Helena – Page 89 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Debate in Israeli cabinet over Gaza

In my earlier post, I was looking at the public debate among non-official Israelis over the course of the Gaza war. The more important debate, of course, is that inside the Israeli cabinet.
A Haaretz reporting team writes today that officials in the defense ministry, which is headed by Labour Party leader Ehud Barak favor ending the war via,

These are fascinating differences– if the Haaretz report is based on accurate reporting, as I assume is probably the case.
The cabinet contains, obviously, some non-trivial internal political tensions, given that Israelis have a general election February 10 in which Barak is leading a party that will be running against Kadima, the party led by Livni– as well as against Likud, which keeps up strong pressure on both Labour and Kadima from the rightwing/hardline direction.
Hence, I’m assuming, the resistance both Barak and Livni evince to the idea of any written-down agreement that would also involve Hamas signing onto it, directly or indirectly, and therefore involve some prior negotiations with Hamas.
This is starting to look more and more like Shimon Peres’s ill-fated war venture of 1996. He felt he needed to launch that war– which was against Hizbullah in Lebanon– in March of 1996, because he faced elections within a short number of weeks. He knew he was under a lot of pressure from Likud (then as now led by “Bibi” Netanyahu), and he felt he needed somehow to “burnish” his militaristic credentials to the generally bellophilic Israeli voting public.
That war was a disaster– for Peres; for Israel’s strategic project of using military coercion to get its way in Lebanon; and for the whole broader strategic “credibility” of Israel’s power of deterrence. Read the details, here.
Long story short: Israel’s public, by and large, just “loved” that war, especially at the beginning; but Peres and his commanders fatally overshot their military mark, couldn’t figure out how or when to end the war; the IDF ended up killing hundreds or thousands of Lebanese civilians, including in Qana; and Israel finally had to succumb to international pressure that forced them to enter into a negotiated ceasefire with Hizbullah that for the first time ever would be monitored by an international monitoring team– a facet of the agreement that helped assure the stability of the ceasefire but also considerably restricted Israel’s “freedom of action” inside Lebanon over the years that followed.
Oh, and Peres lost that election to Netanyahu, anyway. Not least because the Palestinian Israeli voters whom he could otherwise have fairly strongly relied upon were so disgusted by his war that they stayed home from the polls in droves.
(In Lebanon, four years later, a completely depleted and demoralized Israeli occupation force slunk out of the country altogether in June 2000, under a new plan for “unilateral”, i.e. un-negotiated, Israeli troop withdrawals that was hatched by– yes, none other than Ehud Barak. Hizbullah has increased its power and influence in Lebanon in the eight years since then…)
In the current war, Olmert’s reported position of favoring some form of international monitoring mechanism seems the most constructive to me. And remember, there is no way you could get any such mechanism into place without involving Hamas in the negotiation over its deployment and terms of reference. Also, as noted above, a third-party monitoring mechanism can help assure the stability that both citizenries so desperately need.
Olmert, of course, is not running as head of any of the parties in the election, so he perhaps feels he can afford for his position to be more “statesman-like” and less unredeemedly belligerent than those of either Livni or Barak? Also, he is the current prime minister, so he should be able to wield executive power over Barak if they came to a serious disagreement over how to end this war?
But no, I don’t think it would be that easy for him to do that…
Oops, maybe these three highly competitive people should have had all these discussions and figured out a joint plan on how to end the war before they got into it?
The internal politics within Israel’s cabinet may well end up making the termination of this conflict very complex and long-drawn-out indeed.

