The videos from the April 18 Chicago Hearing, which looked into whether U.S. policy on Israel upholds American values, are now all available through their website.
I really apologize to readers that I haven’t yet had time to write up my personal impressions of that amazing afternoon, when I was the moderator for all three of the panel discussions. But now, you can watch the sessions for yourself and have your own impressions, so maybe that’s better.
If you look at that portal page for the videos, you’ll see that you could organize a series of three (or four) viewing parties in your church, temple, mosque, school, or other community or neighborhood group. You could watch segments 1,2, and 3 at the first session (72 minutes total viewing time); segments 6, 7, and 8 at the second session (75 minutes viewing time), and segments 4, 5, and 9 at the third session (63 minutes). Having the video-viewing portion slightly shorter in that last session would give you more time to start brainstorming things your group could actually do to help organize and work for justice for Palestinians.
If you only have time (at first) to see just one of these segments, I urge you to go and watch this one.
If you noodle around a bit on the CH website you can find and download the truly excellent information sheets they produced on all the topics discussed. You can also find– right there on the front page– their suggestions of actions you and your colleagues and friends can undertake.
What a great initiative that was (and still is!) My biggest thanks to Jennifer Bing-Canar and all the other people who worked long and hard to organize the Hearing.
Of course, we’ll know the campaign has been making some real inroads once the relevant U.S, congressional committees themselves start organizing hearings like this, to hear testimony from people who have suffered directly from the use the State of Israel has made of all the many, many benefits it gets from the U.S. government.
Author: Helena
Mearsheimer writes obituary for ‘two-state’ option
Prof. John Mearsheimer gave a great talk at the Palestine Center in Washington DC on Thursday, under the title “The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners.”
His most important conclusion was this:
- Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a “Greater Israel,” which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream.
(I should note that there is more than one form of Zionist dream. Judah Magnes and other pioneers of the revival of Hebrew language and Jewish life in Palestine in the early and mid-twentieth century had a “dream” of a binational state there. That dream can still be revived today. But Mearsheimer does recognize that stream in Zionist thought, as well– see below.)
Mearsheimer also gave this good, short analysis of the situation in American Jewish community:
- American Jews who care deeply about Israel can be divided into three broad categories. The first two are what I call “righteous Jews” and the “new Afrikaners,” which are clearly definable groups that think about Israel and where it is headed in fundamentally different ways. The third and largest group is comprised of those Jews who care a lot about Israel, but do not have clear-cut views on how to think about Greater Israel and apartheid. Let us call this group the “great ambivalent middle.”
Righteous Jews have a powerful attachment to core liberal values. They believe that individual rights matter greatly and that they are universal, which means they apply equally to Jews and Palestinians. They could never support an apartheid Israel. They also understand that the Palestinians paid an enormous price to make it possible to create Israel in 1948. Moreover, they recognize the pain and suffering that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967. Finally, most righteous Jews believe that the Palestinians deserve a viable state of their own, just as the Jews deserve their own state. In essence, they believe that self-determination applies to Palestinians as well as Jews, and that the two-state solution is the best way to achieve that end. Some righteous Jews, however, favor a democratic bi-national state over the two-state solution.
To give you a better sense of what I mean when I use the term righteous Jews, let me give you some names of people and organizations that I would put in this category. The list would include Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, Tony Karon, Naomi Klein, MJ Rosenberg, Sara Roy, and Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss fame, just to name a few. I would also include many of the individuals associated with J Street and everyone associated with Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as distinguished international figures such as Judge Richard Goldstone. Furthermore, I would apply the label to the many American Jews who work for different human rights organizations, such as Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch.
On the other side we have the new Afrikaners, who will support Israel even if it is an apartheid state. These are individuals who will back Israel no matter what it does, because they have blind loyalty to the Jewish state. This is not to say that the new Afrikaners think that apartheid is an attractive or desirable political system, because I am sure that many of them do not. Surely some of them favor a two-state solution and some of them probably have a serious commitment to liberal values. The key point, however, is that they have an even deeper commitment to supporting Israel unreservedly. The new Afrikaners will of course try to come up with clever arguments to convince themselves and others that Israel is really not an apartheid state, and that those who say it is are anti-Semites. We are all familiar with this strategy.
