Here is my latest CSM column, out today. The editors there put a good headline on it: Movement controls stunt Palestinian lives – and democracy.
I mentioned in there that I’d been part of a group that convened in late 2002 to look at the prospects for a new Palestinian election. That effort had been launched by some well-meaning folks at American University in Washington, DC, and at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies. But it got absolutely nowhere. The Israeli government never showed itself ready for a minute to allow the kind of conditions (freedom of movement and expression; general public security) that would allow an open, fair, and credible election to take place in the occupied territories.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone— maybe that great advocate of democracy now sitting in the White House?–could persuade Prime Minister Sharon that that would be the right thing to do?
Of course, Pres. Bush might have a little bit of a credibility problem of his own if he pressed someone else running a military occupation to allow free and fair elections in the occupied territories…. Especially after the pathetic attempt his own administration made last November to circumvent the approach of free and fair elections in Iraq. (Click ‘Rube Goldberg’ in the Search box here.)
But still, there is now some hope that the people of Iraq will be able to hold free and fair elections, under some kind of U.N. auspices, some time around the end of this year.
Actually, the Bush administration seems, belatedly, to have come to the recognition that such an arrangement– elections to produce (hopefully) a credible, legitimate Iraqi leadership, plus the essential ingredient of UN auspices–may be the best bet it has to be able to draw down the US’s own treacherous over-exposure inside Iraq, and to allow the US forces to be taken out in something approaching good order.
So why wouldn’t the Bushies urge their Israeli friends to do something similar in Gaza and the West Bank? Could it be that they understand that Sharon really does not want to pull Israel’s control mechanisms, and its troops and settlers, totally out of those areas? And perhaps, too, that they actually sympathize with Sharon’s preferences in that regard?
So much for democracy.
2 thoughts on “New CSM column out today”
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The Israeli government claims these movement controls are needed to prevent suicide bombers from reaching Israeli cities. But in addition, the Israeli chief of staff has told Israel’s Hebrew-language press that the military’s policies toward Palestinians have a clear purpose of political coercion.
Such an attempt to impose collective coercion on an entire people is illegal under the Geneva and Hague Conventions. It is also counterproductive. Israel’s movement controls have been the single major cause for the collapse of the Palestinian economy and the rise in Palestinian militancy. Sharon has not brought to either Palestinians or Israelis the era of “peace and security” that he promised, nor does his newest “Disengagement Plan” look set to do so.
These words should be played over and over again on banners on the bottom of television screens in the USA. Please note that I don’t really blame the Israelis–I blame the ideologues in the West for setting up conditions of moral hazard where only the strategies of Sharon can win seats in the Knesset, and where honest peace-minded Israelis get shafted.
Helena – Do you think it is time to write an article that is critical of the Palestinan Authority? Perhaps on the Palestinians who are regularly captured and/or killed by the PA as supposed ‘collaborators’. Arafat personally orders their executions without fair trials. I can only imagine how many international human rights treaties this must breach…
Or perhaps you might consider writing an article that is written from the Israeli perspective. Perhaps on the growing sense of frustration and futility on the Israeli side (and I don’t mean self-hating kapos).