Michael Posner, who's the US's Assistant secretary of State for Human Rights, Democratization, etc, spoke about the Goldstone Report at the UN Human Rights Council today. He called on Israel, as well as Hamas, to,
"If undertaken properly and fairly, these reviews can serve as important confidence-building measures that will support the larger essential objective which is a shared quest for justice and lasting peace," he said.
... Posner reiterated Washington's view that the Council paid "grossly disproportionate attention" to Israel, but said that the U.S. delegation was ready to engage in balanced debate.
Before Posner was appointed to his present position in February he was the president of an excellent organization called Human Rights First-- formerly, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. So he must know Judge Goldstone pretty well from the work both of them did in the 1990s.
Also, HRF has done some great work on various Middle East-related issues, including Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Israel-Palestine. I imagine it would have been hard for Posner to stay in his present job if he'd been forced simply to throw the Goldstone Report into the trash-can.
Goldstone did, it is true, call firstly on the relevant state authorities on both sides to carry out credible and rigorous investigations into the war crimes and crimes against humanity that he alleged. But he also requested the international community-- in the form of the UN Human Rights Council and the Security Council-- to remain seized of the matter and to ensure that those investigations take place.
So let's wait and see.
As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, it's right to recognize that there's some tension between the future-oriented demands of peacemaking in any situation of ongoing conflict and the backward-looking demands of the whole quest for "accountability".
I think Posner has done a good job in arguing how the carrying out of credible investigations by the two national authorities can itself be a step that builds confidence. (Much better than the attempt Susan Rice made, to argue that the demands of accountability should simply be jettisoned altogether.)
However, my expectation that this government in Israel will want to 'build confidence" in the way Posner suggests-- or indeed, in any of the other ways it's been requested to do so by the Obama administration-- is very low, asymptotic to zero.
And meanwhile, as I noted in that earlier post, Israel as occupying power continues, day after day after day, to impose on Gaza's people living conditions that are extremely inhumane and continue to constitute, as Goldstone argued, a quite illegal pursuit of collective punishment on all 1.5 million of them.
So set aside questions about "the past" and "the future" for a moment.
What is Washington doing to end that illegal behavior, which is being carried out on a continuing basis in the present by that state that is so heavily dependent on our generosity, Israel?
I guess to me, as a US citizen, that's the most burning issue. At this point, I'm not sure how much it's worth for Pres. Obama to try to get either the Israelis or the Palestinians (or other Arabs) to undertake "confidence-building steps" toward the other.
But what I do know is that it's the US itself that now needs to build the confidence of the vast majority of the people in the world in the integrity and fair-mindedness of our government, which continues to cling onto its long-held role as the dominant mediator in this conflict.
That's why we need to see the US both doing effective follow-up on Goldstone and-- even more urgently-- taking concrete actions to lift Israel's inhumane siege of Gaza.
Peter Martin had a very informative article in Saturday's Toronto Globe & Mail about the rapid emergence of a new kind of religio-nationalists in Israel.
They even, he says, have a new name: "Hardal"-- a cross between "haredi" (an ultra-orthodox Jewish believer) and Mafdal, Israel's longstanding National Religious Party.
The piece starts like this:
No longer are they the inward-looking anti-Zionists who only cared that the government provide them with money for their separate schools, welfare and exemptions from military service. These days, many of the Haredim – the word means “those who tremble” in awe of God” – have joined with right-wing religious Zionists to become a powerful political force.
They now are equipped to redefine the country's politics and to set a new agenda.
Two decades ago, they were confined mostly to a few neighbourhoods in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Today, they have spread throughout the country, in substantial numbers in several major communities, as well as building completely new towns only for their followers.
One Haredi leader who almost won Jerusalem's mayoralty race last fall, boasts that, within 20 years, the ultra-Orthodox will control the municipal government of every city in the country. And why not? Of the Jewish Israeli children entering primary school for the first time this month, more than 25 per cent are Haredi, and that proportion will keep growing. There are between 600,000 and 700,000 Haredim in Israel, and they average 8.8 children a family...
He writes,
“In many ways these guys are closer to Islamic fundamentalists than to anything else,” Prof. Ben Yehuda said.
They also do not shrink from violence.
Prof. Ben Yehuda's research found that violence is the number-one criminal infraction among Haredim. He also found that most of that violence is for political purposes.
This past summer witnessed many vivid examples...
Anyway, a fascinating article. I wonder when we'll see one like it in a mainstream US publication?
I've been thinking, based on many conversations over past years, about what constitutes the heart of the "independence" that Palestinian supporters of a two-state solution judge it is, that their independent state has to have.
Very evidently, no independent Palestinian state that emerges from anything like the current diplomatic arrangements or the current balance of forces with Israel, will be able to conduct anything like an independent military policy. Indeed, the Palestinian state will be substantially disarmed, and if it's born at all will be born under a very stringent and long-lasting demilitarization regime.
There will be similar constraints on the ability of the Palestinian state to conduct an independent foreign policy.
To see why, you have only to look at the heavy constraints that the peace treaties that Egypt and Jordan have concluded with Israel place on those two countries' ability to conduct an independent military or foreign policy. And those are significant, pre-existing states! So there is no way that the Palestinians, from their current position of intense dependency and vulnerability, can win anything like even the pared-down, constrained militaries that those earlier treaties allotted to their Arab parties.
So if national "independence" is to have any meaning for Palestinians at all, it has surely to lie in two other key dimensions of the sovereignty of states: control over its own resources and borders, and freedom to conduct its own economic relations directly with the rest of the world economy.
Absent those two dimensions of sovereignty, the Palestinian state would have no independence that, I think, most Palestinians would consider worth having.
A Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that is economically independent, and that has a free-flowing and internationally assured linkage between its two halves, can play many important-- and potentially very profitable--roles in the regional and world economies. Interim PM Salam Fayyad is quite right to be concentrating on planning and building the infrastructure of this economically independent state: the airports, ports, and other nodes through which it can interact with its Egyptian and Jordanian neighbors, with other Mediterranean countries, and as an important entrepot for the region.
However, to protect its own economic space and its freedom of international economic action, this state would have to have firm and agreed borders with Israel, (which would presumably also want to preserve the independence of international economic links.) The two economies would almost certainly grow for a number of years in rather different economic directions and at different rates, since they start from such different base-points and have such very different international linkages, as well.
The Palestinian economy, once freed from the stifling constraints of Israel's current total domination, could grow remarkably rapidly. The Palestinian people are very well educated. Diaspora Palestinians have lots of capital they could invest in a country whose independence and inviolability from foreign aggression could truly be assured. And the location of the country is strategic, indeed.
(Of course, if the Palestinian state is demilitarized, it would have to have iron-clad guarantees of its security from the UN Security Council or elsewhere. But the Palestinians should turn such demilitarization from a necessity into an economic virtue, like Costa Rica. Maintaining a heavy military is, after all, incredibly expensive and burdensome!)
Over the 42 years during which Israel has maintained its occupation over the West Bank and Gaza, there have been two major models for the economic relations between Israel and the OPT Palestinians. The first was one in which Israel forcibly imposed dependency on the OPT Palestinians. The occupation authorities intentionally suppressed the indigenous productive and economic capacities of the OPTs. The OPT Palestinians were thereby forced to work as very low-wage workers in the Israeli labor market; and to become a captive market for the products of Israel's factories.
The First Intifada put an end to that. Afterwards, Israelis replaced the low-wage and few-rights Palestinian laborers with low-wage and few-rights migrant laborers imported from distant spots around the world, especially East Asia.
And in that second stage we had Oslo, and the PA, and all the fol-de-rol about Shimon Peres's "New Middle East", and Israel's pursuit of an economic model in which-- the needs of Palestinians were still completely subsumed to those of Israelis. The West Bank and Gaza are still captive markets for Israeli companies. But Israel's power-that-be no longer want to have any Palestinian laborers crossing into Israel. So they have left Palestinians of working age simply to rot inside the large open-air prisons known as the OPTs.... And every so often (as with Netanyahu now), they throw them a few economic crumbs in the hope that Palestinians will be so busy rushing after the crumbs-- and fighting each other to get them-- that they'll stop worrying about politics and the fight for national independence.
You have to admit, in Ramallah, some of those "crumbs" look pretty ostentatious and glitzy. But they still don't represent anything like a functioning economy-- let alone a functioning and independent Palestinian national economy.
So that is what is going to have to change, if there is to be any kind of a meaningful national independence for Palestinians. To put it plainly, Israel's boot has to be lifted completely off the Palestinian economy.
Which means there will have to be a real border between Israel and Palestine. And not just the kind of fuzzy, one-way permeable, one-side dominated line we have seen until now (and which is still advocated over the long term by many Israeli proponents of the "New Middle East.")
This question of the need for a real border impacts very directly on the question of Jerusalem.
I take as a given that if there is to be a viable, independent Palestinian state, alongside Israel, then the Palestinians will have to gain/regain control over a substantial portion of currently occupied East Jerusalem. Yes, including three-fourths of the Old City.
So it occurs to me there would be two formulas for how this need for Palestinian economic independence (and thus a real border) could be reconciled with the political-geographic needs of reaching a politically viable settlement over Jerusalem.
Either the city would need to be once again physically divided between the two states, with a meaningful (and internationally monitored) barrier going through it. Or, the whole city should be designated as some kind of special, internationally invigilated "condominium" between Israel and Palestine, with real borders erected between this condominium and each of the two "parent" states.
Otherwise, how do you keep the two states and their economies separate? How would you prevent massive smuggling between them, through Jerusalem?
Neither of these formulas is ideal. But for the vast majority of those-- Israelis and Palestinians-- who have a direct stake in bringing peace and hope to Palestine/Israel, either of these formulas would be a whole lot preferable to the current situation.
All Palestinians, both those 250,000 people nowadays hanging on "by a thread" in their East Jerusalem homes and that vast majority of Palestinians who have been completely banned from visiting their nation's capital city for many years now, are currently living with the deep wound of the separation of East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.
There already are walls going through East Jerusalem: the Israeli government has been building those atrocious barriers for the past five years now.
There is no "peace" or "unification" in Jerusalem, as Israeli propaganda would have us believe. And there is a non-trivial number of Jewish Israelis who have already said they are ready to make concessions to the Palestinians over Jerusalem...
But can the international negotiators get their head around these ideas, I wonder?
Have they even started to think through what it would mean for the State of Palestine to have real economic independence and its own direct economic links with the rest of the world?
Have they thought through how this impacts on borders and the question of Jerusalem?
I hope so. Because if they take bold action and go after far-reaching and fair-minded ideas like the ones discussed above, then they might still have just a tiny glimmer of a hope of securing the two-state-based peace agreement.
But if they don't-- if they plan on (once again) fudging the idea of Palestinian economic independence, and fudging the question of securing access for all the peoples of the region to their holy places in Jerusalem, and fudging the whole issue of clear and accountable lines of governance in Jerusalem-- then the two-state formula doesn't stand a chance.
Regardless of all the fine words that Pres. Obama might say about his commitment to it...
There have been positive signals coming out of the Egyptian-mediated reconciliation talks between Fateh and Hamas.
Al-Quds al-Arabi tells us that Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal, who met with Egyptian intel chief Omar Suleiman yesterday, signaled his agreement to the main compromise (on voting rules) being proposed by the Egyptians-- and that he expects the reconciliation agreement to be completed "next month."
Well, who knows? There have been so many false alarms before regarding the imminence of this agreement.
However, this time I think Suleiman and his prez may be more motivated than they ever have before to get this agreement completed. Previously, they were really a big obstacle in getting it completed. And Egypt does sit astride the only border Gaza has that is not 100% controlled by the Israelis-- Gaza's short border with Egypt is only around 99% controlled by Israel, under various agreements pursuant to both the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 and the Israel-PA 'Agreement on Movement and Access' of 2005... So Egypt also sits, in a very real way, astride the Hamas-Fateh nexus which is so central to lifting the siege of Gaza.
It's not that, at this point, Suleiman and Pres. Mubarak suddenly want to see Hamas succeeding, or anything. But most likely they-- like all Washington's close Arab allies-- are really upset by Obama's slowness and mis-steps on the peace diplomacy and fearful of the regional explosion to which they might lead... So that may well lie behind their greater focus on succeeding in this mediation this time around.
Hamas also, pretty evidently, wants to see the reconciliation effort succeed. The pro-Hamas website PIC reported today Mishaal told a news conference in Cairo yesterday that, "there was a consensus on various issues between the Palestinian factions and the next round of the national dialog would only address some details."
PIC also reported that a separate press release from Hamas on Monday,
The current Egyptian proposal seems to stipulate a postponement in the holding of PLC elections. Instead of being held in January 2010 as currently scheduled, the new round would be held "sometime in the first half of 2010." Ma'an has a lot of other details about the Egyptian proposal, here.
For those who want to hear what I said in my talk on this topic September 24 at the Middle East Institute, you can now listen to it here.
Thanks to MEI President Wendy Chamberlain and vice-pres Kate Seeley for hosting the discussion-- and to the other MEI staff members who worked it and then got this up onto their website so quickly.
(Can live-streaming be far behind?)
There's a rapidly growing discussion here in the US about "what to do in Afghanistan." Some of it is thoughtful, well-informed, and serious. Like this piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in today's WaPo, which argues that the two best options look to be "Go all-in, or fold."
(Actually, that's only one choice, since the US citizenry and budget are quite incapable of doing what would be needed to "go all-in" in that very distant and logistically intimidating country.)
I note that one aspect of the way path forward that just about nobody in the US discourse has yet started talking/writing about is the idea, that I consider crucial, that it does not have to be, indeed should not be, the US that dominates all decisionmaking and international action regarding Afghanistan, going forward.
Members of the US commentatoriat are so US-centric! It still boggles my mind. I suppose that right now, this is still part of the legacy of the 1990s, when the US was the sole and uncontested Uber-power in the world...
Anyway, that caveat notwithstanding, Frank Rich had a fascinating piece in today's NYT in which he noted a new aspect of the strong relevance the Vietnam precedent has for the decisions Obama currently faces over Afghanistan.
Rich noted that George Stephanopoulos recently blogged that the latest "must-read book" for members of Obama's "war team" is Lessons in Disaster, a book published last year about a guy called McGeorge Bundy and "the path to war in Vietnam." Bundy was John Kennedy's national security adviser.
Underscoring the book's relevance, Rich notes that when it came out last year, no less a person than Richard Holbrooke, now Obama's chief emissary for Afghanistan and Pakistan, reviewed it (in late November) in the NYT.
Holbrooke's review is well worth reading. He gives some helpful info about the background to the writing of the book. He also refers to a much earlier essay he himself had written about Bundy that he had titled, "“The Smartest Man in the Room Is Not Always Right”, noting that, having known Bundy a little bit, he had had him in mind when he wrote it.
Holbrooke concluded the review with this:
Much of the current analogizing between the US in Vietnam and the US in Afghanistan focuses on the decisions Kennedy faced in 1961. Other commentaors have focused on decisions faced by his successor, Lyndon Johnson, in 1964.
Last week, I had a couple of good conversations with Dr Jeffrey Record, a very thoughtful guy who teaches at the US Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, who has written a lot of good studies of the big mistakes the Bush administration made in Iraq.
Record has also studied the US performance in Vietnam very closely. As we talked last week, he explored the 1964-2009 analogy a bit. He noted that in 1964, Johnson faced much the same kind of "big" decision Obama now faces-- whether to increase the US force commitment substantially, or find a way to ramp it down...
And like Obama today, Record said, Johnson was concerned both about trying to win some serious, big-picture reforms in domestic social policy and about the possibility of a political backlash inside the US if he should be seen as "backing down" from the confrontation in Vietnam.
In 1964, Johnson made the fateful decision to escalate. Rather than investing his domestic political capital in defending a decision to de-escalate in Vietnam, he invested it in pushing through a number of important "Great Society" social reforms at home, instead.
Later, the Vietnam part of that decision would come back to haunt him badly...
On balance, then, it seems good that Obama and his people are all reading what sounds to be an excellent study of the decisionmaking of those earlier years.
As the Obama administration prepares for next Thursday's important P5+1 meeting with Iran, the prospects for mounting a successful sanctions campaign against Iran are being seriously undermined by the actions of the Israeli government and government-backed Jewish extremists in Jerusalem.
Today, Israeli police battled Muslim worshippers in the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary; also known as the Temple Mount) after the worshipers tried to block the entrance into the Haram of a Jewish group of unclear intentions.
The situation of the 250,000 Palestinian residents of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem has deteriorated rapidly in recent months, and has for some time been in imminent hazard of exploding.
The latest clash may be a spark that ignites much wider tensions between Israel and Palestinians who have become increasingly frustrated over the complete lack of progress in Obama's peace effort. One Hamas spokesman responded to the latest incident in Haram by calling on all Arabs and Muslims to "urgently act to save the holy Aqsa Mosque in occupied Jerusalem from repeated Zionist attempts to desecrate and control it."
But even if today's crisis is contained, the grave and continuing threats faced by the Jerusalem Palestinians, most of whom are Muslims, anyway threaten to undercut the western nations' ability to enroll into their anti-Iran effort the many Muslim neighbors of Iran whose cooperation is essential to the success of any stepped-up sanctions.
I was recently given that warning, in just about exactly those words, by a senior diplomat from a strongly pro-US Arab nation.
"It is Iran's neighbors who will have to implement most of the sanctions," this envoy said. "We can't do this if we are still arguing about Jerusalem."
... Yesterday, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani stated quite clearly he "did not think" sanctions would work. He was also adamant that, ""Iraq will never permit any country to use Iraqi land or sky in any war and any aggression." (HT: Paul Woodward.)
Iraq has a very lengthy land border with Iran.
And it's not just Arab countries. Yesterday, too, prime minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, another Muslim country that shares a land border with Iran, urged caution about stepping up the sanctions on Iran. He said that sanctions "won't bring about anything good for the people (of Iran). So I think we have to be careful."
Turkey is currently a member if the Security Council and is emerging as a powerful actor throughout the whole Middle East.
Now, it is true that neither Talabani nor Erdogan expressly mentioned the situation in Jerusalem as contributing to their wariness regarding the anti-Iran campaign.