A beautiful but tragic story from Syria

Syria has been host to 450,000 Palestinian refugees for decades. (Their families found refugee there from the fighting when Israel was founded in 1948.) More recently, Syria has been host to some 700,000 refugees from the fighting in US-occupied Iraq.
This photo is from a lovely story from Syria about a project in which two choirs– one made up of Iraqi refugee children and non-refugee Syrian children, and the other of Palestinian refugee children– came together to sing a program that included Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi music.

photo by Ibrahim Malla
Too often, people in the international community think of refugees as, at best, “a problem” to be solved through merely technocratic means, or at worst a “menace”, and a potential source of instability. People forget that people who are refugees are every bit as human as those of us who are not (yet) refugees. They have amazing capacities and capabilities that can be either nurtured or stifled by the way they are treated. They have agency, resilience, and amazing capacities to love, to be kind, or to experience the whole range of other human emotions. And they have rights, codified in international law but “honored”, too often, only in the breach.
I look at the photo of these children– who seem to be part of the Iraqi portion of the choir. I imagine the work it took for their parents or older siblings to get them looking so neat and beautiful, even though many of them probably have horrible living conditions. I see the range of ways they’re engaging with the task at hand (or looking mischievously around). I look at their joy in artistic creation and in working together. I notice that they’re reading words and perhaps also reading music.
Imagine where any one of these children might be in another two, or 20, years time! Will they have returned to their respective homelands and be living a peaceful and productive life there? Might one or more of these children turn out to have real musical talent, now being well nurtured, and end up a Barenboim or a Yo-Yo Ma? Where else might this experience of musical education, group activity, and the nurturing hands of adults lead these kids?
A Happy New Year to people everywhere. And especially, in our conflict-riven times, to all people everywhere who are refugees.

Israelis debate how (more than whether) to continue war

Brushing aside the many calls from the “international community” for an immediate and permanent ceasefire with Gaza, the Israeli government has vowed to continue its assault against the Strip, and some Israeli citizens are now openly debating whether the war effort should be continued more or less “as-is”, i.e. mainly an assault from the air force and other stand-off weapons platforms, or whether its should be expanded to include some form of a major ground incursion.
This debate is presumably being held all over the country. A Haaretz poll reported today that 52% of Israeli respondents favored continuing the war as-is, and 19% favored launching a ground push. Only 20% favored negotiating a truce as soon as possible. (Unclear from that poll: when it was taken exactly, and– even more importantly– whether it included the Israeli citizens who are of Palestinian-Arab ethnicity or was restricted, as many Israeli opinion polls are, only to Jewish Israelis. If the former, then they most likely occupied just about all the slots of those who favored a speedy truce.)
Also, in today’s Haaretz, Yossi Melman lays out seven possible courses of military action for Israel regarding Gaza, including the “as-is” and the two versions of the “introduce ground forces” option. Two of his other options (numbers 5 and 7) involve concluding a ceasefire with Hamas: one more limited, and the other more extensive; and he notes that both these options have significant advantages. But he also argues that they have the “disadvantage” that they would entrench Hamas’s power to a significant degree. Altogether, though, his is a fairly realistic and reasonable assessment.
Haaretz also, as always, opens its pages to several voices from the hard right. Among these are, today, Ari Shavit and the longtime settler activist Israel Harel.
Harel seems to be a big proponent of using ground forces, and much of what he writes is very informative. First, he simply assumes– as do, I suppose, most Israelis– that the main decisionmaking “brain” behind Israel’s Gaza policy since last spring has been that of defense Minister Ehud Barak. He strongly criticizes Barak’s decision to accept the tahdi’eh of last June, which he says allowed Hamas to regroup and strengthen its positions in Gaza. (The tahdi’eh also– though it has been Israeli writers other than Harel who have noted this– allowed Barak to complete his preparations for the present war.)
Harel writes this about the current war effort:

Continue reading “Israelis debate how (more than whether) to continue war”

Security Council discussing Gaza tonight

This news from the BBC is good. The SC will meet at the request of the Arab League Foreign Ministers who,

want a binding UN resolution to ensure an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and a lifting of the Israeli blockade of the territory.

