Category: Obama presidency

Climate of Change?

In a recent NYTimes article entitled “Climate of Change” Paul Krugman wrote:

    Elections have consequences. President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.

Baloney. from a recent news report:

    Obama Budget to Boost Military Spending $20.4B
    President Barack Obama wants to increase spending on the U.S. military by $20.4 billion in 2010. . .
    The president unveiled a federal budget for 2010 that would increase defense spending to $533.7 billion. This year the military is receiving $513.3. The difference is a 4 percent increase, the White House said Feb. 26.
    The $533.7 billion does not include money for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or about $20 billion that is to be spent on nuclear weapons and other military items outside the Defense Department.
    Obama wants $130 billion for the wars – down from $144 billion being spent this year.
    The three elements combined – the “base” budget, war funding and nuclear weapons – would push 2010 spending to about $683.7 billion. Spending for 2009 is about $681 billion.

Continue reading “Climate of Change?”

Dennis Ross as Clinton ‘special adviser’: Outrageous

The State Department yesterday announced the appointment of Dennis Ross as “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for The Gulf and Southwest Asia.”
The designation of Ross’s geographic purview is fuzzy, but intriguing. In the parlance of many UN and other bodies, “Southwest Asia” is the (non-Eurocentric) term used for what many of the rest of us might call “the Middle East”.
Dennis Ross can no longer be judged to have even the minimum level of policy objectivity and neutrality that’s required for this job. He served as an ambassadorial-level special coordinator for Arab-Israeli negotiations for both presidents George H.W. Bush and Clinton. But since then, he has been appointed Chairman of the Board of an outfit called the Jewish People Policy Planning Instite, which has been– as its masthead there proudly proclaims– “Established by the Jewish Agency for Israel, Ltd.” JPPPI is also headquartered in Israel.
For just some of the problems Ross’s dual affiliations might cause, you can see on the current front page of its website a photo of “The Ambassador Dennis Ross presenting JPPPI’s annual assessment to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.” Ross is doing this, obviously, in his capacity as Board Chair of this Israel-based body that was established by the Jewish Agency, a body that has played a key role in the leadership of the Zionist movement since well before 1948, and which enjoys very special relations with the State of Israel o this day.
For example, the Jewish Agency has been a major partner for successive Israeli governments in the building of Israel’s completely illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. (As referred to quite casually in, for example, this 2005 report in the Financial Times.)
So if Dennis presents the JPPPI report to the Israeli Prime Minister today, and tomorrow he goes back to deliver a demarche from the US president on, say, Israeli settlement building– how would that work?
More to the point, how can any of the rest of us, US citizens, have any confidence whatsoever that the “advice” Dennis Ross will be giving Secretary Clinton will be the kind of calm, objective, US-centric advice on Middle Eastern issues– including Iran, Iraq, and quite possibly also Palestine– that she and the rest of the administration all so desperately need?
HT to Col. Pat Lang for having pointed out the JPPPI connection a month ago.
But I’m puzzled why I’ve seen no mention of this obviously problematic affiliation of his in any of the mainstream reporting that I’ve read?
Also, I should point out that when Dennis was running the US-led Israeli-Palestinian peace “process” for eight years under the Clintons, he notably failed at achieving anything except to give the Israelis the time to just about double the number of settlers it had in the occupied Palestinian territories. Earlier, when he was under the adult supervision of Bush I and James Baker, the Bush-Baker team did make a solid effort to penalize Israel for its continued pursuit of the settlement-planting policy. Once Dennis himself was more in charge of the US’s “peace” diplomacy, all those efforts at conditionality/accountability were halted. The Jewish Agency and its partner, the State of Israel, were able to accelerate their settlement building project with almost no obstructions.
A bleak day indeed for the US body politic.

