Author: Helena

WaPo bows cravenly to pro-Israel lobby

On Thursday, the WaPo published the following, completely craven “Correction”:

    — A June 26 A-section article referred to Gilo as a Jewish settlement. It is a Jewish neighborhood built on land captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and annexed to Israel as part of Jerusalem’s expanded municipal boundaries. The United Nations has not acknowledged the annexation.

So the WaPo quite simply endorses whatever Israel says is the case??
It is not just the UN that has failed to “acknowledge” the annexation/Anschluss of East Jerusalem to Israel. The United States has never either “acknowledged” or– more to the point– supported the view that east Jerusalem is part of Israel, either. And neither have just about all the other countries of the world (except, um, Micronesia… )
The International Court Of Justice, when it issued its 2004 ruling on Israel’s Apartheid Barrier, came out unequivocally against the idea that Israel could unilaterally annex any part of the land occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem.
So why does the WaPo endorse Israel’s Anschluss of East Jerusalem (and Gilo)? What kind of back-stage campaign was waged between June 26 and july 16 to “persuade” the ailing newsrag to do this?
This plunge in standards is all on a par with publisher/heiress Katharine Weymouth’s shameless pimping of her newsroom.
But still, we should all send the paper letters of strong protest at this latest debacle.

US military chafes under Iraq Withdrawal Agreement

Oh, pity the retreating hegemon– just for a fleeting second– as it starts to realize the implications of the drawdown of ts forces from Iraq, in compliance with the Withdrawal Agreement (PDF) concluded last November.
The WaPo’s Ernesto Londono and Karen De Young reported from Baghdad today that on July 2, two days after the deadline for the withdrawal of US forces from all the cities of Iraq,

    Iraq’s top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to “stop all joint patrols” in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to “notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement.”
    … U.S. commanders have described the pullout from cities as a transition from combat to stability operations. But they have kept several combat battalions assigned to urban areas and hoped those troops would remain deeply engaged in training Iraqi security forces, meeting with paid informants, attending local council meetings and supervising U.S.-funded civic and reconstruction projects.
    … The Americans have been taken aback by the new restrictions on their activities. The Iraqi order runs “contrary to the spirit and practice of our last several months of operations,” Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post.
    “Maybe something was ‘lost in translation,’ ” Bolger wrote. “We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I’m sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be.” He said U.S. troops intend to engage in combat operations in urban areas to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.

Hullo?! Earth to Gen. Bolger! Why did he think it would somehow be “okay” to keep “several combat battalions assigned to urban areas”?
Maybe he should go and read the text of the Withdrawal Agreement, as duly concluded between his (and my) government and the Government of Iraq last November.
The WA states, Article 24, clauses 1 and 2:

    1. All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.
    2. All United States combat forces shall withdraw from Iraqi cities, villages, and localities no later than the time at which Iraqi Security Forces assume full responsibility for security in an Iraqi province, provided that such withdrawal is completed no later than June 30, 2009.

And in Article 4, clauses 1, 2, and 3:

    1. The Government of Iraq requests the temporary assistance of the United States Forces for the purposes of supporting Iraq in its efforts to maintain security and stability in Iraq, including cooperation in the conduct of operations against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, outlaw groups, and remnants of the former regime.
    2. All such military operations that are carried out pursuant to this Agreement shall be conducted with the agreement of the Government of Iraq. Such operations shall be fully coordinated with the Iraqi authorities…
    3. All such operations shall be conducted with full respect for the Iraqi Constitution and the laws of Iraq. Execution of such operations shall not infringe upon the sovereignty of Iraq and its nation interests, as defined by the Government of Iraq. It is the duty of the United States Forces to respect the laws, customs, and traditions of Iraq and applicable international law.

So it really is small wonder that the combat battalions Bolger had kept deployed– and also quite frequently employed– inside Baghdad and other cities since June 30 have been running into a lot of opposition from the Iraqi forces, and perhaps also from some para-military formations operating with the knowledge of the Baghdad government.
For example, as the waPo writers note, on Thursday night there was a mysteriously sourced “rocket strike on a U.S. base in Basra on Thursday night that killed three soldiers. ”
But why were those US soldiers still inside Basra at all?
Bolger says that the US forces inside urban areas have been engaging in operations to “to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis”?
Threats to whom? Threats to themselves and their own– at this point illegal– presence inside the cities, it seems.
Just get the heck out of the cities, Gen. Bolger! That is what our government agreed with the Iraqi government would happen.
But thus far, it apparently hasn’t. So it is the US forces that have been contravening the terms of the WA. And no amount of “spinning/lying/dissembling” on Gen. Bolger’s behalf can change that.
It is not clear to whom Bolger sent the reported email. But evidently he was venting some of his frustrations there:

    “Our [Iraqi] partners burn our fuel, drive roads cleared by our Engineers, live in bases built with our money, operate vehicles fixed with our parts, eat food paid for by our contracts, watch our [surveillance] video feeds, serve citizens with our [funds], and benefit from our air cover,” Bolger noted in the e-mail.

Poor cry-baby. He imagines the Iraqi people should be grateful that the US military marched in and smashed up their country?
Here’s another reading assignment for him:
Article 5 of the Withdrawal Agreement, “Property Ownership”:

    1. Iraq owns all buildings, non-relocatable structures, and assemblies connected to the soil that exist on agreed facilities and areas, including those that are used, constructed, atered, or improved by the United States Forces.
    2. Upon their withdrawal, the United States Forces shall return to the Government of Iraq all the facilities and areas provided fro the use of the combat forces of the United States…

Just get out, Gen. Bolger. Stop chasing phantoms and your own tail there. I am sure that once the Iraqi people and their government see you exiting the cities fully as per the WA, and complying with all its other terms, they will be happy to leave you alone.
The WA and international law demand that you withdraw from the cities, and only come back in with the explicit agreement of the Iraqi government. And guess what, the US public and Congress are in strong support of the WA.
(I’ll just note parenthetically here that the WaPo piece is also larded with allegations from un-named US officials that, under Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki’s rapidly expanding sovereignty, all kinds of Iranian-backed splinter groups– with pathetically mis-transliterated names– are now active in Iraq and striking at US targets. That’s what I mean by chasing phantoms… )

D. Makovsky and M. Sfard on the Palestine Question

On Wednesday, I went to two intriguing discussions in Washington about different aspects of the Palestine Question.
The first was a seven-person round-table discussion on the US Institute of Peace’s recent report Hamas: Ideological Rigidity and Political Flexibility. The seven people included the report’s two authors, Paul Scham (formerly of Americans for Peace Now; now a visiting prof at the University of Maryland and Executive Director of its Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies), and Osama Abu-Irshaid, the imam of a mosque in Northern Virginia and founding editor-in-chief of Al-Meezan. It also included a moderator and four other people, all of them male and almost none of them with the degree of expert knowledge of Hamas’s politics that I have.
But hey, USIP has to keep its Congressional source of funding flowing, so I guess the very cautious people there felt they couldn’t have anyone who has actually conducted (and published) as much research on Hamas as I have!
… Anyway, there were a couple of interesting exchanges there. Some of the most interesting involved David Makovsky, a long-time pro-Israeli propagandist who is currently the director of the “Project on the Middle East peace process” at the pro-AIPAC Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Listening to Makovsky marshalling his very misleading (and often simply mendacious) claims and arguments was made bearable only because the other panelists and the moderator, the WSJ’s Cam Simpson, all did a good job of having a decent, fact-based, and realistic discussion on the issues.
I’ll get back to Makovsky in a moment.
… From USIP I biked along to the New America Foundation where Michael Sfard, a Jewish Israeli lawyer and the legal adviser to the excellent Yesh Din anti-occupation organization, was talking about “Settlements and the Occupation.”
New America is such an agile, tech-savvy organization that they already have the16-minute video record of that session available for your viewing there. Along with Sfard, it features the indefatigable NAF duo of Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah.
Sfard made several important points in his presentation. He noted that the maps of where the settlement boundaries are inside the West Bank always greatly understate the depth of the disruption, fear, and exclusion that the presence of the settlements, their (often Jews-only) feeder roads, and other Israeli objects and facilities have on the lives of the area’s 2.3 million indigenous Palestinians.
He said,

    Every Palestinian farmer knows the true situation better than any Israeli politician. They know that there’s an unseen line around each settlement or other Israeli facility– even a cell-phone tower!– that they can’t cross without a real fear of getting shot at; and this line is ways outside the boundaries of the settlement or other facility.
    Every Israeli structure in the West Bank is the epicenter of magnetic lines, if you like, of growth and of domination.
    We in Yesh Din are trying to map the real lines of domination. The existing maps don’t show it. The true situation is constantly changing.

He argued, too, that even if the Obama administration succeeds in winning a complete freeze on settlement construction from the Netanyahu government, even that would count for little unless there is also a complete freeze on planning for new construction in the settlements.

Continue reading “D. Makovsky and M. Sfard on the Palestine Question”

IPS post on Nabucco project and the Middle East

My piece on this is here. Also archived here.
This piece was a quick out-take, if you like, from some of the research I dd for my presentation at the MEPC mini-conference Thursday.
Actually, I had wanted to write for IPS this week either on Hamas or on some of the broad regional implications of the US troop drawdown in Iraq. But my friend Jim Lobe, the editor who decides these things, said he had news stories coming in on both those topics so I should do my analysis on something else.
Ah well, I try to be flexible. (And as longtime JWN readers know, I have a long-lived interest in matters of logistics and their effect on geopolitics.)
More Hamas for them later, I’m sure. Also, more Iraq. I don’t think either of those stories is going to go away any time soon.

Recalling the importance of the Iraqi-US Withdrawal Agreement

At yesterday’s panel discussion on the regional implications of the US withdrawal from Iraq, former assistant secretary of defense Larry Korb started off his presentation by saying,

    We need to remember how just plain lucky we are that the Bush administration did sign the Withdrawal Agreement/SOFA last November. This has been a really good thing– for us Americans, for the Iraqis, for everyone. And we need to remember that it wouldn’t have happened at all if the Iraqis hadn’t insisted on it.
    So now, we don’t have to have any endless debate in this country over “who lost Iraq”, as we did over “who lost Vietnam.”

Korb is a very pleasant guy, whose specialty is really force planning. He mentioned some of the extreme stresses that the Iraq war inflicted on the US military. Including, he cited a recent study from the Rand Corp. that says that some 350,000 US troops who have been subjected to the stresses of repeated deployment now have mental-health problems.
Well, from Korb’s perspective it might look as if it was just “luck” that motivated the Iraqi government to insist on getting Washington to sign a Withdrawal Agreement that includes a date certain for the exit of all US forces from Iraq.
The PDF of the Agreement’s text can now be found here. It stipulates, Article 24 (1) that:

    All United States forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.

But of course it wasn’t just “luck” that motivated the Iraqi government to insist on the agreement. It was the determined organizing and activity of nationalist-minded members of Iraq’s parliament that pushed the Maliki government to do so.
You may recall that in the weeks leading up to the late-November signing of the final text, the official spin from the Bush administration side was that no, of course there wouldn’t be any complete withdrawal, and nor would there be any defined deadlines.
But there were. Both of them. And it was the Bush administration that signed off on it. Which means the Republicans are now in no position at all to blame Obama for “cutting and running”, or even, really, to blame him for many of the things that might yet go wrong with the withdrawal as it proceeds towards its end-of-2011 deadline.
Yesterday, I finally caught up again with Raed Jarrar, the tireless organizer in DC for a US withdrawal from Iraq. He was the key person, last summer, who coordinated a visit to DC by an Iraqi parliamentary delegation that helped people in this country start to understand more about the dynamics within the Iraqi parliament.
Raed is currently working with the American Friends Service Committee. Last month he and two colleagues from the Friends Committee on National Legislation had another good victory– this time working with the US legislature: They got the House of Representatives to include in the military budget authorization bill crystal-clear language that:

    1. Affirms the United States legal agreement with Iraq to withdraw all U.S. military troops from that country by December 31, 2011; and
    2. Requires the Defense Department to submit detailed quarterly reports to six congressional committees on their progress in meeting various parameters of that withdrawal.

This has been a tremendous initiative! It is the first explicit acknowledgment and support coming from the US Congress for the Withdrawal Agreement.
Raed said yesterday that they are pretty confident the same language will be included in the bill adopted by the Senate.
Now, he’s working on helping parliamentarians from Iraq and Kuwait win support for an initiative to end Kuwait’s longstanding financial and other claims against Iraq, so that Iraq can be brought out of the “Chapter Seven” position it is still in, under the terms of the UN Charter.
… Bottom line: No, Larry Korb, it is not just dumb luck that gives the US and Iraq a Withdrawal Agreement that turns out to be good for everyone. It is the dedicated organizing of sometimes small groups of people, working for just ends. As Margaret Mead said (paraphrasing here): “Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever has.”
(More from the conference, later.)
—-
Apologies for the horrid typos that I’d left in here this morning. I was rushing to catch a train. And succeeded, so that was good. ~HC.

Hamas’s diplomatic openings

I have a lot more to blog about Hamas. Including this news report that Tom Pickering, a former US Under-Secretary of State and ambassador to the UN, met with Mahmoud Zahhar, foreign minister in the PA government that was elected in 2006, in Switzerland recently.
But I’m finishing my preps for my presentation on regional implications of the US withdrawal from Iraq.
More later.

Netanyahu spokesman uses racist attack against HRW

For many years now, successive governments of Israel– and their blind-love cheering sections in western countries– have tried to “shoot the messenger” when human rights groups or international bodies like, erm, the UN, have criticized official Israeli practices.
So at one level it’s nothing new that Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev yesterday slammed Human Rights Watch’s objectivity, claiming it had “lost its moral compass.”
HRW’s sin? A delegation from the organization went to Saudi Arabia in May to raise money and to work with local rights activists on brainstorming strategies for addressing some of the Kingdom’s own very large-scale human rights problems.
Oh, it’s that old “tainted Arab money” story again. How racist can Regev get?
Let’s be clear here: Neither in Saudi Arabia nor anywhere else has HRW ever raised money from governments. I’ve been on the organization’s Middle East advisory committee for 17 years. I would never have gone on if they’d been an organization that accepts government funding– from anyone.
HRW’s fund-raising dinner in Riyadh was hosted by a private individual.
The report linked to there was by Nasser Salti of Arab News. He focused a little on the part of the presentation made by the HRW team where Middle East division head Sarah Leah Whitson described some of the work HRW has done on Israel. He also noted that,

    Keeping with its mission of even-handed criticism, Human Rights Watch has also leveled criticism at other states in the region, including Saudi Arabia. The organization recently called on the Kingdom to do more to protect the human rights of domestic workers…

Knowing Sarah Leah as I do, I am confident that her presentation at the dinner was professional and even-handed.
HRW does fund-raising events like this all the time— mainly in the US, but also in other countries around the world. It has, as it happens, a particularly rich network of long-time Jewish-American donors.
So what is wrong with trying to raise money for worldwide human-rights work from people in Arab countries??
Would Mark Regev prefer that wealthy Saudis who want to engage in philanthropy do so by donating to the Taliban?
I don’t know how much money HRW netted from Sarah Leah’s visit to Saudi Arabia. But one other clear result of the brainstorming she and her colleagues were able to do with Saudi counterparts there was this well-researched report, which HRW published last week, which calls for an end to Saudi abuses of their millions of migrant workers, who face what the report called “slavery-like conditions.”
Perhaps Mark Regev is indifferent to the fate of those millions of people?
He told the Jerusalem Post,

    “If you can fundraise in Saudi Arabia, why not move on to Somalia, Libya and North Korea?… For an organization that claims to offer moral direction, it appears that Human Rights Watch has seriously lost its moral compass.”

This is a really pathetic argument. As Sarah Leah herself pointed out to the JP reporter, it is always quite necessary, in human rights work, to distinguish between a government and its people, and “Certainly not everyone is tainted by the misconduct of their government.”
Regev’s attack against HRW is, it seems, just part of a broader attack the Israeli government is planning against HRW and Amnesty International.
The JP reporter, Herb Keinon, writes,

    Regev’s comments came two weeks after Israel was ripped for alleged misconduct during Operation Cast Lead in reports issued by HRW and Amnesty International, two of the highest-profile human rights NGOs. Israel has decided to take a much more aggressive stance toward future reports issued by these organizations, the Post has learned.
    “We will make a greater effort in the future to go through their reports with a fine-tooth comb, expose the inconsistencies and their problematic use of questionable data,” one senior official said.
    “We discovered during the Gaza operation and the Second Lebanon War that these organizations come in with a very strong agenda, and because they claim to have some kind of halo around them, they receive a status that they don’t deserve,” he said.
    The Foreign Ministry is currently considering how best to expand its focus and deal more systematically with this issue, and it is assumed this will be done together with the Prime Minister’s Office, the Post has learned.

The Israeli government will probably also be working in close conjunction with a new, Jerusalem-based group called “NGO Monitor” (which is funded, for what it’s worth, by the Weschler Family Foundation, Newt Becker of Los Angeles, and Ben & Esther Rosenbloom Foundation of Baltimore.)
When I was in Israel in February/March I did make, as JWN readers knew at the time, several attempts to get myself accredited as a visiting reporter with the Israeli government’s press office in Beit Agron, West Jerusalem. Sadly, they claimed they’d never heard of The Nation (!!!) and I never got it.
But the helpful young man in the GPO office there, Jason, pressed upon me several brochures from “NGO Monitor” and urged me to do a story about their “revelations.” (He really wasn’t terribly swift… )
Anyway, Regev’s use of the old “Arab money” canard is one that should absolutely be exposed for the racist thinking that it is.

This Thursday: Speaking on implications of withdrawal from Iraq

If you’re in the Washington DC area on Thursday morning, note that I’ll be participating in what looks like (PDF) a pretty informative event. It’s brought to you by the Middle East Policy Council, former home of my esteemed friend, Amb. Chas Freeman:

    You and your colleagues are invited to the 57th in the MEPC’s Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East policy:
    U.S. Withdrawal from Iraq:
    What are the Regional Implications?
    SPEAKERS:
    James F. Dobbins
    Director, International Security and Defense Policy Center, RAND Corporation;
    Former assistant secretary of state and special envoy to Afghanistan
    Ellen Laipson
    President and CEO, Stimson Center; former vice-chair, National Intelligence Council
    Helena Cobban
    Publisher, JustWorldNews.org; author, Re-engage! America and the World After Bush
    Lawrence J. Korb
    Senior fellow, Center for American Progress; former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration
    MODERATOR:
    Thomas R. Mattair
    Consultant; book review editor, MEPC; author, Global Security Watch – Iran: A Reference Handbook
    Thursday, July 16, 2009, 9:30 – Noon
    Capitol Visitor Center, HVC-215
    R.S.V.P. Acceptances Only: (202) 296-6767 or E-mail: info@mepc.org

Max B. “feels the hate” in Tel Aviv

The gifted video-journo Max Blumenthal has now brought us a vivid picture of the racist hatred that is so freely expressed by some young people in Tel Aviv.
This adds to Max’s growing “hate in Israel” library. The first installment was “Feeling the hate in Jerusalem”, which he released last month.
In Jerusalem, Max was interviewing mainly a bunch of pampered and drunk visiting young Jewish Americans. This time, his subjects include some young, apparently raised-in-Israel Jewish Israelis participating in some kind of street festival. Max notes that one of them described Pres Obama as “a Nazi, a Muslim, and a ‘Cushi,’ which is Hebrew slang for ‘nigger.’ When questioned about the source of his opinions, one teenager proudly declared himself a ‘gezan,’ or a racist.”
… Anyway, go see for yourself what kind of racist hate-speech seems to be considered quite okay to use in the public discourse in today’s Israel.
Great work, Max!

Younger Israeli peaceniks: Dov Kheinin

One Israeli/American friend commented on my BR piece that it seemed I interviewed mainly Israeli peace movement people who are over 65. He suggested–and I agreed– that it would have been excellent to interview, among others, Hadash (Communist Party) MK Dov Kheinin.
Another friend then pointed to this very informative interview in English with Kheinin, that was published in February 12. Two days after the Israeli election, if memory serves me well.
It was conducted by phone on January 6, that is, while the assault on Gaza was still raging; and it was posted by Josh Nathan-Kazis.
The whole interview is very important. But here’s just the beginning:

    … What is your position on Israel’s actions in Gaza?
    We of course oppose the war in Gaza. We think that the war cannot be and is not actually a solution to the problem. It is part of the problem. We think that the only way to achieve security for the people in the Israeli Negev is through a real cease-fire with Gaza, including the opening of the blockade on the Gaza strip and an agreement on an exchange of prisoners and detainees including the release of Gilad Shalit [an Israeli soldier abducted by Hamas in 2006]. We think that such a ceasefire agreement is possible and such an agreement can open a possibility for a real dialogue; a political dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians and the Palestinian National Authority in order to achieve a comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian settlement.
    What do you make of Meretz’s initial support for the bombardment, and the support of the mainstream Jewish Israeli left?
    Well, unfortunately Meretz supports the war. It is most unfortunate. I think that this is the moment for leftists to raise opposition and to make it clear to the Israeli public that there is an alternative. The war option is not the only one. We can have another political way.
    Why is it that they supported the bombardment and your party doesn’t? Are there political considerations that exist for them that don’t exist for Hadash?
    I think that it is time for political courage. You have to be courageous in [Israel] right now to oppose the war. But this is the time not to wonder where the wind blows, but to make it clear what your policies are and what your suggestions are for the Israeli situation. There are people from Meretz who decided to leave Meretz and join us. It reflects the disappointment of some Meretz activists in the position of the leadership of the party vis-à-vis the war.
    Hadash is often grouped in the media with the Arab parties, and your voters are mostly Israeli Arab. What does it mean for Hadash to be a mixed Jewish Arab party?
    You know, Israeli policy is based more and more on the total separation between the Jews and the Arabs. This separation exists not only on social and cultural grounds but also in the way politics are being conducted. As a matter of fact, there are two lines of politics in Israel. There is the line of politics for the Jews spoken in Hebrew and there is a different line of politics for the Arabs spoken in Arabic. It is extremely important to have these very brave political experiments of Hadash combining Jews and Arabs together into a joint political movement based on the same political principles. This is the reason why Hadash is so important in the Israeli political spectrum…

Big thanks to the friends who drew the interview to my attention.