HC writings on Hamas, 2006-2008

One strategy you can always pursue is to check out my writings on Hamas, both those published here on JWN and (links to) those published elsewhere, by going to the JWN main page and doing a site search for “Hamas” in the search box on the right
sidebar.

But here are some of my key writings on Hamas from March 2006 through
June 2008:

Quarantine Wall news, and an intriguing human story

It seems the recently negotiated prisoner swap agreement between Israel and Hizbullah might start to be implemented as early as tomorrow, Sunday.
The Israeli political system is, perhaps understandably, too preoccupied with the woes of PM Olmert to pay much attention to the progress of either this emerging (or already completed) agreement with Hizbullah, which has been mediated by German government officials, or to the possibly close-to-completion ceasefire agreement with Hamas, mediated by Egypt.
Whatever the final timeline on completion and implementation of these two agreements, however, the fact that the Israeli government has been very seriously engaged in these negotiations has already seriously undercut the “Quarantine Wall” that the Bush administration has long tried to maintain, to prevent its allies around the world away from having any diplomatic dealings whatsoever with either Hamas or Hizbullah (or, come to that, Syria.)
So let’s just quickly review which US allies have been chipping very seriously away at different portions of the Quarantine Wall in the past weeks and months:

    Israel (Hamas, Hizb., and Syria)
    Qatar (all three)
    Turkey (Syria)
    Egypt (Hamas)
    Germany (Hizbullah)
    Fouad Siniora (Hizbullah… also of note: as I thought might happen, a politically reconfigured Siniora is back again as Lebanon’s PM-designate)

Anyway, within the stories of prisoner releases there are always numerous very gripping human stories.
In Israel, Miki Goldwasser, the mother of the Hizbullah-held IDF soldier Ehud Goldwasser recently expressed her frustration about the neglect to which her family has been subjected by Israeli officials over recent weeks. She said that no official has visited her, “and that no one has reported any kind of new developments on the issue to her family.”
Ms. Goldwasser also expressed her conviction that her son and the other IDF soldier captured by Hizbullah in July 2006 are both still alive, though there remains considerable doubt about that.
My very best wishes to Ms. Goldwasser and the mothers of all the other people in that region who have been captured by enemy forces and held to be quite cynically used as bargaining chips.
Meanwhile, from Al-Manar’s English-language website we can learn some intriguing details about the family background of Nissim Nisr who, according to the website, has been detained in Israel (I believe on charges of acting as a Hizbullah spy), but “will be released on Sunday” as a preliminary step in implementation of the Hizbullah-Israel prisoner swap.
The site says:

    Nassim Nisr was born in 1968 to an Israeli-Jewish mother and a Lebanese Muslim father and left Lebanon during the Israeli invasion in 1982 to join his mother’s family near Tel Aviv. Nisr’s mother Valentine, 70, now lives in the village of Bazouryeh in southern Lebanon, and said that she had [unlike Miki Goldwasser] been informed of her son’s imminent release.

If I were in Lebanon, I would head straight down to Bazouriyeh– hey isn’t that Nasrullah’s home village?–to get an interview with this intriguing Israeli-Jewish woman, Valentine Nisr.
Is she being held in any form of confinement in Bazouriyeh, I wonder, or is she there of her own volition? And what is the story of her, an Israeli-Jewish woman, having married a Lebanese Muslim father, presumably some time before 1968? I hope it’s a good romantic story. Tell us, please!
… So then, in the horrendous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (the same one that afterwards gave birth to Hizbullah), the 14-year-old Nissim, who had been living in Lebanon, left the country to go live with his mother’s family near Tel Aviv. What were his experiences like there at the time? Of course, with a Jewish mother, he too would have been considered Jewish and therefore immediately eligible for Israeli citizenship… Did his mom go with him or stay on in Lebanon, sending him to her relatives to gain some safety from the conflict raging all around?
Did he really later become a spy for Hizbullah? I’d love to hear more of that story, too.
But we may not hear the details of that one any time soon… It is the back-story of Valentine and her spouse’s romance, the boy’s childhood, and his abrupt displacement at age 14 to Israel that I’d love to hear right now.
Tangled webs, eh?

Scott McClellan– some remorse maybe??

I have been as intrigued as everyone else by the fact that former White House spokesman Scott McClellan has published a book accusing President Bush of having engaged in spin and unfair manipulation of both the facts and those who report them (i.e. the media) during the lead-up to the Iraq war.
I have not yet read McClellan’s book, but hope to some day soon. (I’m reluctant to contribute to his authorial earnings, though. So I’ll have to look for a library copy.)
Obviously his record of what happened inside the White House spin machine is very important.
But I think that a lot of the MSM reporting on the book’s revelations still falls into the trap of treating them as primarily an “inside the Washington Beltway” story, focusing on two major memes:

    1. How could you have done this to us, the MSM journos, Scott?
    2. A sort of gossipy story about ‘Does this mean that all his former White House friends are now mad at him? How mad are they? Who’s mad and who isn’t?’

