HaAretz had a fascinating piece yesterday that was Ari Shavit’s account of a fierce discussion he had with Kadima MK (and Labor defecter) Haim Ramon about the virtues of the ‘spearation barrier’ (the Wall) and the whole Kadima mindset of unilateral separation that goes with it.
Since this is certainly the main issue in today’s election in Israel, I thought people might want to read the article. It’s here.
Author: Helena
Perspectives on Iraq
This is just to note that our friends Reidar, Shirin, and Salah have continued their good discussion on intra-UIA and UIA-US issues down on this JWN comments board.
Meanwhile, Juan Cole is still referring in a quite uncritical way to Abdel-Aziz Hakim as “the Iraqi Shiite cleric who heads the largest bloc in the elected parliament.”
Iraqi and US women on war, occupation, peace
I’m here attending the two-day conference Creating our Common Future, which is billed as an “Iraqi and American Women’s Summit”. The morning’s session was extraordinary. We had six Iraqi women and one man up there on the platform, in a lengthy panel discussion titled “Stories from the Ground”, that was moderated by Elizabeth Vargas, the co-anchor of the big network news program that ABC News does every day.
Of the seven Iraqis, one (the ethnic Kurdish judge Zakia Hakki) was a strong cheerleader for the US invasion of, and continued presence in, Iraq; a couple– including Faiza al-Araji and Dr. Rashad Zaydan (a pharamacist working with a charitable organization in Baghdad and Fallujah)– were outspoken critics; and the rest were all somewhere in between.
I believe the Iraqi “delegates” here (not sure that anyone has actually been “delegated” to be here; but it sounds important, doesn’t it?) have had some time meeting just with each other over the weekend.
And then just before lunch, the deep differences among the US invitees here became clear, too. First up there was Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictne nun who gave a truly inspiring, wonderful short sermon about the folly and tragedy of the whole war venture, and the need for us all “not to drink from the water of hate.” Then there was Olara Otunnu, a Ugandan-American who’s worked with the UN for a long time, including as Sec-Gen’s Special Rep for Children and Armed Conflict. He gave a kind of generic plea for everyone to focus on the children, saying very little of any specificity to Iraq. And then we had Charlotte Ponticelli, who’s the “Senior Coordinator for International Women’s Issues” at the State Dept.
Sr. Joan had gotten a standing ovation from most of the 120 or so people present, for her oration. Ponticelli tried to follow that performance with some extreme rhetorical flourishes, and with continual references to “the courage of our Iraqi sisters who have stepped up to the plate“– a very provincially American metaphor from (I think) baseball that most people from outside the US find quite mystifying… Exactly what plate it was the Iraqi women had “stepped up to”, and what they were expected to do now they were there– all that was left very general…
And she talked again and again about how her Bushite masters had “liberated” the Iraqis, and how much better things were in Iraq now than before 2003, etc.
It’s been an interesting experience being in this gathering where the differences of opinion within each of the two bodies politic are so very, very evident.
I’m not sure exactly what the organizers are hoping to get out of the event. Oh, here‘s one early expression of their goals:
Continue reading “Iraqi and US women on war, occupation, peace”
Peace train, part 2
Thursday, I wrote here about the guy who came and asked if I could tell him where to get a pro-peace yard sign like the one we have, and how I gave him one there and then.
Before he left, he asked how much he could pay me. I told him they cost $5, but really not to bother. Before he left we introduced ourselves to each other: “By the way, I’m Helena”… “And I’m Phil. Nice to meet you.”
Yesterday, I found $5 in our mail box. It was wrapped in a piece of paper saying, “Helena– Thanks for what you’re doing for our country– Phil.”
What a great end to the story.
Today, I came up to NYC by, yes, real metal train. And yes, I did get my bg BR piece almost completely written. 9,600 words. (And yes, that is the short version.)
…Terrible day (again) in Iraq, today. Oh my G-d.
Tomorrow I’m going to a “summit meeting” of pro-peace US and Iraqi women convened by the Global Peace Initiative of Women. Faiza will be speaking there… Maybe they’ll have wifi in the hotel and I can blog it in near real time?
Who are the Palestinian militants?
I am getting increasingly fed-up with the way so much of the western MSM continues mindlessly to echo the refrain that the Hamas people are “militants”. You almost always see the word “militant” attached to the name “Hamas” once or many times in any news report…
But the militants in the Palestinians arena these days are not Hamas people. Hamas has not undertaken any militant action at all against Israel (or anyone else) since the end of Setember 2005. And that brief single episode in September was the result of a ghastly, if perhaps understandable, mistake on its behalf. Prior to that, Hamas had maintained the discipline of the tahdi’eh (“calming”) quite fully since the end of last March. And once the Hamas leaders recognized their mistake in September, they immediately reinstituted the discipline of the tahdi’eh.
