Author: Helena

Sam Bahour on economic realities of occupation

The prominent Palestinian-American business executive Sam Bahour has an op-ed in today’s WSJ that gives the lie to all the hasbara that Netanyahu, Oren, Friedman, etc have been putting out regarding the alleged “amazing green shoots” of the West bank’s economy.
Bahour knows whereof he writes:

    I was the manager who oversaw the establishment of the first modern mall in the West Bank—the Plaza Shopping Center in El Bireh. I can attest that the success of a West Bank mall rests on a thin layer of elite consumer privilege poised precariously over a chasm of widespread disempowerment. Until West Bank Palestinians gain free and open access to the world economy, beyond the markets of the occupying power, major enterprises in Palestinian towns will suffer.
    Objective analyses by the World Bank suggest that Israel’s repressive practices will not permit the Palestinian economy to develop meaningfully…

He has more data and examples there.
His conclusion is particularly sobering if you keep in mind that he is someone who has worked hard for 15 years to try to make the “economic peace” approach work:

    Peace talk is cheap; actions by Israel that would make real peace—even economic peace—a reality are still the exception rather than the rule. I do not disparage any progress that has been made but, viewed in context, it is no more than window dressing.
    Meanwhile, the continued brutal subjugation of Gaza and coerced Judaization of Arab East Jerusalem call into serious question Israel’s true intentions. Absent a political framework to secure Palestinian freedom and independence, “economic peace” initiatives only facilitate the crime of occupation.

Btw, it looks as though there’s a concerted campaign by the hasbaristas to stack the comments board linked to Bahour’s piece. (At one point, one of them even writes: “this apologist has gotten short shrift here. nicely done folks.”)
So maybe instead of, or in addition to, posting comments here, JWN readers should go over and post some comments there.

‘Afghanistan worse than Vietnam’

Fascinating post at FP’s AfPak channel today, comparing Afghanistan with Vietnam, elections and all.
Not favorably for Obama’s policy in Afghanistan, it has to be said. The headline said it all: “Saigon 2009.”
The authors are:

    Thomas H. Johnson [who] is a research professor of the Department of National Security Affairs and director of the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, [and] M. Chris Mason [who] is a retired Foreign Service officer who served in 2005 as political officer for the PRT in Paktika and presently is a senior fellow at the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies and at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, D.C.

So they appear to know what they’re talking about.
Here’s their bottom line:

    For those who say that comparing the current war in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War is taking things too far, here’s a reality check: It’s not taking things far enough. From the origins of these North-South conflicts to the role of insurgents and the pointlessness of this week’s Afghan presidential elections, it’s impossible to ignore the similarities between these wars. The places and faces may have changed but the enemy is old and familiar. The sooner the United States recognizes this, the sooner it can stop making the same mistakes in Afghanistan.
    … It doesn’t matter who wins the August elections for president in Afghanistan: he will be illegitimate because he is elected. We have apparently learned nothing from Vietnam.

Salafist extremists lash out at Hamas

Scott Sanford of Jihadica has helpfully collected and summarized some of the early reactions from salafi extremists to last Friday’s confrontation between Hamas and the salafist Jund Ansar Allah group in southern Gaza.
By the application of vastly superior force, Hamas won that battle, though at some cost. The JAA’s leader and several of its fighters were killed and the movement has now, presumably been effectively suppressed.
One of the salafist strategists Sanford cites is Akram al-Hijazi, a Palestinian who yesterday launched this tirade against the Hamas leadership on Al-Fallujah Islamic Forums yesterday.
Three days ago, Hijazi posted this tirade against Hamas on the forum.
I haven’t had time to read these texts in detail. But Sanford tells us that Hijazi argues that the present Hamas leadership has abandoned the “true path” that was established by Hamas founder Skeikh Ahmed Yassin and the movement’s second leader in Gaza, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi.
In this way, Hijazi is making a play for the sympathies of Hamas rank-and-filers who may be disgruntled with the diplomatic-political tack taken by the current leadership.
Of course, Yassin was the originator of the idea that it would be a good idea to have a “hudna” (truce) of some possibly lengthy period with Israel, during which the Palestinians could run their own government in the post-liberation territories of the West Bank (including E. Jerusalem) and Gaza. That is still the version of the “two-state solution” advocated by the Hamas leadership.
Yassin also cooperated with Israel in several ways during his life. Much more than Meshaal and the rest of the current leadership ever have! So the idea that salafists somehow represent the “true path” of Yassin does not have a lot of prima facie credibility…
However, the potential attractiveness of the salafists to Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere– who see themselves confined by Israel in the open-air prisons that are what Gaza and the West Bank have become, and who see their just claims for liberation, national independence, and the settlement of decades-old refugee claims all just endlessly denied, derided, and shunted aside as Israel’s colonization of the West Bank continues apace– cannot for a moment be denied.
Nehemiah Strasler had a good piece in Haaretz on this topic on Tuesday.
He wrote,

