Author: Helena

IPS piece on Fateh’s crisis

IPS published my piece on Fateh’s leadership crisis yesterday. It’s here, also archived here.
The news peg for this was, obviously, Farouq Qaddoumi’s public launching last week of the accusation that Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) had conspired with Dahlan, the US, and the Israelis in the poisoning of Yasser Arafat, and the subsequent ruckus within Fateh.
Fateh’s Sixth general Conference is due to open August 4– just ten days from now– in Bethlehem. Let’s see how that goes. Actually, I’d kind of like to go there and cover it.
I am intrigued by the logistics of the operation. Bethlehem, along with its traditionally Christian sister-towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour, is encircled by some particularly ferocious sections of Israel’s 8-meter high concrete Wall. And as I noted when I visited there in late February, access to this enclave is tightly controlled by the Israeli occupation forces… And that is just access from elsewhere in the West Bank! Then, of course, there is access to the West Bank as a whole, which is also controlled by the IOF.
Will Fateh’s members from occupied East Jerusalem be allowed to travel to Bethlehem to take part? Fateh members from Amman or Beirut or elsewhere in the Palestinian diaspora?
It strikes me that for Abbas and his followers, this is sort of a no-win situation. If he wants to get a truly representative group of Fateh leaders and activists together for the conference, he needs Israeli cooperation… But then, especially in the present circumstances, having that cooperation can taint the proceedings very deeply, perhaps irreparably.
The PLO, which is the broader, Fateh-dominated body that claims to speak for all Palestinians, held a meeting of its policymaking National Council in Gaza in 1998. That was at the request of the PM of Israel, then as now Netanyahu, with the express aim that it should over-ride or delete those portions of the PLO’s founding Charter that called for the end of a specifically Jewish state in historic Palestine.
That session was attended by no less a personage than Pres. Bill Clinton. (Woohoo! … Irony alert.) It did not delete but did attempt to over-ride the controversial portions of the Charter.
Other key governance events that have taken place within the OPTs under Israeli occupation have of course included the elections of 1996, 2005, and 2006. Those, however, were all elections merely to administrative/governance positions within the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority, rather than relating to the nationwide Palestinian constituency, a clear majority of which consists of Palestinians exiled from their homeland who have no vote in (and no direct interest in) the workings of the PISGA.
Fateh, however, claims to represent a portion of the “nationwide” constituency of Palestinians. So the idea that it will hold its policymaking gathering under the tight control and ever-watchful eyes and ears of the Israeli occupation is strange, to say the least.
But then, let’s face it, Fateh is a strange entity altogether.
—
p.s. I intend to make it a practice to refer to the PISGA by its full name and initials whenever possible, as a way of reminding all of us that this body is not, and was never intending to be, a long-term governance solution for the Palestinians of the OPTs. Indeed it is now seriously past its Sell-by Date, since the text of the Oslo Accords stipulated that by 1999 Israel and the PLO (yes, the PLO, not the PISGA) would have negotiated a final-status peace between them, and presumably any “interim” governance formula would thereafter be phased out.

59 Gazans still missing from war, presumed under rubble

Ma’an news agency had this disturbing report today, in which it listed the names of 59 Gazans still missing since last december’s Israeli assault on the Strip, and presumed still buried under the estimated 1.5 million tons of rubble still left uncleared there.
The listing goes in order of age. The youngest three are:

    1. In’am Ra’fat Al-Masri, 12, Ash-Shati Refugee Camp
    2. Abed Ar-Rahman Ahmad Al-A’tawnah, 15, Al-Faloja
    3. Jihan Sami Al-Helu, 17, Al-Karama Tower

The oldest five are:

    54. Hakmah Abed Ar-Rahman Al-‘Attar, 75, Beit Lahiya
    55. Mahdiaeyah Salman Ayyad, 76, Az-Zaitoun
    56. Eid Jum’a A’yyad, 80, Az-Zaitoun
    57. Mariam Abed Ar-Rahman Abu Thaher, 85, Beit Lahiya
    58. Mariam Mutawe’ Mutawe’, 85, Al-Mughraqa

May their souls rest in peace. But what an outrage that Israel refuses to allow into the Strip the heavy lifting equipment required to locate and extract the mortal remains of these 59 people, so they can be given a decent burial.
Remember the huge lengths Israel goes to to get hold of the body parts of every single Israeli citizen, including airmen downed in combat? Well, Palestinians honor their dead every bit as much. I can barely imagine the pain the families of these missing people must be experiencing.

Afghanistan: “Armed nation building”??

