Author: Helena

Wilson Center conference on Israel-Palestine

Yesterday morning I went to a very interesting small conference jointly organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center and the American Task Force on Palestine. Former PA Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabboo was speaking, and so was former PA Culture Minister Ziad Abu Amr. These are both smart, articulate people whom I’ve known for many years, so I was eager to hear their views– especially on current relationships between Fateh and Hamas.
(I see that the Fateh and Hamas prisoners have just negotiated a joint political platform, which was presented to Abu Mazen. It reportedly included acceptance of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hamas leaders not in pirson said they hadn’t seen it and couldn’t comment…Anyway, joint political discussions between the two leaderships are due to start in Ramallah soon.)
Ziad and Yasser both gave excellent presentations. Both men are much closer to Fateh than to Hamas, politically. But they both made impassioned pleas to the western nations to end the very harmful siege that has been imposed on the PA-held areas and on the Hamas government. Both said the move made by the Quartet Monday to create a Trust Fund to allow some external funding to go into the PA areas did not go near nearly far enough. Both also argued forcefully that pressure and exclusion would only strengthen the support for Hamas inside the PA areas and the region, and that a policy of political inclusion is the only way to force Hamas to test its political claims and reveal their weaknesses.
Both men pointed with anguish to the terrible, and very humiliating, treatment Pres. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has received at the hands of the Israelis and the Americans. They underlined that Hamas has now given Abu Mazen an explicit mandate to negotiate in the peace process, and that support for a negotiated peace leading to a viable two-state outcome remains high among Palestinians.
Ziad said at one point, “Hamas has made it clear that a two-state solution is fine, even though this doesn’t end their more ‘ideological’ or sentimental claim to the whole of the land– which is exactly the same as the Likud or Kadima people say.”
… Anyway, I certainly haven’t done justice there to the presentations those two gave. The other speakers included Nabil Amr, who is more of a Fateh apparatchik, Israeli journo Nahum Barnea, former Israeli Ambassador to the US Zalman Shoval (who gave a speech worthy of the hardline territorial maximalist that he has always been; no change there), and former Foreign Ministers from Israel, Egypt ,and Jordan: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Ahmed Maher el-Said, and Marwan Muasher. Later, Saudi Ambassador to the US Prince Turki al-Faisal gave a “Keynote Address”.
I was particularly interested to hear how Ahmed Maher, Muasher, and Turki spoke about Hamas– since a big part of the US-Israeli campaign against Hamas thus far has concentrated on trying to get the Arab states to joint the economic siege on the Hamas-led government, while the Hamas ministers have had some (limited) success in breaking that aspect of the siege.
Ahmed Maher said he judged that clashes between Fateh and Hamas “are dangerous for the stability not just of the Palestinians but also for Israel and the whole region.” He argued that “Fateh should support– everyone should support– the incorporation of Hamas into the political system. We all need to understand we have no right to choose the leaders of the Palestinians.”
He noted that the US negotiated with the North Vietnamese even before there was a ceasefire. He urged the US to relaunch serious peace negotiations. “So maybe you can’t have direct negotiations, but you should have the Quartet playing an active role in mediation. Hamas has accepted a hudna. It has accepted to let Abu Mazen negotiate. There is something to build on.”
When Muasher spoke, he stressed that it was complete fallacy that Hamas’s electoral victory in January interrupted an ongoing peace process. “There was no peace process!” He also said it was a fallacy that Hamas was elected primarily on the basis of its anti-peace program. “People voted for Hamass mainly because they were dissatisfied with the way the PA had been running before then.” He said the implementation of the unilateral plan described by Olmert would result in the institutionalization of a Palestinian ghetto, and asked whether that could possibly be in Israel’s interest.
He and Prince Turki both laid a lot of stress on the value of the “Beirut Declaration” of 2002 and urged that pushing that forward– including, as an early step, winning Hamas’s support for it– would be the best way forward. (That declaration, which was supported by all the Arab states then and since calls for Israel’s withdrawal from all the land it gained control of in June 1967; the creation in the West Bank and Gaza of an independent Palestinian state; a “mutually agreed” resolution of the Palestinian refugee question on the basis of UN resolution 194; the complete ending of the state of hostility between Israel and all Arab states; the establishment by Arab states of normal peaceful relations with Israel; and the establishment of a regional security order.)
There was some discussion in the conference as to whether the “Road Map” declared by Pres. Bush in 2002 was dead or not. All (except Shoval) agreed that the target dates defined in it needed to be updated if it is to have any relevance. All the Arab speakers stressed the importance of negotiating a final resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even if implementation is in stages; and said that the indeterminacy of the Oslo approach to negoptiations had been a real weakness of it.
Anyway, more on this later…

