Category: Israel-2009

Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 2: Naomi Chazan

Naomi Chazan was one of the founders of Meretz,
which was founded in 1992 as a leftist and pro-peace party.  She was one of Meretz’s
MKs from 1992 through 2003, serving from 1999 through
2003 as a deputy speaker of the Knesset. She is currently Chairman of Meretz’s party congress and president of the New Israel
Fund, which tries to support pro-peace and social justice projects within
Israel.

She was one of the few Israeli public figures who spoke out
publicly against the war from the very beginning. (By contrast, Meretz’s current leader Haim Oron actively
supported the war in its early days, only coming out against some of its
later phases.)

On March 1, I talked with Chazan at
some length about the decline of the Israeli left.  I suggested that a good starting point might be the time in
September 1982 when, as news about the massacres that had been carried out
under the the IDF’s
auspices in the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps south of Beirut  started to hit the international airwaves, a massive
crowd estimated at some 600,000 people gathered in Tel Aviv to protest the IDF’s involvement in the affair.

(I still, personally, think that was the Israeli peace
movement’s finest hour. 600,000 people was roughly
one-fifth of Israel’s entire Jewish population at the time. It was huge. They
succeeded in forcing the government to form the Kahan
Commission, which ultimately came out with its well-known censure of  Defense
Minister Sharon. They forced prime minister Menachem Begin to suddenly understand the degree to which
he had been duped by Sharon. And they showed that organized mass action can have a serious effect, even in a society as heavily
militarized in all respects as Israel’s. 
Of course, 
as Daphna Golan and many others have noted, there was  no protest activity on anything like
that scale during Israel’s barbaric recent war in Gaza—and that was
one where the IDF undertook its own barbarism rather than, as in 1982,
subcontracting it out to Lebanese Maronite
subordinates.)

Anyway, Chazan argued that 1992
rather than 1982 should be taken as the starting point of an attempt to chart
the decline of the Israeli left–

In  the elections of 1992, remember,
Labour won 44 seats, and they were down to 13 in this
past election. In ’92, Meretz had 12 seats, and they
are now down to just three.

So that’s the scale of it… And yes,
there is just now the start of an auto-critique inside Meretz.
We think we lost two seats to Livni and some votes to
Hadash.

Continue reading “Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 2: Naomi Chazan”

Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 1: Daphna Golan

    I have so much great material in my notebooks from my recent trip! Now, I’m going to start presenting some of the highlights from the interviews I did with various Israeli figures, mainly in the peace movement. These are, of course, in addition to the interview I did with Likud strategic thinker Efraim Inbar, which I already published here, and some highlights from the interview with Benjamin Pogrund, as published here. I have more from Pogrund that i might use sometime, too. he’s a fascinating representative of a fairly influential brand of “Left” Zionism.

Daphna
Golan is a long-time Jewish-Israeli activist for peace and human rights who
runs a human-rights program in the law school of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
We met in late February in the university’s Ramat Gan
campus. She spoke very poignantly about how isolated she and other Israeli
peace activists had felt during the Gaza war.

Even during the war there were only
twenty people or so taking part in the weekly Women in Black antiwar protests.
There was one antiwar demonstration in Tel Aviv with about 20,000 people in it.
But most pathetic of all was an action that Peace Now organized here in
Jerusalem: There were fewer than twenty people taking part.

Honestly, the war was the worst
time for us, we were feeling so isolated. But it seemed so obvious to us that
the war would not “achieve” anything except spread more misery and anger.

… During the war, of course,
Israelis weren’t shown anything about what was happening inside Gaza. We don’t
even have CNN on our cable offerings here. Mostly, what we
shown on our t.v. was
lots of ex-generals giving their ‘analysis’ of events. But it was meaningless
technical gobbledygook: ‘Bank of targets’—what is that supposed to mean?

Later, as we walked out the campus’s main gate, she pointed
to a fence where, she said, during the war some rightwing students had hung
some very racist posters urging the killing of all the Gazans.