But if the western nations and the pro-US governments in the region want to make a convincing case for tightening the screws further on Iran then-- as the Arab envoy I talked to said quite clearly-- their ability to do so is significantly weakened so long as the Israeli governmental and non-governmental bodies continue their attacks on the Palestinian community and the Palestinian Muslims' sacred places in Jerusalem... And so long as the US government does nothing to rein in or punish Israel for those actions, which are highly prejudicial to the chances of the two-state peace to which Obama has said he is committed.
Information about the assaults that Jewish-extremist settler groups are making on the fabric and viability of Palestinian life in Jerusalem is readily available.
Haaretz's Nir Hasson tells us today that the settler group Ateret Cohanim recently announced in a brochure that it has six properties in the Old City to sell to 22 Jewish families, "which would bring the number of Jews living in the Arab quarters of the walled city to 1,000."
In line with the town-planning models in many Islamic cities, Jerusalem's walled Old City has for centuries had separate "quarters"-- almost literally laid out as four quarters-- designated for Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Armenians. Immediately after Israel conquer East Jerusalem in 1967, it evicted all non-Jews from the traditional Jewish quarter of the Old City, replacing them with Jews.
Now, as Hasson makes clear, the next step for the settler extremists-- in the Old City as in the newer (though often centuries-old) neighborhoods around it-- has been to implant settlers into the heart of very long-established Palestinian Christian and Muslim neighborhoods.
The Israeli organization Ir Amim ("City of the Peoples") has a lot of information about the situation of East Jerusalem on its website, and on the blog its supporters contribute to Huffington Post.
In one recent post there, Yizhar Be'er noted that the rightwing Jewish group Elad has been undertaking extremely incendiary excavations-- under the guise of "archeology"-- in extremely sensitive parts of the city including Silwan and the Old City:
... Thousands of Jews identify with the movement to rebuild the Temple. They gather around Succoth in the national convention center and swear to "remove the abomination" (i.e. the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem and one of the holiest sites of all of Islam) from the premises.
She held a meeting in New York yesterday with high-level representatives from the six GCC countries, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan.
Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman told reporters afterwards, "We don't want to have the perfect be the enemy of the good... We're not going to wait for the perfect package before we start negotiations."
Nobody's asking for perfection! But people everywhere who yearn for a decent and viable end to the Israel-Palestine conflict do want to see a modicum of fairness and even-handedness in the positions adopted by the US, which still aspires to the role of lead mediator of this tragic conflict.
Clinton reportedly told Reuters that the meeting with the nine Arab state reps had been "positive and productive."
Maybe she hadn't been listening to Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, when he said in his address to the General Assembly,
If all of this international concern, all this international consensus and all these international endeavors have so far failed to induce Israel to honor the commitments to which it previously bound itself under the Road Map, how can we be optimistic?
... is here. Also archived here.
Key Obama advisor Rahm Emanuel said this about Israeli-Palestinian peace and the US role in securing it, to Charlie Rose on Wednesday night:
They have a responsibility. We don’t have -- we can’t want this more than they want it.
In terms of tired, inaccurate, and distinctly counter-productive cliches that get mouthed about Palestinian-Israeli issues, that's not all, either. Emanuel drags out that ghastly, demeaning, and racist quote Abba Eban coined about "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."
To Charlie Rose's credit, he does try to push Emanuel a little at a couple of points. But Emanuel generally gives only evasive answers. Here's an example:
RAHM EMANUEL: We have a very deep relationship with the government of -- not just this government of Israel, but the country of Israel as it relates to its security...
CHARLIE ROSE: Has the Netanyahu government disappointed you about what it...
RAHM EMANUEL: No. The president was clear about the issue of the settlements.
Earth to Rahm Emanuel: Yes, the American people can care more about Israeli-Palestinian peace than the parties themselves. And we have a strong and direct interest in this peace process succeeding. Please stop giving a complete veto over our policy to Israel's Likud government.
Footnote: How come, in a White House that's usually renowned for its message discipline, Rahm Emanuel even gets to speak publicly about foreign policy issues that are not his direct responsibility?
I am very glad indeed that Emanuel gave Charlie Rose this interview, as it provides us an important window into the kind of advice he is presumably giving the president on a whole range of foreign policy issues. But in international affairs, words publicly uttered words by government officials have major consequences.
These ones certainly should.
Where he said it was as important as what he said.
Today, in his debut appearance as US President at the UN General Assembly, Barack Obama vowed,
The time has come -- the time has come to re-launch negotiations without preconditions that address the permanent status issues: security for Israelis and Palestinians, borders, refugees, and Jerusalem. And the goal is clear: Two states living side by side in peace and security -- a Jewish state of Israel, with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people. (Applause.)
As we pursue this goal, we will also pursue peace between Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Syria, and a broader peace between Israel and its many neighbors. In pursuit of that goal, we will develop regional initiatives with multilateral participation, alongside bilateral negotiations.
Now, I am not naïve. I know this will be difficult. But all of us -- not just the Israelis and the Palestinians, but all of us -- must decide whether we are serious about peace, or whether we will only lend it lip service. To break the old patterns, to break the cycle of insecurity and despair, all of us must say publicly what we would acknowledge in private. The United States does Israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its security with an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians. (Applause.) And -- and nations within this body do the Palestinians no favors when they choose vitriolic attacks against Israel over constructive willingness to recognize Israel's legitimacy and its right to exist in peace and security. (Applause.)
We must remember that the greatest price of this conflict is not paid by us. It's not paid by politicians. It's paid by the Israeli girl in Sderot who closes her eyes in fear that a rocket will take her life in the middle of the night. It's paid for by the Palestinian boy in Gaza who has no clean water and no country to call his own. These are all God's children. And after all the politics and all the posturing, this is about the right of every human being to live with dignity and security. That is a lesson embedded in the three great faiths that call one small slice of Earth the Holy Land. And that is why, even though there will be setbacks and false starts and tough days, I will not waver in my pursuit of peace. (Applause.)
It is still not enough. He needs to pledge himself not just to the pursuit of peace, but to its securing. He probably needs to move beyond the mouthing of inaccurate and formulaic "parallelisms": equating Israel's settlement-building with alleged Palestinian "incitement"; or the US's previous neglect of Palestinian claims with the alleged "vitriol" of verbal attacks launched by the UNGA against Israel; etc.
Most of all, he needs to act. We need to see him throwing the whole weight of US national policy behind this vigorously pursued search for attainment of the final-status peace.
But at least, yesterday's comments after the three-way with Netanyahu and Abbas and today's even more significant UNGA speech are, as I said, a good start.
Finally, he said it!
Just as I and some others have been urging him to do for some time now, today Pres. Obama said this about getting a final Israeli-Palestinian peace:
That gave a complete veto to whichever of the two parties wanted to block or delay the peacemaking. Which in practice was nearly always the Israelis, as they continued their drive to steal the land from under the Palestinians' feet and implant their own settlers on it (with generous continuing subsidies from the US taxpayer, no less.)
So now, finally Obama is saying not just-- as he has said for so long-- "We think this is in Israel's interest" but also "It is in our interest, as Americans!"
Which means that next time the Israeli government tries to stall and say, "Oh, we can't do this", or Oh, we can't move forward because we're concerned about that", Obama and his people can say, "We hear your concerns. But sorry, buster, we're pursuing our own compelling interests in this peacemaking too, and this is how we need it to proceed!"
Shocking? Not really. I mean, haven't you heard just a few times the Israelis telling us they're going to pursue their own interests in the peacemaking?
Now, it is true that Obama only slid that line about peace being in the US's own interests in at the end of the remarks he made today after the "three-way" with Netanyahu and Abbas, rather than putting them more prominently at the beginning.
And it's true that for Abbas to agree to the three-way-- and even more so, to agree to send his negotiators to start the negotiations in Washington next as Obama asked him to do-- marks a significant concession on his longheld previous position, given that Israel's land-grabbing policies in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank continue apace.
But still, as I have written a number of times, it is crucial for the final peace negotiations to get started-- and even more crucial for them to get speedily and successfully finished.
And if that is to happen, then the US President needs to not only declare but also single-mindedly pursue the US's own interest in seeing them concluded in a timely and sustainable fashion.
So today's declaration was a good (though long overdue) start in that process.
... with Marina Ottaway. It's here.
We recorded this just over a week ago, so it's not totally up-to-the-minute. But not bad to have it up today, all things considered.
I have to say it's a very weird way to have a conversation. But kind of fun. (Next time I'll try to organize a phone to talk on that lets me use a geeky-looking headset.)
I've been thinking more about the timing of the WaPo's publication of Woodward's bombshell and the accompanying materials this morning.
It seems clear to me Woodward must have had the text of the McChrystal Assessment for a number of days. His colleagues had the time to do some good follow-up reporting with Gen. Jim Jones and other senior officials. Also, the WaPo and the Pentagon had time to negotiate the amounts of the assessment that the WaPo could put onto its public web-site. So obviously, the folks inside the administration knew that Woodward had it and the WaPo was going to publish it.
Yesterday, Obama was doing his big t.v. blitz-- going onto five major t.v. news-discussion programs to discuss primarily health-care but also aware he'd be getting questions about Afghanistan and other issues.
Here's what he said on Afghanistan on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos:
Now, I think we've lost -- we lost that focus for a while and you started seeing a-- a classic case of mission creep where we're just there and we start taking on a whole bunch of different missions.
I wanted to narrow it. I did order 21,000 additional troops there to make sure that we could secure the election, because I thought that was important. That was before the review was completed. I also said after the election I want to do another review. We've just gotten those 21,000 in. General McChrystal, who's only been there a few months, has done his own assessment.
I am now going to take all this information and we're going to test whatever resources we have against our strategy, which is if by sending young men and women into harm's way, we are defeating al Qaeda and -- and that can be shown to a skeptical audience, namely me -- somebody who is always asking hard questions about deploying troops, then we will do what's required to keep the American people safe.
In their piece in the WaPo today, Rajiv Chadrasekaran and Karen DeYoung write that the chaos surrounding the holding of last month's Afghan election was a turning point for the administration.
Also, note the apparent put-down of McChrystal in what Obama said.
So, a couple of quick points here. Did the WaPo delay the publication of today's news reports to allow Obama to get his version out to the public first-- or was there some other reasoning behind the timing of publishing these stories?
Also, McChrystal may well not last long in his job.
But whether he does or not, the bigger issue here is that Obama and his national-security team are going to have to do some very broad thinking (as I noted earlier-- see # 2 here) if they want to find a way to ramp down the currently huge risks the US/NATO troops face in Afghanistan.
You can criticize Bob Woodward-- and I have-- for the insidery, back-scratching nature of most of his recent journalism. But he still manages to pull out a significant number of real news items.
Wow! In today's WaPo, he has a piece describing a document (PDF) that was most likely leaked to him by someone on the staff of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top US general in Afghanistan, in which McC warned that
I have not had time to pore over the PDF version yet. But Woodward and various other writers at the WaPo evidently have done so. The PDF version posted on the WaPo website is one for which they received a security clearance after certain portions were removed.
An accompanying article by Rajiv Chadrasekaran and Karen DeYoung gives an account of some-- but certainly far from all-- of the political context within the Obama administration, within which someone took the decision to leak this very sensitive document to Woodward.
Chandra and DeYoung write,
Inside the White House, the way forward in Afghanistan is no longer so clear.
Although Obama endorsed a strategy document in March that called for "executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy," there have been significant changes in Afghanistan and Washington since then. A disputed presidential election, an erosion in support for the war effort among Democrats in Congress and the American public, and a sharp increase in U.S. casualties have prompted the president and his top advisers to reexamine their assumptions about the U.S. role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.
Instead of debating whether to give McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, more troops, the discussion in the White House is now focused on whether, after eight years of war, the United States should vastly expand counterinsurgency efforts along the lines he has proposed -- which involve an intensive program to improve security and governance in key population centers -- or whether it should begin shifting its approach away from such initiatives and simply target leaders of terrorist groups who try to return to Afghanistan.
"Until I'm satisfied that we've got the right strategy, I'm not going to be sending some young man or woman over there -- beyond what we already have," Obama said on NBC's "Meet the Press." If an expanded counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan contributes to the goal of defeating al-Qaeda, "then we'll move forward," he said. "But, if it doesn't, then I'm not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan or saving face or . . . sending a message that America is here for the duration."
2. In the range of other options he's looking at, he should certainly be looking at options that involve bringing other significant international partners into the operation rather than just, as at present, members of the NATO alliance. NATO is so much the wrong implement through which to be acting in Afghanistan, for the reasons I've blogged about a lot here over recent months. Other powers, located much closer to Afghanistan, have both (a) a much stronger direct interest in seeing some form sustainable stabilization take root there than members of distant NATO do, and (b) much greater capability-- in terms of being both geographically and culturally closer to Afghanistan-- to act effectively there. These nations include China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan (which has its own problems, of course), and most of the other Central Asian nations. The UN would seem to be so much the most appropriate body to convene and lead this new form of help for Afghanistan.
3. Of course this would signal-- and be a part of-- a much broader shift in the balance of power in world politics between "the west and the rest." But this shift is happening, anyway.
4. Very evidently there is a huge, deep, and significant debate within the Obama administration over whether to continue with a "COIN"-only approach, or not. Chandra and DeYoung indicate that this seems to pit some military commanders (McChrystal and Chairman of the JCS Adm. Mike Mullen) against the civilian leadership in the White House.
5. Unmentioned thus far have been the views of Gen. Petraeus, the highly political general who as head of CENTCOM is McChrystal's immediate superior and thus stands between him and Mullen in the chain of command. Unknown also is the position in this tussle of Secdef Gates.
6. All of the above people serve, of course, at the pleasure of our elected president. But a pointed resignation of any one of them, if he should disagree with the decision that Obama eventually makes, would be a major political blow to Obama. That gives all of them clout-- but probably Gates and Petraeus the most clout of all.
7. The leaking of McChrystal's assessment seems very like a move to cover the rear-end of the military leaders in the-- increasingly much more likely-- event that the US/NATO "mission" in Afghanistan ends up in some degree of defeat, ignominy, chaos, or worse. Woodward tells us that McChrystal's assessment concluded by saying, "While the situation is serious, success is still achievable." But if McChrystal or anyone in his office had anything to do with the leaking of the document, then that act would indicate that the leaker really did not not judge "success" to be very likely at all.
8. Woodward's acquisition and leaking of this document are a reminder of the big journalistic coup of his early career in the 1970s, when he and Carl Bernstein leaked details of the dirty tricks President Nixon used against the Democrats during the Watergate affair. But they have more in common, substance-wise, with the 1971 leaking to the NYT of the "Pentagon Papers", an internal Pentagon assessment that pointed to the unwinnability of the US-Vietnam War.
Despite the very personal nature of Dean Grant Hammond’s
last e-mail (apparently sent to me by mistake), I had no intention of
dignifying his vulgar outburst with a reply. However, given the publication of
his response to Helena Cobban’s queries, I feel obligated to alert the reader
to the distortions of reality, inconsistencies, and omissions which
characterize his defensive tract, all of which can be readily discerned from
the—as yet unpublished-- e-mail exchanges that took place between myself
and the NATO Defense College staff.
But more important than my efforts at
clarifying the episode, is my endeavor to underline its exact magnitude, lest
it appear a mere tit-for-tat exchange between myself and NDC
staff.
The episode is nothing short of a
botched attempt to enlist me --on account of my “academic expertise [on Hizbullah] and reputation” to borrow Hammond’s words-- to
deliver a lecture on the Lebanese resistance movement to an audience of Israeli
and other NATO officers and diplomats, and then, in clear violation of
my country’s laws, to engage IDF officers and diplomats in back-channel talks,
in the context of the scheduled “Q&A” session. It is crucial to repeat here
that these Israeli guests were not private citizens but diplomats and IDF
officers, and that accordingly, I was invited to not merely engage in cultural
normalization with Israeli academics, but in security normalization with
Israeli officers.
I will take as my starting point Dr.
Hammond’s argument that Dr. Florence Gaub was
ignorant of Lebanon’s laws which ban interaction between Lebanese citizens and
Israeli military officers. This is an insult to the intelligence, particularly
when one considers Gaub’s earlier admission to me that : "We are not
under Lebanese law and invite academics in their private capacity, not as
government officials. It is for this reason that we have been able, in the
past, to invite scholars from very different backgrounds and to ensure frank
discussions even among
Israelis and Arabs, and even among Israelis and Lebanese." Gaub’s involvement in or observation of these back-channel
talks,
presupposes her familiarity with the laws that necessitate that
such meetings remain confidential and confined to academics rather than
government officials. Hammond’s comparison of my seemingly incredulous
ignorance of NATO’s partnership with the Mediterranean Dialogue with Gaub’s ignorance of Lebanon’s laws concerning Israel, is an absurd and irrelevant analogy. Moreover, the
fact that I conditioned my acceptance of the NDC’s invitation on the absence of
Israeli officers, suggests that I knew they would be present at my lecture.
Second,
Hammond’s saccharine platitudes on NDC’s respect for Lebanon’s laws and my
abidance by them are disingenuous to say the least. Gaub’s assurance to me that NDC is “not under Lebanese law”
and as such, offers “a free academic environment under Chatham House rules,
meaning that nobody can be quoted from discussions taking place here,” hardly vindicates Hammond’s argument about NDC’s respect for Lebanese law.
Furthermore, Gaub’s attempt to persuade me to take
part in “frank and open discussions” with Israeli officers as other Arabs and
Lebanese have done before me after I
had made it clear to her that I could not give a lecture with Israeli guests
present, does not exactly corroborate Hammond’s claim that “We would not
expect her to break the laws of her nation.”
But it is Hammond’s own words which
most clearly betray his contempt for the rule of law in Lebanon. His insistence
that Florence had “done nothing wrong” in trying to convince me to commit a
crime bordering on treason says it all. Hammond’s depiction of my denunciation
of Gaub’s supercilious approach as “unjust” and “vitriolic”, the
likes of which he has apparently “never encountered” before, is
intriguing. That a hardened
military man with decades of experience under his sleeve, would respond in such
hysterical fashion to a non-threatening e-mail, written in an “academic”
–albeit “claptrap”--style by his own account, leaves one wondering
whether he has been isolated in his ivory tower for too long or is simply
acting out a subconscious fear of the recalcitrant native who refuses to play
the role of native-informant.