What’s gotten left out of the reporting I’ve seen has been the fact that the lie-telling in which McClellan engaged while inside the White House contributed materially to inflicting massive amounts of actual harm on millions of people in Iraq and scores of thousands of others here in the US.
Scott McClellan, could you express some remorse to the family members of Iraqi civilians killed by and because of the US invasion of their country?
Scott McClellan, could you express some remorse to the family members of the 4,080 American citizens killed, and the scores of thousands maimed forever, because of Pres. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq?
To me, the Scott McClellan story is not primarily “about” what happens inside the Washington Beltway. It is about the harm the war has inflicted on millions of people outside the Beltway– both in outside-the-Beltway America and overseas. Can Scott McClellan look into a camera and speak to those people and say, “I am truly sorry for the part I played in implementing the President’s plan to prepare for and launch the invasion.”
Will he give the royalty earnings from this book to charities that work to reconstruct the shattered lives of Iraqis and of US war veterans? That would be one solid good move.
I just watched this Youtube clip of McClellan being interviewed on NBC’s “Today” program yesterday. At around 3:30 minutes into the clip he starts saying some significant things about the role he played in the buildup to war, and how he felt about it at the time.
He said (paraphrasing here):

    I felt we were rushing into the war… But we were un the post 9/11 world, and the president had an experienced foreign-policy team that had performed well in Afghanistan… so because of my affection and trust for the president I gave him the benefit of the doubt…
    … I struggled as I wrote this book, to figure out how to explain how it happened…

Well, I guess I’m glad that you underwent that struggle, Scott. But it would be good if you could acknowledge that the struggle you have undergone to do that, undertaken in the comfort and safety of a luxurious family home and surrounded by presumably-intact family members, completely pales in comparison with the struggles for survival currently being undertaken by scores of thousands of badly wounded Iraq war veterans in this country, and their families, and by literally millions of Iraqis inside their war-shattered country.
So maybe a little less emphasis on the difficulty of your own “struggle” might be in order? And a bit more moral plainspeaking? And some plain human empathy for people struggling far outside the Washington Beltway because of your complicity in the war preparations? And some efforts, however small or symbolic, to contribute to the repair of those people’s lives?
Also, just some old-fashioned and straight-from-the-heart remorse?

Pictures and reflections from China

Thanks to McClatchy’s Tim Johnson for signaling two extremely moving collections of photos from China’s earthquake zone.
This one is on the WaPo’s website and has images from a number of brilliant photogs working for different international agencies.
This one is from the EastSouthWestNorth blog, picked up from China’s Guangyuan Daily News. Less technically brilliant but more immediate and in some cases intimate.
I am sure that there have been glitches, mistakes– perhaps even big mistakes– grandstanding and incompetence in the response of some Chinese officials to this terrible natural disaster. As in all disasters. But overall, the response looks magnificent. What I see in both slideshows are citizens and well-organized cadres of military and civilian officials acting under conditions of great trauma and continuing threat but with huge compassion, focus, good organization, and dignity.
I am embarrassed to recall the images the whole world saw of our government’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2007. I was in Geneva shortly after. and had a meeting with Cornelio Sommaruga, the former head of the International Committee for the Red Cross. He could scarcely believe the incompetence and basic inhumanity of the US response. That was some 19 days or so after the hurricanes struck. Bodies were still bumping around in the receding waters or left on median strips, completely uncollected, stripped of all dignity, and posing a continuing public health hazard. All that because the groups and private companies that had gotten the contracts for “rescue operations” had been told not to touch them because the profit-bearing contract for “mortuary operations” would be going to someone else…
Anyway, my very best wishes to the people and government of China.
I’m thinking maybe next year, once China has dealt with the worst of this disaster and we have a new administration here in the US, perhaps some Chinese emergency response specialists could come over to the US and do some good trainings for our own Red Cross, military, and other first responders?

Tutu in Gaza, meeting Hamas

South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is in Gaza on a fact-finding mission that he, along with LSE professor Christine Chinkin, is conducting on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council.
He– and also, presumably, Chinkin– entered Gaza from Egypt through the Rafah international crossing point.
Yesterday, he met with elected Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh. The pro-Hamas PIC website reported that, in a press conference that he and Haniyeh held in Gaza, Tutu called for an end to targeting civilians in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Today, Tutu travelled to the north-Gaza town of Beit Hanun where an Israeli attack in November 2006 killed 19 Palestinian civilians (including five women and and eight children) in their own homes. AFP reports that Tutu described his team as “quite devastated” by the accounts he heard in Beit Hanun from survivors of the attack.
It was that incident in Beirut Hanun that Tutu’s team was primarily sent to report on. The team originally planned to investigate the situations both in Beit Hanun and in Israeli places subjected to Hamas rocket attacks, but the government of Israel has continued to deny them the necessary visas and permissions. Indeed, the team was only able to get to Beit Hanun, via Rafah, after Israel’s vise-like control over the Rafah crossing-point was lifted last June, though the modalities for any broader and more more meaningful re-opening of Rafah– such as would allow actual Gazans to connect more easily with the global economy and with family members living in the Palaspora– have yet to be agreed.
AFP says that after hearing the harrowing reports from the Beit Hanun survivors,

    Tutu commented that the purpose of the visit was to gather information to write a report for the UN Human Rights Council, “but we wanted to say that we are quite devastated”.
    “This is not something you want to wish on your worst enemy,” added the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town.