Black is Black, I Want My Barry Back

NOTE: Helena and I have been thinking quite independently along similar lines, which is not an isolated occurrence.
Approximately half of the CIA budget is reportedly devoted not to intelligence but to operations, such as targeted assassinations. New technology allows the US to use un-manned aircraft to kill people whever and wherever the President directs.
On February 13, 2009 Senator Diane Feinstein reported that the CIA has been flying Predator aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles from a Pakistan base.

    Reporting from Washington — A senior U.S. lawmaker said Thursday that unmanned CIA Predator aircraft operating in Pakistan are flown from an air base in that country, a revelation likely to embarrass the Pakistani government and complicate its counter-terrorism collaboration with the United States.

    Continue reading “Black is Black, I Want My Barry Back”

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.

Chas Freeman to NIC; Mitchell Twittered

My IPS colleague Jim Lobe seems to have it pretty firm that Chas Freeman, the very distinguished former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and before that Nixon-era DCM in China will be the the first Obama-era Chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
As Lobe writes, this is huge– and it is very welcome indeed.
The NIC was created to try to re-professionalize the key part of intelligence analysis after the intelligence fiascos around 9/11 and the whole dreadful story of the politicization of analysis around the WMD issue in Iraq. As Ive blogged here before, the former head of the NIC, Tom Fingar, did a pretty good job putting the task of top-level “estimating” (i.e. analysis) back onto a professional basis.
Lobe gives us this great quote from a speech Freeman gave last October:

    In retrospect, Al Qaeda has played us with the finesse of a matador exhausting a great bull by guiding it into unproductive lunges at the void behind his cape. By invading Iraq, we transformed an intervention in Afghanistan most Muslims had supported into what looks to them like a wider war against Islam. We destroyed the Iraqi state and catalyzed anarchy, sectarian violence, terrorism, and civil war in that country.
    Meanwhile, we embraced Israel’s enemies as our own; they responded by equating Americans with Israelis as their enemies. We abandoned the role of Middle East peacemaker to back Israel’s efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations. We wring our hands while sitting on them as the Jewish state continues to seize ever more Arab land for its colonists. This has convinced most Palestinians that Israel cannot be appeased and is persuading increasing numbers of them that a two-state solution is infeasible. It threatens Israelis with an unwelcome choice between a democratic society and a Jewish identity for their state. Now the United States has brought the Palestinian experience – of humiliation, dislocation, and death – to millions more in Afghanistan and Iraq. Israel and the United States each have our reasons for what we are doing, but no amount of public diplomacy can persuade the victims of our policies that their suffering is justified, or spin away their anger, or assuage their desire for reprisal and revenge.

For the past few years, Freeman has been President of the Middle East Policy Council, a body on whose advisory board I sit. I had heard, in late January, that Chas was leaving to go work in some capacity for Dennis Blair, the overall Director of National intelligence. I guess I thought it would be in some senior advisory capacity. I am delighted to learn that no, he’ll be doing a real and very important hands-on job there.
His long experience of both China (and its region) and the Middle East will be an invaluable asset to the Obama administration.
… Meantime, in other intriguing news from Washington, George Mitchell yesterday held a conference-call discussion with (only partially identified) Jewish community leaders. (HT: Laura Rozen.)
The Jerusalem Post reports that,

    about half the questions asked by progressive organizations, including Brit Tzedek v’Shalom and the New Israel Fund, that have not always been included in previous administrations’ outreach.
    “It’s a breath of fresh air to have a briefing with a broad spectrum of pro-Israel organizations that is on the record,” said Ori Nir, spokesman for the dovish Americans for Peace Now.

The JP also wrote that, regarding the prospect of a Fateh-Hamas reconciliation:

    Mitchell said that should Egypt bring the sides together it would be “a step forward,” and that until now divisions among the Palestinians have been a major obstacle to bringing peace to the region.