I would classify most of the individuals who head the Israel lobby’s major organizations as new Afrikaners. That list would include Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress, and Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, just to name some of the more prominent ones. I would also include businessmen like Sheldon Adelson, Lester Crown, and Mortimer Zuckerman as well as media personalities like Fred Hiatt and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Peretz of the New Republic. It would be easy to add more names to this list.
The key to determining whether the lobby can protect apartheid Israel over the long run is whether the great ambivalent middle sides with the new Afrikaners or the righteous Jews. The new Afrikaners have to win that fight decisively for Greater Israel to survive as a racist state.
There is no question that the present balance of power favors the new Afrikaners. When push comes to shove on issues relating to Israel, the hardliners invariably get most of those American Jews who care a lot about Israel to side with them. The righteous Jews, on the other hand, hold considerably less sway with the great ambivalent middle, at least at this point in time. This situation is due in good part to the fact that most American Jews – especially the elders in the community – have little understanding of how far down the apartheid road Israel has travelled and where it is ultimately headed. They think that the two-state solution is still a viable option and that Israel remains committed to allowing the Palestinians to have their own state. These false beliefs allow them to act as if there is little danger of Israel becoming South Africa, which makes it easy for them to side with the new Afrikaners.
This situation, however, is unsustainable over time. Once it is widely recognized that the two-state solution is dead and Greater Israel is a reality, the righteous Jews will have two choices: support apartheid or work to help create a democratic bi-national state.
‘Just War’ theory in the spotlight
I am briefly in London. Got here this morning. Heading to Wales on Saturday for some executive/management coaching… But recently, I was discussing with some friends the status of the whole body of theory called ‘Just War’ theory— in connection with it having coming under such stark attack from the strident Israel-first apologists of the so-called ‘Lawfare Project.’
So here I am, staying in the strongly Quaker-affiliated Penn Club in Bloomsbury, and what do I find in the library but a copy of Peter Brown’s important study of the life and work of Augustine of Hippo, who was the prelate who first introduced into Christian theology the idea that some wars could indeed be ‘just.’
Prior to that, most followers of Jesus of Nazareth had worked hard to follow in his pacifistic footsteps. But by the time Augustine, who was born in North Africa, got coverted to the faith in the late 4th century CE, Christianity was well on its way to becoming the religion of the Roman Empire. And it was after (‘Christian’) Rome was sacked by the Goths that Augustine sat down in North Africa and started writing the multi-volume work, “The City of God” that planted the first seeds of the permissibility of war.
So I sat and read a couple of the relevant chapters of Brown’s book. Then I went to the nearby British Museum and discovered that I had just, by about half an hour, missed attending a lecture on the sack of Rome.
It happened exactly 1,600 years ago this year… And the reverberations of the church’s subsequent “conversion”, under Augustine’s urging, to a doctrine that permitted war, have been strongly felt throughout Europe and indeed the whole world, until today.
Just War theory is really a sort of two-edged implement. It seeks to strictly restrict and regulate the occasions on which a ‘just’ ruler can have recourse to war. (Indeed it seems to be predicated on a realistically strong recognition that wars always cause harm, even when their cause is ‘just’, and that their course is always unpredictable.) But, for the first time in the history of Christianity, once Just war theory was promulgated and adopted, wars thereafter became permissible… which is one heck of a dangerous slippery slope to be sliding around at the top of.
Because if you think about it, no-one who has ever started a war has set out from the get-got with anything less than the firm conviction that this war is just.
But, um, in that case, how can two countries ever fight each other, if the causes for which both of them are fighting are just?
Imagine this: George W. Bush, to a still-skeptical Congress in late 2002: “Well, I admit our evidence on the Iraqi WMDs is kind of spotty; and it’s true we really haven’t exhausted all the diplomatic options for dealing with our concerns; and I realize that if we launch an invasion of Iraq things there may take a very unpredictable course… but I’m asking you to give me congressional backing to take the nation into war against Iraq, if need be.”