Challenges of peacebuilding in Darfur (and all of Sudan)

Just to record how glad I am that the main focus of international attention and activism regarding Darfur has shifted from one-sided finger-pointing to problem-solving… And specifically to the massive, multi-pronged effort that will be required to make and then buttress a sustainable longterm peace in that region.
Jonathan Edelstein has not only the text of the peace agreement but also what looks to me like an extremely well-argued commentary on the broad peacebuilding effort that must follow the signing of the peace accord.
Thanks so much for the clearheadedness and commitment you put into writing that, Jonathan.
Great that the US government is going to fund some of the needed efforts. Everyone else needs to pitch on in.

US mis-steps and Shiite activism in Iraq

I can’t decide whether I find it truly pathetic or quite criminal that US commanders in Baghdad are still– three years after invading Iraq– being described by reporters as trying to teach their troops a few of the fundamentals of waging war in built-up areas.
I mean honestly, how many times have reporters told and retold this exact same story (different general being brown-nosed to) over the past three years?
This, from the LA Times’s James Rainey today:

    Some American troops in Iraq have been their “own worst enemy,” unintentionally creating new insurgents by treating the Iraqi people in a heavy-handed or insensitive manner, according to the U.S. commander in charge of day-to-day military operations.
    Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, in a weekend training session with troops and in an interview afterward, said he found a need to reemphasize to soldiers that they must use reasonable force and treat the Iraqi culture with respect, in part because the insurgency has persisted and grown.

Actually, that reasoning is flawed. They should “use reasonable force and treat the Iraqi culture with respect” because it is the right thing to do, because it is (or should be) in line with their professional values and training, and because they are obligated by the laws of war to do so…
Oh, and as a side-benefit of doing so, they might find it helps their ability to contain the insurgency?
Actually, it is probably ways too late for anything the US troops do in Iraq to make any scintilla of difference to the political outcome. Though they do have the capability to inflict considerable additional suffering on Iraqi families and should certainly be prevented from doing so.
Borzou Daragahi, also of the LAT, had an intriguing piece in the paper over the weekend titled, Iraq’s Shiites Now Chafe at American Presence, Perceived U.S. missteps, a torrent of angry propaganda and the sect’s new political sway have fused to turn welcomers into foes.
The whole of that piece is worth reading. It starts:

    A visitor need not go far or search hard to hear and see the anti-American venom that bubbles through this ancient shrine city, which once welcomed U.S. forces as liberators.
    “The American ambassador is the gate through which terrorism enters Iraq,” says a banner hanging from the fence surrounding the tombs of Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas, among the most revered martyrs of the Shiite Muslim faith.
    … For three years, most of Iraq’s Shiites welcomed — or at least tolerated — the U.S. presence here. In the weeks immediately after the American-led invasion, the mothers and sisters of Saddam Hussein’s Shiite victims clutched clumps of dried earth as they wept over mass graves and thanked God for ending their oppression.
    The Shiite acceptance of an American presence allowed troops to concentrate on putting down the insurgency in western Iraq, which is led by Sunni Muslim Arabs. With the exception of an uprising in mid-2004 by followers of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, the south has been relatively quiet and peaceful under the sway of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani.
    But now the mood has shifted. Perceived American missteps, a torrent of anti-U.S. propaganda and a recently emboldened Shiite sense of political prowess have coalesced to make the south a fertile breeding ground for antagonism toward America’s presence…

