I just chose and posted the June 2003 Golden Oldies. I even managed to get them into the ‘Main Index Template’ without crashing the whole software system. Am I making progress, or what?
Anyway, check ’em out! You’ll find them, as always, on the righthand sidebar of the ‘Main’ page if you scroll down a bit.
Author: Helena
Palestinian refugee issues
This is so embarrassing. I was going through my June 2003 posts to pick some ‘Golden Oldies’ and I found this one, which I hadn’t ever hit ‘Publish’ for…. So it’s just been sitting there in Draft form in my JWN files…. Might as well publish it now, eh? Far as I can figure the situation’s about as described there….
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Palestinian refugee issue these past few days, in connection with a big writing project I’m working on. It’s hard issue to discuss much, publicly, here in the US, where much of the hardest of hard-line Israeli rhetoric about the refugees has just been accepted at face value.
That is, such mendacious old canards as (1) the refugees all left their homes in 1948 because the Arab leaders told them to. (Therefore they don’t have any “right” to return to their homes… ) Or (2) that the refugee camps are all run as training camps for the Palestinian militant groups and should be disbanded immediately. Or (3) that the Palestinians should all just resettle in the countries where they now are. (What’s all this about a “right” of return, anyway?). Or (4), that Arafat only raised the issue of the refugees in late 2000, suddenly and “capriciously”, with the sole aim of torpedoing the negotiations. Or (5), that anyway, before the Jews started going to Israel in the 20th century there weren’t even many Arabs there at all; the ones who were there just before 1948 were nearly all recent migrants who’d been attracted only by the Jewish wealth being poured into the country to “make it bloom”…
Are those the main ones? Any more?
I’ve been trying to figure out just why it is that the Palestinian refugee issue pushes such ultra-sensitive buttons for so many Israelis and so many of their supporters worldwide. What’s the big deal? Why is it that these ultra-Zionists feel they have to be so combative (defensive) about the refugee question that oftentimes they just refuse to discuss or even examine the claims of the refugees at all?
I think there are probably two reasons:
Memories of the truce that failed
I’ve just about finished (let’s hope!) reviewing the final edit of the long piece I’ve written for Boston Review since I got back from Israel/Palestine. It should be in the upcoming issue.
Anyway, here’s one little bit of data I pulled together for the piece, that I’ve been pondering on quite a lot since. This does not attempt to be a complete description and analysis of Palestinian-initiated hudna (truce) of last year. It just presents some of the basic casualty figure for that period. You’ll have to read the BR piece to find the longer version (and a lot more, too.)
When Mahmoud Abbas became Palestinian Prime Minister in May 2003, one of
his first priorities was to persuade Hamas and Islamic Jihad to agree to
the broad Palestinian hudna vis-a-vis Israel that was required
from the Palestinians under the terms of the Road Map. By late June, he and his
main negotiator on this front, Ziad Abu Amr, had won the support of all the
Palestinian factions for a three-month truce. The truce went almost immediately into effect.
Here are the casualty figures for that period:
- Number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in Israel or the occupied territories:
May 2003–13
June–28
July–2
Ariel Sharon’s government in Israel never felt itself bound any commitment
to any kind of reciprocal ceasefire. Nevertheless, many Israelis were
extremely eager to see an easing of the tensions, particularly with the annual
tourist season about to peak. So, though Sharon reserved the right to carry
on with actions like the extrajudicial killings he ordered against suspected
Palestinian militants and the use of excessively lethal fire against demonstrators,
still, the Palestinians’ announcement and indeed enactment of the truce in
late June 2003 evidently had an effect on Israel’s behavior, too:
Gender and whistleblowing
Katherine Gun, Clare Short, Jane Turner,* Sherron Watkins,** hundreds of female service members now in the Gulf…
What do all these people have in common?
They are all female and they have all been whistleblowers on major abuses of the public trust that have been undertaken by supposedly responsible people in their own workplaces.
Is this a trend? How might we account for it?
I raised this question over our morning coffee today with Bill, the spouse.
“Maybe women are more honest?” he speculated. (What a sweetheart!)
“Or maybe,” I said, “many of these abuses are things that are done in some kind of a good-ol’-boys culture in the workplace, and the women have never been invited to become part of that? In fact, I’m sure a lot of women in all these organizations have had major battles of their own trying to deal with the good ol’ boys… So really, you wouldn’t expect them to have any investment in good-ol’-boy culture, would you?”