No, that’s not how leaders launch wars. First they convince themselves that this is a war of absolute necessity, then they set about convincing others, colluding in the manipulation of the evidence if that’s what it takes.
The Nuremberg Tribunal had it absolutely right when, in the statute establishing the tribunal they declared the launching of an aggressive war to be a crime against the peace. Too bad the provisions the negotiators for the 1998 Rome Treaty, which established the International Criminal Court, never gave substance to the (still-hollow) provisions made in its text for the (future) criminalization of the launching of war.
As I have argued on numerous occasions, waging war is the original Ur-atrocity that creates the circumstances in which all the other kinds of atrocity that were fleshed out and given teeth to at Rome, then occur and proliferate.
Well, anyway, what is there to say about all these “lawfare” people who smear and defame Judge Goldstone and everyone else who tries to call Israel to account for its actions; and who accuse all the human-rights and international humanitarian law activists around the world of “unfairly singling out Israel”?
Mainly, that we’ve seen it all before– from apologists for every single state that has ever been accused of committing atrocities.
These pro-Israel activists, however, have taken the defamation and smearing of Israel’s critics to heights few others have ever reached before.
Why on earth do they think that Israel, alone among the nations, should not be held accountable for its actions? Where do they get off, trying to persuade others around the world that Justice Goldstone, a very distinguished member of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and a key figure during his country’s transition to democratization, is some kind of a hate-filled (self-hating?) crazy guy?
Well, they won’t succeed in persuading very many people at all of this– except in those pockets of the U.S. Congress and administration that have been deeply manipulated for many years by Israel-first propaganda.
Mainly what they achieve is that they reveal themselves to be so consumed by fear and hatred that it seems to have addled their brains. Sad. Sad. Sad.
Boston Review gets well-deserved recognition!
Big congratulations to Joshua Cohen and Deb Chasman, the joint managing editors of Boston Review, for having the magazine win the 2010 Utne Independent Press Award for “best writing.”
In announcing the award, the Utne folks wrote,
- Crack open Boston Review’s generously sized newsprint pages and plunge into a world where poems sit alongside political essays, where fiction coexists with cultural criticism, and where—this is key—every element in the intellectual fiesta is thought-provoking and expertly crafted. When the 35-year-old bimonthly added more investigative reporting to its repertoire last year, we nearly swooned. Let mainstream publications give in to the perceived demand for bite-sized news; Boston Review provides the exquisite main course.
This is fabulous news.
Great writing can only be achieved with great editing. These two and the staff they lead are the best!
(Just regarding “main course” versus “bite-size”, I’ll note that the second piece I published with them, back in 2002 or so, was 14,000 words long. You don’t find that in Newsweek!)
Pro-Israel warmongers preparing the next war
The experienced former U.S. officials Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett had an important op-ed in Politico yesterday titled The Slippery Slope to Strikes on Iran. In it they warned that “there is a serious risk that President Barack Obama may eventually be maneuvered into ordering military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets.”
The Leveretts note the key role that high-ranking National Security Council officials Tom Donilon and Dennis Ross have been playing in pushing the administration towards a more and more confrontational stance against Iran. They note that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been trying, with apparently mixed success, to push back against that pressure:
- Gates believes the United States does not need to go to war over Iran’s nuclear program. He is strongly supported by the senior uniformed military leadership, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen.
Dennis Ross, let us remember, joined the administration after a stint as the founding President of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Public Policy Institute. Prior to that he was the many-times-failing “czar” of Arab-Israeli peacemaking on behalf of the Clinton administration.
In the Politico piece the Leveretts write this about the strategy that has apparently been pursued inside the Obama administration by Ross, ever since he joined it:
- Ross told us before he returned to government service in the Obama administration, [that] President George W. Bush’s successor would probably need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets.
Pursuing diplomatic initiatives early in Obama’s tenure, Ross said, would be necessary to justify potential military action to domestic and international constituencies.
