The vulnerability of Palestinian refugees, revisited
I'm looking forward to seeing my old friend-- and now Just World Books's latest author-- Jonathan Randal, who'll be flying in to DC from Paris on Saturday. We've arranged for a bunch of public and less-public events for him next week, in both DC and New York. You can find the schedule for the public events here.
Please do share that with all your friends.
When I was a cub reporter in Beirut back in the 1970s, Randal was one of my mentors. By then, he was already the Washington Post's senior foreign correspondent. He and a bunch of other senior journos came in to Beirut to cover the civil war that started there in 1975, many of them coming in almost directly from Vietnam.
He and a bunch of other journos and I worked hard to understand what was going on during the often complex and fast-moving events of the civil war. We all had our share of ducking snipers' bullets, dealing with the facts of our own fears and mortality, and losing friends and colleagues during the war. We also had to cover plenty of the war's atrocities. The worst one I had to cover was the Phalangist militia's siege and final storming of the Palestinian refugee camp at Tel al-Zaatar. Phalangist militia boss Bashir Gemayyel, who led the assault on the camp, even organized a press tour of the fall camp the day after it had fallen. It was a truly sickening and very difficult trip. The Phalangist-led caravan of western journos' cars wound its way up the hill into the remains of the camp amidst a stream of pickups and other small vehicles driven by Phalangist supporters, each of whom had a small paper that they waved to get in, which was a "license to loot"-- loot, that is, the pathetic amount of personal belongings the refugees had been able to amss in their shelters there but had now been forced to leave behind.
And as those cars and pickups ground their way up the hill, they were driving right over some of bodies of refugees-- mostly, women and children-- who had been killed as they tried to flee the days before. And those bodies were pancaked so thin by the traffic it took me a seeing a few before I figured what they were.
Oh, and before he took the journos into the camp, Gemayyel held a little press conference in Phalangist headquarters, at which he assured us-- I have my news report of this still to hand-- that "I am proud of what you're going to see inside the camp."
... I could give ore details of what I saw (and smelled, and heard, and felt under my feet) inside the camp, but I guess you get my drift.
That was in 1976. We all reported what the Phalangists did after the fall of Tel al-Zaatar. Six years later, in 1982, I was in U.S. (but Jon Randal was still in Beirut.) In June that year the Israelis launched a large-scale assault on Lebanon, with some help from their Phalangist allies... Then, in mid-September that year, after the PLO fighters had all left the country as per an agreement brokered by Pres. Reagan's personal envoy Phil Habib, the IDF advanced into West Beirut (quite in violation of the Habib agreement)... and then they brought Phalangist fighters in, in trucks, to "take control" of the completely undefended Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila. The Phalangists committed their worst atrocities ever during 48 hours of killing in the camps...
There was still a fairly active peace movement in Israel in those days. As news of the Sabra and Shatila massacres emerged, the peaceniks took to the streets. They-- and the mounting international diplomatic pressure on Israel-- were enough to force the IDF to pull the Phalangists out of the camps and slink away. Some months later, Israel held a public inquiry into the massacres, called the Kahan Commission. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who was the main architect of both the war and the Sabra and Shatila actions, told the commission that he "never expected the Phalangists would behave so badly in the camps."
What a liar.
(The commission censured him and said he should never be allowed to hold high office in Israel again. We know how that went, right?)
... Jon Randal wrote about Tel al-Zaatar, and Sabra and Shatila in a book he published on the Phalangists in 1983. I am really proud that this year, on the 30th anniversary of Sabra and Shatila, my company is publishing a new edition of the book, along with a new Preface.
This is the book that Jon will be discussing during his events in Washington DC and New York next week. Come if you can!
Tragedies of liberal interventionist thinking in Syria and elsewhere
Where to start? Maybe with this piece by Le Monde Diplo's Alain Gresh today (or anyway, recently.) In it, he writes:
- The opposition cannot bring down the government, and the government cannot put down an uprising that has a surprising determination and courage...
Who listened then? And here we are, one year later. And yes, there is still deadlock.
In the intervening twelve months, there have been several periods when the well-rewarded people sitting in comfy think-tanks in Washington DC, and their allies, were absolutely convinced that Pres. Bashar al-Asad was "just on the point of leaving office." I recall one phone call three months or so ago with someone who'd recently left Thinktankistan for (equally nicely paid) "service" in the U.S. government when he said, "Yes, we in [this branch of the US government] have all been amazed that Bashar did not do as we thought he would, and take this opportunity to take Asma and the children on a lovely long vacation somewhere."
(As though the departure of Pres. Asad would somehow have "solved" anything?)
But really, that was the entire gameplan of Hillary Clinton's State department; and it was based on a completely faulty understanding of the situation inside Syria.
Back to Alain Gresh, whom I have met once or twice and is generally fairly smart about developments in the Mashreq. It is, however, his point of departure in this latest piece that puzzles me. He writes:
- Should we do nothing? There are other options than military intervention. Economic pressure on Syria has already made some middle-class government supporters reconsider, and this could be increased, as long as it targeted the leaders and not the population... "
Are French (or one-generation-on, French-naturalized) intellectuals like Alain Gresh easily able to identify themselves with the policies of their national government, which would be one version of the "we" he is speaking of here? Or is it the kind of airy-fairy, untethered, liberal-universalistic "we" whom he is claiming to represent?
But really, why should anyone who is not a Syrian claim to have any kind of a right to speak about what should happen in that beleaguered country-- now, or at any other point?
Maybe I'm just jaded about the claims of "liberal" universalism these days because so many of my liberal-universalist friends have found themselves so easily seduced by the claims of the militarists-- in re Syria, as Libya, and elsewhere.