I have been writing about the likelihood of this happening for, h’mm, three years or more at this point. Lt.-Gen. Chiarelli and his officers may want to go back and read what I was writing, for example, here, in May 2003.
There, I was looking at the way that the Shiites in South Lebanon gradually shifted from being general supporters of Israel’s military invasion of their country in 1982 to being militantly anti-Israeli just– er– three years later…
Not a bad piece, though I say it myself…
Looking at the prospects of radical change in the US-Shiite relationship in Iraq, I wrote there:

    of course it’s not going to all be an exact replay of Lebanon. But there are already scores of similarities. And one of them is definitely the existence of a common, shared body of knowledge about what works in building a popular movement to resist foreign military occupation, and what doesn’t…
    But hey, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody’s armies just returned to their own national soil??? Why should that suddenly seem such a revolutionary notion?

Hey, it still seems like a good idea.
Even better: Don’t go invading and threatening other countries in the first place! Please!!!

Kadima government helps break the boycott on Hamas?

In my piece on Hamas for Boston Review, the dateline for which was May 1, I had written that the continuation of the harshly damaging boycott on allowing any material or financial aid to reach the PA-held areas was most probably a function of the continuing (as of then) absence of a new government in Israel… And that most likely once a Kadima-led government had been formed and started to stabilize itself it would quietly put out the word to the Bush administration and the pro-Israelis in Congress to ease up on the boycott….
(This, in line with the way the US government became persuaded to change its views on talking with the PLO, back in 1993: In other words, only when the word goes out from the Israeli government– and in line with that, also from their allies in Washington’s powerful pro-Israel lobby– do the US administration and the leaders of the US Congress “dare” to change their policy. Which, on that earlier occasion, they did with truly breathtaking rapidity.)
So guess what. Today, suddenly we learn that a viciously anti-Palestinian piece of legislation called HR 4681, that had been proposed in the House of Representatives by the rightwing Islamophobe Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), has suddenly been taken off the floor and will not be considered this week.
Interesting, huh?
This, the same day that the WaPo published a piece from their Israel-Palestine correspondent Scott Wilson in which he writes,

    A full collapse of the Palestinian Authority … could bring on a larger political and financial role for Israel in the Palestinian territories, which it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. That could complicate the agenda of Israel’s new government, which is preparing to evacuate isolated Jewish settlements in parts of the West Bank.
    “Nobody needs the collapse of the Palestinian Authority,” a senior Israeli security official said in a recent briefing, speaking on condition of anonymity. “When I say nobody, I mean nobody.”

Last week, Marc Perelman wrote this in the NYC Jewish weekly, the Forward:

    Efraim Halevy is no dove.
    The bluntly speaking former Mossad chief, a key adviser to former prime minister Ariel Sharon who supported harsh retaliation against Palestinian terror, is a supporter of the Iraq War who issues dark warnings about the dramatic increase in Europe’s Muslim population. So, there were more than a few puzzled looks at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations last week when Halevy spoke out about the need to engage Hamas.
    Twice he warned his audience that “we’ll be seeing things we have not seen before,” a seeming allusion to potential talks between Israel and Hamas.

If you want to find out all of my reasoning on why I’d thought a Kadima-led government, once established, might start urging the US government to ease up on the suffocation of the PA, you’ll have to wait till the BR piece comes out. But you can find a foretaste of my theory of “parallel unilateralisms” if you go back and read this March 9 column on the topic
By the way, Ori Nir also had a good piece on the shaky international state of the boycott campaign in last week’s Forward. He wrote there:

    Bush administration officials say that the pressure on Hamas will either bring about a gradual change in the movement’s belligerent positions or accelerate the collapse of its government. On the other hand, according to diplomatic sources in Washington, America’s European allies are not pressing for regime change in the territories.
    “I have never come across anyone in Europe who wants to engineer the fall of Hamas’s government, both because it’s counterproductive and because we don’t want to tamper with a clean election,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior adviser for political and academic affairs to Washington’s European Commission Delegation.

