The Arab world and Iraq: column & discussion

Here is my latest CSM column on the views that Arab analysts have of the situation in Iraq. (Also, here.)
Sometimes, as on this occasion, I find writing in the CSM-column format hugely challenging… primarily because of the intense constraints on word-length. My experience is that it is far more intellectually challenging to write a short piece– especially when I have so very much great material to be working with– than it is to write something much longer. (Such as I frequently write here on the blog.) Or to put it another way– when I write “composed” pieces, there are always numerous intellectual, organizational, and conceptual challenges involved… and generally, these don’t seem any easier to deal with when writing a short piece than when writing a long, long piece like some of my great long things in Boston Review. But what you end up with in a CSM column is just 850 tightly-considered words. It might not seem very substantial, but I can tell you it represents a huge amount of work.
This column was written about ten days ago, and has undergone various edits since then. I’m not as happy with the shape of it as I was with the “Four trends” one that preceded it. Moreover, this one raises many more queries than it actually answers.
For example, I report there (with, as you may imagine, my own implied approval) the judgment of my Iraqi friend that there’s a possibility that a fairly speedy US withdrawal from his country “would concentrate the minds of his countrymen on the need to find a workable reconciliation”… but “if the Americans stay, we can expect the situation to remain bad.” But I also note later on– with my own explicit endorsement, the judgment of another longtime friend and colleague, Hussein Agha, that, “for now, all of Iraq’s neighbors prefer that US troops stay tied down inside Iraq, rather than withdraw.” In addition, I express my own clear judgment that, “the broad deployment of US troops in Iraq has been transformed from an American asset in the region into a liability that erodes US power and standing.”
How, therefore, can all these widely varying interests in the remaining or leaving of the US troop presence in Iraq be reconciled? This is, clearly, a tricky diplomatic/strategic conundrum. (One regarding which, imho, the UN is the only body capable of orchestrating the search for a solution. And I approach that question in the full knowledge that the UN we have is the UN we have, if you get my meaning.)
Basically, what I come out of this whole analysis with is the conclusion that,

    (a) The Arab governments are all quite serious in their argument that US needs to find a way to deal straightforwardly and in a constructive way with Iran, rather than continuing to pursue destabilizing agendas of regime change or other forms of confrontation and escalation against Iran;
    (b) They are also quite serious about the need for real progress to be made on Arab-Israeli peacemaking; and
    (c) Regarding US-Iran relations, they do have a fear that the US and Iran might conclude a ‘grand bargain’ covering Iraq and various other issues without any input from them and in a way that might infringe seriously on their own interests.

Anyway, the regional dynamics in the Middle East right now are extremely interesting. One big additional factor that I didn’t adequately reflect in the column is that the US troop ‘surge’ is being notably unsuccessful… I conclude that this means that what I have called a ‘Tank’-driven US withdrawal from Iraq– that is, one that is driven on the US side primarily by the need of the military establishment to avoid complete logistical/organizational breakdown due to the overstretch in Iraq– will become more urgent than ever within the coming weeks…

Craig Murray: About that “Fake British Map”

I have been extremely displeased by the media reporting regarding the ongoing Iran-Britain “detainee” crisis. The boundaries questons surrounding the Shatt/Arvand River are hardly of recent vintage. They are instead a crtical flash-point of contention that goes back centuries. Insuring access to world seaways via the disputed area is a vital interest, not just to Iraq, but to Iran also. And Iranians of all political persuasions have reasons to be deeply suspicious of “perfidious Albion” — on this issue.
It has been a crisis waiting to happen – or be manufactured. More on my views, a backgrounder, and cautions in another post.
For now, here’s a few stunning excerpts from the extraordinary blog of Craig Murray, the dissident former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and a onetime “Head of the Maritime Section of the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office.”
As he did before, he’s blowing the whistle on “sexed-up” Blair-spin — and on the incredibly lazy reporting in the mainstream media (here in the US and in the UK):
Today (March 28th):

“The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker.
But there are two colossal problems.
A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force.
B) Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Cornwall and the incident, both were closer to Iranian land than Iraqi land. Go on, print out the map and measure it. Which underlines the point that the British produced border is not a reliable one.”

Well imagine that. Should we be surprised? Who was it that invented the art of artificial line drawing in the Middle East?
Murray’s blog entries since March 23 are all worth considering – and comparing with what we’re reading in the media. To be sure, Murray sees room for blame on all sides

“None of which changes the fact that the Iranians, having made their point, should have handed back the captives immediately. I pray they do so before this thing spirals out of control. But by producing a fake map of the Iran/Iraq boundary, notably unfavourable to Iran, we can only harden the Iranian position.”

I share Murray’s wish that this be resolved rapidly, before ideological hotheads on both sides (AN & TB) turn this into something bigger and more difficult to unwind.
And will somebody please get Helena’s hotline suggestion – e.g., Colonel Lang’s “deconflict mechanism” – working and stat!?
Comments?

Sewage-flood tragedy in Gaza

Laila el-Haddad has a great post on her blog about the collapse of the dam holding back a sewage lagoon in northern Gaza, which sent a flood of human excrement surging into nearby communities. The flood killed two toddlers, two elderly women, and one other person.
Laila writes:

    It was bound to happen. All of the major humanitarian organizations issued endless reports and warnings about its imminent flooding. But even if the funding was available, the permission to expand and renovate the facility was not granted by the necessary “Authorities” who built it (on a major acquifer) in the first place.
    I’m referring to the collapse and flooding of Gaza’s northern sewage treatment facility, known locally as the “Death Swamps”, which you can see here on wikimapia…
    “This was not only foretold, it happened twice before, in 1988 and 1993,” tells me human rights consultant, and friend, Darryl Li, who has worked for Israeli, Palestinian, and International HR groups. Darryl’s last trip was in August, to this very facility…
    The facility stopped functioning entirely in the weeks after the power cutoff last year (when Israel bombed Gaza’s power plant), and later functioned at very low efficiency levels with generators. Water level consuquently rose dangerously high.
    The embankments of the cesspool have also been the target of frequent Israeli shelling, threatening their integrity, says Li.

