I just found a collection of wonderful video shorts on YouTube, that show members of the Quaker meeting (congregation) in Watford, UK, both practicing and talking about Quakerism. They are produced by someone called Chris, I believe Pettit.
I was drawn, first to this 4m40s video in which some Watford Quakers talk about the Quaker testimonies. But then I watched, and really enjoyed, the two 8-minute videos described as "An introduction to Quakers", parts 1 and 2; and this shorter video about our very distinctive form of decisionmaking and (anti-)leadership.
I am so grateful to Chris and the members of Watford meeting for producing and posting these videos. We're a rum lot, Quakers. We have such great respect for integrity and dignity of all other persons that most of us find it very hard to think of doing anything that might suggest "proselytizing."
Well, actually that applies mainly to the Quakers (Friends) who-- like the British Friends and those of us on the east coast of the US-- still hold "unprogramed" meetings for worship... But the further west you go across the US, the more the Quakers become, in many respects, like other Christian churches. Till in the midwest they start calling their congregations "churches", not meetings, and they start having pastors and programing a liturgy for their worship sessions... And then when you get even further west they start being "Evangelical Friends" who-- guess what!-- evangelize... And hence, most Friends (Quakers) in the world today (a) live in Africa, and (b) are Evangelical.
I have worshiped with great joy with Evangelical Friends in Africa. But still, I love our very simple, non- or anti-hierarchical pattern of worship and internal organization. You can find out a lot more about it by watching some of these videos, including, in the first part of the "Introduction to Quakers" the camera will even take you inside a worship session very similar to the ones we have, in Charlottesville.
Check 'em out!
Yesterday, Pres. Bush referred to the huge subsidies the US government gives to farmers to grow corn for conversion into ethanol, a car fuel, by saying:
But who defines this slippery thing called the "national interest", anyway? In Chap. 7 of my book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush, I write:
This current, mounting global food crisis is an instance in which we certainly need to adopt the people-centered rather than big-business-centered definition of "national interest".
It is certainly not in our interest, as US citizens, that the activities of our country's very well-funded Big Ag sector and the financial sectors that have been speculating heavily in foodstuffs-- and fuel-- over recent months should be allowed to continue to pursue policies that are driving hundreds of millions of our fellow-humans in poor countries into hunger, and towards outright, directly life-threatening starvation.
These big business sectors need to be effectively controlled and regulated by a political leadership that understands-- finally!-- that the greed of US car-owners should never be allowed to over-ride the right that all the world's men, women, and children have to adequate and assured sources of nutrition. (Elsewhere in the book, by the way, I note that most "rights" activists in the US have focused far too tightly on issues of civil and political rights around the world, and have given short shrift to the frequently far more pressing issues of social and economic rights.)
The WaPo's smart and thoughtful business columnist Steve Pearlstein has a good column in today's paper on the role that speculators have been playing in the current food crisis. For those of you who are interested, the whole of the column is worth reading. As was his previous column, here.
Some highlights from today's Pearlstein:
Many of these were the same hedge funds and hot-money investors who had gorged on sovereign debt of developing countries, tech and telecom stocks, subprime mortgages and commercial real estate and now needed a new thing to focus on. Others -- including, it is said, some sovereign wealth funds -- looked to commodities as a hedge against the falling dollar. But perhaps the biggest push came from pension funds, foundations and university endowments whose managers had all gone to the same conferences and read the same academic papers, suggesting that a basket of commodity futures would provide a good hedge against stock and bond market declines.
...[T]he Bank for International Settlements estimates that the value of all the derivative contracts traded on the unregulated over-the-counter markets surged from about $3 trillion in the spring of 2005 to more than $8 trillion today.
Whatever the number, it's hard to imagine that it wasn't a significant factor in skyrocking prices...
... [T]he only people who don't believe speculation is driving a commodities bubble are the big commodity traders and the commodities exchanges, which are profiting handsomely from the soaring prices and trading volumes, and the regulators at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, whose economists cannot seem to find statistical evidence that financial investors have had much of an impact on commodity prices.
But in today's irreversibly hyperconnected world it is always, also, in our interest to make sure that actions taken by our government and our fellow-citizens on Wall Street, in Big Ag, and other big-business sectors stop inflicting harm on the world's poorest, most vulnerable people.
I was really disappointed, when watching the BBC's US newsfeed this evening to hear the two evidently well-fed white-guy anchors talking about the mounting global food crisis in ill-informed and patronizing terms. One of them said something like, "It looks as though it could cause hunger and even perhaps a degree of social unrest." No recognition there of the desperate straits that millions of families in the low-income world are already living in, and the imminence of not just "hunger" but actual megadeaths from starvation... and not just "social unrest", but social collapse, war, and all the associated pestilence.
This editorial in the WaPo, back in March, wasn't much better. It spoke only of the possibility of some people in what is still coyly called "the developing world" being pushed into "privation or even hunger." It also, quite unconscionably, failed to mention the relationship between US subsidies for the new "biofuel" industry and the current shortages of food grain around the world.
This week, however, the WaPo news section has what looks like a very informative series on the unfolding global food crisis Tomorrow, they'll be publishing an article on "The problem with linking food and fuel."
My recommendations for what citizens of rich countries should be doing and pushing for right now to address the crisis remain the same as I stated at the beginning of the month:. We should:
2. stop the subsidies for biofuels immediately; and
3. push our governments to stop the current financial speculation in basic foodstuffs.
This is probably the first food crisis in history that the whole of a united humanity has faced together. Can we come through it with our basic relationships with each other and our sense of compassion and human decency all intact?
Remember, there is enough food for everyone in the whole world, if we are wise and generous in how we decide to distribute it among our fellow humans. And we have the know-how to make the harvests of the years ahead even better, with the right distribution of inputs including credit to small farmers around the world), and fair methods for distribution of the subsequent harvest.
Left to themselves, I don't think the markets can solve this one. Governments need to come together on a basis of equality and mutual respect among all persons, rich or poor. In 2000, all the governments of the world came together to endorse the Millennium Development Goals. The very first of those goals included that the proportion of people suffering from hunger should be halved by 2015. The base-line for that goal was 1990, so in 2000 maybe it looked quite doable. Today, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the world's poorest, most vulnerable people think that "goal" was nothing but a sick, unserious promise.
I long ago concluded that "justice" is always, inescapably, a highly political matter. Including-- perhaps especially-- the workings of criminal courts, which for some reason so many western liberals seem to completely conflate with the idea of "justice" simpliciter.
A criminal court, remember, is always established, funded, and supported (or not) within a specific political context. I suppose that it is the de-contextualization of these aspects of a criminal court's operations that allows so many people in the western rights movement to believe that the operation of such courts can ever be completely a-political.
Where a political system is well-constituted, and its leadership accountable, the courts can be reasonably-- but never perfectly-- fair. But today, on both sides of the US-Iraqi divide, we have highly politicized criminal-court proceedings carrying on, both of which are 100% products of the Bush administration's divisive, "GWOT" approach to the world. Why should anyone be surprised that these court systems are lousy with politicization, corruption, and abuse?
In Iraq, the work of the US-created, and US-manipulated "Iraqi Special tribunal" grinds on. Now, 16 months after the horrendous travesty of the Saddam execution, we have former Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, and others, being tried on charges of involvement in the execution of 43 merchants accused in 1992 of having hoarded foodstuffs in Baghdad. That was, let's not forget, a time when western-imposed sanctions were starting to bite in Iraq. Actually, since politically-imposed starvation is now occurring on a wider and more visible basis once again in many developing countries, a number of those countries may soon resort to the death penalty for foodstuff speculators. I am not quite sure how such executions-- inhumane though they, like all executions, including those regularly carried out in the USA, are-- rise to the level of an atrocity, as such? Nor am I clear what kind of criminal responsibility Tariq Aziz bears for them...