Like I said, interesting days…
—
Addendum, Tuesday 10 p.m.:
So, this evening there was a surprise announcement from NYC that the Quartet members have all agreed to form a special “Trust Fund” to supply funding to the people of the PA areas. That AP piece says,

    The new fund is supposed to administer only money for basic human needs. But both European and U.S. diplomats said that at some point it might be used to pay salaries for urgently needed doctors or teachers or for other services that the Hamas government otherwise would be expected to provide…

Did I call it or what?? Last Thursday, Israel formed its government. Today, just five days later, we see what that AP writer calls “a slight softening of the hard U.S. line against financial engagement with Hamas.”
It is true that this “Trust Fund” money is not supposed to go to its recipients through the Hamas government. But it will presumably go through NGOs (and also may help pay the salaries of government employees.) Regardless of the exact modalities in that regard, what seems indisputable is that if a decent level of efficient, non-currupt human services are to be provided to the Palestinians, then Hamas-affiliated networks will be centrally involved with that effort…
(As I wrote in this Salon article.)
Next up: Watch as the Hamas government takes Gaza out of the Paris Agreement and into a new economic relationship with the world through Egypt. Exiting from Israel’s economic stranglehold is a great way for the people of Gaza to get off the international welfare rolls…

Too much work on dead-tree publications!

My schedule has been crazy. Last week I got back the copyedited and laid-out versions of two significant longer articles that I needed to review very carefully. One was my piece on Hamas for Boston Review. The other was my article on the british counter-insurgency campaign in Kenya for Radical History Review. Each required a lot of concentration, and also required me to re-upload a huge amount of arcane knowledge back into my poor suffering grey cells.
And that was before I got an enquiry from Paradigm Publishers as to whether I’d finished reviewing the copyedited version my book on post-atrocity policies in Africa, that they had sent to me in early April… But the darn thing never arrived in my AOL inbox!!!!! So now the book’s editing and production schedule has been delayed by a whole month… and instead of having some nice leisurely time in early April to go over that edit, I need to be doing it between last Thursday and May 17 or so– a period when I already had a horrendous amount of projects scheduled.
Okay, whine, whine, whine. Now I’ll shut up. This morning I told myself “Okay Helena repeat after me: ‘It’s great that I have such a lot of such great, meaningful work to do.’… ” So yes, okay, it’s great. But still, it has felt a bit burdensome. (She takes a deep breath.)
Actually, it’s proceeding okay. I just finished reviewing Ch.4 of the copyedits on the book. I have two chapters to go– and then I need to compose things like the Preface, the Dedication, etc.
And I’ve been doing a bunch of other things, too.
In a couple of hours, I’m driving to DC. I’ll be there a couple of nights. Going to a good mini-conference tomorrow morning that I’ll try to blog about… Then I’m helping to set up the Eyes Wide Open exhibit that’s going to take a poignant antiwar message to the National Mall. …
All this is to say that i recognize that my posting onto JWN has been a little spotty these past few days, and may be for the next few days, too. But I’ll do what I can. Anyway, Blair and Bush are both still in big trouble. That hasn’t changed– so having that headline at the top there for the past few days hasn’t been bad, at all.
Now, I’m going to post a couple of things quickly before I leave for DC….

Blair and Bush both in big trouble

The two heads of the “coalition” of forces occupying Iraq are both in BIG political trouble.
Blair was already foundering– especially after Labour’s disastrous showing in Thursday’s local elections. Just yesterday, he axed Jack Straw and a bunch of other ministers (including former SecDef John Reid). And the Sunday Telegraph had gotten hold of a letter, reportedly supported by 50 Labour backbench MPs, in which they were demanding a speedy timetable for Tony to get out of No. 10, Downing Street.
(And soon after that, I would hope, out of Iraq as well.)
But all of that political unrest came before the downing of the British chopper in a heavily populated portion of Basra, in southern Iraq, Saturday.
In that piece AP’s Robert Reid writes from Baghdad that the chopper,

    apparently was hit by a missile Saturday and crashed in Basra, triggering a confrontation in which jubilant Iraqis pelted British troops with stones, hurled firebombs and shouted slogans in support of a radical Shiite Muslim cleric.

