Helena – Page 54 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Eyal Weizman’s “Hollow Land”– Read it!

I’ve been reading a most amazing book: Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, by the Israeli architect and social activist Eyal Weizman. (He is on the board of the excellent human rights organization B’tselem.)
This book is so much more than a work of dry architecture criticism! It is a deeply engaged, thoughtful, and far-reaching exploration of many of the ways in which physical “space” impacts and is impacted by Israel’s ongoing projects of colonial implantation in Palestine.
I started reading it for the excellent chapter it has on the Israelization/Judaization of Jerusalem, and was transfixed by this sentence about planning norms in the city under Israel’s control (p.47): “For the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem, unlike the Jewish residents, hardly anything was ever planned but their departure.”
One of the the things I really like about the book is the illustrations. There are scores of them, most of them in color; and they’re excellently integrated into the text. If you’ve never been to the OPTs and want to gain a vivid idea of the topography of the place– as well as its geography of human control, displacement, and spatiocide– then this book is a great place to start.
He has a whole chapter on checkpoints, which makes horrible, grisly reading, given how massively these locations of control deform the everyday life of all the West Bank’s Palestinians. It’s prefaced by a simple, full-page photo taken within the Allenby Bridge crossing point between the occupied West Bank and Jordan. The photo is taken from over the shoulder of a PA passport-control officer, looking out through the (presumably bullet-proof) glass at a receding tide of glum-faced Palestinian supplicants.
In the caption, photographer Miki Kratsman recalled about taking the shot that,

When I positioned myself over the shoulder of the Palestinian border policeman to take this photograph, I suddenly heard voices calling behind me: ‘Zooz! Zooz!’ (‘Move! Move!’ in Hebrew). Only then did I realize that behind the mirror [behind her] were the Israelis. When I tried to take a photograph of the mirror I was removed from the terminal by the angry Palestinian policeman.

Weizman has, of course, chapters on the Wall and on settlements. He also has two brilliant chapters on the human topography of the Israeli way of war. One of these is on “innovations” developed by the IOF in urban warfare, and the other on the IOF’s use of Palestinian airspace in war–with a long segment on the use of airborne platforms, usually drones, to undertake targeted killings.
Both these latter chapters are quite extraordinary, since Weizman seems to have gained the confidence of several high-ranking IOF generals sufficiently to get them to talk with great apparent frankness about the way they view the use of both ground-space and airspace in their operations.
In the book’s Postscript he writes:

Anyone living in, visiting Israel or living under its regime is well aware of the diffusion of the military in all spheres of life. Many officers and soldiers were willing to talk, mostly anonymously, about military operations, tactics, and procedures. Among the most fertile sources for this work were interviews with Shimon Naveh, a retired officer and former director of the military Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI). I thank him for being forthcoming…

Indeed he was. A large portion of the material in the two chapters on urban warfare and air war came from Naveh, who I think retired as a Brigadier-General and from his colleague Aviv Kochavi, who was commander of the Gaza front in 2005-06.
It seems that Weizman was interviewing Naveh and Kochavi at a time when they and much that they had created through OTRI was suddenly becoming somewhat discredited within the Israeli military. It was a tumultuous time in the IDF general staff in 2005-2006. Naveh, Kochavi, and the whole OTRI institution had apparently been operating under the patronage of former chief of staff, accused war criminal, and present vice-premier Moshe Ya’alon. Then, when Dan Halutz took over as chief of staff in 2005 he dismantled OTRI. But I guess that Naveh felt that many of the lessons he had been teaching Israeli officers at OTRI were being taken by them into the war against Lebanon in July-August 2006….
But, as Naveh acknowledged in an October 2006 interview that Weizman cites (p.214), “The war in Lebanon was a failure and I had a great part in it. What I have brought to the IDF has failed.”
Well, it failed in Lebanon where Hizbullah had built up a very smart and disciplined network of defensive formations that were relatively well-armed– at least, well-armed in comparison to the Palestinians of the refugee camps of Jenin and Balata where Naveh and his people had developed their ghastly tactics of control, even if not at all well-armed, in comparison with the IDF.
Weizman gives us numerous examples of the high-end, “structuralist” and “post-modernist” intellectualizing that Naveh brought to his planning of the assaults the IDF launched against several densely populated Palestinian areas in 2002-2006…
One of OTRI’s big innovations was to plan “swarming” raids in which the Israeli soldiers would advance from several points around the perimeter of, say, a refugee camp, towards the middle, all at once– and in many cases moving right through the homes of the camp’s terrified Palestinian residents, while those residents were still cowering wherever they could within whatever was left to them of their homes.
Read his fuller description of what happened in those raids, on p.194.
He concludes with this:

The unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home has been experienced by civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation…

Then, on p.217, he writes very perceptively about the IOF’s theories regarding where exactly it needs to be:

to replace presence in occupied areas with a capacity to move through them, and produce in them what he called ‘effects’, which are ‘military operations such as aerial attacks or commando raids … that affect the enemy psychologically and organizationally.’

Of course, the prime example of this approach is Gaza.
Weizman makes clear, too, that the IOF’s concept of the Wall in the West Bank is that it should be permeable from west to east, even while it is expressly designed to block permeability from east to west. (Another “one-way mirror”, we could say.)
Anyway, I could write a lot more about this excellent book. Just the chapter on the IOF’s use of assassination as a policy of the Israeli state is worth re-reading several times…
In describing in great– and very helpfully illustrated– detail the technical nuts and bolts of how, exactly, Israel has been pursuing its policy of spatiocide, control, and exclusion against the Palestinians, this book makes a fine complement to Jonathan Cook’s Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair.

Settlements– or the final peace?

There has been a lot of chirping and noise in the media about whether Sen. George Mitchell and Israeli PM Netanyahu might be close to some kind of a deal on a cutback in the Israeli settlement construction, and on what terms.
See Haaretz, the Jewish Daily Forward, the Guardian, etc.
Mitchell and Netanyahu met in London yesterday, and issued a terse statement that made clear that the “conversation” between them will continue. (As Laura Rozen also noted.)
But surely, what all of us should focus on and press for at this point is not the settlement freeze but rather the central goal of speedily securing a final peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis (and FPAs between Israel and Syria and Lebanon, respectively, as well; though those can be far easier to nail down.)
Yes, I know that Israel’s continued perpetration of the grave breach of the Geneva Conventions that’s constituted by its implantation of civilian residents into the occupied West Bank is an impediment to the resumption, let alone the completion, of the negotiations for an Israeli-Palestinian FPA.
But let’s keep some perspective. Any FPA will include a detailed map of the final border between Israel and the long-overdue Palestinian state. At that point, Israel can presumably build anything it wants– consonant with not infringing anyone’s rights– in the area that will lie on its side of the border. But on the Palestinian side of the finally delineated border, Israelis should expect that not only will there be no new settlement construction, but beyond that, the settlers already living there will have to either leave or, if they remain, to do so as law-abiding residents under Palestinian sovereignty.
Problem solved.
According to some reports, Obama is planning to have won final agreement on the FPA within the two years. These very condescending– and actually, inaccurate– writers in the Guardian claim that this timetable is “viewed as unrealistic by Middle East analysts.”
Well, I’m a Middle East analyst of lengthy experience, and I don’t view this timetable as unrealistic, at all. Indeed, given the huge volume of preliminary work that’s been done on all the issues connected with the FPA, I think it could be completed within nine months or less– if Obama has the backbone to really push for it.
That would involve him working closely with all the partners in the international community who want to see this peace concluded. In the first instance, all these pro-peace forces should reach and declare their agreement on the basis in international law and diplomacy on the basis of which the peace talks will be convened. This includes, of course, all the relevant resolutions of the United Nations and other provisions of international law.
All relevant parties, including of course both Israelis and Palestinians should then be invited to participate in the peace talks to be convened on the internationally agreed basis. And if one party– Israel, say– should balk at the terms of reference for the resumed peace talks, then the Security Council would be apprised of that and would proceed as it sees fit.
Israel’s unilateral reluctance to take part in a diplomatic effort that is based on well-known norms of international law and practice cannot be allowed to impede the progress of the peace effort.
This is the battle that Obama needs to be prepared to fight, if he really wants to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict– not a shadow “battle” over whether, in the interim before the securing of the FPA, Israel would be “allowed” to build 200 or 300 settler housing units here or there.
Remember that these “battles” over a possible settlement freeze have already eaten up the first seven months of Obama’s current term. And they have achieved little, except perhaps to educate a few additional members of the US Congress about the harsh reality of Israel’s ongoing, quite illegal land-grab in the West Bank.
These “battles” over a settlement freeze are real time wasters! Obama should go for the FPA right now.
And yes, I do fully understand that the participation of every Israeli government since 1967 in the project to implant settlers, illegally, into East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and Golan, has continued without a break through all of those years. And that it even accelerated after the Oslo “interim” accord of 16 years ago.
I understand, too, how deeply the presence of the always pampered settlers and the continued, government-fueled growth in their numbers offends the Palestinians of the OPTs and sows ever deeper despair in their hearts as they watch the territorial base of their longed-for state being eaten up and concreted over before their very eyes.
Danny Rubinstein had a great quote from a Palestinian in 2006: “I look out of the window and see my death getting near.”
I understand, too, how hard it is for Mahmoud Abbas, or Salam Fayyad, or any Palestinian leader to agree to sit down and talk with an Israeli government so long as Israel’s perpetration of these atrocities continues day by day.
But that is why, if the peace talks are to succeed, they need to be held on the clear basis of UN resolutions and international law and practice. Having those principles as the basis for the negotiation will give Palestinians some of the assurance that they need that the international community will be supporting their legitimate rights in the negotiation.
Because we all need to understand, too, that continuing to describe the negotiation only— or even mainly– as a bilateral encounter between Israelis and Palestinians, one in which perhaps the Americans play only a very thin role as “mediators” or “facilitators”, is a sure recipe for diplomatic failure. And the US government, if it acts in such a “facilitating” role, would be fully complicit in all the conflict that would inevitably ensue.
So let’s have international law restored to its rightful position as the basis of this negotiation. Let’s get the negotiation for the FPA started.
And most important of all– 16 years after the briefly flickering “promise” of the Oslo “interim” accord– let’s get the final peace agreement between these two long war-battered peoples concluded.