("Grotian Moment", anyone?)
And 8,000 miles away from Baghdad, we have the outrageous, and equally politicized, proceedings of the Guantanamo Kangaroo Courts. Huge kudos to Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who yesterday told one of the hearings at the quite unconstitutionally constituted Kangaroo Court, under oath, that at an earlier stage, when he had been working as the Defense Department's chief prosecutor for terrorism-related cases,
Davis told the KC hearing-- which was open to some reporters-- that,
"He said, 'We can't have acquittals,' " Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents [five-year detainee Salim Ahmed] Hamdan. " 'We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.' "
What can the post-Bush government in this country do about the scores of detainees who remain at Guantanamo, all of whom our government has subjected to significant mistreatment-- or, in many cases, actual torture. Some of these individuals have been somewhat reliably accused of involvement in serious criminal acts; but against many of them the evidence is far more flimsy, if not completely fabricated, extracted under torture (and therefore unusable in any respectable court of law), or in some cases, quite non-existent.
But we were told when Gitmo opened that these were all "the worst of the worst." That was a clear calumny.
But what to do about these individuals, some-- but not all-- of whom may be tempted to engage in violent acts after their release.
I believe that the US authorities, under any president and flavor of congressional leadership, is singularly unsuited to being able to sort out this issue. The U.N. should be invited to establish a commission of enquiry on the whole matter of the Bush administration's illegal detentions policies around the world, with a view to finding a humane, rehabilitation-based future for these men and due accountability for those U.S. officials who have wilfully subjected them to such horrendous and in many cases long-sustained ill-treatment.
Supporting a solution like that would be the very best way for a new US leadership to reaffirm, and reinstate, our country's values.
George Bush's general approach to dealing with the problems of Iraq and Afghanistan-- as to the many other rapidly mounting challenges that confront Washington both globally and domestically-- has been best summed up in this short animated cartoon published on April 11 by the WaPo's extremely gifted Ann Telnaes. (Check out some of her other animations there, too.)
Bottom line: At this point, facing these omnipresent challenges, Bush is working simply to minimize the amount of damage they cause to him, and to presumed Republican nominee John McCain, in the time remaining till the November 4 election. And he is doing this, even if it quite predictably (and predictedly) results in building up much greater challenges for whoever it is that succeeds him next January.
But what if Bush's attempt to postpone the eruption of full-blown crises until after Nov. 4-- and preferably, from his perspective, until after January 20, 2009-- fails, and these crises start erupting within the next six months?
This might well happen. Regarding many issues, including the domestic US economy and the Palestine question. I know that for the people directly concerned, their situations are already in extreme crisis. But I am talking here about the potential of these crises to become full-blown challenges to the Bush administration's attempt to hold onto Washington's power to "control" events in very distant parts of the world.
Today, it is the (functionally linked) crises the US faces in Iraq and Afghanistan that seem likely to mount most speedily to this point.
The functional link between these two crises is, of course, the force-level constraint and the trade-offs that exist between the two theaters in terms of the US military's force planning. (One notable distinction between the US's bid for global hegemony over the past 15 years and the maintenance by Britain, France, and other European powers of their globe-circling "empires" in earlier eras is that in the case of those European empires, the vast majority of the cannon-fodder required to police the distant colonies was pulled from the pauperized indigenous peoples of other colonies. The US, by contrast, has no power to compel citizens of other countries to fight its wars for it, and has shown little ability to persuade them to do so, either. Hence, it is the US that in both Iraq and Afghanistan has done the vast majority of the paying to raise the fighting forces, and the fighting and the dying there. Unlike when, for example, it was the British Army that got majorly caught short in Iraq in WWI-- and it was Indian troops who did most of the dying there.)
Now, US force levels are stretched to the limit. The "surge" in Iraq was supposed to be temporary, but has turned out not to be. A week ago, when the Green Zone in Baghdad came under sustained mortar fire, the US and its Iraqi Security Force proxies tried to dig into, take, and control the whole of the southern third of Sadr City, in an attempt to deny the mortar-firers the proximity they needed to be able to hit the GZ. That involved a massive attempt at quadrillaging the southern end of Sadr City, an area that is home to 2.5 million human souls.
(I should note that Badger, over at Missing Links, is quite right to castigate all those US commentators on Iraqi affairs who did not sharply criticize the anti-humane quality of this US-led assault on Sadr City.)
Anyway, the US-led attempt to prevent the mortaring of the GZ was spectacularly shown to have failed yesterday and today, when a dust-storm prevented the US from flying the aircraft used to spot launchers, and the mortaring of the GZ resumed again.
It seems from that account by the WaPo's Sholnn Freeman that the US-led forces had been trying to simply to carve a barrier right through the middle of Sadr City, in order to establish that line as a forward defensive perimeter for the GZ. That meant trying to push the new barrier right through the middle of some very densely populated districts. I can certainly imagine some of the suffering that has inflicted on all the families who live anywhere nearby. (The US military reported that 38 "gunmen" were killed in Sadr City yesterday. How about the noncombatant casualties, though? Also, why should we believe their designation that all those they counted as killed were actually involved in hostilities?)
Meanwhile, one other, extremely important effect of the US-led attempt to quadrillage Sadr City has been to firm up an emerging anti-US alliance between Iraqi MPs and political currents from a number of different currents that span Iraq's sectarian and ethnic divides. About 50 leaders, including Ahmed Radhi, a member of the Iraqi Accord Front, and other Sunni-Arab and even Kurdish figures, joined a pro-national dialogue, and effectively pro-Sadr, protest in Sadr City yesterday.
McClatchy's Hussein Kadhim and Raviya H. Ismail added to that report the following about Moqtada Sadr's position:
"We want liberation of ourselves and our lands from the occupier," part of the message read. "To have a real government and have real sovereignty."
(More analysis of the anti-US bloc from Badger, here. Kudos to him for his attentiveness to the politics of the story.)
Meanwhile, all has most certainly not been going well for the US-led effort in Afghanistan. Yesterday, the Taliban showed their ability to penetrate close to the heart of a very high-security event being staged by the Karzai government, with all the foreign ambassadors and other dignitaries present. Themilitary display and speeches there were designed both to mark the anniversary of the mujahideen's victory over the Soviets 16 years ago, and to demonstrate the capabilities of the new, US-built and US-controlled Afghan security forces.
Oops.
Asia Times Online's Syed Saleem Shahzad gives a lot of helpful background about the Taliban action. He notes that the attackers "penetrated no fewer than 18 security rings around the parade's venue and they used their latest weaponry - small mortars that are only manufactured by a few Western countries, including Israel." They got to within 500 meters of the event's main stage, sending salvoes from machine guns and rocket launchers into the back of the stage.
Karzai and the dignitaries escaped unharmed, but three Afghan Security Force people and three Taliban were killed in the ensuing shootout.
It sounds eerily like the attack Egyptian Islamists mounted in 1981, when they killed President Sadat while he was reviewing troops at a big, high-profile public event staged to commemorate the Egyptian army's successful crossing of the Suez Canal eight years earlier. In that one, the attackers succeeded in killing Sadat. In both cases, the attackers had evidently gathered useful intelligence cooperation from people within the national armed forces involved.
Since yesterday's attack in Kabul, NATO and US spinmeisters have been working overtime to try to put a brave face on what happened. (E.g. here.) But the event certainly points to the fragile nature of the US-led order in Afghanistan. Shahzad's piece has lots more details and what looks like a good and fair analysis. His bottom line: NATO has gotten smarter and somewhat more effective, but the Taliban have also adapted and learned... "Indeed," he warns, "the Taliban have lined up a stream of attackers to target Kabul to rattle the Afghan government and NATO forces in coming days and weeks."