One participant in the 45-minute call, William Daroff of the Washington office of United Jewish Communities, even Twittered the call as it proceeded. Look on his Twitter site for the long series of posts (“Tweets?”) from around 3 .m. Thursday EST. Maybe to understand the call best, start with the oldest (lowest on his successive pages) Tweets and then read forward (up) from there…
Here are some of them:

    Sen. Mitchell: the Administration is fully committed to Israel’s security, including it’s qualitative military edge
    Mitchell: very limited lessons learned from N. Ireland experience: circumstances in mideast are unique & in some respects more complicated
    Mitchell: divisions in the Palistinian community make dialogue much more difficult
    Mitchell: US govt is uniquely positioned to bring about 2 states living side by side in peace & with stability, & eventually reconciliation
    … Mitchell: reviewing all aspects of the situation, incl settlements,
    … Mitchell: will not pre-judge settlements; P’s & Arab leaders bring it up in every conversation; important issue – but not only issue

Fascinating window into the experience there. (I’m going to try to Twitter from the fourth anniversary anti-Wall activities Bil’in when I go down there later today. Pretty sure it won’t be as full as daroff’s Tweeting– my phone here doesn’t have an easy keyboard and I’ll have to do the whole thing over an international phone line to London.)
But my next question: When will Mitchell be holding a similar call with leaders of the Arab-American community?

Obama @ Prayer Breakfast

Despite his hesitance to say anything “principled” ahead of Israel’s upcoming elections, President Obama today did remind us of a profound truth about all major faiths at this morning’s National Prayer Breakfast:

But no matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.
We know too that whatever our differences, there is one law that binds all great religions together. Jesus told us to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” The Torah commands, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” In Islam, there is a hadith that reads “None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself.” And the same is true for Buddhists and Hindus; for followers of Confucius and for humanists. It is, of course, the Golden Rule – the call to love one another; to understand one another; to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.

While these humble, yet vital words are not getting much press, I am encouraged. Like his inaugural reference to “the slaughter of the innocents,” might today’s reference to all faiths having a shared humanity have an implied application to those who would turn their eyes away from the sufferings anywhere, including in Gaza?
Such ecumenical sentiments will not go down well with the “just warriors” and their media agents who have been so determined to launch crusades against “the jihadi religion.” Yes, the ironies in that statement are intended. In my experience, those “religious” figures most determined to do battle with another “jihadi” religion often seem themselves most determined to justify war in the name of their religion.
Yet just as each creed breeds its own jihadis, so too we can yearn for better angels to emerge. May they draw from within to build common ground in our shared humanity, our capacity for empathizing with the suffering of another, beyond creed and confession.
As the 13th Century Persian poet Sa’di put it, as etched into the walls of the United Nations:
Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.

