated at five percent of Lebanon’s population. As an Israeli sergeant explains to his platoon in the 1986 film 

, Lebanon is a metaphor for the whole region: “everyone hates everyone, but they all hate us.”

Syria and Iraq are one more tutorial on what can happen in a political ecosystem where the secular nation-state remains the exception, and religious identity is a surrogate for national identity

Add oil, two world wars, and Cold War geopolitics to the regional mix. World War I gave Britain cause to seek clients among both Jews and Arabs. World War II produced the 

 and gave the American military government in Germany cause to steer its survivors to Palestine despite deep ambivalence in Washington, let alone London. The Cold War gave the Soviet Union cause, in 1955, to sell arms to Egypt via Czechoslovakia. The Czech arms deal gave the United States cause to respond in kind, pushing ahead with plans for a kind of Middle Eastern NATO that included Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and even Pakistan. As usual, external concerns and local predilections turned the global local, and vice versa. The Middle East was now an accessory to the Cold War, and the Soviet Union an accessory to the Palestine conflict. 

A year after the arms deal, Egypt’s decision to nationalize the Suez Canal led to war with Britain, and reminded an isolated Israel, exposed to attack from Gaza, that it was in serious need of friends. Short-term fallout included the loss of over 10 percent of world oil output (with obvious consequences for a Western Europe that relied on the Middle East for two-thirds of its oil) and the collapse of the pound sterling, still one of the world’s reserve currencies. Long-term consequences included an ever-larger American role and stake in an unfamiliar and accident-prone corner of the world, and an unacknowledged Israeli Bomb, which remains one of the world’s most public secrets.

A far more dramatic war in 1967 ended in six days. Israel’s stunning victory averted direct extra-regional intervention, but it left the West Bank a juridical white space, provisionally filled by an Israeli occupation still in place nearly a half-century later. It also emancipated Palestinians from the fraternal tutelage of their Arab neighbors, freeing them, for better or worse, to act on their own.

Three years later, emancipated Palestinians hijacked four international flights and attempted to overthrow the Kingdom of Jordan. When Syria came to support the Palestinians, Israel threatened to defend Jordan’s crown. When the Soviet Union threatened to support Syria, the United States threatened to support Israel. The Sixth Fleet and contingents at Fort Bragg and in Germany were reportedly at the ready before the passengers disembarked and the hijacked planes were blown up live on TV for viewers around the world to see. The plan was “to bring special attention to the Palestinian problem,” said a spokesperson. It did. But this time, the defeated Palestinians were forced to retreat to Lebanon.

In a 1973 sequel to the 1967 war, Egypt and Syria resumed their offensive with coordinated assaults on the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights, while the oil producers imposed an embargo on states they considered neutral or friendly to Israel. Shock waves from both the war and the boycott would be felt around the world for the rest of the decade. According to credible reports, by the second day of the war, things looked so dark that 

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan proposed a nuclear demonstration as a show of force

. Prime Minister Golda Meir was unequivocally opposed. A few dramatic days later, the Soviet Union resupplied its clients. The U.S. not only did the same, it placed the Strategic Air Command, Continental Air Defense Command, European Command, and Sixth Fleet on DEFCON 3, the highest level of peacetime readiness.

Nuclear war didn’t materialize, but the Cold War proxy battles continued. Palestine was nowhere in view 

1979, when Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to one of America’s most celebrated covert operations, a joint venture with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in support of local resistance. But the Israeli-Palestinian issue did surface briefly in 1990, when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and threatened to rain rockets on Israel. The U.S. persuaded Israel to abstain in return for an American-manned umbrella of Patriot missiles while America mobilized a formidable alliance of European allies and Arabs. A few years of relative calm ended on September 11, 2001, when the horrific blowback from Afghanistan struck civilians on American soil while Israelis contended with a Palestinian eruption known as the Second Intifada. It came as no surprise that Israelis and Americans saw one another as natural allies in what was now known as the War on Terror.

It has been said that Jews are like everyone else, only more so. In the same sense, it could be said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like every other Middle East conflict, only more so.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two secular historical experiences superimposed a global morality play without historical precedent. One was the Nazi murder of some two-thirds of Europe’s Jews by the end of World War II. The other was the progressive decolonization of Asia and Africa, which began almost immediately after the war’s end. Both inevitably left their traces on the usual suspects in the usual capitals. Eager to get Britain out of the approaches to the Black Sea, the Russians were within minutes of being first to recognize Israel. Stalinist paranoia, traditional anti-Semitism, anti-colonial ideology and geopolitical strategy then led to recalculation and a fateful tilt to the Arabs. Eager to minimize external commitments and encourage anti-communist nationalism in the Arab capitals, the executive branch in Washington labored into the mid-1960s to keep Israel and the Zionist enterprise at arm’s length. Congress was reluctant to commit money, let alone weapons, but civil society was a natural constituency from the beginning.