Over recent weeks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pleaded and pleaded with the NATO allies to commit more combat troops to Afghanistan. With little success. So how can the dangerous military situations that the US and its small number of combat-willing allies now face in both Iraq and Afghanistan be dealt with without disaster? Hard to say. But calling for the UN to convene and lead a much broader--that is, no longer US-dominated-- political stabilization effort for both countries seems to be the only way to avoid a disaster in one or both theaters that might well blow up-- even on George W. Bush's watch.
China announced today it would resume talks with an envoy of the Dalai Lama that have been broken off since July 2007.
This is great news. McClatchy's Tim Johnson reports that the official Xinhua news agency has found a way to start climbing down from its recently belligerent anti-DL rhetoric by issuing the following statement:
The very best of luck to this effort.
I have a big piece in the CSM today that urges Americans to build a relationship with the rest of the world on the basis of strong commitment to the ideals of human equality and nonviolent problem-solving. (It's also here.)
If you go to the CSM website's version, you can even here the audio of an interview my editor, Josh Burek, did with me on the subject.
My book gets a nice mention there.
In the article I note that human equality is a fundamental American value, and that the UN, which was a great American creation, is built on the ideas of equality and nonviolent problem-solving.
The piece is a gentle critique of the whole discourse of American "leadership", which is the dominant discourse in Washington today. (How to regain it, after Bush has squandered it, etc.) Actually, if I'd dealt with the issue more thoroughly I would have noted that "leadership" can be exercised in a number of different ways and certainly need not involve the "leader" in question throwing its weight around. Moral leadership, shared leadership, and leadership that is dedicated primarily to effective team-building are all much more useful concepts of "leadership", as such.
Anyway, tell me what you think...
So Hamas has now signed on to a ceasefire/truce plan with Israel that covers in the first instance only the Israel-Gaza front, but with a proposal that this be extended to the West Bank according to a fixed (but at this stage undisclosed) timetable.
This is in line with the expectations I reported on here on Tuesday.
In the Reuters report that's linked to above, Jonathan Wright writes that,
"We can't have a period of quiet that will just be the quiet before the storm," said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
[An un-named Palestinian official close to the talks] said Hamas made any truce conditional on Israel opening all of Gaza's border crossings and halting military action in the territory.
The Islamist group had backing from other Palestinian militant factions in the enclave, he added.
But each side has things it wants to win that it still has not. Primarily, for the Israelis, the release of Gilad Shalit (which will be part of a prisoner exchange); and for the Palestinians, the extension of the tahdi'eh to the West Bank (in their locution, this would constitute a "comprehensive" ceasefire.")
Egypt's intel chief Omar Suleiman has been the main intermediary in these negotiations. Al-Masry al-Yawm's Fathiyya Dakhakhni reported today that Suleiman is due to travel to Israel pretty soon to resume negotiations on these remaining issues.
No word yet on whether Hamas has specified the length of the timetable within which they want to win the extension of the ceasefire to the West Bank, far less what that length might be.
Wright attributes to Egypt's official MENA news agency a quote from an un-named senior Egyptian official to the effect that this truce "would contribute to talks between Israel and the rival Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as well as to reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah." That I doubt. In fact, coming just as Abu Mazen is about to meet Bush here in Washington, it considerably undercuts Abu Mazen's position by showing the whole world that Israel considers it more important to negotiate a tough deal with Hamas rather than to make nice with him in the US-sponsored formal peace talks.
At this point, I imagine that many Israeli officials are concerned first and foremost about securing a degree of calm in their country as they prepare for their 60th anniversary celebrations. Hamas and its allies are the ones with the ability to deliver-- or withhold-- that calm. Abu Mazen is not.
One main issue ahead will be that of responsibility for verifying the ceasefire. This is crucial to its robustness. I hope Omar Suleiman has made provision for that. Because without verification, any small (or large) mischief-maker on either side of the line could easily torpedo it. Maybe if, under the terms of the siege being lifted, the EU regains a (possibly slightly differently configured) monitoring presence at Rafah, then an expanded EU mission could also provide ceasefire verification?
Let's wait and see.
I just went to an excellent briefing that the Israeli saint (and journo) Amira Hass gave to Human Rights Watch about the background to the extremely intrusive and life-strangling system of movement controls that Israel has maintained on the 3.5 million Palestinians of the occupied territories for the past 17 years.
The central point of Hass's briefing was to focus on the importance of a key administrative change the occupation authorities made on January 15, 1991. For the 20 years prior to that, the basic approach of the occupation authorities had been to promote the idea of "open borders" between Israel and the OPTs. (That, in line with the approach Moshe Dayan had pioneered earlier, whereby Palestinians would be encouraged to work in Israel and to satisfy themselves with some economic gains, in the hope they might forget about their national cause.)
From the early 1970s through January 1991, Hass noted, the prevailing idea was that the Palestinians of the OPTs should have freedom of movement within the West Bank and Gaza, between them and Israel, and between the two of them, as well. Thus, as she recalled-- as I have, too-- that during the first intifada, organizers and activists would move freely between the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and Israel.
In those days, some Palestinians, as individuals, had restraining orders that forbade them to move from their house, or their town or city. But those were exceptions, made on a name-by-name basis by the IOF.
On January 15, 1991, all that changed. Overnight, the prevailing approach was changed to one whereby Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were prohibited from entering Israel-- and even from entering occupied East Jerusalem, which Israel claimed as its own. That meant also that West Bankers could not visit Gaza, and vice versa.
At that point, only those Palestinians who could get specific, named permission from the IOF were allowed to cross those boundaries. Freedom of movement was transformed from a basic right, to a privilege granted only to a few.
At the time, Hass said, that big change wasn't much noted because it was part of a much wider clampdown imposed on the OPTs as Israel geared up (or hunkered down?) for the First Gulf War. She said everyone simply assumed that when the war was over, the whole clampdown would be lifted. But the new system of movement controls never was lifted. Indeed, over the years that followed 1991 it was fine-tuned and extended by its IOF administrators; and later, a whole system of truly Orwellian checkpoints and movement control centers was constructed deep inside both territories, on the basis of that administrative change.
Hass noted, crucially, that that change in the movement control philosophy was enacted more than two years before the first ever Palestinian suicide bombing against a target in the West Bank, which occurred in 1993, and more than three years before the first suicide bombings against Israeli civilians inside Israel-- which occurred in April 1994, in response to Baruch Goldstein's massacre in the Hebron Mosque, as the suicide bombers and their masters described their action at the time.
She also talked a lot about the close connection between the movement control regime in the West Bank and the still-continuing Israeli settlement project there.
Another good point she made was to describe the pressure the IOF places on all the OPT's Palestinians as the "boil the frog slowly" approach...
... On a related note, I see HRW has a new press release out today that criticizes Israel's the tight restrictions Israel has been placing on the delivery of fuel into Gaza. The criticism is voiced in the fourth paragraph down in these terms:
But I think the release has a more serious problem when it says this, right up near the top:
It is fine for the press release to report on what Israel states its goal to be with the fuel-cuts and other aspects of its collective punishment. But HRW's response to that should simply be that collective punishment of this sort is always illegal, regardless of the validity (or otherwise) of the stated goal, and regardless of the efficacy (or otherwise) of the collective punishment in question from bringing about achievement of the goal.
HRW should cut out nearly the whole of that second sentence there and move up its criticism of this illegal act. Perhaps in the following terms:
Excellent, though, to have organized that informative session with Amira Hass. Thanks for that.
The news that Pres. Bush has nominated Gen. Petraeus to be head of Centcom raises some interesting possibilities.