It is an excellent demand. The people of Gaza are suffering hell now, and their neighbors in southern Israel are living in some degree of fear.
There should be an immediate, binding ceasefire with, as requested, a lifting of the siege of gaza under terms carefully negotiated to ensure that

The people of Gaza would also need credible international guarantees of their physical security from any renewed Israeli assaults.
The need for a negotiated ceasefire is urgent. All members of the international community should be required to support the push for it by undertaking not to ship any weapons to either Hamas or Israel until they agree to it. Other sanctions could also be applied against the warring parties until they agree to a ceasefire.
Of course, Hamas is already subject to heavy international sanctions. If they agree to a ceasefire on the terms outlined above– including the complete and verified demilitarization of Gaza– then those sanctions should be lifted.

US military still committing atrocities in Iraq

Did you think that after the chief US commander and the US Ambassador in Baghdad both signed a final “Withdrawal Agreement” with the Iraqi government on November 17, the 140,000-plus US forces remaining in Iraq would shift their mission to prepare for their successive withdrawals (a) out of all Iraq’s cities and large towns, and (b) out of the whole country, as mandated by the agreement? Did you think they might start to work very hard at building a much better, more cooperative relationship with all segments of Iraqi society, as a way of ensuring their regrouping and subsequent complete withdrawal could be carried out with minimum casualties?
Did you think they might start to behave better?
Think again.
CNN today carries a grotesque story about a US “Special Forces” raid on a family farmstead outside Baghdad on December 10, in the course of which the Americans killed a member of the farming family, apparently in cold blood, and then either before or after the killing chopped off his right index finger and apparently took it away with them.
(HT: Raed Jarrar.)
CNN’s Michael Ware is careful to report both “sides” of the story. Including the detailed claims made by surviving family members about how the man, Hardan al-Jubouri, was first of all forced by the heavily armed Americans to lie down in an outside courtyard in only his underwear, like all other male family members, and was then directed by the Americans to return inside the house and turn on all the lights, after which they killed him inside there. And the claims from the US military that he had somehow escaped from their control in the courtyard, returned voluntarily into the house and emerged with an assault rifle.
The family has some grainy video footage of the aftermath of the raid, including of a lot of blood on the walls, bullet holes, and Hardan’s mutilated hand.
Ware reported that the US military is conducting an investigation.
Raed is asking his readers to contact the US military and ask whether cutting off people’s fingers is official policy… also about whether executing people described simply as “Al-Qaeda suspects” is also official policy. (He gives an email address at the Iraq.centcom.mil domain name. I think it might be better to go higher up the chain of command?)
These are good and important questions.
There are also some larger questions that urgently need asking about the US’s military policy in Iraq. Primarily this: Does our government intend to fulfill its completely unequivocal obligations to undertake a complete withdrawal from the cities by the end of next June and a complete withdrawal from the whole country by the end of 2011– or is it planning to look for a way to evade those obligations?

Gaza: the importance of the Bob Gates straddle

Yesterday, as I noted here, Condi Rice gave a degree to acquiescence to a much-needed statement calling for “an immediate and permanent ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas/Gaza, that had been jointly agreed upon by Ban Ki-moon, Bernard Kounchner, Rice, and Sergei Lavrov. Ban had apparently convened the conference call in which the four members of the Mideast “Quartet” all agreed on that position.
Was Condi thereby representing the position of President Bush?
Good question. Bush has been cavorting around his vacation home in Crawford, Texas. But his spokseman Gordon Johndroe came out today to say,

that is what will be the first steps in a ceasefire.”

