Israel-2009 – Page 8 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

My IPS piece on Netanyahu’s big meeting with Obama

… is here. Also here.
What I didn’t have the space to put in there were two things:
1. My judgment (as explored here before now) that Bibi might well throw out the bone of saying he’s prepared to engage with the idea of a Palestinian state… as a way of demonstrating his “flexibility”. But that he would still hedge this apparent acceptance of the idea around with so many caveats that it would be worthless and above all time-wasting. (As was the case in the 1990s when he finally agreed to make the “concession” of meeting with Arafat, etc.)
2. My disgust at the way so many western analysts and journos just lazily accept and perpetuate the US/Israeli spin that “the Arab world” is more concerned about the Iranian “threat” than they are with Israel and Palestine. In the case of the vast majority of Arab governments this simply isn’t so. Imagining that it is simply plays into Netanyahu’s “Iran first” agenda.

Uzi Arad in Washington

So controversial Netanyahu aide Uzi Arad has been in Washington this week, doing advance work for his boss’s upcoming visit with Pres. Obama.
From June 2007 until this week Arad was barred from visiting the US, given his role in running the spy ring involving convicted spy Larry Franklin in which former AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Kenneth Weissman were also implicated. Long-outstanding charges brought against Rosen and Weissman were recently dropped by the FBI.
I imagine no-one in the administration was very keen to share any actual secrets with Arad on this latest visit. So what would have been the point in sending him? Just to jab a finger in Washington’s eye, I guess.
I would love to know who Arad met with in Washington, and what the back-story is regarding him getting this long-denied visa.

Uzi Arad and other aspects of Netanyahu’s Washington visit

Richard Sale had an excellent post on Pat Lang’s blog yesterday, in which he surveyed some of the key problems in the relationship between Pres. Obama and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who will have their first face-to-face meeting as national leaders in Washington, on Monday.
There are plenty of serious disagreements between the two leaders, which have been well described both by Sale, writing from Washington, and by the pro-Likud magnate and commentator Isi Leibler, writing in the Jerusalem Post on Monday.
Leibler, who had just concluded a quick visit to New York, wrote,

Of course, Leibler’s intention in calling “J Street” a “fringe group” and mischaracterizing its platform in the way he did is quite clear…
Sales’s piece has more details of the problems that have arisen between leading representatives of the two governments. Including, crucially, the issue of Uzi Arad, the man named by Netanyahu as his national security adviser.
Arad has been barred from getting a visa to enter the US since June 2007 under section 212 3(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, because of FBI concerns about his role in having “run” Lawrence Franklin, the former Pentagon analyst jailed for 12.5 years for having passed highly classified U.S. intelligence directly to Arad.
Will Netanyahu try to take Arad with him when he travels to Washington this weekend? As Sales writes, when Hillary Clinton was in Israel in March, Netanyahu and his team pulled a fast one on her by sneaking Arad into a meeting with her even though her people had already conveyed their desire this not happen.
I imagine this did little to endear Netanyahu or Arad to her. (Which is probably good.)
Beyond the question of Uzi Arad, however, there are numerous other matters of significant disagreement between the two governments. The main one is the peace process with the Palestinians.
Netanyahu has continued to refrain from expressing any support for the approach favored by Obama: the two-state solution involving a viable Palestinian state. He’s been expressing support for some form of an “economic peace” for the Palestinians, instead.
Today, he took a step that was most likely designed to make him look “flexible” and “visionary” ahead of his visit to Washington: He announced that he would allow a full range of foodstuffs to be shipped into Gaza.
Hold the applause, folks!
Firstly, this is only a promise; who knows about its implementation? Secondly: Israel is still the occupying power in Gaza and therefore has entire responsibility for the welfare of Gaza’s 1.5 million people, so why should anyone applaud Netanyahu when he “promises” to fulfill this small part of that responsibility? Thirdly, of course Israel’s responsibility to Gaza’s people goes considerably beyond the provision of adequate foodstuffs; Israel has a responsibility to support the full social and economic development of the Strip’s people, including, as a very first step, allowing the shipping into the Strip of the the construction materials needed to repair the horrendous damages from the recent war… No word from Netanyahu on that, yet.
And finally, on those foodstuffs, don’t you remember that back at the end of March, outgoing PM Olmert already promised that full shipments of them would forthwith be restored? So why would Netanyahu expect anyone to “applaud” now if he is merely– two months after Olmert’s promise– finally getting around to “promising” implementation of it, once again?
It is interesting to see, though, how desperately Netanyahu seems to be trying to appear “reasonable” and “flexible” in front of an American public that is much more skeptical of the Israeli PM’s good intentions than at any other point since– well, since he was PM the time before, in the mid-1990s.
My expectation of Monday’s meeting between him and Obama, fwiw, is that Netanyahu may well decide to show some more apparent “flexibility” inside the meeting room by telling Obama that he has, indeed, finally become convinced that a Palestinian “state” of some sort could be a workble idea…
Of course, he would continue to hedge that position around with all kinds of preconditions for what powers the “state” might have, and the timeline on which it could even start to be established.
Regarding its powers, do recall that South Africa’s Bantustans were given the formal name of “states”. (Also, in US political parlance, a “state” is a distinctly sub-national entity.)
Regarding the timeline for it, Netanyahu and his people would certainly, under this scenario, bring forward all those huge preconditions that the “state” could only start to be established after all Palestinian “terrorism” has been completely eradicated, and after the US and the rest of the international community have destroyed Iran’s nuclear programs, etc etc etc…
They might also bring in the language of “viability.”
When most people talk about the need for a future Palestinian state to be “viable”, they look at two key aspects of it: its territorial base and the base of its political support among Palestinians.
When people around Netanyahu talk about “viability” it often seems they are talking about the state having been built over many years, “from the bottom up” (as they like to say), by the Americans, and along a template that the Israelis themselves would still completely control.
So anyway, my bottom line on Monday’s meeting is that Obama’s people should be ready, in the event that Netanyahu grants them the “concession” of starting to agree to the idea of a Palestinian state, with their own response to that that makes clear that the US version of a viable Palestinian state is one that is truly viable.
Palestinians and all other Arabs are very wary of the prospect of a Palestinian end-state that is only a Bantustan. (It’s bad enough that Ramallastan looks and acts so much like a Bantustan already today; but at least the PA is only a “temporary” body, not the end-state.)
If Netanyahu comes out openly and says he supports a “state”, and then immediately hedges his definition of it around in an impossible way, and without his caveats meeting a firm and clear reaction from the Obama team, then that could end up killing the two-state project far faster than anything else.
Netanyahu’s hug for an Israeli-dominated and completely non-indepedent Palestinian “state” would a hug of death.
You see, there is this concept that Americans used to adhere called, quite quaintly, the “consent of the governed.”
Remember that?
… Anyway, we’ll clearly have some interesting days ahead.