So much for the Brits allegedly knowing how to run an occupation any “better” than the Americans, as they had previously claimed.
Robert Reid continued,

    British soldiers with armored vehicles rushed to the site and were met by a hail of stones from a crowd of at least 250 people, many of them teenagers, who jumped for joy and raised their fists as thick smoke rose from the wreckage.
    As many as three armored vehicles were set on fire, apparently with gasoline bombs and a rocket-propelled grenade, but the troops inside escaped unhurt, witnesses said.
    The crowd chanted “we are all soldiers of al-Sayed,” a reference to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, an ardent foe of foreign troops being in Iraq.
    Calm returned by nightfall as Iraqi authorities imposed a curfew and hundreds of Iraqi police and soldiers set up checkpoints and patrolled the streets, residents said. Sporadic rocket fire could be heard throughout Basra, Iraq’s second largest city…

In a piece in Sunday’s Independent about the burning of Straw, Francis Elliott wrote,

    Jack Straw’s fate was sealed in a phone call from the White House to Tony Blair last month, according to the former foreign secretary’s friends.
    They say President George Bush was furious that Mr Straw said it was “nuts” to use nuclear weapons against Iran, an option reported to be under active consideration in Washington.
    Downing Street had already warned Mr Straw repeatedly to tone down his complete rejection of the military route as “inconceivable”, insisting it was important to keep all options on the table.

Actually, it seems Straw had at least two serious strikes against him. One, he had seriously annoyed Tony’s close pal Pres. Bush. Two, he was thought to be ways too friendly with Blair’s nemesis in the Labour Party, Gordon Brown– the guy who’s just waiting in the wings until Tony makes his long-promised “exit” from the premiership.
Here in the US, meanwhile, we have the whole ongoing implosion of the Bush presidency… what with the Goss-Negroponte dust-up and the Foggo scandal, which between them are leaving not just the presidency but also the country’s longer term intelligence capabilities in chaos.
The WaPo’s Linzer and Pincus wrote today that,

    senior administration officials said Bush had lost confidence in Goss, 67, almost from the beginning and decided months ago to replace him. In what was described as a difficult meeting in April with Negroponte, Goss was told to prepare to leave by May, according to several officials with knowledge of the conversation…

And Dana Priest wrote:

    Porter J. Goss was brought into the CIA to quell what the White House viewed as a partisan insurgency against the administration and to re-energize a spy service that failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks or accurately assess Iraq’s weapons capability.
    But as he walked out the glass doors of Langley headquarters yesterday, Goss left behind an agency that current and former intelligence officials say is weaker operationally, with a workforce demoralized by an exodus of senior officers and by uncertainty over its role in fighting terrorism and other intelligence priorities, said current and former intelligence officials.

Not surprisingly, the Prez’s poll numbers are yet further down. Even Fox News’s poll can only get him 38 percent of support these days…
Also heading downward: the US-led “coalition”‘s performance in Afghanistan. Underlining that fact, Bush had his own downed helicopted problem today: ten US soldiers were killed when their Chinook came down in the east of Afghanistan.
This crazy idea that militarism can solve our problems and make the world safer is so incredibly harmful– to everyone concerned!!
Are we now, I wonder, getting to the point of understanding that our parents and grandparents had reached in the summer of 1945, when they penned these words…

    “We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…”

Those words– which are the very first words in the UN Charter– were written in the immediate aftermath of World War 2, remember… That is, in the aftermath of a war that nearly everyone nowadays (and most of the victors back then) has thought of as having been a “good war.”
Well, however “good” or necessary it was, the people who had lived through it well understood that it, like every war, was a scourge.
And if even World War 2 was a “scourge”, then what about George W. Bush’s war to invade Iraq??
Now, the two key authors of the war are both in big political trouble. Now is surely therefore the time for the rest of humankind to get together and figure out how to use the United Nations and all its mechanisms for nonviolent problem-solving to rebuild the secure, life-affirming, right-respecting order that those two deeply misguided men and their accomplices have so notably failed to provide.

