Author: Helena

Israel, deterrence, and self-referentialism

Israeli leaders and analysts have proclaimed that one of the main goals of the ghastly, extremely inhumane war on Gaza was to “restore the credibility of Israeli deterrence”– a credibility that had, they felt, been badly damaged by the outcome of the 33-Day War against Hizbullah in 2006.
But some influential Israelis, it now turns out, have a very weird and self-referential understanding of what “deterrence” is. It turns out that their version of deterrence has much more to do with their own machismo or testosterone level than it does with the attitudes or feelings of non-Israeli others who are or might become their opponents in war.
In traditional strategic thinking, deterrence is quintessentially a phenomenon that is interactive between two parties: I succeed in deterring you from attacking me if I am able to convince you that if you should do so, the retribution I would enact on you would make you far worse off than ever; and therefore, you decide not to attack me.
It is hard to absolutely prove the existence of successful deterrence, since government decisionmakers are understandably reluctant to admit openly either that they have been deterred in the past from taking actions that they might otherwise have taken or, more importantly, that they remain susceptible to such deterrent pressure in the present and the foreseeable future. (So yes, there is an element of machismo– or more simply, face-saving– involved in that reluctance of the deterree to admit to having been or still being deterred.)
But the reciprocal deterrence between the world’s two hyper-nuclear-armed ‘superpowers’ was the central strategic fact of the Cold War. During those decades it provided a degree of strategic stability to what otherwise would likely have been a chaotic, violent, and possibly speciescidal era. And luckily, as the decades of the Cold War progressed, strategic thinkers and national leaders in both the US and the USSR became increasingly able to think about, map, and even talk with each other about the– necessarily interactive— psychological dimensions of the whole phenomenon of strategic deterrence.
But now, inside Israeli society’s extremely self-referential little bubble of a political elite, a whole new understanding of ‘deterrence’ seems to have been incubating. I first got wind of this when I was reading a report from Israel in The Economist in London yesterday, in which the as-always-anonymous Economist reporter wrote this about the Gaza war:

    In the short term, the [Israeli] government claims already to have restored its deterrent power. Favourable sentiment in the southern towns under rocket fire and among the reservists massed along the border bears this out.

Excuse me? The attitudes of Israelis being used as evidence about the restoration of Israel’s deterrent power? Um, Economist-people, deterrence has to do with affecting the attitudes of those others who are or might be your adversaries, not with affecting your own attitudes…
Well, I thought maybe it was just that reporter (or her or his editors) getting sloppy on a fast-moving story. And yes, there certainly seems to have been editorial sloppiness or at least deep ignorance involved there. But perhaps the reporter was picking up something significant in the Israeli zeitgeist within which she or he moves. Because today, in the NYT, Steven Erlanger wrote this:

    While the details are debated and the dead are counted, a critical long-term issue is whether the Gaza operation restores Israel’s deterrent. Israel wants Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Arab world to view it as too strong and powerful to seriously threaten or attack. That motivation is one reason, Israeli officials say, for going into Gaza so hard, using such firepower, and fighting Hamas as an enemy army.
    The answer will not be known for many months, but the key to the Muslim world’s reaction is actually that of the Israeli public, said Yossi Klein Halevi, of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem. “The Arabs take their cue from Israeli responses,” he said. “Deterrence is about how Israelis feel, whether they feel they’ve won or lost.”
    Mr. Halevi cited the 1973 war — which Egyptians celebrate and Israelis mourn, though it ended with a spectacular Israel counterattack — and the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
    Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, apologized for the 2006 war on television, “but he quickly reversed himself to declare a wonderful victory when he saw the Israeli public declaring defeat,” Mr. Halevi said.

