Author: Helena

Arab League war crimes investigators in Gaza

The Arab League has shown a surprising burst of initiative and has been deploying a fact-finding mission to Gaza to investigate Israeli war crimes, according to this news release from the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights.
The news release tells us that the mission started its work February 22 and will wrap it up today. PCHR has hosted the mission during its time in the field.
The members of the missions are:

    John Dughard, Former UN Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories; Finn Lenghjem, a judge and legal expert; Paul De Waart, an international legal expert; Gonzalo Boye, a lawyer and representative of PCHR in Spanish courts; Raeleene Sharp, an international lawyer; and Francisco Corte Real, an expert in forensic medicine. The mission is also accompanied by 3 members of the secretariat general of the League of Arab Nations: Radwan Ben Khader, Legal Advisor of the Secretary General; ‘Aliaa Al-Ghussain, Director of Palestinian Affairs Department; and Ilham al-Shajani, First Secretary of Demography and Immigration Policies Department.

The heavy representation of Spanish experts in the team is not surprising, considering that the Spanish courts claim “universal jurisdiction” for a range of war crimes and other atrocities– as Pinochet earlier learned to his dismay– and that the National Court of Spain anyway has a case outstanding against seven former senior Israeli military officials in connection with the IAF’s 2002 dropping of a 2,000-pound bomb on the home of Salah Shehadeh in Gaza, an act that killed 17 civilians along with Shehadeh, injured 70 other civilians, and completely destroyed eleven homes.
So who knows how the Arab League or prosecutors in Spain or elsewhere might end up using the report of this fact-finding commission?

Good news on US Iran policy

According to David Ignatius yesterday,

    The administration official who oversees the Iran file is William Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs. Although Dennis Ross will take a broad strategic look at the region in his new post of State Department adviser, senior officials stress that Burns is the address for Iran policy.

So it looks as if the strongly pro-Israeli, anti-Iranian, and professionally unsuccessful Ross has not been given the extremely powerful mandate he had evidently hoped for.
Ignatius’s piece is mainly a description of a discussion he had about Iran policy with Lee Hamilton, an extremely wise elder statesman who’s had two private meetings with Obama since the inauguration.
He wrote:

    Administration officials echo [the need Hamilton described] for a careful, low-key approach to Iran. The administration has begun an interagency strategic review of Iran policy (they love “reviews,” this Obama team). Until this is done, says a White House official, “it’s premature to talk about talks, or pre-talks, or emissaries.” (Point taken. I wrote recently that former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski would be good emissaries if talks ripened. Add Hamilton to that list.) The starting points for U.S.-Iran discussions, Hamilton said, would be to “state our respect for the Iranian people, renounce regime change as an instrument of U.S. policy, seek opportunities for a range of dialogue across a range of issues, and acknowledge Iran’s security concerns and its right to civilian nuclear power.” He said Obama has already signaled that he wants such a conversation, without preconditions.

This point about taking externally driven campaigns for “regime change” off the table is extremely important, and is evidently an essential precondition for any serious diplomacy at all.
I think it’s important to keep the discussion of possible future emissaries, as Ignatius does, at the level of extremely weighty former statesmen like Scowcroft, Brzezinski, or Hamilton. The idea that a highly ideological and professionally unsuccessful lightweight like Dennis Ross could do the serious job of de-escalation of tensions that’s required in the case of US-Iran relations appears more and more risible. (Or, actually, dangerous.)
A final note here, too, as to why de-escalation of tensions with Iran is absolutely necessary for this US president.
In case anyone hadn’t noticed, the US is now entering an extremely serious economic crisis, and the president has pledged to reduce the federal government’s budget deficit considerably even during his first term in office.
Yesterday, Obama submitted to Congress an outline (“topline”) of his defense spending request for FY2010.spending request. Here’s a portion of the bottom line there:

    The topline request provides $534 billion in FY 2010 funding for the Department of Defense’s “base” budget, which excludes funding for Iraq, Afghanistan, and nuclear weapons activities…
    President Obama’s topline thus requests $664 billion in total DOD and war funding for FY 2010. This figure does not include funding for nuclear weapons or miscellaneous non-DOD defense costs, which were approximately $23 billion in FY 2009… After adjusting for inflation, the $534 billion topline request is $9 billion, or 1.7 percent, greater than the $525 billion (FY 2010 dollars) appropriated by Congress in FY 2009 for DOD’s base budget.