* * *
But I truly do not understand how liberal universalists in the west, whose views, representations, and analyses of what is happening in Myanmar/Burma in these months are so uniformly calm and supportive of the wrenchingly negotiated transition to greater democracy there absolutely never stop to ask whether a similar process may not also be the best thing for Syria today (as it was for South Africa, 20 years ago.)
Why is Syria's current government uniquely picked out by these so-called liberals as worthy of their rage, anger, and militarized "intervention" when those other authoritarian regimes, actually, committed far worse abuses against their citizens over the course of many decades?
Why the racism that is deeply embedded in these kinds of judgments?
And yes, "Avaaz", I am speaking about you, too.
* * *
This intense partisanship and Asad-hatred of the liberals in the west have had real conseuqneces, too. Among other things, they have helped strengthen the hand of the really nasty, neoconservative and neo-colonial interventionists within our respective western societies. And they have held out false hopes of significant western-government and western-society support to those among the oppositionists in Syria who have been open to the idea of exploiting western backing (including military backing) for their own gain.
As I tweeted a few weeks back: This has many of the same aspects of tragedy as Hungary 1956 and Basra 1991. Almost criminally irresponsible, I would say.
* * *
It's been hard, sitting on the relative sidelines over recent months, seeing so many of my longstanding warnings go unheeded-- regarding Syria, as regarding Palestine, Iraq, U.S. militarism in general, and a number of other issues. But I fought the good (rhetorical) fight here at JWN and in other forums of public discourse, for so many years. Completely, I should note, unpaid by anyone; but that's okay. Now, I am more in a phase of building up this institution that is my publishing company, Just World Books. It's a different set of challenges, but also over the long haul extremely worthwhile and, I hope, transformative of the discourse. I am, it should go without saying, really proud of the publishing we've done so far, and excited about the projects we have immediately ahead.
(I really appreciate all support JWN readers can give to the publishing house. Check out our list of great titles-- and buy profligately from among them!-- at the JWB webstore, here.)
So here, anyway is a thought for Easter/Passover. Let's work for a lot less militarism and lot fewer calls for "liberal interventionism" (which only too often ends up meaning only war), from everyone in the disproportionately powerful west... And let's have a lot more focusing on how conflicts can be resolved in ways other than escalation and war; in ways, that is, that aim specifically at the de-escalation of tensions, an end to finger-pointing, and the knowingly partisan treatment of claims about each side's commission of atrocities. Let's remember that Syria is a complex, sizeable country that is the homeland of its own people. It is not, and should not be turned into, a playground for other countries' grudge matches and competitions (as happened, only too tragically, to the citizenries of Lebanon and Iraq.) Let's look at other examples around the world where peoples won expanded rights and empowerment through negotiated transitions. And let's, honestly, forget all this misguided and misapplied business about outsiders having any pre-ordained "responsibility" or even, heaven forbid, "duty" to intervene.
I'm sorry, Alain Gresh. I don't mean to take after you in person. I know you're a smart, sensitive, and concerned analyst. But there was just something about that "we" you used in that article that seemed badly out of place...
JWB's fab titles--in C'ville Saturday, and globally, forever!
Posted by Helena Cobban
March 23, 2012 4:53 PM EST | Link
Filed in Hometown Charlottesville , Writing and publishing
For all JWN readers in the Greater Charlottesville area-- do come by the VaBook book fair that runs tomorrow, 9am-4pm, at the Omni Hotel. Tell your friends to come, as well! You can see and buy copies of all the fabulous titles published by my company, Just World Books, including the two latest: Miko Peled's "The General's Son", and Jon Randal's "The Tragedy of Lebanon".
I know I haven't blogged much at all this year. But the book publishing has been really exciting-- and all-consuming! Our Spring 2012 "list" (inasmuch as we have a "list" as such, which I've always resisted doing) is shaping up to be truly great. In addition to those two new titles we'll have "Watches Without Time: An American Soldier in Afghanistan", a really important memoir from Matt Zeller, an amazing young man who served eight months in the U.S. military as an embedded combat adviser for the Afghan security forces-- and then came back to run for Congress on a strong veterans' rights platform, in 2010... and "Wrestling in the Daylight" by Rabbi Brant Rosen, author of the "Shalom Rav" blog, which is his own curation of the best of the blog-posts and comments board discussions over at his blog... and which traces his transformation from, as he describes it, "a liberal Zionist to... a Palestinian rights activist."
(Who knows, maybe Peter Beinart and other present-day liberal Zionists might also make this same journey over the months and years ahead?)
By the way, we're already taking advance orders for Matt Zeller's book, over at the webstore... and we'll hope to take advance orders for Rabbi Rosen's book soon, too.
Plus, we may well have another couple of fab titles to announce before summer sets in... Stay posted...
For those of you NOT in Charlottesville-- a clear majority of JWN readers, I'm sure!-- I hope you all know that everyone, all around the world, can now affordably buy JWB's pathbreaking titles through our new webstore, where you can now get free shipping on all orders greater than $40.
Setting up the webstore, and upgrading JWB's capabilities in general, has all taken a lot of hard work. But I'm really excited at the team we've been building here... and most importantly, at our output!
By the way, I would love to hear from anyone on the U.S. west coast, or in London, who might be interested in doing a bit of publicity and outreach work for us on a part-time contract basis!
This work will include backing up the efforts several of our authors are making to take their books "on the road" with book tours... Miko Peled will be doing a full schedule of speaking events over the months ahead, in many countries, all of which will need a lot of support from us. Check his book-blog here. It has just the first few events listed in the calendar portion there. There will certainly be a lot more, soon! (Also, check out the contest we're running there. Think of entering it, and tell your friends about it, too.)
