Author: Helena

Israeli pilots of conscience

Heroes in the Israeli Air Force!! Bring them on!!!
Here’s an English translation of a good article about the IAF’s newest (partial) conscientious objectors, thanks to Gila Svirsky of Women in Black. It also includes the text of the letter the pilots sent to the IAF Commander:

    Friends,
    Here is the best gift imaginable for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which begins this Friday: The refusal to serve of 25 Israeli Air Force pilots. To understand why this event will shock Israelis in the morning newspapers, you have to know that Air Force pilots are the heroes of Israel, epitomizing the best, brightest, and bravest.
    Below is my quick translation of the internet article prepared by Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest circulation newspaper by far. It gives much more insight than the dry Ha’aretz article. Read it and savor the impact that this will have, undermining support for the occupation.
    This letter is a blessing. May it catalyze a speedy end to the occupation, and presage the dawn of reason and, ultimately, peace. In the Middle East and everywhere.
    Shalom / Salaam from Jerusalem,
    Gila Svirsky
    _______________________________________
    Air Force Pilots in Reserves: We Refuse to Attack in the Territories.
    Pilots in Reserves and Air Crew sent the following letter today to Air Force Commander, Dan Halutz: “We are opposed to carrying out attack orders that are illegal and immoral of the type the State of Israel has been conducting in the territories.”
    Twenty five pilots, former pilots, and air crew sent a petition today (Wednesday) to General Dan Halutz, Commander of the Air Force, in which they declared that they will not participate in attack missions in the territories.

    Continue reading “Israeli pilots of conscience”

Colonialism 101

I think the true epiphany came to me a couple years ago when I first visited the Disney-ized (but also “real”) gold mine that is a big attraction in the “Gold Reef City” theme park near Johannesburg.
Before the eager visitors get to “re-create” the thrill of being an actual South African gold-miner by being winched down the very scary mine-shaft, you get to wait in a sort of museum-y place where they have actual artifacts, old photos, diagrams, maps, etc.
One sequence of grainy old photos has a (circa 1985?) caption telling us that these are the “native African boys” (actually, a crowd of very ragged-looking grown men) who were persuaded to work down the mines by the fact that they needed to earn cash to pay poll-taxes that had summarily been slapped on them by the British colonial power that had taken over their land. Otherwise, the caption added someplace, the “boys” would have been very reluctant to go into the bowels of the earth in such a dangerous way to carry out the British mineowners’ desires…
So here it is, Helena’s guide to How to be a Colonialist. (Iraqis, Palestinians, and other peoples of color probably don’t need to take this course.)
1. Have a big army. Take over a country.
2. Pauperize the “native” population as fast as you can by destroying their “native” economy. If necessary impose outrageous taxes.
3. When the locals are truly desperate, offer them terrible sweatshop work at extremely low rates of pay. (But only offer it to a few. Have them compete for the chance to work so then they feel “grateful” if they get it!)
4. Feel good about the fact that you are offering the chance to work to these poor benighted souls who otherwise would be in total destitution.
5. Take your profits home. Enjoy them. Feel good about yourself for bringing “civlization” and “modernization” to those distant natives.
Actually, Riverbend has had a few good posts about how this whole process has been working in today’s Iraq. Like this one, today.
Juan Cole has had some interesting news along the same lines, too. For example, today he reports that yesterday (Sept. 23) the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program(WFP) issued a joint report that recorded that chronic malnutrition afflicts several million persons in Iraq today, including 100,000 refugees and 200,000 internally displaced persons. “The situation of mothers and children in central and southern Iraq is of particular concern,” the report says.
However, soon after that, he comments:

    It is a horrible thing that a potentially rich oil state such as Iraq has been reduced to fourth world conditions by the misrule of the Baath.

I certainly don’t hold a candle for the Baath. But I don’t recall reports of such chronic malnutrition in Iraq during their time in power. Terrible atrocites of other descriptions, yes. Thousands of otherwise avoidable infant deaths because of the UN-impsoed sanctions, yes. But widespread and chronic malnutrition? I just don’t recall it.
Plus, honestly, how can you blame the Baath for malnutrition that’s occurring now, nearly six full months after the US “won” the “major combat” phase of the battle–and thereby, under international law as well as simple logic, became completely responsible, as occupying power, for the basic welfare of the country’s population???