A victory in the US Congress!

Hurrah! The Friends Committee on National Legislation, a small but very effective organization that lobbies the US Congress on issues of concern to Friends (Quakers), tells us that on Tuesday, the full US Senate,

    declared the United States should not establish permanent military bases in Iraq and added a clear statement that the U.S. does not wish to control Iraq’s oil resources. The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) congratulated Sen. Joseph Biden (DE) on winning approval for the measure, which specifically prohibits the use of any new funds to establish permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq. The House passed a similar ban in March.

Joe Volk, the Executive Secretary of FCNL is quoted there as saying,

    “This is an important milestone in the development of U.S. policy toward Iraq. For the first time since the U.S. launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003, both chambers of Congress have now said the U.S. must change course in Iraq… The Senate vote today sends a clear signal to the people of Iraq, to the international community, and to the people of this country that the United States does not intend to permanently occupy Iraq. This Congressional action also is a strong signal that the Bush administration has to change policy in Iraq now.”

FCNL has the largest team of pro-peace lobbyists of any group that works to educate and persuade the members of the US Congress. It has been quietly working with members of both Houses– and both parties– for more than a year now, urging them to take this first declarative step.
Sadly, though, I have to tell you that FCNL is facing a harsh funding crunch. They have two great staff members– Mary Trotachaud and Rick McDowell– who have both spent a significant length of time doing humanitarian and peacebuilding work in Iraq, including before and since the US invasion. Rick and Mary have unique expertise when it comes to providing solid analysis of what’s going on in Iraq today– and they can speak with unique authority about the country when they go and talk to Members and their staffs.
But if FCNL’s funding crunch continues, they might have to let Mary and Rick go. That would be tragic.
You can find out more about FCNL if you go here. And you can find out how to make a donation to their work– either their lobbying work or their (tax-deductible) Education Fund– if you go here.
Please consider being as generous as you can. We can go on all the peace marches we want. (And I went to my usual Thursday pro-peace vigil here in Charlottesville, Virginia, just this afternoon: we got a great response!) But to really keep up the steady work of persuading our members of Congress that there is a broad and very serious pro-peace movement out here in the citizenry and that they’d better listen to us— well, FCNL is a great national network to be a part of… and it’s a network with its pointedly persuasive end located right there, on Capitol Hill.
Great work, the FCNL team, and all your network of contacts there in the halls of Congress! Even, I should say (though I disagreed with him yesterday on a slightly different issue) thanks for your leadership in winning this declaration, Senator Biden!

Israel has a government

38 days after their recent parliamentary elections, Israel has a government. That link goes to a JPEG file with pics and party affiliations of all the ministers. So it’s 12 Kadima members, seven from Avoda (Labor), two Pensioners, and four from Shas. (Amazing how similar the neatly-groomed bearded men of Shas look like their Hamas counterparts.)
Jonathan Edelstein says he expects this government will be fairly stable:

    My primary reaction to the cabinet lineup (other than being unutterably glad that this idiot [i.e., Avigdor Lieberman] isn’t in it) was how much of an apparatchiks’ gallery it is; other than Peretz at Defense, Rafi Eitan in his new senior citizens’ portfolio and possibly Yuli Tamir at Education, I can’t see any of them making any radical or controversial policy changes..

Here is the list that HaAretz published of the eight agreed policy guidelines that will form the basis of the government’s work.
Crucially, in terms of the prospects for peacemaking, the second and third points are these:

    2. The government aspires to bring about the definition of the state’s permanent borders as a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, and as a democratic state, and will act to do so through a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians on the basis of mutual recognition, existing agreements, the principles of the road map, an end to violence and the disarmament of the terror organizations.
    3. The government shall endeavor, as stated, to conduct negotiations with the Palestinians … but if the Palestinians do not behave as stipulated in the near future, the government shall act even in the absence of negotiations and an agreement with them … The government shall determine the borders of the state. The Israeli settlement in Judea and Samaria must be reduced.

