Helena – Page 10 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Reactions to Gaza Flotilla 2

Nine boats of siege-busting ‘Freedom Rider’ activists are now gathering in the Mediterranean, preparing to challenge the longrunning siege that is one of the main tools through which Israel continues to stifle the lives and livelihoods of all of Gaza’s 1.6 million people.
An act of collective punishment like this siege is quite illegal under international law. Under international law, Israel has status over Gaza, as over the West Bank, only as a foreign military occupier, a status it has enjoyed for a jaw-dropping 44 years now. (Hey, even the Allied occupation of post-war Germany only lasted 14 years.) It is only that standing as occupying power that “allows” Israel to exercise control over all of Gaza’s land and sea borders, over its airspace, and even over the vital population registry that determines which Palestinians are allowed to enter into or reside in the Palestinian land of Gaza.
It is that long-running military occupation that needs to end; and we should never forget that.
Right now, there is zero movement in the “international community” towards ending Israel’s prolonged occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. There is no prospect of peace and none even of that long-running time-waster, the peace “process.” In the absence of any prospect of peace, actions to end the illegal siege through which Israel seeks to break the will of the civilian population of Gaza are a very valuable way to break the deadlock while also bringing hope to Gaza’s long-besieged civilians that no, the rest of the world has not forgotten about their plight.
I have such admiration for Freedom Riders like the amazingly talented and gutsy African-American writer Alice Walker. The essay in which she explains her reasons for joining the flotilla should be required reading in every class on Middle East politics, all around the world.
… Or Joseph Dana, an American-Israeli journalist who has decided to travel with and document the work of the flotilla, despite numerous attacks against him. Dana is great Twitterer. Follow his realtime updates here.
And then, there are all the sick attacks that Israeli government spokespeople and their fellow travelers in the U.S. State Department (including Hillary Clinton) and in pro-Israel circles in the U.S. and elsewhere make upon these courageous Freedom Riders… Including accusations from the IDF that the Freedom Riders are intent on using violence, from government sources in Israel and the U.S. that “Rafah is now open” and there are no remaining restrictions on the movement of goods or people in and out of Gaza, etc etc.
As I witnessed in Rafah with my own eyes (and suffered a bit with my sun-battered body) two weeks ago, claims that “Rafah is now open” are simply false.
In light of the above, what are we to make of this statement from an organization called “Americans for Peace Now” today? It includes this bit of verbal bullying:

Let there be no doubt: the organizers of the flotilla are seeking to provoke a confrontation with Israel. In doing so they are playing a dangerous game. None of us knows what the consequences of their actions will be…

Oh, come on. The flotilla organizers are not seeking to “confront” the whole of Israel. They are seeking to confront the specific Israeli policy that maintains a quite illegal siege on all of Gaza’s people. And this “confrontation” is of exactly the same kind used by the Freedom Riders or lunch-counter activists in the days of the civil rights struggle in the United States.
I suppose APN, which is a U.S.-based support branch for the once-magnificent and powerful Israeli organization Peace Now, was trying to establish its pro-Israeli “muscularity” there before they made their core argument which was that Israel should simply let the flotilla make it to Gaza.
Their statement argues that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is a “failed policy.” It does describe it as part of a campaign of collective punishment of the whole population of Gaza, though does not spell out the essential illegitimacy of any such collective punishment.
And nor, crucially, does the statement mention that Israel’s ongoing measures against Gaza are possible only because of Israel’s status as occupying power in Gaza: a status that is only ever intended under international law to be a temporary situation, and one that is always– and hopefully speedily–brought to end by the conclusion of a final-status peace between or among the belligerents.
APN’s statement makes it seem quite possible that Israel could continue to exercise its sway over Gaza for ever! It says:

We recognize Israel’s right to stop and inspect ships it has genuine reason to believe are seeking to smuggle weapons into Gaza… More effective and defensible measures to prevent arms smuggling into Gaza – both via land and via the sea – must be implemented, in cooperation with Egypt, the United States, and the international community.