But to be fair, it bears mentioning here that NDC’s
agenda is not unique to the institution but is rooted in a wider NATO policy of
promoting security normalization between Israel and states such as Lebanon which do not have relations with it. This policy was
clearly articulated by NATO Secretary General, Jaap
de Hoop Scheffer in a speech that he delivered January
11, 2009, in a session in Tel Aviv jointly organized by the Tel Aviv-based
Institute for National Security Studies and the Atlantic Forum of Israel. He talked enthusiastically there
about, “NATO’s
role as a political agenda-setter”, and said that,“The [Mediterranean] Dialogue now offers us the opportunity to conduct open
and frank discussions on regional security, including with countries with which
Israel does not have diplomatic relations.”
As a citizen
who refuses to violate Lebanese laws which criminalize normalization with
Israel, I find it highly “offensive” and “disrespectful” of Gaub to dare suggest that I engage in off-the-record talks
with the Israeli military, knowing full well that neither her nor Hammond would
ever dare to encourage citizens of
western countries, or Israel for that matter, to flout their country’s laws and
undermine its security by holding secret meetings with enemies of their state.
It was my indignation at the injustice inherent in such double-standards,
rather than my imputed “cultural sensitivities”, that prompted me to invoke the
charge of “crude neo-Orientalism.” In fact, that is
the least offensive term I could employ to describe this undignified treatment
of Lebanese scholars as potential informants and agents.
Gaub’s
allusion to other Arabs and Lebanese who have held “frank discussions” with
Israelis as a reference point for me, only confirms my observation that all
Arab scholars are expected to conform to the template of perfidious,
unprincipled opportunists, bereft of nationalist loyalties, who are all too
eager to jump on the Israeli bandwagon when approached by purportedly
prestigious western institutions such as NATO. If some Lebanese and Arab
scholars choose to betray their countries and relinquish their dignity by
engaging with Israeli military officers and diplomats, that is not sufficient
grounds for over generalizing that all Arabs are culturally predisposed to
surrender and
treason, and can be approached as such.
It is in this
context that Hammond’s observation that “Dr.
Saad Ghorayeb appeared to
hold her invitation as her paramount concern and not an appreciation for the
circumstance of the College, Dr. Gaub or the NATO
Alliance in this matter,”
appears particularly ridiculous. In the first place, Hammond need only refer to
my e-mail exchanges with NDC staff to see that it took me a full 3 months to
conditionally accept their invitation—hardly the behavior of someone whose
paramount concern was her invitation. Second, my e-mails focus far more on
NDC’s disrespect for my country’s laws than Gaub’s
revocation of my invitation. Furthermore, it might interest Hammond to learn
that I was similarly “disinvited” from my position at the reputable Carnegie
Middle East Center for refusing to conform to their “standards and approaches”,
which necessitated that I change my “way of thinking and writing” and
that required me to become a “different” kind of scholar .
As this example illustrates, I am but one example of many Arabs and Lebanese
who value their dignity and integrity far more than any association we could have
with supposedly prestigious western institutions that require us to relinquish
them.
In closing, while I appreciate Hammond’s apology for accidentally sending me that memorable mail, I was far less insulted by the manner in which he attempted to demean me as an academic, than his endorsement of Gaub’s complete disrespect for Lebanon’s sovereignty by asserting that she had not committed any mistake. If NATO and its member states are as genuinely concerned with Lebanon’s “state-building” process and respect for the “rule of law” as they claim to be, I suggest that they respect Lebanon’s sovereignty by discontinuing their campaign of promoting normalization with Israel. As the Dean of Nato’s Defense College, I suggest that Professor Grant Hammond and his faculty do the same.
For many years now,
successive US administrations have been vigorously trying to persuade as many Arab countries
as possible—especially those that are still in a state of war with
Israel—to undertake “confidence building measures” in a purported attempt
to “entice” Israel into being more forthcoming in the peace diplomacy…
Now, an episode
involving the respected Lebanese political scientist Dr Amal
Saad-Ghorayeb shows us that the US-dominated NATO
alliance has also been part of this campaign.
Unless you’re a
particular kind of a military-affairs afficianado you
may not be aware that NATO runs its own institute of higher learning, the NATO
Defense College (NDC) , in Rome. Through the work of this college, as
well as in other ways, NATO has been trying for some years now to impose its
own form of (military-based) normalization on the relations between Israel and
several Arab states-- including Lebanon, a country that (a) is still in a
formal state of war Israel now, as it has since 1948, (b) has been the victim
of numerous acts of Israeli aggression over those decades, including a string
of extremely lethal major military invasions, occupations, and assaults, the
most recent (and one of the most lethal) being that undertaken in 2006, and (c)
continues to this day to be subject to Israeli aggression, including in the
form of very frequent military overflights.
In these circumstances,
it is scarcely surprising that Lebanon has a law barring its citizens from
having any contact with Israeli military personnel. Ah, but now it turns out
that NATO—a body that proclaims its support for (a certain version of)
the rule of law—has been seeking to tempt Lebanese citizens to skirt or
break this law by meeting with Israeli military officials in a clandestine,
“off the record” kind of way.
I could digress a bit
here and write about the deep problems NATO has been experiencing ever since,
with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-3, it suddenly lost its
foundational raison d’etre and had to start inventing
“missions” for itself in various places far distant from its originally
envisaged Central European battlefields.
(As I’ve blogged quite a few times in recent months, the continuing NATO
“mission” in Afghanistan is one that’s particularly ill-suited to NATO’s
capabilities, and may well bring about the dissolution of the alliance in its
present, neo-imperial form.)
But
back to NATO and Lebanon. Sometime this summer, Florence Gaub, who
works with something called the NATO Regional Cooperation Course (NRCC), which
is run out of the Rome-based NDC, invited Amal Saad-Ghorayeb to give a lecture to the members of this
fall’s NRCC course. Saad-Ghorayeb agreed to do it.
She also, not surprisingly, sought the assurance of those inviting her that she
would not be expected to work with Israeli military personnel while she was
there.
This assurance was not
forthcoming. On September 8, Gaub wrote to Saad-Ghorayeb noting that Israel was a full partner of
NATO’s in the NATO-sponsored “Mediterranean Dialogue”, one of the co-sponsors
of the NRCC course. She also wrote that, “I can not ensure that any of the NATO officers present does not by
chance hold a second Israeli passport.”
(This latter statement is
intriguing. How many of NATO’s member countries allow
members of their militaries to have Israeli-- or other—second passports?
Or is it only Israeli passports that are permitted? Also, several NATO members
have sizeable military units serving in the beefed-up UNIFIL peacekeeping force
in south Lebanon. Might some of those soldiers be holders of Israeli passports?
An interesting thought, right there… )
In her September 8 email, Florence Gaub added,
here at NATO Defense College we provide a free
academic environment under Chatham House rules, meaning that nobody can be
quoted from discussions taking place here. We are not under Lebanese law and
invite academics in their private capacity.... It is for this reason that we
have been able, in the past, to invite scholars from very different backgrounds
and to ensure frank discussions, even among Israelis and Arabs, and even among
Israelis and Lebanese.
If this obstacle is not surmountable to you, I regret that we will not be
able to host you as a lecturer here.
Saad-Ghorayeb replied to Gaub (Sept. 9)
that,
The main issue for me is not how I can circumvent Lebanese law, with
Chatham House rules, but rather, my refusal to violate the laws of my country
even if I were able to circumvent them.
While I understand your disinclination to "disinvite" your
Israeli guests, I would like to point that you don't seem to have had any
reservations about disinviting me, your proposed speaker.
Perhaps it might interest you to know that the organizers of all other
events featuring Israeli officers and diplomats, which
I have been invited to, have respected my position on this issue. They have
always found a way to accommodate my constraints.
Given your clear position on this issue, I have no desire to give
this course.
Gaub’s boss, NRCC Director Sandy Guptill,
also wrote an email to Saad-Ghorayeb on Sept. 9,
which was notably more measured in tone than Gaub’s. Guptill wrote:
I have been kept fully informed of your
situation and I fully respect your academic, professional and personal
integrity and your observance of the laws of your nation. Ironically I find
myself in a similar position. We cannot dis-invite
any nation from participation here at this College. That is a
political decision which rests with NATO nations and
[is] simply not within our remit.
Please rest assured that we do not take
lightly the loss of the opportunity to hear your thoughts and views.
(I added the emphasis
there.) Of course, the biggest single nation in NATO is the US, which is also
far and away the greatest supporter of Israel, in every imaginable way.
Including—as noted above-- for many years US diplomats have pushed and
pushed Arab countries, including Lebanon, to engage in “normal” relations with
Israel even before Israel makes any concessions in the negotiations with them…
This
approach has been roundly rejected by the vast majority of the Arab
governments—including, very recently and decisively, by Saudi Arabia. It is described by many Arab diplomats as “peace for
land for peace”: a perversion of the longstanding idea of “land for peace”, and
one that, when applied in the past (including at Oslo), has too often allowed
Israel to pocket all the concessions the Arab parties made while it continued
to hang onto and exploit Arab land and resources.
… Anyway, after
receiving Guptill’s email, Saad-Ghorayeb
sent him (or her?) a reply in which she expressed appreciation for the tone of
his email and the “outrage” she had felt at Gaub’s
tone.
Saad-Ghorayeb added:
Implicit in [Gaub’s] words is the suggestion
that my invitation only stands if I break Lebanese law… [I]n
so doing, she was compromising my standing with the law ; according to
Lebanese law, the penalty for any interaction (meeting, discussion etc.)
between Lebanese civilians and Israeli military personnel is a prison sentence
with hard labor.
But it is not only Gaub's apparent
indifference to my fate which I find disturbing, but
her clear disrespect for my country's legal system, which she deems violable. I
wonder if she would as readily countenance the reverse scenario had
I invited her to give a lecture where representatives of
some state or non-state actor deemed an "enemy" by her native
Germany, and I then attempted to persuade her to break German law
by assuring her the utmost secrecy…
Gaub’s behavior, Saad-Ghorayeb
wrote, amounted to a particularly crude form of neo-Orientalism.
Saad-Ghorayeb had sent ‘CC’ copies of this email to a number of
officials at NDC/NRCC, including NDC’s Dean of Academic Affairs, Dr. Grant T. Hammond.
Hammond then made the mistake (who hasn’t, at this point?) of hitting “Reply to
all” with his first response to it.
Which, um, sent straight back to Saad-Ghorayeb and a number of other people the following
stream-of-consciousness reaction:
While I find this despicable and the most unjust, vitriolic piece of
academic claptrap I have ever encountered WE DO NOT RESPOND! If
she makes the effort to write me or the Commandant, we
will do so. But do not get involved in a pissing contest over this.
Florence—you did nothing wrong. But let’s not get into a series of
negative e-mail exchanges on [t]his…
And that was the point when a copy
of this whole exchange found its way into my in-box.
I wrote Hammond and asked him to
clarify a number of points. In particular, I asked these questions,
[I]s it the policy of NDC
to demean the legal system of another country to the extent that it asks
nationals of that country to break the law?
Did the NDC make any attempt to find a reasonable and legal accommodation of
Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb's concerns?
Hammond replied, courteously and at some length, as follows:
The Faculty Advisor who invited Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb was not aware of the Lebanese law which prohibited her from speaking to an audience in
which Israelis were present. This is regrettable and the initial cause of
the misunderstanding. But there was no intention to, and it certainly is
not the policy of the NATO Defense College, to demean
Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb or Lebanon. We would not
expect her to break the laws of her nation. While Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb finds it hard to believe that Dr. Gaub was unaware of the Lebanese law, Dr. Gaub and indeed others here at the College, find it hard to
believe that Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb was not aware of the
15 year old relationship between NATO and the Mediterranean Dialog (MD) countries—which
include Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Israel.
As a NATO body, we were not in a position to prohibit Israeli participants who
have been invited by the North Atlantic Council to participate in a NATO
sponsored program of large size and duration since 1994. That being the
case, and Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb having legal stricture
preventing her participation in the NRCC, Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb
in effect, by her nation’s law, had to refuse to participate, and thus,
“disinvited” herself.
Dr. Gaub’s reference to a
free academic environment at the NATO Defense College
and the use of the Chatham House Rule was an effort to describe the interchange
that occurs in the discussions held here and that we have scholars from a
variety of backgrounds—and course members—who have been able to
have frank discussions of very serious issues. Not knowing the specifics
of the Lebanese law, and the circumstances to which it applied, Dr. Gaub indicated that if the exclusion of the Israelis were
required, we would not be able to host Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb.
While the
misunderstanding of the legal circumstances involved on both sides is
regrettable, the “despicable and most unjust, vitriolic piece of academic
claptrap” to which I referred in my e-mail sent to all (unintentionally
including Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb) in a previous
message—for which I am sincerely sorry—referred not to the legal
strictures affecting Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb, or her
integrity in following them, but to what I considered a harsh and unnecessary
personal attack on Dr. Gaub, who, to my way of
thinking, had done nothing wrong, either personally or professionally in
explaining the situation to Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb.
Dr. Gaub’s reply to Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb
left the matter to decide about her participation up to her, and she declined
to come. Dr. Saad Ghorayeb
appeared to hold her invitation as her paramount concern and not an
appreciation for the circumstance of the College, Dr. Gaub
or the NATO Alliance in this matter. In essence, her ignorance of the
NATO circumstance mirrored Dr. Gaub’s ignorance of
the Lebanese law.
Dr. Gaub’s tone was neither “discourteous” nor “offensive,” nor
“ungracious” and “disrespectful” in explaining the nature of the discussions
held here. While it may well be true that Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb
has never spoken to a group where Israelis might be present where others
“always found a way to accommodate my constraints,” it was simply not the case
here. The charge that this is a “crude form of neo-Orientalism,”
is extreme and unwarranted. The language used to describe Dr. Gaub’s behavior and imputed
intentions was also.
… While
the entire circumstance is regrettable, it is another illustration of different
cultural sensitivities and the work we all have to do to better appreciate each
other’s social, political and cultural context.
I can
assure you—and Dr. Saad-Ghorayeb—that her
academic expertise and reputation were the reason that she was invited to
address the NRCC course. That this is impossible under Lebanese Law and
NATO course participation regulations is, under the circumstances, our
loss. But there is no personal slight in her being “disinvited.”
She refused to participate under the circumstances. She was asked to
address the course, a condition of her doing so was to ask the Israeli course
members to absent themselves, and this NATO cannot do. As
members of the NRCC course, they are all treated equally. While this may
not be seen as appropriate from a Lebanese point of view, and I am well aware
of why this is so, it was not in the power of the NATO defense
College to prohibit a particular nationality from participating in its NATO
approved course offerings.
Well, it strikes me that no-one at the NDC/NRCC had ever tried to find a legal and
reasonable way to meet Saad-Ghorayeb’s concerns. (A number of possible formulas for
doing this suggest themselves to the agile mind.) And Hammond was telling me
they had no intention of even trying to find such a formula. He, like Guptill, was simply saying that
“this is how NATO insists things be done; take it or leave it.”
“NATO”, of course, is not some
abstract, bureaucratic body. It is an alliance between member-states who
allegedly uphold the values of democratic accountability and the rule of law.
“NATO” as such cannot insist that Israeli officers who are participants in an
NRCC course be physically present if a Lebanese lecturer comes into the room.
“NATO”, or rather the faculty of the NATO Defense
College, could certainly ask those Israeli officers to step into another room
in deference to the request of an invited lecturer, whose democratically
elected government has criminalized any contact between its citizens and members
of Israel’s military.
Who knows, perhaps even a video link
might be provided?
But at a broader level, I wonder
what is the point of having this inter-military “Mediterranean Dialogue”
that NATO has been running for the past 15 years? Especially since, as Hammond
indicated, it involves-- along with Israel and the two Arab League states that
have made peace with Israel-- four other Arab states that have yet done so?
We could also note that neither
Mauritania nor Jordan is actually a Mediterranean state. So this venture is not
just “about” Mediterranean-basin concerns.
It does look very much like an
attempt to ram a certain sort of inter-military “normalization” down the
throats of those Arab states.
Now, maybe this kind of
“cooperation” would be worthwhile if, at times of crisis, the democratic
countries of NATO and the governments of the Arab countries involved in this
“dialogue” could use all the relationships they have built up with Israel’s
military in order to restrain Israel from pursuing some of its baser and more
belligerent behaviors.
But I guess that didn’t happen in
1996, when Israeli PM Shimon Peres unleashed the IDF into a big and very
harmful assault against Lebanon. It didn’t happen in 2002, when Sharon sent the
IDF into the West Bank and Gaza to demolish the infrastructure of the
(European-funded) Palestinian Authority there. It didn’t happen in 2006 (Olmert; Lebanon), or in 2008 (Olmert;
Gaza)… So really, I do wonder, what is the point of this “Mediterranean
Dialogue”?
Well, as I noted above, NATO is
still floundering around, trying to look for a “mission”; and it is running
into deep, deep troubles in Afghanistan…
It truly is time for all the
reasonable, equality-loving people of the world to get together and devise a saner
approach to restoring security to the world’s troubled regions than that pursued
since the end of the Cold War pursued by the pro-Israeli militarists of
NATO.
With all the fast-moving developments of the past couple of weeks, I felt it was time to draw out the main theme behind them.... I tried to do that in my IPS piece today. It's here-- also archived here.
As I thought about it and read it, I came to the conclusion there's good news and bad news... as reflected in the concluding two paras of the piece:
But that fact does not bring serious U.S. efforts in the peace process any closer. Indeed, by making a strong anti-Iran coalition look unachievable under any circumstances, it may even lessen the motivation of some in Washington to push hard on Israeli-Palestinian peace diplomacy. [That's the bad news.]
Phil Weiss, who's read more of the Goldstone report than I have at this point, zeroes in on the paragraphs Goldstone and Co wrote about the IDF's killings of police officers and cadets in Gaza.