    During the entire period of our rule in the territories, we have destroyed the existing leadership, which led to the rise of more extreme leaders. We destroyed the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat, who had agreed to a two-state solution and was capable of “delivering the goods.” And we brought about Hamas’ seizure of the Gaza Strip. Now we are cultivating the third stage: Al-Qaida.
    That’s because on our side people don’t want to understand that when the oppression increases and there is nothing to lose, the adversary doesn’t surrender and grovel. Just the opposite. He becomes more radical. Hate wins out and the desire for revenge becomes the only hope. So when poverty in Gaza increases and unemployment is on the rise, Al-Qaida will take control. It will happen either in a coup or through elections, and we will long for that terrible Hamas.

—
By the way, just a small geographic note. I know there’s a Fallujah in Iraq, and there’s also a Fallujah in southern Palestine (maybe now in Israel?), which was one of the limits that the Egyptian army reached in 1948. Was one of them named after the other? Does anyone know?

‘Rumors’ of settlement freeze just that

Steve Clemons blogged this morning that,

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be using his skills as a crafty political executive to sidestep some of his more bureaucratic and recalcitrant allies in cooking up a deal with George Mitchell and Barack Obama on settlements.

Not so fast, Steve.
Richard Silverstein has an excellent commentary on the latest spate of rumors about some kind of a Mitchell-Netanyahu deal on settlements.
He quotes an Israeli friend as noting that the word used in Hebrew to describe what the Israeli government is contemplating is hamtana, meaning “waiting”– or, as Richard comments, maybe more like “the pause that refreshes.”
Israeli Housing Minister Ariel Attias (Shas) is reported as saying “There is no freeze”– but there is some hamtana.
For its part, the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department has said that,

    the terms so far made public fail to comply with Israel’s obligation to implement a comprehensive and immediate freeze on all settlement activities as stipulated in the 2001 Mitchell Report and the 2003 Road Map.

The PLO-NAD also points to a report in the Israeli business press as saying that,

    the Israeli department of government properties is expected to invite tenders for a bid to build 450 residential units in Pisgat Ze’ev, a neighborhood on the Palestinian side of the 1967 borders in internationally recognized East Jerusalem.
    The magazine’s Wednesday edition said the department was relaxing some of its earlier requirements for bid so the project can get going in the next six months.

So altogether, it looks as though the settlement freeze is (a) not going into operation in any meaningful way, but is (b) being “played with” by Netanyahu in his interactions with the Americans, just as Efraim Inbar predicted would happen…

Obama, Afghanistan– and St. Augustine

Pres. Obama gave a speech to the veterans of Foreign Wars annual convention on Monday in which he spelled out his view of the US’s now-declining strategic stakes in Iraq and its continuing strategic stake in Afghanistan.
His words were considered and important.
On Iraq, he said,

    In Iraq, after more than six years of war, we took an important step forward in June. We transferred control of all cities and towns to Iraq’s security services. The transition to full Iraqi responsibility for their own security is now underway…
    But as we move forward, the Iraqi people must know that the United States will keep its commitments. And the American people must know that we will move forward with our strategy. We will begin removing our combat brigades from Iraq later this year. We will remove all our combat brigades by the end of next August. And we will remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. And for America, the Iraq war will end.
    By moving forward in Iraq, we’re able to refocus on the war against al Qaeda and its extremist allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan….

From one viewpoint, of course, what the US military has been doing in Iraq has been moving back, not forward, despite all of Obama’s uses of the term “forward”.
It’s forward, I suppose, if you understand that he means that the US has been proceeding with its commitments under the November 2008 Withdrawal Agreement. And his mention of the end-of-2011 deadline buttresses that interpretation.
Also, if he wants to describe– for this presumably very nationalistic US audience– this very necessary move out of Iraq as a move “forward”, let him do so, I say.
And then, remembering what he has just said about Iraq, let’s see what he said about Afghanistan. He described his administration’s “new, comprehensive strategy” in Afghanistan in the following terms:

    This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war—that we also need diplomacy and development and good governance. And our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals—to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies.
    … These new efforts have not been without a price. The fighting has been fierce. More Americans have given their lives. And as always, the thoughts and prayers of every American are with those who make the ultimate sacrifice in our defense.
    As I said when I announced this strategy, there will be more difficult days ahead…
    But we must never forget. This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.