I believe Ross also wrote that, quite clearly, in the book “Myths, Illusions, and Peace”, published last July, that he co-authored with David Makovsky.
Of course, Dennis Ross and Tom Donilon are far from the only influential members of the US policy elite who have been pushing for a U.S. military attack against Iran for some time now.
Indeed, we can see all those same actors now using exactly the same kinds of tactics that were used to “seduce” the U.S. public into supporting the aggression against Iraq, back in 2003, now being rolled out once again to “prepare” us for another act of military aggression, this time against Iran.
We U.S. citizens who want to halt this “slippery slope” slide into a new war need to start taking some much more focused action to prevent it.
In the Leveretts’ schema, “containment”, as advocated by Gates and Co., is presented as the path that is significantly less escalatory and risky than “crippling sanctions” and other moves toward escalation and a possible military action, such as are advocated by a growing chorus of political figures (ably orchestrated by AIPAC.)
But containment can also be seen as an approach embodying many very unhelpful– and also potentially escalatory– elements of coercive diplomacy. Especially if it is pursued hand-in-hand with actions intended to build up a “deterrent threat” to back it up.
Those deterrent threats were on full display in the Obama administration’s latest Nuclear Posture Review (PDF), which by clear inference exempted Iran (and South Korea) from the stated guarantee that U.S. nuclear weapons would not be used against non-nuclear-weapons states. (See the President’s own explanation of this policy, here.)
“Containment” can thus be seen as a pivot policy: It could be a gateway drug on the way towards either escalation or de-escalation. And thus far– as the Leveretts continually point out– Obama has done very little indeed to test what he might obtain in terms of furthering our country’s true interests by pursuing a determined policy of de-escalation toward Iran, through a smart and serious form of real diplomatic engagement with it.
Of course, the fact that he has Dennis Ross almost at his elbow there in the White House, now exerting reportedly ever-greater influence over both our country’s Iran policy and its Palestine policy, probably has a lot to do with Obama’s failure to fully test out the potential of diplomatic engagement with Iran.
But honestly, why should he trust Dennis Ross’s judgment on anything out there in the real world (as opposed to in the fevered imagination of longtime Israel-firsters)? Ross was a notable failure, in American terms (if not Israel’s), during his first long stint in Mideast diplomacy. And he’s shown no signs of having understood the world any better, since then.
Secretary Gates, by contrast, is someone who– along with Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mullen– bears direct line responsibility for the welfare of U.S. troops all around the world, including the hundreds of thousands of troops now deployed close to Iran, and in situations where they are deeply dependent on the goodwill of well-rooted Muslim countries.
Why on earth would the president even listen to Dennis Ross, rather than to the advice of those two extremely serious leaders over there in the Pentagon? Some friends suggest that this is due to considerations of domestic policy. I certainly hope not– though I fear this may be the case.
That just means that those of us– surely a strong majority– who do not want our country to get jerked by cynical Lobbyists into yet another war in which our service-members die needless deaths far from home while the military contractors get another big chance to raid our treasury, need to make our voices heard now. If there is a “domestic calculus” that Obama is in some way playing to in this matter, then evidently we need to change it.
Contact your members of Congress and tell them “No war or escalation against Iran! Get back to the diplomacy now!”
The global politics of an Israeli-Palestinian peace
I was just thinking a little more about the global-political context within which any soon-foreseeable Palestinian-Israeli final peace might be concluded… That was after writing this blog post yesterday in which I looked briefly at the question of the international auspices under which any peacekeeping/peace-monitoring force might be deployed to the OPTs.
I noted there that the body or bodies directing the PK force would most likely be the body or bodies directing the diplomatic effort to achieve the peace agreement. Which in the present context would be the U.S.-led Quartet.
The Quartet’s three “junior” partners are the E.U., Russia, and– quite anomalously– the U.N. (The U.N. certainly should not be the junior partner of any single member state. It’s supposed to represent the interests of the whole of humanity.) I very much doubt, however, if any of those junior partners would be prepared to supervise, underwrite, or contribute troops to the maintenance of a PK force sent to “keep” any form of peace that does not meet the full requirements of international law.
