… with the whole family. It proved ways harder to pay attention to the news than I’d expected. Something to do with having three grandchildren to pay attention to, and very limited web access.
Anyway, lots to blog about. Watch this space.
Author: Helena
Israel’s ‘J14’: New potential for Jewish-Palestinian solidarity
As I have chronicled here and elsewhere many times, over the past decade the once-vibrant movement of Israelis actively working for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza had become increasingly moribund.
Yes, a small number of brave Jewish-Israeli souls participated in the weekly protests in Bil’in, Nabi Saleh, or (more recently) Sheikh Jarrah. A small number continued to undertake other conscience-driven acts to try to challenge the occupation. But the mass movement of anti-occupation activists that one saw in the 1980s and early 1990s dwindled throughout the late 1990s and was then effectively killed off by Ehud Barak in late 2000.
Since then, feeling much more secure behind their Wall (along with all the horrendous battery of associated population-control measures) and also completely insulated from bearing the financial costs of administering the occupation, since the EU and U.S. governments between them have been financing it non-stop since 1994, most of the Jewish-Israeli public seemed to retreat into a form of disengagement that was marked by apathy (at best) or outright anti-Palestinian racism, at worst.
But now, there is something new in the streets of Tel Aviv– and of Jerusalem and a score of other Israeli cities. Directly inspired by the Arab popular movements of Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, lower-income Israelis from a broad range of different “ethnic” sectors have taken to the streets in the ‘J14’ movement to demand affordable housing. And despite the attempts of some of J14’s early organizers to keep the agenda “non-political”, the Palestinian issue has now entered the heart of the movement in a most revealing way: not via any big endorsement by J14 participants of a slogan to “end the occupation” but by the endorsement by many of them of the principle of Palestinian-Jewish solidarity within Israel.
The sight of that huge, Tahrir Square-inspired, bilingual banner in downtown Tel Aviv is amazing! But the political implications of the J14 movement are also huge– and could become a lot huger.
Veteran Jewish-Israeli anti-occupation activist Haggai Matar reported this telling vignette from Saturday’s very large J14 rally in Tel Aviv (translation Dimi Reider):
- Odeh Bisharat, the first Arab to address the mass rallies, greeted the enormous audience before him and reminded them that the struggle for social justice has always been the struggle of the Arab community, which has suffered from inequality, discrimination, state-level racism and house demolitions in Ramle, Lod, Jaffa and Al-Araqib. Not only was this met with ovation from a huge crowd of well over a hundred thousand people, but the masses actually chanted: “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” And later, in a short clip of interviews from protest camps across the country, Jews and Arabs spoke, and a number of them, including even one religious Jew, repeatedly said that “it’s time for this state to be a state for all its citizens.” A state for all its citizens. As a broad, popular demand. Who would have believed it.
“A state for all its citizens” has been, of course, a key organizing demand for that 20% of Israel’s citizens who are Palestinian indigenes, throughout the decades. It is, of course, a key principle of democracy anywhere. But until now, Israel’s leaders and far too many of its Jewish citizens have insisted that Israel should be, instead, “the state of the Jewish people”– including all Jewish people, anywhere in the world, any of whom is welcomed and supported to immigrate to Israel and is given citizenship immediately upon doing so.
The 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCOI’s) are the descendants of the survivors of the widespread ethnic cleansings that the Jewish/Israeli forces undertook during the Nakba of 1947-48. They are a community has suffered numerous waves and forms of repression since then– including campaigns of expropriation of their lands and properties that continue to this day. The Israeli authorities (and too many of Israel’s acolytes in the western media) have tried to deny the PCOI’s Palestinian heritage, referring to them either in general terms as “Israeli Arabs” or segmenting them into “Israeli Bedouins”, “Israeli Druze”, etc. But by ethnicity and heritage they are as Palestinian as any other Palestinians. Indeed, they are the close cousins of the Palestinian refugees now scattered around the whole world, since by definition the vast majority those refugee families are descended from Palestinians who were expelled from the area that became Israel in 1948.