It also notes this:

    In February, the Israeli army announced that no charges would be brought against Israeli soldiers over the attack.
    After conducting an internal investigation, Israel concluded that the shelling of the civilians’ homes was “a rare and grave technical error of the artillery radar system”.
    The army said it had been aiming its artillery at an area from which Palestinian militants were firing rockets at Israel but, due to the technical problem, the shells instead hit two homes.

This explanation from the Israeli authorities handily underlines one of the serious problems with the whole notion of focusing only on stopping acts of violence that target civilians.
Both Israel and Hamas say that they do not deliberately target civilians, and there is evidence that, on both sides, this claim is now largely though not completely true. However, “technical errors,” as that Israeli report described the phenomenon, happen. Perhaps they happen more frequently in the case of Hamas’s very primitive rockets. (So should we therefore be calling for an upgrading of Hamas’s capacity to target its rockets more precisely?) It is also the case that some of the non-Hamas groups in Gaza are less focused than Hamas on trying to target only military facilities on the other side.
But if there is a “targeting capability gap” between the forces on the two sides of the Gaza-Israel border, we should recognize that there is also a truly gargantuan “lethality gap” between the two forces, too.
So when the Israeli forces– whether through a mere “technical error of the artillery radar system” or through a much more serious, and potentially justiciable, case of inattention to the potential for such an error– end up mistargeting their ordnance, it has effects that are considerably more harmful to the civilians living in the combat-zone.
Also, just look at the sheer number of artillery shells, missiles, mortar shells, high-impact bullets, etc, that Israel uses during any escalation of hostilities with Gaza. If each piece of ordnance has just a tiny chance of suffering “targeting error”, then the greater the number of pieces of ordnance you launch, then the more the chance of error happening increases. This is not hard-to-understand “rocket science”. It’s the simple arithmetic of aggregating probabilities. Plus, if soldiers are shooting off large numbers of rockets, shells, big bullets, etc during any battle, then the complexity of managing that amount of fire mounts as well, so the probability of “targeting error’ mounts somewhat more than arithmetically.
Month after month after month , the highly lopsided mortality figures– for civilians– on each side of the Gaza-Israel border underline these disparities in the lethality and sheer number of pieces of ordnance used.
It strikes me, therefore, that while all the well-intentioned humanitarians around the world continue to try to stress the principle of trying to “avoid targeting civilians”, that will not on its own do much to reduce the actual harm that this conflict has caused to civilians over recent months and years. What we need to focus on, rather, is finding a way to end the hostilities themselves. In the first instance this might be just a limited tahdi’eh (ceasefire.) But once that ceasefire is won, enormous further efforts immediately need to be invested in finding a final and sustainable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in all its dimensions.
The conflict itself inflicts continuing harm on civilians, primarily on Palestinian civilians around the world whose families are split up, properties expropriated, immediate environment darkened by the threat of further attack, rights denied, etc. The conflict also inflicts harm on Israeli civilians by harming some of them directly and by forcing them all, too, to live in an atmosphere of dread and threat and preventing them from concluding normal neighborly relations with the peoples living all around them.
… But anyway, it is a great first step that Tutu and his team have visited Gaza, that they’ve talked to Haniyeh, and done something to bring the ghastly experiences of the survivors of the Beit Hanun massacre to world attention. This, coming shortly after Pres. Jimmy Carter’s recent groundbreaking visit with overall Hamas head Khaled Meshaal.
So let’s now move rapidly on from here to a robust ceasefire, and then a final peace?
Do you think final peace is unlikely and/or unattainable? Desmond Tutu could probably tell you a few things about how determined and well-organized action taken by a principled coalition acting across national borders can make radical transformations from conflict to basic peace happen much sooner than anyone once thought possible.