Syria-Iran tussle over Iraq?

As the US withdrawal from Iraq become an increasingly firm prospect, the tussle is now quite predictably intensifying among the war-shattered country’s neighbors for influence over what remains of it.
One intriguing example of this is the very serious spat that erupted yesterday between largely Iranian-backed Iraqi PM, Nuri al-Maliki, and the government of Syria.
At issue are Maliki’s allegations that the extremely deadly bombings of last Wednesday were the work of Baathist networks whose leaders have been sheltered by Syria, and his demand that Syria hand them over to Iraq for trial. The Syrians deny that the wanted men, Mohammad Younis al-Ahmed and Sattam Farhan, are in their country, and point out that they have roundly condemned the bombings.
This new conflict between Baghdad and Damascus is serious– and its timing seems very surprising. Just last week, Maliki undertook a seemingly very successful and lovey-dovey visit to Damascus. He and his Syrian counterpart agreed to set up a “strategic cooperation council”. They agreed to ” establish a mechanism for high-level military dialogue” and pursue many joint economic opportunities.
And in a joint statement, they said,

“The fraternal relationship between Syria and Iraq is characterized by strong social and pan-Arab ties, as well as common history, culture and neighboring relations of both countries.”

Well, so much for that “fraternal relationship”, eh?
What seems to have happened is that Baghdad’s relationship with Syria has gotten tangled up in the internal power struggle now going on inside the Iraqi regime over how closely it should align with Iran.
When I was in Damascus in June, several of the close-to-power people we talked with there were at pains to note two significant things about Iraq: (a) that the Syrian government considers stabilizing the regime there to be a high priority for them, and (b) that despite Damascus’s long and close strategic relationship with Iran, Syrians see their goals for Iraq as very different from, and sometimes clearly at odds with, those of Iran.
Damascus’s goal for Iraq, they said, is that Iraq should be stable, Arab, and basically secular. Iran’s goal, they allege, is that Iraq should be Shiite-dominated and basically follow Tehran’s theocratic model of governance regardless of whether this threatened the unity and stability of Iraq as a whole.
Damascus’s policy on all this is also influenced by the degree to which the Syrian government, which is basically secular and depends a lot for its internal stability on its pan-Arab credentials, feels it is getting support from other significant Arab powers, principally Saudi Arabia. When Syrian-Saudi relations are tense– as they were from 2005 until about three months ago– then the Syrian government feels less confident about risking a rupture with Tehran.
Right now, both Syria and Saudi Arabia probably feel they have a shared interest in minimizing the amount of influence Tehran can exercise over the Baghdad government– though I doubt if policymakers in either of those governments feel they can eliminate Iran’s influence completely, in the same way that Saddam Hussein was able to do, through the exercise of great internal repression, so long as he was in power…
That there is a huge internal tussle going on right now in the heart of the Iraqi regime is quite evident– though the actual line-ups and interests at work there are still extremely murky.
Last Wednesday’s bomb blast came six years to the day after the fateful August 19 bomb blast of 2003 that killed UN envoy Sergio Vieira De Mello and inaugurated a new period of considerable post-invasion political instability within the country. This year’s August 19 blast killed more than 100 people and left the finance and foreign ministry buildings pertaining to the Maliki government substantially wrecked.