This quote is so revealing! According to Halevi, Arabs have little agency or cognitive capability of their own, but are completely reliant on “getting their cues” from Israel… So if they see Israelis feeling downhearted and defeated, Arabs will feel strong and undeterred, whereas if they see Israelis feeling strong and self-confident they will be fearful and deterred…
It is all about Israel! It is all about Israelis being able to feel machismo, strutting their stuff as they watch the smoldering ruins of Gaza schools and mosques and watch sad Gaza families counting their dead and tending their wounded.
I shan’t even dwell on the moral sickness of such attitudes. I’ll just point out that if Israelis really do believe that their deterrent capability is only a matter of how they themselves feel about the world, then they are are being sorely mislead.
This business about Nasrullah “apologizing for the 2006 war” that Halevi raises is another non-trivial canard that has drifted into the Israeli discourse in recent months.
First off, it’s important to note that Nasrullah was not for a moment apologizing to the Israelis for Hizbullah’s actions during the war as a whole. He was apologizing to the Lebanese people for the error of tactical judgment he made when, as he said, he and his advisers had not expected that their cross-border POW-capture operation of July 12, 2006 would spark such a truly disproportionate and damaging Israeli response. But at a broader operational/strategic level, Hizbullah proved itself quite able to respond to and withstand the Israeli blitzkrieg unleashed on July 12 and emerged with its core strategic goal of preserving the organizational integrity, independence, and counter-strike capability of the Hizbullah movement well realized.
As I wrote here shortly after that war, the war had been about two things: firstly, the desire of each side to “restore” the credibility of the deterrent it projected toward the other side, and secondly, the desire of the Israeli (Olmert) government to win a significant change in Hizbullah’s political and organizational standing inside Lebanon. In the first of those contests, both sides won— in that each was in fact able to reassert the credibility of the deterrent it projected toward the other. But in the second contest, Israel failed, since it had had the ‘transformational’ political goal in Lebanon, which it failed to realize.
The underlying durability of the mutual even though highly asymmetrical form of deterrence that was re-established between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006 is the explanation why the Israel-Lebanon front never heated up during this latest Gaza war. Both sides were presumably active and attentive, to make sure it didn’t. Both sides had something of value to lose in the event that it had opened up. The mutual deterrence relationship held.
So what, now, of Gaza?
Do Israelis feel jubilant and invulnerable? Maybe so.
But is that good for peace?
Do Gazans feel extremely sad and to some extent “defeated”? I am sure they feel very, very sad. But I doubt if they feel “defeated” in the way Halevi and many other Israelis would like them to feel. There is, after all, very little evidence that any of the following has happened:

    1. The Hamas leadership has been destroyed.
    2. The Hamas leadership has surrendered.
    3. Hamas’s rocketing capabilities– primitive though they are– or its capacity to build more rockets, have been destroyed.
    4. Gazans and other Palestinians have started to turn against Hamas

The latest news is that Hamas has announced that it will observe a one-week cessation in hostilities, in response to Israel’s announcement yesterday of a unilateral ceasefire, and with the expectation from the Hamas side that during this coming week all the IDF troops who reinvaded Gaza during the past three weeks will withdraw.
The situation on the ground has improved somewhat today after Israel and Hamas started holding their fire, and after at least some of the IDF troops in Gaza started withdrawing.
But the Gaza situation remains very tenuous indeed. The ceasefire has been essentially un-negotiated, and as I blogged yesterday important elements of it have yet to be agreed.
Today Condi Rice, most of whose previous actions regarding this war have been extremely unhelpful, finally made a statement that looks fairly constructive.
Here’s the report of what she said,

    “The goal remains a durable and fully respected ceasefire that will lead to stabilization and normalization in Gaza,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after Israel called off its three-week offensive in the area.
    “The United States commends Egypt for its [mediating] efforts and remains deeply concerned by the suffering of innocent Palestinians,” she added. “We welcome calls for immediate coordinated international action to increase assistance flows and will contribute to such efforts.”

So now, let’s hope the ceasefire does get made a lot more durable over the days ahead– and that this can help pave the way not just to the “normalization” of the situation in Gaza but to the speedy securing of a final-status peace Israel and all its Arab neighbors.

Link Gaza ceasefire details to final peace push

The need for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza becomes more urgent every day. However, even after the guns and rockets– and Israel’s warplanes, naval guns, and precision-guided missiles– all fall silent, there will remain numerous very important details of the ceasefire agreement to be worked out.
These “modalities” constitute the difference between a “raw” ceasefire (the guns fall silent, but there is little assurance this will last) and a more robust ceasefire agreement. The modalities include items like:

    1. The precise plan for the withdrawal of the IDF troops currently on the ground in Gaza;
    2. The access agreements between Gaza and the outside world– including both immediate access for urgent humanitarian relief and longer-term access for the rebuilding, reconstruction and hopefully also economic development programs in Gaza;
    3. The need for arms control provisions;
    4. Monitoring mechanisms for the ceasefire and for the above three agreements that are credible, inclusive, effective, and therefore robust;
    5. Other items like the release of detainees related to the current fighting.

These are not easy items to reach agreement on quickly, even though Israel and Hamas have previously built up some level of trust and understanding around the June 2008 ceasefire. Negotiating these modalities must not stand in the way of concluding a speedy ceasefire. But we need to understand that one of the major reasons both sides continue to fight is because each wants to win the optimal terms regarding these modalities. (Another is that neither side wants to ‘back down’ first.)
However, looking at the above list of the ceasefire-related modalities that need to negotiated, it is clear that they provide a key segue between what needs to be done for this ceasefire and some of the continuing items on the final-peace agenda.
Besides, if a final peace agreement between Israel and all of its Arab neighbors is not secured well before the end of this year, then we can expect further extremely damaging crises in Gaza or elsewhere in the region at any time over the coming years.
The momentum of this crisis needs to be seized and exploited for a comprehensive final peace effort.
I was encouraged by the statements Obama made a number of times this week to the effect that he intends to start working for an inclusive final peace agreement “from Day One.”
Day One is now three days away. Even if there’s a “raw” ceasefire in Gaza before then, the modalities to make the ceasefire more robust will remain to be worked out. Obama should start spelling out the urgency– and the huge benefits– of a comprehensive final peace. From Day One.
(Note: Sorry that I earlier published two versions of this same post under different headlines. The vagaries of trying to blog while traveling… ~HC)