The PCOI’s and the Palestinian refugees have a lot more in common, too. In particular, at the political level, neither group ever had much love for the whole Oslo process– and they still, to this day, don’t have much love for the two-state outcome between Palestinians and Israelis. Both groups form “natural” constituencies for a one-state outcome. The PCOI’s, in addition, are distinct because they have lived alongside Jewish Israelis for the past 63 years. They know them very well–for good and ill. They constitute the largest community of non-Jewish speakers of Hebrew in the world, since the Israeli school system forces them to learn a lot of subjects in Hebrew (and also force-feeds them a lot of Jewish history, while requiring little study of the history of their own people in the region.) They thus form a natural spearhead for the movement to re-imagine and rebuild the political order in the region as one that sees a single, unitary and democratic state in the whole of Palestine/Israel: A state, moreover, that honors and protects the language and culture of both of its constituent peoples, equally. (Also, a state that finally allows the millions of exiled Palestinians to exercise their long-denied right of return.)
Of course, we do not know yet where this latest J14 movement in Israel will lead. It may fizzle out completely. It may (as some participants have warned) become “captured” by the forces of the Jewish ethnonationalist right wing in Israel. Or it may mark the beginning of a completely new kind of social movement in Israel that is marked by Palestinian-Jewish solidarity against the forces of the repressive, Likudist status quo.
There has been some speculation that Netnyahu and his cronies in government (Lieberman and Barak) may seek to distract attention from J14’s demands by launching a new military adventure. Already over recent days, Israeli warplanes have resumed their earlier patterns of terrorizing and bombing Gaza. (Read Eva Bartlett’s searing on-the-ground account of this, here.)
Lieberman has also been mouthing off some very escalatory warnings about “bloodshed ahead” if the PLO leaders take their case for an independent state to the UN in September.
But there are some signs, too, that Netanyahu may be trying another tactic to defuse the pressures coming from J14: Winning the release of five-year Israeli POW Gilad Shalit from Gaza. Netanyahu’s negotiator on this matter, Amos Gilead, arrived in Cairo on Sunday for talks.
Conclusion of a deal that wins Shalit’s release would almost certainly have some very interesting political fallout on the Palestinian side. Netanyahu’s essential negotiation is with Hamas, which has been holding Shalit since it took over Gaza completely in June 2007; and the terms would almost certainly include the release of several hundred of the 7,000 or so Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails. This would strengthen Hamas politically, perhaps by a considerable amount. The Hamas-Fateh reconciliation process announced with some fanfare on May 3 has been moving ahead only very slowly and fitfully since then. Meanwhile, Fateh has continued to be riven by internal factionalism– most recently, when an internal movement commission of enquiry reported publicly that longtime Fateh strongman (and darling of the western governments) Mohamed Dahlan “had a hand” in the death by poisoning of movement icon Yasser Arafat, in 2004.
Fateh has been closely embraced and given generous financial support by the U.S. and its allies since 1994, and has come to play within the Palestinian national movement something like the role that Renamo played in Mozambique, UNITA in Angola, (or Inkatha in apartheid South Africa.) But it has been visible withering on the vine in recent years, for many reasons but most significantly because of the complete failure of its leaders’ strategy of relying wholly on the goodwill of Washington (rather than, for example, any mass-based organizing strategy) to achieve its goal of an independent Palestinian state, established alongside Israel in just 23% of historic Palestine.
A clear Hamas “victory” in the negotiations over Shalit might toll the death-bell for Fateh as an effective political force.
… But who knows what Netanyahu has in mind? All that is clear is that the J14 movement brings the potential for some real political change to both Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine.
Syria, authoritarianism, war, and peace
I regret that I haven’t had much time in recent months to blog and write about the many developments in the still-unfolding ‘Arab Spring.’ However, I think that much of what I was writing back in March and April– especially on the extremely upsetting and complicated series of events in Libya and Syria– has stood the test of time pretty well. That has been particularly the case, I think, with regard to the warnings I issued ( e.g. 1, 2) about the danger of trying to use military tools, as in Libya, in order to pursue a claimed human-rights agenda, and with regard to the calls I made (e.g. 1, 2, and in this late-May discussion at the Middle East Institute, MP3) for people to focus on achieving a reform process in Syria that is negotiated, inclusive, and wide-ranging rather than continuing to pursue only shrill and personalized “rights” campaigns that all too easily and often shift over into highly politicized calls for regime change.
I repeat: War and extreme social conflict are always and necessarily injurious to the rights of the civilian residents of the conflict zone, especially the most vulnerable. Armchair activists in the west who have never lived in a war zone often have zero understanding of this fact.
