Category: Israel 2003-08

Israel: Yaalon tells it like he sees it

The Israel Defense Forces’ Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon was, according to the online edition of the NYT, the “senior military official” quoted in today’s Israeli press as having said that Israel’s current hard-line policies against the Palestinians were working against Israel’s “strategic interest.”
For example, in Wednesday’s Yediot Aharonot, veteran columnist Nahum Barnea quoted the (still un-named) senior official having said that the Israeli-imposed,

    comprehensive travel restrictions and curfews imposed on Palestinians were actually harming Israel’s overall security.
    “It increases hatred for Israel and strengthens the terror organizations,” Mr. Barnea wrote, quoting the official.
    General Yaalon [for it was, as we now know, he] also said that Israel should have eased punitive measures to bolster the fortunes of the former Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who resigned on Sept. 6 after only four months on the job.
    Mr. Abbas expressed frustration that Mr. Sharon never took concrete steps to convince Palestinians that the Middle East peace plan, initiated in June, would bring about any real improvements in their lives.
    “There is no hope, no expectations for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, nor in Bethlehem and Jericho,” Mr. Barnea quoted the “military official” as saying. “In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest.”

The NYT story, by Greg Myre out of Jerusalem, notes that Yaalon had always previously expressed fairly hawkish sentiments.
Indeed, when he first became IDF Chief of Staff back in July/August of 2002, Yaalon famously said that Palestinian militants were like a “cancer” that needed to be aggressively dealt with. He also expressed full support, at that time, for a policy of imposing tough collective punishments on palestinians that would serve to “burn [or brand] into their consciousness” the understanding that Israel was not about to back down under pressure.
Yaalon’s emphasis on “not backing down under pressure” at all– which of course always used to echo Sharon’s long-held views on the matter– merely buttressed Sharon in not even making tactical redeployments (in Gaza, for example) that could have strengthened the IDF’s broader position.
Not to mention, they would have made life a whole lot better for Gaza’s Palestinians!
So the big questions now are: (1) Will General Yaalon stick to his new, significantly more moderate line, and continue to espouse it openly? and (2) If he does, what will Sharon do about him?

Palestine/Israel: final outcomes

I’m back. Here’s a link to my CSM piece of Oct. 9th. In it I argue that if Israelis are unwilling to provide the Palestinians with the territorial/jurisdictional basis for a viable independent state alongside Israel, then perhaps the only acceptable outcome would be to have a unitary, one-person-one-vote system in the whole area of Mandate-era Palestine.
I’ve received some interesting reactions to this suggestion. It is not, of course, original, having already been articulated in recent times by Sari Nusseibeh, Meron Benvenisti, and many others. (Including, in the New York Review of Books by Tony Judt.)
Another wrinkle on this is that just after my piece appeared came the news of Yasser Abed Rabbo and Yossi Beilin’s success at shepherding their “citizens’ diplomacy” venture of describing a framework for a final outcome in a two-state context that could win support from the people in both national comunities.
I think theirs is an a wonderful approach! The idea of having substantial citizen groups on both suides of the lines working together on this– and each, then, going back to its home community to win support for their vision– is great.
And if, moreover, they succeed in changing the dynamics in both communities from one of hopelessness, dread, and fear to one of hope and a sense of possibility and reasonableness– then that is exactly what needs to happen!!
In the Ha’Aretz piece on the Beilin-Abed-Rabbo project, Beilin is quoted as saying of the project’s many critics on the Israeli right– including, of course, from an infuriated Israeli government– that: “I know that they’ll say this is a bad agreement, that we caved in and gave away everything. But one thing they won’t be able to say: that there is no partner [for an agreement].”
That is certainly the case. Yasser Abed Rabbo is a very well-connected former (and present?) PA minister who still has very good relations with Yasser Arafat, who has given the venture his approval. YAR has won significant support for the project from other significant figures in the Palestinian movement, including some leaders of the hardline, Fateh-linked “Tanzim” organization. (Actually, “tanzim” means “organization.”)
On the Israeli side, meanwhile, Beilin is also a former government minister. His role in this project has the support of a number of Labor MKs including Amram Mitzna, Avraham Burg, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, and Yuli Tamir; a number of Meretz MKs including Haim Oron (Meretz); former MK Nehama Ronen; Brigadier General (reserve) Giora Inbar, and author Amos Oz.
It’s worth noting, too, that the Swiss government seems to be ready to host the final announcing/publication of what is already being called the “Geneva Accord”, and that the project received financial backing from a number of governments around the world but NOT, notably, the US government.
What is different about this venture as opposed to the ill-fated “Oslo Accords” of september 1993? Mainly–and here’s the source for hope in it–that it delineates what the the final outcome of the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiation would look like– whereas Oslo only defined an set of interim phases and, at the Israeli side’s insistence, still left the final outcome undefined.
Over the ten years since the conclusion of the Oslo Accords, all of Israel’s governments have continued to alter the facts on the ground, implanting hundreds of thousands of additional israeli settlers into East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. So continuing to chase after ever smaller-scale and ever more elusive “interim” arrangements, as the moribund “Roadmap” does just continues to postpone the final day of reaching peace while allowing Israel’s territorial maximalists to continue with their settlement-building project…
As for the ‘one-state’ outcome, I am not personally wedded to either it or the two-state outcome. Indeed, I think that is totally not a decision for outsiders to make. But I don’t think we should ignore the idea of the one-state outcome. In Israel/Palestine– as in South Africa– it could be an exciting possibility.

Israeli pilots of conscience

Heroes in the Israeli Air Force!! Bring them on!!!
Here’s an English translation of a good article about the IAF’s newest (partial) conscientious objectors, thanks to Gila Svirsky of Women in Black. It also includes the text of the letter the pilots sent to the IAF Commander:

    Friends,
    Here is the best gift imaginable for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which begins this Friday: The refusal to serve of 25 Israeli Air Force pilots. To understand why this event will shock Israelis in the morning newspapers, you have to know that Air Force pilots are the heroes of Israel, epitomizing the best, brightest, and bravest.
    Below is my quick translation of the internet article prepared by Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest circulation newspaper by far. It gives much more insight than the dry Ha’aretz article. Read it and savor the impact that this will have, undermining support for the occupation.
    This letter is a blessing. May it catalyze a speedy end to the occupation, and presage the dawn of reason and, ultimately, peace. In the Middle East and everywhere.
    Shalom / Salaam from Jerusalem,
    Gila Svirsky
    _______________________________________
    Air Force Pilots in Reserves: We Refuse to Attack in the Territories.
    Pilots in Reserves and Air Crew sent the following letter today to Air Force Commander, Dan Halutz: “We are opposed to carrying out attack orders that are illegal and immoral of the type the State of Israel has been conducting in the territories.”
    Twenty five pilots, former pilots, and air crew sent a petition today (Wednesday) to General Dan Halutz, Commander of the Air Force, in which they declared that they will not participate in attack missions in the territories.

    Continue reading “Israeli pilots of conscience”

Palestine/Israel: one state or two?

I was reading Imshin’s blog from Israel, and came across a post in which she translated a long extract from a recent article by Shlomo Avnieri bitterly criticizing the few brave souls inside Israel who started to argue that, given the huge degree of demographic mixing that the settlers have achieved, maybe the best path now is to aim for a unitary binational state in Israel/Palestine rather than for the very difficult disaggregation of the populations into two mono-ethnic states.
If Avnieri’s arguments are the best that the “anti- one state” brigade can come up with, then that is really a poor showing. I note that Avnieri has been around for a VERY LONG TIME as first an Israeli Foreign Ministry official whose arguments were always (no surprise here) that Israel could do no wrong, and more recently as a retired person whose tune seems not to have been changed by one jot. Also, he doesn’t seem to have learned much over recent years. He notes the collapse of many mutli-ethnic states after the fall of communism, but seems unaware of the continued existence of large numbers of other multi-ethnic states around the world.
Even on Canada and Belgium, the recognition he gives is grudging indeed:

    Canada and Belgium–two veteran bi-national states–are facing great difficulties, in which the last word has not yet been said, even though no one has been murdered or killed there for over 150 years.

(Quick question to readers: would you rather live in Canada today, or in Israel? In Belgium, or in mono-ethnic Saudi Arabia?)
Most importantly–since this is really is the best analogy to the prospect facing Jewish Israelis–he totally neglects the incredible experiment in multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicism that has been underway in South Africa for the past nine years.
Here’s why the South African experiment is so relevant: because there, as in any future Israeli-Palestinian binational state, you have members of the colonizing community living in full civic equality within one state with members of the colonized community. And yet, with huge amounts of creativity and goodwill, they are managing to do it.
In his article, Avnieri asks huffily a bunch of questions that he assumes to think we will agree would have the aanswer “It’s impossible!”
However, the record of South Africa’s amazing cultura/political transformation shows us that for a forward-looking, generous-hearted people, it is by no means “impossible” to find answers to the kinds of questions he asks. Such as these:

    * How will it be possible to run a state in which half of the population will see the fifteenth of May as a holiday, and the other half as a tragedy, a day of national mourning: What will be celebrated exactly?
    * What will be taught in mixed state schools, for instance, about Herzl: Founder of a national movement or western colonialist? What will be taught about the Mufti (of Jerusalem in the period of the British Mandate–I.J.): National hero or collaborator with the Nazis? Or maybe one thing will be taught in the Jewish schools and another in the Arab schools?
    * Will it be permitted to name streets after Hovevei Tzion (a group of ninteenth century Jewish settlers–I.J.), Herzl, Bialik (Israel?s national poet–I.J.), Ben Gurion or (heaven help us) Jabotinsky (founder of the right wing Revisionist Party, that provided the ideological basis for the Etzel and the Lehi Organizations–I.J.)? Will roads be named after Izzadin A-Kassam and Haj Amin al-Husseini? Will Zionism Bvd. in Haifa change its name to something “neutral” (Avineri obviously brings this example because this road used to be called UN Bvd. and its name was changed in 1975 when the UN passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism–I.J.)? Or will a parallel road be named “Hamas Bvd.”, for the sake of balance?
    * What will be taught about the Holocaust? A terrible crime or a Jewish “invention”?
    * How will the history of the 1948 war be taught? What will be said in schools about the suicide bombers: Murderers or heroes of the War of Independence?
    * If organizations, Jewish or Arab, threatening violent action, will be established, which police force exactly will deal with them?
    *If the state has an army, what will it be called exactly? Or maybe there will be two armies, the IDF and the PLA?

But his pessimism that answers to such questions can ever be found is quite misplaced. Let him go to South Africa. Let as many Jewish Israelis as possible go there, and see with their own eyes how challenges exactly similar to these ones have been addressed there…

Camp David 25 years after

So, we’ve ridden out the 20-hour power-out that Hurricane Isabel brought us, and finally I have time to write a few quick things about the conference I went to in DC Wednesday, that marked the 25th anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David accords.
Jimmy Carter was there, presiding, and just about all the people who’d worked for him on Camp David-related things. Except Cy Vance and Roy Atherton, of course, RIP.
On the Israeli and Egyptian sides, neither Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat nor Moshe Dayan was there (RIP). But Aharon Barak–now Israel’s very distinguished Chief Justice– and Eli Rubinstein (now attorney-general) were both there in person. Mubarak’s foreign-affairs advisor Osama el-Baz participated by videolink from Cairo, where he’s been busy trying to help nail down another ceasefire in Palestine/Israel; and Boutros Boutros-Ghali sent in a (non-interactive) videotaped message from Paris.
The first thing that struck me from sitting in the audience for the day-long event was how much everyone seems these days to take the fact of Israel’s peace with Egypt totally for granted.
The CD accords of September 1978 did, however, spell out agreements between the Egyptians and Israelis on two issues: one, that the two governments would negotiate a bilateral peace agreement within three months, and two, that negotiations would start on establishment of a self-governing authority for the Palestinians.
As I mentioned here a few days ago, the Egyptians and Israelis got theirs, but that Palestinian part of the negotiation went nowhere.
So what struck me during Wednesday’s conference was the degree to which that unfinished business totally dominated the discussions…

Continue reading “Camp David 25 years after”

Mideast anniversaries

This day, ten years ago, I was sitting on the White House lawn watching the truly bizarre sight of all the leaders of the US Jewish community and the US Congress–people who until three days earlier had excoriated Yasser Arafat’s name with every fiber of their being–as they lined up to have their own special photo ops with the head of the PLO.
That was the signing of the Oslo peace accords. The next day, Norwegian Foreign Minister Johan Holst came to our house and described some of the ins and outs of what had happened along the way.
Holst died of a stroke not long after. Rabin was killed by a Jewish extremist in 1995. Only Arafat, of those three “principals”, is still alive. And look where he is today…
Twenty-five years ago this day, I was in Beirut, Ms. eager young hotshot reporter, reporting the breaking news on the reactions of Arafat and other PLO leaders to the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations then ongoing at Camp David.
Just a few days later, Begin, Sadat, and Carter emerged from the woods to announce that the Israelis and Egyptians had concluded two parallel Accords. One laid down a process whereby Israel and Egypt would rapidly negotiate a final peace treaty. The other, a process whereby the Israelis and Palestinians would enter a transitional phase on the way to their eventual peace treaty.
The Egyptians and Israelis got theirs. The Palestinians (need it be noted?) did not.
Since then, the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied territories–including East Jerusalem, which many Israeli tallies of this figure don’t even bother to include these days– has soared to more than 400,000. Four million-plus Palestinian refugees still languish in their forced exile. Three million Palestinians live in the walled-off Bantustanettes that the occupation authority has devised for them… Six million Israelis live in fear of the next suicide bombing.
And 25 years in the future– what?

Tragedies, tragedies

I was stunned by yesterday’s bombing of the UN HQ in Baghdad. Why the UN? Why Sergio Vieira de Mello, and so many other members of his team?
I was relieved to learn this morning that our dear friend Ghassan Salameh, now working as the UN mission’s top political advisor in Baghdad, managed to survive. He was described in a story in Lebanon’s Daily Star this morning as pretty distraught over the death of his friend and boss de Mello, and said he’d spent the past four hours scrabbling through the rubble looking for survivors.
Another massive bombing on Jerusalem’s No.2 bus yesterday, as well. When I see the footage of these events, wherever they take place, I remember what it’s like to experience the immediate aftermath of such an attack. Body parts flung into unlikely places. Screams of anguish. Dust and rubble. A universe turned upside down. And then, the enduring sense of loss and of anguish.
International humanitarian law tries, quite rightly, to afford special protections to civilians (and to former combatants who are currently hors de combat.) That distinction is at the heart of the Geneva Conventions and all the rest of international humanitarian law. When you reflect on such horrifying actions as those that created yesterday’s carnage in Baghdad or Jerusalem, you see why such protections are particularly valuable, and why the standard of working hard and actively to avoid harm to noncombatants has to be a vital value for our world.
People who are combatants have taken a special vow when they entered the military. Their special status allows them to kill (people who are other combatants), with impunity. But it also means they accept the risks of being killed or wounded in the line of duty. Civilians have taken no such vow.
These two events were, it seems to me, the result of deliberate actions, designed, planned, and executed by sentient human beings. And these actions aimed deliberately at bringing death and mayhem to noncombatants.
We can, and should, discuss the role of intentionality in all this. Is death as a result of the intention of the perpetrator any qualitatively different– for the victim, for her survivors, for the rest of society–than death by as a result of the perpetrator’s reckless or even wilfull inattention?
After all, many more deaths worldwide are caused through the reckless inattention of decisionmakers who in many cases would not even see themselves as perpetrators of wrongdoing than are caused through the perpetrators’ focused intention.
But there is something about the intentional infliction of harm that I, and I suspect most other people, find particularly revolting. The intentional harm-causer will, after all, fine-tune his actions precisely so as to cause the maximum of harm. (I think of the driver of the cement-mixer in Baghdad carefully easing his explosive-packed vehicle into the right place to cause the maximum death and destruction.) The reckless harm-causer, by contrast, may adjust his actions to minimize harm if the possibility of harm is brought to his attention. The person whom I would describe as the wilfully inattentive harm-causer lies somewhere between those two…
But regardless of the role of intentionality, the proscription against causing harm to civilians has to be stressed again and again.
These two bombings have a clear potential to radically change the course of events in the Middle East, and throughout the world. They bring us several steps closer to the worldwide clash between militant Muslims and the rest of the world that is, I believe, one of the main goals of their perpetrators.
I deeply, deeply do not want this clash to develop further. If it does, the main casualties will be caused not amongst the rich, comfortable segment of global society, but amidst the poor and downtrodden, the communities where people’s social and economic situations have already been chronically troubled for decades, and where inter-group hatreds that are pursued under the banner of values that are claimed to be “religious” can cause almost unimaginable harm.
Think of much of the Third World being transformed into Lebanon. While the arms dealers and other chaos merchants of the comfortable world rake in their tidy profit.
Can we avoid this outcome? Yes, I believe we can. We need urgently to open a dialogue of conscience and of values around the world. The current decade is supposed to be the UN’s Decade of Nonviolence. Now that one of the UN’s finest has been killed by the forces of chaos and confrontation, it would be great if Kofi Annan would lead this new call for conscience and values. It would involve restating some important values on which the UN was founded, like those of national independence (for Iraqis) and of human equality (Israel/Palestine), and of peaceful and speedy resolution of outstanding conflicts…
Along the way, though, we also need to restate the core values of international humanitarian law, and work hard to re-establish the global consensus– in the Middle East, in Africa, and elswhere– that regardless of the nature of the conflict or oppression, causing damage to civilians is always wrong.
I note that this a core value of much of traditional Islamic writing on the constraints to be observed in times of war. We urgently need to initiate a global dialogue with Muslim political activists of all stripes on this issue.

Israel and South Africa compared

I wanted to write a bit about one of the conversations I had on Star island last week, one in which we were comparing the issues of Israel and South Africa. The person I was talking with was Heather Gregg, a nearly-done doctoral student at MIT…
(The following is a slight revision of something I put in the latter half of the post I put up on JWN on July 27. But it was kind of buried down there. So I gave it its own post, here.)
The main thing people tend to say when the Israel/South Africa comparison comes up is, “Well, of course, it’s unlucky the Palestinians don’t have a Nelson Mandela.” My main reactions to that are threefold.
Firstly, it is quite true that neither Yasser Arafat nor Mahmoud Abbas is Nelson Mandela. But it’s also true that neither Ariel Sharon nor any other Israeli leader is a Frederick W. De Klerk… Something real and important happened inside the Afrikaaner community during the 1980s that enabled their leaders to accept the hugely radical notion of– hold onto your chairs– human equality, and equal political rights for all of God’s children.
Has this happened n the Jewish-Israeli community yet? I honestly don’t think so.
Secondly, just because the palestinians don’t have a Mandela, does that mean we shouldn’t pay any attention to their claims? Was George Washington Mandela?
And then thirdly, it wasn’t just the personalities of Mandela and Tutu or any other individuals that allowed the ANC to win in its struggle for fully equal political rights for all South Africans. Face it, Mandela was in jail for 28 years, and quite incommunicado there for most of that time.
What it was that brought the ANC’s remarkable victory in the 1990-94 period was the clarity and discipline of the organization itself. It was decades of tireless organizational and political work that brought them victory: work that succeeded in mobilizing people from all sectors of the South African population.
And that was where one important part of the clarity came in. The ANC was quite clear that the South Africa they sought was one that included everyone, even whitefolks, on a basis of real political equality. The ANC had credible whitefolks in its leadership. It walked the talk… And that stance was not uncontroversial in a black community in which “Black Consciousness” ideas were also strong…
So it’s important to notice the huge differnces between the culture of the ANC and that of the PLO or, even more importantly, Fateh. Clarity? Discipline? Where are they?
Obviously, organizations like these are the creations of individual men and women. But rather than focusing on any individual charismatic qualities that Mandela undoubtedly does have (and Y. Arafat notably lacks), I think it’s much more useful to focus on the abilities each of those men and their respective comrades-in-arms showed in the field of building disciplined and ideologically clear national-liberatin organizations… And that’s where the really important difference between them lies.
Having said that, there are still many, many parallels between the actons of successive Israeli governments and that of the apartheid governments in South Africa… Including of course their highly discriminatory practices on the ground, and the attempt that both of those leaderships have sustained over the years to keep their own people, and their supporters around the world, mobilized by reference to the threat of what the Afrikaaners used to call a “Total Onslaught” from the hostile indigenous populatons all around them…
Well, more on this later. Send in some comments!

Amos Oz on compassion

Yes! A great piece– once again– from Israeli writer Amos Oz. There was a small period there, at the beginning of the current intifada, when he got a little too accusatory for my taste. But this piece, from the newspaper formerly known as the Manchester Guardian, is truly a great one.
He writes:

    This is the time for the rest of the world to offer both sides as much help, empathy and understanding as possible. This is the time for well-meaning governments and individuals to come forth with a “mini Marshall Plan” in order to resettle the Palestinian refugees in the state of Palestine. It is also the time to offer Israel the security guarantees it will need in return for renouncing the occupied territories.
    This is time for compassion, not for historical accounting and not for blaming. Neither Sharon nor Abbas is likely to become a Nelson Mandela. But whether they like it or not it looks as if their sleeves are now caught in the cogwheels of the peace process…

Yes, yes, yes! (Sorry to get a little Molly Bloomish here.) But compassion exactly what I’ve been urging, for a while now.
I guess the only point where I’m a little wary of what Oz says is when he writes: it will be almost impossible for those two leaders to run away now from the peace process. Well, at least he qualified his forecast a little bit.
Gosh I remember all those oh-so-wise pundits back in the mid-1990s– Rita hauser and Judith Kipper come to mind, but there were plenty of others– who told us, “The peace process started at Oslo is irreversible!”
Irreversible, huh? Did those people ever read any history?
Still, I’ll forgive Oz his “almost impossible.” Firstly, because he did qualify it. And secondly because his main argument, re compassion, is such a great one.

More on Israel’s assassins

Friend Judy S sent me the URL for an interesting examination of the degree to which Israel’s policy of extra-judicial executions (a.k.a. assassinations) has affected/stimulated the development of similar policies by the UK and the US. I don’t know anything about the writer, Richard Bennett. But he seems to present a LOT of information and I can’t imagine someone would do this in the public media, on such a sensitive subject, without being pretty sure of his sources.
On another note, my old friend Tom Friedman has a fairly good piece on the Israeli assassins issue in today NYT. His main point is that– regardless of whether Israel has the “right” to undertake such killings, or not– the policy seriously undercuts the chances for peace by strengthening the Palestinian hardliners of Hamas.
Is Tom assuming there that Sharon actually wants peace? No, he doesn’t seem to be doing that. (Hey, Tom was in Beirut in the summer of 1982. He has a pretty good take on Sharon.)
But he does pull his punches in a couple of significant ways. First, by not even mentioning the possibility that maybe Sharon and his cronies might actually want to undercut the chances for peace? Second, by not specifying just how many Palestinians have died in these gruesome and deliberate acts of (totally illegal) killing.
According to recent figures from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose work is very carefully done and whose director, Raji Sourani, is a man of huge integrity, no fewer than 243 Palestinians had been killed in assination operations between the beginning of the current intifada and June 3, 2003. (Of course, the number has risen substantially since then.) Of the 243, “at least 90 (37% of the total number of killed in assassinations) were bystanders, of whom 31 (13%) were children.”
Okay, so we assume that “only” 90 of those killed in those operations were bystanders. Then 153 of them were in some way connected with Palestinian militant groups.
Tom F, in his piece, writes, “Have you noticed how often Israel kills a Hamas activist and the victim is described by Israelis as “a senior Hamas official” or a ‘key operative’? This has led me to wonder: How many senior Hamas officials could there be? We’re not talking about I.B.M. here. We’re talking about a ragtag terrorist group. By now Israel should have killed off the entire Hamas leadership twice. Unless what is happening is something else, something I call Palestinian math: Israel kills one Hamas operative and three others volunteer to take his place, in which case what Israel is doing is actually self-destructive.”
Well, by that token, then Israel’s deliberate killing of 153 Palestinian militants would have persuaded 459 of their friends to step up and take their places.
I disagree with quite a few things Tom writes. (What else is new?) But it’s certainly worthwhile to see him hammering home the essential point that, “The fact is, Ariel Sharon’s two years of using the Israeli Army alone to fight terrorism have not made Israelis more secure.”