He writes,
The mission analyzed the history of the Gaza police since the Hamas takeover in 2007. While policemen were recruited from Hamas followers, Goldstone found that the police are a "civilian law-enforcement agency" and that the police targets of Dec. 27 were none of them taking part in hostilities and had not lost their "civilian immunity." Yes "individual" policemen were surely members of armed groups and can be considered combatants. But the Israeli attacks failed to strike an acceptable balance, between anticipated military advantage of destruction and civilian damage. The great majority of these policemen were civilians. So the mission concludes,This was a violation of international humanitarian law.
A noncombatant is a person whom, under international humanitarian law, it is forbidden to target, and who is therefore "protected" by IHL.
This includes civilians but it also includes members of a military formation who are not currently fighting. Hence the specificity of the term "noncombatant."
This class of persons includes all civilians. It also includes members of military formations who are "hors de combat" because of injuries-- along with members of military formations who are not "on duty" in the military at the time.
It would include, for example, even senior officers in the IDF or any other military (or of Hamas's military formations) who are off duty-- sleeping in their homes, or whatever. And it includes the many members of Israel's reserve forces who, during the Gaza war or at any other time, might have been sleeping at home and going about their normal family and professional lives.
Many members of the police force in a place like Sderot may, for example, have also been reserve officers in the IDF. But at any time that they are not actually engaged in combat as part of the IDF-- or, I think, in military training, which is a preparation for combat-- they are considered noncombatants, and therefore have all the IHL protections of noncombatants.
Thus, for a Gazan, simply being a member of an armed group does not make a person into a "combatant", that is, a legitimate target of Israeli fire. Unless he is currently engaged in combat, which the cadets at a police academy graduation ceremony evidently weren't.
That's the great thing about international humanitarian law: it applies to everyone in the same way.
... Anyway, that's my only quibble with what is otherwise a really excellent post by Phil.
I was reading this account from Reuters of the way that Obama's ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, today tried to sideline and bury the important report of the Goldstone Commission.
Firstly, she brushed aside the report's recommendation that the Security Council should remain actively involved in the follow-up efforts to win accountability from the accused perpetrators of atrocities on both sides during Israel's December-January assault on Gaza.
Then, this:
"This is a time to work to cement progress toward the resumption of (Israeli-Palestinian peace) negotiations and their early and successful conclusion," she said.
But then I thought there is already a very, very long history of Palestinians having their "justice" claims brusquely pushed aside in favor of the promise of a future, western-led peacemaking effort... And throughout the past 61 years those efforts have never, ever led anywhere.
So today, the Palestinians are once again asked to forget about their past grievances, and to focus on a promise of some kind of a future peace settlement that, if the past is any kind of a reliable guide, may well prove quite illusory.
Lost in all this, however, is the situation of the Palestinians-- in Gaza, but also elsewhere-- in the present.
Is there anything the US could do about this?
Of course there is! And it's not only the case that the US could do something to help the Gazans in the present-- the US also should be doing a whole lot more than it has to date to alleviate the harm that they continue to suffer on a daily and continuing basis, since it has enormous leverage over the government of Israel.
But Washington has used not one iota of that leverage to force Israel to open Gaza's borders up for the passage of the freight that the Strip's 1.4 million people sorely need in order to conduct a normal, safe, and dignified life.
Winter is approaching in Gaza, where it can bring rain and some bitterly cold winds. And despite all the representations that various do-gooders have made since the parallel ceasefires wet into effect on January 18, Israel has not allowed into the Strip any of the most basic construction materials that are needed to repair the extensive damage that the IDF caused during last winter's war, in many cases quite intentionally, to housing, schools, factories, and public infrastructure.
So maybe now is not the time to pull together a huge series of international court cases to look into the atrocities of the past. (Or maybe it is.)
And maybe we should give the US-led diplomacy one last chance to build a better future. (Or maybe not.)
But if we look only at the continuously unfolding present, then if the US does nothing to force Israel to open Gaza's borders to the passage of vitally needed freight, then Washington will be directly complicit in the additional harms that Gaza's people will suffer this winter.
(Meantime, in today's statement, Rice criticized the mandate of the Goldstone Commission, and she criticized its policy recommendations. But I don't think she questioned any of its actual findings. And those findings surely stand as the best draft we have to date of the historical record of who did what to whom in the Israel-Palestine theater in the time of the 2008-09 Gaza War. Even just as a record, the work of the Commission will be invaluable-- and it can provide the basis for all kinds of court cases in the future.)
Excellent analysis, as usual, from Reidar Visser on Biden's latest trip to Iraq.
Noting that this is Biden's second visit to Iraq as Vice-President, Visser writes,
Biden’s frank assertion that he expects no major national reconciliation initiatives prior to the elections is useful in two ways. Firstly, it is good news in itself. It is often not realised that to leave these issues in suspense during the elections could actually have a positive impact on Iraqi politics in that voters may get the opportunity to discuss basic constitutional issues in Iraq in a less sectarian and confused atmosphere than that which prevailed during the two 2005 elections and ahead of the constitutional referendum that year...
Biden’s comments are also useful in that they highlight the limited window that remains for the Obama administration to exercise diplomatic influences in Iraq’s internal political process. If Biden is correct, not much more will be attempted this side of the 16 January 2010 elections. On that day, it is possible that the Iraqi people will reject the SOFA in the referendum that will coincide with the parliamentary elections, in which case the Maliki government will notify Washington that they have one year to leave the country and the logistics of getting out will likely become the preoccupation of the Obama administration. But even if the SOFA is accepted by the Iraqi people, the time that remains for the US between January and the end of 2011 is in practice highly restricted. Combat forces must be out by August 2010, and Washington has already factored in a couple of months in the post-election period to secure a stable transition – meaning that by the time a new government has been formed and serious discussion of national-reconciliation issues can recommence, probably no earlier than April 2010 if past experience is anything to go by, the mechanisms of withdrawal will probably occupy most of the Obama administration’s attention. On top of this, the first batch of constitutional revisions will be passed by a straightforward majority decision in the Iraqi parliament; any crisis over Kurdish objections will erupt only after a subsequent referendum, probably in late 2010 at the earliest...
It is intensely depressing, though, to see the Obama administration now ginning up an effort to define political benchmarks for both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Have they learned nothing from the fate of the "benchmarks" defined for Iraq?
It is also as though people who live in the Washington policy bubble have zero awareness of how their actions are viewed by that 95% of humanity who happen not be American. Including, of course, Afghans and Pakistanis.
Erm, guys, I would like to introduce you to this thing called "the printing press." Also, the "wireless telegraph." And I've heard tell, too, of a device called "The Inter-Tubes." Of course, if you're still living in the days of the quill pen and the pony express, you could perhaps imagine that people living outside the US might not learn of your plans for colonialist-style arrogance.
Ehud Barak to Yediot Aharonoth:
Barak said "Israel is strong, I don't see anyone who could pose an existential threat," although he did add that he viewed Iran as a challenge to the whole world.
The Reuters report linked to above takes care to note-- as few US media would*-- that,
Still, it is excellent that Barak is on the record with this statement.
---
* Update: But MJ Rosenberg noted this in his very informative post on the topic at TPM Cafe.
The NYT's John Schwartz reported last night that Human Rights Watch has decided to suspend the controversial military analyst Marc Garlasco with full pay, pending an investigation into his engagement with the hobby of collecting Nazi-era military memorabilia.
I think this is the right thing to do. Wish they'd done it some days earlier. Then we could be devoting more attention today to the very important findings of the Goldstone Commission.
Fwiw, I'm quoted a bit at the bottom of Schwartz's piece.
The topic is Who Speaks For the Palestinians at the Negotiating Table? The time is Noon thru 1 p.m. Since my friends at the Foundation for Middle East Peace are co-sponsoring this event, sandwiches will be served.
More info here.
The Goldstone Commission, appointed in April by the UN Human Rights Council to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that were committed during last winter's Gaza war, has now presented its findings to the Council.
Regarding actions undertaken by the armed forces of the State of Israel, the report states,
Significant trauma, both immediate and long-term, has been suffered by the population of Gaza. The Report notes signs of profound depression, insomnia and effects such as bed-wetting among children. The effects on children who witnessed killings and violence, who had thought they were facing death, and who lost family members would be long lasting, the Mission found, noting in its Report that some 30 per cent of children screened at UNRWA schools suffered mental health problems.
The report concludes that the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole, in furtherance of an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population, and in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population. The destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a deliberate and systematic policy which has made the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population.
The Report states that Israeli acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their rights to access a court of law and an effective remedy, could lead a competent court to find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, has been committed.
The report underlines that in most of the incidents investigated by it, and described in the report, loss of life and destruction caused by Israeli forces during the military operation was a result of disrespect for the fundamental principle of "distinction" in international humanitarian law that requires military forces to distinguish between military targets and civilians and civilian objects at all times. The report states that "Taking into account the ability to plan, the means to execute plans with the most developed technology available, and statements by the Israeli military that almost no errors occurred, the Mission finds that the incidents and patterns of events considered in the report are the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions."
The Mission concludes that the rocket and mortars attacks "have caused terror in the affected communities of southern Israel," as well as "loss of life and physical and mental injury to civilians and damage to private houses, religious buildings and property, thereby eroding the economic and cultural life of the affected communities and severely affecting the economic and social rights of the population."
Here are the Commission's conclusion and recommendations (reformatted by me for clarity):
* It recommended that the UN Security Council require Israel to report to it, within six months, on investigations and prosecutions it should carry out with regard to the violations identified in its Report.
* The Mission further recommends that the Security Council set up a body of independent experts to report to it on the progress of the Israeli investigations and prosecutions.
* If the experts' reports do not indicate within six months that good faith, independent proceedings are taking place, the Security Council should refer the situation in Gaza to the ICC Prosecutor.
* The Mission recommends that the same independent expert body also report to the Security Council on proceedings undertaken by the relevant Gaza authorities with regard to crimes committed by the Palestinian side.
* As in the case of Israel, if within six months there are no good faith independent proceedings conforming to international standards in place, the Council should refer the situation to the ICC Prosecutor.
Longtime JWN readers will know that I have long reflected and written about how the demands of peacemaking and the demands of seeking full accountability for past acts can best be reconciled. This is a very important case-study in this field.
Meantime, of course, if Pres. Obama is serious about his support for the human-rights agenda and for building a new, more constructive relationship with the UN, then he needs t get behind this process of holding both parties acountable.
Including, he should immediately signal to both Israel and Hamas that he will condition all future US aid to both of them on their compliance with these recommendations.
Netanyahu just loves to poke his finger in America's eye... again, and again, and again...
Today, with Pres. Obama's peace envoy George Mitchell still in Israel, Netanyahu bluntly told a key Knesset committee that "there will not be a complete freeze on settlement building and that building in Jerusalem will proceed as usual."
The exact words, as reported by Haaretz's Jonathan Lis, were,
His taunting and his non-compliance are both outrageous. The best response from Obama is to move directly and speedily to securing the agreed delineation of final borders between Israel and the independent Palestinian state. In the West Bank, that border-line will, of course, also include one that runs through Jerusalem.
Deal with it, Netanyahu. Jerusalem does not belong only to Israel.
Another Ramadan, another set of soap operas in the Arab world (along with new seasons of old-established favorites like "Bab al-Hara.")
From Beirut, the "Land and People" blog's Zayd gives us a quick critique of this year's crop of soap operas, that he gathered in that center of Lebanese urban life, the local greengrocer:
The difference between Turkish and Syrian soap operas comes down to food. There is no food in Turkish soap operas; whereas no matter what is going on in a Syrian soap opera--siege of the town by the French; fights in the street; death, mayhem, amshakal--there is always food being bought, sold, prepared, cooked, or eaten. Always. The theory in the mahal [the greengrocer] is this is the real reason everyone in Turkey is crying; they’ve given up their alphabet as well as their food culture...
The soap opera, whose name means “The Neighborhood’s Gate,” has seen almost unprecedented success since its debut run in 2006. Set in Damascus during the inter-war period of French colonial occupation, the program depicts the last moments of a society yearning for independence.
... In East Jerusalem, giant screens have been erected for fans and it even has a Syrian restaurant in Nottingham, England named after it. Syrian President Bashar Assad is reported to be a huge fan and the program has – perhaps inevitably in the 21st century – already spawned a video game.
... There are 157 original series being aired during Ramadan, representing three quarters of the Arab world’s annual televisual output. All this extra programming means Ramadan is now big business for advertisers.
The show, which receives increasing local and international acclaim, is critical of both Palestinian society and its governments, tacking myriad issues in each 15-minute episode. Despite its regular criticism of the government, source say the show is supported by Abed Rabbo.
The official played himself the episode “Obama in Ramallah,” which saw him excuse US President Barack Obama who apologized for being 60 minutes late for a meeting “because of the checkpoints,” an often heard excuse from the tardy.
Replying to Obama, Abed Rabbo says, “Sir, you are 60 years late in understanding our suffering under these checkpoints.”
“But [PLO Chief Negotiator] Dr Sa’eb Erekat did not tell us about the suffering of these barriers,” Obama explained.
Trying to console the US president’s ignorance, Abed Rabbo replied “[Don’t worry] Erekat doesn’t tell us what happens with him in the negotiations.”
Qatar seems to have produced at least one soap opera with a biting social edge.
In Kuwait, the Ministry of Information felt that at least one soap opera, "Sotik Wasal" ["Your voice carried"; maybe "I already heard you"] had gone too far in its political commentary, and banned it.
The birthplace of the Arabic t.v. soap opera was originally Egypt. But Amira Howeidy tells us that now, the biggest productions there during Ramadan are not soap operas, but talk shows; and numerous talk show hosts have gained sizeable mass followings.
She writes this,
Adib may well come across as an independent, influential voice, but there are critics who take issue with his agenda. Ayman El-Sayyad, editor of the monthly cultural magazine Weghat Nazar, argues that the Adib-Khalifa episode covertly promoted Hosni Mubarak's son, Gamal. "The message was clear, all that talk about change and the talk about how the president protected Adib," El-Sayyad told Al-Ahram Weekly. A segment of the episode, where Adib predicts that Gamal Mubarak will succeed his father, was censored.
Al-Qahira Al-Yom has aired live 250 days a year for a decade now. Until 2004 -- the year the anti- Mubarak dissent movement Kifaya took to the streets triggering a wave of protests across Egypt -- it was mainly a celebrity gossip show. Then came the shift, and for a while at least Adib was the only Egyptian discussing political developments as millions watched. Other talk shows... soon followed. Presenters vied for the loyalty of the audiences. Once they succeeded in securing it they enjoyed an influence that, arguably, no politician or official has ever enjoyed.
In a country where political groups are denied the right to form parties (the government has denied over a dozen requests to form political parties in the last two years), and where political stagnation leaves no room for change, talk shows and their presenters have unwittingly filled the gap.
Advertising companies were quick to notice the popularity of such shows among viewers...
It is encouraging to note that not all Middle Eastern countries streamline a barrage of juicy soap operas during the Holy Month. In Turkey, the television programming is geared towards Islamic history, living the deen of Islam and Q&A shows where callers can call in to have their questions about Islam answered live on air by a reputable sheikh. Locally produced and aired music channels in Turkey also pull their programming during Ramadan in favor of airing Islamic nasheeds [devotional songs].
Storytelling is an age-old tradition. However, Ramadan is a golden gift that should be seized by every Muslim that is willing and able to receive the blessings that come with it. Being glued to the TV and rapturously eating up all the human folly portrayed there definitely tarnishes the reality of what Ramadan is all about.
The usually well-informed Akiva Eldar has an important piece in today's Haaretz, reporting this:
Palestinian and European Union sources told Haaretz that talks will initially focus on determining the permanent border between Israel and the West Bank.
... It is understood that this will be accompanied by a public American and European declaration that the permanent border will be based on the border of June 4, 1967. Both sides may agree to alter the border based on territorial exchanges.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's refusal to discuss Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees in the initial negotiation stages will not be allowed to delay the announcement of an independent Palestinian state.
Likewise, Netanyahu's demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and that the Arab world embark on normalizing ties with Israel, will not constitute preconditions to an "early recognition" of Palestine.
If Eldar's report is accurate, which I assume to be the case, then I think this says some moderately good things about where Obama's policy is heading.
I understand that Obama's failure to win-- or even, really to fight for-- a complete settlement freeze has been very frustrating for the Palestinians But as I noted in this recent IPS piece,
From that perspective, any further prolongation of the fruitless tussle over the settlements can be seen both as a huge time-waster and as a growing drain on Obama’s political capital domestically and internationally.
These analysts point out that any FPA will necessarily include a demarcation of the final borders between Israel and the future Palestinian state.
Once those lines are demarcated, the issue of whether and where Israel can build new housing for its people is instantly transformed. After border demarcation Israel can presumably build freely within its own final borders, consistent with international law.
But outside those borders not only will it be unable to continue its building programmes, but Israeli citizens already living there will rapidly come under Palestinian law.
And as the FPA goes into effect there will be no more Israeli military occupation of either or the West Bank, and thus no remaining problem, under international law, regarding Israeli settlers in those areas.
Demarcating a final border for Israel in the West Bank is something that Netanyahu and many of his allies in Israeli’s rightwing government have long been opposed to. Netanyahu’s Likud party traditionally considered the whole terrain between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – and even a stretch of land east of the Jordan – to be part of the Biblical “Land of Israel”.
2. Not getting sidetracked by either endless nickel-and-diming over an interim settlement freeze, or the terrible dead-end of a "Palestinian state with a provisional border," or Israel's demands that it needs to receive the Palestinians' prior agreement to "recognize Israel as a Jewish state", or whatever.
3. With regard to the interim settlement freeze idea-- which seems as though it'll go onto operation in only a very limited way-- making no mention of any kind of mandatory Arab-state quid pro quos for that. (I see that Saudi Arabia's very influential Prince Turki al-Faisal today reiterated in the NYT that the Kingdom is not prepared to engage in any normalization or or other peacebuilding measures until "after [the Israelis] have released their grip on Arab lands." Absolutely no surprise there.)
4. Having the US and EU declare that the final border will be "based on the line of June 4, 1967", though with mutually agreeable exchanges.