Johndroe said that as part of the report he made to journos on a phone conversation Bush had with Olmert this morning.
Reuters added:

Continue reading “Gaza: the importance of the Bob Gates straddle”

Gaza: US blocking power eroded; Quartet calls for ceasefire

Back in the 33-Day War of 2006, the Bush administration was able to block the Security Council and the rest of the UN from issuing a formal call for a ceasefire until the point when Israel, realizing its forces were getting into very hot water indeed, started actively pleading for one.
This time, the Olmert government is still very resistant to a ceasefire. And earlier, the position of the Bush administration was, as in 2006, to give Israel carte blanche to do what it liked against its neighbors.
But the international dynamics have changed since 2006.
This evening, Condi Rice agreed to join the principals of the other three powers in the Quartet in calling for “an immediate ceasefire that would be fully respected.” Follow that link for more details of who was involved, how it happened, etc.
The other three members of the Quartet are the EU, Russia, and the UN. Ban Ki-moon was on the conference call in which the call for the immediate ceasefire was agreed.
The global balance between the US and the other 95% of humanity is indeed changing.

How Israel can end the Gaza war

Once again, as in 2006, the Israeli government has launched a war against neighbors from which it finds difficulty in extricating itself.
Of course, not launching the present war was always an option, right down to the time (Friday night?) when an irrevocable decision to launch it was taken. Not launching it might have been judged politically difficult, given the vulnerability of residents of Southern Israel to the Palestinian rockets whose firing– in continued, highly asymmetrical exchanges of fire with the IDF– became a new fact of life after the six-month tahdi’eh expired December 19th; and given, too, the imminence of Israel’s general election… But still, a responsible Israeli government could surely have used the proven Egyptian channel to the Hamas leaders to try hard to reinstate and even strengthen the tahdi’eh regime, while also reaching an agreement for the freeing of long-held POW Gilad Shalit.
That course could have been presented to the Israeli public with honor by a government going into an election. But Ehud Olmert’s government chose not to take it.
Instead, they chose to launch the present war of choice. And now, it is clear– once again, as in 2006– that they are very unclear indeed on how to end it.
And today, Olmert brushed aside reports that the Defense Ministry had been considering responding positively to an early proposal from French FM Bernard Kouchner for a 48-hour pause in the fighting, to allow humanitarian goods into Gaza, and an evacuation of the wounded. Instead, Olmert vowed that Israel would “continue [fighting] as long as necessary.”
He also (Xinhua here) said today that the Israeli military operation in Gaza Strip is “the first phase in a series of steps approved by the cabinet.”
A “series of steps”, amid reports of the call-up of additional units of Israeli ground forces? Does this sound as if the Israeli cabinet is considering a ground-force incursion into Gaza? I believe it does.
And there is some raw military logic to such a ‘”step.” Since, if the goal is to make quite sure that no-one in Gaza is capable of launching any rockets into Israel, then only the IDF/IOF’s exerting a very intrusive and oppressive form of control over the whole Strip can ensure that.
However, if Olmert is serious about wanting to halt all or very nearly all the firings of rockets from Gaza into Israel, as I believe he is, then he has two ways he can achieve that:

It feels to me today like we’re at about Day 20 of the 33-Day War that Israel launched against Hizbullah in Lebanon back in July 2006.
So many similarities! Including that Israel’s war goals include winning a cessation of the opponent’s firing of rockets, the release of Israeli POW(s), and also, beyond that, a significant sea-change in the political complexion of the territory from which the rockets have been fired.
In the 33-Day War, Israel won the first and second of those war aims… But it won them only through the conclusion of an internationally mediated ceasefire agreement in which it, too, was bound by reciprocal conditions. It did not win the third of the listed war aims in 2006.
The ceasefire with Hizbullah has proven remarkably robust in the 28 months since it went into effect on August 14, 2006. Including right now, I imagine Hizbullah’s fighters in South Lebanon have been working overtime to prevent any attempts the many Palestinians in South Lebanon might have hoped to make, to heat up that border with Israel, too.
… So now, Olmert is making a second attempt to force an Arab opponent to meet his demands for unilateral disarmament using brute physical violence instead of negotiation. Why does he imagine that, this time around, the attempt might end more successfully?
I have no idea.
Perhaps he thinks that this time around, Israel can rely on the power vacuum of the transition environment in Washington to ensure there is no pressure of any real kind from there for him to halt operations on humanitarian grounds?
Well, he faced no such pressure back in 2006, either.
Perhaps he thinks that this time around, Israel’s ground forces will be much more effective and well-trained than they proved to be back in 2006? (And certainly, the flat terrain of Gaza is far easier for their tanks to roll into than the hills and ravines of South Lebanon.)
But so the tanks roll in– and then what? Obviously, thousands of Palestinians might die in the event of a massive land incursion into Gaza. And given the dense patterns of habitation in the Strip, a large proportion of those killed would inevitably be civilians…
But then what? Israel’s much-vaunted ground forces with their lumbering big Main Battle Tanks would find themselves mired in the alleyways and backstreets of Gaza’s refugee camps and shanty-towns. We could expect 100 Jenins…
And then what?
Even in the many jingoistic, intensely bellophilic portions of Israel’s public, there is a real (and quite realistic) reluctance to send the country’s conscript army back into the heart of the Gaza Strip…
And meantime, what happens tothe political environment in the Middle East and the rest of the world?
There is already serious political instability threatening in Jordan, as Marc Lynch noted this morning.
Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, which has cooperated with Israel in maintaining the tight siege around Gaza for the past three years, is now coming under mounting popular pressure to accede to Hamas demands to end the siege by reopening Egypt’s border fully with Gaza. (You can see some recent videos of Cairo street protests here.)
These two countries’ governments are bulwarks of US power and influence in the Arab world…
But US influence in the Middle East and worldwide is anyway nowhere near as strong as it was back in 2006. So even if the Bush administration– and perhaps even the Obama administration from January 20 on– want to continue shielding Israel from the mounting international chorus that is calling for a ceasefire, it won’t have the same muscle to do so this time as it used in 2006.
In fact, today as in 2006, Israel’s defiance of the international campaign for a ceasefire could well contribute significantly to a continued erosion of Washington’s worldwide influence.
I see that the EU has now taken up Kouchner’s original call, which had been for a 48-hour humanitarian pause, and has been discussing strengthening it into a call for a lasting ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
This is interesting. There is a significant difference between a humanitarian pause and a lasting ceasefire.
So Olmert brushed aside the earlier humanitarian pause idea– and now the Europeans are coming back with an even stronger suggestion.
If he carries on brushing off not only the Europeans but also the rising chorus of other voices calling for a ceasefire, then might the international momentum shift even further towards calling for an immediate, authoritative, UN-led peace conference to hammer out the details of a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, as I hope it does?
Notable, too..,Breaking news here… that this time around Condi Rice has apparently come to the conclusion that she can’t hold out against the worldwide momentum for an immediate ceasefire, and this evening she joined the representatives of the other three “Quartet” powers in calling for “”an immediate ceasefire that would be fully respected”.
Hurray!
Now let’s see how the UN, the EU, Russia, and the US can work together to being that about… Immediately!
… But meantime, let’s be clear in all this. Olmert can end this war any time he wants. But if he wants to end it in a way that results in an assured end to the firing of rockets into southern Israel, then he is going to have to get into a negotiation that also includes Hamas.
The Olmert government and its friends in Washington can rant on all they want about “terrorism.” But their invocation of the discourse of (anti-)terrorism rings horribly hollow to a world public now seeing the face of the humanitarian disaster and mass killings, including of civilians, that the people of Gaza are now suffering.
They ranted on about “terrorism” in the case of the war against Lebanon in 2006, too. But that did not prevent them, at the end of the day, from engaging in negotiations that also, indirectly, involved Hizbullah. And those negotiations “worked”, from, Israel’s perspective, in bringing about the end of Hizbullah rocketings of northern Israel, and the return of the remains of the lost POWs.
They also worked for the Lebanese, by allowing a restoration of calm that allowed them to bury their hundreds of civilian dead and start, slowly, to rebuild their shattered towns and villages.
This time, too, negotiations that involve Hamas can “work” for Israel, by bringing about an end to rocketing and the return of Gilad Shalit (who apparently was among those injured in the recent bombing.)
But let’s take this idea of a simple “ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas very much further. Let’s give it some real political strengthening, as the latest EU moves suggest. Indeed, let’s see it as a speedy segue into the final, durable Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement that those two peoples, all their neighbors, and the rest of the world all so sorely need.