The major engine of growth in this defense budget request is doubtless the president’s Quixotic (and tragically doomed) attempt to try to “win” in Afghanistan by very expensively deploying more US troops to that landlocked distant land. But if he is going to have any chance of meeting his goal of deficit reduction, the budget for all these military adventures the US has been sustaining around the world will have to be part of the reduction.
Launching yet another war, against Iran, would be sheer lunacy– from every point of view. Especially since there are so very many alternatives to war, as a way of resolving the US’s tensions with Iran, that haven’t even been tried yet.

A walk in West Jerusalem

I woke to sun, blue skies, and a light breeze here in Jerusalem today. My first appointment was with Daphna Golan, a veteran leader of the Israeli peace movement who runs human-rights education programs at the Hebrew University. We met in the cafe linked to the Wise auditorium at the university’s Givat Ram campus in West Jerusalem. “Come to where you hear the piano playing,” she said; and indeed I heard the lovely chords of the piano as I approached the building.
What a beautiful idea: a university cafe with a huge grand piano in the middle! Given that the music school is right nearby, Daphna said there’s always someone who wants to sit down and play. As the kippa-ed young guy got his hands around those flowing arpeggios, a security guard by another door was swaying back and forth saying his prayers. The cheerful Palestinian guy behind the counter served me a large cappucino, and Daphna and I sat in a sunny spot and talked.
Like most of the conversations and interviews I’ve conducted since I came here, the tenor of this one was very gloomy. She was reading a couple of Hebrew-language newspapers as I arrived, and informed me that Avigdor Lieberman would almost certainly be in the government, where he was asking for (though might not get) no fewer than five seats… With for himself, either the foreign affairs or finance portfolio.
She talked a little about whether Livni is just hanging tough in the coalition negotiations to try to get a better deal for herself and her part– or whether she would be happy ending up in the opposition, instead.
“Not that it makes much difference,” Daphna said. “Sure, Livni talks about a two-state solution. But what she means by it is not what you or I mean.”
I asked about what had happened to the Israeli left. “There is no Israeli left any more,” she said bluntly.
She noted that Meretz seemed to have shot itself in the foot in the recent elections, in a number of ways. Firstly, it had come out in favor of the war– “So people on the left were asking, ‘So why is Meretz any different from anyone else?” Meretz had also tried to present itself as “new and improved”, but had completely failed to do so. As for the Labour Party, she said that though it still probably has a stronger core of support than Meretz, that support is ageing and is seen as linked to much earlier generations when kibbutzes were still important in Israeli life.
The one good thing about Israeli public life is that people seem to want to vote for women, she said, adding that she thought that was a big reason for the amount of support Tzipi Livni got. “But then, look at Labour and Meretz: no women made it high enough onto those parties’ lists to get elected. What are those parties of the so-called ‘left’ thinking of?”
The only portion of the left that she saw as having much good life left in it is Hadash, the former Communist Party. Though Hadash has been mainly supported by Palestinian Israelis in recent years, she noted that one of their most interesting new MKs will be Dov Chanin, an explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish Israeli who ran for mayor of Tel Aviv last November and amazed everyone by winning one-third of the votes there– more than Meretz.
Golan talked a bit about how isolated she and her pro-peace friends had felt during the Gaza war. She recalled there had been huge pro-war mobilizations on many Israeli campuses. One day during the war she had arrived at the Ramat Gan campus of HU and found large, very belligerent posters calling for the bombing of all of Gaza hung up around the entrance. (She tried to tear them down, herself, right then, and was then threatened by a group of young students who stood around her and called her filthy names. Perhaps some of the same nasty, misogynistic names that get thrown my way from time to time…)