J. Cook on the Pope in Nazareth

Jonathan Cook, aka the Sage of Nazareth, is back from his vacation and doing some timely reportage on the background to the Pope’s imminent visit to Nazareth.
See this piece from yesterday’s National about the struggle Israel’s Christian Palestinians had to wage to persuade their government that Nazareth would be more appropriate than Haifa as a place to hold the big papal mass.
This piece, from today’s edition of the paper, gives some background to the Muslim-Christian tensions that are very evident in the city.
This pope seems like an unlikely bearer of any kind of peace message. His background in the Hitler Youth was bad enough. And then, he made that borderline Islamophobic speech in 2006… But I guess I believe in the power of everyone to act more compassionately and fairly over time.

Obama and Israel’s nukes

My IPS news analysis piece yesterday was on the Obama administration’s intriguing injection of Israel’s nuclear weapons into the global and regional diplomacy. It’s here (and here.)
The piece attempts to put Rose Gottemoeller’s fascinating statement, made to an NPT review gathering in New York on Tuesday, into the broader context of Obama’s return to stronger support for the NPT– and the ‘non-proliferation’ strategy it embodies. This, after eight (or 16?) years of US support for the much more unilateral approach of ‘counter-proliferation’.
In the article I failed to spell out, as I should have done, that Iran is a member of the NPT.
Gottemoeller said,

“Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea … remains a fundamental objective of the United States.”

I have been interested to note that some people have reacted to the statement by saying it was “no big deal.” This includes Joshua Pollack, writing Wednesday on the normally quite sensible Arms Control Wonk blog.
Pollack was reacting to this excellent piece of reporting in the Washington Times.
He notably made zero mention of this equally excellent piece of opinion writing, in the WT the same day, which was by Avner Cohen, who is the world’s best-informed expert on the facts about, and impact of, Israel’s nuclear arsenal. (Oh, he also happens to be Israeli.)
Cohen argued that the US’s 40-year-old policy of, essentially conniving in Israel’s protection of its nukes through the use of a robustly maintained policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” should be changed.
He writes there,

