Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 129 – Info, analysis, discussion

Selling the tahdi’eh

The Hamas-Israel ceasefire (tahdi’eh) went into operation today, thank God. But not without– as I forecast yesterday– some last-minute salvoes from each side.
The tahdi’eh is scheduled to last in the first instance for six months. According to the agreement, which was mediated by Egypt, the reciprocal cessation of attacks between Gaza and Israel will be followed in short order by Israel taking significant steps to ease and then lift the economic siege it has maintained on Gaza for two years; by steps to open the Rafah personal-transit crossing between Gaza and Egypt; and by completion of the negotiation on a prisoner exchange.
Until very recently, Israel’s leaders were adamant that they would not deal with Hamas, and Hamas’s leaders– who still do not grant Israel any of the legitimacy it craves as a Jewish state– remained very wary indeed of having any dealings with it. Since the leaders on both sides have promulgated these views very widely among their own people for many years, they have now necessarily had to accompany the release of the news about the ceasefire with their own efforts to explain to their respective followers how and why this ceasefire is acceptable.
This work of psychological leadership, or “message management”, is a necessary concomitant of all moves that leaders anywhere make from hostility to de-escalation or peacemaking. But studying it in this case is particularly interesting.
One perception the leaders on both sides have to combat is the idea that in reaching this de-escalation step they are displaying the “weakness” of their side vis-a-vis the other. In Hamas’s case, the movement addressed that concern directly yesterday. The pro-Hamas PIC website reported that,

The Hamas Movement on Wednesday affirmed that it signed the calm agreement out of strength and not out of weakness and that it would abide by all articles of the agreement as mediated by Egypt.

PIC also reported the (not completely unjustified) attempt by a Hamas spokesman to frame the conclusion of the ceasefire as a positive achievement for the movement:

Note, in that statement, too, how Abu Zuhri, whose statements until recently would drip with scorn or skepticism regarding the credibility and trustworthiness of Israel’s leaders, is now also assuring his Palestinian listeners that “both parties are committed to the agreement.”
For the vast majority of the Gazans listening to him, the promise that the commercial crossings between Gaza and Israel will be “completely open” within two weeks will obviously come as a huge relief, and– like the cessation of Israeli armed attacks that the ceasefire also involves– a real benefit of the ceasefire. So from that point of view, the challenge that Hamas has faced in “selling” the tahdi’eh to its public has been relatively easy.
In Israel, where only a small proportion of the public has been adversely affected by the long-continuing (and highly asymmetrical) exchanges of fire with Gaza, the leaders’ selling job has been considerably harder. Israel’s leaders have therefore been trying to sell the tahdi’eh to their people in a different, much more convoluted way and, I would say, with notably less enthusiasm than the Hamas leaders.
Haaretz tells us this:

Continue reading “Selling the tahdi’eh”

Bad timing

On the day that Israel announces it’s agreed to participate in a reciprocal ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza, Ziad Asali, the head of the “American Task for Palestine” (more rightwing American than Palestinian, as a task force) has an anti-Hamas op-ed in the rightwing Washington Times.
It’s titled “Miscalculation: How Hamas wastes Palestinian lives.”
Asali and others associated with the ATFP have been working hard in Washington DC in recent months, urging the US (and Israel) to take even tougher measures to try to “punish”, exclude, and crush Hamas.
Oops, who miscalculated now?