The generally sane and realistic military analyst Tony Cordesman published a 28-page paper (PDF) yesterday on the US war in Afghanistan, which to me merely underlined how deeply un-winnable this US war has become.
Here’s his lead sentence:

    There are no certainties in war, and the tasks that NATO/ISAF and the US must perform in Afghanistan go far beyond the normal limits of counterinsurgency. They are the equivalent of armed nation building at a time when Afghanistan faces major challenges from both its own insurgents and international movements like Al Qa’ida, and must restructure its government and economy after 30 years of nearly continuous conflict.

Armed nation building?
Pack up your guns and come home, guys. Do whatever deals you need to do, to get out of there fast. Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans.
I’m not even sure where this notion of “nation building” came from, within US/western strategic and policy discourse. The current Wikipedia entry on it is suggestive and helpful. For starters, it denotes a clear distinction between the process of nation-building and that of state-building– most notably, by sending you to a different page for the latter.
To me, nation-building implies a process that can only be effectively and sustainably undertaken by the constituent members of the nation itself. It certainly can’t be carried out in any meaningful way by a horde of very heavily armed robo-troops parachuted in from a distant land. It just might be that a group of armed men from outside could do something to help with the process of state-building. (Not that that would make the resulting state recognizably a democratic one, however.) But nation-building, in the sense of building up the ties among a group of people so they feel they all belong to one “nation” and are bound by the obligations of that commitment?
Nah, I’m still not seeing it as a possibility.
I don’t think NATO can succeed at state-building in Afghanistan, either.
… This evening I was on a Press TV show with Larry Korb and Gareth Porter, about Afghanistan and Iraq, both. Larry, who’s a sensible, realist person, seemed fairly supportive of Obama’s decision to increase the numbers of US troops in southern Afghanistan. At one point I asked him what the best outcome was that he could reasonably foresee in Afghanistan. He said something like,

    Well, that in 18 months we would have stabilized things enough there that the process of nation building could be taking root. But if that hasn’t happened by then, we’d have to look at other options.

This is not exactly a gung-ho outlook. But I think that even this outlook is very short-sighted and irresponsible.
Why wait another 18 months, when it is almost certain that the kind of “stability” Larry was looking for won’t be there then… and along the way, how many more Afghan citizens and how many more Americans will have died?
Pres. Obama should start acting now– to reach out to the whole of the rest of the world community, but especially Afghanistan’s neighbors, to ask their help in formulating a plan for a speedy withdrawal of the western troops from the country. Pakistan and Afghanistan both need a lot of help in re-establishing effective governance at all levels. But military troops who are western are just about the worst imaginable tools to help bring this about.
And guess what. There are plenty of other ways for these two countries’ peoples to get what they need.
Sure, many Americans still have a lot of concern about future Al-Qaeda attacks, or about Afghanistan once again turning into the kind of place where Al-Qaeda can find a safe haven for organizing its heinous plots. But once again, the insertion, use, and maintenance of a large western military force in the Afghan-Pakistani border region seems like just about the worst, and most counter-productive way to respond to these concerns.

Visser: Obama gets Iraqis out of boxes; US MSM still don’t

Reidar Visser has an encouraging short report noting on the way that Pres. Obama referred to Iraq’s people(s) yesterday:

    At one point he mentioned “all of Iraq’s ethnic and religious” groups, but in another instance he referred to the “people of all parts of Iraq” and there was no reference to the specific tripartite formula of “Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds” which was prominent only weeks ago during Vice-President Joe Biden’s visit. All in all, his remarks are likely to be seen as unobjectionable by a majority of Iraqis, quire regardless of what they may think of the current Iraqi government.

Excellent.
(Hey, perhaps Obama’s people have been reading Reidar’s and my writings on this topic earlier this month? Here and here.)
But, as Reidar notes, the western MSM still

    remain stuck in their own clichés. Here, reconciliation “between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds” is the only ticket in town, even if this means having to struggle with quotation marks and sometimes even cheat.

Depressing.
I do know as a longtime journo that frequently, when you’re writing under the pressure of deadlines, you need to have handy “labels” that you slap onto various groups, especially in situations of fluid and often fast-moving conflicts. But a reporter and her editors need constantly to be re-examining the helpfulness as well as the effects of those labels. And since the Iraqi story is not particularly “fast-moving” at this time, there’s no excuse at all for the MSM journos not to be doing this.