The "borders first" approach will not work unless the border-line and any other necessary arrangements regarding all of Jerusalem are also spelled out in the broader border delineation exercise. This is the case, for two reasons: Firstly because "Metropolitan Jerusalem" now constitutes such a large and such a pivotally placed portion of the West Bank that you literally cannot know what Palestinian-administered area you're talking about in the West Bank unless you know where the line is and what the supplementary arrangement are for Jerusalem. Secondly, Jerusalem is of crucial political importance to all Palestinians as well as to 1.3 billion Muslims and 13 million Jews around the world.
My view on what might work in Jerusalem, fwiw, is that the Israelis would get the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and some but not all of the settlement blocs in occupied East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians would get the rest of the Old City and much but not all of the rest of occupied East Jerusalem, with the Palestinian concessions there being compensated with good chunks of land from elsewhere in 1948 Israel... Plus perhaps some kind of special international regime for some Holy Places.
Anyway, there needs to be a line through Jerusalem. We're talking about two separate states with separate economies and different trading partners, etc. Over time, perhaps, the two states will want to cooperate, and Jerusalem will be a great locus for that. But for now, a clean divorce is so much better-- in Jerusalem, as in the land of Israel/Palestine as a whole-- than continuing in any form with the highly coercive and extremely damaging regime that has existed, including at the economic level, since 1967, and also, of course, since Oslo.
2. He needs to spell out that this whole approach is based on international law and international resolutions... And by the way, he needs to bring other countries/groupings into the "leadership process", in addition to the US and the EU. This is not, and should not be seen as, a western/NATO project! It should derive its strength, clarity, and legitimacy from the United Nations, including from the resolutions of the UN Security Council.
3. Based on the preceding two points, he needs to make sure that the "model" of the negotiations is not just one in which "the Israelis and Palestinians get left in a room together to work things out between them." That can never work. One side is, on the ground, a fearsome military and economic power that is occupying the land of the other. The other is a weak and oppressed (though numerous) group of people who've been living under the Israeli fist for many years. That is why both the US's interest and the principles of international law need to be added into the equation to even things up. So that, for example, the negotiations "land swaps", the refugee issue, or whatever don't end up being completely-- and over the medium haul, quite unsistainaby-- resolved in Israel's interest.
4. He needs, obviously, to find a way to include in the diplomacy in some way those parties that were not only excluded but also actively combated and opposed by GWB administration. That includes both Hamas and the five-million-plus Palestinian refugees. On Hamas, there is some modestly good news, in that the Speaker of the PLO's 'parliament', Selim Zaanoun, is supposed to be in Gaza right about now, discussing formulas for bringing Hamas into the PLO... And of course, it is the PLO, not the Determinedly Interim Palestinian Authority, that under the Oslo formula is responsible for negotiating the final peace with Israel. (Even if Saeb Erakat does like to double- or triple-hat himself on occasion); and
5. Finally, this peace diplomacy on the Palestinian-Israeli track will be a lot more successful if it is seen as part of an intentionally synergizing push for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, that is, one that involves progress on the Syrian-Israeli track in tandem with-- rather than, as in the past, in a considerably degree of competition with-- the Palestinian-Israeli track.
Amira Hass had a searing report in Thursday's Haaretz. It's about the killing and slow death during last winter's Gaza war of Ahmed Samouni, age 4, and his father Atiyeh.
Amira, a secular saint from Israel, interviewed Ahmed's mother Zeinat in May in a Gaza City neighborhood.
Here's what Hass wrote that Zeinat Samouni told her about the events of Sunday, January 4:
Samouni continued: "The soldiers began moving between the houses and shooting. We heard them speaking Hebrew. We all started screaming and crying. My husband only said that we shouldn't be afraid and that we should read the Koran. We left the front door open so they wouldn't break it down with explosives and so they would see that there are children here. They came straight into the living room; we were in the children's room, across the way. [The soldiers] looked frightening. Their faces were blackened with charcoal and they had big helmets with branches in them. We were so afraid we shouted."
Mahmoud Samouni, 12: "They were from Givati" - an infantry battalion.
Zeinat Samouni: "We all shouted. Atiyeh stood up to approach the soldiers and talk to them. He knows Hebrew. Ahmed followed him, crying: Daddy, Daddy. Atiyeh told him, Don't be afraid.
"My husband walked toward the soldiers with his hands up. 'Here I am, Khawaja [term for a non-Muslim]. He barely said a word and they shot him. It wasn't just one who fired. Atiyeh was at the door of the children's room, [the soldiers] were maybe a meter away. They kept shooting into the room where we were. Ahmed was hit in the head and the chest, Zahwa in the back. Her sons Faraj and Qanan were also hurt, and my Abdallah [10] was hit in the head and the hip, also Amal [his twin sister].
"We all lay down on the floor. After maybe a quarter of an hour I shouted to the soldiers, 'Ktanim, Khawajam, ktanim' ["little ones," in Hebrew], and they stopped shooting. I saw one soldier spit twice on my husband. Then they came into the children's room and in my bedroom they began destroying the furniture and threw something [probably a stun grenade], so the room filled up with smoke and a fire started and everything in the room - clothes, documents, money - was lost.
"Because of all the smoke and fire we started shouting again, and again said 'Ktanim, ktanim,' and we prayed and read the Koran and coughed. I couldn't see the children because of all the smoke. The soldiers put on gas masks and lit up the place with the lights on their rifles, and spoke Hebrew. We're crying and the children are peeing their pants and the soldiers are laughing. In the end, they said, 'Come on, come on,' and took us out. They spat on my husband again. I look at the pool of blood under his head and a soldier aims his rifle at me. Outside there were soldiers who fired. My children and I went out barefoot, our arms raised. Fahed, Zahwa's son, carried Ahmed. I told a soldier I wanted to take my husband. He said no. Outside I saw many soldiers.
"Amal ran to the house of [Uncle] Talal, but the soldiers wouldn't let us follow her. We walked on the paved road [eastward, toward Salah al-Din Street]. I didn't notice anything, and suddenly everyone stopped. It turned out that there was a snipers' post in Sawafiri's house. They ordered my husband's [older] sons to pull up their shirts and turn around, and then they ordered them to go to Rafah [south]. We continued and entered the home of Majed [Samouni, another relative]. I looked at Ahmed; his clothes were covered with blood and I saw the two big holes in his head. I gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, I screamed, I asked for an ambulance. His mouth was dry. I moistened his lips with saliva, and then with water that Majed brought me.
"We tore a sheet for white flags, so we could go out. Majed's wife was pregnant and began going into labor. His mother and I helped her give birth. There were about 40 or 50 of us. The children were hungry. Majed brought pita and olives and tomatoes that were in the house. I asked Ahmed if he wanted to eat and he whispered, 'Yeah . . . Mommy,' and I gave him a little bread in water. I fed him like a baby bird. All the time blood was running, everything was covered in it. In the evening he told me, 'I want to take you and Dad to Paradise.' I kept bringing towels to absorb the blood and I thought about Amal and about my husband's dead body.
"Ahmed died at about or 4:30 or 5 A.M. [on January 5]. I screamed and I closed his eyes. Salah's girl came and said a shell landed on the home of Wa'el [a relative] and that the roof fell in and everyone was screaming and covered in blood. She said everyone had fled to the city. I said that in that case we'd all leave the neighborhood.
"We left, the big ones holding the little ones, Fahed carrying Ahmed's body, all of us holding white flags. The soldiers on the roof of Sawafiri's house started shooting just as we went out, and there was also shooting from a helicopter and from a tank [on Salah al-Din Street]. We were screaming and crying. We kept walking, barefoot, until the Star Cola factory. An ambulance came a little later. They asked if there were wounded. I said there were some behind us, who could barely walk.
"We were about 300 people, everyone with white flags and some with plastic bags because they couldn't find white cloth. The ambulance people apologized for not being able to come, because the soldiers shot at the ambulances. They took us to Shifa Hospital. They put Ahmed next to the others who were killed, and there I saw Talal's family, all of them crying. Then I noticed the dead and I started to recognize them. I wandered around Shifa like a madwoman, looking for Amal. They told me, 'We were all in Talal's house and the soldiers took us to Wa'el's and a shell hit and we were all wounded and killed.'
I couldn't find Amal. My aunt came and started crying and said, 'Rashad is dead and Talal is dead and Rahma is dead and Safa is dead and Mohammed is dead and Hilmi is dead and Leila is dead and Tawfiq is dead, and Walid and Rebab - and I hugged her and we screamed together. Men and women gathered around, crying with us.
"They took my son Ahmed from the bed and put him into the refrigerator, and I'm behind them, screaming. The young people are holding me and I'm saying that I want to go into the refrigerator with him. The refrigerator was full. There were so many dead that they didn't even put Ahmed in a separate compartment, but on the floor. With Mu'athazam and Mohammed. Then a relative came and took us in his car. I didn't yet know that I had no home to go back to [the IDF demolished it before pulling out]. I didn't yet know where Amal was and what had happened to her."
His own defense of his actions is here.
He writes,
I work to expose war crimes and the Nazis were the worst war criminals of all time. But I'm now in the bizarre and painful situation of having to deny accusations that I'm a Nazi.
He claims that, "I've never hidden my hobby." But when I spoke with Iain Levine, who's the head of all HRW's programs and thus Garlasco's supervisor's supervisor, he said he had no inkling that Garlasco had such a hobby "until Tuesday morning."
Garlasco writes,
Also, one of those allegedly "juvenile" postings was presumably this one, made in 2005: "The leather SS jacket makes my blood go cold it is so COOL!” Garlasco was 34 or 35 years old at the time. He'd been working for HRW for two years by then. It was only four years ago.
Hard to make a claim of "youthful indiscretion", based on such facts.
... I would like to have the opportunity to discuss these issues with Garlasco, in person. I asked Levine if I could have access to him. Hasn't happened yet.
I'd like to make a few last points here:
1. I do not claim to know what Garlasco's attitude is toward the Nazi-era military memorabilia that he so obsessively collects. He clearly seems to have a collector's zeal, or obsession, and to spend a lot of time pursuing this hobby. 7,734 posts on Wehrmacht Awards since March 2004, and compiling a 450-page guide to one small sub-branch of Nazi-era badges are not the signs of a casual collector. The comment shown above, made on Wehrmacht Awards in 2005, indicates some open-ness, at the very least, to the idea that one could entertain and express fondness for specifically SS memorabilia.
Also, using 'Flak88' seems like a signal of possible pro-Hitler proclivities to others in that part of the collecting world, who would be quite aware that '88' is their insiders' code for Heil Hitler.
To my mind, this does not prove that Garlasco's a "Nazi sympathizer", or an anti-Semite. But his participation on these sites-- including interactions there with people who clearly do seem to be Nazi sympathizers-- is extremely disturbing in itself.
2. I have had my affiliation as an Advisory Committee member with HRW for some 17 years. In that time I've interacted with scores of HRW staff members and advisers (though never, personally, with Garlasco.) I have never had any reason at all to suspect that any of the ones I interacted with were motivated at all in their work by anti-Semitism, or that they harbored any anti-Semitism. Indeed, it is common knowledge that a high proportion of people in the upper levels of the organization are now, and have always been, Jewish.
To suggest that Garlasco is just "the tip of the iceberg" of a whole coterie of anti-Semites working at HRW is a malicious and completely unfounded accusation.
It is probably no surprise to readers here to learn that I am a little disturbed by the degree to which the HRW powers-that-be have thus far circled their wagons round Garlasco and attempted to defend him. I have been having some communications with people in HRW, which are necessarily private, to suggest better ways forward.
3. As always, the big issue here is not Marc Garlasco and his distasteful "hobby". It is not even Human Rights Watch, tragic though the current episode is for all of us. The big issue is the need to keep everyone's attention focused on the effort to improve the human rights situation of the extremely vulnerable and still hard-pressed population of Gaza, while also improving the rights situation of all the peoples of the Middle East.
As I wrote in my IPS piece yesterday, the revelations about Garlasco's "hobby" come at a pivotal point in the campaign to get some real accountability for the gross rights abuses perpetrated during last winter's Israeli assault on Gaza.
This coming week, Judge Richard Goldstone is due to present his commission's official report on those abuses to the UN Human Rights Council.
I do not know to what extent his report builds on investigative work done by Marc Garlasco for HRW. But certainly, HRW and Garlasco are very far from the only organizations that have done extensive work documenting the nature and extent of the violations of IHL committed during the Gaza war. So regardless of the latest revelations about Garlasco's bizarre and troubling out-of-hours activities, Goldstone will still have plenty of good documentation to build on.
If Garlasco, through his actions, had not put his employer into the position of feeling so vulnerable at this point, we might have expected HRW to be a strong voice within the US body politic, advocating for strong support of whatever Goldstone's recommendations might be. Now, I am sure they (we) will do what we can. But I can't disguise the fact that I am extremely upset that Garlasco's actions led to this.
What was he thinking? Did he think no-one would ever make the connection between "Flak88" and Marc Garlasco?
He must have known the connection would likely be made, at some point. He knew there were many staunch defenders of Israel out gunning for HRW; and if he had sat back and thought for one moment about the tracks he was leaving all over those Nazi-memorabilia websites, he must have known that he'd be "outed" one day... And surely, despite his protestations about the "innocence" of his hobby, any half-way intelligent American could have predicted the deep disgust and questioning with which such revelations would be greeted by many or most other Americans.
To his buddies on those websites, meanwhile, he made little or no attempt to hide his actual name, or even his afiliation with HRW. It was only his supervisors at HRW who were nearly all, despite his somewhat general protestation that "I've never hidden my hobby", kept in the dark...
Tragic.
I realize I promised to put something on the blog about the presentation that Rob Malley made during Thursday's discussion of Hussein Ibish's latest anti-one-state screed. Let me convey just the main points here.
Rob started off by noting that all the attempts to get a two-state outcome that have been undertaken since the conclusion of the Oslo Accord in 1993 have failed. (He later referred to "serial failures.")
He was, of course, part of the diplomatic team, based in the Clinton White House, that was responsible for many of those failures. (But only a junior member.)
He asserted that, "The one-state solution doesn't meet even the basic needs of Israeli Jews."
If I'd had more time, I'd have loved to ask Rob to be a lot more specific. Which basic needs, precisely, of Israeli Jews does he see it as not meeting?
He said, "I haven't given up on the two-state solution. Rather, I've soured on the methods used until now to attain it."
He (like, I think, both the other people leading the discussion-- Hussein Ibish and Aaron Miller) made one or more references to the need to attain a conflict-ending two-state solution.
But he said the US needs to do two main things different in the methodology it pursues, than what it did in the past. (And he, like the others, was still talking very definitely about a diplomacy that would continue to be led by the US.)
The main ideas in what he said were familiar, actually, from the NYRB article he co-authored with Hussein Agha back in June.
His first suggestion for a change in methodology was to ask, "Have we left out some vital actors: on the Palestinian side, the refugees and the Islamists, and on the Israeli side the religious and the settlers?"
He argued that in all the rounds of diplomacy carried out since 1993, members of all those groups were excluded and "treated like lepers."
"We need to stop doing that," he said, "Because we will need as much endorsement as we can get from all those groups for any eventual peace deal, because they are so present and so well-mobilized."
His second methodological suggestion was that the people running the diplomacy should realize that, to be conflict-ending, the final peace agreement "has to deal with the issues of 1948, as well as 1967."
He defined "the issues of 1948" as consisting, on the Israeli side, of a continuing demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and on the Palestinian side, a "demand that they get acknowledgment and some form of reparation for what happened in 1948."
These two "methodological changes" are, of course, linked to each other-- particularly in their recognition that, to be sustainable, any peace deal has to address the concerns and at least some of the claims of the Palestinian refugees.
It does strike me that the first of his two suggestions-- focusing on being more "inclusive" towards the religio-nationalists on both sides and also towards both the Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlers-- is a little "unbalanced" in the diagnosis on which it is based: All the peace efforts carried out between 1993 and now have been very attentive indeed to the concerns of Israel's settlers and religio-nationalists... To the point that all US presidents have endorsed final border lines that would annex huge chunks of settler-populated occupied Palestinian territory to Israel, while the Israeli governments they have negotiated with have always included representatives of Israel's religio-nationalists; and indeed, Israel's religio-nationalists, like its settlers, are all fully enfranchised within the Israeli political system...
Whereas on the Palestinian side-- ?
The Clinton White House, just like the GWB White House, tried to completely downplay and minimize the concerns and claims of the Palestinian refugees. They worked hard to keep the Palestinians living in their Diaspora-- all of whom, of course, are refugees-- disenfranchized within the Palestinian system, by pursuing the idea that the Interim PA in Ramallah somehow represented "all" the Palestinian people. And they either encouraged (Clinton) or actively instigated (GWB) extremely brutal crackdowns on the leaders and members of the Palestinians' principal religio-nationalist movement.
Also, it is a little misleading to claim that the interests of the settlers should in any way correlate with, or should be "balanced off" against, those of the refugees.
The settlers, who now number around 500,000, are people who for varying numbers of years now have been-- usually quite wittingly-- the beneficiaries of Israel's highly illegal project to implant, and provide generous subsidies to, settlements that use land and other natural resources stolen from its rightful Palestinian owners.
So it hard to see why the claims of these people "deserve", in any moral sense, much attention from anyone. Of course, as a matter of common humanity they should be addressed as human equals who need a place to live, preferably inside their own country. And as a matter of political expedience, it is probably wise to do a few things to try to reach out to them.
However, they have been illegally living off the fat of someone else's land for varying numbers of years now. So let's not go overboard in efforts to accommodate them, maybe?
The Palestinian refugees, meanwhile, consist of around 6.8 million people-- 1.8 million registered refugees currently residing in the West Bank or Gaza, and around five million Palestinian people living in the Diaspora, only about 2.9 million of whom are "registered" with UNRWA.
These are fellow-humans who have been living-- the vast majority of them for all their lives at this point-- while stripped of the most basic right of residing in their family's homes.
Many of them-- especially, today, those in Gaza, those in Lebanon, and those in Iraq-- live in extremely tough situations, in great poverty and subject to continuing threats to their physical wellbeing.
So are all human persons equal? Do we consider that the legitimate claims and concerns of one Palestinian refugee should have the same priority as the legitimate claims and concerns one Israeli settler?
How should we weigh the legitimate claims and concerns of 6.8 million refugees against those of 500,000 settlers?