She also quotes Li as saying:

    “This is life in a ‘disengaged’ Gaza: It is not enough to be locked into an open-air prison by Israel. Nor to be turned into a beggar by the international community for voting in a democratic election. Nor to be torn apart by internal feuding. Now Palestinians have to drown in their own shit? I can’t wait to hear the latest excuse about how this, too, is their own fault.”

Anyway, go read the whole thing.

More on Palestine-related diplomacy

My ‘Delicious’ tagging system is not working. I found this fascinating article today by my very well-informed old friend Jihad Khazen on the recent Arab Foreign Ministers’ gathering and Condi’s meeti8ng with the ‘Arab Four’ (I hate the word ‘Quartet’ at this point.)
He writes:

    According to my information, the Arab group’s talks with Dr. Rice were confined to the Palestinian Cause. Rice heard once again that all the region’s issues are linked to the fate of this Cause, which is the core of all issues.
    Neither did Rice ask for the amendment of the Arab Peace Initiative, especially the refugees’ right to return, nor did the Arab ministers think of it.

This latter point is in direct contradiction to some Israeli whisperings and general hasbara to the contrary.
He also writes this:

    Two days ago, the main-story headline of Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth was: ‘New Initiative to Coordinate an Overt Israeli-Saudi Summit’, with efforts exerted by EU Policy Chief Javier Solana and Rice. However, when I read the story, I found that it talked about a possible meeting between the Arab Quartet with Israeli officials. A meeting between officials is not a summit; and it certainly isn’t a Saudi-Israeli summit, if a meeting occurs in the first place. In an article a day before this, US renowned political commentator, Thomas Friedman, called on King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz to follow in the footsteps of the late president, Anwar Sadat, and visit Jerusalem.
    I can say that King Abdullah will not visit Jerusalem or deliver a speech in the Knesset, not tomorrow, or even after a thousand years. I also say the same for myself, although I always prefer to speak or write as a historian, not a fortune teller. But I’m sure of my information and my knowledge of King Abdullah and Saudi policy.

Also on the current Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, read this from IPS’s Jim Lobe.
I’ve spent most of today at a meeting on Palestinian affairs at the venerable London foreign-policy think tank, Chatham House. I did tell them this morning that I now see new possibilities for real, constructive political change within the US political firmament. Many of the others there seemed skeptical. But the point Lobe makes in his last para there– namely, that even strongly pro-Israeli American members of the ICG board like Ken Adelman and Steve Solarz have signed on to the recent ICG Board Statement calling for engagement with the new Palestinian government, etc etc– seems strongly to prove my point.
Strikes me that the once firm-seeming ice-cap that the extremist pro-Israeli discourse-suppressors were once able to maintain over all aspects of the political discourse within the US has been melting gratifying fast… So now, the world might see some significant movement in the diplomacy over this long-frozen issue.

The Mother of all Sermons

(Note: this is Scott Harrop writing.)
Four years ago this past week, 23 March 2003 to be exact, I heard what for me then was the “mother of all sermons.” Yet until now, I have resisted writing about it:

*First, I am not inclined to be too autobiographical in the blogosphere.
*Second, when I finally forced myself to re-listen to the digital recording of “the sermon,” it dawned on me that I’ve heard far worse since. (See John Hagee section below)
*Third, I have long resisted returning to the subject of “Christian Zionism.” Where I was raised in Pennsylvania, Hal Lindsey and his 1970’s bestseller “The Late Great Planet Earth” was widely read at churches my family attended. A bit later at a “Christian University,” I once wrote a paper on “Peace and Prophecy” with the edgy subtitle, “Are they Compatible?” I had the “nerve” to think they were. Still do.
*Lastly, I am also not too inclined to ridicule ministers in public, even when well “earned.“

But then I saw a bumper sticker on the family van of one of my daughter’s friends that proclaimed, “No Jesus, No Peace.” It convinced me that I needed to go back and “unpack” four years of pent-up angst over what “the sermon” signifies for me, then and now.
Besides, I have analyzed the Friday political sermons of Shia clerics for over two decades, so I shouldn’t be so abstemious about assessing what presumed “Gospel” ministers have to say on Middle East matters. I also lamely take some courage from how George Fox challenged ministers of his day.
THE Sermon:
The context of “the sermon” was just days after the US “shock and awe” bombs began raining down on Saddam’s Iraq in 2003, as the first stages of “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The setting was one of the larger “evangelical” churches here in Charlottesville, Virginia. We had been “visiting” this church, in part as the Pastor had assured us that his “new covenant” church didn’t preach “Christian Zionism.”
The sermon that day four years ago was delivered by a visiting older minister, long a mentor, an “Apostle” to the local pastor, and now involved primarily in outreach efforts to drug-infested communities. Jesse Owens was his name – not to be confused with the famous Olympian.
Much of “the Apostle’s” sermon tone was blistering high-volume, classic fire-and-brimstone, text-less, “holy spirit” fury. At early points, Owens was nearly apoplectic, as his face turned deep red and purple and his neck veins bulged.
But his subject that day wasn’t about heaven or hell, sin, eternal damnation, or any of that.