Shortly after the blasts, the ethnically Kurdish Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, voiced the serious allegation that they were the work of senior security officers within (other parts of) the regime. I find Juan Cole’s logic in claiming that the bombings were aimed at the blocs/parties in control of the targeted ministries to most likely be valid.
The education ministry was also targeted, though not I think as badly hit. It is controlled by a branch of Maliki’s own Daawa Party. The finance ministry has been in the hands of ISCI (whose leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim died in Iran earlier today.) Foreign affairs has, obviously, been largely run and staffed by ethnic Kurds.
I disagree, however, with Juan’s other main conclusion: that the bombings were likely the work of former Baathists, rather than Qaeda-related networks. I also think his allegation “Iraqi Sunni Arab resistance in exile in Syria… are running terrorist cells inside Iraq”, and that these networks were connected withe August 19 bombings, is a serious one that he does nothing whatsoever to authenticate or provide a source for.
But it is, certainly, murky. And all the more so because of the political developments that have been erupting within the coalition that’s been more or less “running” Iraq since 2007, under the different forms of tutelage provided by both the US military and the Iranian theocrats.
On Monday, Raed Jarrar had this fascinating analysis of what’s been going on.
In his view, it was Maliki who took the initiative in breaking his links with what Raed calls the “gang of four”: that is, the two Kurdish parties, ISCI, and the (Sunni) Islamic Accord Party. In his view, Maliki was doing this for these reasons:

(Raed also expressed this important conclusion: “There is a lot of violence coming ahead, but this does not mean in anyway the US occupation should last for an extra day… There is nothing that the US can do to fix the situation other than leaving Iraq completely and stopping all forms of intervention in Iraq’s domestic issues.”)
The WaPo and NYT accounts of the political split inside the Baghdad regime both seem to attribute much more of the momentum for the split to the non-Maliki side than to him… But I tend to respect Raed Jarrar’s feel for intra-Iraqi politics more than I do that of any of those western journos.
And meanwhile, from Syria, came this analysis piece today from the always well-informed Sami Moubayed.
First of all, Moubayed lays out a very well argued refutation of the accusations of Syrian complicity in last week’s bombings. Then he asks,

Well, let’s see how this plays out.
I just wish we had some kind of leading body in the international community who could get the leaders of Iraq and all its neighbors into one room together and get them to agree on strict codes for non-intervention, nonviolence, and de-escalation of tensions among them.
But alas, we have no such body. After many years of systematic US downgrading of the role and efficacy of the UN, the UN is just a shadow of what it should be today. And the US itself is clearly incapable of playing a neutral, calming role like this.

Palestinians and Israelis reclaiming a village’s memory

I just got the latest mailing from the great Israeli organization Zochrot, about a tour they organized last Saturday to the ruins of the Palestinian village al-Damun.
This report is written is such a vivid and humanistic way, it really brings to life the pain and other emotions of those ethnic-Palestinian Israelis who took part! (Scroll down to see the photos there, too.)
The report says,

All those who participated in the tour received a copy of the booklet, “Remembering al-Damun,” prepared especially for the occasion. The refugees requested many additional copies to send to those who were exiled from their land and now live in other countries. Most of them are in Lebanon, and some are in Europe and the United States. “This booklet will reach Canada,” said one of the refugees. In 1948 lived in al-Damun more than 1500 residents. About half of them remained in Israel, and, together with their descendents, live nearby, but they’re forbidden to return and are unable to reclaim their property.