The “militants” these days in Palestine are people affiliated with Fateh, not with Hamas.
Hamas is politically hardline, yes. But it is not now actively “militant.” Writers and editors make a serious mistake– whether wilfully, or through inattention– if they fail to recognize the difference. We should give credit where credit is due to Hamas, for having shown so much discipline and self-restraint with respect to the tahdi’eh, which it has stuck to, remember, in the face of numerous continuing acts of anti-Palestinian violence committed by Israel over the past year.
Abu Mazen plays hardball (but not with Israel)
I regret that I didn’t get to see PA president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) when I was in Palestine recently. It seemed that whenever I was in Gaza, he was in Ramallah, and vice versa. (He was also out of the country for a while there.)
Anyway, I did get to speak to some old friends who know him well. One man of great political smarts and great political connections told me, off the record, back at the end of February that,
- Abu Mazen felt badly wounded by Hamas in the [January] election. Now he wants to humiliate them in return… That’s why we’re facing some months of wrangling between the President and the PLC.
Well, my friend was right. In the past few days, Abbas has launched a number of political initiatives designed to circumsrcibe Hamas’s power, even though (or, in my friend’s view, precisely because) Hamas trounced Abbas’s Fateh Party at the polls. These intiatives have included moves to grab as many as possible of the (admittedly meager) levers of power at the disposal of the PA to his office in the Presidency, and away from control of the Hamas-led government.
(Ironic, of course, that when Abbas was the PM and Arafat was the Prez, the US had striven mightily and with great success to get these powers shifted to the PM’s office… )
In addition, according to this article by Chris McGreal in today’s Guardian, Abbas is delivering a letter to Hamas PM-designate Ismail Haniyeh today. According to “sources close to Mr Abbas” this letter “is intended to ‘draw the battle lines’ with Hamas, but it also serves as a warning to Israel and foreign powers that threats to sever aid and links are likely to strengthen rather than weaken the Islamist party.
McGreal said he “saw” the letter before it was delivered. (Was he able to read it as well, I wonder?)
Anyway, HaAretz’a Akiva Eldar also has a piece about this letter in his paper today (on Shabbat? How does that work? Maybe they just have an online edition on Shabbat?). He writes that though he didn’t ‘see” the letter itself, he and a group of other reporters were briefed about its contents by Abbas’s aide Tayeb Abdel-Rahim.
Kind of interesting and significant, I think, that the content of this intra-Palestinian letter would, at a time of continuing, very tough conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, be briefed to Israeli reporters even before it is transmitted to PM-designate Haniyeh?
I guess the letter is part of Abbas’s attempt, discreetly, to have some influence for the good on the Israeli elections. (I.e. by showing that he is “standing up to” Hamas, and therefore that “there IS someone to talk to on the Palestinian side”– i.e. him.)
This was also, even more clearly, the intention of the interview that he gave to Eldar last Wednesday.
Eldar wrote there about Abbas that:
Continue reading “Abu Mazen plays hardball (but not with Israel)”
Harvard’s shame (and Chicago’s)
So it is indeed true. Harvard has indeed “removed its logo” from the footnoted version of the Mearsheimer/Walt study that is archived on a Keenedy School website, as HaAretz‘s Shmuel Rosner reported..
In addition,
- The university also appended a more strongly worded disclaimer to the study, stating that it reflects the views of its authors only. The former disclaimer said merely that the study “does not necessarily” reflect the university’s views.
This is totally shameful pandering on behalf of this money-grubbing institution of so-called “higher learning”. (H’mm, I wonder what lesson about academic independence and the value of evidence-based research students are supposed to take from this episode?)
Universities and other research institutions publish studies all the time on the basis that these studies “do not necessarily represent” the views of the institution. (Which leaves it an open question as to whether the study in question does do so, or not.) That is what a commitment to the freedom of enquiry is all about.
So Harvard (and Chicago) now seem to be going quite a bit further when they now, in what was presumably a carefully considered statement of disclaimer on the front page of the web-archived version, state that,
- The two authors of this Working Paper are solely responsible for the views expressed in it. As academic institutions, Harvard University and the University of Chicago do not take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty, and this article should not be interpreted or portrayed as reflecting the official position of either institution.
