Category: Gaza08-09

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)

Tewks: “Let the Children Dance”

I recently highlighted Gina Bennett’s National Security Mom, with it’s marvelous drawing from the “lessons we teach our children” to understand national security.
I’ve been wondering then what lessons Israel has been purporting to teach to the children of Gaza. Is this the message of the iron fist, that if you dare to mess with Israel, you will be pounded, mercilessly, until you submit? That seems to be logic of Tom Friedman’s latest column, wherein he invokes the “success” of Israel’s pounding of Lebanon in 2006 to explain Israel’s Gaza “strategy:”

“Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future….That was the education of Hezbollah.”

In Gaza, Friedman can’t quite tell “if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population.”
Friedman favors “educating” those civilians who would vote for Hamas. He prefers that Israel not “obliterate” them. How magnanimous.
We’re now past 1,000 Gazans dead, including over 300 children. With Gazans now properly “educated,” Friedman deems the time for “diplomacy” with them is at hand
But what lessons have the surviving children learned? Are they now more likely to submit to Israel’s will or turn in despair to very violent means?
As I have struggled with such madness, I came across a lyric from a rising Charlottesville singer/thinker, David Tewks: I post his blog preface and song with his permission.

Continue reading “Tewks: “Let the Children Dance””

Gaza Update

What are the US ‘papers of record’ up to?
The Washington Post has offered balanced coverage:
Israelis Push to Edge of Gaza City
Move Could Signal A Long Urban Battle
But this WaPo essay is ridiculous–
Gaza’s True ‘Disproportion’
Carlos Alberto Montaner
Israelis are being accused of suffering too few casualties in their confrontation with the Hamas terrorists. Those who reason thus usually speak the words “disproportion” or “asymmetry” in an indignant tone. While at this writing close to a thousand Arab Palestinians have died or been wounded as a result of the bombings, the Israeli losses amount to just over a dozen. . .Tel Aviv’s critics — from whom an anti-Semitic stench often rises — do not say whether Israel should increase its quota of cadavers or if it must reduce the Arabs’ quota to achieve the reasonable proportion of blood that will soothe the peculiar itch for parity that afflicts them. . . .This demand for “proportionality” can only be called surprising. . .Israel has not the slightest interest in causing casualties.
The New York Times:
Israelis United on War as Censure Rises Abroad
JERUSALEM — To Israel’s critics abroad, the picture could not be clearer: Israel’s war in Gaza is a wildly disproportionate response to the rockets of Hamas, causing untold human suffering and bombing an already isolated and impoverished population into the Stone Age, and it must be stopped. Yet here in Israel very few, at least among the Jewish population, see it that way.
And this Op-Ed NY Times piece by Rashid Khalidi is good.
What You Don’t Know About Gaza
NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.

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.

Trash Talk

Reader D. Mathews has alerted us to a despicable congressman, Mark Kirk (R-IL), who said at a pro-Israel rally: “To misquote Shakespeare, something is rotten in Gaza and now it’s time to take out the trash.”
Here are some visuals of the “trash” that has been ‘taken out of Gaza’, here, here, here, here and here.
Speaking of trash, it seems to me that something is rotten in the US Congress, and judging from its 20% poll approval rating and its 71% disapproval rating I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

Blogging on Gaza

Some news and opinions from Middle East bloggers.
From Gaza, with Love:
8th of January -13th day of the Israeli Attack against Gaza
720 are killed
including :-
215 children
89 women
12 1st aid health workers
more than 3000 are injured many with serious injuries
11 ambulances were attacked and destroyed while on duty
a Palestinian mother:
The military offensive in the Gaza Strip is affecting civilians indiscriminately, while medical teams continue to face serious obstacles to providing assistance, the international medical humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said today. The international community must not be content with a limited truce, which MSF said is largely inadequate for providing life-saving assistance.
The Gaza Blog:
‘This is not like the previous invasions – this time they mean to kill us. There is no escape.’
Israeli human rights groups:
Maysa’ a-Samuni, 19, tells how on 4 Jan., Israeli soldiers ordered her entire extended family to gather in one building. The next morning, as some members tried to leave, the army shelled the building, killing and wounding dozens.

Continue reading “Blogging on Gaza”

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.