Jon Randal will be in Washington DC and NYC in early May. I timed the publication of his book, which gives a LOT of detail about the history and record of the Falangist militias in Lebanon, for this year's 30th anniversary of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, which were, of course, committed principally by the Falangists, but under the ever-watchful eye (and WP flares) of the area-dominating Israeli military. If you know anyone who wants to do a media event with Jon around his book's themes, give me a holler.
Matt Zeller will also be doing huge numbers of events around his book, for which we're hoping to have actual copies in hand at the end of April. He seems to have amazing networks all around the United States, already.
We want to set up a good schedule of speaking events for all our authors, not just these three, at U.S. colleges in the Fall semester. Please let us know if you're at an institution, or a member of a student group, that has access to some decent program funding and would be interested in inviting one of our authors, so we can start working on the Fall schedules now! Here is the list of all the titles we have on our website so far-- and don't forget Rabbi Brant Rosen, either. (We'll get his book onto the website very soon. Copies of his book will be available maybe late May?)
So JWN friends, I really hope all of you can help me get the word out about JWB's authors and their important, discourse-expanding books. If you can help me by doing that, then I promise that in return I will make a lot more effort in the weeks ahead to do some good, cutting-edge blogging here. So many breaking news events to blog about!
Powerful, intimate memoir from Israeli peace activist Miko Peled
Posted by Helena Cobban
February 16, 2012 11:13 AM EST | Link
Filed in Activism, etc. , Writing and publishing
The countdown clock is now ticking fast, toward the publication of Miko Peled's amazing and powerful memoir, The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine. The book traces Miko's journey from being born, in 1961, into a family that was at the core of the Jewish-Israeli elite to, now, being a visionary and gutsy activist in the cause of equal rights for all in Israel/Palestine, and a rights-based solution to the deadly conflict between the two peoples.
I am so happy that my company, Just World Books, has been able to work with Miko to make this long-planned book a reality. Our editors have been doing a fabulous job, and we should have the first copies in hand in the early days of March. And did I mention that Alice Walker has contributed a wonderful Foreword to it?
As we've all been working on the book, I've increasingly been reminded of an earlier book that some 20 years ago captured my attention both by the quality of its writing and by the morally gripping content of the tale it told. That was My Traitor's Heart, by the South African writer Rian Malan. You see Malan, too, like Miko Peled, had grown up in the bosom of the tightknit elite that ruled his country... And in both cases, that government, feeling itself embattled, was committing major rights abuses against large, disenfranchised swathes of the population under its control... And Malan, too, like Miko Peled, spent some time outside the oppressive hothouse/coccoon of the land of his birth and came to the realization that the only future for his country and the national group of which his family was a part was for the ciuntry's ruling group to learn to share power and to start to deal with all the people whose lives they had been controlling on a basis of equality and mutual respect, rather than continuing an oppressive and increasingly morally deadening reliance on mechanisms of force and control...
If you haven't read Malan's amazing book, I urge you to do so. But the tale he tells is now a part of history. The tale that Miko Peled tells, by contrast, has a burning urgency to it! In Israel/Palestine, the oppression continues, on a daily basis; and the unresolved conflict between the two peoples continues to blight the lives of both of them (though very asymmetrically so.)
There are several books out now in the west, in which Jewish citizens of western countries wrestle publicly with some of the anguish they feel over the fact that the Zionist project in which an earlier generation of western Jews invested so many of their-- often politically liberal-- hopes and dreams has now spawned a government and system that has turned increasingly to the right, and has aligned itself increasingly with the most rightwing and oppressive forces in western society.
There are also a number of works of great scholarship by Jewish-Israeli historians and geographers in which they document the past practices of the Zionist leaders and planners in an unflinching and unvarnished way, laying bare for all to see the ethnic cleansings and other, often still continuing, acts of administrative violence that lie at the heart of all the 'success' the Zionist project has claimed until today.
But Miko Peled's book is the first book I know of that combines the features of being a reflective and very intimate memoir, by an Israeli, of what it felt like for him to grow up in the bosom of the Jewish-Israeli elite in Jerusalem-- one grandfather was a signer of Israel's Declaration of Independence in 1948; his father was a revered general during the 1967 war; his older sister used when young to frolic at the local poo alongside Benjamin Netanyahu and other children of the world Zionist elite-- with having acquired enough perspective from his time outside his country to be able to see its conflicts and dysfunctionalities with new eyes.
Hence, the comparison I make with Rian Malan. Malan's family, too, had been part of the innermost core of the elite that ruled his country. He had a great-uncle who was the prime minister who wrote the country's infamous apartheid laws. He had an uncle who was defense minister in the 1980s. And yet, he rebelled... In his case, it was his involvement in the country's anti-conscription campaign that led him into pro-democratic and pro-rights engagement.
Miko Peled's story is a not entirely the same, of course. In his case, it was the killing of his beloved niece Smadar, at the hands of a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in 1997 that first propelled his activism. (His activism was nurtured by way of the Bereaved Families Forum, and involvement in a local Israeli-Palestinian dialogue group in Southern California.) Miko came to his activism when he was already significantly more mature than Malan-- and therefore, perhaps, the commitment that his activism has required has necessarily had to be deeper. And Miko Peled has been able to draw on considerably more support, in his quest for justice and meaning, from members of his family than, as I recall, Rian Malan was ever able to find...
Miko's dad, I should add, was indeed a much-decorated in the Israeli military; and in the run-up to the 1967 war he part of a hawkish claque of generals that urged-- some say, virtually forced-- the country's civilian government to launch a "pre-emptive" war. But Miko's dad, Matti Peled, was also, from almost the very moment that that war ended, also himself a peace activist. Indeed, from then until his death in 1995, Matti Peled ran many very real risks for peace, being one of the Jewish-Israeli pioneers of the campaign to open up negotiations with the PLO...