Gaza ceasefire-consolidation talks update

I’ve been busy recently: I’ve been in New York with editors and (separately) the new grandbaby… Also, preparing for my next reporting trip to the Middle East, which starts this afternoon as I head off from freezing Washington DC to Cairo.
Cairo is the place where negotiations have been continuing over the past two weeks to consolidate the still extremely shaky, in-parallel, and un-negotiated brace of reciprocal ceasefires across the Israel-Gaza border that went into operation January 18.
A negotiated, and therefore mutually agreed, ceasefire is absolutely essential if the military actions that have already marked the period since January 18 are to be prevented from escalating, at any moment’s notice, into yet another full-blown war between Israel and Gaza. This negotiation need not be direct. In fact, both sides at this point probably prefer strongly not to deal directly with the other. But it does– as Jimmy Carter’s point-man Bob Pastor pointed out at the excellent panel discussion of his that I attended last week– need to be written down, and to have some form of third party authentication, oversight, or even more preferably still a continuing, third-party verification and monitoring mechanism. (Evident parallels there with the development of Israel-Hizbullah relations that took place between 1993 and 1996. Btw, the 1996 war was also launched by an Israeli PM as a part of his general election campaign… )
Bob Pastor said that Hamas and the Israeli government had notably disagreed, thoughout last summer and fall, about what exactly Israel had promised, regarding lifting the siege on Gaza, in the Egyptian-negotiated, six-month-long, mutual ceasefire (tahdi’eh) the two sides reached on June 18 last year; and that’s why, if the new ceasefire is to have any durability t needs to be written down, signed, and counter-signed. It also makes elementary sense that, in a situation of such grave mutual distrust, any agreement needs to be written down, signed by authorized representatives of both parties– and those signatures and texts authenticated by a third party whose third-party role is trusted and authorized by both of them.
Several Hamas people have expressed grave distrust in the role that Egypt has been playing as mediator/intermediary. But apparently Egypt– and in particular, Egyptian intel boss Omar Suleiman– is still trusted “enough” by both parties that he is once again the main intermediary/channel between them.
That’s one reason why it’ll be interesting for me to be in Cairo. From there I’ll proceed to Amman, Israel, and Palestine and perhaps also Syria, depending on a number of things.
As far as I understand the Hamas-Israel negotiation, Hamas has been adamant that any renewed ceasefire agreement must include solid provisions for lifting the siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza ever since Hamas won the January 2006 elections. The present Israeli government, for its part, is facing tough elections next Tuesday. The war on Gaza did not go nearly as well as Olmert, Livni, and Barak had hoped. The intermittent descent of Gaza-launched rockets onto southern Israel that has occurred– along with many Israeli military actions against Gaza– even since January 18, reminds Israeli voters that the Olmert government has not “solved” the problems with Gaza that the war was, they had promised, intended to solve. Pressure from (and support for) the rightwing Israeli parties has intensified…
Under these circumstances, it’s unclear to me whether Olmert even has any motivation at all to conclude– far less announce!– any ceasefire agreement with Hamas before next Tuesday. Probably the only thing that just might make such an agreement acceptable to Israeli voters, in their current state of great anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Hamas frenzy, would be if it included the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli POW who has been held by unidentified militant groups in Gaza since June 2006, and by Hamas since it took control of the Strip in June 2007.
Hamas wants to keep the prisoner-exchange negotiations separate from the Gaza-ceasefire (and siege-lifting) negotiations. More than two dozen elected Hamas negotiators from the West Bank– including the speaker of the Palestinian parliament– have been held by Israel, without charges, as apparent bargaining chips for Shalit. Israel also holds a further 11,000-plus Palestinian detainees in its extensive complex of prisons for political prisoners. Most of these are being held without trial. Many of them are Hamas supporters and activists– though they come from all branches of the Palestinian national-liberation movement.
The rightwing Likud party is now clearly expected to win in Tuesday’s elections– and parties even further to the right like Avigdor Lieberman’s “Israel Beitenu” party have been moving up in the polls. Israel Beitenu now outranks Ehud Barak’s Labor Party as #3 in the opinion polls. (This marks yet another phase in the long decline of Israel’s once completely dominant Labour Party, which I have chronicled since 1998.)
… In other news, George Mitchell returned to DC a couple of days ago after completing his first “fact-finding” tour of the Middle East in connection with his role as the special envoy appointed jointly by Pres. Obama and Sec. Hillary Clinton. He reported back to both Clinton and Obama– in the White House’s Oval Office, yesterday. Tuesday, Clinton had earlier jumped the gun in terms of public announcements, by declaring that Hamas would still have to meet the three tired old, and very exclusionary “requirements” before it could be included in any US peacemaking. (Commitments not to use armed force and to recognize Palestinian rights have notably not been reciprocally required from the Government of Israel.)
Time has been running out for Obama to say something principled and clear about our country’s own strong interest in and commitment to a fair and durable Israeli-Palestinian peace, in time for that statement to resonate effectively with Israeli voters before they go to the polls Tuesday.
That’s a pity. I guess Obama has had a few other things to deal with, like the still-imploding national economy and the tanking of his nomination of old buddy Tom Daschle as secretary of Health and Human Services. But he really does need to keep his eye on this Israeli-Palestinian ball; and I hope that george Mitchell is dedicated to helping him do that.
This matter certainly can’t be left to the uncertain capabilities and understanding of Hillary Clinton.
Well, that’s it for now… Watch this space for continuing field updates as I travel. (Also, given how clunky the hosting service has become here at JWN, I’m considering shifting over to WordPress sometime soon. No change for JWN readers, though Don and Scott, as occasional authors, will need to get the new info when I do that. But until I can get that switch organized, I’ll probably be doing a lot of Delicious-ing of online resources I find helpful– check them out on the JWN sidebar. I’ll also be Twittering as the spirit moves me. So check that out, too. I’ve figured how to do that from my cellphone… I think.)