I was deeply moved and personally delighted to catch up with Daphna. She needed to bring the interview to a halt and invited me to walk with her to her home in a leafy nearby neighborhood, where she was engaging in an ingenious bit of civil disobedience. A while ago someone she knows started a project to import organic produce into Jerusalem from the West Bank– defying the whole forest of administrative and financial obstacles with which the Israeli occupation authorities try to prevent or minimize that from happening. So Daphna knows a group of people who form one of the distribution nodes for this cross between a regular veggie coop and a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project. When we reached her front yard the friends had nearly finished the sorting. Before us were a dozen produce boxes brimming with beautiful veggies: cabbage, lettuce, green onions, spinach, peppers, tomatoes, etc., all ready to be distributed to the members of this node.
They gave me a crunchy little cucumber to snack on, and I went on my way. I love walking around Jerusalem. My next walk took about 40 minutes: back past the HU campus, up around the new Foreign Ministry building, along Rabin Boulevard to a little park, then up the steep and intimate confines of Bezalel Street, across King George V Blvd, along to the Government Press Office at Beit Agron.
There the cheerful young English-Israeli, ‘Jason’, who’s been sitting on my application for a press card for four days now, told me once again that he’s “on top of it”… But that for some reason The Nation, who have commissioned some of my writings from here, has never applied for a press card here before, so the Israeli consulate in NYC has to do a bit of additional paperwork… Or something. Most strange: I mean, I am in their computer already from the last time I was here, in 2006. On which occasion, yes, they did let me into Gaza.
I asked Jason whether there are any particularly interesting press conferences or other media opportunities coming up. He said no, but tried to sell me on doing a story about the horrors of the “politicization” of many western-based NGOs. I took the brochure he was handing out about this, and proceeded on my way.
I usually enjoy the Jaffa Road/ Ben Yehuda shopping and pedestrian area, but there was ways too much construction there today, so I didn’t linger. I made for Helena Ha-Malkha Street, one of my favorite ways to go– and not only because of the name. (Actually Queen/Saint Helena is a bit of an embarrassment to Quakers and members of other peace churches. It was through her possibly lunatic importunings that her son the Emperor Constantine became a Christian… and a large chunk of Christianity became transformed into the state religion of a huge empire… Among other distortions of the old faith, that whole theory called “Just war” was thereafter introduced. Heck, maybe I should even change my name…)
On the right as you walk along HHM, the ghastly bricked-up windows of the cells in the Moscobiya prison in which the Israelis hold– or certainly have held, in the past– many longterm Palestinian political prisoners. I made a point of singing cheerful songs in English about liberation as I walked past, so maybe people inside those cells could hear me through the few tiny holes they have for ventilation and know that someone was thinking about them.
On the left, the “Sergei Court”, a beautiful large courtyarded structure built by the Russian royal family in the late 19th century to serve as a hostel for high-class Russian pilgrims visiting the city.
After the communist takeover of Russia, the Brits expropriated all the Russian state’s holdings in the city; and after the Brits left the Israelis took them over in their stead. But in recent years the post-Communist Russian state has been working hard to regain control of these lovely pieces of Jerusalem real estate. (Which include, as I’m assuming from the name, the Moscobiya itself?) Anyway, I see from today’s paper that the Israeli government has greed in principle to let the Russian government regain control and ownership of the Sergei Court, though its actual control will start in the first instance with only one wing of the building.
The paper (J. Post? Haaretz? I forget which) said the Israeli government had been reluctant to accede to the Russian demand for its buildings since it was afraid that other countries might also seek the return of city buildings expropriated from them. H’mmm…
Anyway, on down Helena Ha-Malkha to Nevi-im, past the Nablus Road “Arab” bus terminal, and back to my hotel. Made a few calls; and now here I am.
(I have to say I have so much material from the past three weeks that it’ll take some time to sort it all out and write it up. Tuesday I did an interview with Salam Fayad which was pretty interesting. And yes, I’m still hacking away at a broader “mood” piece about Ramallah but it ain’t ready yet… )

