I find two aspects of Milosevic’s death in UN custody yesterday quite interesting. The first is what his death actually tells us about the value of using criminal prosecutions to do a “truth establishment” exercise (and the linked question of the reactions to his death in different political spheres.) The second is the continuing tale of the toxicological aspects of his death.
Regarding the value of criminal trials in “establishing a historical record” about past atrocities– which is one of the main goals people are seeking when they support such trials– Milosevic’s death, and the suicide in UN custody earlier this week of the “lesser” defendant Milan Babic, have underlined the problems with the fact that criminal trials always revolve centrally around the actions and culpability of named individuals.
Then, if key indicted individuals should somehow “escape” from the control of the court– whether through a death, a suicide, or through becoming in some other way “unfit to be tried”– the trial stops right in its tracks. And not only the issue of the guilt or innocence of the accused individual is left hanging– indeed, given the presumption of innocence, he has to continue to be presumed innocent after his death– but also the whole broader “truth establishment” venture stops dead in its tracks.
Recognizing this fact, tribunal spokesperson Christian Chartier is quoted here as saying: “This is tragic for the truth… This is tragic for the victims.”
I note that truth commissions don’t suffer from this extreme vulnerability to the physical status of a small number of individuals.
The reactions to Milosevic’s death have been interesting in this regard. (See my discussion of this issue, too, in my comment to this post over at Transitional Justice Forum.)
The BBC’s Jon Silverman (whom I met once, in Rwanda) has a piece on their website titled simply, Worst outcome for Milosevic tribunal.
Silverman writes that M’s death:
Kissinger and Haig on Iraq/Vietnam
At a forum here in Boston yesterday, former Nixon advisor Al Haig said that the Bushies are repeating a mistake made in Vietnam by not applying the full force of the military to “win” the war in Iraq:
- “Every asset of the nation must be applied to the conflict to bring about a quick and successful outcome, or don’t do it,” Haig said
Actually, it’s not totally clear to me that Haig was saying there that the US still should be trying toi “apply the full force of the military”– or was the quoted statement perhaps meant as a critique of the Bushies’ past actions? Well, I wasn’t there, so I’ll have to trust the reporting of that AP reporter as to what Haig meant.
Either way, though– what an incredibly stupid, irresponsible, and I would say even borderline criminal statement!
Has Haig forgotten that back in March-April 2003, the US did win a decisive military victory in Iraq? Fat lot of good it did them! This is not now and never has been a war that could be won solely on the battlefield. The application of more forces, even of “every asset of the nation”, whether back in March 2003 or now in 2006, could not have “won” the war if there wasn’t a vision for how to translate that military victory into a political victory.
If Haig was indeed urging that now, in 2006, the US should be applying “every asset of the nation” to the war in Iraq– just exactly what military targets does he advocate that they target? And how, once they’ve achieved that, do they intend to transform that new military situation into a political victory?
At the same event, which was a forum on the Vietnam war held at the Kennedy Library, the ageing Henry Kissinger was also on the platform.
Here’s some of his interaction with questioners from the audience:
- He refused to directly respond to a question, submitted by the audience and read by a moderator, that asked if he wanted to apologize for policies that led to so many deaths in Vietnam.
“This is not the occasion,” Kissinger said. “We have to start from the assumption that serious people were making serious decisions. So that’s the sort of question that’s highly inappropriate.”
In another audience question, Kissinger was asked whether he agreed that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and, if so, was he responsible for the 2 million people the Khmer Rouge killed?
“The premise that the bombing of a 5-mile strip led to the rise of Khmer Rouge and the murder of two million people is an example of masochism that is really inexcusable,” he said.
These responses are interesting. Wth regard to the first one, why is his assumption that a suggestion that he apologise for the Vietnam-era deaths is not “serious”? An apology could be an extremely serious political act– as when, for example, President Clinton apologized to the Rwandans for the US’s failure to act to stop the 1994 genocide.
His response to the second question is simply an example of out-and-out evasion of any responsibility.
What a sad, sad old guy.
Here’s what he said about the US invasion of Iraq:
- Kissinger also spoke about the war in Iraq, saying he supported the invasion.
“We have a jihadist radical situation,” he said. “If the U.S. fails in Iraq, then the consequences will be that it motivates more to move toward the radical side. This is the challenge.”
What a jumbled argument. In 2002-early 2003, there was no “jihadist radical situation” in Iraq. (Even today, that is not the main thing that’s going on there.) Yes, since April 2003, some very serious “jihadist radical” elements have emerged in Iraq. But that emergence cannot be used, ex post facto, to justify the invasion. And nor can it be used to justify the continued US military occupation of the country– especially since it is precisely under the circumstances of that occupation that the “jihadist radical” elements have emerged.