Obama: What if this happened to your girls?

When he was on the campaign trail, Pres. Obama gave Israel nearly “carte blanche” to act as it wanted against Gaza by saying– in southern Israel– that if his daughters were threatened by rocket attack in the same way that kids in southern Israel were, then he couldn’t imagine what he would do in response.
So I hope he reads this piece by Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise in the NYT today, about what happened to Sabah Abu Halima’s family in Atatra, Gaza during the recent war:

    The phosphorus smoke bomb punched through the roof in exactly the spot where much of the family had taken refuge — the upstairs hall away from the windows.
    The bomb, which international weapons experts identified as phosphorus by its fragments, was intended to mask troop movements outside. Instead it breathed its storm of fire and smoke into Sabah Abu Halima’s hallway, releasing flaming chemicals that clung to her husband, baby girl and three other small children, burning them to death.

But that’s not all. Later on,

    Omar Abu Halima and his two teenage cousins tried to take the burned body of his baby sister and two other living but badly burned girls to the hospital on that Sunday.
    The boys were taking the girls and six others on a tractor, when, according to several accounts from villagers, Israeli soldiers told them to stop. According to their accounts, they got down, put their hands up, and suddenly rounds were fired, killing two teenage boys: Matar Abu Halima, 18, and Muhamed Hekmet, 17.
    An Israeli military spokeswoman said that soldiers had reported that the two were armed and firing. Villagers strongly deny that. The tractor that villagers say was carrying the group is riddled with 36 bullet holes.
    The villagers were forced to abandon the bodies of the teenage boys and the baby, and when rescue workers arrived 11 days later, the baby’s body had been eaten by dogs, her legs two white bones, captured in a gruesome image on a relative’s cellphone. The badly burned girls and others on the tractor had fled to safety.
    Matar’s mother, Nabila Abu Halima, said she had been shot through the arm when she tried to move toward her son. Her left arm bears a round scar. Her son came back to her in pieces, his body crushed under tank treads.

Bronner and Tavernise’s piece is tragic. (Though the NYT gave it an inappropriate headline, I think.)
It’s also notable because they make a point of noting how many Palestinians were killed by Israel’s security forces in the 39 months between the IDF’s supposed withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005, and the outbreak of the hostilities last December: about 1,275.
Israeli hasbaristas have argued throughout this time that the siege the Israeli government has maintained around Gaza has been the main (or sometimes, the only) Israeli “response” to the rockets launched against Hamas and other militants in Gaza over this time. I have always argued that this was never a simple situation of “rockets versus siege” but that during this period, in addition to the siege, the Israelis maintained very lethal military ops against Gaza, as well.
Also, few if any of Israel’s actions against Gaza have been undertaken solely “in response to” Palestinian rocketings. There has always been a cycle of violence; and very frequently (including, most notably, last December 27) Israel has been the one to initiate a new round or significantly escalate an existing round. The number of Israelis killed by the Gazans’ for the most part extremely primitive, home-made bottle rockets has been very low. Certainly, far fewer than 100 killed over that same time. (Though Bronner and Tavernise somehow omit to mention the number. I believe it’s available at B’tselem’s site.)
But anyway, main point of post: Pres. Obama, what would you do if your family members got treated the same way Sabah Abu Halima’s family got treated? I am assuming, of course, that you and everyone else agrees that a Palestinian life is every bit as valuable as an Israeli life…

Obama, act now for peace and humanity!