M. Totten on Israel junket– and in JWN comments

Interesting to see that the comments board here recently attracted an interesting and well-written comment from emerging young blogger Michael Totten, who’s just completed a short junket to Israel paid for by the American Jewish Committee.
To his credit, Totten– unlike so many earlier beneficiaries of all-expenses-paid junkets provided by pro-Israeli organizations– did at least admit his sponsorship upfront. However, he did not admit in the comment submitted here, if it was indeed he who submitted it, that the whole text of that comment ran on his blog, here, a month ago.
Since I missed it then, I’m interested to see it now, since it not only paints an interesting picture of the views of many members of the Jewish Israeli policy elite but it also conveys pretty clearly to an English-speaking audience the messages those Israelis want to have conveyed.
Overwhelmingly that message is that “There is no fast or easy solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
You could also, certainly, link that argument with description– which by all accounts seems an accurate one– of the degree to which Israelis feel happy or satisfied with the results of the recent Gaza war. As he blogged on January 26, “Most Israelis I spoke to in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem last week feel a tremendous sense of relief and seem more at ease than they have been in years.”
In other words, they feel– or as of January 26, they did feel– under no immediate pressure to change any of their existing practices in the security/strategic field. Those practices include, though Totten makes no mention of these issues, their continued building of additional settlements in the West Bank, the continued maintenance of the ‘movement control’ noose around West Bankers, and most shockingly of all the continuation of the tight siege around Gaza that prevents the delivery of even basic construction materials that are desperately needed to rebuild the thousands of badly damaged and completely destroyed homes, water systems, and other basic infrastructure there.
“Israelis feel okay about themselves– so therefore, there’s no need for anyone to rush hard toward making peace with the Palestinians”: That seems to be the general trend of the extremely self-referential argument that Totten is both describing and subscribing to.
In the blog post “The mother of all quagmires”, which was what was sent here as a comment, Totten adduces several pieces of “evidence” as to why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is currently unsolvable.
The most important of these items of ‘evidence’ is his argument that (1) Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel’s to exist (and by clear implication, that it cannot be made to accept this, even perhaps grudgingly, in the context of a broad peace bargain in which others of its important demands get met); and (2) that this rejection by Hamas of Israel’s “right to exist” and a concomitant rejection of a two-state solution, are widely shared among Palestinians.
Regarding the first part of that argument, of course diplomatic balancing of all the issues is quite possible, in the context of a true, wide-ranging peace negotiation– as Khaled Meshaal and other Hamas leaders have very clearly indicated. (But Hamas, unlike Fateh, is unlikely to give away all its negotiating cards upfront.)
Regarding the second part of the argument, Totten is just plain wrong. He writes,

    Hamas speaks for a genuinely enormous number of Palestinians, and peace is impossible as long as that’s true. An-Najah University conducted a poll of Palestinian public opinion a few months ago and found that 53.4 percent persist in their rejection of a two-state solution.

Where did he get that figure?
You go to any of the series of very professionally conducted polls that have been conducted among the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, and you’ll din the picture is almost the direct obverse of what Totten claims.
The PCPSR (Shikaki) poll of early December 2008 found that:

    * 53% accept and 46% reject a mutual recognition of Israel as the state for the Jewish people and Palestine as the state for the Palestinian people; 48% think a majority of Palestinians support the mutual recognition while 38% think a majority of Israelis support it.
    * 66% support and 30% oppose the Saudi Initiative that calls for an Israeli withdrawal to the lines of 1967 in return for an Arab recognition of Israel and normalization of relations with it.