Petraeus is best known for three things: For having kowtowed in a fairly craven fashion to Bush for much of the past two years; for having overseen the whole, very politically motivated "surge" campaign in Iraq; and for having co-authored the new Army/Marines Counter-insurgency manual.
When he goes to Centcom, he will be in a whole new ball-game of responsibility for a command that stretches far wider than Iraq. Crucially, he will have some big decisions to make regarding the allocation of resources between the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters.
Some commentators have speculated that he will seek to "take" to the US operation in Afghanistan the kinds of COIN lessons he applied in Iraq. I think that gets it seriously backwards. Actually, many of the lessons they've been trying to apply in Iraq were ones that were first developed and applied, albeit on a very small scale, in Afghanistan. The PRTs approach, etc. So the command in Afghanistan doesn't really need, from their point of view, to "learn" the COIN lessons that Petraeus was using in Iraq. The problem in Afghanistan is not the approach. It is the resources-- men and materiel-- that the US military is able to put into pursuing the approach.
I believe that Petraeus has a generally good grasp on the demands of COIN. So now, he is going to have responsibility for allocating those resources. He will be faced up sqaure and centrally against "the Dannatt question". That is, how should the military's increasingly thinly stretched resources be allocated as between Iraq and Afghanistan?
Maybe Petraeus could be the person who, understanding the problems and now to gain responsibility for averting disaster in the whole of the Centcom theater of operations, might be the respected military leader who tells the political bosses that some tough choices have to be made?
Mainly, one tough choice, as framed earlier by Gen. Dannatt: that we cannot hope to "win" (or avoid disaster) in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore we have to choose...
Interesting possibilities ahead?
This morning, Egypt's prestigious semi-official daily Al-Ahram reported that the much-needed, Egypt-mediated Israel-Hamas ceasefire (tahdi'eh) agreement may be on the point of getting nailed down. Given the extreme reluctance with which Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak even got drawn into playing the intermediary role in the first place-- and the fact that until just a few days ago his media were still engaging in a heavy anti-Hamas propaganda campaign-- this latest news is significant indeed.
(Might it also signal that the key Egyptian mediator, security boss, Omar Suleiman has been doing a few things that push the boundaries of whatever mandate he got from his Prez? If so, that would be potentially even bigger news...)
This negotiation has been going on since mid-February. In the past ten days it has been conducted in parallel with Jimmy Carter's visits to Hamas leaders and to Israel. Obviously we still need to learn a lot more about the interactions between these two processes, though all sides have been quite clear that Carter has not been involved in the ongoing, Egypt-mediated negotiations on the three topics of the tahdi'eh, the prisoner exchange, and lifting the siege Gaza siege.
The Reuters report linked to above tells us,
Egypt's state newspaper al-Ahram reported a preliminary agreement had been reached on "achieving a period of calm with the Israelis".
A Palestinian official familiar with the Islamist group's talks with Egypt said he expected Hamas to agree to a reciprocal truce with Israel "in the Gaza Strip, at this stage".
Hamas, which controls the coastal territory, had said it also wanted a ceasefire to cover the occupied West Bank, where the rival Fatah faction of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds sway.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, said the group would present its final response to Egypt on Thursday.
He declined to comment on its content but said any ceasefire should be based on "ending the aggression against the Palestinian people" and securing the opening of Gaza border crossings.
Israel's Ha'aretz reports that Hamas head Khaled Meshaal has approved Suleiman's Gaza-only agreement. And citing the Ahram report it said that Suleiman
Here is what the PIC site reports:
Mishaal... also emphasized the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland in occupied Palestine.
He also explained that his Movement has "politely" turned down a request by former US president Jimmy Carter to announce a unilateral ceasefire for 30 days, underlining that the Palestinian rocket attacks on IOF positions and on the Israeli settlements around the Gaza Strip were "reaction rather than an action".
He noted that Hamas had declared a unilateral ceasefire more than once in the past, but the Israeli occupation government had never respected or reciprocated those steps.
Mishaal and Carter met twice in the Syrian capital over the past couple of days despite strong objection from the US administration and the Israeli occupation government.
"Our main objective of reaching a comprehensive truce with the IOA [Israeli Occupation Army] was to protect our Palestinian people, to lift the siege, and to open the Rafah crossing point, which spurred us to reject Carter's proposal", asserted Mishaal during the conference.
As far as the case of the captured IOF corporal Gilad Shalit was concerned, Mishaal explained that his Movement has disagreed to a suggestion made by Carter to swap Shalit with 71 Palestinian prisoners in addition to children, women prisoners, and the kidnapped PA lawmakers and ministers.
"The issue of the prisoners is very sensitive and concerns almost every Palestinian household; hence, we told Carter that we prefer to follow up the issue through indirect negotiations and via the mediators, especially the Egyptian mediator, in order for us to secure the number we have had tabled", underlined Mishaal.
However, he added, Hamas has agreed to a request from Carter to transmit a letter form Shalit to his family to reassure them of his well-being despite the fact that the Israeli occupation authorities maltreat Palestinian captives and deny them family visits.
With regard to holding a referendum on a possible PA-Israeli peace agreement, Mishaal pointed out that the National Harmony Document, which was signed by all Palestinian factions including Hamas and Fatah on 2006 was transparent in obliging the PA negotiating team to subject any possible peace deal with Israel to either a transparent and free popular referendum where all eligible Palestinians voters inside and outside of Palestine are to vote on it; or to present the agreement before a duly elected Palestinian national council for voting.
But he noted that there could be no plebiscite amidst the current political rift in the Palestinian arena, underscoring that "national reconciliation should precede any popular referendum".
Concerning the opening of the vital Rafah crossing point, Mishaal underlined that the crossing point should be permanently opened being a purely Palestinian-Egyptian crossing point.
Yet, he explained that his Movement had briefed Carter on all the negotiations Hamas officials had with the Egyptians over this point, underlining that Hamas was agreeing to a formula where Egypt, Hamas, the PA leadership, and the EU observers would operate the border terminal, and that the EU observes are to be based in Egypt and not in "Israel".
... Finally, Mishaal underscored that Hamas was and still is amenable and open for Palestinian national reconciliation with all its obligations, including the formation of a national unity government, restructuring the PA security apparatuses on healthy basis, and respecting fundamentals of the political game in the PA among other obligations.
What Carter has helped to achieve is to show that Hamas is a serious political organization that is worth engaging with. For example, Meshaal's declaration about the "enhanced hudna" is a serious statement of the Hamas position-- though I note that it actually is not different in substance from what Sheikh Ahmad Yassin proposed, regarding a hudna some 10-plus years ago.
Also, if the international community as a whole were serious about the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, and about the integrity of the UN's Partition Plan of 1947, which accorded none of the currently occupied Palestinian territories to the Jewish state, then its representatives could certainly engage in a further negotiation with Hamas regarding how the principles of the hudna plan could be further stretched to become consonant with international law, including the prolongation of the hudna to become a permanent arrangement, and the agreement by the Palestinian state to grant full recognition to all its neighbors, including the Jewish state.
So there is, potentially, a mesh between an enhanced hudna and a two-state outcome.
I have to note, however, that neither Hamas nor the dominant forces in Israeli society are particularly attached to the two-state outcome... That is why it now looks as if both Hamas and the Olmert government are heading for what I call the "two-entity" situation instead. That is, a Palestinian entity in Gaza that is not a state but has some of the attributes of a quasi-state, and an Israeli entity that is also not a settled state since it is unable to define its own borders and remains burdened down by its continuing entanglement in the affairs of the West Bank.