Anyway, it’s an interesting question. What do you JWN readers think?
—
* FBI agent, reported on a theft by another FBI agent from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. FBI responded by trying to dismiss her. (Today’s WaPo, p.A11. Hate their new registration system so not putting in link.)
** Revealed some of Ken Lay’s misdoings at Enron
Suicide bombings, contd.
In a post
here yesterday (Tuesday), I posed five questions about the phenomenon of
Palestinian suicide bombings and assigned myself the pretty onerous task
of addressing them “over the coming days.” (You can go straight to
the list of questions, from
here
.) In that earlier post, I tried to tackle Question 1, Is there
something about these types of attack that makes them uniquely different
from any other form of assault against a society, and if so, what is it?
— and I made some reference to a couple of the later questions.
Today, I want to start at Question 2, Do the “special” attributes of this
form of attack justify “special” forms of response against those judged
responsible for such attacks? And maybe from there I’ll segué
right on into Question 3: How broadly or narrowly should such “responsibility”
be ascribed?
Palestinian suicide bombings: another explanation
So here I am, trying to work through the whole complex subject of Palestinian suicide bombings (and the nature of Israel’s reactions to them)… But Ze’ev Boim, Israel’s deputy Defense Minister, thinks he might have the answer.
Tuesday, he made a statement in public in which he asked: “What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness.”
According to this story by Yair Ettinger in today’s Ha’Aretz, Boim’s statement created “a firestorm of outrage” in Israel. Ettinger reported on a number of outraged comments made by Members of Knesset from the Labor-and-to-the-left and Arab parties. (Go read them.)
But here’s my question: Where’s the outrage from political or cultural figures in the United States?
Imagine how great, and how rapidly organized, the outrage would be if a deputy minister in an Arab country (or anywhere else) had gone on the record with exactly parallel comments about the Jews! But here is a clear example of hate-speech… And where, oh where, is the outrage– or even, any expression of mild criticism– from pols and other public personalities in the US?
In addition to the various criticisms of Boim’s speech that various political figures inside Israel voiced publicly, Ettinger also reported the following significant reactions from Israeli personalities:
Continue reading “Palestinian suicide bombings: another explanation”
Cole on Sistani and Mudarrisi
Okay, I know I just criticized Juan Cole for his reading (or, non-reading) of the Brahimi report. But his blog is, in general, just the most amazing resource for everyone around the world who is interested in, and cares deeply about, Iraq. I was so happy that he won the 2003 Koufax Award for “Best expert blog”. (I hope that the rest of you all voted for him there, as I did.)
Today, in addition to his post about the Brahimi report, he had two interesting posts that were up to his usual standard of careful, well-informed analysis. In this one he cites a statement that Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued on Monday, in which Sistani spelled out yet again his view that, “the UN should play a central role in the transfer of power to the Iraqis.”
In this post, he wrote about a statement from another Iraqi Grand Ayatollah, Muhammad Taqi al-Mudarrisi, the leader of the Organization of Islamic Action, which Cole describes as “a mostly Karbala-based party”. Notable in Mudarrisi’s statement was a strongly worded warning that any undue delay in holding direct elections in Iraq would be,
- “a time bomb that could explode at any minute… Without elections, our national institutions will remain shaken, unrecognized and distrusted by the people.”
The contrast between (the reported versions of) these two statements–both issued on the day the Brahimi report was being unveiled in New York–seems significant to me.
Brahimi report: a realistic way forward
Y’all know that I admire Juan Cole a lot. However, I wish he had read the Brahimi Report on Iraq some before he made the sweeping judgment that, “This way of proceeding seems to me unlikely to be fruitful.”
The reasoning Juan provides for this judgment is to note that Annan reportedly plans to send Lakhdar Brahimi back to Iraq to consult with “leading political figures” there over how to proceed– and then, to completely and quite unjustifiably conflate that latter category with the Iraqi Governing Council!
No other reading of the Brahimi report that I have seen–including my own–supports that conflation. (Tsk, tsk, Juan!) Instead, what the report talks about is the urgent need for consultation “among the Iraqi stakeholders”, in order to reach agreement on all the many modalities of the transition process including the elections that will be a central part of it. Elsewhere, it mentions that such stakeholders include a broad spectrum of community leaders in Iraq, of which the IGC is only one among many.