The JMCC poll of late January 2009 found, in Q.11, that, of a list of different final outcomes suggested (and some not suggested) by the poll-takers, 54.8% of respondents preferred the two-state outcome, as against 18.4% for a “A binational state on all of historic Palestine”, 1.6% for an Islamic state, etc.
These most recent poll results, I should note, are remarkably consistent with findings of polls undertaken by these and other polling organizations for many years past. Back in the early years of this decade, I recall that the level of Palestinian support for a two-state solution was around two-thirds. Yes, it has declined since then; but only slowly. And crucially, even in the context of complete stasis in the negotiations, a continuation/acceleration of Israeli settlement building, and the recent Gaza war, it still remains noticeably above 50%.
That certainly gives peace negotiators a great basis of public support to work on– if they use it swiftly and well.
(Ah, but how about the levels of Israeli support for a robust two-state solution like the one the Saudi/Arab peace initiative calls for? Those figures would be far, far lower, I think… )
So why does Michael Totten distort (or, unquestioningly accept and re-propagate the Israeli distortions of) this part of the Palestinian record?
I guess there are two separate questions there. One is about Totten. In a sense it’s a trivial question. Totten is a journalist-provocateur, on the same order as his friend Chris Hitchens (with whom he got into a little adventure in Beirut last week, after the ever-pugnacious Hitchens decided to deface a mnument of the veteran Lebanese party the SSNP.) Hitchens is so “famous” now that he doesn’t even have to pretend to do real reportorial journalism. Totten is still up-and-coming, however; and he does make some effort to do real reportorial journalism (which also builds up his value to those who want to use him as a journalist-provocateur.) But he does his “journalism” in an unabashedly biased way. He goes to Israel on the dime of the AJC and he makes no attempt whatsoever, while there, to seek out any Palestinians and gain anything even approaching a “balanced”– as between Israelis and Palestinians– view of the conflict between these two peoples. Instead, he just parrots the views and impressions of local anti-Arab propagandists like Martin Kramer.
(I recall that last August, during the Ossetian war, Totten went to Tbilisi and did some blatantly propagandistic flacking for Saakashvili, while there. I’d love to know who picked up those expenses for him… Is it the neocon ideology that drives his work, I wonder; or the taste for “Boys’ Own” adventures of the most laddish kind; or the excitement of getting noticed and adopted by powerful and rich organizations like the AJC? Maybe a bit of all that.)
But a more interesting question is why the influential Israelis with whom he met want to put about the idea that there is “no hope for peace” because “the Palestinians are all hate-filled irredentists who don’t even, really, want the two-state solution they claim is their goal.”
Ah, I guess once I write it down that way, that question looks pretty obvious and trivial, too.

Dennis Ross as Clinton ‘special adviser’: Outrageous

The State Department yesterday announced the appointment of Dennis Ross as “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for The Gulf and Southwest Asia.”
The designation of Ross’s geographic purview is fuzzy, but intriguing. In the parlance of many UN and other bodies, “Southwest Asia” is the (non-Eurocentric) term used for what many of the rest of us might call “the Middle East”.
Dennis Ross can no longer be judged to have even the minimum level of policy objectivity and neutrality that’s required for this job. He served as an ambassadorial-level special coordinator for Arab-Israeli negotiations for both presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton. But since then, he has been appointed Chairman of the Board of an outfit called the Jewish People Policy Planning Instite, which has been– as its masthead there proudly proclaims– “Established by the Jewish Agency for Israel, Ltd.” JPPPI is also headquartered in Israel.
For just some of the problems Ross’s dual affiliations might cause, you can see on the current front page of its website a photo of “The Ambassador Dennis Ross presenting JPPPI’s annual assessment to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.” Ross is doing this, obviously, in his capacity as Board Chair of this Israel-based body that was established by the Jewish Agency, a body that has played a key role in the leadership of the Zionist movement since well before 1948, and which enjoys very special relations with the State of Israel o this day.
For example, the Jewish Agency has been a major partner for successive Israeli governments in the building of Israel’s completely illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. (As referred to quite casually in, for example, this 2005 report in the Financial Times.)
So if Dennis presents the JPPPI report to the Israeli Prime Minister today, and tomorrow he goes back to deliver a demarche from the US president on, say, Israeli settlement building– how would that work?
More to the point, how can any of the rest of us, US citizens, have any confidence whatsoever that the “advice” Dennis Ross will be giving Secretary Clinton will be the kind of calm, objective, US-centric advice on Middle Eastern issues– including Iran, Iraq, and quite possibly also Palestine– that she and the rest of the administration all so desperately need?
HT to Col. Pat Lang for having pointed out the JPPPI connection a month ago.
But I’m puzzled why I’ve seen no mention of this obviously problematic affiliation of his in any of the mainstream reporting that I’ve read?
Also, I should point out that when Dennis was running the US-led Israeli-Palestinian peace “process” for eight years under the Clintons, he notably failed at achieving anything except to give the Israelis the time to just about double the number of settlers it had in the occupied Palestinian territories. Earlier, when he was under the adult supervision of Bush I and James Baker, the Bush-Baker team did make a solid effort to penalize Israel for its continued pursuit of the settlement-planting policy. Once Dennis himself was more in charge of the US’s “peace” diplomacy, all those efforts at conditionality/accountability were halted. The Jewish Agency and its partner, the State of Israel, were able to accelerate their settlement building project with almost no obstructions.
A bleak day indeed for the US body politic.