But Carter, bless him, was still operating mainly within the paradigm of the "two-state" outcome, so it was on the elements of that that he was primarily trying to push Hamas. But Meshaal and his colleagues-- like the majority forces in the current Israeli government-- have been more focused on the established Egypt-mediated negotiations on other matters. Regarding those other matters, Hamas was notably unwilling to give anything concrete to Carter at this time, turning down his proposals regarding the prisoner-exchange deal,and (yet another) unilateral ceasefire.
But on the ceasefire (tahdi'eh) front, things do now seem to be moving through the Egypt channel. Watch that space.
Should Carter feel disappointed with what he has achieved? I don't think so. Demonstrating a strong commitment to talk with and-- even more importantly-- listen to all parties is always a valuable practice, and it is one that, sustained over time, can build sturdier bridges of understanding and trust. And he has put another few planks on just such a valuable bridge, including one running between Hamas and Israel's Shas.
Thank you for your commitment and work, Jimmy Carter.
Today I co-taught the sixth of seven classes I'm committed to teaching to the second- and third-graders in our Quaker meeting's First Day School (Sunday school.) My co-teacher, Linda Goldstein, and I had done some pretty good things with the kids in the earlier classes, but we hadn't fixed on a firm plan for today's class till half-way through the week, when a light went off in my head and I told Linda, "Hey, we really should do at least one session on John Woolman!" She agreed.
So we have four seven- and eight-year-olds in our class. One has pretty severe autism, so a teenage member of the meeting sits with him, which is great.
There is so much of interest about John Woolman's life and writings that all American kids-- not just the relatively small number of Quaker kids-- shoulkd know about and understand. Since the unit we're teaching is on peace and peacemaking, I decided to focus primarily on the incident when, during the big war of the 1760s between, on the one hand, the Anglo settlers in North America and on the other, the French settlers and some of their allies among the Native Americans, when John Woolman decided to head out west from Philadelphia to try to actually meet with, and understand the viewpoint of some of the "Indians" there...
And then-- but let's let John Woolman tell this in the words of his own journal (p.272-3 from the e-text here):
Our guides took us to the house of a very ancient man. Soon after we had put in our baggage there came a man from another Indian house some distance off. Perceiving there was a man near the door I went out; the man had a tomahawk wrapped under his match-coat out of sight. As I approached him he took it in his hand; I went forward, and, speaking to him in a friendly way, perceived he understood some English. My companion joining me, we had some talk with him concerning the nature of our visit in these parts; he then went into the house with us, and, talking with our guides, soon appeared friendly, sat down and smoked his pipe. Though taking his hatchet in his hand at the instant I drew near to him had a disagreeable appearance, I believe he had no other intent than to be in readiness in case any violence were offered to him...
We talked with the kids a little about John Woolman, what his family and community were like as he grew up in New Jersey, and then why he had decided to try to go and meet some Indians. A fear-stoked war-fever was running pretty high in Philadelphia and the rest of the Anglo settlements of the eastern seaboard at the time, so what John Woolman decided to do was very gutsy. (I'm thinking Jimmy Carter here.)
We talked a little about how scary it must have been for JW, traveling in an area with people whose language he did not speak. (Though I also found this page, that has downloadable audio clips of some common phrases in the Lenape language, which the kids found pretty interesting.) And we talked about how, for the Lenape people there, JW's arrival might have seemed pretty scary, too.
We did a great little role-play-- though unfortunately I got one of the key details wrong, in that I had misremembered it as being the Lenape man who was in the house, and JW who was approaching it, though from the journal it was clearly the other way round... But still, the essence of the story was the same: the two men had many reasons to be wary or even fearful of each other. The Lenape man had a weapon, and on seeing JW, pulled it out from under his coat. JW had to decided pretty quickly how to try to defuse the tension, and this is what he did: "I went forward, and, speaking to him in a friendly way, perceived he understood some English. My companion joining me, we had some talk with him concerning the nature of our visit in these parts; he then went into the house with us, and, talking with our guides, soon appeared friendly, sat down and smoked his pipe..."
Moreover, JW was at pains to attribute a non-hostile motivation to the other man's baring of his weapon: "I believe he had no other intent than to be in readiness in case any violence were offered to him."
We talked a little bit about other choices JW could have made. Or what if he himself has also had a weapon? Might he then have reacted differently? What role does fear play in stoking violence, etc?
Of course, there is also much, much more in John Woolman's testimony that is worth exploring. He had such a broad, indeed, "systemic" analysis of the relationshiop between the Native Americans and the white settlers. Read the last paragraph of p.271 and the first paragraph of p.272 there. He also, in other chapters of his journal, shows a very sophisticated understanding of the terrible ills and wrongs of slavery, the relationship between slavery and warmaking, the relationship between greed and violence, and so on...
Much more to think about, write about, and discuss.
... The kids in our Quaker meeting are such a blessing! Ever since 9/11 we've had a steady flow of new young families coming into our meeting. The parents, in general, seem eager to find a place where they can help raise their kids in a way that helps them resist the pressures of the violence-laden society all around us. We also have lots of great Quaker elders, including half a dozen who are active Friends in their 90s... Today, we sang John McCutcheon's great "Happy Birthday" song to Dieta Raisig, to mark her upcoming 92nd birthday. "It makes me think of the good old days... "
Yesterday I got my hands on the first copies of my upcoming book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush. It is so exciting! Paradigm Publishers have done a fabulous job editing and producing it to a punishingly rapid schedule.
Those of you who have placed advanced orders for the book can now expect them to arrive pretty soon.
The official publication date is still May 15th. The folks at Paradigm and FCNL, and I, are all working hard to give the book a great launch, and then speedy and effective nationwide promotion. If you would like to help us with this, send me an email, as we're still in the planning stage.
More details about the launch and promo events will be on the book's website soon.
I have a big family weekend this weekend. So not much time to blog about Jimmy Carter's meeting with Khaled Meshaal, or this report, by the WaPo's Glenn Kessler, on info that the Egyptian foreign minister gave yesterday about the state of the negotiations his government has been mediating between Hamas and the Israeli government. ("We're making good progress...")
Regarding the Carter-Meshaal meeting, the new information has been that Carter conveyed to Meshaal a request that Israeli deputy PM Eli Yishai of the Shas Party made when Carter met with him Wednesday to meet with Hamas himself, in order to discuss the prisoner-swap issue. But according to this Haaretz report, Yishai was clear that he did not intend to complicate the government's diplomacy by discussing the ceasefire question or other questions with Hamas.
My upcoming Boston Review article on the rise of Hamas and some of the broad diplomatic implications of that is now in final editing. It pushes further the analysis I made in this 2006 BR article about the emergence of "parallel unilateralisms" being pursued by Hamas and Likud.
Given the new role being played by Yishai and the undoubted weight of Shas as a voting bloc (currently, 12 seats in the Knesset) and social phenomenon within Israeli society, I should probably factor them-- and perhaps some of the Israeli far-right parties-- much more into my analysis as it develops.
Shas is certainly a fascinating phenomenon, in general. It is the main religious party of the mizrachi ("eastern") Jews. In fact, nearly all the Shas people are Jews "ingathered" into Israel from Arab countries. So it is particularly interesting to see the parallels between their modus operandi and emergence and that of Hamas-- though Shas has often been able to get its hands into the trough of national budgets and several of its past leaders have been engaged in corruption, which makes it different from Hamas on both counts.
To me, the most interesting question is the importance that Shas gives to defining a formal national border between Israel and a portion of the West Bank that would be under Palestinian "sovereignty." In the past, Shas's people were mainly concentrated inside Israel proper, and its concerns were mainly for the level of social spending and services provided to the mizrachi communities there-- spending which was very strongly negatively impacted by the huge government investments in the West Bank settlements. My impression, though, is that in recent years many members of the Shas base, like so many observant ashkenazi Jews, have been moving into West Bank settlements-- perhaps mainly in and around East Jerusalem.