Continue reading “Israelis, mainly peaceniks, Pt. 1: Daphna Golan”

Problems of the west’s extreme casualty aversion, Afghanistan and Gaza

The extreme aversion of the US and Israeli armies to own-soldier casualties has huge and often unintended consequences in the realms of both strategic effectiveness and ethics. This is now being amply demonstrated with regard both to Israel’s practices in Gaza (and the West Bank), and US military’s practices in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Joshua Foust of the generally excellent Registan blog has a ‘guest writer’ gig on the Reuters Pakistan blog, summing up the most important things he learned during his just-completed ten-week military embed with the US forces in Afghanistan.
His main point, well illustrated in the Reuters post, is that the culture of extreme casualty aversion that’s dominant in the US military hobbles it from waging effective “counter-insurgency” in Afghanistan.
Writing that, “It is a cliché that, in counterinsurgency, one must be among ‘the people’,” Foust then shows some of the many ways in which the own-soldier casualty aversion of the US forces in Afghanistan means that that is not happening:

    A rural insurgency is a devil’s game. It is difficult for a foreign counterinsurgent force to concentrate itself to maximize effectiveness, in part because the insurgency itself is not concentrated. When there are no obvious population clusters, there are no obvious choices for bases. Bagram Air Base, the country’s largest military base, is in the middle of nowhere, comparatively speaking – dozens of miles north of Kabul, and a 45-minute drive from Charikar, the nearest city in Parwan Province. FOB Salerno, a large base in Khost Province, is miles away from Khost City, the province’s capital-and the road in between is riddled with IEDs.
    The many smaller bases strung in between are surrounded by enormous Hesco barriers, concertina wire, and guard towers. No one is allowed on the base without being badged and interviewed by base security, and in many places delivery trucks are forced to wait in the open for 24 hours before completing their trips to the dining halls, clinics, or technology offices.
    There are other ways in which Coalition Forces are separated from the people of Afghanistan beyond their heavily fortified bases. Most transit – on patrol, on delivery runs, or on humanitarian missions – is performed through Mine Resistance Ambush Protection, or MRAP vehicles. These enormous trucks, thickly plated with metal blast shields on the bottom with tiny blue-tinted ballistic glass, make it near-impossible to even see the surrounding countryside from another other than the front seat.
    On the narrow mountain roads that sometimes collapse under the mutli-ton trucks, soldiers drive, too, in up-armored Humvees, which are similarly coated in thick plates of armor and heavy glass windows they aren’t allowed to open.
    When soldiers emerge from their imposing vehicles, they are covered from head to groin in various forms of shielding: thick ceramic plates on the torso, the ubiquitous Kevlar helmets, tinted ballistic eye glasses, neck and nape guards, heavy shrapnel-resistant flaps of fabric about the shoulders and groin, and fire-resistant uniforms. A common sentiment among Afghans who see these men and women wandering in their midst is that they look like aliens, or, if they know of them, robots.
    There is no doubt that MRAPs, up-armored Humvees, and the seventy pounds or so of bullet and blast shielding has saved the lives of countless soldiers. But counterinsurgency is counterintuitive: in the relentless quest to ensure a casualty-free war, it seems the West has begun to engineer its own defeat.
    By separating itself so completely from the population it claims to be trying to win-even at Bagram, where there is almost no combat, ever, it is almost impossible for a soldier or civilian to walk outside the gates to purchase something in the nearby bazaar-there remain precious few opportunities to do the gritty work of actually trying to “win hearts and minds”.
    The end result is stark: in a war that is desperately short of the troops needed to provide security to increasingly less remote communities, 93% of the soldiers stationed at the Coalition’s primary base never walk outside the gates. Instead of a focus on separating the insurgents from the population – another clichéd pillar of counterinsurgency – the focus seems instead to be simply killing as many of the enemy as can be identified.

I would just amend what he writes in one way, what “the west” is trying to fight in Afghanistan is not entirely a “casualty-free war”, but rather one in which the casualties among its own soldiers are reduced as far as possible toward zero. Casualties among the identified “enemy” may indeed, as he writes, tend to get maximized. But intense aversion to own-soldier casualties also– in both Afghanistan and Gaza– leads to far greater casualties than would otherwise be the case among the civilian population.
In Gaza, as many testimonies from the IDF soldiers themselves have now made clear, the general ROEs were that own-soldier casualties should be avoided even if that meant opening fire on Palestinian civilians. That, despite the fact that even the IDF’s own code of ethical conduct reminds soldiers that a soldier has a duty under international law to avoid civilian casualties even at the cost of some additional risk to his own troops.
In Gaza, many of the killings of civilians were fairly up-close affairs, but others were inflicted from drones or from aircraft flying at very high altitude– just like the way the US forces operate in Afghanistan (and Pakistan.)
This does not, as Foust notes, help win “hearts and minds” in a counter-insurgency context in Afghanistan.
And nor did it succeed, in Gaza, in inflicting a paralyzing dose of “shock and awe” to the Gazan population, where that seemed to be more of the intention than any form of, um, winning “hearts and minds.”
In today’s Haaretz, Amos Harel writes that before the latest Gaza war:

    The General Staff expected that Israelis would have trouble accepting heavy Israel Defense Forces losses.
    The army chose to overcome this problem with an aggressive plan that included overwhelming firepower. The forces, it was decided, would advance into the urban areas behind a “rolling curtain” of aerial and artillery fire, backed up by intelligence from unmanned aircraft and the Shin Bet. The lives of our soldiers take precedence, the commanders were told in briefings. Before the operation, [GOC Southern Command Yoav] Galant and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi painted a bleak picture for the cabinet ministers. “Unlike in Lebanon, the civilians in Gaza won’t have many places to escape to,” Ashkenazi warned. “When an armored force enters the city, shells will fly, because we’ll have to protect our people.”
    A large part of the operation was conducted by remote control. “The Palestinians are completely transparent to us,” says A., a reservist whose brigade was posted in the Gaza Strip. “The Shin Bet has people everywhere. We observe the whole area from the air and usually the Shin Bet coordinator can also tell you who lives in what house.” The Shin Bet defines the enemy and, for the most part, someone who belongs to Hamas’ civilian welfare organizations (the da’awa) is treated the same way as a member of its military wing, the Iz al-Din al-Qassam.
    Essentially, a person only needs to be in a “problematic” location, in circumstances that can broadly be seen as suspicious, for him to be “incriminated” and in effect sentenced to death. Often, there is no need for him to be identified as carrying a weapon. Three people in the home of a known Hamas operative, someone out on a roof at 2 A.M. about a kilometer away from an Israeli post, a person walking down the wrong street before dawn – all are legitimate targets for attack.
    “It feels like hunting season has begun,” says A. “Sometimes it reminds me of a Play Station [computer] game. You hear cheers in the war room after you see on the screens that the missile hit a target, as if it were a soccer game.”
    …There is a discrepancy between the official military response, of denial and horrified disapproval, the testimonies of the Rabin pre-military preparatory course graduates, and the response to those reports by key officers, unwilling to be identified.
    “What did you think would happen?” a senior officer wondered this week. “We sent 10,000 troops into Gaza, more than 200 tanks and armored personnel carriers, 100 bulldozers. What were 100 bulldozers going to do there?”
    The IDF estimates that approximately 2,000 houses were destroyed in the fighting. The Palestinians say the figure is twice that. IDF officers, who were not surprised by the testimonies, recalled that during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, military courts convicted soldiers for killing civilians, including the British peace activist Tom Hurndall, who was killed in Gaza in 2003.

Harel also reminds us that it was not until the Second Intifada, which started in 2000, that the IDF judge advocate general “annulled the practice of opening an investigation into every killed Palestinian.”
Wow, that would be how many investigations they would have to launch into what went on in Gaza?
What Harel writes about the IDF’s targeting doctrine indicates very clearly indeed that the IDF was not trying to make the distinction, deemed essential under international humanitarian law, between combatant (legal) and noncombatant (illegal) targets.
I don’t have time to write more about this important topic now. I’ll just note that the lethal and destructive consequences of the decision that both the IDF and apparently also the US military have made, to work to avoid own-soldier casualties even where this can clearly be expected to increase the casualties inflicted on noncombatants are first and foremost quite tragic for the civilian residents of the war-zone.
Making this decision to value the lives of one’s own soldiers above that of civilian residents of the war-zone is racist and, quite simply, illegal under international humanitarian law.
Also, at the end of the day these decisions are strategically either ineffective in these kinds of wars or even actively counter-productive.
All of Foust’s post there on the Reuters blog bears close reading. He points out that the extreme own-soldier casualty aversion of the US troops in Afghanistan has resulted in huge areas of the country simply being ceded to the effective control of insurgent forces.
He concludes with these wise words:

    It is that mentality – severe risk aversion, coupled with attention paid to process rather than outcome – that risks ultimately undoing the Western mission in Afghanistan. As an institution, the U.S. Army seems unwilling to make the difficult choices necessary to create the conditions for peace: a population that is adequately protected from the crime, drug, and war lords, and therefore no longer contributing to the desperate regional instability.
    It is also a mentality that can be challenged in small doses from below, but demands concerted action from above. Command at the highest levels is vital in changing course, and admitting that war is actually a terrible and ghastly thing that requires your own people dying to win. It is a choice not many at the top seem willing to consider.

I should note that I disagree strongly with Foust in his assessment that for the US “winning” in Afghanistan is even possible. But he is a realist; and he’s right to note that the idea that the US can ever “win” in Afghanistan without taking very many casualties among its own soldiers is quite wrongheaded.
He’s equally right to remind everyone that “war is actually a terrible and ghastly thing.”
Because of that, international customary law lays upon every international actor that has a deep conflict with another party a very strong responsibility to find non-military ways to resolve that conflict.
Do such non-military ways exist in the case of Israel, with the Palestinians, or the US, in Afghanistan?
Of course they do.

Those revelations of IDF violations in Gaza

Kudos to Haaretz for publishing the first English-language accounts of the “spill the beans” session held at Oranim Academic College February 13 in which dozens of IOF soldiers who had served in Gaza talked openly about many of the laws-of-war violations they saw their fellow soldiers committing there.
Yesterday Haaretz followed up, with the fullest English-language version to date of the session. This is an important text that bears close reading.
Especially this portion, from the testimony of a soldier codenamed Aviv:

    At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then … I call this murder … in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified – we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?
    From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn’t fled. I didn’t really understand: On the one hand they don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault … This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this…

According to Aviv he changed the orders he had gotten from “above” by using loudspeakers to give the residents of the houses five minutes to get out of them before the killing squads would go in.
“Above”, though: Where did those orders come from?
It seems that the problem of IDF violations in Gaza was not only (and perhaps not mainly) one of poor training and disorganization at the NCO level, as Pat Lang had earlier surmised, but one of fundamentally inhumane and possibly criminal orders being issued from the higher echelons.
After the Oranim revelations were published– they came out in Maariv, as well, though not I think in English there– the IDF promised it would launch an investigation and Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the IDF was still “the most ethical army in the world.” In light of the facts that have also been emerging– in the soldiers’ testmonies at Oranim, and elsewhere including here— about the incendiary and criminal tracts distributed to troops in Gaza by the IDF’s own rabbis, and about the widespread commissioning by IDF units of extremely hateful and anti-humane T-shirts, Barak’s bleating is outrageous and the idea that the IDF itself can ever satisfactorily “investigate” its own deep culture of supporting and condoning laws-of-war violations (= war crimes) is completely non-credible.
By the way, the whole of Uri Blau’s piece there about the inciteful T-shirts is worth reading. The soldiers he interviews there who’ve been involved in commissioning, selling and/or designing some of the many designs of these T-shirts make quite clear that the designs receive advance approval from officers or NCOs before they are distributed within the units.
A few final notes:
1. Palestinian survivors of the atrocities in Gaza and local and international human rights groups had earlier produced numerous reports, since almost the first days of the war, about the IDF’s widespread commission of law-of-war violations in Gaza. Asked about those reports, IDF spokesmen nearly always issued strong denials, though where the evidence was incontrovertible they said they would investigate what had happened themselves. (No signs, though, that they ever did so.) These spokesmen should be held accountable for their lies. They include reserve officer Michael Oren, now back to his day-job teaching students at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
2. At a broader level, Israel as a state, the IDF as an army, and the responsible officials within the IDF should all be held completely accountable for these reported violations which– as now described by numerous IDF soldiers themselves– certainly mount to the level of war crimes. The ROEs or standing orders mandating this behavior, these soldiers say, came “from above.” Everyone in the world concerned about the commission of atrocities, and most especially those of us who are US taxpayers and thereby also morally responsible for IDF actions, need to gain a complete understanding of what the ROEs were and who signed off on them; and we need to see the responsible levels within the IDF or the Israeli government punished and excluded from the future exercise of power. Until this happens, all officers in the higher echelons of the IDF should be considered possibly culpable.
3. As clearly described by the soldiers in the Oranim meeting, and as previously revealed in any number of reports, one of the highest priorities of the IDF in the Gaza operation was to avoid IDF casualties to the highest degree possible– even where this would involve increasing the risk of harm to civilians. This was because of the effects of Israeli war dead on domestic Israeli politics both during the lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful IDF campaign in Lebanon 1982-2000 and the effects of Israeli war dead during the 2006 debacle in Lebanon: Inflicting a lot of damage on Gaza, and being seen by everyone in the world as being quite ready to do so, was an important part of what was meant when Israeli leaders described the war’s goal as being to “increase the credibility of Israel’s deterrence.”
International humanitarian law, by contrast, requires that members of military units be prepared to take additional casualties among their own numbers in order to avoid harm to civilians; and the IDF’s own “permanent” ethics code states

    IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or [who are] prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.

During the Gaza war, that ethical norm clearly got over-ridden at some level. At what level, and by whom?
4. The tendency of many Israelis to engage in hand-wringing self-referentialism continues. Jeffrey Goldberg comments on his blog,

    the Jewish people didn’t struggle for national equality, justice and freedom so that some of its sons could behave like Cossacks. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not equating the morality of the IDF to that of Hamas. The goal of Hamas is to murder innocent people; the goal of the IDF is to avoid murdering innocent people. But when the IDF fails to achieve its goal, and ends up inflicting needless destruction and suffering, it sullies not only its own name, but the name of the Jewish state…

His post there is titled “How far has the IDF fallen?” Um, Jeffrey, how about if the IDF, in which you once served, apparently with pride, has always or very often been like this in the past… ?
5. Some Israelis and pro-Israelis just love to wax poetic about how sensitive the IDF’s soldiers are… how they not only shoot but they engage much more sensitively in the activity known as “shooting and crying.” Possibly the most mendacious and nauseating version of this sentiment is the one piously intoned by Golda Meir in 1969:

    When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.

(Barf.)
Ah, well, it is not just the “sons” of the Arabs who are getting killed by the IDF these days… It is also their babies, their grandmothers, their sick, their halt, and their lame.
But here’s a memo to the ghost of Mrs. Meir and to all other Israelis who try to appear oh-so-“sensitive” as they go about, or try to condone from afar, the IDF’s murderous and criminal actions: No-one is “forcing” you to act this way. The Israeli government as a body, and individual Israelis who serve in their nation’s army, all have a choice. One choice is to end occupation; end the attempt to dominate and oppress your neighbors, the Palestinians; and make real peace. The other is to carry on with the murderous business as usual. It’s up to you to choose.
But please, if your choice is to carry on with the killing and destruction, don’t come to us to expect any sympathy for the choice you made.

Israelis’ Nakba-deception exposed

My life as a writer frequently involves my sense of time spooling around itself in interesting ways. After arriving back in the US after my recent trip to the Middle East it took a bit of time to catch up with the stack of periodicals that had arrived in my absence. Only yesterday did I get around to reading Amira Hass’s searing essay “Return to Gaza” (subscription required) in the February 26 edition of the London Review of Books. I was on a train, coming to New York to see my grandbaby, Matilda.
More time spooling around on itself involved in this grandparenting business, too.
Only later on during the train-ride (around Wilmington) did I get around to reading Gabriel Piterberg’s extremely important review, in the same issue, of three books by the recently deceased Israeli author S. Yizhar that have recently been translated and made available to English-language readers.
Yizhar was born in 1916 in the Zionist settlement of Rehovot. Piterberg demonstrates in the review why these books of his are extremely important texts for anyone seeking to understand Jewish-Israeli life and culture– and why it is also really excellent that finally, just in the past couple of years, they have been published in English.
My starting point here is the statement that then-prime minister Golda Meir made in 1969 to the effect that, “There never was a Palestinian people. It’s not as if there used to be people here who were Palestinian Arabs and we came and chased them away.” (I’ll pinpoint the the exact quote later; it’s in my 1984 book on the PLO and many other places too.)
That was a classic and politically weighty statement of flat-out Nakba denial. Made in English to the London Sunday Times.
But did Mrs. Meir believe what she stated? And did most Jewish Israelis at that time, in the late 1960s, believe it too?
Now, I think it’s clear that she did not… And that mendacity in her statement raises the nature of what she was engaged from the already worrying level of Nakba denial to the even more serious level of outright Nakba deception.
I never really gave much thought to the question of Mrs. Meir’s “truthfulness”– and that of the rest of her generation– on this question until recently. I guess I just assumed it was possible that somewhere in the tumultuous and busy 21 years that intervened between 1948 and 1969 a lot of Jewish Israelis had– whether through deliberate suppression of their own memories or other mechanisms– kind of “forgotten” what had happened in 1948.
Piterberg’s review makes it quite clear that that had not happened; but that instead, within the “safe” and generally hidden confines of their own Hebrew-language discourse, throughout the mid- and late-1960s Israelis were grappling at significant national levels with how to deal with the true story of the mass ethnic cleansings of 1948. This, because one of the Yizhar books Piterberg reviews, Khirbet Khizeh was itself a poignant account, fictionalized but recognizably partly autobiographical, of the ethnic cleansing of a fictional Palestinian village of that name. Piterberg tells us, the book had been written in the 1948 war’s immediate aftermath. And, even more significantly,

    Khirbet Khizeh became a set book in Israeli secondary schools in 1964… The story, which deals with the cleansing of rural Arab Palestine as Yizhar experienced it, goes to the heart of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict and has given rise to great unease, even evasiveness, among liberal commentators in Israel…
    … Yizhar [is] perhaps the greatest poet of Palestinian landscape in modern Hebrew. He is also a historian of destruction and expulsion. In the closing pages of the story, watching the humiliated Palestinians [who have previously been described as “most of them elderly or women or children”] huddling in Israeli lorries, Yizhar’s narrator has an epiphany:

      Something struck me like lightning. All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like… I had never been in the Diaspora– I said to myself– I had never known what it was like… but people had spoken to me, told me, taught me, and repeatedly recited to me, from every direction, in books and newspapers, everywhere: exile. They had played on all my nerves. Our nation’s protest to the world: exile! It had entered me, apparently, with my mother’s milk. What in fact had we perpetrated here today?

This text, remember, was being taught in Israeli secondary schools from 1964 on. Then, in the 1970s, it was made into a play. Jewish-Israelis from that generation– and from today’s generation, too– have no justification whatsoever for saying “We never knew!” about what happened in 1948.
Piterberg’s whole review is well worth reading, as too seem to be the three Yizhar books he writes about.
One is a largely autobiographical novel, Preliminaries, that Yizhar completed only in 1991, when he was 75. It recounts many details of his youth growing up on a number of moshava rural settlements and also in the ever-growing suburbs north of Tel Aviv. As a boy– and into his adulthood– Yizhar seems to have had a great fondness for the landscape of rural Palestine and an understanding, as Piterberg notes, that what made it look so appealing and so “Biblical” was precisely the labor expended there over generations by its Palestinian Arab landowners and farmers: The people who had planted and tended all those “Biblical” accoutrements of the landscape like olive-trees and grape-vines; who tended the sheep, made the wine and olive oil, and did all those other “Biblical” things that made the land so attractive for the Zionist settlers.
Piterberg cites an interview Yizhar gave to Ha’aretz in 2005, shortly before his death. In it, the interviewer asked, “Why were you the only member of your generation who saw the catastrophe that befell the Arabs?” Yizhar replied:

    The others were attentive only to relationships with other people, among themselves. I looked at the landscape, the landscape was a central part of my personality, and that’s why I saw the Arabs. The landscape was the paper on which everything was written, and afterwards it gets torn and nobody looks at the paper.

Actually, that answer is interesting at a number of different levels. There is a clear implication, especially in the first sentence– even from Yizhar– that the only people who are really people in their own right are the Jews; whereas the Arabs became recognizable to him only by virtue of the role he saw them playing with respect to the land, rather than in their own right.
But at least he did recognize that they had an essential and important relationship to the land. Unlike all the hasbaristas in the 1960s and since who continued to perpetrate deliberate deception about what had happened in the Nakba of 1948.
Piterberg writes that at the end of Preliminaries,

    Yizhar delivers his final verdict on the Zionist project. The child is haunted less by the possibility that Zionism in the shape of a powerful, durable settler nation-state might not succeed than by the certainty that its realisation would erase the landscape of pre-1948 rural Palestine. In the final scene the boy is sent to collect baskets of grapes from a nearby vineyard and realises that ‘soon … none of this will remain, neither this vineyard nor this sandy path… ‘ … He thinks of the extinction of the villages and the fate of their inhabitants: “These Arabs will not remain… Zarnuga will not remain and Qubeibeh will not remain and Yibneh will not remain, they will go away and start to live in Gaza.’

And then, in a master-stroke of editorial judgment, the very next piece, placed in a box right under that sentence, is Amira Hass’s description of some of what happened to residents of Gaza during the recent war.
In case anyone reading this doesn’t understand this, some three-fourths of Gaza’s current residents are refugees from what became Israel in 1948.

Likud strategic thinker Inbar’s self-confident view of the world

Jerusalem, March 3—Israel’s government should try to block the reconstruction of Gaza; incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu might try to send the military back into Gaza at some point; the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dead; and Israel is strong and the rest of the world just needs to get used to that: These were some of the key themes that emerged in an interview I conducted here March 1 with senior Likud security-affairs specialist Efraim Inbar.
Inbar is Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, and has often advised Likud leaders in the past. The views he expressed in the interview coincided at several points with those expressed in an op-ed article published in Yediot Aharonoth today by former Netanyahu national-security adviser Giora Eiland.
Like so many other interviews that foreign journalists and researchers conduct in Jerusalem, this one was conducted over coffee in a lounge of the lovely, traditionally built American Colony Hotel. Inbar is a friendly man in his early 60s who wears a yarmulke atop a mass of springy white curls.
I asked his assessment of the prospects for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “The most important factor for us is not the Arabs, but the Americans,” he said. “And honestly, no-one there really believes in this. Even at Annapolis, in spite of all the fine rhetoric about concluding an agreement before the end of the year, in actual fact their only goal was a ‘shelf agreement’—that is, an agreement that could sit on a shelf for an indefinite ength of time.
“The two-state solution is passé—because the Palestinians aren’t up to it. The only way it could work would be if two conditions were fulfilled: that the Palestinians should support it, which they don’t; and that the state would have a monopoly on the use of force, which the Palestinian Authority doesn’t have.”

Continue reading “Likud strategic thinker Inbar’s self-confident view of the world”

Reconstruct Gaza? A Likud adviser says ‘No’

Egypt is today hosting a big conference in Sharm al-Sheikh to rally (mainly pro-western) donors to the task of rebuilding the large amounts of housing and public infrastructure in Gaza that were destroyed by Israel during the recent war.
Ramallah-based Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayad is requesting $2.5 billion for the task. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reportedly carrying with her to Sharm a pledge of $900 million of US funds. Different governments and groups around the world are even competing to give (or be seen to give) money for this reconstruction effort. In some cases, like that of the US, this intention of giving reconstruction aid now seems bizarre and hypocritical, given that Washington could have stopped Israel’s assault on Gaza in its very first hours, and thereby prevented just about all of the horrendous damage Gazans have suffered; but under Pres. Bush it chose not to do so.
But there is one party that might well be strongly opposed to the rebuilding of Gaza: the Likud Party, which is shortly going to take over power in Israel. In a telling op-ed published in The Jerusalem Post in early February, Prof. Efraim Inbar, an adviser to Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, argued that,

    The developing international campaign to reconstruct Gaza is strategic folly. It is also unlikely to be effective. And, under current circumstances, it is also immoral.

The article strongly supported a policy of punishing all the people of Gaza for the actions of Hamas.
I interviewed Inbar here in Jerusalem yesterday. Referring to his article and to today’s donors’ conference, he admitted that the international community might (misguidedly) insist on rebuilding Gaza– “but we can always slow the process down.”
Indeed until now Israel, which is the “occupying power” in the Gaza Strip, has complete control over the passage of all freight into or out of the Strip. Since the Gaza war it has used that power to prevent the entry of just about all the basic materials required for physical rebuilding: cement, rebar, glass, piping, etc. So it seems that the outgoing Olmert government has already been working hard to prevent or slow down the rebuilding of Gaza.
Inbar is the Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. In another part of yesterday’s interview he talked about the need to maintain the extensive series of roadblocks and other movement-control mechanisms deep inside the West Bank with which Israel controls its 2.3 million Palestinians. Those roadblocks currently number more than 600, and have completely paralyzed the ability of West Bankers to build anything like a functioning economy.
Inbar described the West Bank roadblocks as another part of the effort to punish, or “train”, the Palestinians. The US and other governments have urged Israel to reduce their number. But Inbar told me, “The Americans may push us on this, and we may remove one or two roadblocks. We’ll just play with the Americans!”
He expressed a lot of confidence that, despite the different “tone” he now hears coming out of Obama’s Washington, the new president will not end up doing anything very different on the Palestinian issue than his predecessor. “Time is on our side,” he said a number of times.

US and Israel: End ‘Manhunting’ now!

Pres. Obama has apparently ‘seen the light’ regarding one of the anti-humane and illegal practices instituted by the Bush administration in its “Global war on terror”: the use of Guantanamo Bay as an extra-legal grey zone in which the US can carry out major human rights infractions at will. But he has shown no readiness yet to end the US’s indefinite detentions of alleged ‘enemy combatants’ in Bagram airbase, Afghanistan. And elsewhere in Afghanistan and even Pakistan, the US military has even under Obama, stepped up its recourse to extra-judicial executions of alleged “bad guys.”
Meantime, Israel continues to threaten the lives of numerous leaders and activists in movements that oppose it.
All these manhunting operations– that is, lethal operations conducted against people who are not currently engaged in armed hostilities— are quite illegal under international law. For this reason alone, they need to be ended, just as surely as the Guantanamo detention camp needs to be closed.
In addition, these manhunting operations, a.k.a. extra-judicial executions, or just plain assassinations, have a number of practical effects that are extremely detrimental to international peace and security:

    1. They rain down death and injury on large numbers of people who are in the vicinity of the identified targets.
    2. Because they rely on secret information that is never exposed to the light of day or tested in a fair courtroom, they run the real risk of misidentification of targets and of malicious false accusations being acted upon.
    3. Because of the breadth of the casualties, damage, and human displacement that ensue from these operations they frequently serve to strengthen the determination of targeted constituencies– and other constituencies that may be far afield– to become even harder-line and more violent.
    4. Plus, because these operations frequently target political leaders, they can considerably complicate and delay the politics and logistics of conflict termination.

The NYT reports today that

    With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.

The “attacking” in these cases and in many others in Pakistan and Afghanistan is carried out by “killer” drone aircraft whose weapons are controlled, I assume, from places very far away, using recon imaging provided by the drones and matching it against “information” or “accusations” that have been gathered from human sources.
The NYT writers report that these new CIA targets are “training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud”, who has been accused of having organized the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007. They note that Pres. G.W. Bush, “included Mr. Mehsud’s name in a classified list of militant leaders whom the C.I.A. and American commandos were authorized to capture or kill.”
There are many tangled legal, jurisdictional, and diplomatic issues involved here. The Pakistani government denies any foreknowledge of or involvement in the US killer-drone strikes– though Sen. Dianne Feinstein [corrected from ‘Pelosi’. HT Mick] recently let slip that at least some of the US’s lethal “manhunting” ops inside Pakistan have been run out of Pakistani military bases and not, as people had previously thought was always the case, from US bases in Afghanistan.
The idea of the US waging this clandestine war inside Pakistan is very worrying, at all levels, regardless of whether Washington has the complicity of some portions of the Pakistani government or not. (This is the case even though Pakistan’s people face many extremely complex issues of internal conflict and atrocious governance… And even though accusations have come from credible sources that some parts of the country provide safe havens for Al-Qaeda or other terror networks with violent global ambitions. But why should the US arrogate to itself any “right” to act in response to these challenges unilaterally and using lethal violence? What if all the world’s nations felt they had a similar “right” to act like this wherever and whenever they pleased?)
But in this post, I want to focus on that deadly concept of my government having a “classified list of militant leaders whom the C.I.A. and American commandos [are] authorized to capture or kill.”
Not, you’ll note, people whom US security forces might be particularly interested in “capturing or killing” if they should discover them taking part in hostilities against the US… But people whom US operatives are authorized– or let’s say, even more actively encouraged– to hunt down and go out and “capture or kill” even if they’re sitting down for a bowl of cornflakes on a sunny day with their family all around.
Of course, the use of killer drones completely gives the lie to the “capture or– ” part of the authorization.
Were the drones programed to swoop down from the skies, grab Baitullah Mehsud by the scruff of his neck, and haul him back to Bagram air base for interrogation? I think not.
This “capture or ill” slogan is in 99% of the cases only a euphemism for flat-out, lethal manhunting, and should be recognized as such. The intention in the vast majority of these still ongoing US and Israeli operations is not to capture. It is to kill. This is what makes it completely unacceptable under any concept of international law.
(By the way, that Wikipedia page linked to there gives an interesting survey of the use of manhunting by various western militaries over the decades, and has some very informative source notes.)
Another aspect of this that should be a cause for huge concern is the completely secret nature of all the alleged “evidence” on the basis of which these assassination classifications/decisions are made.
As in so many of the extra-legal practices the US military developed– under Pres. Bush and before him under Pres. Clinton– the practice of lethal manhunting was pioneered in recent times by the Israelis. They have assassinated literally scores of Palestinians since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000– and many scores over the decades before that, too.
Recall the incredibly sympathetic piece of writing about the Israeli commanders who make these decisions that the WaPo published back in 2006. Writer Laura Blumenfeld never once asked the really tough questions about the nature of the “evidence” against the targeted men, and why Israel, with all its many huge capabilities on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank didn’t simply arrest these men and bring them to trial through legal means instead of hunting them down from the air like fish in a barrel… You’d think she’d never read a book or seen a movie about the way the Nazis behaved in the Warsaw Ghetto…
If you look down the right sidebar of this page on Btselem’s website you can learn that in each of the years 2001-2004, the number of targeted killings the IOF carried out in the occupied Palestinian territories was between 37 and 44. In each of 2005 and 2006 it was 22.
This is obscene.
Israel is the power that has been in military occupation of these lands since 1967 and is responsible for the welfare of all their residents. Systematically targeting some of these residents for assassination– on the basis of always secret “information”– is completely illegal.
During the most recent Gaza war, the policy of assassinations, which had fallen into disuse when the 6-month ceasefire started last June, was resumed again.
Both countries should end this vile practice.