Bushists’ Quarantine Wall crumbles further

For the past seven years the Bush administration has pursued an often ruthless campaign to impose and maintain a complete ban on any of its allies having dealings with the states and entities– labeled “terrorist”– that it has sought to quarantine and where possible overthrow.
Last week, we saw many significant fissures in the Quarantine Wall. Longtime US ally Fouad Siniora concluded a (Qatar-mediated) peace agreement with Hizbullah that led to the speedy end of Lebanon’s months-long government/constitutional crisis. The Olmert government in Israel revealed that it was engaged in a Turkey-mediated peace negotiation with Syria. More news emerged of Olmert’s ongoing attempts to conclude an Egypt-mediated ceasefire agreement with Hamas…
And this week, we have news of two additional breaches in the Bushists’ Quarantine Wall:

Oh my goodness, locally generated and (generally) locally mediated peace and reconciliation efforts seem to be breaking out all over!
Hallelujah!
And the US government, which for 35 years maintained a near-total monopoly over all the region’s diplomacy (a) is not involved in these new peace and reconciliation efforts– not surprisingly, since all of them involve serious dealings with movements and governments that Washington has worked to quarantine, crush, or overthrow; and (b) is suddenly incapable of reining in its allies and stopping this crumbling of the Quarantine Wall.
In the case of the emerging Israel-Hizbullah deal, Haaretz reports this:

    Israeli sources on Monday said that Israel and Hezbollah had struck a deal securing the release of two Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, captured by the Lebanon-based militant group in a July 2006 cross border raid that sparked the Second Lebanon War.
    The sources explained that in exchange for the captives, Israel would release [Samir] Kuntar, a Lebanese militant currently imprisoned in Israel for the 1979 murder of a Nahariyah family, an Israeli citizen jailed for espionage on Hezbollah’s behalf and four other Hezbollah men captured by Israel during the 2006 war. The deal reportedly will also include the return of the remains of ten Lebanese, currently held by Israel, to Hezbollah.
    Earlier on Monday, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah hinted that a prisoner swap would soon be completed, telling supporters in Beirut that Kuntar would soon be freed.

We should note that Hizbullah’s capture of Goldwasser and Regev was the casus belli that PM Olmert used when he launched his infamous, harmful (and very counter-productive) assault on Lebanon in 2006. The negotiated return of these two men– or is there a chance this will only be of their mortal remains? I am not sure if their being-alive has yet been established?– will therefore, when it happens, form an instructive coda to narratives of that tragic and unnecessary war.

Likud taking down its apostate?

It strikes me that the current, very specific allegations of financial malfeasance being made under oath against Israeli PM Ehud Olmert in a lawcourt in Israel may well be part of a plan by long-time supporters of Likud to take down a government leader who (a) was one of the leaders of the movement to split the Kadima Party out of Likud and (b) has been edging closer and closer to engaging in the true apostasy, from Likud’s point of view, of agreeing to withdraw Israel’s control from some portions of “Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank.)
As far as I can see, all the transfers of dodgy money to Olmert that are alleged by Morris Talansky took place when Olmert was still in Likud. Therefore, Talansky and the other donors rallied by him were presumably shoveling over that money with the aim of furthering Likud’s ends.
Olmert then betrayed them…
I wonder whether Labor or any other parties in Israel’s money-drenched political system are any more free of the kind of sleazy internal corruption we are now seeing revealed in the Likud of the 1990s?
Addendum:
Leslie Susser tells us this in Jerusalem Report:

    The limits on campaign donations only apply to the last nine months before an election. There are no limits on donations made between elections before the final nine-month run-up. President Shimon Peres, for example, received donations of $100,000 each from Swiss-based businessman Bruce Rappaport and Hollywood magnate ex-Israeli Haim Saban, and $120,000 from S. Daniel Abraham of Palm Beach, Florida for the Labor party leadership primaries in 2005; but although the funding was well over the prescribed limits, Peres was able to show that he received the funds before the critical nine-month period, that he registered all the donations and then used the money for campaign purposes…
    The fact that so many probes have been instituted against Olmert and other public figures would seem to suggest a high degree of public graft in Israel. The once powerful finance minister and Olmert confidante Avraham Hirchson is about to be indicted on charges of embezzling about 2.5 million shekels ($750,000) from the National Workers organization, which he headed. A prominent Shas politician, former Health minister Shlomo Benizri was convicted in late April for accepting hundreds of thousands of shekels worth of services from a building contractor and sentenced to 18 months in prison. But Transparency International (TI), a Berlin-based organization that measures global corruption, gives Israel relatively good grades….
    But where Israel is very weak in the corruption stakes is in the concentration of wealth in very few hands – relatively fewer than just about anywhere in the world. According to some estimates, around 60 percent of the country’s economy is controlled by 12 family business groups – the Ofer, Dankner, Arison, Gabriel, Charles Bronfman, Matthew Bronfman, Tshuva, Saban, Leviev, Bino, Borovich and Fishman groups. “This gives them enormous influence,” says [democracy researcher Doron] Navot.