He also argued that the new policy could help make a negotiated approach to the Iranian nuclear question much more feasible– something he strongly supports.
Cohen’s recent piece in the Forward is also worth reading.
But the reason I found J. Pollack’s “no-big-deal” response to Gottemoeller’s statement so interesting is that this is exactly the tactic that Israeli hawks and their friends frequently use to “bury” news that they find disquieting. (This goes right back to Ze’ev Schiff’s early responses to Mordechai Vanunu’s revelations, back in 1986.)
Pollack’s argumentation is certainly all over the place. He quotes, with glowing approval, some comments that George Perkovich reportedly made (PDF) at a recent conference on nonproliferation.
Perko had said:

I also think it’s not constructive to kind of like call out and talk about Israel as having nuclear weapons and that, you know, people ought to come clean and so on…

He also said,

How would we create a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East? And you invite all of the states in the region, and you have the little placards there for Iran, for Saudi Arabia, so on and so forth – and Israel. And I guarantee you, Israel will show up and other seats will be empty…

This is dangerous and misleading nonsense. Even in present circumstances, if you convened a conference dedicated to the creation of a zone free of all WMDs in the Middle East, you would certainly get Egypt and Jordan prepared to turn up and commit themselves to the goal alongside Israel.
Yes, it’s true that Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t currently have diplomatic relations with Israel; but there are plenty of diplomatic contexts in which their representatives do sit down alongside those of Israel to discuss disarmament-related issues, and it’s perfectly possible to imagine a way the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament or some other UN-linked body could convene a gathering at which all the Muslim Middle East states would agree to sit down with Israel to discuss actions toward this important goal.
I suspect it would be Israel that would not sit down there, if it is made plain in advance that everyone’s nuclear weapons capabilities will certainly be on the agenda.
Why does Perkovich make such a silly and mendacious claim?
… Anyway, while J. Pollack was trying to argue that Gottemoeller’s statement was no big deal, Ha’aretz’s Aluf Benn and Barak Ravid were writing that the content of the statement– and the fact it had not been “coordinated with Israeli officials” in advance– was being understood by people in Israel’s political elite as signaling a big change from the lovey-dovey-ness Israeli governments have enjoyed with the White House under George W. Bush.
Good.

Discussing Hamas with Allister Sparks

I had the very good fortune to spend a couple of hours today chatting with Allister Sparks, the legendary South African journalist who was editor of the gutsy Jo’burg paper the Rand Daily Mail for four crucial years 1977-81 when it was a leader in uncovering many of the sins of apartheid. What I hadn’t realized before talking to him was the degree to which, in recent years, he has turned his considerable energies and wisdom to trying to understand– and in in his own way to start to de-escalate– the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
(By the way, we’re both in Doha. We’ve been at the World Press Freedom Day event here.)
In particular, he told me a bit about the personal fact-finding trip he made in September 2006 to Damascus, to talk with the Hamas leaders there. After undertaking that trip, he went to Israel and the occupied territories, traveling around quite widely and talking to lots of people there, too.
I’ve looked for an online version of things Sparks wrote at the time about the trip, but have so far been able to find only the account that appears in the bottom half of this January 2007 article.
Sparks was quite forthright in telling me thought the situation in the occupied territories is “like apartheid– or worse.”
In the piece I linked to he wrote,

Well, Allister, I have done it– also, like you, with no funding or backing from any big organization.
Anyway, I wanted to blog quickly here about a couple of the things he told me that struck a particular chord.
He said that when he was in Damascus, he had several long conversations with Mousa Abu Marzook, often described as Hamas’s deputy leader. (Khaled Meshaal was busy in meetings, but Sparks had one or more conversations with him by phone while he was there.)
He said that in those talks, he pitched to Abu Marzook the idea that if Hamas was successful in getting a hudna with (and therefore a meaningful degree of independence from) Israel, then they would most likely need to have numerous joint committees to coordinate various aspects of life… and that over time the work of those committees might become increasingly important, and the relations between Israel and Palestine would evolve into something like the EU, and later on into a single confederated body, something like Switzerland…
He said Abu Marzook expressed considerable interest in that idea. Later, when Sparks was in Israel, he pitched it to our mutual friend Yossi Alpher, who’s a ‘peacenik’ of the Left-Zionist variety, who had been born in the US and migrated to Israel as a young adult.
Sparks said that Alpher looked at him, absolutely aghast and finally stuttered, “But then we wouldn’t have Jewish state! It would be like living in a diaspora again– and this time, in such a dangerous place!”
Sparks remembered the word “diaspora” in there, very clearly. It is, obviously, a very strange word to use, since Yossi would still have been living in exactly the same place he’s living now.
Also, if the Israeli-Palestinian would have been solved for some time by that point, why would he think it would still be “dangerous”?
Sparks said he started to try to tell Alpher that he understood, perhaps, some of his consternation because he had watched the intense fear with which the Afrikaaners in his own country used, back in the bad old days, to view the prospect that their own political control over all of South Africa might one day have to be ended or diluted.
“I would have told him that the situation of the Afrikaaners in South Africa now is far better than it was in the days of apartheid. They are doing so well there these days! But I couldn’t tell him because he was still just too flabbergasted by the audacity of what I had proposed. I must say i was surprised by the vehemence of his reaction.”
Sparks then proceeded to tell me a number of things about the Afrikaaners and their culture that I hadn’t known before. He said that most of the Afrikaans-speaking ‘Whites’ had stayed in South Africa after the transition to democracy. (The country’s English-speaking “Whites”, by contrast, had many other options elsewhere– in Britain, Canada, Australia, the US, or New Zealand. So a greater proportion of them than of the Afrikaaners left once they’d lost their cushy, uber-privileged spot inside the system.)
He added,