But how about calling for a speedy end to the occupation that Israel maintains over Gaza, which would be done in the context of a peace treaty between Israel and the PLO– like the one that the Oslo Accords stipulated should have been completed back in May 1999, but that very tragically, because of intense and often intentional Israeli and U.S. foot-dragging, is nowhere on the horizon even today.
In the context of a peace treaty, arms limitation agreements might (and should) be agreed to by both parties to the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel as such would have no continuing right to inspect or control the movement of goods and people into or out of Gaza or the rest of the Palestinian state, though the Palestinian negotiators would likely agree to some form of trusted third-party monitoring.
But the idea– as seems encapsulated in the APN statement– that Israel has any unending “right to stop and inspect ships it has genuine reason to believe are seeking to smuggle weapons into Gaza”? Where did that come from? I thought APN was dedicated to achieving a fair and sustainable final-status peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Surely, they should have mentioned that?

Sally Sockpuppet and her friends

Well, just as I thought. Commenter “Sally J” who was trying to argue that she’d “visited Gaza with a volunteer church group” just in April and that nearly everything there is fine… turns out to be one of the multiple-personality sock-puppets who visit the blog from time to time.
Here is a screen-grab of what I got when I did a search in my blogging software for the IP address “she” had used:
sally sockpuppet.jpg
So “Sally J” was also “Rebecca Gomez-Sanchez” (playing for the Hispanic audience, there, Sally?), “Winston Overbrook, Seattle”, and “Robby DiMaggio, Horaceville, IL”… And for goodness sake, “Sally”, don’t come back in and tell me (Tom MacMaster-style) that these are all just your “friends”, who’ve been using your computer.
Of course, that IP address will get banned, right now. Of course, this sock-puppeteer and others will continue trying to subvert and discredit the discussion here. I’ll probably move toward installing a “trusted commenter” system.
On the bright side, it strikes me that if the Likudnik apologists have to resort to such pathetic little ruses– oh, this and the infamous “Marc” pinkwashing video— then they really are getting desperate. They must realize that the vast tide of opinion worldwide is absolutely not on their side and that the tide of opinion inside the long-muzzled United States is also starting to see through their long-sustained curtain of lies and evasions and recognize Israeli colonial oppression of the Palestinians for what it is.

Eyes Open in Gaza, June 2011

The Gaza Strip is a heavily urbanized sliver of land, some 30 miles long, that nestles against the southeast corner of the Mediterranean and that for many reasons– including the fact that more than 75% of its 1.6 million people are refugees from within what is now Israel– has always been a crucible for the Palestinian movement. In the 1950s, Yasser Arafat and his comrades founded the secular nationalist movement Fateh here. In the 1970s, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a local preacher, founded the network of Islamist organizations that later became Hamas, right here in Gaza. In 1987, Gaza was where the overwhelmingly nonviolent First Intifada was first ignited…
On a recent Wednesday morning, I sat in the neat, Gaza City office of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights with its deputy director, a grizzled veteran of the rights movement called Jaber Wishah. We were discussing the prospects for the reconciliation agreement that Fateh and Hamas concluded in Cairo on May 3. Wishah said he hoped that the agreement would result in the formation of a ‘national salvation government’ that could end and reverse the many kinds of assault that the Israeli government has sustained against the Palestinians of the occupied territories: primarily, the multi-year siege that suffocates the Gaza Strip’s 1.6 million residents and the continuing land expropriations and regime of deeply abusive control that Israel maintains over the 2.6 million Palestinians of the West Bank.
“We desperately need this salvation government, to halt the deterioration of our situation,” Wishah said.
Like all the politically connected Palestinians I talked with during my three-day visit to Gaza, Wishah stressed that the key factor that was now– however slowly– starting to ease the harsh, five-year rift between Hamas and Fateh was the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in neighboring Egypt.
Gaza’s longest land border is the one lined (by Israel) with high concrete walls, hi-tech sensors, and a series of watchtowers with machine-gun nests that can fire automatically if any Palestinian approaches any closer than 500 meters to the wall. Gaza’s shorter border is the one with Egypt that, since 2006, has been the only way that Gaza’s people– or rather, a carefully screened subset of them– can ever hope to travel outside the tiny Strip, whether for business, studies, or family reunions. So long as Mubarak and his widely loathed intel chief Omar Sulaiman were still in power in Cairo, they used their power over Egypt’s Rafah crossing point with Gaza to maintain tight control over the Strip and they worked with Israel, the United States, and their allies in Fateh to squeeze Gaza’s Hamas rulers as hard as they could. Many Arab governments have long expressed support for intra-Palestinian reconciliation. But they (and the western powers) were always content to let Egypt take the lead in brokering all reconciliation efforts. To no-one’s surprise, so long as Mubarak and Sulaiman were in charge in Cairo, those efforts went nowhere.