East Jerusalem / West Jerusalem

Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now did a great post on their blog recently showing how wildly inaccurate PM Netanyahu was when he claimed, Sunday, that Palestinians can buy homes and live in West Jerusalem.
Netanyahu made this mendacious claim to buttress his argument that “it should be quite okay” for Jewish Israelis to construct homes and live in occupied East Jerusalem.
But as Lara– and a number of others have pointed out– it is just about impossible for Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to “move over” and live in West Jerusalem, since most of the housing there is on what is called “Israeli state land”, whose sale, or rather long-term lease, to people who are not either Israeli citizens or certifiedly Jewish people from elsewhere is forbidden under a covenant between the government and the Israel Lands Authority.
However, neither Lara nor her primary source, Israeli attorney Daniel Seidemann, mention two other highly relevant aspects of the situation regarding access to housing in West Jerusalem:

    1. Though the Israeli High Court has ruled (in the Qa’adan case) that real estate controlled by the ILA should be made available to Palestinian citizens of Israel, on an equal footing with Jewish Israelis, in practice Palestinian Israelis still find it just about impossible to buy or even rent ILA-controlled homes. Therefore it is not just Palestinians registered as residents of occupied East Jerusalem who can’t freely buy or move into the ILA-controlled homes in West Jerusalem– neither can Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship.
    2. The vast majority of homes controlled by the ILA and other Israeli government authorities in West Jerusalem are properties that rightfully belong to Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from that half of the city during the fighting of 1948. Many of those former residents of West Jerusalem ended up in East Jerusalem. (They include Um Kamel al-Kurd, evicted from her home in Sheikh Jarrah for the benefit of Israeli settlers, last November, and living in harsh circumstances in a tent since then.)
    These West Jerusalem / East Jerusalemites now have to suffer this triple indignity:

      a. They are forbidden to return to family homes that are often just a short walk away from where they now live in East Jerusalem, and have to watch as the homes’ current Jewish residents make free and full use of properties that the Palestinian owners’ forebears scrimped and saved hard to build, and designed and decorated with great loving care.
      b. Since 1948 these West Jerusalem / East Jerusalemites have done the best they can to build new– though always hopefully temporary– lives for themselves in the East Jerusalem areas where they sought refuge in in 1948. But now, even these neighborhoods are under intensive attack from Israeli settlers who receive considerable support from the Israeli authorities.
      c. And now, too, they hear the Israeli prime minister making the quite mendacious claim that they are just as “free” to move into West Jerusalem as the settlers are to move into East Jerusalem!

It simply isn’t so.
I note that Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Association has even weighed in on this issue, saying incredulously to Netanyahu:

    as a longtime Jerusalem resident, I can only say — huh? Arabs in West Jerusalem? Wen? Eyfo?

By the way, Lara Friedman also has an informative interview with Seidemann here about the settlers’ projects in Sheikh Jarrah. And if you go to to the Ir Amim webste (English here) you can find a lot more information about the planning/settling/demographic situation in Jerusalem. Including you can download a good description— with map– of the settlers’ plans for Sheikh Jarrah.

How occupations end

We here in Washington DC currently have a front-seat view of how a country undertakes the ending of the military occupation by its ground forces of another country’s territory.
Today, Iraq’s elected PM Nuri al-Maliki will be meeting with Pres. Obama in the White House. Top on the agenda of their talks will doubtless be continuing disagreements over the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement (SOFA) that the two governments concluded last November, which mandates a complete withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Yes, there have been some disagreements between the two governments over how the WA will be implemented. But seeing how the US is now in the process of pulling its troops out of Iraq over the next 30 months can inform us a lot about some of the issues involved in ending Israel’s continuing military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.
Over the past 20 years, we’ve actually seen a lot of military occupations being brought to an end. This is not rocket science. Here’s what we now know:
1. An occupation can end as a result of an agreement negotiated between the occupying power and a “sufficiently legitimate” governing authority representing the occupied area’s indigenous residents; or the occupying power can attempt a unilateral, essentially un-negotiated withdrawal. A third alternative: Of course, occupations can also be ended– as the German occupations of European countries, the Japanese occupations of Asian countries, and Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait all were– by the direct application of military force.
2. Examples of the second (unilateral) kind of withdrawal include the US’s withdrawal from the portions of southern Iraq it occupied in the course of the 1991 Gulf War, and Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from just about all of southern Lebanon. The Us withdrawal from Iraq occurred in the context of a ceasefire agreement the two governments hastily concluded; but that agreement did not end the overall state of hostilities between Saddam’s government and the US.
3. Unilateral withdrawals, because they do not end the state of hostilities between the parties, merely rearrange the furniture for the continued pursuit of those hostilities.
4. The “withdrawal” from Gaza that the Israeli government claims it undertook in 2005 did not, actually, end Israel’s formal status under international as the occupying power in Gaza, since Israel retained its control over all Gaza’s contact points with the outside world and over Gaza’s air-space; it also retained the “right” under international law to send its troops back into Gaza whenever it wished.
If Israel had not still been seen, under international law, as the occupying power in Gaza, last December’s massive Israeli assault against the Strip including the large-scale incursion of Israeli troops into it would of course have been seen as an international aggression, triggering the intervention of the UN Security Council under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. That did not happen, because Gaza is still under the same Israeli military occupation that it has been continuously since 1967. What happened in 2005 was not the ending of Gaza’s occupation, but a rearranging of the way Israel organized it.