Gaza open thread, mid-Jan

Here’s Cordesman’s excellent strategic analysis to start you off.
And here’s some excellent legal analysis from Shamai Leibowitz, on “Israeli Soldiers’ Duty to Prevent the Commission of War Crimes”.
Here, also from Shamai, is an Open Letter to Israeli Soldiers on their responsibility to do this.
… So friends, I know that many people’s emotions are getting run ragged with what’s happening. But please try to stay civil and respectful in your comments here. Some of them have been getting close to massive group stereotyping or even hate speech. You might want to go and re-read the JWN commenters’ guidelines.

Going to Syria

This afternoon I’m leaving for Syria. I’m part of a delegation of (non-governmental) US citizens– most of whom are considerably closer to the “Establishment” here than I am– whose goal is to explore with Syrian counterparts and colleagues the possibilities for improving the US-Syrian relationship.
After eight years in which Dick Cheney and Elliott Abrams systematically blocked any attempt to do this, I hope the time is right for some real change.
It won’t be easy. The extremist pro-Israeli lobbying groups in this country still have considerable, continuing clout in Congress (as was demonstrated by this past week’s “Swift-boating” of any attempts at balanced congressional resolutions on Gaza, which was orchestrated completely by AIPAC.) Regarding Syria, back in 2003 the US congress passed into law the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act (SALSRA) which sought to place considerable additional sanctions and restrictions on Syria– additional to those that already stemmed from Syria’s longstanding identification by the State Department as a State Supporter of Terrorism.
The US has not had an ambassador in Syria since 2006. There are huge numbers of issues that need to be untangled…
I’m not sure our little group can untangle them all. But I hope we can do something to improve and expand bilateral ties at all levels.
Dick Cheney and the people whom he had carefully placed throughout the Bush administration argued that Syria is both a state supporter of terrorism and a highly dictatorial state… and because of that it should not be “rewarded” in any way by being engaged with in the conduct of normal diplomacy, or even treated as a normal member of the “family of nations”. Instead, it should be ostracized, excluded, and punished until such a time as either President Bashar al-Asad raised a white flag of complete surrender to US power, or he was overthrown.
Even when Israeli PM Olmert opened up his indirect final-peace negotiating channel with Asad through Turkey 18 months ago, Cheney and his supporters tried to dissuade him from doing that!
I find it highly ironic, regarding the whole “democratization” business the Bushites were– oh-so-briefly– enamored of in the Middle East, that actually the government of Syria reflects the will of the Syrian people in matters of national policy to a considerably greater degree than the governments of Egypt or Jordan, both of which are staunchly and generously supported by Washington. (Actually, that’s a big part of why their citizens don’t like those two governments. That, and the extremely repressive practices of their US-funded “security” services.)
Right now, getting a decent working relationship with Syria’s government and people is more important for the true interests of the US citizenry than ever before. Syria is a key actor in all the problem/crisis areas of the region. The relationships it has with all parties in Palestine and all parties in Iraq are a considerable resource for peacemakers.
Of course, in the negotiations for a speedy and robust ceasefire for Gaza, Syria is one of the key actors.
I probably shan’t be blogging here much for the next week. But who knows? Who knows what fascinating experiences I might have in Syria?

At IPS: ” Gaza, and Israel’s Wars of Forced Regime Change”

Here is the 35-year-long purview piece on this topic I wrote for IPS this morning. I noted that the current war on Gaza is the sixth war aiming at imposing forced regime change (FRC) on its neighbors that Israel has waged since 1982. Two of the earlier ones were against Palestinian “regimes” and their associated infrastructures: Lebanon 1982 and the OPTs, 2002. Three were against Hizbullah in Lebanon in 1993, 1996, and 2006.
I concluded thus:

    The history of Israel’s FRC wars deserves close study. All have been “wars of choice” in that the “unbearable” situations that Israeli leaders have cited, each time, as giving them “no alternative” but to fight can all be seen as having been very amenable to negotiation — should Israel have chosen that path instead.
    Also, all these wars were planned in some detail in advance, with the Israeli government just waiting for — or even, on occasion, provoking — some action from the other side that they could use as a launch pretext. All have received strong financial, rearming, and political support from the U.S., not least because they were waged in the name of counter-terrorism.
    But the outcomes are important, too. At a purely military level, the two FRC wars against the PLO were the ones that Israel was able to “win”, in terms of being largely able to dismantle the structures it targeted. But the longer term, political-strategic outcomes of both those wars were distinctly counter-productive for Israel since they paved the way for the emergence of much tougher minded and better organised movements.
    By contrast, Israel was unable to win any of its three FRC wars against Hizbullah. In each, Hizbullah withstood Israel’s assault long enough to force it into a ceasefire. All these wars ended up strengthening Hizbullah’s position inside Lebanese politics.
    So how will Israel’s current attempt to inflict forced regime change on the Gaza Palestinians work out? If history is a guide, as it is, then this war will bring about either Hamas’s dismantling or a ceasefire on terms that will lead to (or at least allow) Hamas’s continued political strengthening.
    A dismantling is unlikely, since Hamas’s leadership is located outside Gaza and has links throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds that ensure that annihilation of Hamas in Gaza would have serious global consequences. But if Hamas is dismantled in Gaza, it is most likely to be replaced there — faster or slower — by groups that are even more militant and more Islamist than itself.
    Meantime, the high human costs of the war continue to mount daily.

IPS today also carries a great piece titled Israel Rejected Hamas Ceasefire Offer in December by Gareth Porter. It gives more details of the negotiations carried out in early and mid-December over the possibility and modalities of a renewal of the six-month tahdi’eh that was due to expire December 18.
He writes about–

    Dr. Robert Pastor, a professor at American University and senior adviser to the Carter Centre, who met with Khaled Meshal, chairman of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus on Dec. 14, along with former President Jimmy Carter. Pastor told IPS that Meshal indicated Hamas was willing to go back to the ceasefire that had been in effect up to early November “if there was a sign that Israel would lift the siege on Gaza”.
    Pastor said he passeda Meshal’s statement on to a “senior official” in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) the day after the meeting with Meshal. According to Pastor, the Israeli official said he would get back to him, but did not.
    “There was an alternative to the military approach to stopping the rockets,” said Pastor. He added that Israel is unlikely to have an effective ceasefire in Gaza unless it agrees to lift the siege.

Porter has more details. Read the whole thing.
And for the final item on your reading list on the political dimensions of the ongoing tragedy in Gaza, there is this piece from the percipient Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani. I hope you all understand the ironic (or despairing?) reference in its title: “Birth Pangs of a New Palestine.”
Rabbani made this excellent point in his essay:

    It is true, as commonly observed, that Israel’s initial aerial campaign failed to decapitate either Hamas or Islamic Jihad, vanquish them militarily or even prevent the intensification of Palestinian rocket fire. But the observation misses the point. As in 2002, Israel’s first objective was to incapacitate public administration, sever the link between government and people, and isolate the leadership, rather than deal an immediate body blow to militant groups. And as in the West Bank at the height of the second uprising, Israel recognizes that smashing armed groups goes only so far; a sustainable victory requires that the population be cowed into submission and lose faith in its leaders and militants, with its energies redirected toward more mundane projects such as obtaining basic needs and services that the crippled government can no longer provide, and protecting itself from the ensuing chaos in an increasingly competitive environment.
    In the case of Hamas, this goal has additionally meant dismantling — with bombs and missiles launched from land, sea and air — the network of Islamist social, religious and charitable institutions that preceded and laid the foundation for the emergence of the movement as a political and military force in the late 1980s, and have been vital to its ability to establish and maintain a support base in every sector of Palestinian society. Israel concluded that because the movement controls the PA in Gaza and has an autonomous web of institutions that can provide services independently of the government, both types of installation had to be destroyed.

He concludes:

    when all is said and done, two issues rise head and shoulders above the rest: the urgency of beginning the process of reversing Israel’s impunity in its dealings with the Palestinian people, and the equally dire need to address the fundamental issue of occupation, without which ceasefires, sieges and code-named calamities like Operation Cast Lead would be unnecessary.

Obama’s grandfather, the British in Kenya, and Gaza today

Barack Obama’s Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, became involved with the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after World War 2. Reporters for the London Times recently wrote about H.O. Obama’s experiences in the British-ruled Kenya of those years that

    He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.
    “The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman Mr [president-elect] Obama refers to as “Granny Sarah”.
    Mrs Onyango, 87, described how “white soldiers” visited the prison every two or three days to carry out “disciplinary action” on the inmates suspected of subversive activities.
    “He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she said The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly antiBritish. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said.

Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has exhaustively documented the mass incarceration and intimidation campaign the British ran against suspected Kenyan independence activists in her recent book Imperial Reckoning. What she documented there tracked very closely with what Sarah Onyango told the Times reporters about her late husband’s treatment (except that according to Elkins’s documentation, around 150,000 of the Kenyan incarcerees may have ended up dead.)
Elkins also noted that life had become particularly difficult for the Kenyan indigenes, and their anti-British fervor had increased, when the British decided to plant many more white settlers into Kenya after the war, displacing hundreds of thousands of indigenous African farmers from their land and resources and confining them to “reserves” that had pitifully few natural resources that rapidly became depleted as the additional displaced Africans were all trucked in.
In my late-2006 review of Elkins’s book, (PDF here), I noted that the “anti-Mau-Mau” campaign the British carried out, very brutally, in Kenya in the 1950s was a sort of “bridge experience” that linked the many equally brutal campaigns of counter-insurgency that colonial settler regimes around the world had waged for many earlier decades against the indigenous people of the lands where they settled, and some of the later COIN campaigns (Algeria, Vietnam, etc) that constituted, in effect, the “last throes” of settler colonialism.
Elkins’s work was also notable because she had access both to several portions of good British archives and to some living survivors of the concentration camps whom, after learning some local languages, she was able to interview for her work.
But settler colonialism hasn’t gone away, has it? It lives on in the lengthy campaign that Israel maintains to this very day to implant its settlers in occupied Arab lands, stealing the land and associated natural resources from their indigenous owners and forcing the indigenes into tightly controlled “reservations”, penal areas, large open-air concentration camps, and actual prisons. This campaign involves– just as in British Kenya or apartheid South Africa– a ruthless effort to oppress and punish anyone who tries to make a sustained objection to the ongoing projects of settlement aggrandizement.
The London Times is making some of its archives available online these days. On this portal page, you’ll find links to several (generally PDF) contemporary articles and photo-spreads about the anti-Mau-Mau campaign in the 1950s. Many of the accounts look as if they were about Israel in Gaza and the West Bank today. (You can also find a link to an even older Times story, titled, “Gandhi’s Salt March: Extremist Leader in Illegal Salt Collection.” No comment needed.)
President-elect Obama has written eloquently about the “Dreams of his father.” I hope he also takes some time to reflect on the meaning, in today’s world, of the actual experiences of his grandfather.

Israel & Hamas reject ceasefire; details urgently need negotiating

Just because the Security Council calls for an immediate ceasefire, doesn’t mean it happens. What it does mean is that the various portions of the international community are gearing up their capabilities to nail down the exact modalities of the ceasefire, including no doubt all or most of the six points I laid out here.
These negotiations need to be conducted with the utmost speed, given the continuation of terrible suffering among Gaza’s 1.5 million people. It’s a pity the US government is not an active supporter of resolution 1860, since it is the power with the greatest ability to force Israeli compliance with the will of the international community (and the demands of basic humanity.)
Hours after the Security Council passed 1860 by a vote of 14-0, an Israeli Foreign Ministry statement rejected it, saying:

    Israel has acted, is acting and will act only according to its considerations, the security needs of its citizens and its right to self-defense.

With the hostilities continuing last night even after passage of the resolution, Hamas also rejected it. AFP reports their position thus:

    “Even though we are the main actors on the ground in Gaza, we were not consulted about this resolution and they have not taken into account our vision and the interests of our people,” top Hamas official Ayman Taha told AFP.
    “As a result we do not feel concerned by this resolution and when the different parties apply it they will have to deal with those who are in charge on the ground.”
    Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri made similar comments in an interview with Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television on Friday.
    “In the Hamas movement, we do not think that the battle has ended because this resolution was issued, especially after … the continuation of the aggression in Gaza after it was issued,” Abu Zuhri said.
    Israel carried out more than 50 air strikes in Gaza overnight, which Palestinian emergency services said killed 12 civilians.

And so– as in 1982 in Lebanon, as in 1996 in Lebanon, and as in 2006 in Lebanon– the latter stages of the current war will see an intense though indirect negotiation between the two fighting parties over the precise modalities and terms of the ceasefire.
The international negotiators need to act fast and with a real commitment to preserving human life and laying the basis for a deeper peacemaking process to immediately follow. And the rest of us need to keep up our pressure for an immediate ceasefire. One good place to do that is at Avaaz. Another, for US citizens, is by contacting your congressional representatives.
The push for an urgent ceasefire is certainly an effort that, here as anywhere else, should include an international embargo on all supplies of arms to the warring parties so long as the hostilities continue.