UN official says Israel violated a truce Saturday

Karen Abu Zayd, commissioner of the UN Relief and Works Agency, told reporters yesterday that on Friday, the Palestinians in Gaza believed they had an agreement with Israel for a 48-hour humanitarian halt to the low-level exchanges of fire that had started to go both ways across the Gaza-Israel border since the previous six-month-long tahdi’eh expired on December 19.
According to her, the weekend lull started on Friday morning and could have been expected to last till Sunday morning.
On Friday there was almost no fighting across the border, and Israel did indeed take the opportunity to allow some very urgently needed food supplies into the Strip.
It was at 11:30 on Saturday morning that the IDF launched its massive aerial assault on the Strip.
“We were all at work and very much surprised by this,” Abu Zayd said.
Certainly, on Friday we in the United States got lots of news and pictures from Israel about the convoys of urgently needed food aid that finally, that day, started to be allowed to cross into Gaza, so there is some prima facie evidence for the idea there was a humanitarian lull of some type and some duration. Also, Israeli FM TZipi Livni had been in Cairo Thursday, talking with the Egyptian government officials who have been the main intermediaries in all the indirect Hamas-Israel negotiations of recent years (some of which have had some success.)
My advice for the Hamas leaders: Next time you think you have an agreement with the Israeli government on a truce or lull, get all its terms written down clearly, signed by an authorized rep of the Israeli government and counter-signed by your intermediaries/witnesses before you make the judgment you have reached an effective agreement.
And yes, what of the Egyptian FM’s role in all this? Was he complicit with Livni, or was he, too, duped by her?
AP (as carried by Haaretz) reported the following from AbuZayd’s press conference, as well:

I have no reason whatsoever to doubt the veracity of Abu Zayd’s evaluation of the attitudes of the Gaza Palestinians. If the Israeli government is hoping to use the ferocity of its attacks against Gaza to somehow turn the population of Gaza against Hamas– similarly to how they tried to turn the Lebanese against Hizbullah in 2006– then it seems that they know nothing at all about the psychology of human communities that come under intense threat from outside.
They learned nothing from 2006. Or from their own lengthy history and experience.
Tragic, for everyone involved. First and foremost for Gazans, who have suffered so many unpspeakable tragedies over the past three years and the past three days. But tragic also for so many Israelis who, blinded and rendered actively illogical by their own sense of fear, continue to cheer on their government’s acts of barbarity and to be quite blind to the effects these acts have on the attitudes of just about everyone else around the world.

Shimon Peres loses his marbles

Shimon Peres, current occupant of the largely ceremonial role as Israel’s president, father of Israel’s atomic bomb, author of its disastrous and very damaging mini-war against Lebanon in 1996, and Nobel Peace Laureate (go figure), has finally lost his marbles.
He told reporters today that the goal of Israel’s current assault against Gaza is ” not just to stop the continuing rocket fire from Gaza, but to put a halt to terror worldwide.”
Sadly, no-one in the media event he was speaking at (alongside IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi) seems to have asked Peres just how, precisely, Israel’s current paroxysm of violence against Gaza might be expected to have the stated effect.
The tragic experience of the US’s 2003 “shock and awe” assault against Iraq was that it fomented and incubated considerable additional levels of terrorism worldwide. Israel’s current assault on Gaza can be expected to have an exactly similar effect.
But Israel’s politicians and their many supporters in the US political elite all seem to live in their own little bubble-world of unreality, where the mere invocation of the word “terrorism” is enough to justify anything.
Luckily, the residents of that bubble-world are becoming less influential in world affairs with each day that passes.