Amnesty’s great campaign for Israel-Hamas arms embargo

Huge kudos to Amnesty International for having pulled together a well-researched and intelligent report on the international arms suppliers who were complicit in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the recent Israel-Gaza war, and for concluding it with a forthright call to all there arms suppliers to cease their arms shipments to the belligerents forthwith.
The news release about the report is here, and the PDF of the report’s full text is here.
(Astute readers of JWN will recall that one of the first things I called for when the recent Gaza war broke out was a complete embargo on all arms shipments to the warring parties.)
Of course, the lethal and destructive capabilities of the arsenals of the two sides are completely asymmetrical. And regarding the shipments of arms to each sides by outside arms suppliers, we can recall Kathy Kelly’s poignant recent speculation regarding the sheer size of the “tunnels” that would be required if all Israel’s arms imports had to be brought in in such a way.
The Amnesty report does three things particularly well:

    1. It pulls together a lot of details about the size, nature, and provenance of the arms transfers made to each side– and, too, of the effects some of these transferred arms had on the communities targeted. And while it is careful to do this for both sides, the report makes quite clear the stark disparity between the level and lethality of the arms level on each side. In particular, though the report is careful to list all the suppliers of significant amounts of arms to srael, the figures it provides show that the overwhelming majority of these outside-supplied arms– $7.9 billion-worth in the four years 2004-2007– came from the United States. The second place was occupied by France, which provided only $59 million-worth.
    2. It provides a very clear explanation (p. 19 of the full report) of the duty all states have under international law to avoid aiding or assisting other states in the commission of unlawful acts. This duty is spelled out in Article 16 of the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (2001), which states: “A State which aids or assists another State in the commission of an internationally wrongful act by the latter is internationally responsible for doing so if: (a) that State does so with knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act; and (b) the act would be internationally wrongful if committed by that State.” After the way the Israelis used their foreign-supplied weapons in and against Lebanon in 2006, surely no state officials elsewhere could thereafter argue that “they did not know” that Israel had a propensity to use such weapons in ways that were grossly disproportionate to the military task at hand and often grossly indiscriminate… Also, in addition to the duties states have under international law, most states– including the US– also have their own domestic legislation governing the end use of weapons it supplies to others. In the case of the US, such arms can be used only for defensive purposes.
    3. Finally, the Amnesty report is quite clear on the policies it advocates. It calls for the immediate imposition of a “comprehensive UN Security Council arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups until effective mechanisms are in place to ensure that weapons or munitions and other military equipment will not be used to commit serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and the establishment of a ” thorough, independent and impartial investigation of violations and abuses of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including the Israeli attacks which have been directed at civilians or civilian buildings in the Gaza Strip, or which are disproportionate, and Palestinian armed groups’ indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilian centres in southern Israel.”