And then, the withholding of the Harvard logo is quite pathetic. Though really, since Harvard is indeed proceeding in this craven, pandery way, if I were Walt and Mearsheimer I would consider a “Harvard logo” to be a thing of very little value.
Interestingly, HaAretz also today carries a fairly nuanced evaluation of the M-W paper by Daniel Levy, a key Shimon Peres ally who was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Accord.
Levy expresses a couple of criticisms of the M-W paper. (I agree with him completely that M&W should have mentioned the Lobby’s conflict with Bush I and Baker over loan guarantees, in 1991-92. Notable, because as I wrote in this book, (1) B&B “won” on the immediate issue of the loan guarantees; but then (2) they were majorly punished by the Lobby in the 1992 election; and Bush I’s defeat in that election stood thereafter for the Clintonites and for Bush II as an object lesson in why they shouldn’t even dream of confronting the Lobby… This, even though many solid analysts of US politics pointed out at the time that “it’s the economy, stupid!” was even more central to Bush’s electoral defeat. But the Lobby’s ideological enforcers managed to get their view of things very “forcefully” across to all the pols… )
But Levy concludes,
Peace train gathering steam, oh yeah!
A really moving thing happened during our regular Thursday afternoon peace
demo today. There were about five of us there, stretched along the
same rim of sidewalk at the big intersection outside the Federal Government
Building in town where we always stand. It was amazingly, gratifyingly
noisy, with a greater proportion of motorists “honking for peace” than I
remember, ever. I was trying to shout a few words of conversation
over my shoulder with my friend Virginia, while also holding up my “Honk
for Peace” sign to the traffic moving in from the right and waving and establishing eye contact with the drivers as they approached. (Waving: friendly; often provokes a response in kind; plus
it draws attention to us standing there.)
I didn’t notice a guy who
was walking along the sidewalk towards us till he stopped right near me and
said, “Thanks so much for doing this, guys, I’m just back from there.”
“Just back?” I said. “In the military?”
“Yes. Got back two months ago.”
I turned to face him, reached out my spare hand, and grabbed him by the arm.
“I am so glad you came back safe,” I said.
He looked as though he wanted to hug me, right there in the street. But I was holding
two signs in my left hand. Plus, well, hugging a strange guy on the
street didn’t feel right. So I kept holding his arm. “Where were
you?” I said
“Baghdad.”
“You doing okay now?”
“Well, it’s been hard finding work. People don’t want to hire me when
they hear I still have a commitment to the military.”
“That sucks! But how’s your head? You having any nightmares?”
“Some.”
“So make sure you get the help you need. Say, you want to stand here
with us a while? We’ve got some spare signs.”
“I’m not supposed to. I’m still in the reserves. But I’m really
glad you folks are here. That’s bad there.”
And then he walked away. Afterwards, of course I wished I’d followed
him, got his story, talked a bunch more to him. But we didn’t have
many demonstrators today (I guess because of the peace march we also held
last Monday.) So I had just decided to stay on-mission there instead.
After he’d left, my friend Heather looked at me and said, “That was so
moving. I almost cried.” Me, I was biting back tears too.
… The general karma these days feels as though the head of anti-war steam
is starting to rise faster and stronger than ever before. And
I don’t think it’s just here, in what some people call “the People’s Democratic
Republic of Charlottesville.” After all, what I’m looking at here are
trends, over time… Another example: three years ago, back at the beginning of the war,
when I put my pro-peace yard sign out next to our driveway, one of the main
things that happened was that people would steal it, or trash it, or rip
it out and throw it down the nearby swale…
Then yesterday, after 18 months of no anti-war yard sign (but a couple of election
ones in there along the way), I planted out one of the spiffy new signs that
C’vill Center for Peace and Justice has been selling. On one side it says
“End the war now” and on the other, “Wage peace.” (This time, they
remembered to put the CCPJ web address at the bottom of the sign, too. Great
work!)
So I put it out, and less than three hours afterwards I hear a ring at our doorbell.
I go answer it, and there’s a heavyset looking white guy standing there whom I’ve never
met before. “Excuse me, ma’am, but I wanted to ask where you get your
yard sign. I’d really like one like it.”
“Ya… what?”
“I want to know how to get one.”
So I told him I just, actually, “happened” to have a spare one in the garage.
Told him I needed to shut the door on him so the dog wouldn’t get out
on the street, and ran to get the spare sign from the garage to give it to
him.
Amazing.