Why did anyone ever take this sorry old guy’s “intellect” seriously at all? He strikes me as just a muddled, highly irresponsible, imperialistic old bully.
Ted Meron and the Israeli settlements
Israeli researcher Gershom Gorenberg has an important new book coming out about the first decade of Israel’s pursuit of its settlement policy in the occupied territories, 1967-77. This recent piece in HaAretz tells us some of the important things in the book, which is titled “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.”
The HaAretz piece quotes Gorenberg as saying, “The title means that the Labor movement leaders had no organized plan to keep the territories, but even without a plan, they each made major decisions that when taken in aggregate, accidentally created the Israeli empire in the territories.”
The HaAretz piece indicates the degree to which the US administrations of those years underestimated the seriousness and intent of the Israeli settlement project.
In an article of his ownin Friday’s New York Times, Gorenberg focuses on one particular aspect of the early years of the settlement venture: the degree to which the Israeli governments of those years understood that the settlements were a violation of international law, but proceeded with building them anyway.
He writes:
- In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War. An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel’s 1948 war of independence.
The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked “Top Secret,” Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally, “My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
In the detailed opinion that accompanied that note, Mr. Meron explained that the Convention — to which Israel was a signatory — forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was “undoubtedly ‘occupied territory,’ ” he wrote.
Mr. Meron took note of Israel’s diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not “normal” occupied territory, because the land’s status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.
But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: the international community would not accept it and would regard settlement as showing “intent to annex the West Bank to Israel.” The second was legal, he wrote: “In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory.” For instance, he noted, a military decree issued on the third day of the war in June said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.
There is a subtext here. In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: if the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity — in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.
This is very interesting. I guess I never knew that Theodor Meron– a Holocaust survivor who went on to become a professor at New York University law school, then the president of the International Criminal Tibunal for Yugoslavia– had been the legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry in that critical period.
Gorenberg writes:
- Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.
Well, yes and no. But neither can 38 years of Israel’s completely unilateral pursuit of its settlement-building project undo the whole body of international humanitarian law.
I think it’s excellent that Gorenberg has given new life to that judgment that Meron reached 39 years ago. It would of course have been great if Meron, today a very respected international jurist, had spoken out some more about this question throughout the intervening years, to reinforce the crux of what he wrote in that memo. I don’t recall hearing of him ever speaking out about it. I’ve read a number of his books on international humanitarian law, and don’t recall him ever dealing with the question of the status of the occupied territories as occupied territories or the illegality of building civilian settlements therein.
Maybe I should go and ask him about these things the next time I’m in The Hague…
RIP Tom Fox
My heart is so heavy I don’t know what to write… about the discovery of Tom Fox’s dead body.
Go the CPT’s website today and you can read the agonized statement they’ve put out about his loss. You can also see a picture of him at one of the recent anti-Wall demonstrations in Palestine.
I never met Tom personally but many of my Quaker friends know him, some quite well.
I hope he didn’t suffer too much.
I hope Jim, Harmeet, and Norman aren’t suffering too much, now. Also Jill Carroll. Also, all people illegally deprived of their liberty in Iraq. I’m praying for them all.
I flew back to the States today, so I’m still feeling a little disoriented and out of it. I’m doing a speaking gig north of Boston tomorrow evening– Gloucester Town Hall, 7 p.m., I think.
The CPT statement starts:
- In grief we tremble before God who wraps us with compassion…
I’m thinking of a God who can wrap us all in mercy and compassion. Bismillahi rrahmani rrahim.
Bil’in Friday
I decided to go down to Bil’in today, to the weekly anti-Wall demonstration that the villagers have been running there for more than a year now. I went with a great group of women from Ramallah, who included Neta Golan, an Israeli activist who is married to a Palestinian and lives in Ramallah with him and their two kids, and Anne X., a nAmerican woman of almost 70 years of age who also lives in Ramallah.
We had made the stunningly beautifully drive from Ramallah through the steep hills west to Bil’in in two cars, with some other people, so I didn’t meet Anne till we got to the village. The moment I met her she handed me a keffiyeh and said, “Here, quick put it on, the tear-gas is coming our way.” And it was.
We were a little late for the main event, which had been a procession from the village mosque down to the place where the line of Wall cuts right across an access road the villagers had always used to get to their lands that are now being taken from them by the line of the Wall. It was kind of hard to see what was happening, as the lines of Israeli soldiers and of demonstrators kept dissolving and reforming in different clumps. There were probably about 30-40 soldiers there, that I saw, and maybe 50-60 demonstrators. The demonstrators seemed to be, just over half of them, Palestinians, most of the rest Israeli peace activists, and a smattering of “internationals.” There were quite a few press people there, too, and a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance.