So now, let’s see what the AI organization in the US, and the US Campaign to End the Israeli occupation can do with this information and this campaign.
Addendum, at 2:00 p.m., EST:
I see that Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum has “slammed” Amnesty for its report, which he described as “unbalanced and unfair because it equates the criminal with the victim.” Doubtless the government of Israel won’t be far behind in denouncing the report.
Regarding Barhoum’s criticism, I would note that the provisions of international humanitarian law on which Amnesty bases its argument deal overwhelmingly with questions of how belligerent parties fight their wars rather than why they fight them. International law does, certainly, give a general right to people living under foreign military occupation to resist their occupiers, including by using military force to do so. (And also, by inviting other states to come and join them in doing so– as the Kuwaitis did, in 1990-91.) So any actions that Hamas takes that can be seen as constituting direct resistance to Israel’s military occupation of Gaza or the West Bank would be considered legitimate.
Thus, for example, just about all the military operations Hamas and others undertook against IOF forces who invaded Gaza during the war– or any actions they might have taken to defend against air or naval assaults against Gaza– would be completely legal.
You could certainly argue that if, during the recent war or in the immediate and quite evident run-up to it, the Palestinian resistance groups had sent rockets or against valid military targets inside Israel, that would have been legal too. What’s illegal as a way of war-fighting is to send out rockets or other ordnance that is not targeted as carefully as possible onto valid military targets.
One important point is that there is good evidence that in the past Hamas has tried to target military targets– mainly, military bases– inside Israel. But the Israeli censorship system forbids any reporting or mention of that. Another is that the targetability of the rockets used by Hamas and other groups is pretty darn poor in many cases. And another is that groups other than Hamas– including, as the Amnesty report notes, groups affiliated with Fateh– are also militarily active inside Gaza; and they may have targeting philosophies that are different from Hamas’s. (However, Hamas, as the predominant authority in the Gaza Strip, has a responsibility to try to curb the actions of any other groups that are committing war-crimes through the indiscriminate firing of missiles into Israel.)
… All in all, Barhoum has something of an argument, but not I think a 100% watertight argument.
Meanwhile, for myself, as a US citizen, I am most concerned with the involvement of my government in this whole business. If the US government were supplying any weapons to Hamas or other Palestinian factions, I would probably want to examine their practices and targeting philosophies much more rigorously. But it is not. It is massively supplying arms to a country that has used many of them to commit war crimes. I shall therefore focus centrally on the responsibilities that that entails.

Syria, as the US pressure for regime change eases

The Syrian analyst, professor, publisher, and general man-about-town Sami Moubayed had a very informative article in Asia Times Online two days ago, assessing the generally very positive recent developments in the US-Syrian relationship.
After detailing several positive steps that each side has taken since January 20, he concludes thus:

    Syrians want to be seen as problem-solvers rather than problem-seekers. They want to show the world – mainly the US – that just as they can deliver on Palestine, they can deliver in Iraq and Lebanon. Syria has said these words in every possible language, and it will continue to show the West that it can deliver in the Middle East. For years the Syrians have been saying that reforms cannot be made unless there are no regional and international threats threatening Damascus.
    When regime-change was on the table in Washington back in 2005, reforms were slowed down on more than one level, politics included. The Syrians always said that reforms cannot be made only because they are a requirement of Europe or the US; they cannot be parachuted on the Syrians. If Syria feels comfortable, as it does now, then the reform process might be given a facelift.
    Last week, speaking at the Arab Writers Union Congress in Damascus, Haitham Satayhi, member of the Regional Command of the ruling Ba’ath Party, announced that there were instructions to improve relations between the security services and Syrian citizens. There was a determination to combat corruption and “achieve more democracy in the political domain”.
    Satayhi added that a special committee has been set up to study and prepare a political party law in Syria to allow for more political pluralism, as promised by the Ba’ath Party Congress of 2005. If anything, this shows that Syria feels very confident, and is not worried, as many in the Western press had speculated, about the international tribunal that will begin on March 1 for the murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafiq al-Harriri.
    Back in 2005, the United Nations prosecutor Detlev Melhis had authored a fascinating report, highly dramatized as the Syrians saw it, to implicate senior Syrian officials in the murder of Syria’s former number one ally in Beirut. Back then the Syrians were worried that the probe was being politicized by the US and Europe, to break Syria. That fear has now become history.
    When asked about the issue during his Guardian interview, Assad said that he was unconcerned with the tribunal, fully certain of Syria’s innocence. More reforms and a new relationship with the US mean that 2009 will finally be a year in Syria’s favor in the Middle East.

Well, I’m not sure a “facelift” is exactly what Syria’s reform process needs. Maybe something a bit more substantial and deep-rooted is needed and is, in fact, now tentatively getting underway?
But regardless of that possibly infelicitous choice of words, the argument Moubayed makes is an interesting and significant one. Namely, that when a powerful foreign government like the US is openly or covertly threatening regime change, that not surprisingly stimulates a circling of the wagons in the country targeted along with a rise in practices that are actually anti-democratic. And conversely, when those pressures for regime change are taken “off the table”, then normal political processes can start to resume.

The rule of what?