Well obviously, I urge you all to buy Miko's book-- and to tell all your friends about it! You can place your orders here. I honestly think that this book, even more than Rian Malan's, will be one that can transform the political calculus, and therefore the world.
Quick notes from Penn BDS conference
The conference was an outstanding success! Everyone involved in organizing it-- and most of us who spoke at it-- have all been extremely busy; so I'm really sorry that we don't have much more, and richer, reporting on the events out already. But expect more great reporting of the conference to come out over the coming days.
You can see the video of Ali Abunimah's fabulous keynote address, Saturday night, here. That and Susan Abulhawa's extremely moving and scrupulously well-documented introductory address were really the two high points of the conference. And just getting together with so many dedicated activists from around the country-- many of whom I was able to meet for the first time, after hearing about and admiring their work for years-- was the other amazing facet of the gathering.
I had the huge honor to participate in two great panel discussions: one on Saturday on on South Africa and Palestine with David Wildman and Bill Fletcher, Jr.; and one yesterday afternoon, on the media, with Phil Weiss and Max Blumenthal. I also got to sit in on a few of the other sessions-- all of them fabulous!-- including a great discussion/analysis of the anti-Ahava and anti-Sabra/Tribe campaigns given by key organizers of those campaigns.
One of my main goals in being there was to sell and get more visibility for my company's books; and that definitely happened to a gratifying extent. It was great to be able to establish those kind of connections for the Just World Books and to tell people both about our existing titles and our upcoming ones!
My sense was that the conference marked an important turning-point for the Palestinian-rights movement here in the United States. As I said at the beginning of yesterday's panel discussion, I think this was the kind of event that will be remembered 15-20 years into the future, when people will still be saying, "Hey, do you remember the Penn conference back in 2012... ?" Or, too many other people will be forced to reply, "Yes, I was so bummed, I couldn't get in: They were sold out already!" (And that happened to large numbers of people, I heard.)
Which is why the organizers now need to go the extra mile and get their record of the many amazing discussions at the conference up onto the web and widely available as a resource for everyone around the world, asap.
Hey, and my big thanks to the people from the ADL and the other discourse-suppression organizations for drawing such broad attention to our little conference and helping to make it into such a fabulous, rock-star event!
There was at least one little team from the discourse-suppressors and discourse-twisters that was present at portions of the conference itself in an organized way. That was, as noted by Alex Kane on Mondoweiss, here, an extremely ideological, apparently Canadian-Israeli discourse-twister Martin Himel, who turned up with a camera crew of two younger women claiming to "represent" the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Honestly, I am not sure that anyone from the all-volunteer, all-student conference staff did enough to check the "credentials" presented by the two young women... (Working with the CBC? Really?) Mr. Himel himself apparently did not present any media credentials at all when he registered. But on the Saturday, he tried to trap Ali Abunimah into a sleazy 'gotcha' kind of interview, which Ali wrote about here.
After that, the conference organizers told Himel he could participate only like a regular participant but not as media, since he was not credentialed as such; and he could not perform any media functions while there.
But yesterday, first of all his two crew members were trying to haul their camera into one of the closed organizing sessions in the morning... And then there was Himel himself, in the after-lunch session with Sarah Schulman and Max Blumenthal, which was an open session; but there was Himel, working hard to direct the work of his two crew members. At which point he and they were, quite appropriately, told to leave.
As Kane wrote at Mondoweiss, Himel has a substantial history of using and twisting footage of pro-Palestinian-rights events to make it look as if all the participants are anti-Semites, "self-hating Jews", crazy hate-filled extremists, etc etc.
For my part, I believe the rights movement can only benefit from full and fair disclosure of the truth both about what's going on in Palestine and about the nature of the movement here in the United States (and also, about the nature of its opponents-- some of whom, tragically enough, really are hate-filled crazies.)
On the other hand, I donated the intellectual property embodied in my presentations at the conference, to the conference organizers themselves; and I certainly did not donate it to be used and abused by a discourse twister like Martin Himel. So honestly, I was glad that he and his crew members had been banned from the conference before the panel discussion we held yesterday afternoon.
If Himel or Alan Dershowitz or Daniel Pipes or any of those other discourse twisters would like to sit down with me and debate the substance of the Palestinian-Israeli issue in a fair forum, I would be happy to do that. (Just as Susan Abul-Hawa did a great and calm job interacting with the Dersh at the Boston Book Festival in October 2010.)
So I am certainly not arguing for curtailing anyone's free-speech rights. But speech has to be honest, grounded in facts, and should aspire always to be truthful. Mr. Himel-- just like the sleazy rightwing 'gotcha' film-maker James O'Keefe here in the United States-- is not interested in honest reporting, an examination of the facts, or a search for truth. That's why having him lurking around the conference directing his two female subordinates in their filming made that portion of the conference feel so unsafe.
...Anyway, the Himel saga was all a minor, but distasteful, main things that were happening at the conference. I am sure that we'll get a lot more great reporting of and from the conference available very soon. probably the best places to look for that will be on Mondoweiss, on Electronic Intifada, and via the #pennbds hashtag at Twitter.
What's new in the publishing biz!
... is Just World Books's new webstore, which gives us global reach for distributing books from, as of now, three different print/distribute hubs...
I am really excited about this development. I've been trying for a while to figure out a way to escape Amazon's large and greedy clutch, and I think this is it.
Continue reading "What's new in the publishing biz!"Pro-Israeli discourse suppressors desperately try to rebuild their Bar-Lev Line!
It is almost amusing to see the lengths to which the pro-Israeli discourse suppressors here in the United States have been going to try to rebuild the long-crumbled "Bar-Lev Line" with which, over decades past, they sought to protect Israel from being the subject of any free, fair, and fact-based discussion.