Lieutenant Nick’s view of Chalabi in Baghdad

A lieutenant in the US occupation force in Iraq left a very interesting comment on the Warblogging.com blog yesterday, giving his view of how Chalabi is regarded by Iraqis and others in Baghdad. (This view accords exactly with that expressed on numerous occasions by Riverbend of the Baghdad is Burning blog.)
Here’s Nick’s comment:

    last time i wrote–months ago–i was getting ready to deploy. been in baghdad since april…
    for what it’s worth, virtually every ordinary just-trying-to-live-their-lives iraqi i’ve met talks smack about mr chalabi. (“thief! as bad as saddam! who is he to tell us what to do, when he ran away for thirty years!”)
    i myself have had the thrill of dealing with his employees a number of times, since one of the things i do is to run checkpoints near the new iraqi government center. chalabi’s goons–i can’t think of a better word for the caravan of bodyguards which follow him around–are constantly rude not just to my soldiers (which i can almost understand) but to their iraqi neighbors as well. chalabi’s men expect–sorry, DEMAND–access to restricted areas so they can avoid the traffic they’d run into by driving around, and throw temper tantrums when i let ordinary iraqi citizens into ‘our’ neighborhood before them. my favorite exchange so far:
    CHALABI THUG (in arabic, directed at my translator): can you not explain to the americans that we are special people? we don’t have to wait in line like the rest of you.
    TRANSLATOR: (in arabic) that’s the way things used to be under saddam. now, we are all equal.
    CHALABI THUG: (in arabic) we are not equal! we are special!
    ME (in english to my translator): please tell him to calm down and wait his turn.
    TRANSLATOR: (in arabic) the lieutenant says you need to wait. please wait.
    CHALABI THUG: (arabic) you are iraqi! why do you listen to the americans?
    ME: (in arabic) if you don’t want to wait in line, that’s fine with me. go away. now.

The Pentagon, Chalabi, and the cheerleaders

Regular readers of JWN may have noticed that I’m not the biggest fan of Ahmed Chalabi. Still, I admit there’s something just a touch delightful about seeing him use all his old charms and slipperiness to start turning on his erstwhile handlers in the Pentagon while he gives aid and comfort to “the enemy”, i.e. the French. (The enemy thing is Tom Friedman’s analysis, not mine.)
The other naughty spectator sport I’m engaging in these days is watching all those serried ranks of Op-Ed columnists and various self-styled “experts” who sold Chalabi’s supposed virtues on an eager-to-believe US political class for so many long years– and seeing how those individuals are dealing with the current apparent dust-up between Chalabi and his former friends in Bombs-Away Don’s Pentagon.
Jim Hoagland comes to mind, first and foremost. (Jim should have known better, but for some reason he’s been foaming at the bit to have the US support Chalabi and topple Saddam for the past few years.) Danielle Pletka comes to mind, too: the former foreign-affairs aide for Senator Jesse Helms and now a recognized neocon in her own right.
So today, Danielle has a just-about-indecipherable Op-Ed in the New York Times. I’ve read it a couple of times and still can’t figure what exactly it is she’s trying to say. I’ll give a handsome prize to any JWN reader who can give a reasonable explanation of what she means in this particularly opaque paragraph:

    Members of Iraq’s Governing Council [read: Chalabi–HC]have argued strenuously against an infusion of additional troops–American or otherwise. Already chafing at the cloying stewardship of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraq’s interim government is eager to take more responsibility for security and governance of the country. Unlike United States commanders–who some of Mr. Rumsfeld’s skeptics in Washington say have been stifled by the secretary’s lean transformation dream–the interim government has no vested interest in keeping United States troop levels down.

Let’s face it, Danielle Pletka was never particularly bright or well-informed. Such a pity that she has now been reduced to blithering idiocy.

Excavating the pre-9/11 record

From John Pilger via the Sydney Morning Herald via this post on Juan Cole’s blog comes a useful reminder that we should look at what Bush administration heavies were saying about Iraq’s WMD capabilities before Sept. 11, 2001.
Pilger had apparently found a tape of Colin Powell speaking to an audience in Cairo in February 2001, when CP apparently said that Saddam “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction…”
That prompted me to go into the State Department’s website and see what relevant texts and transcripts I might find there from that same period. Just a quick search turned up some very similar utterances by CP. Like this one from a press briefing he gave while on his plane traveling to Cairo Feb 23, 2001:

    I think it’s important to point out that for the last 10 years, the policy that the United Nations, the United States has been following, has succeeded in keeping Iraq from rebuilding to the level that it was before… [E]ven though they may be pursuing weapons of mass destruction of all kinds, it is not clear how successful they have been. So to some extent, I think we ought to declare this a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box.

Or this one, when CP was on a plane two days later, traveling to Kuwait:

    QUESTION: Are you stunned that he [Saddam] is still in power after all these years?
    SECRETARY POWELL: Stunned isn?t the word. I never ever have underestimated the power of a dictator, and I don?t think you?ll find me on the record ever predicting his demise at that time. But I also thought that we had pretty much removed his stings and frankly for ten years we really have.

Or this one, which records remarks he made on arrival in Kuwait:

    it is at the top of the agenda to make sure that we continue to contain Iraq so that it does not develop the kind of weapons that it is trying to develop. We have been successful for the last ten years in keeping him from developing those weapons and we will continue to be successful.