(Though I am strong critic, on pacifist grounds, of the whole concept of a “just” war, I do think the first proponents of that originally Christian doctrine understood the always-injurious nature of war; and they coded that understanding into their injunctions that wars should only be undertaken when there was a strong chance of a speedy and decisive victory, and when the goods to be gained through any proposed war could be seen to clearly outweigh the evils that would necessarily accompany it. No-one back then ever proclaimed the idea of an “easy” war that would be a “cakewalk” or that would bring “only” good to the world! How tragic that so many in the west have lost sight of that deep wisdom embedded into the “western” tradition… )
Back to Syria, though. There, as in Libya, we have a situation in which both the regime and the opposition have now proven their resilience. This is, of course, a recipe for stalemate and prolonged conflict that, so long as it lasts– and it has now lasted several months– will cause immediate harm to Syrians of all political persuasions while also sowing the seeds of a possible much more serious social breakdown (fitna) in the future.
I want to ask two questions:
1. How many of those in the west who are now clamoring for immediate regime change in Syria think the negotiated transition from minority rule to democracy that occurred in South Africa in the early 1990s was a good thing? I would imagine the vast majority of them (of you) do.
So has the violence enacted by the minority regime in Syria even come close to the violence enacted by the former minority regime in South Africa against its people?
No. I thought not.
So why was a negotiated transition to democracy good in South Africa, while most western rights activists shudder at the very idea of one in Syria? (I hope the answer is not a racist one: Namely, that westerners were prepared to give a generous pass to members of the minority regime in South Africa because they were “white”… but they’re not prepared to do so to members of the Alawite regime in Syria because, um, they’re just another bunch of Ay-rabs… )
2. Can I invite you to a thought experiment?
I know from my own extensive research that Israel came very close to concluding a peace agreement with Syria at two points since the 1991 Madrid Conference: firstly, in 1994-95, and secondly, in 2000.
Imagine if one of those attempts had succeeded… Then, in early 2011, when the winds of the Arab Spring started blowing in Syria they would have been blowing in a country that (like Egypt) had regained all the national territory seized by Israel in 1967 and held for many years thereafter, and that was in a state of fairly well-entrenched final peace with Israel.
How different would such a Syria have been? How different would have been the role of the “security” forces in the country’s politics and national culture? How different would Syria’s whole society and economy have been from what we see there today?
Note that I am not here just mindlessly “blaming Israel” for all the woes currently besetting Syria and its people. The people inside Syria– on both sides– who have been pursuing their agendas through violence must bear the first responsibility for the losses inflicted. (And there, as in South Africa or U.S.-occupied Iraq, or anywhere else, it has been the dominant security forces that have inflicted the vast majority of the casualties…)
But still, it is worth noting that the security forces in Syria in general have only continued to occupy the bloated social, economic, and cultural role that they have been occupying because of Israel’s steadfast intransigence in the peace negotiations over the years, and because of the extreme reluctance of Israel’s negotiators to abide by the Security Council resolutions (and longstanding international norms) that insist that Israel cannot hang onto any of the Syrian territory that it occupied through war, back in 1967.
If Syria in 2011 had been in a situation of peace with Israel since 2000– even a “cold” peace, as between Egypt and Israel– then might not the internal interaction between pro-democracy forces and the military look more like what happened in Tahrir Square, and since then, in Egypt this year?
In Tahrir Square, the leaders of the military were abiding by an arrangement they had reached with the political leadership (in that time, Pres. Sadat) back in 1977, under which they vowed they would never turn their tanks against civilian protesters. Yes, I realize that pledge was given even before Egypt concluded its peace with Israel in 1978-79. But still, the fact of the peace with Israel made it a lot easier for the Egyptian military in 2011 to once again abide by the pledge they had made in 1977.
… Ah, it’s too late now to “imagine” what Syria might have looked like today if either the 1994-95 or the 2000 peace talks with Israel had succeeded. Those of us around the world who care deeply about the wellbeing of Syria’s 21 million people face the situation we face.
For my part, I’ll continue to call for a reform process in Syria that is negotiated, wide-ranging, authentically Syrian, and inclusive (including of representatives of the present regime, as well as, of course, the different strands of the opposition)– rather than calling for any specific outcome such as either the downfall or the continuation of the present regime.
(In South Africa, putting the focus on the need for real reform and respect for a truly democratic nationwide election proved to be the key that winkled the pro-apartheid National Party out of office– and gave them a decent, respected position in the political opposition… until the NP withered completely on the vine around ten years later.)