Continue reading “Eyes Open in Gaza, June 2011”

Chirpstory on Egypt

Okay I get it. Some of you don’t like my Chirpstories. But I do not have time to blog about everything I might want to, so tweeting is a good, quick substitute. And actually, I rather enjoy the speedy interactions on Twitter and other aspects of the system like hashtags.
So for those of you interested in my quick impressions from the few days I spent in Cairo after (and before) exiting Gaza, here they are: http://chirpstory.com/li/1805.

In Gaza

From Monday through Thursday, Bill the spouse and I were in Gaza. The time there was really great: We got to talk to some really interesting people. It is so important to be able to hear from them firsthand and see the conditions in which they’re living– not least because of the terrible isolation into which they’ve been forced by the occupying power (Israel) and the quite inhumane restrictions it has maintained on their freedom of movement (and of commerce.)
I haven’t had time to blog about it, but I have done a bit of tweeting about it, and I compiled those tweets into this ‘Chirpstory’, here.
Now, we’re back in Cairo– and it is still really busy, since there are so many great people to see here, too. Anyway, I thought I’d send you to the Chirpstory. Post your comments there or here!

Post-Tahrir Cairo, Day 1

Bill the spouse and I had an informative, short conversation today with the longtime MB spokesman Dr. Esam El-Erian, who is also the deputy head of the newly emerging, MB-backed Freedom and Justice Party. (You can find descriptions of interviews I conducted with Dr. El-Erian in early 2007 and early 2009, and a lot of other useful background on the Muslim Brotherhood and other aspects of Egyptian politics, here.)
The Muslim brotherhood were major participants in the democratic uprising that toppled Egypt’s 30-year president, Hosni Mubarak, from power back in February. From 1954 until the end of last February the MB was banned from operating as a political movement. Sometimes its people were “allowed” by Mubarak to run in the notably constrained “elections” he staged– but they had to do so as independents or in the framework of another party. Meanwhile, his regime launched successive waves of arrests, financial expropriation, and other grossly abusive and intimidating acts against the MB. Dr. El-Erian is one of many MB leaders who spent many years in Mubarak’s prisons– that, though the movement definitely renounced the use of violence back in 1982.
The most intriguing points in today’s conversation were:
~ Some of his observations on Egyptian political developments in the run-up to September’s parliamentary elections:

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~ A degree of opposition to the policies of the Saudi government that I found surprising:

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~ A nuanced form of outreach to Western countries:

El-Erian said the Brotherhood, which has long been shunned by many Western countries, has started since the revolution of January-February to have some contacts with European parliamentarians, diplomats, and business executives. But he was eager to strengthen its contacts with Americans, too, and made a special pitch for American tourists to return to Egypt in large numbers.