Security Council orders ceasefire; No US veto

And so, after 13 days of extremely lethal and quite inhumane Israeli attacks on Gaza, the UN Security Council has finally passed a ceasefire resolution, resolution 1860.
The vote was 14 to zero, with the US abstaining. At least the US didn’t veto it. I guess we should be thankful for small mercies.
But it’s notable that it was not until today that the other powers in the Security Council– including the Europeans, Russia, China, and the Arabs (though they are less powerful)– became so highly motivated by the continually unfolding scenes of carnage in Gaza that they pushed this resolution through to a vote.
I’ve been looking for an authoritative text. The best I can find thus far is the AFP news report linked to above.
It says this:

    The text “stresses the urgency of and calls for an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.”
    It “calls for the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment” and welcomes initiatives aimed at “creating and opening humanitarian corridors and other mechanisms for the sustained delivery of humanitarian aid.”
    Resolution 1860 also “condemns all violence and hostilities directed against civilians and all acts of terrorism” and urged member states to intensify efforts for arrangements and guarantees in Gaza “to sustain a durable ceasefire and calm, including to prevent illicit trafficking in arms and ammunition and to ensure the reopening of the crossing points (into Gaza).”
    It “welcomes the Egyptian initiative (the three-point truce proposal unveiled by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Tuesday) and other regional and international efforts that are under way.”
    Mubarak invited Israel and the Palestinians to Cairo for talks on conditions for a truce, on securing Gaza borders, reopening of its crossings and lifting the Israeli blockade on the Palestinian enclave.

This looks minimally acceptable, though it has six key shortcomings that I can see:

    1. It doesn’t specify a time certain for the hostilities to cease. Great, if “immediate” means “immediate”. But if there’s no time certain specified, the end could drag on a long time.
    2. It doesn’t seem to lay down a fixed timetable for the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, but indicates only that this should follow the cessation of active hostilities. Again, if they linger on inside the Strip, or undertake only a partial withdrawal, or undertake a ‘Scorched Earth’ withdrawal, or sow landmines or leave UXO in the locations they vacate, any such actions would make the ceasefire very fragile indeed.
    3. This ceasefire needs a verification mechanism! I can’t stress this strongly enough. There needs to be some form of international monitoring presence along the border between Israel and Gaza that can monitor that neither side is aggressing or preparing to aggress against the other.
    4. It is excellent– though of course, only a bare minimum of what international humanitarian law requires– that the resolution calls for full humanitarian access to Gaza. However, the Palestinians of Gaza do not want to be treated forever as dependent wards of the international community, entitled only to “humanitarian aid” or “emergency relief”. They, like all the other peoples of the world, have a right to all the dimensions of full social and economic development. That means their territory must be re-opened fully to free interaction with the international economy, whether via Egypt, the Mediterranean, or air communications. They will certainly refuse any return to a status-quo-ante in which their small strip of land would once again be completely encircled by a punitive and very damaging Israeli siege. The AP article says the Egyptians have already started to conduct indirect negotiations between the Israelis and Hamas on re-opening the crossings and other matters. Thes manner and mo0dality of the re-opening is a key issue.
    5. I understand that Israelis have strong concerns about the possibility of Gazans repairing, restoring, or even perhaps upgrading their rocket arsenal and/or starting to develop other means of attacking Israel. There are two complementary ways to meet these concerns. One is by ensuring that Gazans are able to build a new status quo in which they have a valuable and growing community self-interest, that is, by allowing full and unfettered economic and social development in the Strip. The other is by instituting some form of control regime at the entry points between Gaza and the world economy– along the border with Egypt, along the Strip’s coast, and at its rebuilt airport– to ensure that weapons are not shipped in. A supplementary form of international– but certainly not Israeli!– monitoring mechanism might be helpful within Gaza, too. The EU had a role monitoring the Gaza-Egypt border in the failed 2005 withdrawal regime and has indicated a readiness to resume it. But Europeans and everyone else all need to understand that maintaining a policy of “all stick and no carrot” against Gazans is bound to fail. They desperately need an opportunity for real, Strip-wide development and reconnection with the outside world.
    6. Finally, of course nothing can work just for Gaza unless it is linked to a vigorous effort to secure a comprehensive and final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian– and preferably also Israeli-Syria– disputes. The Hamas leaders have given some signs they are willing to work with Abu Mazen on this (though his mandate as PA President runs out Friday.) It would have been great if Resolution 1860 could have said something about the need for the broader final peace.

Well, I imagine (and hope) there will be a rapid flurry of follow-up resolutions. The first thing is for all the guns, rockets, bomber airplanes, etc to fall completely silent, and the next thing is for the Israeli troops to pull out of the Strip and allow the humanitarian actors in to do their still-gruesome job in a situation of relevant calm.
Let’s all hope and pray that this peace holds. It is a cold winter down there in Gaza. Families are starving and dying and scores of thousands of them have had their homes wrecked.
The government of Israel, which gratuitously launched and fought this war of choice, and all those in Israel and far afield who cheered them on, should all be deeply ashamed. But there are numerous points of light within Israeli society. Some of them are the human-rights organizations that have geared up an excellent effort to document the suffering the war has caused as best they can. You can read the blog they are using to compile their findings, here.