Susser’s piece is broadly researched and well worth bookmarking.
She notes that “Olmert aides continue to … claim the case against him stems from a right-wing conspiracy to unseat a leader bent on making peace with the Palestinians.”
She concludes with this:

    the prime minister also has a serious political and public opinion battle on his hands. This was greatly aggravated by a mid-May opinion poll by the respected Dahaf organization, showing that 59 percent of the public think he should step down and only 33 percent that he should stay. Worse: 60 percent of the public do not believe his claim that he did not pocket any of the money, and only 22 percent do. But the most crushing blow for Olmert was in the poll’s election predictions: With Olmert at the helm, his Kadima party would crash to only 12 Knesset seats to the Likud’s 28 and Labor’s 19; but with Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni, as the party’s candidate for prime minister, it would actually win, with 27 seats, to the Likud’s 23 and Labor’s 15.
    Ariel Sharon, as prime minister, also had to contend with several parallel police investigations. The difference is Sharon could have won any ensuing election hands down, from jail if necessary. Olmert could not, and in the weeks ahead this is likely to accelerate moves in Kadima to unseat him. Whatever happens on the Talansky front, it will be virtually impossible for Olmert to keep the party behind him if he is seen as a surefire electoral disaster and Livni as a safe ticket to power.

Congratulations, Lebanon!

My very best wishes to my Lebanese friends (and relatives), whose parliamentarians today succeeded in electing a president, former army commander Michel Suleiman, and in resolving the country’s other immediately outstanding issues of governance– all in a single session.
The session was attended by the Emir and Prime Minister/Foreign Minister of Qatar, who last week played a very constructive role mediating (and no doubt also financially “lubricating”) the political agreement among the major Lebanese political movements that lay behind today’s election. The foreign ministers of Egypt, Syria, and Iran were also there, along with the Secretary-General of the Arab League. (The significance of Syria’s foreign minister being there should be noted.)
Parliament speaker Nabih Berri, a stalwart of the pro-Hizbullah bloc, made a speech recognizing the contribution of many outside powers that, he said, had contributed to the Doha reconciliation. Here’s how he also took a side-swipe at the Bush administration:

    Berri… thanked various countries, including Qatar, Iran, Turkey, Russia, France, Italy, Spain as well as the Arab League for their help in bringing an end to Lebanon’s 18-month old political crisis.
    “I thank the United States nonetheless, seeing that it seems to have been convinced that Lebanon is not the appropriate place for its New Middle East plan,” Berri said.
    “This plan will not find any place in the entire Middle East,” he added. He was referring to comments made by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said while on a visit to Beirut during Israel’s war on Lebanon in summer 2006 that the war was part of “birth pangs of the New Middle East.”
    “This is a historic moment,” Berri said, while introducing the president. “I ask God to help you succeed in steering the Lebanese ship to a safe haven … today no one in the world can turn Lebanon into a fighting arena.”

Berri was also at pains to point out two other significant anniversaries that fall on this date:

    “May 25 happens to be the eighth anniversary of the victory of our heroic resistance and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from most of Lebanon’s territory expect for the Shebaa Farms and the Kafar Shuba Hills,” Berri said. [Btw, you can read Hizbullah’s own breathless retelling of the epic of those days, here.]
    “It also happens to be the fist anniversary of the victory of our army against terrorism in Nahr al-Bared,” [Berri] added, referring to last year’s clashes between the army and Islamist militants at a Palestinian refugee camp in the North of the country.

That great, round-up-style Daily Star story linked to above tells us that in his inaugural address Suleiman,

    expressed his belief that Lebanon should “respect all United Nations decisions” and stressed the importance of following through with “the international tribunal pertaining to the assassination of [former Prime Minister] Rafik Hariri.”
    … The new president said a strong defense strategy is “necessitated by Israeli aggression,” calling for a composed dialogue aimed at creating such a strategy, which he said should “utilize the capabilities of the resistance.”
    Suleiman added that Lebanese-Syrian relations should be “brotherly,” with mutual respect for the “boundaries of each sovereign country.”
    Suleiman also argued that “the Palestinian struggle cannot be used as a pretext” for terrorism and that “the gun should never be aimed inward, but should always point toward our enemies.”

On balance I think this outcome so far looks positive and hopeful, though– like As’ad Abu Khalil and others– I have many continuing concerns that the Doha Agreement has most likely entrenched the role that sectarian affiliations play in Lebanon’s politics.
On the other hand, it’s not as if there are many particularly compelling and well-organized non- or anti-sectarian political movements active in Lebanon today…. So you kind of have to deal with what you’ve got. And some of these sect-based political movements do certainly have a national(ist) dimension to their worldview and have shown themselves to be fairly flexible and broad-minded actors within the national political scene. And yes, that description fits Hizbullah as well as its main current ally in the Christian camp, the Free Patriotic Movement, with the FPM probably being one of the most actively anti-sectarian movements in Lebanon today..
At its core, the Doha Agreement allows a governing formula for Lebanon that adequately represents the balance of power at both the domestic and the regional level. That’s why it has a good chance of sticking, and Lebanon now has a good chance of moving away from the abyss of all-out internal armed conflict it was staring right into just two two weeks ago to a situation in which the country’s many very pressing social and economic challenges can now– I hope!– start to be rationally addressed in a climate of broad, if not yet perfect, public security.
At both the domestic and regional levels, the current balance really is one of (to quote the well-worn old Lebanese slogan) “No victor, no vanquished.” At the regional level– to which Lebanon by its very nature is as always so terribly vulnerable– the situation is one in which the pro-US forces and the anti-US forces are facing off against each other, just about equally balanced for now. Though trending over time against US unilateralism.
So we should all be very glad that the long-stressed people of Lebanon now have a hope of sitting out the next few years in a situation of some governance, perhaps even some faintly accountable and helpful governance. The Shihabist era of the latest 1950s comes to mind…
Quick addendum, Monday a.m.:
Shihab era: Not great on accountability; horrible for the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; but pretty good on delivery of basic services to Lebanese citizens. Let’s hope Pres. Suleiman can do much better than Shihab on those first two items. Delivery of basic services, meanwhile, depends on him being able to (re-)build a strong, functioning corps of government administrators. Not sure if this is possible on a basis of continuing sect-based divvying-up of posts? Can he transform the civil service into a truly meritocratic system? Let’s hope so.