Continue reading “How occupations end”

Eldar and Kipnis on Golan

Akiva Eldar recently published a short piece in Haaretz about the recent book on Golan and the history of the Israeli-Syrian conflict written by Yigal Kipnis.
Kipnis is a resident of the settlement of Maale Gamleh in southern Golan. He is one of a group of Golan settlers who says they would be prepared to evacuate their present homes in the interest of a final-status peace between Israel and Syria.
Golan has been under belligerent military occupation by Israel since June 1967. In 1981, the Israeli parliament “extended Israeli jurisdiction” to the area– a step that is the equivalent of all-out annexation. (Such as the Israeli parliament did to occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.) Some 18,000 Israeli settlers and 17,000 indigenous Syrian citizens live on Golan. The Syrian Golanis are the remnants of a once much larger civilian Syrian population there; the rest all fled almost immediately after the collapse of the Syrian army’s defensive positions there during the 1967 war.
Kipnis’s book, “The Mountain That Was As a Monster” (Magnes Press), is an account of the history of the always fraught Syrian-Israeli relationship and includes an assessment of the way that Israelis have nearly always felt fearful about the prospect of the Syrian army coming once again to the Golan Plateau. (Hence its title.)
Of course, in the context of any conceivable Syrian-Israeli peace, all of Golan– including the elevated plateau– would be substantially demilitarized subsequent to the full Israeli withdrawal from the plateau that the Syrians have always, quite justifiably, insisted on. So the “fears” of the Israelis about the heights are quite groundless; but they go back a long way.
In his article, Eldar reports,

    Kipnis writes that from the perspective of the Galilee panhandle inhabitants, who until June 1967 had been bombarded from the east, the image of the Syrian Golan as a “monster” is justified. However, in his opinion, a precise examination of the Israeli-Syrian conflict reveals that the sense of threat and fear has existed, perhaps even more so, on the other side – looking from the mountain to the valley, from Syria into Israel. Kipnis argues that the Syrian’s fear of Israel grew stronger in direct proportion to Israel’s increasing military might and superiority over Syria. Exaggerated fear and mistaken information, he wrote, fed into each side’s perception of the other as demonic.

I don’t know if Kipnis writes this in the book, but it is also certainly the case that the Israeli military’s current positions atop the heights and also in the upper reaches of Jebel al-Shaikh (Mount Hermon) allow them to directly overlook Damascus, which is not far away, and to peer deep into the Syrian interior beyond.
If all those heights are demilitarized and a trustworthy monitoring and verification regime is installed there, neither side need live in fear.
Even more importantly, once Israel has a final-status peace with Syria– which will certainly help pave the way for an Israeli-Lebanese peace– then for the first time Israel will have no immediate neighbor with whom it is at war and who has any substantial military capability able to threaten Israel’s homeland. This means Israeli society can become transformed from the militaristic, national-security state it has been since its founding into a much more normal form of state. Military spending can be ramped down considerably, and young Israelis (and young Syrians) need no longer have to serve as conscripts in their army.
What a great prospect.
In the context of a final-status Syrian-Israeli peace, citizens of each country will be able to visit each other’s countries. And if Israel has also concluded a sustainable and fair final-status peace with the Palestinians at that point, the possibilities for extensive normalization of relations are enormous.
However, many or most Jewish citizens of Israel remain until now unpersuaded by those prospects. They prefer the idea that they alone can dominate Golan’s fertile plateau and its rolling hills and streams.
Netanyahu’s national security adviser Uzi Arad recently had this exchange with Haaretz’s Avi Shavit:

    Arad: [I]f there is a territorial compromise, it is one that still leaves Israel on the Golan Heights and deep into the Golan Heights.
    Shavit: From your point of view, is that the right position to take? That this must be the essence of a settlement – a compromise deep into the Golan Heights? That even in peace we must ensure that a large part of the Golan Heights remain in our hands?
    Yes
    Why?
    For strategic, military and land-settlement reasons. Needs of water, wine and view.
    So you say unequivocally: Peace yes, Golan no?
    Correct.
    What about the “deposit” of Yitzhak Rabin, in which he undertook to leave the Golan Heights?
    There is no such thing…

Too bad about that language in all the relevant UN resolutions about “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, eh?