The Afrikaaners had no other place to go. South Africa was the only place they had to call ‘home.’ And since 1994, there has been a real flowering of Afrikaans-language culture in the country. Lots of poets and writers from their community who had started to write in English have been returning to Afrikaans. Did you know that the fourth largest media conglomerate in the whole world is one that started out as a small, regime-backed Afrikaans-language newspaper?

This is, by the way, the company that owns “News24” in South Africa… Allister said it also now owns a good chunk of People’s daily in China, and of Chinese Central TV. Who knew?
Oh, and on why the present situation in Palestine is worse than apartheid, he made these points:

We also talked a little bit about Sparks’s former colleague (employee?) Benji Pogrund, another left Zionist who’s noticeably less of a peacenik than Alpher. I am interested in the fact that both Alper and Pogrund are people who made a conscious decision to immigrate to Israel when they were already adults. (In Pogrund’s case, already a very mature adult indeed.) For both of them, living as they previously did, in pretty darn secure places with good continuing prospects, migrating to Israel represented a conscious decision to participate in the Zionist project… So for them, perhaps, the concept of “Israel as a Jewish state” is something they’ve invested a lot in and believe in quite defiantly… Whereas most, or perhaps all, of the Jewish-Israeli supporters of a one-state (South African style) solution that I know are people who grew up in Israel…
Anyway, one big thought I had was that it would be excellent to bring Allister to the US to do some speaking gigs about the Palestine situation. He hasn’t been there since February 2006, when he did this interview with Amy Goodman. (At the very end there, he expresses some some support for the one-state idea.)
And since then, he’s been to Damascus, gained a lot more information, insight, and wisdom into the Palestine situation.
If not a live interview, why not a good, well-organized video-conference? He really is someone who can add some deep experience and valuable perspective to this whole discussion.
Do it soon, somebody!

New reports on press and other freedoms

I meant to mention this AFP report in my last post, but I’m tired so the brain is working a little groggily at this point.
It says this:

The Freedom House report is particularly interesting on Israel and the OPTs:

Israel

the Palestinian territories

So much for the hopes of all those Palestinians who had hoped, back in the day, that Oslo would lead to the “liberation” of at least a part of Palestine.

Netanyahu and the ‘Palestinian state’ card

Israel’s former failed prime minister and current defense minister, Ehud Barak, is now saying that PM Netanyahu

will present the U.S. administration a diplomatic plan in line with the principle of “two states for two nations” during his upcoming visit to Washington.

Until now, Netanyahu has refused to commit himself to agreeing with the Obama administration that statehood for the Palestinians is the way forward for peace. So now, Barak is indicating Netanyahu may be a bit “flexible” on the statehood issue. (Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, however, remains strongly opposed. Oops.)
But here’s the thing. It is not the word “state” that’s important, regarding the outcome. South Africa’s Bantustans were also called “states”, remember.
It is the content of the sovereignty and decision-making powers, the independence of the decision-making process, and the territorial and economic foundations that support this independence that are important.
So people should not get hung up on the word “state”– and certainly, they shouldn’t suddenly rush to crown Netanyahu with a peacemaker’s laurels if he should deign to say the Palestinians might be able to have one.
Look at the content of any proposal made, not just its name.
A couple other things to bear in mind:
1. Past PM Olmert also said he believed in a Palestinian “state.” His concept of it was very restrictive, including of course territorially. The fact that he accepted the notion of a Palestinian state did not mean his proposals regarding the final settlement were in any way acceptable.
2. Ten years ago, Barak won a strong victory in the polls against Netanyahu, and replaced him as PM. On that occasion, Barak won by promising Israelis that he was the man who could conclude a final peace with the Palestinians “within six to nine months.” Eighteen months later his premiership collapsed into chaos with that pledge still unfulfilled.
Worse than that, the peremptory and bullying way he conducted his peace “diplomacy” with the Palestinians ensured that the Camp David II summit was a disaster. Barak then loudly blamed PA leader Yasser Arafat for the failure and said Israel “had no partner for peace.” (Clinton, quite shamefully, completely backed him up on that.)
Leaders and activists in the real Israeli peace movement say that Barak’s behavior at that time was a stab in the heart for their movement, from which it has still, nine years later, not recovered.
This time, Barak is “promising” that the Netanyahu government will have peace with the Palestinians “within three years.” He has no credibility.