Can any readers point me in the direction of good materials to read about recent political and demographic developments regarding Shas?? If so, that would be really helpful.
Anyway, regarding Carter, AP's Bassem Mroue is reporting that he went back for a further one-hour meeting with Meshaal this morning, after spending four hours with him yesterday.
Mroue writes, that this morning Hamas's deputy politburo head Musa Abu Marzouk
My good friends Hussein Agha and Rob Malley have a thoughtful and generally intelligent article on the current (sad) state of the formal Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" in the latest New York Review of Books. They do a good job of describing the Bush administration's bizarre strategy of trying to get Olmert and Abbas to reach what is called a "shelf agreement" by the end of this year-- that is, a full final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement that will be signed, ratified through referenda held in both national constituencies-- and then, quite simply, be set on a dusty shelf someplace "until circumstances permit" its implementation.
If this is a recipe for anything, it is most surely a recipe for kicking all the many political problems any US president faces in doing Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy along into the next presidency. That is, even if supposing the whole project doesn't crash long before that...
As I say, Agha and Malley do a good job of describing that. But it's where they voice their own proposals for what might be done to improve the strategy that they look a bit as though they're trying to re-arrange a few last deckchairs on the Titanic. They make the generally laudable suggestions that a way has to be found to include Hamas and if possible also Syria into the negotiating process, and make some excellent arguments as to why these steps would be good. Where they are considerably less sound, though, is on limning out what incentive those two important actors might have for joining the process as it is currently structured (and therefore, what changes might be necessary in the process if indeed they are to be persuaded to join.)
Hussein and Rob also keep their general diplomatic/political horizons incredibly tightly focused within the purview of a US-dominated global and regional environment. For example, at one point they argue that the peacemaking approach has "always" been one of choosing whether the Syrian track or the Palestinian track should go first, and the assumption they can't both be pursued together. But that has really only been the case since 1992 or so. At the Madrid conference of 1991, remember, both parties were well-represented (even if the Palestinian delegates there were still only acting within the fig-leaf of a "joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.") But the idea that only one lucky contestant-- either the Palestinians, or the Syrians-- is allowed through the diplomatic gate at any one time is certainly a creation of the post-Cold War, "unipolar" era. Prior to that, there had always been strong pushback, including from the Soviets and other international actors including most Europeans, to that noticeably divide-and-rule approach... And such pushback may well return again.
Personally, I have always argued for a "comprehensive" approach to this peace diplomacy, in which all the complex intertwining tradeoffs can be explicated and resolved together and the state of hostility between Israeli and all of its neighbors be ended once and for all. In the present circumstances, it may even be necessary to aim for this comprehensive peace within the even broader regional context of concluding a comprehensive Mesopotamian and Gulf peace, as well.
Which brings me to the failure of the NYRB duo to even consider that the global/regional environment within which Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts are pursued is already changing, and can certainly be expected to change even more rapidly over the 3-5 years ahead.
I get a little tired of all the deckchair-arrangers who don't even look at the important broader questions of
(2) Whether the US should continue to play that role; i.e. on what grounds do the peoples of the region and the world allot this important task to this distant country, and why should US presidents continue to set themselves up for all the hassle and hostility involved in this, anyway? And finally--
(3) Whether a more legitimately constituted, UN-led and explicitly UN-anchored diplomatic intervention that embodies global values and is not tied into the partisan, often exclusionary diplomatic agenda of a single, distant power would not, indeed, bring much, speedier, more reliable, and more sustainable benefits to all the parties concerned? (And yes, that includes the citizenries of both Israel and the US as well as the Palestinians and the other Arab parties.)
Obscene! Read the whole of this article on how some male US speculators pulled in multi-billion-dollar takings from their activities in so-called hedge funds in 2007, and weep.
The top HF speculator was John Paulson, who took in $3.7 billion in personal income (after expenses) from the fund that he managed. That is more than the GDP of each of 60 nations and territories in 2005, as listed here by Nationmaster. Among those nations was Niger, population 14 million.
The second HF speculator, by 2007 income, was George Soros-- $2.9 billion.
The author of the article, David Cho, explained that Paulson,
Several hedge fund managers, including Philip Falcone,... also profited from the mortgage crisis by betting that subprime debt securities would plunge in price. Falcone earned $1.7 billion last year. Others made fortunes by betting that the prices of commodities such as oil, sugar and corn would rise.
Cho attributed many of the facts in his article to something called Alpha Magazine. I imagine that would be this article there. He explained that the explosion of income by HF managers to this degree is a phenomenon of just the past few years. He described how top donors within the US's money-drenched political system had recently beaten back an attempt to have these HF manager incomes taxed just as other individuals' incomes are, at a top rate in the US of 35%, rather than 15%, as they currently are.
He also wrote that Daniel Strachman, described as an HF "consultant",
"It's clear somebody has to win and somebody has to lose," he said. "It's not pretty at all because people say, 'Oh my God. Look how much money these guys are making while people are losing their homes and are complaining about the cost of eggs and sugar.' But so what? We don't live in a society that is pretty all the time. That's why it's capitalism."
Today's WaPo contains a hard-hitting op-ed from Hamas's Mahmoud Zahhar, the foreign minister in the Gaza-based PA caretaker government. Zahhar is leading a six-man Hamas delegation that yesterday crossed from Gaza into Egypt with the objective of meeting Pres. Jimmy Carter there today. Carter is then expected to proceed to Damascus, to meet overall Hamas head Khaled Meshaal there, tomorrow.
Of note in Zahhar's op-ed:
2. He strongly criticizes the campaign "the US-Israeli alliance" has waged to "negate the results of the January 2006 elections." A justifiable criticism.
3. He applauds Carter for saying that Hamas needs to be at the negotiating table "without any preconditions" if any peace effort is to succeed.
4. But he also lays out a stiff Hamas precondition: that "the starting point for just negotiations" is that Israel should "first" withdraw completely to the pre-1967 borders.
5. He goes to some length to connect the Palestinians' present struggle with Jewish history, comparing the present actions of Gaza's people with the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and speaking of his respect for the "modern proponents of tikkun olam."
6. He writes movingly of his two sons, killed in the struggle against Israeli occupation, and describes a long time-frame for the Palestinian struggle: "Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begin, and adversity has taught us patience."
One example of that: Zahhar wrote, "Last week's attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West." As any cursory glance at the news reports would reveal, that attack was carried out by a non-Hamas group. But the WaPo editorial accuses of Zahhar of having "endorsed" the attack, which his carefully chosen wording explicitly did not do-- and it even accuses Hamas of having carried it out. It also accuses Hamas of "deliberate targeting of civilians, such as the residents of the Israeli town of Sderot." That, despite reports from Israelis in the know like Daniel Levy that the security forces judge that Hamas avoids targeting civilians.
Again and again, the editorial twists Zahhar's words and Hamas's over-all position. But its authors seem to be doing this mainly in order to fuel the particular object of their ire and derision, Jimmy Carter. What a sad situation.
There is a mean-spirited and extremely biased "gotcha" aspect to the way the WaPo treated Zahhar on its pages-- very similar to the way Bollinger treated Ahmadinejad. There were a hundred ways the paper's editors could have published Zahhar's essay while dissociating themselves from any suspicions readers might have had that they supported his views-- but without resorting to twisting his words to use them to launch their own very vicious attack on Carter, as they did.
Meanwhile, two stories on the paper's news pages give a fairly well-reported picture of the situation in both the West Bank and Gaza. In this story, Griff White writes about the recent death in the Fateh securoity forces' custody of the pro-Hamas West Bank preacher Sheikh Majid al-Barghouthi.