U.S. Senate expresses strong support for Israel’s war

The U.S. Senate is not made up of people who are monsters or idiots. But it is made up of people whose first inclination is to look out for their chances of re-election in a political system that is drenched in, and corrupted by, the influence of raw money.
The new US Senate was voted in Tuesday. Today, as Israel’s assault on Gaza continues, the Senate made one of its first items of business the adoption of a strongly pro-Israeli resolution– crafted in AIPAC’s policy shop— that expressed strong support for Israel’s viewpoint on all aspects of the current war.
This, even as the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was issuing the latest in its series of updates on the humanitarian crisis that Israel’s latest war of choice has inflicted on Gaza’s 1.5 million people.
It read in part:

    The Israeli military operation has caused extensive damage to homes, civilian institutions and infrastructure. The entire Gaza Strip is on the verge of collapse, already weakened by the 18-month blockade on the territory. Most people have no electricity and no clean running water. While food assistance has entered, agencies are facing difficulties to distribute it due to the security situation. Food stocks are low in people’s homes, people are afraid to go out to find food and there is no cooking gas to cook whatever is available. Many homes do not have glass in their windows, and others are leaving them open to avoid shattering. Without electricity, the hospitals are operating on backup generators and are low on fuel, threatening the life-saving services doctors and nurses are urgently providing in the overloaded hospitals…

The report recounted the ICRC’s grisly story of its fieldworkers having yesterday discovered a cache of 12 bodies along with wounded people, including four young children left weak and hungry clinging the bodies of their dead mothers, who were stranded in an area of Zaitoun south of Gaza for the preceding four days. Though some of the wounded people there had called to friends outside, and the Palestinian Red Crescent, for evacuation help, the Israeli military would not allow evacuation for four days.
The OCHA report continued:

    As of 16.00 on 8 January, the MoH in Gaza revealed that 50 bodies were recovered today from the rubble of houses: the total number of fatalities is now 758, of whom 257 (34%) are children and 56 (7.4%) are women. Of the 3,100 injuries, 1,080 (34.8%) are children and 452 (14.6%) are women. The danger to medical staff and the difficulty of extracting the injured from collapsed buildings makes proper evacuation and estimation of casualties difficult.
    Palestinian militants continued to fire rockets and mortar shells into Israel resulting in moderate to light injuries. An IDF soldier was killed this morning.

So, 758 now-identified fatalities, of whom 313 were either women or children. We can assume that many of the men were civilians, too. (Including the police recruits mown down on the first day of the war.) I imagine it is hard, though, for the ICRC/PRCS, or any other body necessarily to tell who was a combatant actively involved in hostilites (which would make him– or her– a “legitimate” military target) and who was a noncombatant.
The OCHA report also said this:

    On 8 January, a UN-contracted convoy transporting food through the Erez crossing was shelled. One UNRWA-contracted worker was killed and two injured. At approximately 14.00, a UN convoy of two armoured vehicles escorted an ambulance through Gaza City to recover the body of a local UN staff member during the scheduled humanitarian cease-fire. On Salah Ed Din Street the vehicles were targeted by three rounds of small arms fire. One armoured vehicle was hit. Two international staff were in the vehicle, but no casualties were reported. The movement of the convoy had been coordinated in advance [presumably with the IDF] and the UN vehicles were clearly identified. UNRWA has announced that it is temporarily suspending its operations until real security guarantees can be ensured.

UNRWA’s quite wrenching decision to suspend its long-established relief services is quite understandable, in the circumstances. But this means that the humanitarian situation can only be expected to deteriorate– and more rapidly, now, than ever.
Information about the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza has been available for a number of days now, and has been reported on the US media. In light of that, I find the one-sided nature of the resolution passed by Congress (the AIPAC-suggested text is here– PDF) literally nauseating.
Do the Senators have any idea how heartless and brutal they look to just about everybody else in the rest of the world when they pass such a slaveringly pro-Israeli resolution?
The House of Representatives is expected to take up a similar or concurrent resolution on the matter shortly. No doubt since all Representatives face re-election in two years and are therefore already “running” for the 2010 election, the vote there will also be an easy one for the AIPAC crowd.
It is true that in the US system, the actual conduct of foreign policy is the responsibility of the president, not congress. So these resolutions have no immediate impact on policy. But they do act as a “warning shot across the bows” of the incoming president, to show him that though some pro-peace organizations — like the courageous and agile Jewish Voice for Peace organization– may have emerged here in recent years, still AIPAC is the Biggest Bully on the Block and can come in like steamroller whenever it sees a chance.
It would be great if the members of the US’s two houses of Congress could show even a little basic human decency in their attitude to the multiply devastated population of Gaza, instead of simply dancing to AIPAC’s tune and cheering on all aspects of Israel’s current war effort against Gaza.
But another thing the members of Congress should consider is the effect their resolutions have on the safety of all US citizens in many countries around the world. In Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr has already called on his supporters to start killing US soldiers because of the US’s support for Israel in the current war. But what about all the other US citizens– soldiers, business-people, students, or just travelers– who find themselves in every country of the world today? Why on earth would anyone in the US Senate or House of Representatives think today’s resolution serves the US citizenry, at all?
It doesn’t. It is just yet another chapter in the long story of the US’s close alliance with Israel helping to drag down the influence of the US all around the world.
A tragic day today. For many reasons.