I call for the same kind of negotiated outcome in Libya, where goodness knows the damage caused by this terrible, tragic war that NATO has waged for the past five months has been unconscionable.
But in the case of Syria, let’s also not forget that the country is still one that it is in a state of war with its neighbor, Israel; and that the only way to end that state of war is through conclusion of a final peace agreement that implements all the conditions of Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. If westerners in countries that have given huge support to Israel for the past 40 years truly want to help the people of Syria– including the very numerous Syrian citizens still prevented from returning to their families’ homes and farms inside the occupied Golan– then surely they (we) should be agitating hard for Israel to conclude the kind of rules-based peace with Syria that it concluded with Egypt back in 1979. Certainly, no U.S. government aid to Israel, whether economic or military, should be given in a way that entrenches and strengthens Israel’s hold on the occupied Golan.
Remembering Qana, five years on
On this day five years ago, at 1:30 am Lebanon time, Israel’s U.S.-supplied warplanes attacked houses in the south Lebanese village of Qana, killing more than 60 civilians, 37 of them children. Go watch this soberly reported video clip from Britain’s Channel 4 to get a measure of the horror.
The Qana Massacre of 2006 was the single deadliest episode in the gruesome 33-day assault that the government of Israel unleashed against Lebanon– with the full support of the U.S. government– in July 2006.
Washington’s role throughout the war was twofold. At the military level it provided many services including speedy replacement of the huge amounts of ordnance with which Israel pummeled Lebanon’s people and their national infrastructure. At the political level, Washington’s main role was to stave off all the calls for a ceasefire that mounted internationally as the long-planned assault proceeded throughout July and the first half of August.
Over the weeks that the war lasted it became increasingly clear to Israel’s military leaders that (1) they could not force a Lebanese surrender purely through the use of standoff weapons, as their super-arrogant chief of staff Dan Halutz had imagined; (2) that they would therefore have to use ground forces, as well, to try to achieve their objective; but (3) their ground forces were unable to prevail against the very well-planned defenses that Hizbullah maintained throughout South Lebanon… The war– which had been designed to “restore the credibility of Israel’s military deterrent” in the eyes of potential opponents from throughout the region– was instead having quite the opposite effect! So by the second week of August, Ehud Olmert’s government in Israel was becoming increasingly eager for a ceasefire. A ceasefire agreement was finally agreed among the parties, via the U.N. Security Council, on August 11 and it went into effect on August 14.
Throughout the entire 33 days of the war, Washington put not one iota of pressure on Israel to stop the carnage. Indeed, some days before the July 30 Qana Massacre, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed the importance of the already heavy Lebanese civilian casualties by describing these losses as only “the birth pangs of the New Middle East.”
This woman– who fwiw has never herself experienced “birth pangs”– helped bring to the families of Qana and so many other places in Lebanon a stream of dead babies and toddlers, caked in the dust, grime, and blood of the sarcophaguses that had been their families’ homes.
For the people of Qana, the massacre of 2006 was an eery replay of the massacre they suffered ten years earlier, during the assault that Israel launched against Lebanon in April 1996. On that occasion, Israeli artillery demolished a clearly marked U.N.-run refuge in which hundreds of old people from the local area had sought shelter from the fighting, killing 106 of them.
On both occasions, Israeli leaders did all they could to deflect responsibility for these acts. They challenged the veracity of the very well-documented news accounts (and U.N. reports) of the incidents. And they claimed that because they had “instructed” local residents to leave the area prior to the attacks, the residents “had only themselves to blame” by staying their home villages: an amazingly arrogant and quite illegal argument for an attacking foreign army to make! In addition, very early in the fighting, the Israeli air force had demolished all the key highway bridges linking south Lebanon to the rest of the country. How were families with old people, disabled people, and young children supposed to “leave” their home village when “instructed” to do so by a foreign army?
I still have a deep well of sadness about what the Israeli military did– with the full backing of my own government– in Lebanon in 2006. Longtime JWN readers will know that on August 11, 2006, a cousin of my ex-husband was killed when the Israeli air force attacked a civilian convoy that was leaving Marjayoun for safer areas further north. The route and timing of that convoy had been clearly pre-arranged in coordination with the Israeli military. But still, the Israelis attacked, killing Colette Rashed and six others of the fleeing Marjayoun civilians. Read more details about that attack here.