As might be expected, the world’s largest surviving Jewish community was intensely interested, passionately involved, and increasingly influential. An established community, well represented in states rich in electoral votes, identified effortlessly with Israel as comrades and 

. Important, too, was a national narrative that made it easy for millions of non-Jewish Americans to look at Israel with its pioneers, its immigrants, and its embattled democracy, and see themselves. “We are both of pioneer stock,” 

President Lyndon B. Johnson told Israeli dinner guests at his Texas ranch in 1968.

 “We both admire the courage and resourcefulness of the citizen-soldier.”

The dynamic evolved as the Cold War matured. Henry Kissinger snickered behind his hand in 1970 when Golda Meir declared Richard Nixon a friend of the Jewish people. Yet by any conventional measure — beginning with arms transfers — he certainly qualified as a friend of Israel. Ever more engaged in the Middle East as the historic European powers receded and withdrew, successive U.S. administrations were increasingly inclined to invest money, arms, and diplomatic facetime. In part, the commitment was a down-payment on regional peace, with complementary shares for Egypt as well as Israel; in part, it was equity in what the Pentagon and CIA had come to see as a strategic asset.

Domestic support moved. If support for Israel tilted to the left, it moved ever further right as evangelical Christians discovered their inner Zion. Once-obligatory photo ops with yarmulkes and Ashkenazic comfort food gave way to 

Presidents, irrespective of party, showed up for the annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

, the powerful American pro-Israel lobby. Israeli prime ministers addressed joint sessions of Congress — most recently at the invitation of a Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives without prior notice, let alone consultation with the White House. Right or left, right or wrong, what happened in and to Israel not only remained news fit to print, but reliable media material. Even in the sunset of the foreign correspondent, American media maintained nine bureaus in Jerusalem, compared to seven in Paris, seven in Berlin, seven in Rome — Jerusalem second only to the 13 bureaus in London.

Palestinians, too, had their storyline and constituency. Once the preserve of a handful of liberal journalists, East Coast establishmentarians, and so-called State Department Arabists, it would eventually include an ad hoc alliance of oil companies, Protestant denominations with missionary pasts, aging New Leftists, and, 

after the 2014 Gaza invasion, an actual majority of American 18-to-29-year-olds

Polls revealed increasing differentials on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by gender, race, and party affiliation

. Two-thirds of self-identified Republicans tilt toward Israel; pluralities and near-majorities of women and non-whites tilted toward the Palestinians, but the aggregates remain virtually constant. Between 1988 and 2014, American sympathy for Israel fluctuated from under 40 to over 60 percent, but remained high and virtually constant between the Second Intifada in 2002 and the latest invasion of Gaza, while sympathy for Palestinians failed to surpass 18 percent.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli diplomat, has 

astutely observed that Europe, where a Jewish complex coexists with a colonial complex

A 2007 survey by the Anti-Defamation League

 found that in Europe, there was no popular majority for either side in the conflict: a plurality of Europeans leaned towards neutrality. Yet this neutrality was disinterested in only the technical sense: Sympathy for Israel, once taken more or less as a given, tends increasingly to the pro forma. Differentiation of anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism is obligatory, but as Ian Buruma and others have pointed out, not always convincing.

Both anti-Israel and anti-Muslim leanings have meanwhile taken alternately right-wing and left-wing forms. At least politically, some of Israel’s most voluble partisans descend from grandparents and great-grandparents who were anti-Dreyfusards or voted for Hitler. Palestinian sympathies are now found among one time '68ers and their intellectual progeny, as well as in growing (and increasingly activist) communities of immigrants from North Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan. Survey data confirm that Europeans, too, follow news from the Middle East with regularity and concern; they also show, at least subliminally, how they wish it would go away. They are hardly alone in this.

In 1951, after a tour as America’s first ambassador to Israel, James G. McDonald wrote that the country’s future would be as a sort of Middle Eastern Switzerland, neither martial nor messianic. He has a modern-day echo, perhaps, 

in celebrated Israeli novelist Amos Oz, who last year told 

that his “hope and prayer” is “to see Israel removed once and for all from the front pages of all the newspapers in the world, and instead conquer, occupy, and build settlements in the literary, arts, music and architecture supplements.”

Churchill reportedly said of the Balkans that they “produce more history than they can consume.” The same can be said of the Middle East, where miracles, once widely reported, are now uncommon.

There is, at least, agreement that no news would be good news. But news remains a major export, and no one expects Israel to be confused with Switzerland anytime soon.

The United States and the State of Israel

 and a former scholar at the Wilson Center.

Edited by Zack Stanton. 

Screen Shot 2015-04-22 at 6.51.10 PM.png

Why and how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more equal than all the others.

The Making of the Modern, Muddled, Middle East

 Even the Bible says so: Worried what’s got into their employer, King Saul, an anxious staff urges him to look for a qualified string player as therapist. It did not end well. (Cartoonists are not the only artists who live dangerously.)