So those are the Palestinians who, along with the courageous Jewish Israelis of Zochrot, were interested in rediscovering and marking the remnants of al-Damun village on Saturday.
The other sons and daughters of the village– the ones from families that crossed the not-distant border with Lebanon during the fighting of 1948– have not been allowed to return anywhere near their ancestral homes in the 61 years since then, and have been living stateless in the ever-insecure refugee camps and gatherings of Lebanon.

What’s up in Iranian Kurdistan?

At the very end of a long news report from Tehran in today’s WaPo came this intriguing tidbit:

killed 26 members of Iranian-Kurdish insurgent groups

You would think that at a time of intense American interest in the internal stability of Iran, that news would have gotten a bit more prominence?
Also, of course, because the Iranian province of Kurdistan is where the three US hikers who had crossed the border, apparently by mistake, were arrested by the Iranian border security on July 31.
They have since been interrogated. Obama’s national security adviser, Jim Jones, has described them as innocent and called for their speedy release.
The news of the recent RG crackdown there underlines the risks the three US citizens were taking when they chose to hike in that mountainous region, where the exact national border is at many points not clearly demarcated.
AFP had more details of the latest Revolutionary Guards crackdown in Iranian Kurdistan.
It said that Pakpoor,

The sources referred to in this Wikipedia entry on PJAK, which include Sy Hersh’s November 2006 article on various Bush administration efforts to foment regime change in Iran, also show (Reuters) that one of the earliest steps the Obama administration took after coming into office was to put PJAK onto the US terrorism list.
That was done on February 4, based on a judgment that PJAK is a front organization for the Turkish-Kurdish guerrilla/terrorist group, the PKK, which has been on the list for many years.
Anyway, I wish we could get better coverage in our big media here in the US of developments– whether in Iranian Kurdistan, Iranian Baluchistan, or elsewhere– that might well be linked to the US government’s continuing or past funding of efforts aimed at regime change in Iran.
One final note. With the US designation of PJAK as a terrorist group, I’m assuming that from that point on no US funds would go to PJAK or to any organizations affiliated with it. But how about before February 4? If there was indeed some US funding for PJAK-related bodies before February 4, it is very possible those groups might still have been operating till now on the basis of that funding…
Anyway, all such funding ought immediately to cease as it is a gross interference in the internal political life of another country. In addition, by nearly all the accounts of Iranian democrats, US government funding or the allegations thereof have seriously undermined the success of their efforts.

Hints of Obama’s peace plan–but a notable J. Diehl mistake

Jackson Diehl broke some important news in today’s WaPo:

As the U.N. General Assembly meets in late September, Obama aims to announce the opening of a new negotiating process between Israelis and Palestinians, along with “confidence-building” steps by Israel, the Palestinian Authority and a number of Arab governments. Though Obama will not offer a specific American “blueprint” for a peace settlement — as a number of Arab governments have urged him to do — he will probably lay out at least a partial vision of the two-state settlement that all sides now say they support, and the course that negotiations should take. More significantly, he intends to set an ambitious timetable for completing the peace deal — something that will please Arabs but may irritate Israel.

This is not new. At Annapolis in November 2007, Pres. Bush also “announce[d] the opening of a new negotiating process between Israelis and Palestinians, along with ‘confidence-building’ steps by Israel, the Palestinian Authority and a number of Arab governments.”
And there, too, Bush, “set an ambitious timetable for completing the peace deal.” It was by the end of his presidency.
Now, here we are, seven months after the expiration of that deadline, and not even one concrete step has been taken along the path back to securing the final peace agreement.
Also, in the nearly two years since Annapolis, Israeli settlement construction has continued apace– quite in defiance of what Bush requested of the Israelis there.
So forgive me if I’m not yet impressed by what Diehl is reporting.
David Ignatius– whose political savvy I trust a bit more than I trust Diehl’s– confirms that there are big peace-diplomacy moves being planned. But he described them a bit differently:

If they can agree on terms for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction, that would open the way for talks on creating a Palestinian state.

So according to Ignatius, the settlement freeze is still in active play as a gateway to be traversed before Obama gets the parties back to the final-status talks. That’s a bad strategy, in my view.
Ignatius is also telling us that the administration is divided on whether to present a US peace plan now, or not.
Diehl ends his piece with some serious– and I would say quite possibly deliberate and ill-intentioned– mistakes of both facts and analysis.
He writes:

turned down a far-reaching peace proposal by Israel’s previous government less than a year ago

remains implacable in its refusal to recognize Israel.