The ADL--yes, folks, that is supposed to be the Anti Defamation League-- recently described me on their website as "an anti-Israel writer, publisher and the former executive director of the Council for the National Interest, an organization that regularly sends delegations of its supporters to meet with Hamas and Hezbollah representatives in the Middle East... " How's that again?
Never mind that in a career spanning 38 years, I spent precisely four months working for CNI... or that, on the one CNI trip I helped organize we spent a lot of time with Israelis of a variety of viewpoints, and even made a special visit to the Knesset... Or that in the course of my career I have extensively interviewed Israeli government ministers, military leaders, and analysts (as the folks from the 'Anti'-Defamation League might know if they ever, er, actually read any of the many books and articles I have written... )
No, instead of doing any research that might involve, you know, actual facts, they just jumped on this rather seedy (but no doubt well-funded) little defamation bandwagon that a bunch of scared "Israel-right-or-wrong" types have been gunning up...
And they recycle an extremely tired (and fallacious) little piece of defamation that appeared somewhere else not long ago, which completely mischaracterized some thing I said at Georgetown University in late January 2009.
Actually, my own contemporaneous (or very near to contemporaneous) account of that incident can be read on this JWN post, that I published on January 25, 2009.
Here is just the beginning of that blog post:
- One notable thing that happened at our panel discussion on Gaza, at Georgetown University Thursday night, was that a young Israeli student directed a question at me asking why I had said that "all Israelis are stupid"-- and also asserting that her country had had "no choice" but to launch the war on Gaza.
I replied that I had never said "all Israelis" are stupid-- though I had certainly pointed out the counter-productive nature, from every point of view, of the decision her country's government had made to launch the most recent war; and I'd pointed out too, with some sadness, that that decision seemed to have received high levels of support from Jewish Israelis.
But certainly not from all of them-- as I had also pointed out in my main presentation.
What I'd referred to specifically was this extremely insightful (and courageous) article, published on December 31 in the WaPo by a Jewish Israeli social-work lecturer called Julia Chaitin. Chaitin, by the way, lives in southern Israel so has a deep understanding of the concerns and fears of the people who live there...
They are truly pathetic. People: You don't control the discourse any more because in the era of the intertubes you can't control the discourse any more! Deal with it. Palestinians-- like Iraqis, Lebanese people, Syrians, Egyptians, Israelis and everyone on God's earth, today get to speak about truth of their situations without the heavy hand of the Zionist discourse-suppression organizations ('Camera', 'Flame', 'Stand With Us', etc) being able to suffocate us.
You know, for six years after the Israeli military swept into and occupied the whole of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in 1967, the generals (okay, most of them, but not Gen Matti Peled, as his son Miko reminds us in his great upcoming memoir) thought their control of Sinai was assured by the defensive line of forts, ramparts, and fortifications they had thrown up along the Suez Canal... That was the "Bar-Lev Line"... And imagining themselves quite secure behind it they started building (quite illegally, as always) settlements in different spots in the large Sinai Peninsula...
But in October 1973, it took the Egyptian military just a few hours to fatally breach the Bar-Lev Line in a number of places. This, from Wikipedia today:
- Within the first hour of the war, the Egyptian engineering corps tackled the sand barrier. Seventy engineer groups, each one responsible for opening a single passage, worked from wooden boats. With hoses attached to water pumps, they began attacking the sand obstacle. Many breaches occurred within two to three hours of the onset of operations — according to schedule; engineers at several places, however, experienced unexpected problems... The Third Army, in particular, had difficulty in its sector. There, the clay proved resistant to high-water pressure and, consequently, the engineers experienced delays in their breaching. Engineers in the Second Army completed the erection of their bridges and ferries within nine hours, whereas Third Army needed more than sixteen hours...
And here's a big shoutout to MuzzleWatch, Mondoweiss, Max Blumenthal, and everyone else who's made a big difference in all of this!
But over there at the 'Anti'-Defamation League and in those other discourse suppression networks, I guess leaders and staffers have their own (highly inflated) salaries they need to justify, and fundraising appeals they need to crank up... So there they go, desperately trying to heap more sand into the breaches and recreate the
As I said, the sight would almost be amusing... if it did not also involve a prolongation of this illegally lengthy Israeli occupation of Palestine with all the desperate human suffering that involves.
The use of web-based disinformation by the 'west'
Posted by Helena Cobban
January 16, 2012 11:51 AM EST | Link
Filed in Activism, etc. , Media , Syria
Patrick Cockburn has an extremely important piece at the Independent today, in which he takes to task the major organs of the 'western' media-- including, crucially, today's Al-Jazeera-- for the extremely uncritical and often openly inflammatory use they make of unsubstantiated or highly exaggerated "news reports" coming out of, in particular, Syria and Iran.
He writes,
- Governments that exclude foreign journalists at times of crisis such as Iran and (until the last week) Syria, create a vacuum of information easily filled by their enemies. These are far better equipped to provide their own version of events than they used to be before the development of mobile phones, satellite television and the internet. State monopolies of information can no longer be maintained. But simply because the opposition to the Syrian and Iranian governments have taken over the news agenda does not mean that what they say is true.
Early last year I met some Iranian stringers for Western publications in Tehran whose press credentials had been temporarily suspended by the authorities. I said this must be frustrating them, but they replied that even if they could file stories – saying nothing much was happening – they would not be believed by their editors. These had been convinced by exile groups, using blogs and carefully selected YouTube footage, that Tehran was visibly seething with discontent. If the local reporters said that this was a gross exaggeration, their employers would suspect that had been intimidated or bought off by Iranian security.
... [T]echnical advances have made it more difficult for governments to hide repression. But these developments have also made the work of the propagandist easier. Of course, people who run newspapers and radio and television stations are not fools. They know the dubious nature of much of the information they are conveying. The political elite in Washington and Europe was divided for and against the US invasion of Iraq, making it easier for individual journalists to dissent. But today there is an overwhelming consensus in the foreign media that the rebels are right and existing governments wrong. For institutions such as the BBC, highly unbalanced coverage becomes acceptable.
Sadly, al-Jazeera, which has done so much to shatter state control of information in the Middle East since it was set up in 1996, has become the uncritical propaganda arm of the Libyan and Syrian rebels.
- The Syrian opposition needs to give the impression that its insurrection is closer to success than it really is. The Syrian government has failed to crush the protesters, but they, in turn, are a long way from overthrowing it. The exiled leadership wants Western military intervention in its favour as happened in Libya, although conditions are very different.
The purpose of manipulating the media coverage is to persuade the West and its Arab allies that conditions in Syria are approaching the point when they can repeat their success in Libya. Hence the fog of disinformation pumped out through the internet.
In my view, the Syrian opposition consists of a number of elements, some of them extremely contradictory with each other. There is a genuine, in-country network of activists who seek real democratic reform and who're working for it using mass nonviolent organizing. But there are also all kinds of opportunistic networks piggybacking on that movement, most of them based in or directed from outside the country... Among them are the openly violence-using people of the Free Syria Army. And though some people in the exile-based Syrian National Council claim that the role of the FSA is merely to "station armed people around mass demonstrations in order to protect the demonstrations", that has never been a tactic endorsed by any genuine nonviolent mass movement. Indeed it is tactic that's almost guaranteed to escalate the situation and cause far more casualties among the unarmed than if only nonviolent moral suasion/reproach is brought to bear on the regime's forces.
We should not kid ourselves by imagining that there is no opportunistic exploitation of the Syrian situation underway, being undertaken by a whole range of anti-Damascus forces-- some sectarian (as in the case of Qatar or Saudi Arabia; also, quite possibly, Turkey), and some pro-Zionist, or anyway easily exploited by Syria's longterm opponents in the Zionist movement in Israel and in the 'west'.
So how do those many western 'liberals' who seem to be so deeply invested in supporting the Syrian 'revolutionaries' fit into this scheme? To me, this is another key part of the puzzle, along with the enlistment by the 'revolutionaries' of so much of the western media, as documented by Patrick Cockburn.
Okay, I understand that the Syrian government has a really lousy human rights record. I have worked long enough (38 years) in and on the affairs of the mashreq to understand that better than probably 95% of the people in the human rights movement who currently present themselves as "experts" on Syria. But is getting out there to advocate a "Libya-style" overthrow of the regime (i.e. with the aid of outside forces) really a good way to bring rights abuses to an end?
No it is not! Wars and civil conflicts everywhere and always involve a mass-scale assault on the rights of civilian residents of the war-zones, with the most vulnerable residents being the ones whose rights (including the right to life) get abused the worst.
That is everywhere and always the case. No exceptions. That is why I am always really dismayed and upset when I see rights activists who claim to understand what they are talking about taking actions that escalate the tensions toward outright civil conflict and war... Remember that in the case of most rights activists who live in comfortable, secure western countries: These people have never had direct experience of living in a war zone. They are bombarded (by the military-industrial complex) with arguments that modern warfare can be a "precision", "surgical" business... and most recently, in Libya, we saw the emergence of the keffiyah-ed warrior racing through the sand as a figure of popular heroism and adulation. (Lawrence of Arabia, anyone?).
I have lived in a war zone. I lived in Lebanon from 1974 through 1981. In six of those years the country was plagued by civil war. I lived within Lebanese society, being married to a Lebanese citizen. I was not a "visiting fireman", as many western journos were-- parachuting in to stay a few days or weeks in a relatively comfortable hotel from time to time. Everyone involved in fighting the Lebanese civil war, from all the multiple "sides" that were engaged in it, was convinced of the justice of his (or sometimes her) cause. Each one was fighting what he knew to be a "just" war... But the war and its associated atrocities ground on and on and on.
Another thing the western rights activists too often forget: Mass-scale atrocities-- as opposed to a rampage by a lone, psychotic gunman-- are nearly always, or always, committed only in the context of an ongoing civil conflict or war. Conflicts provide the heightened degree of threat and the dehumanization of the opponent that are essential ingredients in the organized commission of atrocities. They also, in the past, provided plenty of the "fog of war" in which those acts can be shrouded.
Thus, if you want to avoid the commission of atrocities: avoid war! Do everything you can to explore and enlarge the space for de-escalation and the negotiated resolution of grievances!
It is true that modern communications technology makes the shrouding of atrocities much harder (though not impossible) to achieve. That is, obviously, a very good thing! But this same technology also enables the fighting parties of all sides to do much more than they could previously, to frame and disseminate their own "stories" of what's happening... Rights activists in other countries need to be very aware that this is not only a possibility-- it is actually happening. And in the case of Syria, in particular, these reports are being used to whip up western (and worldwide) support for a 'western'-led military campaign aimed at bringing forced regime change to Syria.
Colonialists have, throughout history, always tried to cloak their campaigns of military intervention, domination, and control in the lingo of "rights", "progress", and liberalism. Even the Belgians and their supporters, when they entered Congo in the late 1800s to initiate an era of control that was marked throughout by mass killings, mass enslavement, and outright genocide that within 23 years took the lives of some ten million persons indigenous to the area... did so in the name of a campaign sold tothe European publics as being one aimed at "liberating" the people of Congo from other (in truth, much less maleficent) Arab slave-traders.