Names

On Friday, I was back in Charlottesville and in the late afternoon I biked to downtown to do a couple of errands. There, right next to the magnificent “Free Speech Monument” on our downtown pedestrian mall was the Virginia version of the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibit, set up over this Memorial Day weekend by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice and other congregations and groups.
In case anyone’s unfamiliar with EWO, it is a simple display made up of two portions. One portion is combat boots, lined up as in a (personless) parade, with each pair tagged with the name of a US soldier killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The other is a group of just-regular-people’s shoes, babies’, kids’, women’s, and men’s shoes, each tagged with the name of a civilian Iraqi casualty of the current lengthy war. You can see some good photos of the last time EWO was set up in Charlottesville, here.
EWO started off as a nationwide project. I wrote about participating in the nationwide EWO exhibit on the National Mall in Washington DC in May 2006, here. At that point there were 2,428 pairs of combat boots and the logistics of setting them out, guarding them (including from rain), then packing them up and trucking to the next place was becoming huge. Soon after that, they broke them up into state-level collections. In a sense, this helps “bring home” the cost of these wars even more effectively.
Friday, when I found them down on the C’ville mall, I slapped my forehead in exasperation. I had forgotten it was this weekend they were doing it– and I’d been meaning to volunteer to help them read the Iraqi names. Because what my good friends in CCPJ were planning to do was every couple of hours have a solemn reading of the names of all 117 of the Virginians killed in Iraq, alternating with the names of “a small sample” of the many Iraqi civilians killed in the war.
Here is a listing of the names of 141 Virginians killed in the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
But it was okay. They were about to do a reading of the names and I was pressed straight into service. Someone had produced a list of some of the Iraqi war dead. That was what I read. The way we did it, standing on the small granite platform there with a sound-system, was a woman called Kelly would read the name of a Virginian casualty; Christine, one of the main organizers of the exhibit, would strike a bell; I would read the name of an Iraqi casualty; Christine would strike the bell again… and we’d repeat the whole process, name after name after name.
We tried to keep the pace slow and dignified, to give each name some full seconds of thought and attention. I found it far more moving than I had expected. The sun was pretty hot. We got into the slow rhythm of the reading and stared out over the rows of black empty black combat boots, or turned to stare at the circles of civilian shoes.
Name after name after name.
Punctuated by the eery chiming of the bell.
Just three days earlier, I had been in New York City, listening to a very expert and attentive reading-out of names. Those were the names of half of the entire Master’s-degree graduating class at Columbia Teachers’ College. Eight hundred names! Each read out with good attention– but a little faster than our reading at EWO on Friday.
The Columbia TC graduation was held in Riverside Church, the same soaring, Gothic-style edifice in which, in April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr., started speaking out publicly against the war in Vietnam. It gave me goosebumps just now to press the audio button you’ll find on this web-page devoted to the sermon, and hear Dr. King’s voice, and realize he was standing in the very same space we were sitting in, Tuesday.
Each of those names read out at the TC graduation corresponded with one of the bright-faced and slightly excitable mass of blue-robed Master’s candidates packed into the pews in front of us… Young people in their twenties or early thirties, most of them; young people of now-proven accomplishment and skills who were looking forward to making new contributions to society as they apply those skills in the years ahead. Young people with hopes and dreams, fears and concerns, loved ones, and many of them– like my daughter, Leila– with their own distinguished professional record already.
Young people visibly bursting with energy and life.
So then, just three days later, I was myself a reader-out of names. Each of these names, however, corresponded not to an excited young person on the brink of a new phase in her or his life, but to a loss.
A loss that is worse than nothing, unimaginably worse than “just” a pair of empty boots or shoes, though the empty footwear helps represent the loss.
A loss that rips a lasting hole in the lives of loved ones, rips a hole in the universe.
A loss that need never have happened. A loss that should never have happened.
Name after name after name, after name after name after name…