The United States, he said in 1991, “can’t want peace more than the parties.”

Here are the mistakes of analysis:

this article

But finally, there was Diehl’s most egregious and most telling mistake– a mistake of raw fact. That was when he attributed to Sec. James Baker the terrible little dictum about “the United States can’t want peace more than the parties.”
That was not Baker. That was Clinton and Pres. George W. Bush.
This mistake matters.
Why? Because as Diehl wrote, Baker was indeed a master of Middle East diplomacy. But he won his very real achievements in that field by pursuing a policy based on the very opposite of the quite irresponsible sentiment expressed in that phrase.
Under Clinton and Bush II, by contrast, those leaders’ easy reliance on the “can’t want a peace more.. ” mindset meant that they never vigorously pushed for anything in the diplomacy on the basis that securing a fair and durable peace was in the strong interest of Americans.
That was what led to the reliance of those two presidents on the idea that “the parties” should just be left to negotiate the terms of a peace settlement just between themselves.
In the context of the Palestinians, whose entire country is under Israel’s military occupation, that approach is crazy. The very best it could ever lead to would be something like the deals that Marshall Petain or Vidkun Quisling struck with the occupying Nazis.
Did anyone expect the Emir of Kuwait simply to sit in a room alone with Saddam Hussein in August 1990 and “negotiate” a peace with him, with no other parties or considerations of international law intervening?
Small wonder that first of all Arafat and then even the very pro-peace-minded Mahmoud Abbas turned down the extremely pusillanimous and demeaning deals that were all they were ever offered under those circumstances.
And thus, small wonder than neither Clinton nor Bush II ever presided over the securing of a final peace.
And meanwhile, throughout all those 16 years, Israel’s implantation of additional Jewish settlers into the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) continued apace… And so did the anger of Muslims and others around the world who saw the US as continuing to bankroll and support every action of the Israeli government.
Where was international law in all this? Where were the resolutions of the United Nations? Where was firm and principled US diplomacy?
Out of the window!
So please, Jackson Diehl, let’s have no more of your mendacious re-writing of history.
A fair and durable peace in the Arab-Israeli region is certainly in the interests of Americans and everyone else in the world who upholds fairness and international law, and is offended to see it being flouted on a daily basis by Israel in the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.
And if any particular “party”, such as the Netanyahu government in Israel, does not see such a peace as being in its own interest?
Then the US, whose fate and reputation in the world is necessarily tied very closely to Israel’s behavior, will just have to “want” the peace more than that party; and should proceed with the policy steps that are necessary in order to win it.
Those steps would certainly not include continuing to give Israel generous financial, political, and military help that is quite unlinked to Israel’s behavior in the occupied territories.
And yes, it was James Baker and his president who were the most recent US leaders
to make that point clear, and to establish that conditionality quite firmly within US policy.

Some thoughts on Megrahi and Lockerbie

There is currently a huge amount of over-heated rhetoric on the airwaves and in the blogosphere, in reaction to the Scottish court’s decision to release convicted Libyan mass-bomber Abdel-Basset al-Megrahi before the end of his sentence, on compassionate/health grounds.
I think the court has done the right thing. This very sober analysis from the BBC makes quite clear that huge question-marks still hang over the issue of Megrahi’s actual criminal responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. It concludes thus:

The warm welcome he got on his return to Tripoli indicates the high probability that he was indeed a Qadhafi-provided scapegoat.
In which case, all the angst and venom that has been directed against him personally, including by some but not all of those bereaved by the bombing, has been largely misplaced.
Of course, as always, it would be excellent to see even one-tenth as much US media attention paid to the sadness of such people as those Americans bereaved by the 1967 Liberty incident, or those Palestinians, Lebanese, and others bereaved by US-supplied Israeli weapons in more recent years.
Or even more so, the families of those scores of thousands of Iraqis killed by the US and as a result of the US outrageous and illegal invasion of their country in 2003.
The WaPo had a fascinating article Friday that described two Washington-area residents, both bereaved by the Lockerbie bombing, who had come to very different conclusions.
One was Anastasios Vrenios, 68, a singing teacher in Northwest Washington:

The other was Stephanie Bernstein, 58, a Bethesda rabbi, whose husband, Michael, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, was killed in the attack. (The OSI is a special unit of the Justice Department that for 30 years or so has been dedicated to hunting down Nazis around the world and bringing them before the courts.)
According to the WaPo reporter, Rabbi Bernstein

The very different reactions of these two people indicates very vividly that not “all” Americans– and not even “all” the families of those bereaved– are “incensed” by Megrahi’s release.
Indeed, families who are bereaved through acts of terrorism go through very different processes as they struggle with finding the best way to think about their bereavement. One of the best books on this subject is this one by Susan Kerr Van De Ven, daughter of Malcolm Kerr, the president of AUB who was killed by a terrorist, suspected to be a Shiite– on his campus, in 1983.
Van De Ven’s mother, Ann Kerr, is a dear friend of mine. The family has wrestled hard, for many years, with how to respond to Malcolm’s killing, and her daughter’s book is an excellent, intimate record of that.
In the work I’ve done on (anti-)death penalty issues here in Virginia, one thing that has surfaced again and again has been a feeling by some of those who have been bereaved through acts of violence that in order to honor the memory of their departed loved one it is somehow “necessary” to seek the harshest possible vengeance against the killer– and that if you don’t do that, then somehow that dishonors the lost loved one or diminishes his/her memory.
Of course, plenty of people in the legal system, the media– and even among pastors, rabbis, and other religious leaders– are eager to validate and amplify those kinds of arguments.
Such arguments do, however, depart very radically from traditional Christian (and Buddhist) ideas of forgiveness. Also, how about the Old testament’s strong witness regarding “Vengeance is mine, said the Lord”–meaning, presumably, that vengeance should not be for mere mortals to dole out but should be left to the hereafter… And there are plenty of social activists and community leaders here in the US who urge a much less vengeful, calmer, and more constructive response to violently induced bereavement. Including, the people who work with the fine organization Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation.
In sum: No, it doesn’t diminish the memory of someone killed in violence by one iota if their surviving family members deal with the tasks of grieving in a non-vengeful manner.
Indeed, quite frequently, just the opposite.

Reading Sari Hanafi on refugees, spatiocide, Jerusalem, etc.

I had a few good research experiences this morning. The first was that I was looking for something else online but ended up reading this chunk out of a chapter the brilliant Palestinian researcher Sari Hanafi wrote on the sociology of a Palestinian return, in Rex Brynen and Roula Rifai’s 2007 book Palestinian Refugees: Challenges of Repatriation and Development.
The 25-page chunk that Google Books gave me there had a lot of really interesting, thoughtful material in it. Hanafi talked about the advantages of using the term “return migration” rather than repatriation, given that repatriation (which is the technical term used in most refugee studies) is really an entire “migration” of its own… He talked about the important concept of “enduring transnationality” for many Palestinian refugees, whether they return or not… He drew on huge amounts of both sociological and economic data, gathered both by the Shaml institute that he headed in Ramallah for several years and by other organizations.
Wow.
So anyway, the chunk that Google Books gave me ended before the end of the chapter and without giving me any of Sari’s footnotes. But I clicked on “Find it in a Library” and yes, indeed, the whole– very expensive!– book is available in the U.Va. library, which is around 2/3 mile from where I am now sitting.
Okay, so finding that chunk of text, and finding that the whole book can– I hope!– be in my hands before nightfall were two good experiences…
I had originally been doing a Google search on Sari because I know he was the originator of the important concept of spatiocide (aka spaciocide) and also, I think, of the important term biopolitics…
Googling for “spatiocide” I then found these two pages (1 and 2), which are both about a 2006 book titled City of Collision: Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism.
Since I am very interested in both Jerusalem and urban planning issues, this books looks fascinating! Sadly, however, the nearest library that it’s in is 4100 miles away, in Frankfurt. I think I’ll have to buy it and then maybe donate it to U.Va., which has a huge architecture school…
Okay, I’ve just made that purchase. (Stop me before I buy more books!)
Now I need to go back and read the review essay by Oren Yiftachel that I was reading before I got distracted by the whole Sari Hanafi thing.