Most peacekeeping forces around the world are supervised by either the U.N. or by the relevant regional organization like, in West Africa, ECOWAS. One major exception, that is in the Middle East, is the U.S.-led Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) that supervises the U.S.-brokered peace treaty that Egypt and Israel concluded in 1979. The MFO has 12 national contingents, all of them coming from very strongly pro-U.S. nations. Those countries’ governments are happy to contribute forces because they know that this peace is a stable one that is strongly underwritten at the political level by the U.S.– and because it is fully based on the international-law principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force. Egypt did not cede one inch of its national territory to Israel in the peace agreement, though it did of course agree to very extensive demilitarization measures, economic terms highly favorable to Israel, etc.
But because that peace is both stable and based on international law, participation in the MFO has never, to my knowledge, come in for any serious criticism from the publics of those nations contributing forces.
So now, let’s come to the challenge of forming and supervising a PK force to keep an Israeli-Palestinian peace…
Which nations are going to contribute troops to this force, and under whose supervision?
In the CNAS study (PDF) I was writing about yesterday, Marc Lynch even posited as one of the “scenarios” he was considering, the idea that the PK force– whose supervisory auspices he studiously avoided discussing– might have to engage in some counter-insurgency missions against Hamas’s very extensive networks in the West Bank!
(Hamas, remember, being the party that won the PA’s 2006 parliamentary elections.)
Truly, how many countries are going to be contributing troops to this PK force?
But also, how many governments or or inter-governmental bodies would be willing to participate– in either a supervisory/legitimizing capacity, or a troop-contributing capacity– in a peacekeeping operation designed to “keep” any peace that would fall far short of the requirements of international law?
I think the answer to that question is that only one seriously-sized government anywhere in the world would be willing to consider doing that, and that is the U.S. But this is really a non-starter. Can anyone imagine the reaction worldwide (and in the region) if the U.S. were to try to dominate a PK force in the OPTs, with a big part of the mandate of the force being to protect Israel’s illegal settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank from the many Palestinians– including the actual owners of many of those lands– who still maintain their claims to them?
We are not in 1979.
Back then, the U.S. stood aside the world and was able to convince everyone else that it could (and perhaps even should) monopolize the entire diplomacy of Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Jimmy Carter and his team were also able to persuade the Israeli government of the day that, despite its earlier desire to hang onto much of the Egyptian territory of Sinai, indeed it could not; and it would have to withdraw completely to the international border. Hence that peace agreement met the requirements of international law.
Today’s U.S. president is not nearly as powerful– either within world politics, or even, it seems, in the ongoing tussle of wills with Israel.
For all these reasons, it therefore seems to me quite implausible that the U.S. could hope to replicate the MFO model of 1979 and plan to deploy a U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” type of PK force in the OPTs.
The “willing” are far less numerous, and far less willing, than they used to be. Even NATO, having gotten dragged by Washington into both the war in Afghanistan and the beefed-up UNIFIL operation in Lebanon, now has many members who reportedly pushed back hard against Jim Jones’s late-2008 suggestion that NATO run the post-peace (and perhaps also the peri-peace) PK force in the OPTs.
I think everyone is agreed that if there is to be a two-state outcome in the foreseeable future–a HUGE ‘if’ there– then the Palestinian state that thereby emerges would be substantially demilitarized. (Personally, I think that in the context of a comprehensive peace, that includes the Syrian-Israeli and Lebanese-Israeli tracks as well, then Israel should emerge substantially demilitarized, as well… But that’s a slightly different issue.)
But if the Palestinian state is demilitarized, then the citizens of that state of course need considerable reassurances that they won’t be subjected to resumed forms of Israeli aggression. They would thus probably need some form of international force to help provide that reassurance– as well as to help police their side of the border against any attempts by Palestinian militants to breach it.