I had an interesting morning. First, it being a normal workday here in Ramallah, I went to conduct a 90-minute interview with two members of the Palestinian Legislative Council which was, you will recall, elected in a free and fair election here in January 2006.
One of these men had recently been released from an Israeli prison where he’s spent nearly the whole of the last 32 months. The only accusation against him was that he’s a member of a parliamentary bloc, ‘Change and Reform’, that, though it ran in the election quite legitimately– and indeed, with the express authorization of both Israel and the US– was suddenly deemed by Israel, five months later, to have an affiliation with “terrorists.”
Back in June-July 2006 a large number of PLC members were rounded up by the Israeli occupation forces. That was shortly after militants in Gaza captured the young, on-active-duty Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit as a POW; and just about everyone said at the time that the PLC members had been captured as additional “bargaining chips” against Shalit’s release. (That, though the taking of hostages for the any purpose, including that of using them as bargaining chips, is quite prohibited by international law.)
41 of those PLC hostages still remain in prison, including PLC speaker Aziz al-Dweik. The PLC, which has 132 members, has been unable to muster a quorum since June 2006 and thus has done no business for this entire time. (George Bush, quite shamefully, uttered not a word of protest against Israel’s cruel and expressly anti-democratic move. Will President Obama change that position? I hope so.)
Both PA president Mahmoud Abbas, whose own elected term ran out on January 9, and the man elected by parliament to be PM back in March 2006, Ismail Haniyeh, took upon themselves the right to name an “emergency government.” The Abbas-designated government, which is based here in Ramallah, has been given very generous financial support (and weapons and many forms of training) by the US-led west, which has meantime worked consistently– ever since January 2006– to support Israel’s extremely harsh, and in many cases actually lethal, siege of Gaza.
Those policies were just two prongs of a wide US-Israeli campaign to oust the duly elected Haniyeh government completely.
So in my meeting with the two parliamentarians here this morning, Mahmoud Musleh, MP, who was the one recently released from jail told me about some of the forms of mistreatment and humiliation to which he and his fellow parliamentarians were subjected while there. He, like several of the others, is a man in his late sixties. On thing he noted was that each time any of the detainees is taken to an Israeli court for a hearing, they are subjected to two days of demeaning and sometimes painful treatment on their way there and back.
More from that interview, later.
… A couple of hours later I had a chance meeting with an American woman who’s here on a two-year contract with USAID to work on “rule of law” issues with the Abbas/Fayyad government’s “Ministry of Justice.”
I was interested to find out what it is, exactly, that she does. The old rubric “capacity building” doesn’t tell you very much, does it? She talked a bit about what she had done on previous contracts, in Bosnia and Afghanistan. One of the things she mentioned specifically was the establishment of regulations for judgment enforcement. This is especially important, she explained, for foreign investors– otherwise, what are their contracts worth, at all?
She said she doesn’t really “do” human rights. But even in what she does do, she said she had run into considerable problems, because any governmental regulations that are drafted in a “rule of aw” situation need to be drafted in line with the enabling legislation— and the legislature hasn’t been able to conduct any business since June 2006…
This professional dilemma of hers is a great illustration of the “cart before the horse” or “Alice Through the Looking Glass” nature of many of the “aid” interventions that western governments have been running in occupied Palestine ever since Oslo. (And that is 16 years now… )
The basic issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty have not even come close to being resolved here yet! Israel’s occupation forces surround this city–and they send snatch-squads in to capture or sometimes kill suspects here with impunity, several times a month. Meantime, all around the extensive fence-and-wall system that surrounds Ramallah, the Israeli settlements expand, expand, expand, gobbling up yet more Palestinian land.
And yet, though the occupation continues– here, as in Gaza– western governments are building “Palestinian” court-houses and prisons and giving numerous “trainings” and other interventions to “teach” these obviously somewhat backward Palestinians (irony alert) all about the “rule of law.”
As if the Palestinians didn’t actually in an earlier era establish nearly all the state administrations for all the little emirates/statelets/former “Trucial states” down in the Gulf– including their judicial systems, penal systems, etc.
And these presumably comfortably compensated US contract workers continue to do this, while day-in-day-out strong US ally Israel gives the Palestinians the exactly opposite lesson about the ascendancy of raw might over any concept of domestic or international law.
Talk about Looking Glass Land.
The rule of law, here in the West Bank and Gaza. Now wouldn’t that be a fine thing?