I talked a little with Rateb Abu Rahmeh, a man from the village who teaches social work in the Al Quds Open University. He explained that he’s a member of the village’s Popular Committee which has been maintaining this action as a creative, nonviolent protest for all this time. (The villagers who are owners of some of the land cut off by the Wall here are also maintaining a challenge to its location in the Israeli courts. Akiva Eldar wrote about that in HaAretz earlier this week.)
Rateb told me that every week the Friday anti-Wall demonstration has a different theme. This week, they had made a large model of a graveyard, 30 meters by 10 meters, to commemorate the nine local people who have been killed in connection with anti-Wall protests. And they carried that to the Wall as their protest. “The Israelis broke up the model graveyard. They also broke my wrist,” he said, showing me the bandaged hand he was shielding inside his jacket.
Rateb seemed like a very interesting person and I’d like to write more about him. But the only other thing I have time to note here is the very easy, friendly relations I saw between the Israeli anti-Wall protesters and their Palestinian colleagues. In fact, the Israeli protesters seemed great: very active and dedicated and committed to the discipline of nonviolence. Also, they played a special role in reproaching the young soldiers there in their own language.
Actually, many of the men in the village speak Hebrew. Bil’in is so close to the Green Line that until the latest intifada most of the village men would go to work in Israel– and, one of them told me, some of them still do.
As the demonstration came to an end, everyone drifted back to the main part of the village. Some of the Israeli “Border” Guards came after the departing demonstrators, and there were a few skirmishes between them and some youngsters who started throwing stones as the soldiers approached. The soldiers lobbed few canisters of tear gas and we heard some much sharper bullet shots ring out, too. But the Israeli demonstrators– most of whom were, it seemed, self-described anarchists– seemed very at ease with the villagers, some of whom invited them into their homes for tea, and sat and chatted at length with them in Hebrew.
Hamas lawmaker on Islam and society
This is an interesting and significant short public exposition, in English, of the views of a Hamas legislator on how he sees the role of Islam in society. (And actually, on a bit more than that, too.)
It’s from the online publication Bitterlemons-international, which is a joint project of the Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher and the (outgoing) PA Minister of Planning, Ghassan Khatib.Until now, Hamas has refused to participate in any of the joint Palestinian-Israeli “people to people” type projects that have proliferated since about 1990. I imagine that reluctance will continue. But it’s interesting that Yehya Mousa contibuted this to BLI.
Pathetic threats from Bolton
What a contrast between the bellicose rhetoric and actions that the Bush administration deployed against Saddam Hussein’s regime three years ago and the pathetic bleats it is issuing against Iran today. Back in 2002-2003, the Bushies were threatening (and preparing to use) a concerted military attack in order to meet the strong “concerns” it had voiced about Saddam’s WMD program. Today, the worst threat that hawkish ambassador to the UN John Bolton can muster is to suggest that,
- if the Security Council doesn’t take tough action, the United States might look elsewhere to punish Iran — possibly by rallying its allies to impose targeted sanctions.
Many things have happened in the interim, of course. Firstly, the US military has become majorly bogged down in Iraq, where 130,000 US troops are deployed in positions extremely vulnerable to attack– especially by any forces sympathetic to Teheran, of which there are many inside Iraq. So Washington has zero possibility of mounting any credible threat of a major military intervention against Teheran. Bolton and Co. have ramped up the rhetoric against Iran a lot in recent months. But it is all hot air. Its major effect has been to stiffen Iranian defiance in response.
Second, of course nobody this time round, after what happened in Iraq, would take seriously any amount of questionable “information” the Bushies might claim they had that would point to an Iranian breakout from the NPT. And let’s remember that Iran still has not broken out of the NPT.
(AP reported Thursday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on state television that, “We don’t want to be the ones to remind [everyone] who was right and who was not in Iraq, although the answer is obvious,”)
Third, the Bushies themselves have taken major steps to shred the NPT, culminating in last week’s decision to give India a completely free pass on its defiance of the whole NPT approach to cooperative, multilateral nonproliferation efforts.