Probably the best kind of force for that purpose would be one in which both the Palestinian citizens themselves, and the “international community”, and Israel, all have high confidence. A Turkish-led force is one model that immediately comes to mind. A U.N. force is another. (After all, UNDOF and UNTSO have very successfully kept Israel’s 1974 ceasefire line with Syria quite quiet for the past 36 years.) Actually, a Turkish-led U.N. force would seem to me to be the best of all possible options.
Bottom line here: Any PK force that goes into Palestine in the context of an Israeli-Palestinian two-state peace has to have a high degree of international legitimacy, both in its institutional structure and in the content of the peace that it’s keeping. The model of a U.S.-led force, that worked in 1979, is incapable of working today. It’s the U.N. or nothing.
Therefore, if the folks in the Obama administration truly want to see a stable, two-state peace emerge, then they will need to find a way to hand the peace-making baton over to the U.N. as rapidly as possible.
But maybe they don’t want it that strongly?
Ambitious think-tankers on peacekeepers and Palestine
A think-tank in Washington DC called the Center for a New American Security recently released a weighty-looking study (PDF here) that claims to examine issues relating to the deployment of an international peacekeeping force to a Palestinian state, once achieved.
The report is titled “Security for Peace: Setting the Conditions for a Palestinian State”. Note that: “Security for Peace”– not “Land for Peace”. And amazingly, as you read through this report you will find not a single map of where the Palestinian state will actually be.
Continue reading “Ambitious think-tankers on peacekeepers and Palestine”
Traveling, family, refugees, etc
I am still intending to write some reflections on Sunday’s Chicago Hearing, which was an amazing experience. However, my sister and her husband arrived on our doorstep in DC on Sunday– refugees from European Air Hell, since they’d been planning to fly back to London from LA last week, and have been unable to.
Of course it’s been great to catch up with them. Haven’t seen ’em for a year.
In Chicago, for the Hearing
So I’m in Chicago, for the Chicago Hearing, which will be running from 1:30 through 5:30 this afternoon, CST.
Last night we had an interesting dinner at Dr. Ghada Talhami’s home. Jad Isaac of ARIJ and Mark Braverman of, um, Mark Braverman were there along with a bunch of other interesting people.
I hadn’t seen Jad in many years, so it was great to catch up with him. Back during the First Intifada he was one of the pioneers of organizing mass civilian (nonviolent) resistance. Last night he was talking very interestingly about (1) the apparent hopelessness of the PLO’s current negotiating strategy, but (2) the apparent usefulness and effectiveness of Salam Fayyad’s administrative and economic strategies.
I guess the big question I wanted to ask is how long you can continue with #2 there so long as #1 continues, since the horrible facts of continuing occupation, dispossession, expropriation, and Israeli control will always constrain Ramallah’s ability to exercise effective domestic governance.
A “well-run” ghetto– who wants that?
Anyway, this morning I had breakfast with a group of interesting Syrian Americans. On Friday, Norman Finkelstein was here. Chicago seems to be hopping with pro-justice activity!
Announcing… Just World Books!
I am delighted to announce the establishment of a new book-publishing company, Just World Books, an imprint of the recently created limited-liability company, Just World Publishing, LLC.
The first titles in Just World Books’ Fall 2010 list will start to be available in September. The list will include books by:
- • Laila El-Haddad, author of the ‘Gaza Mom’ blog, whose first book with us has the working title Gaza Mom Reflects.
• Joshua Foust, a principal contributor to the ‘Registan’ blog, whose book will be a very well-informed critique of U.S. policies in Afghanistan and neighboring countries
• Chas W. Freeman, Jr., the talented (and in some quarters controversial) retired diplomatist, who will be publishing two or more titles with JWB presenting some of his extensive expertise in U.S. foreign and military policy, U.S.-China relations, and the Middle East
• Reidar Visser, who is probably the English-speaking world’s best-informed and most meticulous analyst of Iraq’s internal politics: His first book with JWB will be a study of Iraq under PM Nouri al-Maliki, 2006-2010.
As you can perhaps infer from this description our Fall list, JWB’s business plan is based on the concept of ‘Short Turnround Time for Timely Titles.’ I am confident we can bring out excellent books by these accomplished authors in a very timely way, based on these factors: