Helena – Page 7 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

2012: A good year to boycott Sabra (& Shatila) Hummus

I’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about the upcoming 30th anniversary of the September 1982 massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. As some of you may know, my company, Just World Books, will soon be publishing a reissued version of former WaPo journo Jon Randal’s classic 1983 study of the Israeli-backed Maronite-extremist militias that, with the full backing and encouragement of Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, committed those massacres. More details on that, soon…
(Jon is also working on another book, which will be a study of the massacres themselves. In the meantime, he has written a fab new preface to the 1983 book, explaining to a new generation of peace-and-justice activists the significance of all those events… )
These days, “Sabra” is also the trade-name of one of the two brands of Israeli-related hummus that BDS activists are boycotting. In the case of Sabra hummus, the boycott is based primarily on the fact that the Strauss Group, an Israeli-owned company that owns half of the brand, has had a long history of giving material support to the Golani Brigade, an Israeli military formation associated with numerous grave rights abuses.
I’m thinking that maybe this year in particular, the BDS folks might start calling the hummus brand “Sabra and Shatila hummus”, to make even clearer the connection between the hummus brand and the excesses/atrocities committed by, or under the close supervision of, the Israeli military….
I’ve also been thinking about the meanings, connotations, and expropriations of the term “Sabra” in general. In Arabic, the most common understanding of the triliteral root S-b-r relates to being patient and long-suffering. The root is also used in the common name that many Arabs, including Palestinians, give to the prickly pear/ “Indian fig”, and its fruit. It has also been thus used in modern Hebrew. (I don’t know about ancient Hebrew.)
And then, in modern-day Israel, the term “Sabra” was introduced to refer to those Jewish Israelis who had actually been born in the country– as opposed to that proportion of them, originally very large, who arrived from elsewhere as colonial settlers inside the land. Indeed, the use of the term “Sabra” in that context merely underlined the fact that for so many Jewish Israelis, being born in the country was not the norm.
For Palestinians, meanwhile, the hardy prickly-pear (Subar) hedges that once ringed or demarcated properties in many traditional villages in historic Palestine over time became, in many cases, the only trace left of where once had stood those villages that in 1947-48 were ethnically cleansed by the advancing Jewish/Israeli armies that pushed the boundaries of the state of Israel far beyond what even the very generous U.N. Partition Plan had allotted to it. You can still drive around many parts of Israel today and see, on a small rise here or in the fold of valley there, a neglected and ragged line of prickly pear hedges; and you’ll know that that was where one of the ethnically cleansed villages stood.
Patient, indeed.
But the word “Sabra” in one form or another has also been used as a family name in many Arab families, as has the family name “Shatila”. In Beirut, the Chatilas/Shatilas have long been one of the big Sunni trading families… So I imagine the names of the two refugee camps established in southwest Beirut in 1948-50 came from the names of the owners of the lands on which the U.N. and the Lebanese government agreed to locate those camps.
The refugees housed in those camps, as in the three dozen other large refugee camps that ringed the area of the State of Israel, then and now, were some of those same Palestinians who’d been ethnically cleansed from those now destroyed but still “Subar”-hedged villages inside the area of Mandate Palestine.
The massacres at Sabra and Shatila were committed, as noted above, by extremist-Maronite militia formations who were acting under the close supervision of, and with much logistical support from, the Israeli military. (This coordination was well represented in the haunting 2008 film from Israeli director Ari Folman, “Waltz with Bashir.”) The key architect of the whole episode, as of the extremely lethal, all-out military assault on Lebanon that preceded it, from June through early August of 1982, was Ariel Sharon. Israel’s own investigation into the massacres, conducted by former Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Kahan, found that Sharon bore personal responsibility for the massacres, and recommended that he not be permitted to hold high office again.
Well, we know how that went, don’t we…
So now, here we are, 30 years after the Israeli assault on Lebanon, 30 years after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and elsewhere are still no closer to having their rights restored. Their communities were expelled from their ancestral homes and lands through the use of violence and force, and were subsequently prevented from returning to those lands by the same force. They have been subject to repeated assaults by the arrogant Israeli military (with the Golani Brigade as one of the most violent and aggressive units in it.) And they’ve have been forced to continue living as stateless refugees for 64 years now, though numerous United Nations resolutions assure them of the right to “return or compensation” (in UNGA resolution 194, and reaffirmed in numerous U.N. resolutions since then), or, more simply, as per the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the “right to … return to his [or her] country.”
So maybe if we start calling “Sabra” hummus “Sabra and Shatila” hummus, it might remind American shoppers of some of this history?
(What I would not want to do, however, is stigmatize the use of the term “Shatila” in a brand name. The Dearborn, Michigan-based Shatila Food Products bakery produces the very best baklava there is in the whole of North America… )

J. Alterman on America and Egypt

Jon Alterman has an op-ed in the NYT that has some good sense in it but also some very troubling ideas and policy prescriptions.
Alterman is quite right to note that by far the most important thing that’s happening in Egypt right now is not the confrontations or lack of them in Cairo’s very visible Tahrir Square but the electoral process that is unfolding, with almost painful slowness, all around the country– and the negotiation that will subsequently unfold between the election’s victors and the country’s now-ruling military council, the SCAF.
(The piece doesn’t mention the SCAF’s recent actions against US-funded NGOs in the country. That was probably because it was written a few days ago. But anyway, his basic thesis that it is the election and the subsequent negotiation that are the most important story, still stands.)
He is also right to note that the Islamist parties that between them are now showing a clear lead in the elections are doing so for good reason– because they have built up serious, nationwide political organizations. He writes:

Islamists have grasped that the game has moved beyond protests to the mechanics of elections, and their supporters are motivated, organized and energetic. By contrast, the secular liberal parties are virtually absent from the countryside. Judging from posters, billboards, bumper stickers and banners, the two major Islamist parties have the field almost to themselves.

However, he was unnecessarily patronizing and wrong when he prefaced those remarks by writing ” For Americans, it is hard to imagine that religious parties could win almost 70 percent of the Egyptian vote… ” What? I have been “imagining”, indeed predicting, this for a very long while now. I’m an American; and so are many others– from a broad range of viewpoints, who have “imagined” it.
Why does Alterman need to make it seem as though only he understands what is really going on? (And isn’t he an American, too? Or has he, like Michael Oren, suddenly transformed himself into an Israeli?)
Well, that is a relatively small quibble. The more serious problems occur at the end of his piece, where he writes:

Let’s look at that first paragraph there. It is factually accurate that “Many in Israel and America, and even some in Egypt” harbor the fears he describes. Though why he should put the fears of a subset of Israel’s actually tiny– and often paranoid– population before those of Americans and some Egyptians in a piece that purports to speak about American and Egyptian interests, I don’t know… But more importantly here, he lets the substantive scenarios described in those fears stand as quite possible outcomes without making any mention of the assurances that the MB’s Freedom and Justice Party and even the salafist Nur Party have given re not tearing up the peace treaty with Israel; and the assurances the FJP has given re the other “feared” scenarios that he lists.
As someone who claims to be a knowledgeable, evidence-based “realist” rather than an alarmist, wouldn’t that be information Alterman should include in that paragraph, rather than letting those “scare” scenarios simply stand?
Moving on to the last two paras of his piece… I feel pretty sure that Alterman would define “American interests” in a way that is in some portions the same and in some portions different from the way that I would define “the true interests of the American people”. However, let’s assume we’re talking here about roughly the same thing. In my definition the true interests of the American people would require that our government and all its appendages, including its sneakily misnamed, government-funded quangos like NED, etc, stay completely out of Egyptian politics, and take only those actions toward Egypt that are clearly requested by the new government that will emerge from the ongoing electoral process.
Realistically, that government will only emerge and stabilize itself once presidential elections in April, as well as the current lengthy round of parliamentary elections, have been completed. But the parliament that emerges from the current elections will have a leadership that will be in a position to negotiate with and make demands of not only the SCAF, but also the SCAF’s main financial backers, that is, the U.S. government.
So Alterman is arguing for an outcome “that finds a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians. We do not want any one side to vanquish or silence the other.” Say that again, Jon? Um, in democratic theory there’s this thing called civilian control of the military. Surely, anyone who claims to want to see greater democracy in Egypt should aim to have that principle firmly implemented there! It’s not a question of “vanquishing” or “silencing”. It’s a question of who’s in charge.
In the next sentence, he seems to giving another reason why “we” Americans should seek to see the power of Egypt’s elected leaders curtailed: “it is especially important that the outcome not drive away Egypt’s educated liberal elite, whose economic connections and know-how will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs.” His clear implication here is that an Islamist government (a) would not be able to mobilize any– or sufficient numbers of– “educated” people with “connections and know-how”, and (b) would “drive away” the country’s liberal elite, whose fabulous attributes “will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs.”
This argument is nonsense on stilts! It is based on incredibly condescending views of observant Muslims and the Islamist parties that grow up in their communities, to the effect that they really do not have sufficient education, know-how, or connections to run a successful modern economy.
Turkey, anyone? (Or come to that, Iran– and the impressive abilities its technicians showed recently when they hijacked the US military’s allegedly “stealth” RQ-170 drone… )
But the argument Alterman is making is also a sly one. By placing his “concern” about Egypt’s “educated liberal elite” right there alongside his argument for the military to still retain a say in national governance, he sis clearly implying that the military can be a guardian for the interests of the liberal elite.
Actually, that too is a pretty stupid argument. True, there are some in the “liberal elite” who strongly indicated in the past that they would be happy to see some form of military guarantee, or counter-balance, to protect them from the programs and policies of the Islamists; but for quite a while now relations between the SCAF and the liberals have been far, far worse than the relations either side has with, say, the MB. But I guess Alterman is adducing this argument here as a way of making the support he is expressing for a continued strong military role in Egypt more appealing to Western liberals…
Anyway, in his’s last paragraph, he states his position clearly: “what Egyptians, and Americans, need is … not a victory, but an accommodation.” That is, he doesn’t want to see a true victory for a democratically elected civilian leadership in Egypt, or for the important democratic principle of civilian control of the military; but he wants to see a continuing strong role for the military in Egypt’s governance.
Describing his own policy preference as a “need” for both Egyptians and Americans” is, of course, colonial, patronizing, and quite unwarranted. Let Egypt’s voters (who include, of course, all the members of the military) define their country’s needs on their own behalf. They don’t need Jon Alterman to do it for them.

Democracy and human rights in Libya??

I just caught up with this piece by the Guardian’s Chris Stephen in Tripoli. (H/T B of MofA.)
Tell me again why anyone ever thought that NATO missiles were capable of somehow ‘delivering’ democracy and a system of respecting basic human rights in Libya?
Stephen writes of the country’s current rulers, the National Transitional Council:

The NTC refuses to say who its members are, or even how many there are.

And there’s this:

where gunfire crackles on most nights.

The news peg on which Stephen hangs his article is a grim reminder of how deep the political fragmentation in Libya currently is. basically, it’s the tale of how the militias were all lining up to control tripoli’s international airport, in the expectation that the UN was about to fly in several planeloads of Libyan dinar bills that had just been printed in Germany… with the hope that whoever could control the airport and the road from there to the central Bank could take a hefty rakeoff from the booty in the name of “providing security services.”
Here is the scene that Stephen described:

Meantime, even people in the ranks of the rebels are conceding that somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 Libyans were killed during the seven months of fighting that followed NATO’s entry into the fighting March 19. Prior to that, the death toll was only one-tenth as high.
My old friend Hugh Roberts knows 100 times as much about North Africa as I do. In November, he was writing these very sane words in the LRB:

The claim that the ‘international community’ had no choice but to intervene militarily and that the alternative was to do nothing is false. An active, practical, non-violent alternative was proposed, and deliberately rejected. The argument for a no-fly zone and then for a military intervention employing ‘all necessary measures’ was that only this could stop the regime’s repression and protect civilians. Yet many argued that the way to protect civilians was not to intensify the conflict by intervening on one side or the other, but to end it by securing a ceasefire followed by political negotiations…

This was, of course, the very same argument that I was making back in March. So was Hugh: He was then working for the International Crisis Group, which as he noted in the LRB piece put forward its own very sensible proposal for a negotiated de-escalation at the time. But no: The foul humors and animal spirits of the west’s warmongers won the day on that occasion– as they seem to, only too, too often.
But why, I wonder, had so many western liberals and rights activists learned nothing from what had happened in Iraq over the preceding eight years? Truly tragic.

Mrs. Peled and the Palestinian homes of West Jerusalem

I am delighted that my company, Just World books, is publishing Miko Peled’s intimate and thought-provoking memoir The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine. (We’re already taking advance orders though the book won’t be available before the end of February.)
Miko has been giving out some great teasers for the book in the writing and lecturing he’s been doing in recent months. Today, on his blog, he has this intriguing story:

Ah, the importance that a mother has in raising a thoughtful and compassionate person, eh?

Solipsism of U.S. power: Iraq, Libya

This is just a short post to, once again, express my anger and sadness at what the U.S. government has done during nearly nine years of occupation of Iraq. (And also, at what looks very likely to happen over the coming years in U.S.-attacked Libya.)
Right now, the particular form of ‘constitutional democracy’ that the American occupiers imposed on Iraq looks set to implode and as Reidar Visser notes, there is a real possibility of complete political disintegration there. The present situation and future prospects for most of Iraq’s 30 million people look very grim indeed.
But in Washington DC– and Fort Bragg, NC– Pres. Obama and his people seem oblivious to the fate of Iraqis, intent as they are on trying to “sell” to the American people the idea that simply getting the American troops out of Iraq without them suffering any additional casualties constitutes some kind of a valuable achievement… regardless of what happens to the long-suffering Iraqis.
Obama’s people are even trying to fundraise around this idea. Two days ago, I got this email from Obama’s re-election campaign:

No reference at all to the idea that perhaps, having wrought such havoc inside Iraq, we might also have a responsibility to– and a stake in– Iraq’s future, as well.
This is wilfull, almost psychopathic, disregard for the facts of human inter-dependence and the responsibility that war-waging nations have under international law for the wellbeing of the civilian residents of the places where they choose to fight their wars.
We have seen this same solipsism in the conduct of the U.S. and its NATO allies in Libya– and in particular, in the way that the NATO command tried wilfully to disregard the compelling evidence that NATO bombs had killed many of the very same civilians whom they were allegedly acting in Libya to protect.
C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt had a generally excellent piece of reporting in the NYT on December 17, in which they detailed both their own painstaking investigations of incidents in which NATO airstrikes in Libya had killed civilians– and the extreme reluctance of NATO officials to acknowledge these facts.
Libya looks in many ways to be the ‘western’ nations latest paradigm in how to fight a war. Taking lessons from the problems the United States encountered in running the Iraqi occupation, western actions towards Libya have been much more hands-off. NATO never explicitly put troops on the ground in Libya (except for a few ‘deniable’ special ops forces), and therefore acts as if it does not have to bear any direct responsibility for running the country now. Meanwhile, the British government still reportedly controls much of Libya’s sovereign wealth, and NATO ships continue to police Libya’s shoreline. Both those instruments of power can be used to exercise indirect control over key aspects of the post-Qadhafi government’s policy.
It all sounds a lot like Gaza to me. There, the Israelis pioneered the whole concept of running a ‘hands-off’ kind of a military occupation wherein they (quite illegally) deny that they have any responsibility for the welfare of Gaza’s residents, while they still nonetheless continue to control all significant interactions between Gaza and the outside world…
At least in Gaza there is one, generally competent, indigenous governing body which has done a generally good job of maintaining public security for the vast majority of the Strip’s 1.6 million people– something that has been especially welcome to Gazans after the lawlessness of the earlier years of IDF/Fateh condominium there. In Libya, by contrast, the power vacuum that followed NATO’s destruction of Qadhafi’s army and the reluctance of the NATO powers to take any responsibility for post-Qadhafi public security has left the whole country open to the competing militias and warlords who were NATO’s local allies.
But why would voters in America or in other NATO powers care about any of that? The bet that Obama and the other NATO leaders are making is that the voters at home won’t care at all.

Visser on Iraq in the NYT today

Reidar’s op-ed, ‘An Unstable, Divided Land’ is a must-read. It places due responsibility on the U.S. government– under both G.W. Bush and Barack Obama– for the tragedy that most Iraqis continue to live through, today.
The news analysis piece that the NYT’s own Tim Arango also has in the paper today is in stark contrast to Reidar’s fine work. It’s ill-informed, exculpatory (of Washington), and deeply dishonest. Especially when he writes that the social and sectarian breakdown that Iraq experienced after the U.S. invasion– and that was certainly exacrebated by the U.S. occupation administration’s calculated policies of divide and rule– was “unforeseen” by Americans before the invasion. They were not unforeseen. Juan Cole, I, and numerous other people who knew a lot more about the country than the dangerous people running the Bush administration foresaw many or most of these problems and published widely about our concerns. If we were not listened to, that was not for lack of us trying to be heard.
When I read Arango’s piece I was almost overcome by a wave of sadness and anger. Sadness, for what our country wrought in Iraq, and anger at not having been given any kind of fair hearing in the pre-2003 period (or since.)
Arango does have some good quotes and snippets from Iraqis expressing their anger at the U.S. government after nearly nine years of miserable occupation.
But Reidar’s piece really beautifully sums up the analysis of how U.S. policy has continued to be harmful to Iraqis, including under Pres. Barack Obama.

Syria, Myanmar, South Africa, Libya…

Just a quick note from an airport here… How come that western publics who applauded the negotiated transition to democracy in South Africa and who applaud the current openings in the same direction in Myanmar/Burma, generally seem so unwilling to pursue a similarly negotiated transition in Syria?
Why do so many western rights activists continue instead to give strong support to the forces of the increasingly militarized opposition in Syria? Do they really want a violence-driven outcome there similar to what we have seen in Iraq and now Libya? Or, do they not understand the basic facts of violence: that violence begets more violence and in the modern, heavily armed world the use of violence is highly inconducive to the building of an accountable, rights-respecting social/political order.
The situation in Syria remains complex. There are many elements inside the country’s opposition movement who are sincere democrats. There are others who are vicious sectarians and men of violence. The goal for political leaders inside and outside the country is surely to find a way to engage the former while marginalizing the influence of the latter. Sadly, Pres. Asad seems unable or unwilling to find a way to do this– and most of the numerous outside forces now supporting the Syria opposition seem very unwilling to do it, as well.
By the way, here is the record of the panel I was recently on, on Syria, at the (Turkish-American) SETA Foundation in DC.

Further thoughts on Syria, Turkey, and democracy

This Monday, Nov. 28, I’ll be speaking at a 2pm symposium in Washington DC on the topic “The Future of Syria: Political Turmoil and Prospects of Democracy”. It is organized by SETA-DC, the Washington DC branch of the Ankara-based SETA (Foundation for Economic, Political and Social Research.) Also speaking will be Erol Cebeci, Executive Director of SETA-DC and until recently a parliamentarian for the AKP.
Longtime readers of this blog will be aware that I have followed Turkish-Syrian relations for some time here; and back at the beginning of the current political turmoil in Syria I was arguing that Turkey’s AKP government was uniquely positioned and perhaps uniquely motivated to be the principal power mediating the regime-opposition negotiation in Syria that I saw, and still see, as overwhelmingly the best way out of Syria’s impasse.
Since I started expressing that position publicly, back in May, several important further developments have occurred. Principally, of course– and just as I predicted back in the March-May period– the confrontation between the regime and the opposition in Syria has continued; both sides have demonstrated resiliency; and the casualty toll has continued tragically to grow. There have also been these other developments:

today

So obviously, there will be a lot to discuss with my SETA colleagues next Monday.
One thing that has been much on my mind in recent days is the range of possible effects that the situation in Syria might have on the prospects for democracy not only in Syria but also in Turkey. Of all the Middle Eastern forces currently giving support to a Syrian opposition that claims to pursue the goal of democracy, the only one that any has any credible claim itself to uphold and practice the values of democracy is Turkey. The idea that Saudi Arabia, other GCC countries, Jordan, or the currently military-ruled regime in Egypt has any credibility in saying it seeks the goal of democracy is completely laughable. So it strikes me that sincere supporters of democracy around the world who want to see a democratic and accountable outcome in Syria should pay particular attention to the role that Ankara might yet play there.
It is also the case that for me, one of the bedrocks of any commitment to democracy is a commitment not to use violent means to resolve differences of opinion or politics among fellow-citizens, however deepseated and sensitive these differences may be. Democracy is not really– or perhaps, not only– about elections, which are at best only a technical means to reaching a democratic end. (Elections, remember, can be and are used by all kinds of profoundly rights-abusing regimes.) Democracy is about having a fundamental respect for the equality of all human persons and establishing a set of political mechanisms that allow citizens of one state (and eventually, of the whole world– though we are still a long way from that) to live together peaceably and over the long term while allowing the different communities within that state to live out their own vision of the good life so long as this does not impinge on the rights of others.
Turkey is a country in which many different kinds of social groups live together. These include members of the Sunni-Turkish majority. They also include members of ethnic, religious, and sectarian minorities. They include people who are highly secular and people who are highly pious and for whom “the good life” is necessarily one defined by religious norms. They include highly sophisticated, “Europeanized” urbanites, and people much more rooted to the traditional ways of villages and small towns. Yet somehow, as a result of decisions taken throughout the course of Turkey’s modern history– including both the Kemalist era and the post-Kemalist era– nearly all these different groups have been able to find a way to come together and agree on the (still-evolving) rules of a democratic order for their country.
I have long thought of this as an amazing achievement. Of course, it is still incomplete. But still, Turkey’s people have come so far away from both Ottoman-era theocracy and the intolerant, ethnocratic militarism of Kemalist rule that I think this is an achievement to be acknowledged and celebrated by democrats everywhere.
Turkey’s longest land border is its border with Syria– more than 500 miles long, as I recall. If there is ethnosectarian breakdown in Syria, can Turkey be insulated from that, I wonder? And if so, at what cost?
… Well, the events in Syria are moving fast, and will doubtless continue to do so over the coming three days. So I shan’t complete gathering my thoughts for Monday afternoon’s presentation until that morning.
As a side-note here, I also want to send my (only slightly qualified) congratulations to my friends at the Crisis Group for having once again produced a very sane and timely analysis of the situation in Syria. In the Conclusion to this study, they write:

The report goes to some lengths to spell out the massive risks involved in any non-negotiated resolution in Syria, which is good. And they highlight the extreme political incompetence of the Asad regime, which I also think is something well worth doing. But I think they let the opposition off too lightly; and I really do not see that that the Arab League as such is in any position to negotiate the kind of transition– that is, a negotiation to a truly democratic, rights-respecting and accountable political system– that I see as being the one best able to prevent the outbreak (or continuation) of further internal violence in Syria, going forward.
Throughout my years in Lebanon during the early years of the civil war there, I saw at first hand how an “Arab League peacekeeping mission” there was used all along by all the different Arab powers to pursue their own, often highly divisive agendas and thus became yet another factor that prolonged the fighting and the suffering there. And I have no reason to believe that the Arab League is in any better position today to plan and run a constructive peacekeeping mission in Syria. In addition, as noted above, it is amazing for anyone truly concerned about pursuing a more democratic and accountable Syria going forward to think that the governments now running the Arab League are well positioned or well suited to help realize that goal. Hence I would like to keep alive the possibility of a role for democratic Turkey in spearheading a serious push for negotiations– something that the Crisis Group’s report doesn’t mention.
(On the Arab League, and Qatar’s rapidly shifting political role in regional politics, As’ad AbouKhalil has had four excellent short pieces in Al-Akhbar English in the past couple of weeks. You can access them all via this web-page.)

Palestine 1948 at the University of Virginia

On Saturday, I was delighted to attend the first two sessions of a half-day conference held at the University of Virginia on the topic ‘1948 in Palestine.’ The main speakers at those sessions were Susan Akram of Boston University Law School and Rochelle Davis of Georgetown University.
Both those sessions were really thought-provoking. Susan Akram presented a smart and thoughtful set of comments based on the recent essay in Jadaliyya in which she compared the international-law strategy pursued by the PLO over the years highly unfavorably with that pursued by SWAPO and its allies in an earlier era. Bill the spouse was the commentator for that. Rochelle Davis then gave a lovely presentation based on her recent book about “Palestinian Village Histories”, and someone from UVA Jewish Studies called Gabriel Finder was the commentator for that one.
What was equally notable to the high quality of both of these discussions was, for me, simply the fact of the open-ness of this corner of American academe to discussing this whole issue of 1948 in such an open-minded way.
These days, dealing with the still-unresolved issues of 1948 is moving back to being an inescapably central part of the whole quest to find a workable and equality-based formula for the longterm coexistence of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, whether in two states or one. For several years in an earlier era– perhaps up to 1999 or 2000; or possibly, even later than that?– it seemed to many people around the world that dealing only with the issues of 1967 (primarily, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that Israel initiated in that year) would be sufficient and/or workable, while the issues from 1948 (primarily, the question of that large portion of Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from the area-that-became-Israel that year) could somehow be sidestepped, swept under the rug, or finessed in one way or another.
For many Israelis, however, even trying to discuss the question of the Palestinian refugees as being bearers of rights is still seen as anathema, or as an attempt to “delegitimize Israel”, or whatever… and the same is true of the many pro-Israeli watchdogs and discourse-suppression organizations in the U.S. media and the U.S. academy.
That’s why I found it particularly refreshing to hear of this symposium, which was organized by Alon Confino, a distinguished Israeli-American professor in the UVA history department. I wish I had the time to write more about the discussions. (Maybe they’ll be published some day by Confino and his department?) In the meantime, though, I urge JWN readers to go read Susan Akram’s piece on Jadaliyya and Rochelle Davis’s book…

Making sense of Syria

I have so many questions swirling around my head about what’s been happening in Syria. One is why the AK government in Turkey didn’t take my great advice and play a leadership role in trying to broker a serious, negotiated transition to democracy in Syria, but instead has been giving ever stronger support to the Syrian opposition. (So far, my main answer to that is that the AK is probably quite serious about pursuing a strongly Sunni-ist agenda, which seems to over-ride all the many Realpolitik-al and other reasons why positioning itself as a powerful mediator would have made more sense.)
Perhaps their motivation really was, in their minds, overwhelmingly a pro-democracy one, based on the demographic weight of Sunnis in the Syrian population. But in that case, surely they should have been eager (as an outside power) to put the opposition’s democratic claims to the test as soon as possible, that is, by working proactively with all concerned parties to negotiate the terms for a truly democratic election in Syria? Certainly, if they had done that, then they would have had a lot more credibility as “midwives to democracy” than the Gulf Arab states do…
Democracy, as the AK people should know as well as anyone, does not grow out of the barrel of a gun but is above all a set of tools that are used to resolve very thorny differences and disputes in a nonviolent and rights-respecting way. (As happened between “Whites” and non-“Whites” in South Africa in the early 1990s… and that, after the “White” South Africans had sustained a centuries-long reign of terror in the country that completely dwarfs anything the Baathists have done in Syria. But yet, democrats around the world all cheered loudly– and imho, quite correctly– at the news that the Apartheid-enacting National Party had agreed to take part in a free and fair national election against its rivals, rather than having its leaders all strung up on lamp-posts.)
Oh well, not worth my while sitting around for too long, regretting Ankara’s failure to play a truly democracy-promoting role in Syria…
So the next question I have in my head is a combination of two questions, really. Firstly, why did the GCC countries and other Arab League member-states step in last week with such (relative) speed and determination to position themselves as the main external mediators of a regime-opposition negotiation in Syria, thereby doing a lot to strengthen Pres. Asad’s position, at least temporarily… And the corollary to that is, why on earth should anyone inside or outside Syria take seriously a claim by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to have mainly “democratic” goals in mind in Syria? But really, the first half of this question is the more pressing one, and I’ll try to come back to it later.
The next set of questions I have are the ones concerning the linkages and interactions between developments in Libya and those in Syria. Now, I know that a lot of opposition people in Syria were fairly loudly calling for the imposition of a Libya-style “no-fly zone” in Syria. Maybe they still are calling for it. But it ain’t going to happen– for a large number of reasons. One important one is that the GCC countries, whose cooperation with the whole ‘NFZ’ project in Libya– and in the case of Qatar and the UAE, their actual participation in it, at least symbolically– was seen by western countries as crucial to its international “legitimacy”, very evidently decided at some point that they were not about to engage in the same kind of hostile act against Pres. Asad in Syria. Another was, of course, the clearcut and definitive Russian and Chinese use of their veto against the US-sponsored resolution in the UNSC which would have provided exactly the same kind of springboard for subsequent military action that resolution 1970 provided for 1973. And another is the fact that in both Europe and the U.S., the appetite for yet another act of military aggression against a distant Muslim land seems to have drained away almost completely– certainly, compared with the heady days of BHL’s bellicosity back in March.
The way things have turned out in Libya has also, I am sure, had its effect on the desire of just about all non-Syrians to engage in a repeat performance in Syria.
The anti-Qadhafi military operation in Libya, remember, was described by its boosters at the time, back in March, as the western-led “NATO-plus-Arabs” coalition finally “getting it right” regarding how to do a foreign military ~~aggression~~ “intervention”. Crucially– and this was especially sold as being a strong contrast to Iraq– there would not even be any need for western or other foreign “boots on the ground”. The whole western intervention would be accomplished from the air, while on the ground in Libya would be the boots only of Libya’s’ reputed throngs of eager democrats.
So now we have how many competing militias on the ground in Libya? Three hundred or more?
Actually, from the POV of the health and safety of the Libyan people, even a western occupation army might have have been better than this situation– which shows absolutely no signs of getting any better, any time soon.
So far from being an “exemplary” action by western armies to support local “democrats” in Libya, what has happened in Libya has turned out to be an application of Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine”, on steroids. That is, the destruction not only of Libya’s anyway ramshackle state but also of many of the internal bonds of its society.
Thank you NATO.
(We can also note that if these anti-Qadhafi people who are now rampaging all over Libya had had a decent amount of democratic sensitivity and commitment, they would have been working hard throughout all this year to resolve the many differences among themselves through nonviolent deliberations or negotiations. But no. NATO powerfully modeled for them all that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, or a drone, and they proved eager learners of that lesson.)
So I imagine that even in some of Syria’s hard-pressed opposition strongholds, the “Libyan model” doesn’t look so irresistibly attractive now as it did, say, a month ago…
Over the past few weeks, various friends and colleagues have pointed me to a number of studies on Syria that they have found interesting. One was this one that Mona Yacoubian published on October 5, under the title “Saving Syria from Civil War.” Yacoubian’s policy prescription is truly mind-boggling: What she argues for is pursuit of “controlled regime collapse” in Syria– that is, a policy of deliberately stripping away successive layers of supporters away from the regime until it collapses.
Honestly, Mona Yacoubian should know better than to imagine that there is any such phenomenon in the world as “controlled regime collapse” of the kind she is talking about. Though she sells her policy as one that can “stave off civil war”, it seems almost certain to lead only to civil war.
Equally significantly, when she talks about stripping progressively greater sections of the officer class away from their allegiance to Pres. Asad– or “Bashar”, as she cozily calls him– she makes no mention at all of the extremely salient facts that Syria is still in a state of war with Israel and has some of its national territory occupied and illegally annexed by Israel, and that no patriotic Syrian inside the army or outside of it is easily going to take any action that would undercut the country’s military preparedness.
Then yesterday, we had ‘Meet Syria’s Opposition’ by Randa Slim, another Lebanese-American woman. This one gives a lot more informative detail about the make-up of the many disparate groups that are in the Syrian opposition, and doesn’t attempt to provide any big-picture prescriptions for American policy. The nearest she comes to making a policy point is this mild and fairly realistic observation, at the beginning of her article:

Seven months into the uprisings, the Syrian opposition has yet to develop a united voice and platform. Unless these disparate groups unite and present a credible and viable alternative to the Assad regime, both Syria’s fearful majority and the international community will find it difficult to effectively push for meaningful change in Damascus.

Sadly, Slim’s piece is marred by some really bad editing, so that at many points it is really hard to figure out what she is trying to say. Thus, for example, she says this:

[The opposition’s] fragmentation and disunity poses [sic] a formidable challenge. It makes it difficult to assess who is representing whom, the level of public support each enjoys among Syrians, and the role each is playing in the protest movement.

But then she immediately says this:

While it is impossible to know which side commands a majority, a critical mass of Syrians has clearly opted for regime change.

So how on earth do the two halves of that last sentence fit together? In this context, what does the term “critical mass” actually mean?
This is far from the only place at which her piece is marred by internal inconsistency and lack of clarity. It is a pity, too, that though her piece came out the same day the Arab League delegation announced its “peace plan” for Syria, she makes no mention of the impact that will have. All she does is note that “Pro-Assad Lebanese allies told me that Qatar and Saudi Arabia were the main funders [of the opposition.] There is no independent evidence to substantiate such claims.” For his part, As’ad AbouKhalil has regularly pointed to links between Saudi Arabia and some members of the Syrian opposition, on his blog, e.g. here.
But if, as seems to me almost certainly to have been the case, various Saudi institutions have been supporting some of the Islamist portions of the Islamist/Ikhwani portions of the opposition– what has happened to that support in the wake of the Arab League peace effort?
Slim doesn’t explore that question at all. (She also makes no mention of Syria’s state of war with Israel.)
… So finally, we come to this paper, today, from the Crisis Group. Its tone is markedly different from the evident anti-Asadism of Yacoubian and Slim– though it is also written with the sensibilities of a Western audience very clearly in mind. The whole first paragraph sets the tone, as well as defining the policy prescription:

Syria’s acceptance of the Arab League proposal to defuse the crisis presents an eleventh-hour opportunity to seek a negotiated transition before the conflict takes an even uglier turn. Despite understandable scepticism, both the protest movement and the international community ought to give this initiative a fair chance; for either one to dismiss or undermine it would be to offer the regime justification for rejecting both the deal and responsibility for its failure. The regime’s intentions soon will be put to the test. In coming days, protesters will take to the streets with renewed energy, probing President Bashar al Assad’s sincerity after months of rising repression; they cannot be expected to show patience for protracted political talks devoid of swift, tangible results on the ground. The various strands of the opposition ought to publicly reject violent attacks against security forces and accept to engage in a dialogue with no condition other than the regime’s implementation of the plan. Likewise the international community should fully endorse the deal and adjust its reaction to developments on the ground. Only by giving Damascus a genuine opportunity to live up to its commitments under the plan can the international community reach consensus on holding it accountable should it choose to flout them.