On ‘flipping’ Syria, prospects for peace

Much of the American MSM commentary on the news about the Syrian-Israeli proximity talks in Turkey has focused on the long-mentioned hope of the west (whatever that is) being able to “flip” Syria away from its 30-year alliance with Iran and its support for Lebanon’s Hizbullah and Palestine’s Hamas.
The way many US commentators use this term you’d think that Syria, population 19.3 million, is a tiny place, so weak that it could simply be treated like a fried egg or your breakfast pancakes. In this case, just slide underneath Syria enough vague promises about the return of long-occupied land and enough western aid dollars and– bingo!– you can politically ‘flip’ this little pancake over by a full 180 degrees.
Demeaning and silly as an analogy? You bet.
Maybe too many Americans think Syria is just like it was back in 1949, when CIA agents hurried into the country with bundles full of cash, which they used to bankroll the coup effort mounted by Hosni Zaim. (Or just like Iran, when the CIA mounted the coup against Mossadegh a few years later… Or like Iraq, when they supported the coup that brought the Baath Party to power in 1963… )
You just find a way to shovel money into the country and overnight it gets ‘flipped’? I don’t think so. And in case no-one noticed, none of the above efforts at “flipping” countries worked out well in the end…
Today’s Syria is nothing like the fragile post-independence entity it was back in 1949. Today’s Syria has a functioning state that has educated and brought into the modern era (with roads, electricity, irrigation, courthouses, schools, etc) a national population that largely supports the policies of its government. That’s the case whether ‘westerners’ like that fact, or not.
We should recognize, too, that the catastrophic failure of the US project to “remake” neighboring Iraq, and the widespread misery that has ensued there, have left Syrians– like probably the vast majority of the other peoples of the Middle East– with a huge skepticism that “the American path” can bring them any lasting benefit at all. As Syrians daily encounter the tragic stories and dispirited faces of the million or so refugees from the US-invented “new Iraq” who huddle in their midst, the fact that this US government is so opposed to the Asad regime probably makes Syrians more inclined to support the regime, rather than less so.
The Syrian analyst Sami Moubayed told us in this fascinating commentary yesterday that,

    The indirect talks between Syria and Israel, via Turkey, are not new. Nor are they a prelude to any peace treaty—so long as George W. Bush is in the White House. They have managed to lift spirits, however, coming hours after warring Lebanese factions announced that they had reached an agreement in Doha on May 22, 2008.
    There was optimism in the air in Damascus.
    No more talk of summer war in the Middle East, which has haunted Syrian lives since 2006.
    No more dangers of another sectarian outburst—at least for now—in neighboring Lebanon. The Syrians were pleased that Beirut—the traditional haven for all Syrians—was now back to normal and they could go there again, for education, medication, shopping, pleasure, and to see family and friends.
    Peace [with Israel] would mean many things, as far as the Syrians are concerned. No more emergency laws that have been in-place since 1963. Nor more forced conscription into the Syrian Army for a draft that lasts up to 24-months. No more limited investment in Syria, and thus, much more job opportunities…