We’ve been doing our pro-peace work consistently, rain and shine, ever
since before the war. It feels great right now to feel such a strong
shift in our direction.
OPT’s: solid humanitarian info
This is Reliefweb’s portal to solid, sector-by-sector information about the humanitarian situation i the Occupied Palestinian territories.
Through there you can go to this March 19 report from the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on the humanitarian impact of the closures of the Karni (al-Muntar) crossing. It stated,
- Gaza requires 450MT of wheat each day to maintain bread supplies. The usual 30-60 day wheat stock kept in Gaza is exhausted. Other basic food commodities are in extremely short supply including dairy products and fruit. Rice and sugar are selling at more than twice their normal price and are also very difficult to find in stores.
Karni crossing (al Muntar) is the only source to import large-scale quantities of wheat and the commercial terminal for imports and exports of goods from Israel. As of today, Karni crossing has been closed 46 days or 60% of this year. (Four of the days (10-13 January — ‘Eid al Adha) were due to Palestinian decision making. ) In comparison, in 2005, Karni was closed for a total of 18% of the year and 19% of the year in 2004.
United Nations organisations are facing similar constraints. UNRWA has been unable to start its emergency food distribuition today because of insufficient wheatflour supplies. The World Food Programme reports that 3,594 MT of wheatflour contracted to local mills were unable to enter Gaza during the recent brief period Karni was opened.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) state that the reason for Karni’s closure is the suspected presence of tunnels dug by Palestinian militants leading to the crossing. The IDF contends that it will not open the crossing until the Palestinian Authority (PA) digs several trenches to intercept these tunnels. Palestinian security services, at the request of the IDF, have dug four trenches, totalling more than 1.5 kilometres in length around the crossing, in an effort to find these tunnels. So far, none have been found.
The report also has a helpful-looking timeline. It makes depressing reading, mainly detailing how many times the IDF demanded that the Palestinians dig ever deeper and deeper trenches in order to discover those oh-so-elusive “tunnels”. The only possible trace of possible tunnel-start was discovered on 20 January:
- 5 January: The IDF requests the Palestinian Authority (PA) to dig a trench west of the Karni crossing to intercept a possible tunnel leading to the crossing. The PA starts this work the same day, digging a 6 metre trench approximately 1km in length.
20 January: The PA completes the trench. According to the IDF, one tunnel was discovered, while according to the PA, a small hole, possibly the start of a tunnel, connecting to a water pipeline was discovered.
That trench was 6 meters deep. Later, the IDF demanded that the PA dig three more trenches, one of them “10m in depth, 300m long,” Still no further evidence of anything even possibly resembling tunneling was found…
Two good blog discussions…
I wish I had more time to spend on moderating the discussions on this blog, which frequently become shrill and excessively combative. On the other hand, most readers are adults who can figure out for themselves whether and how to “read” the comments boards.
In general, though, the ability to have this kind of cross-continental, open-ended discussion is a treasure that I don’t want to curtail too much. It really does allow for the creation of new knowledge and new understanding. (I have long believed that knowledge is an essentially social rather than individual creation… I mean, who taught Tom Hobbes and John Locke to speak and to express themselves, in the first place? Their ability to reason and to argue sure as heck didn’t “grow like mushrooms out of the ground” at all…. Ooops, end of communitarian rant, here.)
So anyway, I thought readers might like to see some useful new knowledge being created in these two portions of the blogosphere:
- — Jonathan’s recent post (and the subsequent discussion) on the constitution and meaning of the Hamas government lineup, and
— Reidar Visser’s comment (in particular), as posted onto my post here yesterday about the continuing, extremely high-stakes political wrangling in Iraq.
Once JWN readers and commenters see how constructive discussions like this actually work, and how they serve us all by expanding the available knowledge base, perhaps you will all be a bit more mindful that this effect does not occur if people get into name-calling of the “hateful Helena” (or “hateful anyone else”) variety, or if they don’t actually make an effort to contribute new knowledge or their own thoughtfully conceived questions to the discussion. Also, it doesn’t really occur very easily if people go wildly off topic.
… One thing I’ve considered here is to see if anyone wants to take on the role of JWN’s “Bernhard”. Bernhard is the guy who started a parallel-universe blog called Moon of Alabama, where people could comment on Billmon’s Whiskey Bar blog, after Billmon shut down his comment section. MoA has evolved quite a bit since then.
Bernhard’s comments here are interesting. Actually, suddenly I’m thinking: why not ask Bernhard to run a JWN comment-site?
Does anyone have any other suggestions? Mail me.