There is a lot of good sense in this paper. Which is nothing less than I would expect, since I have great respect for the careful, always extremely well-informed work of CG’s principal Syria analyst, Peter Harling.
Above all, the CG’s careful argument as to why the Arab League initiative should be supported and given a chance is really important. I wish, though, that the paper had done more to urge its mainly Western-official target audience to work hard alongside the Arab League mediators to push them much further toward pursuit of a truly democratic outcome in Syria than they might otherwise be inclined to go.
But even in this generally strong CG piece, frustratingly, I still could not find answers to my own two big questions about what has been happening in the orbit of the Syria issue, namely: Why has Ankara adopted such a strongly pro-opposition position, and why have the GCC countries intervened so strongly over the past week or so to let Pres. Asad off the hook?
The most plausible answers to the latter question have to do, I think, with two things: Firstly, a fear in many Arab countries that if Syria follows the path of Libya, it might end up following the terrifying path of social breakdown (fitna) that the Arab countries have seen come about not only in Libya, but also in Iraq, in the wake of Western military ~~aggression~~ “intervention”… and the fact that Syria, like Iraq, is much closer to the heartland of the populations and concerns of most Arab countries than is Libya.The past two weeks have seen the emergence of a lot of very bad news from Libya, remember, which could well help to explain the timing of the Arab League’s activism on the Syria-negotiation question.
Secondly, I don’t think any Arab governments can ignore– as Mona Yacoubian, Randa Slim, and even the Crisis Group all managed to– the fact of Syria’s continuing state of war with Israel and its close proximity to Israel.
Back at the beginning of October, did Asad tell Turkish foreign minister Davutoglu that “If a crazy measure is taken against Damascus, I will need not more than six hours to transfer hundreds of rockets and missiles to the Golan Heights to fire them at Tel Aviv,” as the Israeli website Ynet quoted the Iranian Fars news agency as having reported? A spokesman for the Turkish foreign ministry strongly denied this. But if the intention of the Iranian “leak” had been to scare the bejeesus out of the Gulf Arab countries in particular, maybe it had some effect.
(My view of that reported threat? I think six hours is ways more than Israel would need to undertake a devastating counter-strike, so what Asad reportedly “threatened” didn’t sound very threatening to Israel as such– but it certainly would threaten to inflame matters in the whole of the rest of the Middle East.)
There is, to put it bluntly, a bit of a protection racket being sustained by the Syrians (or perhaps, in this case, by the Iranians on their behalf) over some of the other Arab states, in a way that almost exactly mirrors the protection racket that has long been sustained by Israel over the United States… Both Syria (or Syria/Iran) threatens to blow up the whole Middle East by attacking Israel if the Arab states don’t do what Asad wants them to… Just as Israel periodically threatens to blow up the whole Middle East by attacking Iran if Washington doesn’t do exactly what Netanyahu wants it to (which in his case, is overwhelmingly to allow him to continue paving over the whole of the West Bank for the illegal Israeli settlers, without raising a finger in protest.)
Ah, Realpolitik. What a dirty business, eh?
In this case, however, it may well end up tending to take Syria’s people to a much better (because negotiated) outcome than they could ever expect if they choose to follow the path of Iraq or Libya. Yes, it would certainly be amazingly difficult for Syria to be able to democratize while it is still under threat and partial occupation by Israel. Yes, it would be amazingly difficult to reverse the terrible course toward increasing internal polarization and schism that Syrian society has been following for the past nine months. Yes, it seems amazingly unlikely that Riyadh or Doha would ever end up as champions of democracy!
But…. The alternatives to finding a negotiated outcome to the Syrian conflict are now all far, far worse…. As I’ve been saying like a broken record for six months now, in Syria both the regime and the opposition are resilient and won’t be defeated easily. Trying to find a negotiated and democratic way out of this impasse still seems like the best– indeed, the only– way forward. And this negotiation should only be over the form of governance inside Syria– that is, a negotiation for how a transition to democracy will be implemented– and not a negotiation over outcomes, i.e., that “Asad must go”, or whatever. It must be a negotiation that keeps a place at the table for the representatives of all significant forces in society on the basis of preserving the patriotic unity of the country and its people that they all so desperately need, despite– or rather, precisely because of– the depth of the wounds and resentments they bear from the recent and the more distant past. And they need it, too, because of the continuing state of war with Israel and the presence of very threatening Israeli forces looming on Jebel al-Shaikh right over the approaches to Damascus.
Look, you think it was easy for South Africans to overcome their resentments in 1992-94 and sit down at the table together? But who among the democrats of western countries is not glad today that they did so? Almost nobody. So why should we not support a negotiated transition to democracy in the case of Syria, also? (The Crisis Group report was quite right, by the way, to point out that Washington’s repeated calls for regime change in Syria have been extremely unhelpful…)