Category: Writing and publishing

Here is my latest CSM column, out today. The editors there put a good headline on it: Movement controls stunt Palestinian lives – and democracy.
I mentioned in there that I’d been part of a group that convened in late 2002 to look at the prospects for a new Palestinian election. That effort had been launched by some well-meaning folks at American University in Washington, DC, and at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies. But it got absolutely nowhere. The Israeli government never showed itself ready for a minute to allow the kind of conditions (freedom of movement and expression; general public security) that would allow an open, fair, and credible election to take place in the occupied territories.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone— maybe that great advocate of democracy now sitting in the White House?–could persuade Prime Minister Sharon that that would be the right thing to do?
Of course, Pres. Bush might have a little bit of a credibility problem of his own if he pressed someone else running a military occupation to allow free and fair elections in the occupied territories…. Especially after the pathetic attempt his own administration made last November to circumvent the approach of free and fair elections in Iraq. (Click ‘Rube Goldberg’ in the Search box here.)
But still, there is now some hope that the people of Iraq will be able to hold free and fair elections, under some kind of U.N. auspices, some time around the end of this year.
Actually, the Bush administration seems, belatedly, to have come to the recognition that such an arrangement– elections to produce (hopefully) a credible, legitimate Iraqi leadership, plus the essential ingredient of UN auspices–may be the best bet it has to be able to draw down the US’s own treacherous over-exposure inside Iraq, and to allow the US forces to be taken out in something approaching good order.
So why wouldn’t the Bushies urge their Israeli friends to do something similar in Gaza and the West Bank? Could it be that they understand that Sharon really does not want to pull Israel’s control mechanisms, and its troops and settlers, totally out of those areas? And perhaps, too, that they actually sympathize with Sharon’s preferences in that regard?
So much for democracy.

Here’s a link to my column in Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor. I had to do huge rewrite right up against deadline, for reasons I shan’t go into here. So it’s a little ragged. Plus the headline they put on is a tad ambiguous…
Oh Helena, just stop explaining and apologizing. Just let the people just read it and decide for themselves.
Next installment next week there. I’ve already talked with them about doing at least two columns in April on the Rwanda and S. Africa decennials. And today I heard from PBS ‘Frontline’, which wants me to do something for a big special they’re putting together about Rwanda for April 1st. That’s good.

My latest column is in Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor. It’s a call for US citizens to start reflecting seriously on our rightful place in the world.
I ask, “How, during the year ahead, do we hope to see the 4 percent of the world’s population who are US citizens interacting with the other 96 percent?”
I look quickly at some of the more egregiously bad aspects of the war Washington launched against Iraq in 2003, then I conclude:

What’s needed in the year ahead is a serious attempt by all who aspire to US leadership to evaluate what went wrong in the lead up to, and conduct of, the war. How did US leaders get the facts about Iraq’s weapons programs so very wrong? Why was the planning for the aftermath of the war so very flawed? Why was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allowed to do so much to alienate key US allies overseas, and to undermine the guiding principles of the UN? Why has no one been held accountable?
At the same time, Americans need to think long and hard about the quality of their nation’s ties to the rest of the world. Global democratization is progressing, and the more democratic the world and its governance become, the more US citizens will have to rely on its nation’s relationship with others for their own security and well-being.
Americans are, after all, only a tiny minority of the world’s people. It’s time the US government recognized that, stopped trying to throw its weight around, and grew up.

Actually, much of the body of the piece was an accusation that (hawks in the) the administration had unacceptably politicized the intelligence on Saddam’s WMDs, and his ties to Al-Qaeda, in order to build public and political support for the war…

Continue reading “New CSM column: the U.S. and the rest”

My latest Christian Science Monitor column is now up on the CSM website. You can read it here.
It’s titled ‘Made in Israel’ crackdowns in Iraq won’t work, and it starts:

In recent weeks, many US military units in Iraq have turned from trying to win Iraqi “hearts and minds” to a “get tough” policy that explicitly copies many moves from the playbook used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the West Bank and Gaza. These moves include demolition of homes of suspects, imposition of stifling movement controls and other collective punishments on civilians, and the frequent use of excessive force.
Tactics like these are unethical under any moral code, and illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. In addition, their adoption is shortsighted. In Israel itself, many leading strategic thinkers now openly admit that the IDF’s three-year-long pursuit of these tactics has still not “convinced” the Palestinians to end their defiance of Israel’s will.
(It is also tragic that US commanders moved to these antihumanitarian and antidemocratic measures at the same time President Bush issued his call for the spread of democracy throughout the Arab world.)