Why would we ever think it is acceptable to fail to address the legitimate claims and concerns of Palestinian refugees? Why would we think it acceptable to allow any further delay in addressing their concerns, thereby continuing to consign them to the situation of insecurity and impoverishment that so many of them have lived in for 62 years now?
... In the Q&A period of Thursday's discussion, both my friend George Hishmeh (a longtime refugee from Palestine) and I asked questions about the need to include the refugees in the peacemaking, rather than continuing to exclude them from it. In Malley's response to me, he referred to the the formula Hamas has proposed, whereby it would allow some non-Hamas negotiator to proceed with negotiating the peace, but any peace agreement conclided should thereafter be submitted to a referendum of all Palestinian people-- and Hamas would abide by the results of that referendum..
Malley agreed with my assessment that the Diaspora Palestinians would need to be included in that referendum.
That was good.
However, at some point in the Q&A he also rephrased the point he'd made earlier about Israel "needing" to get some recognition of its status as "a Jewish state", by talking about "Israel's need to get recognition as the homeland of the Jewish people."
That sounded like a serious change. The "homeland of the Jewish people"? All of them? When a Jewish American like Rob Malley is talking like that, is he implying he sees Israel as his homeland, too? I found that reference mystifying, and disturbing.
At the end of his main presentation, he summarized his current expectations thus: "I am not optimistic. Maybe we have to lower our sights for the next few years." Later, he talked about the possibility of "a longterm interim."
Very depressing-- as if we didn't have reason enough to be depressed before he spoke...
On September 12, 2001, as US military planners started examining the options they had t counter-attach against Al-Qaeda and its hosts in Afghanistan, they and their colleagues in the State Department rapidly realized that if they wanted to actually topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan they'd need the help of two key nearby powers: Iran and Russia-- and to a lesser extent, India.
They got the help they needed from those regional actors, and went ahead with the invasion operation.
Now, eight years later, the US/NATO forces are still in Afghanistan. And those forces are in deep trouble there. (Osama Bin Laden, btw, is still at large.)
The 95,000 US/NATO forces in Afghanistan are already significantly dependent on Russia and Iran, to be able to maintain their presence in that craggy and distant land. If their commanders are to avert the many worse catastrophes that loom there, they will need even more help from both Russia and Iran.
That is part of the essential background to the decision the State Department announced yesterday, that the US will be participating in the meeting that the Tehran government proposed Wednesday, between Iran and the P5+1 group.
Dafna Linzer of ProPublica notes at that link,
There is now confirmation from Tel Aviv that Israeli PM Netanyahu made a secret visit to Moscow shortly before Putin announced this decision. If, as we can assume, he discussed the Iran file while there, then evidently he failed to prevent Putin from making that clear decision against escalation.
The Israeli government and its many powerful and well-organized supporters inside the US have been vigorously campaigning for all non-Iranian powers-- especially the western governments-- to ratchet up the level of pressure they place on Iran.
Today in Israel, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, who is also Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy, gave an interview to Reuters in which he seemed somewhat seriously behind the curve, still arguing that Russia and China might get on board the anti-Israel campaign.
I doubt it. Maybe it's time for Israel and its supporters in western countries to grow up and take a realistic look at the fact that within the world community that needs to make the decision on this matter they are in a very small minority.
And quite evidently, very few people-- even in the strongly pro-Israeli United States-- will be in a mood to forgive Israel if its actions towards Iran put at risk the lives of 60,000 US service members in Afghanistan.
... is here, also here. My last word on this important subject for now.
Some friends have made the point, a propos of what I wrote here yesterday, that the Iron Cross is not a specifically Nazi insignia, but a longterm insignia of the German military. Thanks for that clarification.
They also make the completely correct point that it's important to distinguish between things German and things Nazi.
I don't have much time to write more here, right now. But I've just had a 30-minute phone conversation with Iain Levine, the over-all Director of Programs at HRW, about the Garlasco affair (which I'll report on here as soon as I have time.) Meantime, very quickly, I want to clarify what my concerns in this regard are:
1. As a Quaker, I find it very troubling that anyone spends much of their free time collecting "military memorabilia", from any military. I do believe this represents an unhealthy obsession with matters military. If my son had done this in his teens I would have been concerned enough. If he'd continued to obsessively pursue such a hobby till his 30s I would be very seriously worried. Collecting military memorabilia is not the same as collecting old lunch-boxes.
Garlasco's out-of-hours involvement in this has certainly not been trivial, as the heft of his book reveals.
2. "Collecting" such memorabilia-- which also involves a lot of trading, discussing, cataloguing etc--is not the same as being a serious military historian. Has Garlasco's book, which was published in 2007 January 2008, garnered any pre- or post-publication reviews from serious military historians? Has it been cited by any? I have seen no indication that it has.
3. Within the broader universe of collecting military memorabilia, if that is what a person wants to do, I think one has to put a particular red flag beside Nazi-era German memorabilia, which in Garlasco's case included an involvement with those from both Wehrmacht and SS units.
All of us who are concerned about the integrity of HRW's work going forward need to gain a clear understanding of the nature of Garlasco's collection. He has told HRW officers that it contains both German and American memorabilia from the WW-2 era. But in what balance? I think that information would be helpful.
Within this question of the "balance" of his collecting and related interests, it is relevant to ask why his first book-length publication was on the German artefacts rather than American or other artefacts.
... I think my colleagues and friends at HRW need to gain a very much fuller understanding of the nature of Garlasco's out-of-hours collecting activity. I have not yet been able to talk to Marc directly. But if, as Levine reported, Garlasco really does want to minimize the damage this affair causes to HRW's work, then he certainly needs to cooperate very fully, honestly, and in good faith with their efforts to gain that understanding.
One last point. Last night the powers-that-be at HRW did finally send me the text of the (quiet-ish) but apparently fully authorized statement they've been circulating on this affair.
Levine explained that the "quiet-ish" nature of this communication is because HRW don't want to make too much of it in public at this point. But since just about everyone else in the world except me has now been given this text, I obviously am glad to be able to publish it in full here:
(New York, September 9, 2009) – Several blogs and others critical of Human Rights Watch have suggested that Marc Garlasco, Human Rights Watch’s senior military advisor, is a Nazi sympathizer because he collects German (as well as American) military memorabilia. This accusation is demonstrably false and fits into a campaign to deflect attention from Human Rights Watch’s rigorous and detailed reporting on violations of international human rights and humanitarian law by the Israeli government. Garlasco has co-authored several Human Rights Watch reports on violations of the laws of war, including in Afghanistan, Georgia and Iraq, as well as by Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Garlasco has never held or expressed Nazi or anti-Semitic views. He prefaced his monograph on military memorabilia by giving thanks that Germany was defeated in the Second World War.
Garlasco’s grandfather was conscripted into the German armed forces during the Second World War, like virtually all young German men at the time, and served as a radar operator on an anti-aircraft battery. He never joined the Nazi Party, and later became a dedicated pacifist. Meanwhile, Garlasco’s great-uncle was an American B-17 crewman, who survived many attacks by German anti-aircraft gunners.
Garlasco own family’s experience on both sides of the Second World War has led him to collect military items related to both sides, including American 8th Air Force memorabilia and German Air Force medals and other objects (not from the Nazi Party or the SS, as falsely alleged). Many military historians, and others with an academic interest in the Second World War, including former and active-duty US service members, collect memorabilia from that era.
Some bloggers have picked up three comments Garlasco made on a memorabilia website in 2005, and a photo of him wearing a sweatshirt with a picture of the Iron Cross and the words in German: “The Iron Cross, 1813, 1870, 1914, 1939 and 1957.” The comments reflect the enthusiasm of a keen collector. They are not in any way indicative of support for Nazis, as has been alleged, and have no bearing on Garlasco’s work for Human Rights Watch.
Garlasco is the author of a monograph on the history of German Air Force and Army anti-aircraft medals and a contributor to websites that promote serious historical research into the Second World War (and which forbid hate speech). In the foreword he writes of telling his daughters that “the war was horrible and cruel, that Germany lost and for that we should be thankful.”
To imply that Garlasco’s collection is evidence of Nazi sympathies is not only absurd but an attempt to deflect attention from his deeply felt efforts to uphold the laws of war and minimize civilian suffering in wartime. These falsehoods are an affront to Garlasco and thousands of other serious military historians.
Actually, perhaps trending pretty rapidly toward the truly catastrophic?
Joshua Fost of Registan blogged earlier today that "Ghazni Province is falling to the Taliban." (Map and basic info on Ghazni are here.)
Later in Foust's post, he seems to backtrack a bit, writing,
Today, too, the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission "annulled ballots from dozens of polling stations in Afghanistan's presidential election... kicking off a lengthy fraud investigation that could keep Afghans locked in political uncertainty for months."
Interestingly, Ghaszni was one of the three provinces described by the ECC with the most fraud identified in its reported election results.
On ABC TV news tonight, I heard US special envoy Richard Holbrooke expressing what seemed like a first attempt to fudge on the sanctity of the Afghan elections. He was arguing something like, "Oh, here are problems in elections everywhere... "
Perhaps, Richard. But not problems on the order of the problems the ECC is uncovering.
Meanwhile, additional indications of the extent of the Taliban/insurgent influence in the country come from the series of maps at this website for the NGO International Council on Security and Development (though I don't think the main there is completely probative.)
But also from this account by recently released NYT journo Steve Farrell of the four days he spent as a captive of Taliban in northern Kunduz province.
He wrote,
Interestingly, they paid when they needed gas for the car, instead of just commandeering it, which they could have easily done. Some villagers appeared very friendly, others more wary and formally polite.
Motorists unfailingly gave way as soon as they saw a Taliban car coming in the other direction, and snapped to a smile and an Islamic greeting. Whether through consent or fear was impossible to read on the faces of villages who were rarely allowed glimpses of us, except at favored stops and safe houses...
But even more, I hope the Obama administration and its NATO allies have a political "Emergency Plan" for how they will ask the world's non-NATO big powers and Afghanistan's neighbors to help extricate them from this mess.
Of course, it will be quite normal for these other powers to require some kind of significant political quid pro quo for this.
... All this happening now, and tomorrow is another September 11...
There is a huge commotion in the blogosphere about the fact that Marc Garlasco, the senior military affairs specialist at Human Rights Watch, has long sustained a hobby of collecting and writing about Nazi memorabilia.
I've thought this over lot since I first learned about it yesterday. Is collecting and writing a long book about Nazi memorabilia in his spare time something an employer like Human Rights Watch ought to be concerned about?
After consideration, I say Yes.
Now, it's true that here in the US we have very strict protections for free speech. Thus, collecting Nazi uniforms and insignia and even wearing them in public-- as Garlasco apparently was in this photo-- is not illegal here. (Wearing them in public would be illegal in Germany and several other places.)
But to have him doing work on human rights in the daytime, while carrying on with this intensively pursued hobby in the evening? That is bizarre, and disturbing.
Even more so when you realize that a lot of the work he has done has involved dealing with Israeli officials and citizens, and analyzing the IDF's operations.
It would be like employing someone to do child-protection work by day who goes home and collects pictures of naked or suggestively-clad children by night. For allegedly "artistic purposes".
As Ron Kampeas of JTA wrote about Garlasco's very enthusiastic pursuit of his hobby, "Ewwwww."
Now, as y'all no doubt know, I'm on the Middle East advisory committee of Human Rights Watch. And I've been very disturbed indeed by the attacks the young, aggressively rightwing Israeli organization NGO Monitor has launched against the work HRW has done on the IDF's combat behavior.
But right now, I'm looking at this page on NGO Monitor's website, and agreeing with much of what they have there on this topic.
One thing (scroll down to Footnote 1) they have is a copy of a defense of Garlasco's actions that someone-- reportedly representing HRW-- has posted into several blogs in recent days.
For NGO-M to post that text is a real service, since I haven't been able to find an HRW response anywhere else-- including on their own website. (I have a request outstanding to HRW Exec. Director Ken Roth for an interview on this issue.)
That reportedly-from-HRW text concludes thus:
To imply that Garlasco’s collection is evidence of Nazi sympathies is not only absurd but an attempt to deflect attention from his deeply felt efforts to uphold the laws of war and minimize civilian suffering in wartime. These falsehoods are an affront to Garlasco and thousands of other serious military historians.
I also share some of the concerns his critics have voiced about the actual military expertise Garlasco brought to the job at HRW, when he moved there after having worked in the Pentagon for eight years. Between 1995 and 2003 he had various jobs as a civilian employee of the Pentagon, doing military intelligence work including some work on targeting US cruise missiles.
But as I noted on JWN last year (including here), he made some serious-- and very basic-- mistakes during the Russian-Georgian war in identifying which country various cluster-bomb remnants came from... Even more disturbingly, perhaps, the HRW powers-that-be were frustratingly slow in correcting the incorrect accusations he originally made against Russia on this score, which were used by all the political forces in the west that were trying to mobilize public and even perhaps military support for Georgia at the time...
The crying shame of the latest revelations is, of course, that HRW is one of the most politically powerful of the numerous human-rights organizations that over the past nine months have compiled detailed documentation of the many laws-of-war violations committed by Israel (and some by Hamas) during last winter's Israeli assault on Gaza.
So this whole series of revelations about Garlasco's "hobby" threatens to distract a lot of attention from the well-documented claims that many excellent organizations-- not just HRW-- have pulled together about those violations.
And what happened to the people in Gaza last winter-- and what continues to happen to them now, for goodness' sake, as Israel still prevents them from engaging in even basic rebuilding of their shattered homes and lives-- is a whole lot worse than "Ewwwww."
This morning I dropped by the Woodrow Wilson Center, a serious think-tank here in Washington DC that's headed by the near-iconic Lee Hamilton. They had a panel discussion that had been convened to help a man called Hussein Ibish launch a book he has just published, titled What's Wrong with the One-state Agenda?
Now, as longtime JWN readers know, I'm personally agnostic on whether Palestinians and Israelis should aim at a one-state or two-state outcome to their lengthy and very damaging conflict. But I do think that anyone who discusses this topic-- or, come to that, any other topic, either-- has a duty to be fair-minded, and in particular not to mis-characterize the arguments of his/her opponents.
Sadly, that was just what Ibish was doing this morning. He stated so many things that were untrue about the position of one-state supporters! Here is a partial list of these untruths:
1. That "The one-state idea emerged in some Palestinian circles at the time of the Second Intifada".
I have particular respect for Jewish citizens of Israel who are prepared to stand up and reject and oppose the highly discriminatory form of ethnonationalism that their country embodies to this day, as it has since 1948. They are important voices of conscience, on a par with those White South Africans who in the dark days of Apartheid spoke up against the discrimination on which their state was built (and of which they were, as they clearly understood, the unwilling beneficiaries.) But the Palestinian citizens of Israel who speak up for a one-state outcome are equally important. Ibish seemed to forget about their existence completely in his speech. Many of them, including significant intellectual figures like Asaad Ghanem or Nadim Rouhanna, see the one-state formula as meeting their community's needs much, much more effectively than a two-state formula ever could.
But the fact is, as a political idea within the Palestinian community this idea is neither a "new" one, as noted above, nor a fringe one. Many Palestinians look at it with great realism, understanding that it won't be easy to achieve it-- but also, judging that there is little remaining hope left, now, for the establishment of a viable two-state outcome, and that therefore the other major item that has long been on their menu of possible political goals needs looking at once again...
These are matters of deadly, even existential, import for Palestinians everywhere. So I think the least that should be required of anyone trying to have a serious impact within this discussion is the basic sense of fairness of not wilfully mis-characterizing either the arguments or the standing of her or his opponents.
Ibish is a Lebanese-American who gained serious credentials as a Palestinian-rights activist through the good work he did with Electronic Intifada.* But for quite some time now he's been working with the (Very) American Task Force on Palestine, an organization that just-- by a hair-- manages not to be a complete sock puppet for the US State Department. For example, both Ibish and VATFP president Ziad Asali, who spoke in the comments section at today's event, stressed that there needs to be a complete freeze on Israeli settlement building if the plan to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel is to succeed.
And that differs from the State Department position, how? Um, actually, I'm not entirely sure... because of course, the folks in the State Department do also say the same thing from time to time. But they don't want to take the next step of imposing actual costs on Israel for its continued defiance of this request...
And no, neither do Ibish and the VATFP, it seems. Well anyway, Ibish was openly derisive this morning about the growing worldwide movement to impose some combination of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel.
... The Crisis Group's Rob Malley was also on the panel. His contribution was much more instructive. Later...
* Update Fri a.m.: Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada sent the following clarification: "While it is true that Hussein and I often wrote articles together in our personal capacities during the second Intifada, Hussein never worked for the Electronic Intifada, and never contributed any articles to EI. EI did on a few occasions republish articles he and I had co-authored for other publications. But we do that with many people. I just wanted to clarify that for the record." ~HC
When will this end???
The project is for the Pisgat Zeev settlement in annexed East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 war.
The announcement comes two days after Israel said it would build 450 new homes for settlers in [other parts of] the West Bank...
Anti-Israel violence has been just about dormant since January 18. Both the Ramallah-based PA and the Gaza-based PA have taken many energetic and effective steps to stop it.
But Israel has simply carried on with these settlement-expansion plans, saying it "might" agree to some very partial slowdown on new construction, sometime in the future.
What if the Palestinians-- from either Ramallah or Gaza-- said and did something similar?
What if they said, "Oh, we might agree to put some curbs on anti-Israeli violence, at some point in the future. But for now, we're going to undertake 50 additional suicide bombings and 45 additional rocket attacks, and meanwhile let's keep on endlessly negotiating about the freeze on anti-Israeli violence?"
Make no mistake about it, Israel's longstanding project of implanting its own citizens as settlers into the occupied territories is also an act of great violence. The settlement project steals for the settlers land and other natural resources that rightfully belong to the Palestinians. And the whole machinery of repression that the government of Israel maintains maintain against the OPT's rightful Palestinian residents, in order to protect the settlers, constitutes a huge edifice of ongoing structural violence, punctuated and maintained by the many acts of direct physical violence that the occupation forces take against the lives and persons of the Palestinians.
500 new settlement homes in Jerusalem? The Netanyahu government is just gleefully poking its finger in Pres. Obama's eye.