… And please, don’t forget to check out (and buy) War Diary: Lebanon 2006, Rami Zurayk’s amazing account of what it was like to be in Beirut and South Lebanon during the whole of that war, which my company is publishing as an ebook ($4.00; several formats) and a short paperback ($7.00). The Israeli assault against Lebanon in 2006 was a turning point for the whole region in several ways. It gave Arabs and Muslims everywhere the idea that there were indeed ways for well-organized national groups to stand up to and defy military organizations that enjoyed apparently unchallengeable superiority on the battlefield. It revealed (yet again) the degree to which U.S. policy had been made into a handmaiden of Israel’s. And it showed the importance of forging strong bonds of unity between secular anti-imperial forces and more Islamist anti-imperial forces if the power of a a hostile and aggressive imperial alliance is ever to be successfully broken.
Rami Zurayk’s book is a wonderful document: humane, impassioned, tender, intimate, and wise. Advance orders for it will be fulfilled on or before August 10. Yes, I think it is important to sell this book and get the story it tells much more widely disseminated within the Anglosphere. But I also want JWN readers to stay keenly alive to the tragedies and costs of war, everywhere. In 2006– and still, today.
Place your orders now for Zurayk’s ‘War Diary: Lebanon 2006’
You can now go to the ‘Buy’ button on the web-page for Rami Zurayk’s ‘War Diary: Lebanon 2006’ and place your advance order for this unique, 60-page work. The ebook will cost you $4.00 (in many different formats), and the paperback will cost you $7.00, plus shipping.
Here is the back-cover text:
- In the summer of 2006, the Israeli military undertook a mega-lethal 33-day attack against Lebanon in pursuit of what came to be known as the ‘Dahieh Doctrine’: an attempt to inflict such dire punishment on the country’s civilian population that they would—Israel’s leaders hoped—turn against the Hizbullah resistance movement once and for all. The attempt failed. Hizbullah emerged from the assault intact and with its political standing, in Lebanon and most of the Arab world, much stronger than before.
Rami Zurayk, a veteran activist from the Lebanese left and the author of Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring, stayed in Lebanon throughout the war. He was in Beirut and in his family’s home village in South Lebanon, working with other activists to relieve the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of civilians pushed out of their homes by Israel’s assault.
War Diary: Lebanon 2006 is the journal Zurayk kept of those 33 days. It is intimate, brutally honest, angry, impassioned, tender—and often bitingly funny. In his wry, diarists’s voice he explains why so many Arab leftists are ready today to make common cause with their more Islamist compatriots as they jointly defend their societies against the attacks not just of Israel but of Western governments and publics that sometimes seem deeply hostile to Arab and Muslim aspirations.
An engaging, must-read document, War Diary: Lebanon 2006 provides much-needed context for understanding the passions and politics of the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011.
I am so happy to make copies of this great work available to the public.
If you want to see the analysis I published of the 33-day war in Boston Review at the end of 2006, you can find it here. Rami’s view of the whole tragic affair, as he recorded it each day during the war, was much more intimate.
If you like what you see on War Diary‘s web-page, please circulate it widely to your friends and urge them to place advance orders, too. We should be able to get the ebook to you within the next week– and the paperback, just a few days after that.
This Saturday, by the way, is the anniversary of the Qana Massacre, one of the most grisly single episodes of the whole war.
p.s. If you go to the sales page(s) for the book, they’ll look as if they are run completely by our partners from OR Books. Well, they are. But we’ll be getting some mention of JWB onto those pages very son– along with a button that can send you back to browse more titles from our list, not just theirs. For now, you’ll have to use the back button– or go “back” to JWB in another tab.
Nurturing that better future
All my wonderful longtime readers here at JWN may wonder why I’ve been so silent recently. Two reasons, mainly. I’ve been deep immersed in the most wonderful forms of family life; and I’ve also been racing against the clock on the ‘War Diary: Lebanon 2006‘ project.
In the past three months, we’ve been enriched by the arrival of two new grandchildren! The second of these, little Salma, arrived just under three weeks ago. I’ve been staying with her and her parents in California. My other amazing grandchildren, now aged 2.5 years and 3 months, are also staying nearby, with (of course) their parents.
It is one of the most beautiful things in the world to be with these little ones– and also to see my own ‘little’ ones now all grown up and being such fabulous parents; and to see all of them just enjoying being together. I’ve had wonderful long periods of holding and rocking the babies, chatting with the new parents, watching the two-year-old as she explores the fabulous local tots-only playground, playing Legos with her, listening to all her great little made-up songs… helping the new parents out where I can.
I remember when I was a new parent, that finding a fit between my work at parenting– and yes, as feminist philosophers have pointed out, for all the joy involved, parenting is certainly the most important form of work that there is– and my professional work was really a big challenge…. And now, I’m trying to find the right balance between being the grandparent I want to be and my work in the professional/public sphere. This time around, though, I think the balance is easier for me to find, since I really do think that what I do in the professional/public sphere is aimed centrally at trying to build that better world in which my grandchildren– and yours, and everyone’s!– can all have an equal chance to grow and flourish, in a world that values each human life equally and turns its back on violence, exploitation, discrimination, and war.
And so, in the hours (or minutes) I can scrounge from being with my family during this week, I’ve been trying to work as effectively as I can on the War Diary project. This little book– which we’re now planning to publish as both an e-book and a paperback— is a document that is truly unique in English. It’s a record of what it was like to live in Beirut (and South Lebanon) in July-August 2006 under the bombing and anti-civilian devastation undertaken by the Israeli military as it gave the first try-out to what became known as the ‘Dahieh Doctrine.’
Yes, that’s Dahieh, as in that whole broad area of Southern Beirut where towering, ten-story buildings that housed homes, offices, shops, and schools, were obliterated from the map and reduced to smoking rubble-fields.
The Dahieh Doctrine was what Israel was also trying to pursue 30 months later, against the people of Gaza. On both occasions, its application was a notable failure. The pronounced goal of the Dahieh Doctrine, after all, was to inflict such harsh punishment on the targeted population that they would “turn against” and repudiate the resistance movements that lived among them…. And on both occasions, the respective resistance movements not only survived with their leadership and basic cadre intact– but they ended up gaining increased political stature amongst their national constituencies, and throughout the whole Arab world, by having done so.
But who know– maybe, as it did in December 2008, the Israeli government will one day once again decide that “with just a few further tweaks” the Dahieh Doctrine can be “perfected” and finally made to work?
That’s why, having the actual record of what it was like to be in Beirut during the very first application of the Dahieh Doctrine is so important. Rami Zurayk’s War Diary: Lebanon 2006 is a key testament to human resilience and to the spirit of an optimistic human community. It shows why the resilience the Lebanese population showed during summer 2006– along with, crucially, the alliance between Islamist and secularist resisters that was also evidenced then– have been cited by several leaders in the Arab Spring as giving them hope that the spirit of a proudly proclaimed and defended common humanity could indeed prevail over the “values” of military organizations, however brutal.
So this is why I think getting War Diary published as soon and as well as possible is important. It also completely fits with the goal of building the kind of world that I want my grandchildren (and everyone else’s) to grow up in. All my grandchildren have a rich mix of ethnic heritages. The littlest one, Salma, is Arab, Jewish, British– and also, very strongly “American”. How could anyone possibly say to her or to anyone that her “Jewish” aspect is more important or more valuable than her “Arab” aspect– or the other way around? How can anyone say that the lives of people who are Jewish, wherever they are, are somehow more “valuable” than the lives of people who are Lebanese, Palestinian, Egyptian, Iranian, or American?
Seeing these little children in my own family just makes me want to work all the harder for a world that gives equal value and equal care to each human person– a goal that necessarily involves turning our backs on violence, domination, and war.
New e-book soon: ‘War Diary: Lebanon 2006’
Today is the fifth anniversary of the beginning of that terrible march of folly, the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006. So I’m delighted to announce today that my publishing company, Just World Books, will shortly be publishing as a short e-book War Diary: Lebanon 2006, by the Lebanese social activist (and AUB professor) Rami Zurayk.
I think it’ll take us 10-14 days to get the e-book up and available for you to purchase. It will cost $4.00 and have around 40 pages. I’m hoping to be able to take advance orders for it very soon.
More about the book later. But you can find some good details about it if you go to that web-page for it.
Afghanistan, logistics, geopolitics, war, peace
The WaPo’s Craig Whitlock has an informative piece in today’s paper about the many continuing challenges the U.S. military has faced as it attempted to provide logistic support to the “surged” U.S. troop presence in very distant Afghanistan.
Supplying these troops is particularly hard, due to three factors:
- 1. Um, Afghanistan is a long way away from the United States; it is landlocked with high mountains surrounding it on nearly every side; and it has lousy internal infrastructure.
2. The all-volunteer U.S. military is configured in a certain way and most of it fights in a certain way. Bottom line here: supporting one service-member in the field, what with bottled water, air-conditioning when at all possible, decent electric supplies, warm meals whenever possible– oh, not to mention the high cost of her or his weaponry, very high-tech vehicles, and the fuel needed to power them– etc., etc., places huge demands on the supply branches such as would not be placed by, for example, a Maoist-style field force “living off the land.”
3. U.S. politics certainly constrains logistics choices that might otherwise be far simpler (and less expensive) to make. For example: one look at the map so handily provided by the WaPo today shows a big U.S.-logistics black hole in the whole of Iran, a neighbor of Afghanistan that has a number of pretty good land links with it. But the U.S. can’t use Iran as a transit zone! (More on this, below.) In addition, though, domestic U.S. political pressures mandate that the vast bulk of the goods supplied to U.S. forces be bought from (and shipped from) U.S. suppliers. So it might make a lot more sense to source the supplies from elsewhere. (And I believe that in the case of bottled water, this is not shipped in from the United States– can anyone confirm that?) But still, that domestic-sourcing pressure might help save a few jobs back in the United States, but it certainly adds hugely to the logistical challenge.
So yes, in some respects the U.S. military is a competent organization; and by and large it has been able to meet the logistical challenges created by the above factors.
Whitlock quotes Alan F. Estevez, the Pentagon’s principal deputy assistant secretary for logistics, as saying “If you look at what we’ve done there in the last two years, we look at it more or less as a logistics miracle.”
H’mm. “Miraculous”, maybe. But also a truly gargantuan money sump for the currently hard-pressed U.S. taxpayer, a massive burden on the global environment and especially the environment of the war zone itself… And all for– what exactly?
In order to deliver the machinery of lethal combat into one of the poorest countries on earth…
Continue reading “Afghanistan, logistics, geopolitics, war, peace”
Speaking about our recent Gaza/Cairo trip: Charlottesville, July 11
Bill the spouse and I will be speaking about our recent trip to Gaza and Cairo at an event sponsored by my Quaker meeting in Charlottesville, on July 11. Details are here.
My piece on Egypt and Gaza, at ME Channel
… is here.
I rather like the title they put on it, “Tahrir’s journey to Palestine”. In fact, the journey that the “spirit of of the Tahrir uprising” has to make before it gets to Palestine is just about as long and difficult as the journey that anyone needs to make to get from the outside world to the Gaza portion of Palestine. We can see the terrible and in one case at least, potentially lethal) measures that someone (presumably Israel) has been taking to prevent the current “Stay Human” flotilla from reaching Gaza. And we saw the lethal (and very intentionally mendacious/libelous) lengths to which the Israel “Defense” Forces were prepared to go in this regard on May 31, 2010.
If you can’t get to Gaza by sea, then you have to go either via Israel, through the Erez checkpoint, or via Egypt through Rafah. Erez has long been closed to everyone except a small group of humanitarian-aid workers and a very small number of Gaza Palestinians requiring urgent medical care at hospitals inside Israel. (But the medical patients are have very frequently been required to become informers for the Israelis as a “quid pro quo” for being allowed to transit Erez, as PHR-Israel has documented in detail.)
Passage through Rafah is almost equally as difficult, whether for “Gaza residents”– that is, that small portion of the Palestinian people whom Israel graciously “allows” to reside in, or visit Gaza– or for anyone else.
It is quite outrageous that an entire population can be collectively punished with illegal restrictions on their freedom of movement and freedom of association in this way. Bill the spouse and I were only able to respond positively to the invitation we received to visit Gaza because we had high-level backing from the Egyptian government. But if a school or community group in Gaza wants to invite anyone they want from Egypt, other Arab countries, Europe, or the United States, to go and take part in a seminar or to sit on the beach with them enjoy the fine Gaza sunset, they can’t do that! Why?????
Because Israel has long had carte blanche from the U.S. government to kick around the Palestinians in any way it wants, with no accountability required.
Time for a change.
Let’s bring the spirit of Tahrir here, to the United States!