When Israel was still bombing Gaza full-bore, back until two days before the end of George Bush’s presidency, president-elect Barack Obama said he did not want to adopt any kind of public position on the war because “We have only one president at a time.”
Now, he is it.
Israelis go to the polls on February 10. The parallel-but-unnegotiated ceasefires announced by Hamas and Israel on January 18 are looking very shaky indeed. Israel’s Military Intelligence has reported that it is the non-Hamas groups that have continued launching some hostile acts (an ambush, some small-scale rockets) against Israel since January 18. Today, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert promised to undertake “disproportionate” retaliation against Gaza for the latest rocket attack from Gaza, sendung warplanes against Southern gaza and threatening even greater escalations over the days ahead.
Olmert himself is not running in the upcoming election, though he is campaigning desperately to save the “legacy” of a term as PM that was stained by the strategic debacle of the 2006 war against Lebanon and the corruption charges that have snapped ever closer and closer to his own heels (and which forced him to step down as head of Kadima some months ago.)
Though Olmert is not running, his colleague at the head of Kadima, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, most certainly is. And so is Labour Party head Ehud Barak, currently the Defense Minister. Since January 18, this troika has come in for considerable criticism from Israel’s hard-right parties who claim– with some justification– that they did not “finish the job” they started when they launched the war december 27, in terms of suppressing the ability of the Palestinian militants to fire their (often home-made) projectiles against Israel.
Over the past few years the major political momentum inside Israel– including among an apparently broad swathe of the Jewish-Israeli public– has been pushing toward ever more hawkish stances and actions, though there are now, as always, several significant voices in the country that point out that suppressing the Palestinians’ will to resist Israel’s occupation and siege is an unachievable task and therefore Israel should seek to engage Hamas in negotiations.
But what of Barack Obama? Now, as the violence starts to re-escalate, he needs to speak out forcefully for de-escalation, and for a return to authoritative final-status peace negotiations, human solidarity, and calm.
He needs to do this before February 10, otherwise the bellophilia that has been holding so many Israelis in its thrall might sweep a very heavily rightwing and anti-withdrawal government into power.
He needs to do it now, to try to knock some sense into the heads of the current Israeli government, who throughout eight years of the Bush presidency got used to having a complete “carte blanche” from Washington, regardless of the serious bad effects that their actions had on US interests spread throughout the region. (For many years now, Washington has been overwhelmingly the main provider of help to Israel at the military, political, and financial levels. Everyone in the world knows that.)
Obama also needs to do this now because the people of Gaza are still suffering. During the recent war, Israel– using overwhelmingly US-supplied weaponry– bombed thousands of their homes and businesses and the physical facilities of many of their major social institutions to smithereens. People are in tents, and the Gaza winters can be biting cold. The work of physical and social reconstruction urgently needs to get underway– but the Olmert government still won’t allow even basic construction materials to pass into the Strip.
There is an urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But the crisis is not the kind of “humanitarian” issue that can be dealt with only by endlessly sending food and hygiene supplies in to Gaza’s people. It is, at its core, part of the deep and continuing political crisis of the Palestinian people– a crisis that has been awaiting an authoritative political resolution for 61 years now.
Obama did despatch Sen. George Mitchell to the region for a “listening tour,” last Monday. So I hope that, even though Mitchell is still in the Middle East, he has already been able to convey back to Obama some of the urgency of the situation he has found there.
But now, even before Mitchell gets back to Washington DC, Obama needs to start speaking out: for de-escalation, for a true spirit of human solidarity with the peoples of Gaza and of Israel, for strengthening the ceasefire in Gaza, and for launching a top-priority, international project to secure the terms of a final-status peace between Israelis and Palestinians within the next nine months.
Diplomatic delay has always been fatal on this issue. The US has only one president. President Obama: step up to the plate now!