Israeli and pro-Israeli propaganda: Nuttier every day!

    “The Pope and the cardinals of the Vatican help organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews…”
    “When I see a human rights organization try to raise money in Saudi Arabia, it speaks to the collapse of the human rights community…”

These are just two of the nuttier arguments currently being made by Israeli and extremist pro-Israeli propagandists. The first is a claim from a pamphlet that was distributed to IDF troops for some months, until recently. The second, which simply assumes that all his listeners will share his own inherent racism against citizens of Saudi Arabia, is an argument made by Ron Dermer, director of policy planning for Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu.
You could say that the increasing nuttiness of the arguments made by propagandists/hasbaristas close to Israeli official circles is an indication of their panic and desperation, now that it’s become clear that some of their earlier claims won’t hold up to the light of day. (“The Israeli army is the most moral army in the world”; “No-one wants peace more than the government of Israel”; etc etc.)
That interpretation of what’s happening may well be valid. But we should remember two other things, too. First, there are apparently plenty of well-connected pro-Zionist people both in Israel and elsewhere who apparently believe claims as outlandish as these ones. Second, Israel’s pro-settlement extremists still command plenty of real coercive power– and they seem increasingly inclined to use it as it becomes clear their claims to be allowed to roam freely and settle over all of the West Bank are meeting an unprecedentedly firm challenge from the US government.
On the extent of the belief in the hasbaristas’ outlandish claims, Haaretz’s Ofri Ilani tells us that the booklet containing the one about the “Vatican-Hizbullah” connection

    was published by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, in cooperation with the chief rabbi of Safed, Rabbi Shmuel Eliahu, and has been distributed [to troops in some IDF units] for the past few months.
    …”The book is distributed regularly and everyone reads it and believes it,” said one soldier. “It’s filled with made-up details but is presented as a true story. A whole company of soldiers, adults, told me: ‘Read this and you’ll understand who the Arabs are.'”
    … The IDF Spokesman’s Office said in a statement: “The book was received as a donation and distributed in good faith to the soldiers. After we were alerted to the sensitivity of its content, distribution was immediately halted.”

Ilani reports that the “story” in the booklet,

    is narrated by a man named Avi, who says he changed his name from Ibrahim after he left Hezbollah and converted to Judaism. Avi says he was once close to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and describes Hezbollah’s purported close relationships with the Vatican and European leaders.

In the booklet, “Avi”– who quite likely doesn’t exist, and never has; scroll down to Richard Silverstein’s comment about him– also purports to describe the close links between Hizbullah, various rich European organizations and individuals, and

    all sorts of Israeli organizations that erode the standing of the IDF … We have a special budget for encouraging [Israeli] politicians and journalists who serve our purposes. Every opinion piece that conforms to our position is rewarded generously.

So right there we see the “Avi” booklet embodying in its own text a link with the campaign we have seen being waged for a while now by official and semi-official bodies in Israel against the human rights groups– some of them, gasp, European-financed!– that have been working to document the rights abuses by all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To claim that because a human rights organization raises money from Saudi citizens (while also working with them to build their capacity to improve their government’s rights performance), that in itself makes the work of the organization suspect– or, in Ron Dermer’s ridiculously overstated words, that it “speaks to the collapse of the human rights community”– is equally nutty. But this argument, too, is perhaps believed by significant numbers of people in Israel and elsewhere who have been fed on a steady diet of anti-Arab racism for many years now.
Regarding the continuing, actual capability and propensity of extremist Zionist groups to accompany their anti-Arab propaganda and ideology with acts of clearly racist violence, we need only read this account of what some settler extremists did near Nablus today:

    Israeli settlers on horseback set fire on Monday to at least 1,500 Palestinian-owned olive trees in the West Bank as others stoned cars, a Palestinian security official said./ The incident occurred hours after security forces razed a number of structures built in unauthorized outposts in the West Bank.
    …The violence is part of a “price tag” policy in which settlers retaliate to the outpost removals by harassing local Palestinians.

The racist propaganda produced by extremists in and close to Israel’s current government authorities is bad enough, in itself (even if it appears to most sane people to be quite plainly nutty.) But the potential of this propaganda to whip up acts of continuing racist violence should also not be under-estimated.