Steve Walt had an excellent critique of Obama’s “war of necessity/ al-Qaeda safe haven” claim on his FP blog yesterday.
I want to take a slightly different tack. I want, first, simply to point out a few important things; and then I want to get more deeply into launching a “Just War theory” critique of the whole US military venture in Afghanistan.
So, the prefatory points I want to make:

Continue reading “Obama, Afghanistan– and St. Augustine”

Registan, Bloggingheads (redux), etc

I’ve gotten into a little argument with Joshua Foust over at Registan, over the chronic problem of the gross under-representation of women at ‘Bloggingheads TV’.
This is not a new problem.
First of all, I understand that that under-representation is not Foust’s fault. But all the guys who participate in those forums without also raising their concern about gender issues are, imho, compounding the problem. Women and other under-represented groups need allies.
Foust claimed that there are “lots” of women at BHTV. I just went, randomly, to the ‘M’ page on their list of contributors and counted six women out of 36 names. That is definitely under-representation!
… Anyway, I feel a bit bad about singling Foust out on this… for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t know him personally at all– unlike some of the other guys who do things there, who is who I should really persist in talking to.
Secondly, and most importantly, the substance of the work that Foust does on Registan is truly first-class. Today he has two other excellent posts up– this one, about the “Meta-war in Georgia one year on,” and this one that asks the really important question about why anyone thinks this week’s election in Afghanistan is important.

Iran: Ready or not to talk? Washington: Ready or not?

In an amazing display of very late-night– or very early-morning– blogging, Laura Rozen put a post up this morning showcasing a Reuters report that Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA in Vienna Ali Asghar Soltanieh had “announced Iran’s readiness to take part in any negotiations with the West based on mutual respect.”
She walked her first report back a bit, after Iran’s Press TV reported that Soltanieh said “”There have been no comments or interviews with TV networks on nuclear talks or conditions.” (Which is not a complete rebuttal of what Rozen first reported.)
Rozen has more about all the “will they, won’t they?” speculation about Iran’s future actions that is rife in the Washington political elite that’s both inside and outside the administration. (Sometimes, outside, but close to it.)
The current focus is whether Tehran will send someone to the proposed talks on the nuclear issue that Washington wants to see held before the UNGA session opens at the end of September.
As usual, one of the smartest remarks comes from Trita Parsi, whom Rozen quotes as saying,

    I don’t think worst case is that they don’t show up… They’ll show up. The worst case scenario is that they show up but they are incapable of making any big decisions because of political infighting in Iran.

This is precisely the fear I’ve had since I first articulated it eight days after the June 12 elections.
The “end of September” deadline is one the Obama administration has been pretty insistent on. It is related primarily to the “understandings” the administration seems to have reached with the (nuclear-armed) government of Israel, to the effect that Washington will try to squeeze significant concessions out of Tehran before the end of the year… and if that doesn’t work, then Washington will push hard for much tighter international sanctions against Iran and possibly other potentially even more hostile acts.
The end of September deadline does not, however, take into account either the now-imminent incidence of Ramadan or the continuing, long-drawn-out deadlock in the internal power struggle inside Iran’s theocratic governance institutions.
Insisting on the deadline, or taking concrete policy steps that further escalate the west’s tensions with Iran, would be most likely to strengthen the hardliners inside Tehran/Qom.
Another inescapable factor in this is, of course, that Washington no longer occupies the uncontested Uber-power position at the pinnacle of the global system that it occupied even three or four years ago. To get any significant strengthening of the international sanctions regime against Tehran requires the concurrence of, at the very least, all the other members of the Security Council’s P-5.
At a time of increasing American dependence on (inter-dependence with) both Russia and China– not to mention the NATO allies– that is far from a foregone conclusion.
Rozen does some good reporting (and some that’s not so good.) But she does seem to operate these days almost totally within the DC policy bubble, and too seldom looks at the broader dimensions of world affairs within which the US’s foreign policy operates.