The report itself is definitely worth reading. It presents what seems to me to be a realistic appraisal of the current situation in Iraq, as well as of the prospects for holding the nationwide elections there that at this point–thankfully!– just about everyone agrees need to be part of any workable and credible transition back to viable Iraqi national sovereignty.
Significantly, the seven-person team that global media star Brahimi headed was one that included both people with solid experience of analyzing current Iraqi affairs and people with solid experience of organizing elections during troubled political transitions. A serious and well-chosen team.
Its expertise shines out throughout the whole report. Paragraph 50, “Recommendations”, is obviously central.
Pentagon’s Iraqi SOFA collapses
Can you hear it? Clunk, clunk, clunk. That’s the sound of the Bushies’ latest hastily-cobbled-together “plan” for post-Saddam Iraq falling apart, one major portion at a time.
The latest part of the Pentagon’s (shockingly misnamed) “plan” to collapse is the part known as a “Status of Forces Agreement”, or SOFA.
In this report in today’s NYT, Dexter Filkins tells us that:
- Iraq’s interim leaders said Sunday that they could not negotiate a formal agreement with the American military on maintaining troops in Iraq, and that the task must await the next sovereign Iraqi government.
Interesting, huh? I wonder what it feels like for all those ignorant, manipulative, and cynical neo-cons (is there any other kind?) when they see all their treasured plans falling apart one by one by one.
I wrote about the importance of the SOFA issue twice back in January, here and here. In the second of those posts, I recalled an earlier SOFA-type agreement in the Middle East that had been concluded with a “successor regime” that notably was not regarded as politically legitimate by its own people, and that as a result collapsed catastrophically. That was the security agreement that Sharon’s government concluded with Amin Gemayyel’s government, in Lebanon.
In that earlier case, the very fact that Gemayyel had been willing to conclude such an agreement with Israel contributed to the general sense of the illegitimacy of his government. Evidently the IGC in Iraq, many of whose members have a highly realistic appraisal of their own lack of domestic legitimacy, was eager to avoid a similar fate.
For example, in Filkin’s piece, he writes:
Hard thinking about suicide bombings
Yesterday, in West Jerusalem, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated his
bomb on a crowded early-morning bus. Eight people–actually nine,
including
the bomber himself– were killed, and scores injured.
What a tragedy.
Here
are some details about seven of these people.
I was in West Jerusalem exactly two weeks ago. When I visited Israel in
2002, I was glad to have the opportunity to take a few bus-rides, as I
hoped
it would show some sort of solidarity with my many friends in Israel who,
I know, live with a constant level of dread that something like this may
happen.
On my most recent visit to Jerusalem, just two weeks ago, I
didn’t ride a bus.
But I made a point of spending an evening walking
over to Ben Yehuda Street and eating in a nice, popular restaurant there.
The same sort of (perhaps ill-focused) “solidarity” at work.
The Israeli government and, it seems, many people in Israel are vocal in
making the case that the fear they suffer from the suicide bombers
justifies
many of the policies their government has adopted taken and continues to
adopt
toward (or against) the Palestinians.
That includes the policy of not
negotiating with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority–on the grounds
that
the extremely hard-pressed PA is “not tough enough” on the militant
organizations
that organize the missions of the suicide bombers.
It also, more currently,
includes the government’s pursuit of its present wall-building project in
the West Bank.
I think I understand a little about how terrible it must feel to live in
a country that is subject to periodic suicide-bomb assaults, many of them
detonated in places filled with civilians.
I have only spent a little
time in Israel.
But back when I was in Lebanon in the late 1970s, car-bomb
attacks against “soft”, civilian-packed targets were certainly one of the
many tactics used by the (Israeli-backed) Maronite extremist organizations
against the people of mainly-Muslim West Beirut.
Like most of the other
western journalists working in Lebanon at that time, I lived in West
Beirut.
I also had my children there.
Yes, we were living within the bounds
of an always unpredictable civil war (which was why I left the city, with
my children, in 1981).
Many horrendous things happened while I was
there– and of course, many even worse things, in 1982, after I was gone.
But one of the things that happened periodically in West Beirut was
certainly car-bombs.