White writes:
With all the current commotion about ex-president and Nobel Peace
Laureate Jimmy Carter's plans to visit Hamas head Khaled Meshaal in
Damascus, most of the attention has been focused on Carter and
his motivations for undertaking the meeting. Little has been paid
to Meshaal's motives for hosting it. Indeed, most of the western media
shows little interest in the question of who Meshaal is, and what Hamas
stands for, beyond simply parroting the fact that Hamas is a "terrorist
organization" that has refused to meet Israel and the US's demands that
it recognize Israel and foreswear violence before anyone should even
start to talk to it.
That sounds, of course, extremely similar to the view expressed for many years by the Pretoria government (and Maggie Thatcher) about South Africa's ANC which, like most other national liberations movements over the years-- and Hamas today-- maintained parallel networks for military and for civilian, mass-organizing activities. In Pretoria's case, it wasn't till Prime Minister P.W. Botha and then his successor Frederik De Klerk finally figured that it was a non-starter to demand complete the ANC's complete physical and ideological disarmament before talks were even started, that the historic negotiations with the ANC got off the ground...
Anyway, as steadfast JWN readers are aware, back in January I
conducted a lengthy interview
with Meshaal in Damascus. Based on that interview and other
research I've done on Hamas in recent years, I have an analytical
article about Hamas that will be in the upcoming edition of Boston
Review. But as finally edited, that piece ends up saying
little about Meshaal. So I thought I would take some out-takes
from that article, add a little more material of my own, and write
something here more specifically about him and his role in the
movement...
Khaled Meshaal has been the head of Hamas's political bureau since
1995. He was
born in 1956 in the village of Silwad, near
Ramallah. When I interviewed him I found him thoughtful
and articulate, but also defensive and generally inflexible. The
views he articulated were very different from what Israel and the
United Stated government want him to say, though he did express an
interest in concluding a speedy tahdi'eh
(ceasefire) with Israel. He also
said he and Hamas could still consider the idea of negotiating a deeper
hudna (armistice) with
Israel-- a proposal that, just possibly, could be expanded to mesh with
the "two-state" model for peacemaking currently being negotiated
(without much success) between Israel and the Palestinian leadership
under President Mahmoud Abbas.
But who is Khaled
Meshaal? After Israel invaded the West Bank in 1967, he left his
home village with other family members, joining the stream of West
Bankers
who crossed rickety bridges into Jordan, fearful of the brutality that
they expected from their new Israeli occupiers. His father, like
hundreds of thousands of
other Palestinians, was already working in Kuwait and after some time
in Jordan the teenage Khaled joined him there. He attended
Kuwait’s prestigious Abdullah
al-Salim Secondary School, where
he joined the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Later,
he studied physics at Kuwait University, then worked as a teacher in
Kuwait—as
many of Fateh’s founding members had done in earlier decades.
Inside Palestine,
Yassin and other long-time MB members spent the first 20 years of
Israel’s
occupation of Gaza
and the West Bank, focusing their energies on building networks of
Islamist religious, social, and
educational institutions in the two Israeli-occupied territories.
It was only after the first intifada erupted
in 1987 that the MB founded an overtly political organization, the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya
(Islamic Resistance Movement), usually known as 'Hamas', which
also means 'Zeal'. Since the early 1980s the Palestinian MB's
parent body, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, had kept a commitment to
work only nonviolently within Egypt's political system. But Hamas
rapidly developed its own armed wing, and from 1987 worked through
parallel militia-based and nonviolent, community-based structures in
the occupied territories.
The Israelis hit back
hard, launching successive broad waves of arrests against Hamas's
operatives in the occupied territories. In 1989 the movement
decided that, given the extreme vulnerability of its networks inside
Palestine, it should move its overall headquarters operation
elsewhere. For a number of years its leadership structure was
fairly widely distributed as it searched for a stable base for
operations, preferably close to the occupied territories. In
1990,when
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, most of Kuwait’s
large Palestinian community, including Meshaal, fled to Jordan.
He took over Hamas’s Jordan bureau. In 1993, Hamas finally
reached a formal agreement with Jordan to host its leadership operation
there. At that point, Meshaal was the deputy to political bureau
head Musa Abu Marzuq. Two years later, Abu Marzuq was arrested in
New York after making the error of judging he could safely relocate to
the United States. Meshaal took over as head of the political bureau at
that point.
Relations with Jordan
continued to be stormy. Finally, at the end of 1999, Meshaal and
the rest of the Hamas leadership were all kicked out of the country.
After a short sojourn as "guests" of the Emir of Qatar, they concluded
a new headquarters agreement with Syria. Meshaal has lived there
ever since, though he has traveled to numerous countries in and far
beyond the Arab world on official business...
(One excellent source
on Meshaal and the broader history of Hamas that I have drawn on here
is Azzam Tamimi's recent
book: Hamas:
A History from Within. Hamas's own English-language website is here. You can access some of my earlier writings on Hamas through this portal.)
This is truly a hysterically funny (or tragic) joke. The ruling authorities in Qatar, ever eager to be taken seriously as "intellectual power-houses" in the Gulf region, are holding their 8th annual "Doha Forum on Democracy, Development, and Free Trade."
And guess who they invited to Doha to speak on these weighty topics? No less an expert than the Foreign Minister of the government that is systematically trying to quash democracy and development in Gaza by the systematic strangling of the Gaza Strip's free trade.
Do the Qataris have any sense of realism and of the meaning of words?
Or do they merely have a too-highly developed sense of irony? (I doubt that this is the explanation.)
For what it's worth, Qatar itself is no great exemplar of the ideals and practices of democracy.
And nor is Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni any kind of intellectual power-house.
In her address to the forum she parroted the same, quite contentless and mendacious kind of rhetoric about the struggle in the Middle East being between "moderates" and "extremists" that the US occupation authorities test-drove in Iraq about 18 months ago, to little good effect.
AP's Barbara Surk reports that,
Longtime Israeli National Security Advisor Dov Weissglas, who in February 2006 argued openly for applying the "Weissglas diet" to the entire population of Gaza, certainly wasn't the first bullying imperial ruler to argue that starving citizens of another nation might be a handy way to force them to submit. As I just noted here, Raj Patel recalled that Richard Nixon's Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz argued openly in the 1970s that,
Butz was forced to resign as Secretary of Agriculture in 1976 after making a remark that was both racist and sexually demeaning. He died a few weeks ago, aged 98.
Maybe the Israeli government-- as well as all those economists and policymakers who are still trying to argue that the so-called "free market" should always be allowed to reign supreme in everything-- should be reminded that it is the agreed stance of the governments and peoples of the world that everyone in the world has the right "to have access to safe and nutritious food." No exceptions.
Raj Patel, a South African specialist in development economics, has published an intriguing-looking book on global food issues. It's called Stuffed and Starved. I definitely want to read it! He also has a very informative blog, of the same name, about the global food crisis. (Hat-tip Rami Zurayk.)
In this post, about the food crisis in Haiti, Patel writes,
The fact that Haiti produced more rice in 1984 than it does now isn’t an accident. The fact that the bags of rice to be found in Haiti have US flags stamped on them is no accident. As former secretary of state for Agriculture, Earl Butz, put it: ‘Hungry men listen only to those who have a piece of bread. Food is a tool. It is a weapon in the US negotiating kit.’
And that’s also one of the ironies behind the complaints of institutions like the IMF and World Bank. At the same time as they bemoan the food crisis, they are its architects. They have aggressively prohibited the kinds of policy that might have mitigated the price shock. No grain reserves. No support for domestic agriculture. No tariff barriers. All so that weapon in the US toolkit could be honed a little sharper.