Ahmadinejad: “Whatever decision they (Palestininians) take is fine with us”

ABC’s This Week program today featured an extended interview, conducted apparently last Wednesday, with Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. (A/N) Here’s the full transcript, and (H/T to Nader) here’s a new link to the full video.
As usual, it seems the western media is missing the significance of what he said. The discussion on ABC’s “This Week” after the interview is even worse; They essentially ignored what Ahmadinejad said. ABC had a scoop on their hands, they sat on it for several days, and flat missed it!
But contrary to VOA and AFP headlines, I don’t think it’s at all clear that A/N has added “preconditions” for US-Iran talks. At one point in the interview, yes, he indicates that any talks should have a clear agenda, and that should be worked out ahead of time. But he isn’t about to do so in public for ABC. Is that so shocking? (And it’s light years different from the old Bush/Rice position that Iran had to stop enrichment first, then we could talk about it.)
In any case, at another spot in the interview, Ahmadinejad insists: “We are always ready to talk… with no preconditions.” (so no headline there)
Second, yes, A/N does comment on the holocaust, its ramifications for the Middle East, and its study. Readers can read the passage for themselves. While grating, I don’t see any holocaust “denial” here, per se.
Most newsworthy, and of surprise to those who subscribe to the Ahmadinejad as “Hitler” motif, the Iranian President had this to say about a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine.

Continue reading “Ahmadinejad: “Whatever decision they (Palestininians) take is fine with us””

Destruction of mosques in Israel after 1948

An argument that I heard from many peace activists in Israel and Palestine during my recent visit is that the Nakba– that is, the dispersal of the Palestinians from their homes, primarily in 1948, and the expropriation and frequent destruction of the properties they had left behind– was not a one-ff affair, but is a continuing process.
Current news photos of Palestinians in Gaza or Jerusalem who have been expelled from their homes through Israeli acts of violence, and are forced to live in tents while Israelis either take over or demolish their homes, are continuing evidence of this.
Recently I read Meron Rapoport’s painfully evocative article “History Erased: The IDF and the post-1948 Destruction of Palestinian Monuments”. It originally appeared– I believe only in Hebrew– in Ha’aretz in July 2007, and was published in English in the Jouranl of Palestine Studies in Winter 2008. Sadly, it’s behind a pay-wall.
Rapoport gives some information about a controversy that arose inside the Israeli bureaucracy about the IDF’s July 1950 demolition of the Mashhad Nabi Husain (Prophet Husain Mosque) in what had been the Palestinian town of Majdal– now, in Israel, Ashqelon.
According to local Islamic tradition, the mosque was the spot where the head of Husain ibn ‘Ali, one of the Shiite tradition’s most revered founders/martyrs had been buried.
After the mosque was levelled by the IDF, Shmuel Yeivin, the director of Israel’s department of Antuities, became quite angry.
Noting that the mosque in the nearby, abandoned Palestinian “village” of Ashdod had also been blown up, Yeivin wrote to the head of the “department for special missions” in the defense Ministry, “I believe the commander responsible for this explosion should be brought to trial and punished, because there was no justification for a swift, war-contingent operation.”
Guess what. It never happened.
Rapoport also noted that Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti has written of the 160 mosques in Palestinian “villages” incorporated into Israel under the 1949 Armistice Agreements, “fewer than 40 are still standing.”
This makes me want to go and read Benvenisti’s 2000 book on the subject, Sacred Landscape; The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention the work of the two Merons here, because I recall that a few years ago some of the Israeli apologists who comment here at JWN were claiming there was no evidence at all regarding widespread Israeli destruction of Palestinian places of worship and cemeteries inside Israel.
Au contraire. There is lots of evidence– even for Engish-speaking readers. We just need to know where to look.