Publishing: From 140 characters to 150,000 words

I haven’t blogged much recently, I know. I’ve been incredibly busy. Primarily with the book-publishing but a bit with family things and also, increasingly, with planning for the trip I’m currently on. (This blog post comes to you from London. On Saturday, I’m going to Cairo… )
Also, I’ve been tweeting quite a bit. That stuff can get quite addictive if you let it. But it also, certainly, has many excellent uses.
It has been quite an interesting experience, all in all, to have been doing so little ‘regular’, blog-post-length or oped-column-length journalism over recent month but to have spent so much time instead either working with the Just World Books authors and the editors as they bring their 100,000-or-so-word opuses (actually, opera) into existence, or just flitting around the Twittersphere, seeing what’s going on there, and contributing some of my own Tweets and Chirps.
I’m still in love with this book-publishing project. I am so happy about the five (very soon to be six!) books that JWB has published so far. Honestly, not a single one of these books would have even existed in anything like its present form unless I had worked with these talented and always-busy authors to help them to pull them together. And now they are there and available as resources for anyone around the world who cares to use them. Plus, equally importantly, they will sit in libraries around the world forever, ready to be consulted by members of the coming generations. That’s what I love about books!
Sure, the near-instant gratification of blog-post publishing gets my adrenalin running good and fast. But blog posts are evanescent. Yes, they may sit in the blog archives– and blog archives are fabulous, let me make no mistake about that! But, and this is a big but, blog archives are not organized in a way that allows for the posts easily to come together into a sustained narrative or a sustained argument. That is the big difference made by the “curating” process that my authors undertake when they pull their material together into book chapters.
Last month, we published Rami Zurayk’s fabulous book Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring. Rami is an agronomy prof and a dedicated social activist in his native Lebanon who blogs at Land and People. The book tracks how the aid and trade policies pursued over the past 25 years by Western governments and their ‘free market’ acolytes in many Arab countries ended up wrecking the livelihoods, lives, and societies of the members of so many millennia-old farming communities throughout the Arab world– thus, over time, helping to “sow” the Arab Spring.
And this, in the part of the world where– as Rami points out in the book– farming first began.
His critique of how the “development” (or in the end, too often, “de-development”) policies pursued by pro-western governments went hand-in-hand with their repression of all dissenting voices at home and their pursuit of foreign policies that ended up kowtowing to the “West” and to Israel is a very serious one that helps to explain the root causes of the “Arab Spring”.
Food, Farming, and Freedom has a fabulous Foreword by Rashid Khalidi. You can read an excerpt from it, and other praise from the book’s advance readers, here.
We had an excellent launch event for the book in New York! It was hosted by the NGO Food & Hunger Working Group at the U.N. We’ll have some video of it to share with you, very soon.
This month, we have now gotten our e-book publishing program off the ground, with the release of the Kindle version of Joshua Foust’s Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. I figured the Kindle version would be good to begin with, both because so many people now have Kindles and because there’s a very handy (and free) iPad app that lets you read Kindle e-books on your iPad.
We’ll be putting our other titles into e-book formats soon, too.
Another big thing I’ve been doing with JWB in recent weeks has been to negotiate a strategic cooperation agreement with OR Books of New York. I’ve admired OR since I first became aware of their work last year. They have just about the same general view of how to make a go of publishing within the technological and market environment of the 21st century that I do– that is: Focus on speedy turnaround of great, timely manuscripts; focus on producing (and selling!) paperbacks and e-books rather than hardcovers; rely on Print-on-Demand so you don’t have to sink money into inventory and inventory management; focus on web-based operations rather than bookstores, etc. They are further advanced in building their business than I am, having started in 2009. The company’s co-owners John Oakes and Colin Robinson have a lot more experience in book publishing than I do. And last but not least John and Colin seem to be really nice people who share a huge amount of my political sensibilities… So this whole cooperation thing looks fabulous from my point of view.
And the final big thing I’ve been doing in the JWB context has been to complete (let’s hope…) the work on Manan Ahmed’s amazing book, Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination. Manan is a thoughtful and brilliant Pakistani-American historian who blogs at Chapati Mystery. He wrote most of the blog posts and other short texts that are curated into the book during the period from 2004 until, well, just last month… For most of that time he was finishing his Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, so he had a front-row seat from which to gaze upon the deformations that American society and politics underwent during the height of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld years and the huge damage inflicted on both American and Pakistan under the rubric of the “War on Terror”. (He ain’t too kind to Obama on this score, either.)