Memo to Sen. Obama on Iraq

Mr. Obama, I am not privy to the whole of the conversation you recently had with Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister in every Iraqi government since the US installed its own puppet regime there in 2003. Zebari, as you doubtless know, is also a prime example of what many Middle East experts have taken to calling the “Kurdification” of Iraqi politics under the Americans.
But Mr. Zebari waited barely a few hours before retelling his side of the conversation to the editors of the Washington Post (who returned the compliment by referring to him as a “dedicated Iraqi leader.”) The way he told it, he had given you a a harsh lecture about (his version of) the realities in Iraq. The WaPo editors reported approvingly that Zebari said he’d told you “We have a deadly enemy” in Iraq”, and that, while he believes the US force levels can and should be drawn down, those reductions should only be made gradually.
Senator, I’m glad you listened to Zebari. I don’t know whether, in doing so, you probed him a little deeper on some of his assertions. It would be fascinating to hear, for example, his version of who he thinks the– apparently monadic– “enemy” in Iraq really is. The WaPo people never probed him on that, of course, because once you do try to define who “the enemy” is, you immediately see that the situation there is very complex, and certainly not conducive to any form of a US-imposed solution.
But Senator, you should also make sure you listen to a broad range of other voices from Iraq. Including, but not limited to, thoughtful Iraqi legislators and community leaders like the ones I listened to in Washington in the past two weeks. (See here and here.)
Above all, try to make sure you hear the views of Iraqis who are not residents of the US-protected Green Zone. You’ll find that their views are very different indeed than those of their “foreign minister.”
You’ve no doubt already remembered that Zebari was an important member of the coterie of Iraqi exiles who in the lead-up to 2003 worked tirelessly to try to get the US to invade Iraq (and then to install them in power.)
I’m assuming you’re smart enough not to get snookered by these guys– that is, either the Zebaris or the WaPos– this time around, just as you weren’t snookered by them in 2002…

Tahdi’eh: Israel confirms

There will be no handshakes and back-patting on the White House lawn, and no turn-on-a-dime lionizing of this Palestinian leadership by the pillars of the world Jewish community. But the tahdi’eh (ceasefire) agreement that Israel has now confirmed it has agreed to with Hamas may well bring a long-needed degree of calm to both Gaza and southern Israel. And if it holds, it could serve as a foundation stone for an entirely new kind of Israeli-Palestinian relationship over the years ahead.
The rest of the day today, Wednesday, may yet see some fighting, perhaps even a last-minute esclation, as we saw along the Israel-Lebanon border in the 40 hours before the August 2006 ceasefire there went into effect. The Hamas-Israel tahdi’eh is scheduled to go into force at 6 a.m. local time Thursday, 15 hours from now, so hopefully not too many more lives will be uselessly lost before then.
Here’s the deal. Ever since Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, the government of Israel– with considerable support from the US-led portions of the “international community”– has maintained and progressively tightened an inhumane and illegal economic siege on Hamas-dominated Gaza, while government leaders have said they would lift the siege only if Hamas and its allies stopped the sporadic rocket attacks they’ve been launching against southern Israel.
But the economic siege and the Hamas rocketings were not the only thing that was going on there. The Israeli military has also, until now, clung hard to a claimed “right” to exercise full freedom of military action in Gaza, and has undertaken many forms of very destructive military actions against militants and others in the Strip. (Remember that the sheer weight and lethality of the ordnance it has used there has far outweighed anything Hamas or anyone else had access to.) In recent years, Israel has also assassinated more than 120 alleged “terror leaders” in the Strip, many of them political leaders, and in the process killed a far greater number of innocent passers-by or family members.
So Hamas, not unreasonably, has demanded that any ceasefire it agree to should be equally binding on Israel.
In 2005 and early 2006, Hamas, like Fateh but unlike some of the smaller Palestinian groups in the Strip, largely complied with a Fateh-Hamas agreement unilaterally to refrain from taking any military action against Israel. That unilateral (Palestinians-only) ceasefire allowed Israel to undertake its withdrawal of troops and settlers from Gaza without major incident. It also allowed the orderly holding of the Palestinian elections of January 2006.
But once Israel had pulled its settlers out of Gaza, it felt no hesitancy about using its military to hammer Gaza hard whenever it pleased.
For Hamas, the idea of returning to a unilateral, Palestinians-only ceasefire with Israel was quite untenable. For them, winning reciprocity in the ceasefire aspect of the deal was vital. Now, they have won it. That is a significant achievement, won after much suffering.
There remains a major potential problem in that the compliance of the two sides with this ceasefire has no monitoring mechanism that I know of. Therefore, ill-wishers either side of the line could still provoke an incident unless the two parties are both willing and able to police it very robustly. If Hamas is to be able to do that, it will probably need some upgrading of its command and control structures, though it has already shown itself fairly capable of exerting discipline throughout the Strip over the twelve months since it chased the ragtag (and US-armed) Fateh bands and hangers-on out of the Strip.
The government of Egypt, which used its longstanding diplomatic relationship with Israel to good advantage to mediate this ceasefire agreement, might well be able to also play a continuing monitoring role? Perhaps even on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border? I’m not sure if that has been discussed yet, but it still could be.
Anyway, if the ceasefire succeeds, the Gaza issue will continue to be an increasingly large issue within Egyptian politics. As it will be, of course, if the ceasefire should catastrophically fail.
If this tahdi’eh goes forward as planned, the Israeli economic siege on Gaza will be progressively lifted, started pretty soon. At some point, the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt will also be re-opened– but this time, according to the reports I’ve seen, notably without any Israeli monitoring role there at all. But with an EU role. An interesting diminution of Israel’s control over Gaza’s borders, if true.
Also, during the week ahead, if the tahdi’eh proceeds, negotiations on the prisoner exchange involving Gilad Shalit and some 350-plus Palestinian detainees will go into high gear. In Palestine as in Iraq, the mass detention of native peoples is one of the ways in which foreign occupying forces try to exert and maintain their control. Don’t think for a minute that, in a huge proportion of these cases, there is any reason for these detentions other than the drive to control the natives, subvert their understandable movements for independence from foreign rule, and use them as hostages in negotiations.
But if this tahdi’eh thereby becomes what I call a tahdi’eh-plus, it might also lead towards some form of longer-term hudna (armistice) between Israel and the Palestinians of the West Bank… that is, to some version of a two-state solution. Or, it could lead to a situation in which– as both Hamas and Israel’s Likud desire– the border between the West Bank and Israel dissolves completely and a new kind of polity arises throughout the whole of Mandate (pre-partition) Palestine.
But that’s for the future. For now, just keep hoping and praying for the success of this tahdi’eh. It will bring vitally needed relief to the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza, and to their neighbors in southern Israel. And it might provide enough calm inside both national communities for the members and leaders of both to start planning their future in the tiny slice of land between the sea and the Jordan River in a more rational, equitable, and sustainable way.