Continue reading “The Mother of all Sermons”

The way forward in Palestine

Last December, when the co-chairs of the Iraq Study Group presented its recommendations to President Bush, the Prez angrily swept them aside, placing his emphasis instead on the planning for his own much-trumpeted ‘surge’.
Well, the surge has been underway for some weeks– and it seems increasingly clear that the Bushites are now, in addition,backing into some degree of compliance with at least two of the ISG’s key recommendations! They have already held some preliminary official contacts with both Iran and Syria, and more are to follow. And they have launched a new round of Palestinian-Israeli peace diplomacy that may yet show some signs of robustness.
The politics of this Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy are particularly interesting. At this point, after Fateh’s entry into a coalition government with Hamas, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has acquired considerable new political strength. Even if domestic support for the bicephalous PA government is not quite the 96% support that PA Info Minister Mustafa Barghouthi claims, it is still extremely high.
In addition, this Palestinian leadership is now– quite unusually– backed by a wall-to-wall coalition of Arab states. The Arab leaders will soon be convening at a summit meetingin the Saudi capital, Riyadh; and the central issue on their agenda there is an effort to push forward the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy on the basis of the key peace plan that an earlier Arab summit endorsed, back in Beirut in March 2002.
But here’s where the structure of this round of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy gets complex: Both Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and the US Prez himself are extremely weak with their respective publics. Did I see somewhere that political support for Olmert had dropped to around 3%? Anyway, it’s extremely low. And Bush’s job-performance and ‘favorability‘ ratings have both been hovering down between 30 and 37 percent throughout most of this year.
Bush, at least, can’t resign. (And I’m interested to see that the ratings given to our newly elected Congress are just about as low as Bush’s numbers. So the Dems have no particular reason to feel triumphalist at this point, either.) But Olmert can resign, and may well be forced to at some point over the next three months. So this all raises a number of intriguing questions:

    (1) Why should any Arab negotiator feel obliged to make concessions to Olmert as such, since the guy is so evidently a very lame duck?
    (2) What can Arab negotiators and others do to structure the incentives for Israeli voters in a way that does the most to ensure a pro-peace outcome from the next government that comes into power in Israel?
    (3) What can the Arab negotiators do to win maximal support for their approach to peacemaking from the ever-skeptical American public? and
    (4) What can anyone else in the world system do to maximize the chances of success of the current round of peacemaking?

One approach I think we might adopt is to stop calling the Arab peace plan the “Arab” peace plan. Why should it not be the world’s plan for bringing peace to this very tormented part of the world? Indeed, let us hear what reasonable objection any other governments in the world– or indeed, the UN as a body– have to this peace plan?
Here, in a nutshell, is what the 2002 peace plan does:

    (a) It calls on Israel to withdraw completely to the territory it held prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the establishment in the Palestinian portion of the occupied territories a “sovereign independent Palestinian state… with East Jerusalem as its capital”;
    (b) It calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194”; and
    (b) It promises, in return, that all the Arab countries– including, presumably, the sovereign Palestinian state to be created– will determine that the Arab-Israeli conflict has been finally ended, and these parties have no outstanding claims against Israel. They will also all sign peace agreements with Israel; will “provide security for all the states of the region”, including Israel; and will establish “normal relations” with Israel.

I note that the withdrawal clause is in full accord with UN Security Council resolutions on the matter, which all mention the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.
The main objections I have heard to this plan have been over that withdrawal clause… and over the clause that addresses the refugee issue. UNGA Resolution 194 did, in its clause 11, state that the General Assembly,

    11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;
    Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation…