We liberals need to be very careful indeed that we do not have our admirable sentiments of human solidarity abused by today's architects of 'western' colonial invasion, control, and domination.
The situation that Syria's people are living through today is extremely difficult. There are no easy answers. Both the regime and the opposition have demonstrated their resilience, and neither looks as though it is about to "win" the current contest any time soon. Given the degree of tension that now exists in Syrian society (due to the actions of the regime, of some portions of the opposition, and of several outside actors), it is hard to see how to simply ramp those tensions down and open up the space for the inter-Syrian dialogue and reform process that the people of Syria so desperately need...
But what kind of future do those of us who are westerners or other kinds of non-Syrians want to see for our friends in Syria? A future like that of today's Libya-- or even, heaven forfend, another "result" of western military action: today's Iraq? Or would we want them to follow a negotiated-transition path like that taken by the people of South Africa, 1990-94... or the negotiated-transition path that the people of Myanmar/Burma now seem to be taking? Few of those western liberals and rights activists who are baying for "no-fly zones" or other forms of foreign military intervention seem to have ever thought about this question, so convinced are they of their own righteousness and the infallibility of their own judgments, however scantily informed these judgments may be in an era of instant You-Tube uploads of videos of, as Patrick Cockburn noted, often extremely sketchy provenance or representativity.
2012: A good year to boycott Sabra (& Shatila) Hummus
I've been thinking a lot, recently, about the upcoming 30th anniversary of the September 1982 massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. As some of you may know, my company, Just World Books, will soon be publishing a reissued version of former WaPo journo Jon Randal's classic 1983 study of the Israeli-backed Maronite-extremist militias that, with the full backing and encouragement of Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, committed those massacres. More details on that, soon...
(Jon is also working on another book, which will be a study of the massacres themselves. In the meantime, he has written a fab new preface to the 1983 book, explaining to a new generation of peace-and-justice activists the significance of all those events... )
These days, "Sabra" is also the trade-name of one of the two brands of Israeli-related hummus that BDS activists are boycotting. In the case of Sabra hummus, the boycott is based primarily on the fact that the Strauss Group, an Israeli-owned company that owns half of the brand, has had a long history of giving material support to the Golani Brigade, an Israeli military formation associated with numerous grave rights abuses.
I'm thinking that maybe this year in particular, the BDS folks might start calling the hummus brand "Sabra and Shatila hummus", to make even clearer the connection between the hummus brand and the excesses/atrocities committed by, or under the close supervision of, the Israeli military....
I've also been thinking about the meanings, connotations, and expropriations of the term "Sabra" in general. In Arabic, the most common understanding of the triliteral root S-b-r relates to being patient and long-suffering. The root is also used in the common name that many Arabs, including Palestinians, give to the prickly pear/ "Indian fig", and its fruit. It has also been thus used in modern Hebrew. (I don't know about ancient Hebrew.)
And then, in modern-day Israel, the term "Sabra" was introduced to refer to those Jewish Israelis who had actually been born in the country-- as opposed to that proportion of them, originally very large, who arrived from elsewhere as colonial settlers inside the land. Indeed, the use of the term "Sabra" in that context merely underlined the fact that for so many Jewish Israelis, being born in the country was not the norm.
For Palestinians, meanwhile, the hardy prickly-pear (Subar) hedges that once ringed or demarcated properties in many traditional villages in historic Palestine over time became, in many cases, the only trace left of where once had stood those villages that in 1947-48 were ethnically cleansed by the advancing Jewish/Israeli armies that pushed the boundaries of the state of Israel far beyond what even the very generous U.N. Partition Plan had allotted to it. You can still drive around many parts of Israel today and see, on a small rise here or in the fold of valley there, a neglected and ragged line of prickly pear hedges; and you'll know that that was where one of the ethnically cleansed villages stood.
Patient, indeed.
But the word "Sabra" in one form or another has also been used as a family name in many Arab families, as has the family name "Shatila". In Beirut, the Chatilas/Shatilas have long been one of the big Sunni trading families... So I imagine the names of the two refugee camps established in southwest Beirut in 1948-50 came from the names of the owners of the lands on which the U.N. and the Lebanese government agreed to locate those camps.
The refugees housed in those camps, as in the three dozen other large refugee camps that ringed the area of the State of Israel, then and now, were some of those same Palestinians who'd been ethnically cleansed from those now destroyed but still "Subar"-hedged villages inside the area of Mandate Palestine.
The massacres at Sabra and Shatila were committed, as noted above, by extremist-Maronite militia formations who were acting under the close supervision of, and with much logistical support from, the Israeli military. (This coordination was well represented in the haunting 2008 film from Israeli director Ari Folman, "Waltz with Bashir.") The key architect of the whole episode, as of the extremely lethal, all-out military assault on Lebanon that preceded it, from June through early August of 1982, was Ariel Sharon. Israel's own investigation into the massacres, conducted by former Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan, found that Sharon bore personal responsibility for the massacres, and recommended that he not be permitted to hold high office again.
Well, we know how that went, don't we...
So now, here we are, 30 years after the Israeli assault on Lebanon, 30 years after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and elsewhere are still no closer to having their rights restored. Their communities were expelled from their ancestral homes and lands through the use of violence and force, and were subsequently prevented from returning to those lands by the same force. They have been subject to repeated assaults by the arrogant Israeli military (with the Golani Brigade as one of the most violent and aggressive units in it.) And they've have been forced to continue living as stateless refugees for 64 years now, though numerous United Nations resolutions assure them of the right to "return or compensation" (in UNGA resolution 194, and reaffirmed in numerous U.N. resolutions since then), or, more simply, as per the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the "right to ... return to his [or her] country."
So maybe if we start calling "Sabra" hummus "Sabra and Shatila" hummus, it might remind American shoppers of some of this history?