Stephen Walt is right. It's time to get tough.
When election results are strongly disputed from within the community they were held in, this represents--obviously-- a deep crisis of power and legitimacy within that community.
That's the case in Iran today, more than three months after their disputed election. It was also the case in the US in November-December 2004, lest anyone forget...
That post-election dispute was brought to an end by a fiat from the US Supreme Court; and the Supremes' notably undemocratic ruling then met with surprisingly rapid acceptance from the vast majority of voters, even Democrats. (How different would the history of our country and the world be if Al Gore had been inaugurated in 2001? Who can know?)
But whether you liked what the Supremes did in December 2000 or not, at least in our country there are mature institutions of national governance that were able to withstand, contain, and end the deep internal division over who won the November 2000 election.
And then, there's Afghanistan.
Mature institutions of national governance? Um, no.
That's why I think Brian Katulis and Hardin Lang have things rather wrong in the post they have on the Af-Pak blog today, in which they seem to be assuming that somehow (they don't say how), a new and somewhat capable president will emerge there in the relatively near future, and will be able to get on relatively easily with the tasks of ending the country's very, very serious insurgency and its urgent tasks of governance reform.
Not so fast, guys! Why are you assuming that, from that very flawed and now deeply contested election anyone can easily emerge as a winner and start to get on with such tasks?
(I guess Katulis and Hardin have some personal/professional investment in the August 20 elections being generally seen as having been "successful", since they went to the country as part of one of the internatinal election-monitoring teams? On the other hand, if you think that the real mission of an international election-monitoring team is to monitor and uphold the idea that elections must be, and be seen to be, free and fair, then maybe they should not be so quick in assuming that this one was well-run enough to generate a legitimate winner.)
Those most at risk, if the dispute over the election results turns into all-out fighting between Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, are of course Afghanistan's long war-battered people, who would have to put up with that new conflict tearing up that society along with all the other conflicts that are already wracking it.
But the US-NATO position in Afghanistan is also at risk if the US doesn't have an Afghan ruling "partner" who has at least some semblance of internal and international legitimacy.
And right now, NATO itself is coming under huge strains from the Afghan war.
Who was it who first said "NATO must go out-of-area or go out of business?" (F. Stephen Larrabee, 1993.)
"Out of business" is now a much more live possibility than it was back then.
The Israeli human-rights group B'tselem today released its final report on the death toll in Gaza from the highly asymmetrical fighting of last December-January.
Their figures differ a little from those released yesterday by the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
PCHR put the complete death toll among Gazans at 1,419. B'tselem put it at 1,387. That's a difference of 32 people. The difference could perhaps be explained by what they were counting: PCHR was counting the number of Palestinians "killed during the Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip", while B'tselem was apparently counting Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces.
B'tselem also counted the number of Israelis killed during the 22 days of fighting:
PCHR counted that 1,167 non-combatants were killed, along with 252 "resistance activists." It specified that,
The B'tselem report notes that this about the Israeli military's claims about the Palestinian death toll:
I dare say that when we see the final report in English from PCHR, they too will be specific about the methodology they used. I have great respect for the careful work and documentary objectivity of the PCHR, which is Palestinian and operates under extremely difficult circumstances from its downtown Gaza headquarters. I would imagine that its researchers have the opportunity to do even more meticulous fieldwork than that done by B'tselem, which is based in Jerusalem and has faced many obstacles placed by the Israeli authorities in being able to get its research teams into Gaza.
I was just looking at this news article by AP's Karin Laub today. It is built around B'tselem's release of its report.
I really question why she gave such prominence to that report, while making only a fleeting reference to PCHR's work and not even mentioning it by name? Is it because she is in based in Jerusalem, or because she is reluctant to give any credence to the work of a Palestinian organization?
Anyway, the big discrepancies are not between the reporting of B'tselem and PCHR, but rather those between the reporting of these human-rights groups and the Israeli military.
Especially as regards the numbers of deaths of minors.
Laub reported that,
Quite clearly, B'tselem has met that (quite evidently fabricated) "concern" by explicating the time-consuming and sometimes actually dangerous methodology it used in the case of reported deaths of minors.
And what "methodology" did the Israeli military use in its compilation of its numbers.
Steve Clemons tells us today that
He goes on to say,
C'meon, Steve. Yeah, maybe you grew up more in the era of post-Cold War US uberpowerdom than I did. But even then, there were always limits on US power.
And you know what, for any kind of a realist, knowing there are limits and figuring out how to work effectively within them is a good thing, not a bad thing.
It was GWB and his crowd who thought there were no limits, and that they could make their own history regardless of other powers or other interests.
... Steve's piece was basically about Afghanistan. Neither he nor anyone else has yet been able to explain to me why the US (which is located halfway round the world from Afghanistan) and NATO-- in which the allies are also very geographically and culturally distant from Afghanistan-- could ever be conceived to be the ideal tools for "pacifying" Afghanistan.
Let's have a whole lot more realism in this discussion. Including by recognizing there are limits to US power.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has now published (PDF, in Arabic) its final tally of the human cost of last winter's Israeli assault on Gaza.
The English version is expected to be out next week.
The report is titled "Targeted Civilians". The Palestine News Network today published a digest, in English, of PCHR's main findings today:
The latest offensive was the most violent, brutal and bloodiest since the beginning of Israeli occupation in 1967.
The negotiations for a prisoner-exchange agreement between Hamas and Israel seem to have entered a new, more productive phase, with the news-- first reported by Xinhua-- that Norwegian officials have now joined German officials in nailing down the details of the prisoner swap.
As reported by Xinhua from Gaza, the deal that's emerging will involve swapping Hamas-held Israeli POW Gilad Shalit for some 1,000 Palestinian prisoners:
Norway's involvement in the swap now being negotiated, Xinhua said, would include providing a home for some of the Palestinian prisoners whom Israel will not allow to stay inside the occupied territories.
Germany's involvement in mediating this issue, first revealed about ten days ago, has some political significance. Germany has previously been involved in most of the (often large-scale) prisoner swaps conducted between Hizbullah and Israel. In all these mediations, Germany's security services have built on experience of fine-tuning the often complex modalities of these swap operations that they gained during some of the spy-swap operations they orchestrated-- also between often very distrustful parties-- during the Cold War.
Germany's involvement in the current Hamas-Israel mediation marks a bit of a setback for the Egyptians, who as the past months have dragged on showed that they were either incapable of nailing down the agreement or, actually, rather unwilling to do so.
Israel's agreement to work through Germany (as well as, still, Egypt) also elevates Hamas's political standing a bit, nearer to the political standing that Hizbullah has in West European circles.
Hamas head Khaled Meshaal was in Cairo Sunday, where he held talks with the Egyptian officials who are working not just on the prisoner-swap file but also on the attempt to reconcile Hamas with Fateh sufficiently for the two to agree on a joint negotiating position with Israel and on the holding of new Palestinian elections next January.
One of the big issues on the reconciliation agenda has always been how to find a formula whereby Hamas can join the PLO for the first time ever. It is the PLO that will be negotiating the final peace agreement with Israel-- if indeed that negotiation ever happens.
Today, PNN reported from Ramallah that Salim Zaanoun, the Fathawi president of the PLO's "parliament", the Palestine National Council (PNC), has been in Egypt discussing formulas for bringing Hamas into the PNC. He will next go to Gaza to pursue those discussions.
I am interested by the role that the Egyptian secretary-general of the Arab League, and former Foreign Minister, Amr Moussa is reported as playing in these negotiations. Does this mark a dimunition of the power of the Egyptian intel boss Omar Suleiman, who previously ran them all on his own? I don't know...
Anyway, it looks as though things are moving in both these negotiation now.
Roughly two or three years too late, I would say... (All that suffering over the years in between!)
I realize I'm coming into the Israel-linked organ-trafficking story late. But my old editors at the CSM always stressed the value of working assiduously at a story to get it done as well as possible rather than rushing in under the illusion you can write a satisfactory "first draft of history" within the confines of a 24-hour news cycle. And I'm still working at this one... Mostly, at this point, gathering and assessing sources.
One of the ongoing diplomatic dimensions to this story has been the tension that arose between the Israeli and Swedish governments after Swedish journo Donald Bostrom published his controversial article (English translation here) recounting the many allegations Palestinians and others made back in 1987-92 that the bodies of young Palestinians who were shot dead in those years were taken by the IDF forces back into Israel where they were stripped of many transplantable organs before being returned, hastily sewn back up along the mid-line, for speedy burial by their families.
The Israeli government screamed that the article was a "blood libel" and demanded that the Swedish government "condemn" it. The Swedish government replied, unsurprisingly, that it would not take an action that would violate the country's free-speech traditions in such a way.
Sweden took over the presidency of the EU in July. Several observers noted that the Israeli government's salvo of harsh accusations against Sweden over the Bostrom article may also have been a shot across the bow, in an attempt to "warn" the Swedish government off from undertaking any meaningful EU activism on the Palestine issue for the rest of its six-month presidency.
Yesterday, indeed, Sweden's Foreign Minister, the internationally renowned diplomatic "rock star" Carl Bildt, announced he was canceling a planned visit to Israel.
Most Israeli sources and commentators speculated that this was because of Bildt's embarrassment at the prospect of protests against him over the Bostrom article. The Swedish foreign ministry's statement said "he's waiting for the right opportunity to do it when the peace process is maybe in a more positive state." Which seems at least as plausible, given the outrageously provocative steps the Netanyahu government has taken over the past few days.
Anyway, back on the Israel-and-organs story...
In addition to the two I referred to in this blog post Saturday (J. Cook and Shraga Elam), I'm now looking at two more:
* This recent CounterPunch piece by Alison Weir.
Woodward gives an excerpt from, and a link to, the very informative testimony on the worldwide market in often illegaly trafficked organs that UC Berkeley prof. Nancy Scheper-Hughes gave to a congressional committee in June 2001.
Her prepared statement starts at p.62 there.
Scheper-Hughes is one of the founders of the Organs Watch project, which has been tracking the international traffic in human organs and tissues since the late 1990s. In the hearing, which was convened originally to examine China's role in harvesting the organs of executed prisoners, she makes clear that Israeli doctors and medical institutions are significant actors in the global market in human organs.
I became intrigued by the role Scheper-Hughes played in the most recent (end-of-July) arrest in New Jersey of Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum. In this July 24 article in the NY Daily News, Michael Daly wrote,
Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California, Berkeley, was and is very clear as to Rosenbaum's role in the ring.
"He is the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network," she said.
Her sources include a man who started working with Rosenbaum imagining he was helping people in desperate need. The man then began to see the donors, or to be more accurate, sellers, who were flown in from impoverished countries such as Moldova.
"He said it was awful. These people would be brought in and they didn't even know what they were supposed to be doing and they would want to go home and they would cry," Scheper-Hughes said.
The man called Rosenbaum "a thug" who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, "You're here. A deal is a deal. Now, you'll give us a kidney or you'll never go home.' "
Scheper-Hughes felt she had to stop Rosenbaum. She met with the FBI.
"I always thought of it as my Dick Tracy moment," she said Thursday.
She waited and waited for something to be done. The FBI may have been following the lead of the State Department, which dismissed organ trafficking as "urban legend."
"It would be impossible to conceal a clandestine organ trafficking ring," a 2004 State Department report stated.
Scheper-Hughes had better luck in Brazil and in South Africa, where law enforcement corroborated her findings and acted decisively...
Her work on the Israel case also, it strikes me, helps us to make sense of the many different episodes of human-body abuse that have been reported out of Israel.
She has also been one of the leaders of the international effort to ban "transplant tourism" and to draw up the 2008 Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism, which stated the following:
Countries from which transplant tourists originate, as well as those to which they travel to obtain transplants, are just beginning to address their respective responsibilities to protect their people from exploitation and to develop national self-sufficiency in organ donation. The Declaration should reinforce the resolve of governments and international organizations to develop laws and guidelines to bring an end to wrongful practices. "The legacy of transplantation is threatened by organ trafficking and transplant tourism. The Declaration of Istanbul aims to combat these activities and to preserve the nobility of organ donation. The success of transplantation as a life-saving treatment does not require—nor justify—victimizing the world's poor as the source of organs for the rich" (Steering Committee of the Istanbul Summit).
If you want to learn about the form of Quakerism to which I belong, you should head over to the brand-new "Qtube" website published by Baltimore Yearly Meeting and click on a few of these great video-clips.
A small group of BYM Quakers were busy making these clips during annual sessions last month. Lots of the folks who were there volunteered to go and speak for them. (I kind of volunteered but then got busy with other things.)
I get a special pleasure watching these because I know so many of these people.
Jonathan Cook had a great piece in The National yesterday, in which he pulled together from exemplary Israeli sources the history of serious problems at Israel's government institute of forensics at Abu Kabir, near Jaffa.
He made the important point that the Swedish journo Donald Bostrom who wrote about the accusations and fears of illegal Israeli harvesting of Palestinian organs was making an unwarranted connection between the recent story of Jewish residents, including some apparent community leaders, in New Jersey, USA, being indicted on charges of organ trafficking and the much longer-running and very well established problems Palestinians and Israelis have experienced with organs being "harvested" (ugh!) without permission by officials at the Abu Kabir institute.
As far as I can tell, no connection between the two situations has yet been discovered. And the Palestinian claims about organ harvesting at Abu Kabir that Bostrom was writing about all related to the early 1990s; they were not current accusations.
Cook writes,
Hiss was in charge of the autopsies of Palestinians when Bostrom was listening to the families’ claims in 1992. Hiss was subsequently investigated twice, in 2002 and 2005, over the theft of body parts on a large scale.
Allegations of Hiss’ illegal trade in organs was first revealed in 2000 by investigative reporters at the Yediot Aharonot newspaper, which reported that he had “price listings” for body parts and that he sold mainly to Israeli universities and medical schools. [6]
Despite that, and despite his history as a former reporter for the Guardian, the Guardian refused to publish this article in its "CommentisFree" section. Jonathan also gives us his record of his subsequent communications with CiF editor Georgina Henry.
Meanwhile, the Zurich-based Israeli investigative reporter Shraga Elam has also recently put a LOT of further information about Israel's organ-removal problems into this post on his blog.
The post, which is now available in English, is tellingly titled The Swedish canard – not only smoke, but also fire.
It tells us that the government investigation committee that looked into allegations of wrongdoing at Abu Kabir in 2001 or 2002, made the following findings:
* The Institute transfers organs to research institutes and universities, in return for payments and reimbursement of expenses.
* The Institute does not have full documentation regarding the organs that were harvested from for the purposes of research and instruction.
* All the research done at the Institute were done with the full knowledge and agreement of Prof. Hiss.
* Prof. Hiss did not conform to the instructions of the Ministry of Health regarding research, instruction and the consent of the families. The management of the Institute attempted to cover up and to obscure the the seriousness of the acts that appear in the report.
* Irregularities were discovered in registration of the money that was given to the Institute in return to for the salvaging of the organs...
Two of the testimonies pertain to a military doctor who gave medics lessons in anatomy using the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces.
IDf sources said on Thursday that the army was unaware of the incidents and that the reports would be investigated.
An IDF conscript who served as a medic in the Ramallah district some two years ago told Haaretz that the "lesson" had taken place following a clash between an armed Palestinian and an IDF force.
The soldier said that the Palestinian's body had been riddled with bullets and that some of his internal organs had spilled out. The doctor pronounced the man dead and then "took out a knife and began to cut off parts of the body," the soldier said.
"He explained the various parts to us - the membrane that covers the lungs, the layers of the skin, the liver, stuff like that," the soldier continued.
"I didn't say anything because I was still new in the army. Two of the medics moved away, and one of them threw up. It was all done very brutally. It was simply contempt for the body. I saw other dead enemy bodies during my service. No other doctor did anything like that."
The statement the White House issued yesterday in response to Netanyahu's announcement that he would unleash the construction of hundreds of additional settler housing units before he considered submitting to any possible freeze on additional construction was weak and pathetic:
As the President has said before, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement expansion and we urge that it stop. We are working to create a climate in which negotiations can take place, and such actions make it harder to create such a climate...
The text immediately goes on to underline its own wet noodleness, by saying this:
That is the ultimate goal to which the President is deeply and personally committed...
Small wonder, then, if Israelis might demur from that and say, "No, actually we have different ideas for how to preserve our security."
The only way Obama or any other American leader will ever manage to register any solid gains in peacemaking is if he makes clear from the outset and through the whole process that the United States itself has a strong and direct interest in the speedy securing of this final peace, and that the US intends to pursue its own strong national interest in this matter. (Oh and by the way, we believe this is also in Israel's interest.)
If the successful securing of a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will entail a big political fight inside the US political establishment-- as it surely will-- then the only way the president can win this fight is by underscoring to all Ameicans, including Jewish Americans, evangelicals, and everyone, that this peace is in the interests of us all, as a citizenry.
If he tries to sell his efforts primarily by arguing "This peace is in Israel's interest"-- but Israel's own leader then chimes in and says, "No, it isn't"-- who do you think is going to win that argument?
Better to frame it coolly and straightforwardly from the beginning and throughout as something that's in the interest of 300 million Americans-- and that yes, also, is in the interest of both Israelis and Palestinians.
... I am very worried by this statement, and by the fact that Obama has already lost 7.5 months of his presidency doddering around quite inconclusively on the settlement issue rather than going directly and firmly to the heart of the securing the final peace.
Someone called Artemy Kalinovsky has just published a thoughtful essay at the AfPak Channel arguing that, for precedents for many of the dilemmas the US military faces in Afghanistan, we should look no further afield than to the Red Army's experiences in Afghanistan a quarter-century ago.
I have a lot more to say on this topic. But I'm tired.
One of the points I make there is this:
I say this as someone who has always said that the American military is the organization that's just about the most ill-suited in the world to be able to "help" Iraqis if political turmoil overtakes their country.... This is a part of my deep opposition to "liberal hawkism" in all its manifestations.
So fundamentally I'm really glad there are no significant American voices calling for the US to use its military to try to "help" Iraqis right now.
(Of course, it also helps that it was the Bushies who signed off on the Withdrawal Agreement. So the republicans are not now able to raise the whole question of the advisability of a US withdrawal from Iraq as an ati-Obama partisan issue.)