Pro-Israeli figures in the US have often argued that the implementation of this clause would result in Israel suddenly becoming demographically “swamped” by a flood of Palestinian returnees. For its part, ever since the GA adopted Resolution 194 in December 1948, Israel has staunchly asserted its right, as a sovereign state, to regulate any entry of persons into its borders (though this right surely cannot simply over-ride the right– enshrined in the Universal declaration of Human Rights– of all persons to be free to leave the country of their birth or to return to it); and in practice, Israel has refused to allow the vast majority of the Palestinian refugees from 1947-48 to return to the homes and farms that they fled during that war.
It is surely evident to everyone that a workable (i.e. sufficiently “fair”) resolution of the refugee issue needs to agreed upon– and accepted by the great mass of the four million Palestinian refugees themselves– if any Arab-Israeli peace process is to be final and stable. Luckily, Resolution 194 itself specifically mentions a number of alternatives to outright “Return”. These include the payment of “compensation… for the property of those choosing not to return”, and “resettlement” (i.e., either where they currently are, or in third countries.) R-194 also specifies, for those choosing “Return”, that they commit to living at peace with the neighbors they will find around them after their return– and also, that this return be undertaken “at the earliest practicable date”…
So it does seem to me that within the context of a comprehensive peace agreement some package of different options– each with a different “compensation” component attached, and perhaps with varying implementation timetables– could be offered to each Palestinian refugee family (however defined), and this would still be in line with both resolution 194 and the longstanding norms regarding the kinds of outcomes that are offered to refugees in other situations around the world.
In other words, the reference to R-194 need not be seen as a barrier to other people and governments expressing their support for the “Arab” peace plan. And nor, in my view, should the reference to a full Israeli withdrawal.
Which among us, after all, is prepared to stand up today for the claim that it is indeed quite okay for nations to acquire new territories purely through the exercise of physical force??
If we want to go back and see what the United Nations itself has ever said, in a more positive vein, about the “national complexion” of the lands of West Bank and Gaza, then we need to go back to the 1947 Partition Plan, under which the whole territory of Gaza was declared to be part of the “Arab State in Palestine”; so was most of the West Bank– except for that chunk in the middle that, according to the Partition Plan, was deemed to be included (along with West Jerusalem) in the internationally administered “corpus separatum” of Jerusalem. A large area of further land that the Partition Plan also allocated to the “Arab State in Palestine” was conquered by Israel during the fighting of 1947-48; no-one in any rounds of diplomacy in the past 50-plus years has ever requested that Israel withdraw from and cede those areas. Israel’s control of them has been essentially uncontested for many decades now.
… The “Arab” peace plan has the huge advantage that– notably unlike the interim (and largely failed) accords concluded at Oslo in 1993– its clauses are all firmly rooted in the resolutions of the United Nations and in the norms of international law. For example, Oslo implicitly condoned the continuation of the support Israel gave to the illegal settlement-implantation project in the occupied territories– and quite explicitly gave open support to the settlement project by stipulating the construction of a whole network of settler-only highways throughout the West Bank. But the 2002 Peace Plan makes no mention of the settlers at all. If the assumption of the plan’s framers was that all the settlers should simply summarily leave the land of the future Palestinian state, still, perhaps the modalities of that relocation could also be subject to some negotiation… (And anyway, how many of the settlers would really want to stay in place under Palestinian sovereignty, and without the whole vast basket of special favors that they currently receive from Israel?)
The 2002 Peace Plan also has the great advantage– again, in clear contrast to the tragic, failed, and very damaging experiment of Oslo– that it speaks directly and solely to the issue of the final-status agreements that have always been so urgently required on both the Israeli-Palestinian and the Israeli-Syrian tracks. Oslo spoke only to the Palestinians, excluding the Syrians. Regarding the Palestinians it said nothing specific at all regarding the content of the final status, so when setbacks occurred, everyone on both sides immediately feared the worst about the intentions of the “others”, and very destabilizingly acted on those fears.
So now, let’s go back to those four questions near the head of this post:
(1) Why should any Arab negotiator feel obliged to make concessions to Olmert?
I don’t think any of them should.
(2) What can Arab negotiators and others do to structure the incentives for Israeli voters in a way that does the most to ensure a pro-peace outcome from the next governmental change in Israel?
This is the more important campaign that pro-peace figures and responsible leaders in the Arab countries and elsewhere should be focusing on. The fact is, there are currently about 180,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem, about 246,000 elsewhere in the West Bank, and 17,500 in Golan. These Israelis constitute a very significant voting (and opinion) bloc within the Israeli system.
In addition, though Olmert is currently weak, it is a sad fact that by far the strongest force that’s challenging him is from the right wing. After the political/military setbacks that Olmert government suffered last summer in Lebanon, the political mood in Israel seems deeply unsettled, uncertain, and fearful; and the pro-peace “left” that was once such an evident presence within the Israeli system is now only a tiny, weak shadow of its former self.
One of the actions that would have the greatest potential to focus the attention of Israel’s long-pampered Jewish population on the need to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Syrians (and through the Syrians, with the Lebanese, too), would be if the US government started showing its serious interest in the need for an peace that is comprehensive, final, sustainable, and based on the solid tenets and norms of international law.
It is probably quite unrealistic to expect that President Bush or any of his officials will come out any time in the foreseeable future and express open support for the “Arab” peace plan. We have heard him talking about the need for a Palestinian state (with no date or other details attached to that), and we have heard Condi Rice talking, rather tentatively, about the need for “a political horizon.”
It would, however, be much more reassuring and helpful to hear administration officials start talking openly and directly about the need for a peace that is “comprehensive and based on international legality.” They should certainly all be requested to do this; and if they refuse to, they should be asked for their reasons for this refusal. And then, beyond merely talking about the need for such an approach, they should be challenged to use the many levers of power they have over Israel (not only financial aid, but also access to markets, military cooperation, etc etc) to underline that message. In other words, the conditionality that used once to exist as between Israel’s activity in the settlement sphere and Washington’s granting fo special favors to Israel should certainly be reinstated.
Experience shows that when Washington undertakes such actions, it really does affect the political behavior of Israelis in the desired way.
But Arabs who are serious about their peace plan should also figure out ways to try to “sell” it to Israelis– or at least, to make sure that it gets clearly and directly explained to them, and in as humanly convincing a way as possible… I know that after the apparent failure of all the heavily funded “people-to-people” efforts the Palestinians engaged in with Israelis in the 1990s, the desire to repeat such ventures dwindled considerably. But still, the need for a sustainable and comprehensive peace is now so urgent that no effort to try to win the support of Israelis– or at the very least, to reduce the ranks of the Israeli hard-liners– should be spared…
(3) What can the Arab negotiators do to win maximal support for their approach to peacemaking from the ever-skeptical American public, and from others?
In the present era of participatory politics, no peace plan can be expected– in the USA, or indeed anywhere else– merely to “sell itself”. Persuading the great mass of the US’s extremely powerful voting public of the fairness and essentially constructive nature of the 2002 Peace Plan will take a major, and very well-considered “marketing effort.”
And when I say “marketing effort”, the one thing I certainly do not mean by that is that some official in the Saudi Embassy in DC might put out a huge contract for this job with some slick “marketing” firm somewhere in the country and sit back and think the job is done.
Oh no. I have seen ways too many similar contracts go out in the past, with their results ending up being absolutely nothing (or, indeed, quite frequently risibly counter-productive, as longtime JWN readers might recall my having remarked in the past.)
What’s needed is a serious effort to engage politically with a broad range of opinion-makers throughout the country… And the great thing right now is that, for a number of reasons, the US citizenry may well be in a good mood to connect with such a message, for the following reasons:

    (a) The terrible outcome to date in Iraq has prepared the US public to really “hear” many messages about the Middle East that it may well not have been ready to “hear” properly prior to 2003. The parallels between the disastrous consequences of the US decision to use force in Iraq and the Israelis’ repeated recourse to force in the occupied territories are evident. So is the role that strongly pro-Israeli figures played in jerking the US into the war in Iraq in the first place.
    (b) The US now has many experiences of its own in trying to run a strongly contested military occupation. US citizens are in a much better position than they were before 2003, to really understand what military occupation is; how unsustainable and damaging it is over the long run– to all concerned!– and to understand that ending the situation of rule by foreign military occupation, wherever it occurs, is the only legitimate, moral, and in the long term feasible way to proceed.
    (c) Some important steps have already been taken in recent months to open up the whole, very necessary intra-US discussion on the huge role and damaging effects of the country’s strong and very well-organized pro-Israel lobby. I wrote about the role of the lobby in the chapter on the US-Israel relationship that I published in my 1991 book on Israel, Syria, and the superpowers… But that didn’t attract much attention then. Now, the work of Walt and Mearsheimer, of Jimmy Carter, and Tony Judt, has opened huge additional public space in which the discourse-suppressing, truth-distorting role of the lobby can be dispassionately discussed. More importantly, by allowing discussion of the lobby’s role, this also allows a much franker and more reality-based discussion among Americans of the facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

…And finally,
(4) What can anyone else in the world system do to maximize the chances of success of the current round of peacemaking?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. As may be clear from the above, I do think that the US remains an important player in world affairs. But I also think it’s time for Americans and everyone else in the international community to break out of slavish adherence to the idea that it is somehow only right and “natural” that the US should continue to exercise near hegemonic control over all the modalities of Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
It is not.
In fact, it’s a pretty extraordinary state of affairs if one government, distant from the scene and representing less than five percent of the world’s people, should be judged to have any “right” to control all aspects of a diplomatic task as central to the stability of the whole of humanity as this one.
For this reason, I am at this point probably not among those who think it would be helpful for the US to put forward its own plan. For if we say that it would be desirable and helpful for Washington to do this, aren’t we just merely perpetuating the view of Washington as constituting the main focal point of any peace diplomacy?
How on earth did it get to the point that the United Nations would agree to be a junior partner of Washington in that strange arrangement called the “Quartet”?
So here’s my Four-point Diplomatic Plan for Palestine:

    (1) Scrap the ‘Quartet’ with its ridiculous power arrangements and its continued adherence to that inane and by now quite outdated ‘Road Map to Nowhere’;
    (2) Have the Security Council appoint a responsible envoy tasked with urgently convening authoritative negotiations over the terms of the final-status peace agreements on all the remaining ‘tracks’ of Arab-Israeli diplomacy– that is, between Israel and respectively Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians;
    (3) Scrap the name the ‘Arab’ Peace Plan and let the Arabs energetically work to get global adherence to the terms of the 2002 Peace Plan, while sympathetically exploring the concerns that others might have about it and brainstorming with them on ways that those concerns can be met;
    (4) Send Condi Rice and her sad and outdated set of very vague and woolly ideas home.

So there you have it…

Quakers and slavery, contd.

In the post I wrote here yesterday about Quakers and slavery I was arguing that it is probably just as important– for Quakers and others– to reflect deeply on the fact that for many long decades our forebears owned, traded in, and profited mightily from the labor of enslaved African persons, and to investigate the degree to which those earlier systems of violence and rapine set in place a situation of great and still continuing inequality between the communities descended from the former slave-“owners” and those of the formerly enslaved, as it is to “celebrate” the role any of our forebears may have played in ending one or another aspect of the institution of slavery…
I had found a small quote from George Fox, the 17th century English guy whom Quaker blogger Marshall Massey calls “the principal human co-founder of Quakerism.” The nub of what Fox wrote was this:

    do you for and to them [the enslaved Blacks], as you would willingly have them or any other to do unto you…were you in the like slavish condition.

On reflection, this not only does not express any clear opposition to the institution of slavery, but it seems to take the institution– and the then-present power relations within it– as an unchallengeable given, urging only the exercise of a certain degree of empathy for the enslaved “Blacks” caught up in it.
Marshall Massey writes in his blog post that,

    George Fox, the principal human co-founder of Quakerism, saw slavery with his own eyes in the English colonies of the New World, but did not condemn it outright.
    William Penn, one of the greatest second-generation Quaker leaders, not only saw slavery but practiced it himself, keeping African slaves on his estate in Pennsylvania.
    Quaker merchants were involved for several generations in the slave trade…
    As historian Douglas Harper has observed, there were African slaves in the Quaker city of Philadelphia within two years after its settlement. The great Quaker body in that area, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, didn’t turn decisively against slavery until 1758, a full three generations later. And in fact, Friends didn’t fully give up slavery until after slavery ceased to be profitable in their area.

But, Massey argues,

    There is no evidence… that early Friends as a religious body ever said slavery was a good or desirable thing.
    Some individual Friends must have said so. William Penn might have, defending his own personal decision to employ slaves. And a fair number of eighteenth-century North American Quaker slaveholders definitely did say so.
    But those were the positions of individual Friends, speaking for themselves. The overall community of Friends never did endorse their views.
    And some groups of Friends came out flatly against slavery at a very early date. It was just four years after the first slaves were imported into Pennsylvania, for example, that several members of the Germantown, Pennsylvania, monthly meeting issued a protest [1688 ~HC] against slaveholding that asked, in labored English, “Is there any that would [himself] be done or handled at this manner? viz., to be sold or made a slave for all the time of his life?”