So, having found those extremely suggestive quotes, I thought let’s hike on over to the White House website, see what they have in the National Security Council archive over there that relates to pre-Sept. 11, 2001 utterances by, oh, the Prez, or Condi Rice, or whoever…
But here’s something scary. If you go to the White House site and look for the texts of speeches etc on the subject of “National Security” by clicking this button, the texts they give only go back to September 11, 2001. Not a day earlier!
Is someone trying to whitewash the record there or something? (By contrast, if you click on “Middle East”, which is a section that deals with Israeli-Arab issues but NOT Iraq, the statements there go back to February 14, 2001.)
There is one intriguing-looking button on the White House site that says simply: “Iraq: Apparatus of lies”. But my understanding is that it may not actually refer to the White House itself…

Palestine/Israel: one state or two?

I was reading Imshin’s blog from Israel, and came across a post in which she translated a long extract from a recent article by Shlomo Avnieri bitterly criticizing the few brave souls inside Israel who started to argue that, given the huge degree of demographic mixing that the settlers have achieved, maybe the best path now is to aim for a unitary binational state in Israel/Palestine rather than for the very difficult disaggregation of the populations into two mono-ethnic states.
If Avnieri’s arguments are the best that the “anti- one state” brigade can come up with, then that is really a poor showing. I note that Avnieri has been around for a VERY LONG TIME as first an Israeli Foreign Ministry official whose arguments were always (no surprise here) that Israel could do no wrong, and more recently as a retired person whose tune seems not to have been changed by one jot. Also, he doesn’t seem to have learned much over recent years. He notes the collapse of many mutli-ethnic states after the fall of communism, but seems unaware of the continued existence of large numbers of other multi-ethnic states around the world.
Even on Canada and Belgium, the recognition he gives is grudging indeed:

    Canada and Belgium–two veteran bi-national states–are facing great difficulties, in which the last word has not yet been said, even though no one has been murdered or killed there for over 150 years.

(Quick question to readers: would you rather live in Canada today, or in Israel? In Belgium, or in mono-ethnic Saudi Arabia?)
Most importantly–since this is really is the best analogy to the prospect facing Jewish Israelis–he totally neglects the incredible experiment in multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicism that has been underway in South Africa for the past nine years.
Here’s why the South African experiment is so relevant: because there, as in any future Israeli-Palestinian binational state, you have members of the colonizing community living in full civic equality within one state with members of the colonized community. And yet, with huge amounts of creativity and goodwill, they are managing to do it.
In his article, Avnieri asks huffily a bunch of questions that he assumes to think we will agree would have the aanswer “It’s impossible!”
However, the record of South Africa’s amazing cultura/political transformation shows us that for a forward-looking, generous-hearted people, it is by no means “impossible” to find answers to the kinds of questions he asks. Such as these:

    * How will it be possible to run a state in which half of the population will see the fifteenth of May as a holiday, and the other half as a tragedy, a day of national mourning: What will be celebrated exactly?
    * What will be taught in mixed state schools, for instance, about Herzl: Founder of a national movement or western colonialist? What will be taught about the Mufti (of Jerusalem in the period of the British Mandate–I.J.): National hero or collaborator with the Nazis? Or maybe one thing will be taught in the Jewish schools and another in the Arab schools?
    * Will it be permitted to name streets after Hovevei Tzion (a group of ninteenth century Jewish settlers–I.J.), Herzl, Bialik (Israel?s national poet–I.J.), Ben Gurion or (heaven help us) Jabotinsky (founder of the right wing Revisionist Party, that provided the ideological basis for the Etzel and the Lehi Organizations–I.J.)? Will roads be named after Izzadin A-Kassam and Haj Amin al-Husseini? Will Zionism Bvd. in Haifa change its name to something “neutral” (Avineri obviously brings this example because this road used to be called UN Bvd. and its name was changed in 1975 when the UN passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism–I.J.)? Or will a parallel road be named “Hamas Bvd.”, for the sake of balance?
    * What will be taught about the Holocaust? A terrible crime or a Jewish “invention”?
    * How will the history of the 1948 war be taught? What will be said in schools about the suicide bombers: Murderers or heroes of the War of Independence?
    * If organizations, Jewish or Arab, threatening violent action, will be established, which police force exactly will deal with them?
    *If the state has an army, what will it be called exactly? Or maybe there will be two armies, the IDF and the PLA?