More on Bil’in, Dov Khenin, etc

    [Editorial note: I received today the following commentary from Israeli leftist Yonatan Preminger on the recent JWN post on Dov Khenin/Chainin, Bil’in, etc; and I’m publishing it here with his permission. You can read some more of Yonatan’s work here. Thanks, Yonatan! ~HC]

From Yonatan Preminger:
As you note on your blog, MK Dov Chenin was indeed “gassed” by the IDF, as were all the demonstrators who had turned out in force to protest the nighttime arrests of Bil’in village residents during the preceding week. The army also fired tear gas canisters at children who had – as children will – run over the hill on their own and were throwing stones. And finally, when we departed, the army thought nothing of sending a few more volleys of gas canisters in our direction, to ram the message home as it were…
You are probably aware that Bil’in residents, together with Israeli activists, have been protesting the route of the so-called “security” fence every week for four years. Two years ago, the Israeli high court ruled that the route had to be changed, but nothing has changed on the ground. And last April a veteran protester from Bil’in, founder of the Popular Committee dedicated to organizing the protest, was killed when the IDF shot a gas canister directly into the crowd. All the demonstrations have been non-violent. This is a basic principle of the Bil’in protests.
However, I would like to add a few words about Chenin. He did not run for the [Tel Aviv] municipal elections as leader of Hadash, but as leader of a new list known as “Ir l’Kulanu” (“a city for all of us”). In its founding meeting, at which I was present, the “party” claimed to be somehow apolitical. Ideology – including socialism, heaven forbid – was notably absent. So were the Arabs.
The Arabs, in this case mostly from Jaffa which was appended to Tel Aviv, were given their own Hadash-backed list. I am certain that the vast majority of Jews who voted Ir l’Kulanu would not have voted for a “Jewish-Arab” party. Chenin knew this. The strategic choice was to split Hadash along national and nationalist lines, and Ir l’Kulanu was the result.
Chenin is a brave MK, one of the few who are ready to take to the barricades. Unfortunately, he heads a party that has not only lost its socialist and communist roots, but says one thing in Arabic and another in Hebrew. The phenomenon of Ir l’Kulanu reflects the bubble known as Tel Aviv, a bubble located far from the front which sparks up every few years, far from the murky occupation, and far from the Arabs – including Israel’s Palestinian citizens. This bubble claims to be liberal and open-minded, but Israel’s insular nationalism is as deeply rooted here as on the hilltops in the occupied territories.
Thank you for your Counterpunch article quoting Dov Yermiya. His letter received too little notice, unfortunately. I hope it appears elsewhere.

Huckabee’s pro-settler stance part of bigger US shift

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is in Israel this week. He’s making a point of touring many of Israel’s (illegal) settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. (Richard Silverstein has one version of Huck’s settlement-focused itinerary in this very informative blog post.)
While visiting with Jewish settlers in occupied east Jerusalem today, he said the U.S. should not “be telling Jewish people in Israel where they should and should not live.”
At the same time that Huckabee is hanging out with people in the Israelis settlements, so is another figure from the US rightwing, Orly Taitz, known as the “Queen Bee of the birther movement”– that is, the movement of those rightwing Americans who are obsessed with the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US and is therefore ineligible to be president.
Like Huckabee, Taitz has strongly criticized Pres. Obama’s campaign to persuade Israel to halt its settlement-building program.
The participation of these two figures from US politics in the orbit of Israel’s settler extremists is part of a deeper shift in US politics. It used to be that just about all of the US Democratic Party was staunchly pro-Israel and would line up like clockwork to defend Israel’s perceived interests, including against any policies of the US administration that might seek to curb Israeli expansionism and militarism.
Back then– oh, let’s say through the end of the 1990s– if you’d hear much open criticism of the Israeli government’s policies from participants in US national politics, it would nearly always come from Republicans.
But over the years things have been slowly changing. (Though still incompletely, as for example here.)
Now, almost no-one in the Democratic Party is prepared to side with this government of Israel against Obama’s extremely reasonable campaign on the settlements issue. And it is the right wing in the country– including not only such seeming nutters as the Israeli-American Orly Taitz but also someone much nearer the GOP mainstream like Mike Huckabee– who are at the forefront of the campaign to “defend” the Israeli government against the policies of the US president.
There are a number of reasons for this shift, which in my view is long overdue. Speaking as someone who is both an upholder of Palestinian (as well as Israeli) rights and generally on the left of the US political spectrum, I can say that for many, many years it felt pretty darn lonely in the camp of “PIPs”– Americans who are Progressive, Including on Palestine. The camp of Americans who were PEPs– Progressive, Except on Palestine– always seemed so much larger. Until the past few years.
(I think this PIP/PEP nomenclature was developed by the estimable Phil Weiss, who is definitely at the forefront of today’s PIPs.)