(Actually, the whole of that 1688 text is worth reading, and I don’t find the English in it labored, at all. It’s a magnificent text!)
I find this rather interesting. Germantown Monthly Meeting is one local congregation of Friends (Quakers). That congregation had come out clearly against the institution of slavery as early as 1688; but then it took the larger, more authoritative Quaker body of which they were part– Philadelphia Yearly Meeting–a further 66 years before it came out unequivocally against the institution by going as far as to “disown” (i.e. expel) any member of the Religious Society of Friends who refused to free such slaves as he still held. (See the timeline on p.2 of this PDF document.)
We could and should reflect on the question of “What took them so long?”
… Anyway, I have also– since I have a copy of George Fox’s Journal conveniently to hand– checked out a few of the things he included there on the subject of slavery. Basically, what he seems to be expressing in the Journal is an essentially very ‘paternalistic’, i.e. denigrating, view of the enslaved persons and their capacities.
In August 1671, George Fox set out from London with an accompanying group of twelve other Quaker “ministers”, on a visit to Barbados, Jamaica, and mainland North America. The voyage over the Atlantic was a little exciting, since off the coast of the Azores they saw what they described as a “Turkish pirate” ship standing by– the Quaker chronicler at that point, John Hull, described it as coming from “Sallee”, presumably today’s Salé, near Rabat, Morocco. (In reference to which, look at the vividness of the description at the head of the Germantown Friends’ minute regarding slavery, on the fears of “white” settlers in North America regarding the possibility of enslavement by the “Turks.”)
Fox and his companions also had at least one other, even more hair-raising adventure of being chased by a “Sallee” man-of-war as they got near to Barbados. (Domination of the sea lines of communication across the Atlantic was always central to the success of the north American settlement venture; and at that point it was still not wholly assured.)
Anyway, Fox and the companions made it to Barbados, where they proceeded to travel about a bit holding Meetings for Worship, and smaller meetings with various local notables. The Quakers in those early days– which were ones of great religious ferment in the whole English-speaking world– were eager to spread (their version of) the Word and to undertake large-scale evangelizing. Also, as much “strategic” evangelizing as they could… Why, one courageous Quaker woman minister had even set out to convert the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, perhaps with the hope that– as with Saint Helena’s conversion of her son the Roman Emperor– with that one conversion a whole empire-full of souls could be gained for the faith. She failed…
So in Barbados, the Quaker evangelizing team (which included two women ministers, and the rest men), not only held as many large meetings for worship as they could, they also wanted to make sure they had continued permission to hold such meetings– which meant they had to have some serious, strategic meetings with the representatives of the settler administration there and persuade those men that their activities were not subversive. (And maybe they tried to convert some of those officials, too.)
Remember, as well, that Fox and many of his companions had already had several long experiences of having been imprisoned under very harsh conditions back in England, on charges related to the radicalism of their views…
So at some point during their time in Barbados (still in 1671), Fox and his companions drew up a letter to “the Governor and Assembly of Barbados”, which is reprinted in the Journal, pp. 602-606. Most of the letter is comprised of a vigorous defense of the orthodoxy and general acceptability of the content of the Friends’ preachings… And indeed, the following portion of the Journal– which includes the texts of letters written from Barbados by both Fox and others, as well as journal entries– mentions quite a lot of large meetings for worship that were held, of both “whites” and “blacks”, during the three months the Quaker mission team stayed in Barbados, from October 1671 through January 1672…
So this is a key little portion of the letter Fox and his companions sent to the Governor and Assembly of Barbados:

    Another slander and lie they have cast upon us is, namely, that we should teach the negroes to rebel, a thing we do utterly abhor and detest in and from our hearts, the Lord knows it, who is the searcher of all hearts and knows all things… For that which we have spoken and declared to them is to exhort and admonish them to be sober and to fear God, and to love their masters and mistresses, and to be faithful and diligent in their masters’ service and business, and that then their masters and overseers will love them and deal kindly and gently with them…
    Now consider , Friends, that it’s no transgression for a master of a family to instruct his family himself or else some others in his behalf, but rather that it is a very great duty incumbent upon them, as Abraham did and Joshua did… And further consider this, that it is a duty incumbent upon us to pray, and to teach, instruct, and admonish those in and belonging to our families…
    Now negroes and tawny Indians make up a very great part of families here in this island for whom an account will be required by him who comes to judge both quick and dead at the great day of judgement… (pp. 604-606)

In his own short journal account of what the group had achieved in Barbados, Fox wrote:

    We came from London on the thirteenth day of the sixth month [Aug.] and we came to Barbados the third day of the eighth month [Oct.], where we had many and great meetings among the whites and blacks. And there was some opposition by the priests and Papists but the power of the Lord and his glorious Truth was over all and reached most in the island. And we stayed above a quarter of a year there and I went to visit the governor and he was loving to me… And I was at several men’s meetings and several women’s meetings which was of great service for the island. And we set up meetings in families in every Freind’s house, among the blacks, some 200, some 300, in their houses that the masters and dames of families might admonish their families of blacks and whites, as Abraham did, which is a great service.(pp. 609-610)