But I am still, also, more than a bit mystified. Where have all the people gone who, before the Bush administration's conclusion last November of the Withdrawal Agreement with Iraq, were ominously warning that the US "could not" withdraw with anything like a fixed timetable from Iraq because afterwards Iraq might "spiral into bloody chaos", or whatever?
Where are those people now?
What I'm sensing is that-- perhaps especially after the economic collapse of last fall-- most Americans have turned their back on their previous fondness for exotic foreign military adventures. Both Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be not nearly as much "fun" as they used to be for those people.
This is mainly good-- especially if it means there will be far fewer loud calls within the US political elite for foreign military interventions, for allegedly 'humanitarian' or any other purposes, over the years ahead, than there have been throughout all the years since the end of the Cold War.
But it's also a bit worrying, if it means that Americans have become much more inward-looking and xenophobic.
The wise and well-informed analyst of Iraq affairs Reidar Visser has responded to the pleadings of the masses (well mine, anyway) and created a blog, Iraq and Gulf Analysis, on which he's posting his shorter research notes as well as links to his longer analytical pieces.
Mainly, this past week, he's been writing about the ISCI succession and the newly reconfigured Shiite bloc, the INA. He's also loaded onto the blog all his past pieces, which are thereby now handily archived and accessible for us.
Thanks for doing this, Reidar! Now all your work will show up in a timely way on my Google Reader.
The compendiously smart and well-informed blogger Profco has a lot of great background about Israeli-Norwegian relations over at TPM Cafe today.
S/he wrote it, of course, in light of Norway's recent decision to divest itself of previous investments in the company Elbit, which produces electronics for Israel's illegal Wall.
Profco notes that Haaretz has put a new lead onto its story about this, noting the following:
Following the meeting, the Foreign Ministry relayed that, "Israel will consider further steps of protest in the future."
Maybe the Israelis will unleash dirty tricks, or an invasion and occupation, or a suffocatingly tight siege against Norway?
Um, maybe better not, since Norway is not only a pretty darned exemplary western democracy but also a member of NATO.
Gal's spluttering threat looks really childish, all in all...
So now, when will other western investment institutions start following Norway's excellent lead?
Lang makes some important points here about the distortion of what should be a rational, nationwide discussion about the US military's massive and troubled engagement in Afghanistan.
He writes,
All the "mechanisms for propagation of the faith in COIN" that Lang mentions are important. But let's hope that wise heads and the continuing military and financial realities of the situation in Afghanistan can speedily turn the debate in Washington in the direction it needs to go.
Oh yes, and some serious, pro-withdrawal popular pressure is really necessary, too.
Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen today announced that the country's $400 billion-strong sovereign wealth fund, the Oil Fund, has divested itself of all investments in the large Elbit company, based on Elbit's involvement in the building and maintenance of the illegal Wall built by Israel deep inside the occupied West Bank.
Elbit, based in Haifa, makes surveillance systems used by Israel on the wall.
Bloomberg reports that Halvorsen told a press conference in Oslo today that,
... “The International Court of Justice has ruled that the building of this barrier violates international law and the Norwegian authorities have expressed the same opinion... The decision to exclude this company is not on the background of its nationality. The surveillance system Elbit delivers to the Israeli authorities is a central component of this separation barrier, or wall.”
She adds,
A research project by the Coalition of Women for Peace called "Who profits from the occupation" found that almost two thirds of those firms are involved in West Bank construction and development.
Norway's decision on Elbit is a breakthrough. The Bloomberg piece gives more details about the operations, thinking, and other recent ethics-related decisions taken by the country's Finance Ministry regarding the investment portfolio of the Norwegian Oil Fund.
It tells us that before today, the ministry, based on the advice of the ethics council that the Oil Fund established in 2004, had previously divested itself from 30 other companies, though some of these bans were later rescinded. For example, a ban was earlier imposed on Thales, Europe’s biggest maker of military electronics, because it was making cluster munitions; when that production stopped, the ban was rescinded.
I hope that portfolio managers in other institutions with large investment portfolios-- including of course, pension funds and universities in the US-- are looking closely at Norway's latest decision and, crucially, the reasoning behind it.
Divesting from direct financial entanglement with Israel's large-scale and continuing construction and control projects in the occupied territories strikes me as unquestionably the right thing to do, regardless what one thinks about the issue of a broader divestment from Israel as a whole so long as its government continues with these illegal policies.
I've been reading the blog entries that Palestinian-American writer and activist Nehad Khader has been posting about her first-time visit back to her grandparents' homeplaces (here, etc.)
Amazing, heartfelt writing. (HT: Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.)
Nehad writes:
In the grand Zionist plan my brother and I were supposed to have forgotten this land. We should not have known that we are from Umm el Zeinat, we should not have stepped foot on it ever again. But in some small way we– and millions like us– have punched a very large hole in the Zionist plan. I had a wonderful conversation today about this with Amin Mohammad Ali, shop owner and brother of Palestinian poet Taha Mohammad Ali in Nazareth. I will write more about this conversation, but I realized that although I am in the “green line” and what is known as Israel proper, the Palestinians here are me and I am the Palestinians here.
New Jewish immigrants to Israel from around the world are all given-- in addition, of course, to instant citizenship, the right to reside in the country endlessly, and generous baskets of social benefits-- a set of experiences, carefully stage-managed by the state's Ministry of Absorption, that is supposed to make them feel as though they are coming "home."
There is not one iota of stage-management in Nehad's experiences, or of artifice in her reaction to them.
It is intriguing to me how nowadays, Palestinians with western passports are among the most privileged of Palestinians, being abe to travel much more freely among the many places of Palestinian residence-- inside Israel, in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the OPTs, Gulf countries, etc-- than most of the Palestinians who still live in the Middle East.
Indeed, once you get to Gaza or the West Bank, the ability of Palestinians residing in those occupied areas to travel freely to visit close relatives in other places of Palestinian dispersal become almost zero.
Nehad was able to go to Syria, where she had spent her early years in the huge Yarmouk refugee camp. She went to Jordan (and of course found relatives there, too)... and now she's in Israel.
The experience of being a Palestinian refugee today really is very different from what it was in, say, the 1950s. It's true that Nehad and other Palestinians with western passports are among the luckiest, regarding the ability to travel. But nowadays, even many Palestinians living in Gaza or Lebanon, in the very worst of all the circumstances faced by Palestinians, can keep in some touch with relatives in other places through the internet, Skype, etc.
True, it is still nowhere near the degree of connectedness that people in rich and middle-income countries are coming to take for granted. But it's a lot more connectedness than Palestinians had with each other in earlier decades... And of course, this has consequences.
One has been to keep a keep rich and textured sense of Palestinian-ness alive in all these places of dispersion. Another has been to make it just about impossible, in this century, to think of "splitting" the Palestinians currently resident in the OPTs from those of their brethren-- including yes, in every family there, close family members-- who have been forced to stay in the diaspora.
Thus, the rights, claims, and needs of the diaspora Palestinians cannot simply be ignored in the peacemaking, which is what the Israelis have always wanted-- and what US diplomacy over the past 16 years essentially aimed at, too.
The Zionists have just about finished with their massive project of "gathering in" their people. The Palestinians' roughly parallel project has not yet begun to be implemented.
The Israeli government today released nine of the 32 Hamas-affiliated legislators, elected in June 2006, whom it had been holding since June 2006.
International law completely prohibits the detention of any persons when they're captured solely to be held as hostages. But the basic criminality of the action-- in the case of the captured legislators or any of the other thousands of Palestinians held without charge or trial in Israel's infamous detention camps-- has never for some reason caused western government to stop giving aid and succor to Israel.
The fact that Israel's capturing of duly elected legislators-- along with the numerous other actions Israel took to punish the winners of the 2006 election and the people who had elected them-- went completely unpunished by western governments that proclaim a commitment to "democracy" also revealed most of those governments to be complete and unashamed hypocrites when it comes to taking the side of any Israeli government, even when it significantly violates international law.
But now, the release of these nine legislators signals the possibility that this situation of deep illegality on behalf of Israel and its backers in the international community is starting to be unspooled?
Will the release of these legislators be followed by the release of all the other Palestinian legislators-- from Hamas and other parties-- who are held by Israel without charge or trial, and in often very abusive conditions?
Will it also be followed by concerted international action to lift the quite inhumane siege that Israel has maintained on Gaza for many years, which was tightened significantly after Hamas's electoral victory and then once again after the failure of Israel's assault against Gaza last December to topple Hamas from power?
Since Gaza is still, under international law, a territory that's under Israeli military occupation, Israel has special responsibilities under IHL for the welfare of the Strip's residents. The fact that it has not only failed to meet those rsponsibilities but has also maintained a very damaging and inhumane policy of collective punishment against the 1.5 million Gazans for the past 43 months is almost certainly a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, that is, a war crime.
Certainly, all governments around the world that claim to uphold "the rule of law" should intervene vigorously to end Israel's siege of Gaza. The aid convoys, very limited in capacity, that go to Gaza through Egypt or via the sea should be supported not only by a small number of plucky western activists and NGOs but by all governments that claim to support international law.
Does Israel's release of these Hamas legislators-- which may well have been carried out in response to pressure from western governments-- signal that these governments are about to get tougher in their insistence on Israel's compliance with international law in other ways, too?
I certainly hope so. The deliberately pursued suffocation and squeezing of Gaza by Israel, under the eyes of the watching world, has been a travesty of any concept of international "justice". President Obama and his officials have "asked" Israel to lessen the conditions of the siege. Israel has done nothing to respond.
So what's next?
The Mail Online's Nick Pisa recently put together a great series of photos of Tony Blair, Middle East envoy extraordinaire (very extraordinaire!) reclining and romping aboard various rich people's luxury yachts between 2004 and roughly last week.
Pisa wrote,
But of course, with Blair's penchant for big luxury yachts now well established over the years, he's going to need somewhere in "Palestine" for his rich friends to come in and pick him up, isn't he?
Blair's personal income has been estimated to be above $7 million/year. Average incomes in the OPTs are, I believe, a little lower than that.
Gideon Rachman (to whom goes the HT for the Mail Online story) writes that though there's been much speculation about Blair becoming the first "President" of the EU, with all the anti-materialist pieties he's spouting these days it looks more as if he's running for Pope.
Rachman comments on these pieties:
With amazing rapidity, an extremely serious debate has erupted in Washington over whether the war in distant Afghanistan can be won, and therefore whether it is worth continuing to try to fight it. The apparent skulduggery that surrounded the recent elections certainly contributed to that, by making it suddenly seem even more improbable that a 'nation-building' program could be successfully completed any time in the foreseeable future.
Yesterday, the weighty paleo-conservative commentator George Will weighed in, arguing in the WaPo that it's "Time to Get Out of Afghanistan"
Yesterday, too, the NYT editorial board hosted an entire discussion on the topic of "Is It Time to Negotiate With the Taliban?" The answer, from just about all their eight expert contributors, was "Yes".
This, while the commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal is on his way to Washington where he is widely expected to argue for an increased commitment of US troops to the the theater, and pursuit of an accelerated campaign of counter-insurgency/nation-building there.
Today, the WaPo's David Ignatius waded into the debate, arguing for a "Middle Way" between shooting and talking in Afghanistan.
Also today, the WaPo hosted a forum of six outside contributors to reply to George Will. All except Andrew Bacevich were arguing for continued, and if necessary increased, US military engagement.
Just about everywhere else in the US public discourse, this issue is now being just as hotly debated... But nearly all these discussions fail to mention one factor that is vital both to the hope of Afghanistan's people ever regaining some amount of internal stability and to the hope of the US forces avoiding a complete catastrophe there: That is, the fact that there are numerous other, significant but non-western, states that have strong interests in Afghanistan and a significant ability to intervene helpfully there in a number of ways.
The way most of the discussion here in the US is being conducted you'd think the whole "story" about Afghanistan consists of an outsize US super-hero trying to deal with a large number of very complicated (and generally rather ungrateful and un-cooperative) Afghan actors, with some bit parts being played by NATO allies and the still-troublesome government of Pakistan.
But if we admit-- as I think we must-- that the US is ways over-stretched in Afghanistan and needs to find a way to radically reduce its presence, a question immediately arises as to how to do that. Thinking about that challenge only in the context of "talking to the Taliban" or not talking to them misses a large part of the point.
Three additional questions that immediately arise are:
(2) If the US/NATO footprint in the country-- political along with military-- is radically reduced, then how can the remaining huge governance problems in the country be addressed thereafter? and
(3) How, actually, can the US and NATO organize a withdrawal from Afghanistan-- substantial or total-- that is not a catastrophic rout?
Afghanistan sits in a central Asian arena in which China, Russia, and Iran all have strong interests. Ways stronger and more compelling, indeed, than the interests the US claims to be pursuing in the country!
But thus far, Washington has worked to sideline the degree of influence that any of these actors can have on political-strategic decisionmaking in and regarding Afghanistan. That prerogative has been reserved for-- of all bodies!-- the explicitly western, and anti-Russian military alliance, NATO.
This, even though over recent months NATO has become a lot more reliant on Russian transit rights for the very survival of its troop presence in Afghanistan. (As I've written quite a lot about here over the past couple of years.)
Over years past as I wrote a lot about what was needed for the US to be able to undertake a withdrawal from Iraq that was speedy, total, and generous, I always-- like the 2006 Iraq Study Group-- stressed the advantage of the US drawing all of Iraq's neighbors into a serious negotiation of the post-withdrawal "rules of the game"; and I argued, too, that the UN had a special ability to convene and lead such a negotiation.
As it happened, in Iraq, as the Bush administration came last year to accept the need for a full US withdrawal it managed to do so with only minimal coordination from those of Iraq's neighbors that it still hoped to marginalize and oppose (mainly Iran.) But of course, the failure to have an effective all-neighbors forum for Iraq continues to hamper Iraq-- though not so much so, the US, as it withdraws.
In Afghanistan, the geostrategic situation that US forces face if and when they contemplate a withdrawal is significantly different. In Afghanistan, the significant neighbors include two of the world's veto-wielding "big powers". Also, in Afghanistan, the sheer logistics of a withdrawal are very much more complex than in Iraq. There's no handy and compliant neighboring staging post such as those provided near Iraq by Kuwait, Jordan, and Turkey... And in case anyone hadn't noticed this, the terrain within and around Afghanistan is mighty hard to traverse or operate within!
So even just in organizing the logistics of any significant US/NATO drawdown from Afghanistan-- let alone the politics and diplomacy of how to do that-- the US will be forced to coordinate closely with the country's "neighbors" (broadly defined). And those will include Russia, China, and Iran.
How will that go? Who knows? What seems clear to me is that, for now, many in the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and in Putin's inner circles in Moscow must be relatively happy to see NATO bashing its had against a brick wall inside Afghanistan-- degrading its capabilities by the day as it does so, while also acting as an ever-increasing drag on the US national budget.
So they might not be in any big hurry to help Washington out... On the other hand, since the main effect of US actions thus far inside Afghanistan has been to allow the Talibs to reconstitute, and since the Talibs pose a much more present threat to China and Russia (and also to Iran) than they do to the US, at some point I imagine these powers may well become happy to step in and help the US exit from the quagmire.
For a price.
Anyway, in all of this, the UN will play an increasingly important role. It is still, after all, the main place where inter-big-power business gets done in the world.
Conventional wisdom here in DC has it that the Palestinians somehow need to "prove" they're capable of running a state before they're allowed to have one....
Never mind that the Palestinians are an extremely-- one might even say, obsessively-- well-educated bunch of people... Never mind that during the 1950s and 1960s, the proto-state administrations that were built all up and down the Arab coast of the Gulf were all established overwhelmingly by Palestinians... Never mind that in Palestine, the PA had built up one entire set of administrative institutions in the West Bank and Gaza, some of which functioned pretty well under the circumstances of occupation-- but they were then all smashed to smithereens in the paroxysm of destructive vengeance unleashed by Ariel Sharon in 2002...
No, never mind all that history. The CW here in Washington DC says that the Palestinians, yet again, have to "prove" their capabilities before they can be allowed to have a state. (As if their backwardness in administrative affairs was the major impediment to their gaining their independence!)
And Salam Fayyad is earnestly setting out to supply the required proof to the Americans on this score... and doing this by trying to build (yet again) the institutions of a Palestinian proto-state in, thus far, just the occupied West Bank.
Fayyad's whole approach has now been very forcefully challenged by the veteran Palestinian social activist Dr Mustafa Barghouthi.
Barghouthi argues for a hard-hitting program of action for national liberation built around these four basic pillars:
Dr. Mustafa has considerably more legitimacy and political credibility in Palestinian society than Fayyad. It's based on the lengthy, dangerous, and visionary work he has pursued since the early 1980s to organize Palestinians throughout the OPTs in the crucial field of grassroots medical relief. Because of his strong and sustained emphasis on grassroots self-organization and self-empowerment he has always been 100 times more "political" than Fayyad. (Hence his strong and now long-sustained call for national unity; a topic on which, at the political level, Fayyad is strangely silent.)
At the end of the article, Barghouthi makes some points about a one-state versus two-state solution that seem a little unclearly written. Maybe I'll write him and ask for some clarifications.
But the four-point program looks excellent.
... in this excellent interview, from Cecilie Surasky of Jewish Voices for Peace.
The words of Klein's publisher, Yael Lerer-- a Jewish Israeli-- are particularly hard-hitting. She says,
The second reason I need the boycott is because I lost the hope of creating change from within, which was what I tried to do as an activist for many years. Twenty years ago I could never have imagined this semi-apartheid situation. I care about the future in this place. I care about my fellow Israelis. I have a huge family here and many, many friends. I know many people who don't have any other passports, and who don't have any other options. I think that the solution for this place, the only possible future, is living together. Unfortunately, at this stage, I don't see how this future can be achieved without international pressure. And I think that boycott is a nonviolent tool that has already shown us that it can work. So I'm asking: please boycott me.
By the way, they also deal really well with the principal anti-BDS arguments made by Uri Avnery-- namely that people are not calling for a boycott of North Korea or Burma, so why Israel; and that that a boycott will only force Israelis into a defensive and even more intransigent crouch.