Tahdi’eh, and fading of two-state prospects

AP reports the following details about the tahdi’eh (ceasefire) deal that Hamas says it has now reached with Israel, with Egypt mediating:

In Ha’aretz, Amos Harel and Jack Khoury report that

The deal looks just about certain to go into effect.
It is notable that the latest steps of this negotiation were completed while Secretary of State Condi Rice was still in the region. The government of Israel has now spent some time engaging in “proximity talks” with both Hamas and Syria. Rice’s proteges inside both the Lebanese and Palestinian political systems have been engaging very seriously with, respectively Hizbullah and Hamas. And her proteges in Iraq have been engaging very seriously with Iran.
So the Quarantine Wall that Rice and Pres. Bush have been working hard to maintain around Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, and Iran now looks to be in very bad shape indeed.
We might (or by now, actually, might not) recall that just last November, Rice and Bush stage-managed a huge Mideast summit conference in Annapolis, Maryland, at which they pledged their very best efforts to try to win a final-status peace agreement between Israel and the Fateh leaders of the Palestinian Administration by the end of this year.
But the Israelis now apparently pay so little heed to Washington’s efforts that Rice’s visit to Israel this week passed almost unremarked by the Israeli media, according to the CSM’s Ilene Prusher.
If the Israeli side does indeed proceed with the tahdi’eh plan as publicized by Hamas, that is of course yet another serious setback for Fateh. Fateh is anyway, as noted above, engaged in its own effort to reconcile with Hamas. If Hamas has the tahdi’eh in its pocket, then that will strengthen its hands in those internal negotiations.
Conclusion of the tahdi’eh will also, more broadly, drive yet another political nail into the coffin of the two-state solution. Though goodness knows, thousands of other nails have already been driven into its coffin in recent months, with all the announcements from Israel of yet more contracts going out to build large numbers of new housing units in the colonial settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.
As I wrote in the Boston Review article, what you may therefore see emerging in Israel/Palestinian instead of two states is two “entities”, with one of them being the Hamas-ruled, sub-state entity in Gaza and the other being an Israel that still finds itself unable to disentangle itself from the West Bank.
Over the longer haul, this is not a stable situation. But if Israelis are unable to withdraw from the settlements they have planted deep throughout the West Bank, then they must expect Palestinian claims inside 1948 Israel to grow stronger in response; and over time, a (binational) one-state outcome will likely become increasingly compelling…