But his pessimism that answers to such questions can ever be found is quite misplaced. Let him go to South Africa. Let as many Jewish Israelis as possible go there, and see with their own eyes how challenges exactly similar to these ones have been addressed there…

Camp David 25 years after

So, we’ve ridden out the 20-hour power-out that Hurricane Isabel brought us, and finally I have time to write a few quick things about the conference I went to in DC Wednesday, that marked the 25th anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David accords.
Jimmy Carter was there, presiding, and just about all the people who’d worked for him on Camp David-related things. Except Cy Vance and Roy Atherton, of course, RIP.
On the Israeli and Egyptian sides, neither Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat nor Moshe Dayan was there (RIP). But Aharon Barak–now Israel’s very distinguished Chief Justice– and Eli Rubinstein (now attorney-general) were both there in person. Mubarak’s foreign-affairs advisor Osama el-Baz participated by videolink from Cairo, where he’s been busy trying to help nail down another ceasefire in Palestine/Israel; and Boutros Boutros-Ghali sent in a (non-interactive) videotaped message from Paris.
The first thing that struck me from sitting in the audience for the day-long event was how much everyone seems these days to take the fact of Israel’s peace with Egypt totally for granted.
The CD accords of September 1978 did, however, spell out agreements between the Egyptians and Israelis on two issues: one, that the two governments would negotiate a bilateral peace agreement within three months, and two, that negotiations would start on establishment of a self-governing authority for the Palestinians.
As I mentioned here a few days ago, the Egyptians and Israelis got theirs, but that Palestinian part of the negotiation went nowhere.
So what struck me during Wednesday’s conference was the degree to which that unfinished business totally dominated the discussions…

Continue reading “Camp David 25 years after”

Powell’s quote of the decade

I generally like to give Colin Powell the benefit of the doubt. But this quote, from him, from today’s Washington Post, is a classic of governmental gobbledygook:

    there was no effort on the part of the Reagan administration to either ignore it or not take note of it.

The “it” in question? Saddam Hussein’s March 1988 poison-gas attack against some of his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja, which reportedly killed 5,000 people.
As the Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran notes in the piece,

    Although the United States condemned the Iraqi government’s use of chemical weapons as a “grave violation” of international law, the Reagan administration did not sanction Hussein, who was regarded as a U.S. ally because of his war against Iran’s Islamic revolutionary government. At the time, the State Department said there were “indications” that Iran had used chemical artillery shells against Iraqi positions in the area…

And oh, Reagan’s national security advisor at that time was– Colin Powell.

Hutton enquiry hots up

Lord Hutton’s enquiry into the circumstances of British WMD specialist David Kelly’s July suicide has been getting very exciting. This week, lawyers for the Kelly family and for BBC journo Andrew Gilligan have been allowed to cross-examine some of the high-ranking government witnesses.
Today, Kelly’s supervisor at the Ministry of Defence Andy Shuttleworth told the enquiry that Kelly had been “actively encouraged” to talk to the press since 1991. Part of Kelly’s regular performance review was in fact based on how often he had done this, Shuttleworth said. Kelly also had wide latitude in doing so and was not required to get advance permission…
So much for the MoD/spook types who had told Hutton earlier that Kelly had gone ways beyond the bounds in talking to numerous journos, including Gilligan.
In another development, deputy chief of defence intelligence Martin Howard admitted that Dr Kelly was not specifically asked for his consent before the MoD leaders decided that they would confirm, if asked, that he was indeed the person who had come forward to admit having talked to Gilligan. (Once again, putting the lie to claims made earlier by MoD types that they thought Kelly had received advance notification that he was about to be skewered in public.)
Howard was being X-examined by Kelly family barrister Jeremy Gompertz. At one point, Gompertz asked:

    “The procedure adopted, Mr Howard, I suggest, amounted to a parlour game for journalists, would you agree?” said Mr Gompertz, “or was it more like a game of Russian roulette?”

I am starting to develop a little theory about the uniquely constructive role independent judicial enquiries can make, in parliamentary democracies, in uncovering the murkier aspects of domestic politics that the elected leaders would rather not talk about….
Earlier this month, we had the very significant report of the enquiry in Israel headed by Supreme Court Justice Theodore Or. He was looking into the causes of the confrontations in early October 2000 between the Israeli police and many thousands of rioting Israeli citizens who are ethnic Palestinians.
Or took a long time to report, but his 3-man team did what I think is a great job of explaining why, 55 years after Israel’s creation as a specifially Jewish state, the 18 percent of the citizens who are ethnic Palestinians still feel badly discriminated against and marginalized at every point… You can read an English-language digest of the 831-page document if you go here.
Did I mention that during those events, the Israeli police shot dead 13 Palestinians, 12 of whom were citizens of Israel. (Which is why they got an enquiry, while the 2,400-plus Palestinians in the occupied territories who have been killed by Israelis– mainly by members of the security forces– never did get one.)
It also makes me think of the important role that the commission headed by Judge Goldstone, in South Africa, played in helping build a climate of accountability by his country’s until then notoritously brutal and trigger-happy police…
Let’s hope Or’s enquiry and the Hutton enquiry can have the same kind of wide-ranging effectiveness in changing state practises that Goldstone’s did.