“The near future” makes it sound as though they’re not going to give the Palestinians very long at all to respond on this. Note also the non-specificity of saying “the Palestinians” throughout, rather than “the PA”.
Actually, I still think there’s a fairly high probability that the system of two parallel unilateralisms, on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, that we saw throughout the past 15 months will continue and become more engrained in the practice of both leaderships, at least for the coming couple of years.
As part of this, I believe there’s a distinct possibility the Olmert government might act fairly soon (if still discreetly) to urge Washington to ease up some on the efforts to strangle the Palestinian administration through financial/administrative means.
It is only the Israeli government that is in a position to persuade Washington to do this– and of course, Israel hasn’t had a government able to do it ever since their election campaign started there in late February.
It truly is not in the interests of either the Israelis or anyone else to see an exacerbation of the pain in the Palestinian community. Added to which, using basic international aid payments and the Palestinians’ own tax revenues as a lever to force compliance is quite immoral… And then– they seek compliance with what? with a ‘road map’ that now really doesn’t exist and that Olmert has never believed in?
Anyway, the weeks ahead will tell. let’s check back on this issue in, say, four months, and see how matters stand then.
… One last point: The Israelis got their coalition government formed 38 days after their election… The Palestinians, operating under the difficult logistic conditions imposed by the Israeli occupation authorities, got theirs formed 63 days after their election… And in US-occupied Iraq? Well, it is now 140 days— exactly 20 weeks– since their election, and they still don’t have a government. Ain’t American military occupation a wonderful thing? (Heavy irony alert at the end there.)

Evo makes his move

I want to express my good wishes to Evo Morales and the people of Bolivia as they try to take back some control over their country’s mineral wealth.
It looked to me that he moved intelligently and with good timing– crucially by trying to ensure that the foreign firms operating in Bolivia’s gas fields are not able to destroy vital production and financial records that will help Bolivia to sit down and negotiate the best possible deal with the firms in the weeks ahead.
I see that over at the CSM today, former foreign correspondent Richard O’Mara has quoted Abel Posse, described as “an Argentine novelist and diplomat knowledgeable about the Andean countries” as having written about the Andean indigenous peoples that,””They live bad, die early, pass through cycles of famine. They have been considered incapable of governing and incapable of being governed.”
That sounds either fatalistic or derogatory (or both?). But O’Mara continues:

    But they have held firm to their traditions and values. They know what they believe. They know what they do not believe.
    The people Morales represents, probably a large fraction of the more than 50 percent of the electorate who voted for him, “don’t believe in globalization, don’t believe in capitalism, don’t believe in Marxism. (Che Guevara died in Bolivia because he failed to grasp that.),” wrote Posse. Nor do they believe in the institutions imposed upon them by whites and mestizos: the judicial system, taxation, everything that has to do with the “imaginary republic” created to further the interests of only 10 percent of the population.
    So what do they believe in? Well, for one thing a softer approach to development and a deeper respect for the environment. Bolivia, owing to slash-and-burn agriculture and the worldwide demands for exotic hardwoods, suffers extensive deforestation, soil erosion, and industrial pollution.
    Morales speaks of a cultural federalism, some new institution to bind together the divergent peoples who inhabit Bolivia’s lowlands in the Amazon basin, virtually at sea level, and those of the sierra, who live in remote hamlets, some clinging to the high Andes at nearly 20,000 feet. These are very practical problems and concerns, hardly driven by ideologies of the standard sort.
    Morales speaks frequently of multiculturalism and “convergent economies,” whatever that means. But his policies are not all vague. Quite specifically, he wants to direct the wealth that flows from existing resources (Bolivia has the second largest reserve of natural gas in the continent) to the people who never got it before.
    … Much will be heard in the coming months no doubt about Indian superstitions, mockery of their worship of Pachamama, their goddess who calls upon human beings to care for the earth. The rise of Evo Morales certainly won’t restore the indigenous people of the Andes to their historical high estate. But a little improvement might be in the offing.

By the way, I’d really like to find an English-language website that provides good, unbiased news and commentary regarding what’s happening in Bolivia. (Or I suppose I could understand a Spanish site easily enough.) Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!