Israel’s story about the war continues to unravel

When the Olmert government announced the start of the current war against Gaza on December 27, government officials said Israel “was forced” to act because Hamas had broken (or at least, gratuitously ended) the ceasefire that existed from June 19 through December 18. Therefore, in some convoluted way, Hamas “started” the present war and is thus responsible for everything that has ensued within it.
These charges have been regularly repeated by government spokesmen since then, and repeated or further amplified by their entire echo chamber of Stepford supporters in the US ever since. (Including the WaPo’s dreadful Richard Cohen, yesterday.)
The charges against Hamas have been further amplified into many forms: “Hamas always wants to hit and kill civilians”, “Hamas always breaks ceasefires”, “The Hamas leaders are men of violence, pure and simple, with no real political agenda except to kill Israelis”, “In their lust for the blood of Israeli and others, Hamas is willing or even eager to see Palestinian suffer and die,” etc, etc.
But in fact, there is no truth to the original charge about how the 2008 ceasefire ended. And diligent researchers have now been going back to look at the entire history of Israel-Gaza violence over the past eight years, and have reached strong conclusions that completely refute the Israeli government’s war-talk.
Yesterday, MIT prof Nancy Kanwisher published, in the Huffington Post, her analysis of the figures the Israeli consulate in New York itself has posted on its “Israel Politik” web site. She underscored that in the four months July-October, Israel recorded the landing of only eleven rockets from Gaza.
Not stated there were:

    — whether those rockets were launched by Hamas or by other groups that it does not control;
    — the explosive capability of those rockets;
    — what the human and material damage from them was; and– most importantly of all:
    — whether Israel launched any ordnance against Gaza in that same period (which it did), and with what effect; and
    — how many Gazans died during those same months because of Israel’s maintenance of its inhumane siege around the Strip.

But even without those important pieces of comparative evidence, Kanwisher shows clearly that the tahdi’eh of June resulted in a generally effective cessation of rocket fire from Gaza– down from the levels of 257 rockets in February, 196 in March, 149 in May…
But what happened after the end of October? On November 4, Israel significantly violated the tahdi’eh by killing a Palestinian in Gaza, and from that point on the tahdi’eh started to unravel. Given that it was scheduled to end on December 18 anyway, urgent negotiations were anyway underway about the terms on which it might (or might not) be renewed.
Those negotiations failed.
Kanwisher also took the important step of going back over the entire history of Palestinian-Israel hostilities since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000. She looked at how pauses in the hostilities got broken in those years, looking at any pauses that were one day long or longer. Her basic data set was the casualty listings and statistics that have been systematically kept by the Israeli human-rights organization B’tselem.
She presented her findings on this in Figure 2 of the HuffPo piece. (It’s not optimally presented. I think the label that’s now at the top belongs on the left-hand side. And there should be a label along the bottom saying these are the respective lengths, in days, of the pauses considered? At least, that’s the only logical way I could read it.)
But her findings were important:

    this analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern — in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause — becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.

Certainly, these findings seem quite consistent with my own recllection of various incidents over these same years. Right back at the beginning of the Second Intifada, there were several weeks during which the Palestinians used overwhelmingly nonviolent means of confronting the Israeli soldiers in the OPTs, who struck back hundreds of times with live fire. I think there were more than 200 or 300 fatalities among Palestinians in those early weeks, before their resistance groups made the decision to use weapons in the intifada.
(Which of course was not how the matter was portrayed in the western media.)
Other pages on the Btselem website underline that the entire history of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities since September 2000 is one of stark asymmetry regarding casualties. This compilation page (with hyperlinks to details) shows that 4,781 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in the OPTs between September 2000 and the end of November 2008, and a further 69 were killed inside Israel, while 727 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians in Israel and the OPTs in that time, along with 335 members of the Israeli security forces, for an Israeli total of 1,062 Israelis.
By the way, this page tells you that from the beginning of the 2008 tahdi’eh until the end of November 2008, only one Israeli civilian was killed by ordnance coming from, quite possibly, Gaza, which is near Kibbutz Nir Oaz. But no Israeli civilians died from rocket fire in that period.
Kanwisher draws these very reasonable conclusions from her analysis:

    First, Hamas can indeed control the rockets, when it is in their interest. The data shows that ceasefires can work, reducing the violence to nearly zero for months at a time.
    Second, if Israel wants to reduce rocket fire from Gaza, it should cherish and preserve the peace when it starts to break out, not be the first to kill.

Thanks for that great work, Prof. Kanwisher!