US Diplomats and Boumediene Case

I too am encouraged by the US Supreme Court’s Boumediene v. Bush ruling that detainees held at Gunatanamo Bay are entitled to Habeas Corpus protection — the right to challenge their detention in a US Court. I also appreciate this LA Times analysis on the “internationalist” considerations that likely influenced the Boumediene majority. Yet I’ve also been perplexed by the fury of the dissents and the hyperbolic claim by presidential candidate John McCain that the ruling was “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
Three complaints stand out: First, dissenting Justice Scalia darkly warns that the ruling will “almost certainly” result in more American being killed. Second, because the US is deemed to be at”war” with those who don’t respect our values, we should not extend such rights to them. Cast as an inhuman “enemy,” they only understand the “language of force.”
Third, the critics condemn the Court for subjecting our laws to the dictates of international opinions — to the norms recognized by the rest of the world. That’s “judicial cosmopolitanism;” it’s “too French.” Or worse, it’d be like Thomas Jefferson in the first sentence of the US Declaration of Independence waxing about “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”
In researching case background (and hat tip to Helena for this resource) I came across a timeless and eloquent response to such concerns, in the form of a Friend of the Court filing, prepared last year by some of America’s best career diplomats. Endorsers include former US Ambassadors to Israel (and elsewhere) Sam Lewis, Thomas Pickering, and William (C) Harrop, as well as Bruce Laingen and the late William D. Rogers and our recently departed Charlottesville friend and mentor, David D. Newsom. (bless his memory)
Among their sage observations: (emphasis added):

If the mounting cost to American diplomatic interests is finally to be curbed, it is imperative, at minimum, to restore meaningful judicial review for prisoners at Guantanamo. Our nation cannot credibly champion the rule of law in the world, while being seen to disregard it in our own affairs….
[O]ur professional experience convinces us that American diplomatic credibility and effectiveness in many areas of international relations suffer greatly from the widely shared perception that, by denying prisoners at Guantanamo access to habeas corpus, our country has lost sight of its historic commitment to independent and effective judicial review of the lawfulness of detention…..
We have come to believe, in our representation of this country to other nations, that those nations are more willing to accept American leadership and counsel to the extent that they see us as true to the principle of freedom under the law. Indeed, the matter has rarely been better put than by President Bush in signing the Torture Victims Protection Act on March 12, 1992:

In this new era, in which countries throughout the world are turning to democratic institutions and the rule of law, we must maintain and strengthen our commitment to ensuring that they are respected everywhere….

(Perhaps this entire subject ought to be re-framed as, “Bush vs. Bush.”)

The admiration and respect for this nation abroad is a function of our own commitment to liberty under law. In this, we have led the world. The success of our interests in the wider arena turns importantly on the extent to which this nation is perceived as continuing to abide by these principles. Any hint that America is not all that it claims, or that it is prepared to ignore a “nonnegotiable demand of human dignity,” that it can accept that the Executive Branch may imprison whom it will and do so beyond the reach of the due process of law, demeans and weakens this nation’s voice abroad.
We have taken it as our duty to so state to this Court. There is no doubting America’s power at this juncture. But values count too. And, for this nation, there is no benefit in the exercise of our undoubted power unless it is deployed in the service of fundamental values: democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and due process. To the extent that we are perceived as compromising those values, to that extent will our efforts to promote our interests in the wider world be prejudiced. Such at least is our collective experience.
George Kennan’s Long Telegram from the American Embassy in Moscow to the State Department in 1946 defined the authoritarian bestiality of the Soviet system and its aim to break “the international authority of our state.” It was perhaps the most important American diplomatic communication of the last century. In closing, Kennan spoke for us all and for all time:

[T]he greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

I recommend this document as an enduring resource for policymakers, educators, and citizens alike, challenging us to consider that we don’t have to toss aside our values to defend them, that our values are a component of our potential influence abroad, that defending our principles need not detract from our “power.”