IPS piece: ‘Republicans Attack Obama on Palestine Policy’

… is here, and also archived here.
It deals primarily with Huckabee but also with other important US pols who went on partisanly sponsored junkets to Israel and the OPTs in recent weeks (Cantor, Hoyer, etc.)
I had some quotes in the piece from the J. Post’s Herb Keinon. He had an excellent piece of reporting in Thursday’s paper. It seems like he had accompanied Huckabee on some of his trips around various (completely illegal) Jewish settlements– including ones in occupied E. Jerusalem and one “unauthorized” settlement outpost.
He’s clearly making a bid for Evangelical grassroots support in the US and assuming that evangelicals are overwhelmingly pro-settler.
Herb Keinon is worth reading. It seems that he (in the form of the un-named “Israeli journalist” he refers to) couldn’t believe that an ultra-rightist like Huckabee might actually be someone with some influence/following in US politics…
Also definitely worth reading on Huckabee are Spencer Ackerman and Matt Duss (1 and 2.)

Does Afghanistan’s election matter? How, exactly?

The only thing that really matters about the presidential election held in Afghanistan yesterday was whether it will generate a nationwide government that has enough political credibility with the country’s 33 million people that it is able to govern.
This seems to be in severe question. And the question may not be answered for many weeks, or even months, yet.
From this point of view, the statement Obama made yesterday lauding the election as a success was both (a) beside the point and (b) inappropriate. Oh, and also distinctly (c) premature.
It is not for him, the president of the foreign country occupying Afghanistan, to declare the election a success. It is for the Afghans. That is, if we are all to believe the official US narrative about Afghanistan now being a “sovereign nation” in which the US and other NATO forces are deployed just to help the Afghan government…
There are two major ways (and a host of lesser ways) in which the election could fail to generate a “credible enough” government.
Firstly, the whole process of voting may be judged by Afghans to be non-credible, as evidenced either by very low turnout or by widesread and credible reports of voter fraud.
It may well be possible that the recorded turnout among the 15-16 million registered voters was so low– due to the intimidation of the anti-government insurgents, disillusion with the governing system, or other factors– that the whole voting exercise is inherently non-credible.
We should know that when we gain an idea of raw turnout numbers, apparently tomorrow.
Or, the turnout figures may be sufficiently high to allow for credibility– but the reports of fraud could be so widespread and credible that even (or perhaps especially) those high raw turnout numbers don’t look credible.
Secondly, even if the voting process has some initial credibility, the reported results of either yesterday’s first round or the runoff that mandated in the event of no clear winner could come under serious contest from one or more of the losers…
We are seeing before our very eyes, in Iran, the debilitating effect that such a contest to electoral legitimacy can have on a governance system.
I imagine, though, that the US military will not allow a prolonged-deadlock situation to go on very long in the event of a contest arising in Afghanistan… And they will intervene in some way… But of course, that would only undermine the legitimacy of the resulting president even more!
But anyway, let’s say that Hamid Karzai or Abdullah Abdullah manages to emerge as the winner after a first or second round, and this victory meets with no immediate serious contestation from other candidates. Then, the lucky winner goes and forms a government…. that does what?
Well, one thing I’m assuming it can almost immediately do is sit astride a rather bloated stream of foreign (US-mobilized) funding. Which it then gets to deploy. Yoohoo! (Why do you think most of these guys are runnng in these elections, anyway?)
But will it be able to provide enough basic services– including that most vital government service of all, pubic security– to enough Afghans to be able to keep and expand its legitimacy?
Who know? The odds look rather grim..
Bottom line, though: It is far too early to call yesterday’s election a “success”– for any of the candidates, or for the process itself.
… By the way, I’ve been pretty disappointed so far in the AfPak Channel of news and commentary that Foreign Policy mag and the New America Foundation got up and running a couple of weeks ago.
Maybe it’s still early days for the people there. But if you want a good, up-to-date source on the election that aggregates news and reports from a wide range of sources, then Wikipedia’s page “Afghan presidential election, 2009” looks far, far better to me.
It provides an amazing range of excellent links. Including one to this great August 19 piece by my fellow IPS contributor Gareth Porter.
Gareth quoted former US ambassador to Afghanistan Ron Neumann as saying that the odds of the election tending up as “good enough” in the eyes of the Afghans was “50-50”.
He also quoted Australian COIN specialist David Kilcullen as saying, “The biggest fear is Karzai ends up as an incredibly illegitimate figure, and we end up owning Afghanistan and propping up an illegitimate government.”
Chapeau, Gareth!