In this post, about the global rice market, he notes that though many rice-eating countries have been hit by massive price increases in recent weeks, China, South Korea, and Japan have not.
He asks,
What distinguishes all three of these countries from others in Asia? First, they have their own domestic production. Second, they augment domestic production with domestic grain reserves. Third, they're only able to do this because they're aggressive and powerful negotiators in international trade agreements. Japan has long held that its rice isn't just a commodity but a way of life.
The political commitment to sustain this way of life, in China, South Korea and Japan, using some Old School economic policy (subsidies, protection, grain reserves) means that in the lean times, these countries will be able to survive. That's great for them - there's no indication that the lean times are going to end any time soon. And it's tough for the weaker countries in Asia, who find themselves cut loose, in the perfect storm that the free market has produced.
Patel's bio says he used to work at the World Bank and has interned at the WTO. He certainly seems to know a lot about what he's writing about. This page on his website gives a handy list of "ten things that we all can do to promote justice and food sovereignty." Definitely worth looking at!
(cross-posted to the Re-engage! blog
I just watched this clip of George Stephanopoulos's interview with Nobel Peace Laureate and former US president Jimmy Carter this morning. (Complete transcript here.) Carter is such a wise, inspirational figure. He was calm and reasoned as he discussed three issues:
-- his argument that countries should not boycott the upcoming Olympics in Beijing-- including why the situation around those Olympics is very different from that around the 1980 Games in Moscow, which the US did boycott, when he was president; and
-- his still-probable plan to hold talks with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal (among many others) during his upcoming visit to the Middle East.
Another of his admirable qualities is the calmness with which he states a position that, once articulated, seems clear, straightforward, and (to me) evidently true, but which flies counter to much of the chatter generated by the US mainstream commentatoriat.
On Hamas, he said,
We'll be meeting with the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudi Arabians, and with the whole gamut of people who might have to play a crucial role in any future peace agreement that involves the Middle East.
As a matter of fact, I've been meeting with Hamas leaders for years. As a matter of fact, 10 years ago, after Arafat was first elected president of the PLO and the Palestinians, we were monitoring that election, and I met with Hamas afterwards.
And then, in January of 2006, we were the monitors there for the Palestinian election, and Hamas won the election. We met with them after the election was over.
And so, I think that it's very important that at least someone meet with the Hamas leaders to express their views, to ascertain what flexibility they have, to try to induce them to stop all attacks against innocent civilians in Israel and to cooperate with the Fatah as a group that unites the Palestinians, maybe to get them to agree to a ceasefire -- things of this kind.
But I might add very quickly, that I'm not going as a mediator or a negotiator. This is a mission that we take as part of an overall Carter Center project, to promote peace in the region.
Rami uses an argument there that I have articulated on a number of occasions:
This approach typically comprises four components: talk to the group in question rather than boycott it; make clear their objectionable actions that must stop; identify their legitimate national or political demands that can be met; and, negotiate in a context of equality to achieve a win-win situation that stops the terror, removes underlying reasons for it, satisfies all sides' minimum demands and rights, and achieves peace and security.
The key to achieving a peaceful win-win situation is to analyze and deal with Hamas in the total framework of its actions, and not only through the narrow lens of terror acts. This means understanding and addressing the six R's that Hamas represents: resistance, respect, reciprocity, reconstruction, rights and refugees.
He told Stephanopoulos the election there,
It will be the end, for instance, of 12 years of conflict, both military and political -- a war that lasted for 10 years and cost about 13,000 lives -- and this will bring peace.
Secondly, it would transform completely the nature of the government. For 240 years, Nepal has had a Hindu kingdom -- the only one on earth. And now, it will have a democratic republic.
And the third thing I think is significant is that, for the first time, large numbers of marginalized people -- more than 50 percent of their total population -- will be guaranteed a place in the political process.
The Madhesis, who live down on the Indian border, Dalits, who are Untouchables, ethnic groups -- and particularly women. As a matter of fact, in the constituent assembly that will assemble as a result of these elections, that'll write a new constitution for Nepal, will have at least 30 percent of the seats in the constituent assembly filled by women...
Yes, the Chinese government has a problematic human-rights record. (Though it also has many human rights achievements, especially in the field of economic and social rights. But China's present western accusers give it no credit for those whatsoever. Indeed, you get the impression that many of them have no idea what it's like to lack basic social and economic rights, in the way that hundreds of millions of Chinese people routinely did during the warlord regimes, civil war, and internal upheavals that preceded the Deng Xiaoping era.)
But guess what? Our very own country here in the US has an extremely disturbing human rights record, too! Guantanamo, anyone? Abu Ghraib? Launching a completely unjustified war of aggression against Iraq then running an extremely damaging occupation there for more than five years? Encouraging Ethiopia to invade Somalia, and Israel to assault Lebanon?
All those actions by our government caused or actually constituted very grave human rights abuses. So maybe if "rights-tainted" countries should be boycotted we should be arguing for our country to be boycotted? Certainly, the US activists who have mounted such a campaign against China should be people who take real responsibility, first and foremost, for the actions of their (our) own government...
I do think that most of the US media has played a bad role in the whole Olympic torch tour fiasco, easily buying into and propagating the meme of "bad China" and "admirable and daring anti-China demonstrators" without examining the issue any more deeply at all. (The same big media in this country, that is, that have almost always completely buried the anti-war demonstrations carried out within this country, while filling their space with all kinds of pro-administration propaganda.)
Talking of the role of the media, do look at the way Stephanopoulos asked Carter his question about the Olympics:
Should the U.S. boycott the Olympics this year to protest China's crackdown on Tibet and its complicity with the genocide in Darfur?
China has 315 peacekeepers in Darfur, as part of the AU/UN force there.
How many does the US have? None.
The US government has many under-the-table deals with the Khartoum government, especially in the realm of sharing intelligence about Al Qaeda.
Again, all the anti-China finger-pointing being undertaken by the more ardent "Save Darfur" people in this country seems misplaced...
Actually, many of the "pro-Tibet" people in the US-- and their hangers-on in the media-- seem to be trying to be much more hardline in their anti-China stance than most Tibetans themselves... especially His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who has never called for a boycott of the Olympics, or for Tibet's secession from China, or for many of the other things that the anti-China crowd in this country wants to call for.
Anyway, it's good to see that Jimmy Carter is a real force for wisdom, sensible engagement, and respect for other people, on both the China and the Hamas issues. I think perhaps where he got his wisdom from-- in contrast to the shallow positions expressed by Stephanopoulos-- is from his commitment to traveling to numerous countries around the world to see the situation in them for himself, and to listening carefully and respectfully to what he gets told by the people in those countries.
If Stephanopouls and his confreres in the big US media would get out of their US-bound echo-chamber a little more, and if they tried to listen carefully to people from a wide range of different backgrounds and with a wide range of different viewpoints, they might actually end up being a lot wiser and understanding how the world works a lot better? Two things that people in the US big media really need to understand a lot better than they currently do are (1) the absolutely inescapable link between war and atrocities, and (2) the fact that one-sided finger-pointing is never a helpful way to get problems resolved (but it can easily raise tensions and help set the stage for otherwise quite avoidable confrontations, even war.)
The most intense arguments over U.S. involvement in Iraq do not flare at this point on Capitol Hill or on the campaign trail. Those rhetorical battles pale in comparison to the high-stakes struggle being waged behind closed doors at the Pentagon.
On one side are the "fight-win guys," as some describe themselves. They are led by Gen. David Petraeus and other commanders who argue that the counterinsurgency struggle in Iraq must be pursued as the military's top priority and ultimately resolved on U.S. terms.
In this view, the