Things have not got easier since. In 1934, the murder of Sergei Mironovich Kirov set off the show trials that would cause some of the Soviet Union’s most prominent founding fathers to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. The same year, cheering audiences let the young Dmitri Shostakovich believe that his new opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” was a smash hit. Two years later, he learned from an editorial in Pravda that what he thought was a success was “muddle instead of music.” The experience would haunt him till his death in 1975.

Even performers took their chances. International prize winners might come home to victory parades, apartments, dachas, even a car. In 1935, the great violinist David Oistrakh returned from Warsaw as second-place winner in the Wieniawski competition, the first modern ‘violin Olympics.’ In 1937, he returned from Brussels as first-place winner of 

the first Queen Elisabeth competition, the gold standard of international tournaments

 ever since. He nonetheless lay awake in Moscow a year later with a small bag of necessaries packed just in case, wondering whether the footsteps on the stairs at 3 A.M. were coming for him or the neighbor.

By that time, Jews, both German and otherwise, were declared unfit to play in Berlin’s Philharmonie or Vienna’s Musikverein. But they were okay, even sought out, at Auschwitz a few years afterward, where a few like Henry Meyer, who survived to become a co-founder of the Lassalle Quartet, were able to save their lives by playing in orchestras as people around them died.

In more recent times in other places, playing in orchestras could as easily cost people their lives. During China’s Cultural Revolution, a tiny cadre of players was needed for the Little Red Book version of Chinese opera. But most, including some of China’s most gifted musicians, were harassed, humiliated, proscribed, assigned to the latrine detail, even hounded to suicide. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, music went the way of alcohol, pork and the ancient standing Buddhas blown to pieces in 2001. When Islamists took over Mali in 2012, ordinary citizens of one of the most musical countries in the world risked their lives if caught singing or even listening on the radio.

Yet recent visitors to the U.S. from Beijing and Kabul not only confirm that music is again allowed, but actively encouraged. In 1956, when an American tour seemed as likely as a moon landing, the People’s Republic founded the China National Symphony orchestra. In early 2013, it toured the U.S. A few weeks later, the Afghan Youth orchestra, founded in 2010, played arrangements of Ravel and Vivaldi, ingeniously reorchestrated for a mix of Western and Central Asian instruments, at Carnegie Hall and Washington’s Kennedy Center.

Washington’s National Symphony, itself only founded in 1931, was meanwhile on the road. The tour began conventionally with Spain, Germany and France. But its last stop was Oman, the little sultanate at the mouth of the Persian/Arabian Gulf that was identified by the United Nations Development Program in 2010 as the world’s most improved country since 1970. A year earlier, the Vienna Philharmonic performed at the Royal Opera House in Muscat, commissioned by Oman’s music-loving sultan in 2001, designed by architects in Honolulu, and managed by an American-trained Jordanian.

The travels and travellers not only connect a geopolitical dot or two. They tell us a thing or two about globalization, the workings of the world since the coming of the telegraph, steamboat and Internet, and the flowering of the Asian Rim.

 from the standard conservatory curriculum that music is the master metric. Yet Max Weber, the great German sociologist who gave us “charisma” and the “Protestant work ethic,” had it figured out a hundred years ago. The principle was simple: All music is equal. But a couple of happy accidents made the subspecies we think of as Western more equal than the others.

The first of the accidents — devised, like so many things, by the Greeks — is the endlessly adaptable 12-tone scale, with its unique capacity to surprise, delight, and inspire, whether played by the Berlin Philharmonic or sung by Justin Bieber. The second is a notation system invented by a 10th century monk that has allowed every tune played, sung, bellowed, hummed, whistled, or just thought about since Hildegard von Bingen, to be written, printed, and preserved as efficiently as words. For those with a taste for it, the theory of both is worth a one night stand with Oxford Music Online, but you can march in the high school band or sing “Take Me out to the Ballgame” without even being aware of it. What matters, as Weber was the first to point out, is the global appeal of a cultural product, born of the diatonic scale and Guido d’Arezzo’s do-re-mi, that had already become one of the Western world’s most successful exports by the turn of the 20th century.

By the threshold of the current century, what was clear to a Heidelberg sociologist in the era of Teddy Roosevelt could be seen and heard in action in any Chinese apartment house: When people join the modern world, their kids get piano and violin lessons.

Japan led the way while Johann Strauss was still composing waltzes. Determined to join what they couldn’t beat, Meiji-era Japanese studied French schools, German law, and British battleships. They learned to play baseball. They also learned to play the violin, even dispatching the Koda sisters to study with the era’s star teachers in Berlin and Vienna. With help from American missionaries and an ironic assist from the Japanese, who soon took over their country, Koreans got the message too. Then came China. A century after the process began, Dr. Shin’ichi Suzuki’s violin method was right up there with Toyota and the Walkman as one of Japan’s most successful exports to the West.

David Schoenbaum