My involvement in editing Manan’s book was a little episodic. I was relying on a couple of my excellent contract editors to work with him to whip it into shape. (And it had several challenging aspects in that regard.) And then, as the final step, we’ve been doing the page layout… and it turns out the text is so complex and rich, what with epigraphs in English, epigraphs in Urdu, poems in English, poems in Urdu, headings, and subheadings, and sub-sub-headings, and there have been some great graphic elements to incorporate as well (including small b&w reproductions of paintings by the gifted Daisy Rockwell and a table correlating various Pakistani leaders’ facial hair with whether they instituted martial law, etc)… As Manan himself would doubtless write at this juncture:
Well.
(Readers will love Manan’s dry wit and great style, as well as the originality of his thought and the depth of his understanding of all the relevant histories.)
The Foreword writer for WTWFA is Amitava Kumar of Vassar. Amitava was also kind enough to publish a great little interview with Manan on Bookslut. You can read it here. And be sure to read the fabulous endorsements the book got from Juan Cole and others, here.
… After wrestling with many typographical and technical gremlins, I finally got the PDFs of WTWFA’s interior and cover uploaded to the printer’s website this morning… so I’m hopeful it will be available for sale on Amazon within the next 4-5 days. (Keep your fingers crossed.) I’ll be sure to let you know when it is finally available for purchase!
Each of these latest two books has turned out, at the end, to be a real quick-turnaround challenge. Rami’s book, we added a whole additional chapter to, about the Arab Spring. And Manan’s contains as an Epilogue the wry observations he blogged a couple of days after the U.S killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.
“Timely Books for Changing Times” ~ that’s my motto at Just World Books! (TB4CT)
So anyway… when I’m working really hard at something, using twitter becomes a far too easy-to-use mind-clearer. Well, something between a relaxing mind-clearer and a potentially dangerous addiction, more like… Another “problem” I have with Twitter is that I do it in two guises. One is @helenacobban; and I try to keep to that one for personal observations. The other is @justworldbooks. I’m trying to use that one only for JWB-related items; but it’s been a bit harder to find the right tweeting “voice” there… Well, either that, or sometimes I just forget which account I’m tweeting on and get ways too mouthy on the corporate one. (I’m not sure that anyone apart from me even cares about this? Maybe having the two accounts is just all-round confusing and I should consolidate them?)
Here’s what I love about Twitter: The amazing power it gives you to connect with new tweeps through hashtags, and with new hashtags through the tweeps whom you follow. During those exciting days of the height of Egypt’s Tahrir Square revolution, it suddenly seemed as if I could connect with English-speakers (and to some extent with Arabic- and French-speakers) from all around the world as we watched all the breaking-news events and their media representations in an important way together, commenting on them as we viewed them…
One of the things I loved about OR Books was that six weeks or so ago they brought out this amazing little book, Tweets from Tahrir, a small book that in 21 chapters presents a day-by-day view of what was being tweeted from the heart of (and to a lesser extent, about) the anti-Mubarak action in Tahrir Square from January 11 through February 14. The book was edited by Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns, from London.
What an amazing thing to do.
On p.394 (I think) of Laila El-Haddad’s book with JWB, Gaza Mom, Palestine, Politics, etc…, we have a short “Tweetstory”, which is a compilation that someone made of the tweets Laila was sending out on that occasion, back in April 2009, when she got held up at Cairo airport for 32 hours with her two small kids, as she was on her way trying to get to Gaza to see her parents… The guys holding her there in the airport didn’t realize she had internet access and was tweeting for all her time there!
But OR Books made a whole book out of Tweets. Neat!
Twitter is like blogging from the point of view that your most recent tweets get put at the top while all the earlier ones get crammed ever further down beneath, meaning that– as with most blog archives– you end up having a slightly disorienting, reverse-chrono arrangement to the text. But three weeks ago I discovered this great new tool called Chirpstory that lets you very easily compile your own tweets– or anyone else’s– into forward-chrono collections that can thereby gain some real narrative heft as they proceed.
Anyway, I’ve now pulled together three or four short ‘stories’ using Chirpstory (check them out here), and see a lot of potential for its future use– particularly during periods of very significant and rapid action…
So that– and some good family things– are kind of what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks. As noted in the title here: dealing with texts of all lengths from 140 characters through 150,000 words… But at the end of the day, I still have a reporter’s heart. So that’s what I’ll be doing for the next couple of weeks.
Oh, that and continuing to do a bunch of things for the book business, of course!