More confirmation on Israel-Hamas deal

Haaretz publishes this today:

For background, see my my recent writings on Hamas, including my recent Boston Review article and full; text of my January interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal, accessible here.
More commentary later tonight, inshallah. Timing obviously interesting in view of Condi’s visit?

Hamas-Israel deal about to be reached?

Time.com’s Tim McGirk reports from Jerusalem today that:

Over the past three months, we have several times come close to seeing this reciprocal ceasefire (tahdi’eh) deal nailed down… but none of those earlier alerts were borne out.
Let’s hope this one is.
If you haven’t yet read my recent Boston Review article on Hamas, that gives considerable background about this negotiation, you can find it here.

Washington: Concealing SOFA plans since November 2003

The National Security Archive at George Washington University has succeeded in winning declassification of some intriguing– though heavily “redacted”– documents dating back to Nobember 2003 that detail the Pentagon’s longstanding efforts to win a very permissive (from their point of view) long-term security agreement from Iraq.
The page linked to there has a good analysis of the documents and ends with links to PDF versions of the docs themselves.
The NSA analyst, Joyce Battle, starts with a reference to Patrick Cockburn’s excellent recent reporting on the details of the SOFA-plus agreement that the Bushists presented to the Iraqi side at the beginning of this month. Under the heading “Looks like San Remo all over again”– a reference to the 1920 conference at which Britain and France got generously handed their League of Nations “Mandates” over the governance of five majority-Arab countries (take that, Woodrow Wilson!)– Battle notes:

Recently declassified documents show that the U.S. military has long sought an agreement with Baghdad that gives American forces virtually unfettered freedom of action in – and possibly around – Iraq. This new information appears to run counter to Bush administration claims that U.S. intentions have been more limited in scope.

The first of the declassified “documents” she presents is a PDF/PPT slideshow, heavily redacted, that she believes was created by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. It was dated November 27, 2003. That was just five weeks after the day on which the UN Security Council– meeting in New York, not San Remo– adopted Resolution 1511 which handed the US a qualified and highly time-limited mandate to rule over Iraq.
We might remember that the three most important clauses of res. 1511 were that, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, the Security Council:

So according to Battle, the requirements that the Pentagon sought in Iraq at the time included items in the following areas:

The collection of documents presented through that NSA web-page comprises eight internal documents dated between the last week of November and the end of December 2003. In one of them, document 5, Paul Bremer laid out in a cable to the State Department and the National Security Council a lengthy list of items that the “coalition” forces would have to insist on still controlling and/or having access to, even after the restoration of Iraq’s supposed “sovereignty.”
Battle wrote this about the Bremer cable:

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Obama, Iraq, and Washington’s unilateralist echo-chamber

So if Barack Obama wins the presidential election, what will his policy toward Iraq actually be in 2009? The answer to this question is extremely important to our country and the world over the years, or decades, ahead. But despite the candidate’s generally sterling record of opposition to the original, 2003 invasion of Iraq, and his statements that he was to see the US begin a serious withdrawal soon after he takes office, still, the actual content of his policy remains shrouded in mystery.
Not least because of the extremely ill-advised comments that Samantha– then still a key Obama foreign-policy aide– made in early March to the effect that his public promises that he’ll get U.S. “combat forces” out of Iraq in 16 months is just a “best-case scenario” that would be “revisited” once he becomes president.
A month ago, The New Republic carried this excellent article in which Michael Crowley analyzed what is known about Obama’s actual thinking on Iraq. (Hat-tip Abu Aardvark.) It is not at all a reassuring picture, and underlines for me why it is important that people in the US antiwar movement continue to build our own strong and independent organization, to keep the pressure up both on the two candidates prior to November 4, and after that, on whoever it is that gets elected on that date.
Here, as a baseline, is what Obama has posted on his campaign website about his Iraq policy.
These are the most important paragraphs, numbered by myself:

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