Actually, I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out. I make a bunch of other important points in there, too.

I’ve had the nose to the grindstone here since Friday a.m. First, I finished final edit on a long piece about the Int’l Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that the Boston Review will be publishing soon. Then before I could catch my breath my friend Tony Bing arrived from North Carolina and we’ve been working non-stop on some (hopefully pretty final) drafting work for a big Quaker report on israel and Palestine that we–and 12 others– have been working on.
Tony is a real hard taskmaster! I’ve had scarcely a moment to blow my nose since he got here Friday afternoon. Far less write anything substantial for JWN.
I haven’t even had time to cruise the blogosphere in general, for goodness’ sakes! What kind of a life is this???
(Actually, since I get to do work that I love, with people whom i really like, the answer is, a pretty good life. I’m just whingeing a bit, above. But if you have any sympathy for me, send chocolate.)

I’m writing this from my sister’s computer in England. Interested to see the numbers of ardently pro-Israel people posting comments on my last post, on the CSM column of mine that ran on Thursday (which they did under the next post here), and on the Israel/South Africa comparison piece.
When I have the time and the bandwidth, I’ll sit down and write some reactions to some of those. But it strikes me the level of some of the discourse/analysis there is really amazingly low. Accusations of me being a Jew-hater or the whole of France being a Jew-hating country really seem inane. As does the apparent description of Palestinians as Jordanian and Egyptian immigrants to “Judea and Samaria.”
Hey guys, let’s try to keep things reasonable and respectful?

Sunday morning in New York City’s East Village. I’m writing this in Alt.coffee, an internet cafe facing Tompkins Square Park. Sunshine outside. Inside, heavy-metal music and air-conditioning. Intermittent short rushes of business at the counter, where Leila and a colleagu are pulling the Sunday-daytime shift (and keeping me filled up with coffee.)
Yesterday I got back to the mainland after a week on Star Island, a magical, amazing, special chunk of rock anchored ten miles out from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Bill and Lorna and I have been going to Star Island’s annual ‘International Affairs’ conference every year for more than 15 years now.
This year, the program part of the conference was on “Islam”, and they had four really talented and engaging speakers. However, I had to spend quite a lot of time away from the conference, finishing up the big drafting/redrafting project I’ve been working on for the past two months. The deadline on that is tomorrow, and it’s just about ready to go.
So I was using my daughter Lorna Quandt’s laptop, a Mac, which was a bit scary for me. Even scarier, I had no internet access for a whole week. I checked out the possibility of getting a boat back to the mainland midweek, so I could rush along to the Portsmouth public library and use their computers to download some mail, etc etc. But there was no boat that could work for a day-trip, and the idea of overnighting someplace there just so I could satisfy my web-lust seemed a little ridiculous.
So a whole eight days of weblessness it turned out to be. Cold turkey!
I survived. I got my work done. And I had some excellent, real life experiences without even thinking much about whether I could subsequently frame them into posts on the blog.
How is Star Island amazing? Well, for starters, life is very different. Not just no web– also, no regular showers! They have two regular slots for communal showers throughout the week– Tuesday and Friday. But during the Friday shower period, the line out of the women’s showers was so long that–even with a total estrogen-powered takeover of the men’s showers– it looked like a 30-minute wait down there in the steamy, slimy shower area…. I took two pitchers of warm-ish water and went back to my room to wash myself in a basin: a much better experience.
But the main thing about being on Star is, as everyone agrees, the people. It’s a unique way of being with people. You get to the dock in Portsmouth at noon on the Satruday and there are people you haven’t seen for 51 weeks. “How was your year?” is the main question on everyone’s lips.
How was my year? That is a question we far too rarely stop to think about– unless maybe we are Jewish and go to Yom Kippur services where a similar kind of accounting for one’s behavior over the past year is, as far as I understand things, at their heart.
How was my year? Well, that’s a question you can either blow off quickly… or you can try to give it a serious answer…

Continue reading “NYC/Star Island reflections”

I’ve been crazy busy for the past two weeks. Haven’t had a moment to write. And now I’m going off to a place where I’ll have no net access for ten days. Plus I’ll be crazy busy thru the end of the month.
Check back in early August!
Or maybe, I’ll write something great while I’m up st Star island and post it as soon as I get back to the mainland, July 26. Who knows? I sure don’t.