Syria: The strong risk of fitna, and how to prevent it

Josh Landis has a truly excellent piece on his blog today. It is a lengthy account that he’s publishing there, that was written by someone identified only as “An American in Syria.” Whoever the writer is, the writing shows the closeness of her/his own connectedness to Syrians in Damascus of a variety of views and backgrounds, the acuity of his/her ability to understand the dangerous social fragmentation that seems to be ripping through the heart of Syrian society right now, and her/his own deep humanity.
The writer– or Landis?– identifies the following eleven themes in the essay:

This piece is part of a fine tradition of great descriptions of how it feels to be inside a country that is undergoing a social fragmentation that is speedy, deep, and often comes as a huge surprise to the people who are undergoing/participating in the process, themselves… In Spring 1994, I published a review of two great books that explored the process from the inside, in both Lebanon and former Yugoslavia… I already archived the text of that review on JWN, several years ago. You can find it here.
One key lesson from both books is just how fast the ruptures, fissures, fears, scars, and worldview of fitna can spread through a whole society.
Since Spring 1994, of course, we have seen many other instances of seemingly stable societies splintering in a shockingly speedy and violent way. Right then, in April 1994, there was Rwanda… Since then, the first big examples that come to mind are post-invasion Iraq and Kenya.
There are many, many things that a responsible national government, responsible opposition politicians, and deeply engaged outsiders can do to arrest and even reverse this process of social breakdown (fitna.) Thus far, neither the Syrian government nor– as far as I can see– the opposition leaders, nor any outsiders have done anything effective in this regard.
The time to act is now (or yesterday.) The tools are widely available in all the annals of diplomacy and negotiation. Various governments (Norway, Qatar, Turkey, Switzerland) and non-governmental organizations like the Sant’ Egidio group in Rome have a lot of experience in figuring out how to stop and reverse the process of iftitan.
A basic agreement not to demonize or diminish any “other” group of human beings, just for being members of that group, is key. So is a commitment to always be conservative in the way people report atrocities, tragedies, or other harms, as opposed to allowing exaggeration, fearmongering, and warmongering to enter into and take over the discourse. Finally, focusing on a strong concept of equal co-citizenship in the one country is an excellent way to restore respect among all the co-citizens, to underline their joint commitment to the wellbeing of their one country, and to pave the way for establishment of a democratic and accountable political system going forward.
But as I said, the time to act is now. Otherwise, Rwanda beckons.

Notes on Turkey and Syria, #2

Turkish FM Davutoglu today told a couple of media outlets (including the NYT) that Syrian President Bashar al-Asad should launch a “shock therapy” version of political reform. Did he use those words in English? If so, it is a truly lousy turn of phrase. “Shock therapy,” as administered to the Russian economy by Jeffrey Sachs back in the day resulted in the evisceration and destruction of the nation’s economy. Shock therapy, as previously used in psychiatry, was violent, deforming, and usually unsuccessful.
Please, Ahmet Davutoglu, get a better turn of phrase. Something like “truly transformational reform”, perhaps?
* * *
On Tuesday, Turkey is hosting a meeting of Syrian opposition activists and leaders in Antalya. The goal is, I think, to enable them to form a joint coordinating body. Sevil Kucukkosum of Hurriyet writes that the Syrian NGO the National Organization for Human Rights is the sole organizer of the gathering. Syrians do not need visas to visit Turkey. But I imagine the Turkish government is allowing this gathering to proceed.
The Hurriyet report says that representatives of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, “could participate at the Syrian opposition meeting.” The Syrian MB has never systematically followed the decision its Egyptian counterpart took in the early 1980, to hew to a solely nonviolent path.
* * *
If Syria is really to enter the “grand constitutional process” that will be necessary to transform the country into a democratic, accountable, and inclusive democracy, then all parties (including above all, the government) will need to agree to a cessation of armed operations. All parties will also need to be able to negotiate the terms of the democratization, the rules going forward, and what to do about the many painful legacies of the past. The government needs to prepare and organize itself for this negotiation; and so does the opposition. From that perspective, having the opposition get organized is an excellent step. And it is doubtless good that the government is sending a (relative) reformer, Abdullah Dardari, to Ankara as ambassador in place of the harder line Nidal Kabalan.
Still reading the Hurriyet report there, however, I see it says this:

Turkish officials have urged al-Assad to conduct a national dialogue that would include the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps even bringing that group into the government by granting it two ministries, according to a report in The New York Times. They have also suggested an anticorruption campaign, which would undoubtedly reach into al-Assad’s inner circle, and greater accountability for the security forces that have often been granted free rein in suppressing dissent.

Honestly, I don’t think any of this goes far enough. What is needed is a thoroughgoing transformation to a real, functioning, one-person-one-vote democracy, not just bringing two MB members into a Baath-dominated government. And this transformation will involve many other changes, as well, including institution of a transparent economic system and a system for ensuring civilian control of the military.
* * *
Can this be achieved while a portion of Syria is still chafing Israeli occupation, while the Israeli military daily threatens Damascus and the whole of Syria and Lebanon, and while Syria is still in a formal state of war with Israel? I believe it can. If the United States is able to do only one thing to help support the process of democratization in Syria it should be to use all the levers at its command to tell the Israelis not to intervene in any way in Syria, and to assure Syrians that the U.S. still fully supports the concept of a “full land for full peace” deal between Israel and Syria and will work actively to see its speedy implementation.
The Asads, father and son, both pursued the “full land for full peace” deal actively with Israel through negotiations. But the negotiations were always stymied and blocked by Israel (with help from Dennis Ross and others) and never got anywhere. Though the Asads maintained a strategic posture toward Israel based on general military deterrence, over time that deterrence became puny in the extreme; and it cannot serve any longer to “justify” the maintenance of the bloated national-security apparatus that currently hangs over the whole society like a very heavy weight.
* * *
Syria has been reeling from several years of drought and many more years of economic mismanagement and the economic burden of its national-security apparatus. It urgently needs economic help and the institution of sound economic policies. Turkey can do a lot to help in both regards, but it cannot do it alone.
* * *
The two countries are extremely important to each other. Each is an important gateway between the other and a significant hinterland. They have many geopolitical interests in common. Turkey is about four times the size of Syria in population and about 12 times as big as it in GDP.
This report from the Ankara-based think-tank the International Strategic Research Organization (USAK) looks very interesting.
that report on it, from Today’s Zaman, says,

I’d love to see an English-language version of the whole report…
* * *
As I noted in this piece that I blogged on Tuesday, I do think South Africa’s experience of a negotiated transition from minority rule to full democracy is one that can be very valuable for Syria. Of course, the South African parties and movements were able to complete their big constitutional transformation more or less on their own, while the Syrians evidently need a friendly outside force to act as mediator, convenor, and general chivvier, and structurer of the incentives. But still, there are a lot of excellent lessons the South Africans can offer.
One key one, I think, is that the focus of all participants should be determinedly forward-looking– laying the basis for a decent, egalitarian, accountable, and cooperative system going forward– rather than vindictive and backward-looking, seeking to settle endless old scores here and there. The Spaniards could offer some good lessons in this regard, too.

Notes on Turkey and the Syrian transition

I’m sorry we haven’t been able to fix the comments here yet. Meantime, you can go over to this post on my backup blog to read what I just wrote about Turkey and Syria… and what’s more, I think you can post comments there.