(What I would not want to do, however, is stigmatize the use of the term "Shatila" in a brand name. The Dearborn, Michigan-based Shatila Food Products bakery produces the very best baklava there is in the whole of North America... )
J. Alterman on America and Egypt
Jon Alterman has an op-ed in the NYT that has some good sense in it but also some very troubling ideas and policy prescriptions.
Alterman is quite right to note that by far the most important thing that's happening in Egypt right now is not the confrontations or lack of them in Cairo's very visible Tahrir Square but the electoral process that is unfolding, with almost painful slowness, all around the country-- and the negotiation that will subsequently unfold between the election's victors and the country's now-ruling military council, the SCAF.
(The piece doesn't mention the SCAF's recent actions against US-funded NGOs in the country. That was probably because it was written a few days ago. But anyway, his basic thesis that it is the election and the subsequent negotiation that are the most important story, still stands.)
He is also right to note that the Islamist parties that between them are now showing a clear lead in the elections are doing so for good reason-- because they have built up serious, nationwide political organizations. He writes:
- Islamists have grasped that the game has moved beyond protests to the mechanics of elections, and their supporters are motivated, organized and energetic. By contrast, the secular liberal parties are virtually absent from the countryside. Judging from posters, billboards, bumper stickers and banners, the two major Islamist parties have the field almost to themselves.
Why does Alterman need to make it seem as though only he understands what is really going on? (And isn't he an American, too? Or has he, like Michael Oren, suddenly transformed himself into an Israeli?)
Well, that is a relatively small quibble. The more serious problems occur at the end of his piece, where he writes:
- Many in Israel and America, and even some in Egypt, fear that the elections will produce an Islamist-led government that will tear up the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, turn hostile to the United States, openly support Hamas and transform Egypt into a theocracy that oppresses women, Christians and secular Muslims. They see little prospect for more liberal voices to prevail, and view military dictatorship as a preferable outcome.
American interests, however, call for a different outcome, one that finds a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians. We do not want any one side to vanquish or silence the other. And with lopsided early election results, it is especially important that the outcome not drive away Egypt’s educated liberal elite, whose economic connections and know-how will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs.
Our instinct is to search for the clarity we saw in last winter’s televised celebrations. However, what Egyptians, and Americans, need is something murkier — not a victory, but an accommodation.
As someone who claims to be a knowledgeable, evidence-based "realist" rather than an alarmist, wouldn't that be information Alterman should include in that paragraph, rather than letting those "scare" scenarios simply stand?
Moving on to the last two paras of his piece... I feel pretty sure that Alterman would define "American interests" in a way that is in some portions the same and in some portions different from the way that I would define "the true interests of the American people". However, let's assume we're talking here about roughly the same thing. In my definition the true interests of the American people would require that our government and all its appendages, including its sneakily misnamed, government-funded quangos like NED, etc, stay completely out of Egyptian politics, and take only those actions toward Egypt that are clearly requested by the new government that will emerge from the ongoing electoral process.
Realistically, that government will only emerge and stabilize itself once presidential elections in April, as well as the current lengthy round of parliamentary elections, have been completed. But the parliament that emerges from the current elections will have a leadership that will be in a position to negotiate with and make demands of not only the SCAF, but also the SCAF's main financial backers, that is, the U.S. government.
So Alterman is arguing for an outcome "that finds a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians. We do not want any one side to vanquish or silence the other." Say that again, Jon? Um, in democratic theory there's this thing called civilian control of the military. Surely, anyone who claims to want to see greater democracy in Egypt should aim to have that principle firmly implemented there! It's not a question of "vanquishing" or "silencing". It's a question of who's in charge.
In the next sentence, he seems to giving another reason why "we" Americans should seek to see the power of Egypt's elected leaders curtailed: "it is especially important that the outcome not drive away Egypt’s educated liberal elite, whose economic connections and know-how will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs." His clear implication here is that an Islamist government (a) would not be able to mobilize any-- or sufficient numbers of-- "educated" people with "connections and know-how", and (b) would "drive away" the country's liberal elite, whose fabulous attributes "will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs."
This argument is nonsense on stilts! It is based on incredibly condescending views of observant Muslims and the Islamist parties that grow up in their communities, to the effect that they really do not have sufficient education, know-how, or connections to run a successful modern economy.
Turkey, anyone? (Or come to that, Iran-- and the impressive abilities its technicians showed recently when they hijacked the US military's allegedly "stealth" RQ-170 drone... )
But the argument Alterman is making is also a sly one. By placing his "concern" about Egypt's "educated liberal elite" right there alongside his argument for the military to still retain a say in national governance, he sis clearly implying that the military can be a guardian for the interests of the liberal elite.
Actually, that too is a pretty stupid argument. True, there are some in the "liberal elite" who strongly indicated in the past that they would be happy to see some form of military guarantee, or counter-balance, to protect them from the programs and policies of the Islamists; but for quite a while now relations between the SCAF and the liberals have been far, far worse than the relations either side has with, say, the MB. But I guess Alterman is adducing this argument here as a way of making the support he is expressing for a continued strong military role in Egypt more appealing to Western liberals...
Anyway, in his's last paragraph, he states his position clearly: "what Egyptians, and Americans, need is ... not a victory, but an accommodation." That is, he doesn't want to see a true victory for a democratically elected civilian leadership in Egypt, or for the important democratic principle of civilian control of the military; but he wants to see a continuing strong role for the military in Egypt's governance.
Describing his own policy preference as a "need" for both Egyptians and Americans" is, of course, colonial, patronizing, and quite unwarranted. Let Egypt's voters (who include, of course, all the members of the military) define their country's needs on their own behalf. They don't need Jon Alterman to do it for them.