I have to say I find these words extremely disturbing to read. The idea that Fox and his companions could so easily consider that the “masters and dames” (i.e. the slave-owners) stood at the head of some “family” that comprised their hundreds of slaves, and that this somehow gave them the right to instruct and “admonish” those enslaved persons, almost beggars belief.
“Admonish” being far too dainty a word, I think, for the kinds of punishments that were routinely administered against enslaved persons, in those times as afterwards.
I know that elsewhere Fox wrote that, while he was troubled by some aspects the institution of slavery, still, he saw the enslaved Africans as so un-“instructed” and so ill-equipped to fend for themselves that keeping the institution of slavery in place for a generation or two in order to give the “masters and dames” a chance to “instruct” the slaves up to the level required for self-sufficiency was probably the best way forward.
(Does this kind of argument have any present-day echoes in the pleadings of those who say the US occupation of Iraq may have some bad aspects… but the Iraqis are somehow not really “ready” for full self-rule, so in the meantime the occupation forces should stay??)
Anyway, Fox gives no evidence at all of having talked at any length to any of the enslaved persons in Barbados, to find out what they might have thought about his argument. Nor does he show any signs of the deep reflectiveness with which, 80 years later, John Woolman set out to try to investigate all the moral dimensions of the institution of slavery. One clear example: Woolman was deeply troubled by the idea of receiving hospitality from a plantation owner who might, in offering that hospitality, be exploiting the uncompensated labor of “his” slaves… So he proceeded, during all his visits to those slaveholders, to give some coins of due compensation for the labor involved in hosting him– either directly to the enslaved persons who had served him or to their masters, with instruction that they be “paid” to the servants concerned… In Barbados, by contrast, George Fox left us no record of having entertained any such qualms, but seemed happily to have taken at face value the claim that all the black slaves (and “tawny Indians”– I guess that was before they were wiped out completely by the colonizers) were just part of the “one big happy family” that by a most amazing coincidence just happened in every single case to be headed by the white slave-owners.
… By writing in this way, do I intend to “condemn” George Fox? No. He was a creature of his evangelizing times, perhaps blinded to some degree by the burning strength of his goal of evangelizing. (Even the Conquistadors thought they were doing a service to the people they conquered in nearby Central America– some of them argued that even if they were flailing the bodies of their captives, at least they were saving their souls!)
So I can certainly point out what I see as the terrible effects of George Fox’s extremely permissive (and also, I would say, distinctly supportive) attitudes toward and actions regarding the institution of slavery, without condemning all of George Fox as a person.
But given that I have such great admiration for many other aspects of his life and ministry, recalling that some of his actions caused real harm (in my view) to others of God’s children can indeed challenge us today to reflect on what actions we might be taking that– though we think we taking them with excellent intent– might actually be having a very harmful effect on other humans.
… Well, I didn’t mean this post to be so long. But I was interested in going back into GF’s Journal to check on what I had read there some ten or more years ago, and to be able to insert it into the present discussion on slavery, the Quakers, and the values of the “Enlightenment”.
(H’mm, maybe we should rename it “the Darkening”?)

More on the four-year US occupation of Iraq

Commenter Bernard Chazelle suggested we watch this very moving short video from Guardian films. It’s about some kids in an Iraqi orphanage.
And there’s a link there to this other short video, which is a powerful testimony from and about Kadhem Jabouri, the one-time Iraqi weightlifting champion who achieved a brief measure of fame when he heartily swung a hammer against the base of the Saddam statue in Firdaus Square on that day in early April 2003 when the statue was brought down.
Today, Kadhem says he wished he’d never done it. He says the four years of occupation have been worse than Saddam’s dictatorship. He says, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” He takes the cameraperson on a sad tour of his neighborhood, ending up at the echoingly empty expanses of Firdaus Square.
So when– as no doubt will happen– in the early days of April the (increasingly depleted) ranks of the war supporters in the US and UK once again replay that footage of the (partly orchestrated, partly ‘spontaneous’) assault on the Saddam statue, and the statue’s final toppling… in their attempt to reconvince themselves and perhaps some others that their war venture in Iraq really was “worthwhile” because it resulted in a toppling of that dictator and his artistic representation there in the square… in an exuberant outpouring of the Iraqi people’s “popular will”…
When you see those film clips replaying again, go back to the one of Kadhem Jabouri, and listen carefully to what he says.
You can note also that though he did swing that hammer with great verve and gusto, actually as the statue-toppling scene progresses it was not the efforts of Kadhem and his friends that brought it down. (They only succeeded in inflicting a few broad pock marks on the statue’s plinth.)
What brought it down was the US armored vehicle that was later brought into the task.
Anyway, watch both those great video clips… Kadhem, and the children… No matter how idealistic the intentions of some of those who planned and undertook the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they surely need to understand the terrible effects that that invasion had on the lives of millions of actual Iraqis.
(Thanks for the link, Bernard!)

British mark bicentennary of their slave trade abolition

Here in London, many people are making a pretty big deal out of an Act passed by Parliament in March 1807 that outlawed the involvement of British ships in the slave trade. Just a block or two from I’m staying, the British Museum has a lot of special events relating to this bicentennial (e.g., this one, on Sunday.) There’s a movie coming out called Amazing Grace, that is based on the life of the abolitionist MP William Wilberforce. I see the British Quakers have put together an interesting little on-line exhibition to mark this bicentennary, featuring some texts and other items from the collections of Friends House Library.
I think it’s excellent to remember this anniversary, and to find ways to reconnect with the strong ethical and religious sense of all those who worked and organized to end the transatlantic slave trade. As far as I understand the long, long global history of that ghastly institution, the enslaved persons in the Americas were about the first slaves in history whose condition of bondage and status as chattel was passed down from parent to child. And in fact, in a cruel irony, as the transatlantic trade in enslaved persons of African origin died out– due to laws being passed against it on both sides of the Atlantic, not just one– the value of the slaves who were already in place, working under horrendous conditions in the US, many Caribbean islands, and some South American nations, merely rose… And there was a strong incentive, until the whole institution of slavery was outlawed, which took many further decades, for slave-“owners” to try to breed their slave-stock as much as much possible, a matter to which many white men in slave-owning communities made a big personal contribution.
If you look at the (US Census Bureau-derived) demographic table in this section of the relevant Wikipedia page, you can see that between 1810 and 1860 the number of enslaved persons in the US rose from 1.2 million to nearly 4.0 million– despite the fact that the importation of additional slaves had been outlawed by Congress in 1808.
Imagine how many enslaved women were raped by white men and boys as part of that “breeding” program. Yes, another proportion of them doubtless bore children from relationships with enslaved men, and I hope that many of those relationships were marked by affection… But whether there was affection or no, the practitioners of the institution of slavery gave almost no recognition to ties of marriage or any other kinds of family ties among the “slaves” whom they owned. As many slave testimonies told, husbands and wives among the enslaved persons could be (and were) as easily separated as parents and children. A man, woman, or child could be “sold down the river” at a moment’s notice; or whole families could be split up when the “property” of a deceased slave-“owner” was divided among his heirs…
I started traveling towards becoming a Quaker some ten-plus years ago, spurred overwhelmingly by my reading of the journal of John Woolman, who was a mid-18th-century Quaker who grew up in a strongly Quaker community near Philadelphia. Woolman pursued many very important ministries of justice and conscience during his life, including by calling attention to the status of the native Americans, and by agitating against Pennsylvania’s raising of a war tax. (This was in the 1750s– quite a long time before the secessionist UDI movement called by its participants the “American Revolution.”)
But one of the most important ministries he pursued was undoubtedly the one against the institution of slavery.
By that point, many, many portions of the white settler community in the US were heavily involved in the institution of slavery… including some portion of just about all the many Christian denominations that had proliferated in the settler communities by then– and yes, that included the Quakers— and also a portion of the Jewish settlers. As far as I know it was only the Mennonites, among the Christians (and perhaps the other Anabaptists?) who had never participated in the owning or trading of enslaved persons. But many, many Quakers certainly had.
Actually, if you go back and read what the founder of Quakerism, George Fox, had written about the institution of slavery in the 1670s, you will see it is far from being any kind of forthright protest against the whole institution. See what he wrote, for example, here:

    ‘…if you were in the same condition as the Blacks are…now I say, if this should be the condition of you and yours, you would think it hard measure, yea, and very great Bondage and Cruelty. And therefore consider seriously of this, and do you for and to them, as you would willingly have them or any other to do unto you…were you in the like slavish condition.’

There were huge hyper-profits to be made in the business; and some were made by Quaker plantation owners in the southern states or Quaker slave-traders in Rhode Island and other states to the north.
Eighty years after George Fox was writing, John Woolman came along. He saw at first hand the misery and inequity of the institution of slavery. He heard all the allegedly “do-gooding” claims of the slave-holders and slave-traders among the Quakers… that they were “saving these poor souls from the misery of wars in Africa”, etc etc… and he slowly confronted them with his witness, one-by-one, and also in small groups and at impassioned meetings for worship and business.
He was not alone. There were other American Quaker abolitionists who joined him in his campaign. But he was the one who kept an extremely moving journal of all his efforts… And between them, these Quaker men and women made a big difference. They managed to persuade all the Quakers of the US to dissociate themselves from the institution; and it was on the basis of that achievement that many Quakers of later decades then became leaders in the broad national movement against what the Americans have often called the “peculiar institution.”
Too bad that, come the 1860s, it was only through the waging of an extremely fierce and bloody war that slavery was finally ended forever in the country. (More on that, perhaps, later: I really think that war was the biggest test for the pacifism of US Quakers– much more so than the distant war against Hitlerism some 80 years later.) Anyway, I guess the ferocity with which the southern whites fought in that war was a marker of just how very profitable the whole institution had been for them…
Back home in Charlottesville, Virginia,my good friend Bill Anderson– who’s an Anglican peace activist and an African-American— has a couple of times said to me, “Helena, I always have a soft spot for Quakers: Your people freed my family back in the 1830s.” I never know what to say. I feel much more ashamed that back at one point, Quakers in Virginia may well have actually “owned” some of Bill’s ancestors, than I feel happy that they eventually helped to “free” some of them.
I guess I wish the events here in Britain being held to mark the bicentennary of this country’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807 had a little less smug self-satisfaction, and a little more real reflectiveness to them. After all, should we really be doing much celebrating if someone stops beating his wife??
When I say “reflectiveness”, I just want to note that I’ve seen nothing in all the many newspaper articles and other items of commentary on this anniversary which looks at how many of the fine institutions of the “Enlightenment” here in Britain, as in the rest of Europe and also, certainly, in the Americas, were financed with the hyper-profits from the slave trade… And then, absolutely no reflection at all on the degree to which the legacies of the slave trade and other crimes of colonialism still live on in Africa; or, on whether these very rich and settled former slave-trading societies of northern Europe should not take seriously the task of effecting some real form of reparations to those ravaged home-communities of Africa.
… I do just want to put in links to two really excellent resources for anyone studying this subject. One is this book, Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews With Virginia Ex-Slaves, reprinted by the University of Virginia Press from a series of excellent interviews made by (generally) African-American interviewers, with some of the last living ex-slaves in the 1930s. The other is Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade, The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870.
But what I really want to say here is this. By the time John Woolman got around to visiting his fellow-Quakers up and down the east coast of America in the 1750s, many of those he visited had succeeded in becoming quite strongly convinced that the institution of slavery was not just acceptable, but also good and ethical. It took Woolman and his friends many years of persistent persuasion to convince them of the error of their ways.
From today’s perspective, the error of their ways seems blindingly obvious!
So what practices are we engaged in today– practices that we may well think are not just acceptable, but beyond that, actively good and ethical– that future generations will look back and say “Unbelievable! How could people back then do such terribly damaging things???”