He warned, however, that any optimism about a speedy conclusion of the final-status peace agreement with Israel would be unrealistic. Comparing the present situation with the situation in Egypt just before Sadat’s launching of the big initiative that resulted in a final-status peace between Egypt and Israel, Moubayed noted that “Olmert is not Begin and George W. Bush is not Carter.” (And as one of his commenters added there, Bashar al-Asad is not Sadat, either.)
I think Moubayed’s lack of optimism is realistic and justified. Prime case in point: the embattled Ehud Olmert has nothing like the domestic-political power needed to bring Israel’s public along with him into finalization of this peace process that PM Yitzhak Rabin had when he was engaged in very serious negotiations with President Hafez al-Asad in 1994-95. And even Rabin had a very hard time of it back then, as we know.
The outstanding territorial issue between Israel and Syria is the ending of the military occupation of Syria’s Golan that Israel has maintained since June 1967. We can recall that in the period before Sadat’s ground-breaking visit to Jerusalem in 1977, many Israelis were “very attached” to the vast, Israeli-occupied reaches of occupied Egyptian Sinai. Many Israelis had developed a romantic-style attachment to those broad expanses of desert, to the fabulous skin-diving along Sinai’s Red Sea coast, to the hippy lifestyles they had developed in resorts throughout the peninsula.
Oh, and there were even a few thousand Israeli settlers who had been easily lured into the attractive deal of heavily subsidized housing in the new coastal settlement of Yamit.
In the peace with Egypt, the whole structure of Israeli control over Sinai was dismantled. The IDF had to pull completely out. Egyptian police restored Cairo’s control over the peninsula’s civilian affairs, though the all or nearly all of the peninsula was demilitarized and placed under the monitoring of a US-led monitoring force.
The settlement at Yamit was demolished, by the Israelis themselves. (It was the earliest example of Ariel Sharon undertaking a highly over-dramatized “demolition” of an Israeli settlement– that had anyway been illegal, all along… a model that he followed once again in Gaza, 25 years later.) The hippy-style resorts were turned over to Egyptian owners; Israeli tourists continued to be able to roam around Sinai, but they now did so under Egyptian sovereignty. Israel also got considerable economic benefits from Egypt as part of the Sinai handback.
Guess what. When the Syrians were negotiating a final-status peace with first Rabin and then Peres in the period 1994-96, they were looking at something exactly like that same model: a complete Israeli withdrawal back to the lines of June 4, 1967, in return for an internationally monitored demilitarization arrangement for Golan plus considerable economic benefits for Israel. If you read the large quote on p.136 of my book The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks: 1991-96 and Beyond you can see how far the chief Syrian negotiator at that time, the present Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, felt the talks had progressed… before they were broken off by the Israeli side in March 1996.
Now it is true that in any peace agreement, each party will also generally include some serious promises about not itself undertaking or giving material support to others who undertake, acts of violent subversion against the other. In the Jordanian-Israeli relationship, Israel’s blatant violation of that clause, in 1997, when PM Netanyahu sent Mossad agents to assassinate a political figure who was in Jordan with the express permission of King Hussein, brought about a near-crisis in Israel’s relations with Jordan. (The figure in question was Hamas head Khaled Meshaal, who had promised Hussein that he would not take any actions to undermine his rule in Jordan.)
Note that Israel did not demand in its peace negotiations with Jordan, and did not get, any promise that Jordan would not even host Meshaal and his colleagues as civilian residents. Meshaal was anyway a citizen of Jordan, so it would have been hard to get that.
Similarly, Egypt, which has a much longer-standing peace agreement with Israel than Jordan, maintains relations with Hamas. (And of course, Egypt’s good offices as mediator have been very valuable to Olmert’s government as it has attempted to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas in recent months.)
So it is by no means engraved in stone that, even if Israel and Syria do succeed in concluding a peace agreement, Mr. Meshaal and his friends and colleagues from both Hamas and Hizbullah would find Syria to be completely hostile territory.
Many of the governments with which Israel maintains good relations– including, of course, Turkey– also maintain good relations with Iran and with Hamas. It is not necessarily the case that a peace agreement with Syria would require Syria to break such relations completely.
Of course, the prospect of revived peace talks between Syria and Israel has probably caused some concern to both Hamas and Iran (though maybe not as much as the Saudi daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat has breathlessly reported.) In Damascus, the government daily Tishrin has sought to reassure its allies by saying that “Damascus rejects all preconditions concerning its relations with other countries and peoples.. Damascus will make no compromise on these relations.”
No doubt the leaders in Syria, Iran, Hamas, and Hizbullah are all also looking quite closely at the prospects that the present peace process may actually arrive in the foreseeable future in a completed peace agreement. The prospects of that happening do not look good. The Syrian government, backed up overwhelmingly by its own citizenry, has always rejected any peace agreement that would involve making any territorial concessions to Israel at all. The popular version of that is that there is no way any Syrian ruler will settle for even one inch less than what Sadat won for Egypt in 1978-79…. And for now, attitudes in Israel toward any prospect of returning all or even most of Golan to its rightful Syrian owners seem even more opposed even than they were in the 1994-96 period.
Haaretz’s Lili Galili reported yesterday that,

    About two-thirds of Israelis object to withdrawing from the Golan Heights even for peace with Syria – more than those who object to dividing Jerusalem for ending the conflict with the Arab world, a recent survey finds.

In addition, Olmert’s own motivations for suddenly engaging in this portion of diplomacy– and therefore, also both his desire and ability to pursue it to successful completion– are certainly open to question. The NYT’s Ethan Bronner was certainly not the only one to observe that,

    It did not go unnoticed, for example, that at the precise hour on Wednesday evening that the police released damning new details of the investigation against him (prosecutors say envelopes of cash were passed to him for personal use), Mr. Olmert made a speech in Tel Aviv that started with his hopes for the Syria talks, thereby upstaging the police on the evening news.
    The newspapers were filled with derisive commentary on Thursday about a prime minister who hopes to trade away the strategic Golan Heights to a sworn enemy when he is facing an inquiry into his integrity and trustworthiness.
    “The Golan in exchange for an envelope full of dollars won’t be well received,” fumed Sever Plocker, a widely read columnist for Yediot Aharonot. “It is doomed to fail: Any agreement that Olmert might present to the public will appear to be stained from the outset.”

So, the news about “the Turkish track” that was revealed this week may have been basically good news (because it was about the possibility of serious peacemaking on this important front) as well as politically intriguing news– because it was done largely or wholly behind the back of the Americans. But it may not, in itself, lead directly to any sustained and successful completion of a peace agreement.
That step will probably require both a much more serious leadership in Israel and either a more seriously engaged leadership in the United States or further considerable changes in the balance of power in the Middle East. All of these changes may well occur in the months ahead, so the story is by no means finished yet.