My base-line on nuclear nonproliferation is firstly that I am strongly committed to creating a world without any nuclear weapons (or other WMDs), and secondly I believe that using a cooperative multilateral path is by far the best path to get to that goal. From this point of view, the NPT regime has its flaws– primarily, because it privileges those five countries that were deemed to be “nuclear weapons states” back at the time the treaty was concluded in 1968. But the NPT has some strong advantages, too. It aspires toward becoming a single, universal franework from nuclear non- and de-proliferation. (So it’s a pity the US never expended any real energy trying to get proven proliferators like Israel, Pakistan, and India to join it– back in the past time when such pressure might have made a real difference.) And Article Six commits all states including the nuclear-weapons states to participating in good faith in negotiations for a complete and general disarmament.
Certainly, the NPT is a much stronger and more egalitarian framework for nonproliferation efforts than the Bushies’ preferred approach of building selective alliances on a purely political basis around the world– an approach that surely, as with Israel and India (and the countries that have acted in response to those two), has merely spurred the further proliferation of nuclear weapons.
So far, the Iranians have been at pains to say that their aim is to develop a peaceful nuclear energy capability. Though who honestly knows what their longterm intentions are? But developing peaceful nuclear capacity is precisely what is allowed– or even, supposed to be facilitated– by the NPT. (It is probably quite unwise on longterm environmental grounds… but that’s another issue.) President Ahmedinejad has meanwhile done very well politically, at home, by portraying the US campaign against the plan as an attempt to deny Iran’s access to peaceful nuclear technology that is of real value to the country’s longterm development. He, and many other Iranian leaders, seems in general very happy to portray Iran as “standing up to Washington’s bullying.” (And some degree of support for this position can be felt far beyond Iran’s own borders.)
This, from AP yesterday:
- “The people of Iran will not accept coercion and unjust decisions by international organizations,” Ahmadinejad said, according to state television. “Enemies cannot force the Iranian people to relinquish their rights.”
“The era of bullying and brutality is over,” he added.
My best judgment at this point is that if either the US or Israel take action against the Iranian nuclear program, the response– and not just from Iran, indeed, perhaps not even from Iran at all– would most likely be broad and highly detrimental to the stability of the present, already very fragile strategic “order” in the Middle East. What’s more, I am sure that the decisionmakers in Washington and Israel all understand this. Hence the bleatiness of Bolton’s rhetoric.
We should not forget, though, that Israel’s raid against Iraq’s Osirak reactor was undertaken in the context of a hard-fought election campaign in Israel, in 1981. Is there any ffear that a besieged Olmert, fighting for his political life at the polls, might seek to launch a repeat performance?
So far, I don’t think so. Hawkish former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon told a US audience yesterday that Israel could launch an attack on Iran that would set back its nuclear program “by several years”. He hinted that this attack might come from submarine-launched missiles, not just from the air. (But I wonder where the Israeli subs would be located for this? Interesting question.) But according to that same Ha’Aretz report,
- Ya’alon also warned that Iran would clearly hit back hard in the event of such an attack, and cited Tehran’s long-range Shihab missiles, Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah has in its possession, and Qassam rockets that Palestinian militants habitually fire into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip. He added that a rise in oil prices could be further fallout from such an assault.
I also note that retaliatory action could well be launched against the US troops in Iraq, since no-one in the world would imagine that israel would take such an action against Iran without getting at least an orange light, if not a green light, from Washington first.
(Former Israeli Air Force commander Eitan Ben-Eliyahu told HaAretz that speaking publicly about these things in the way Ya’alon had done, could be harmful.)
Also of note from today’s HaAretz on the Iran-nuclear question, this from Reuven Pedhatsur:
- There could not have been a worse timing for the signing of the nuclear pact between the U.S. and India last week. While President Bush is leading the international campaign against the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, it legitimized India’s nuclear program, and thus granted India the status of a legitimate nuclear power in every respect.
This happened two years after he announced with great resolve that new nuclear powers should not be added to the list of the five nuclear powers, and eight years after the American administration imposed sanctions on India after it conducted a series of nuclear tests.
Tehran can rub its hands with glee, reading the details of the agreement that Bush signed with Indian Prime Minister Singh.
…When Bush was asked at the joint news conference with the Indian prime minister why the U.S. is rewarding a state that conducted nuclear bomb testing in 1998 and did not sign the NPT, and what message he was sending to other countries, the president responded with “what the agreement says is that things change and times have changed.”
That’s not a particularly successful response, nor does it strengthen the American position as the country that is supposed to lead the campaign to prevent nuclear weapons from reaching other countries.
…[T]he American president has greatly harmed the chances of denying nuclear weapons to Iran. From now on, the U.S. will find it difficult to present a morally authoritative position in its negotiations vis a vis the Iranians. And then there’s the Israeli angle. If India is accepted by the Americans as a legitimate member of the nuclear club, and even wins some nice benefits from it, it is possible that the time has come to start thinking about certain steps along the nuclear path it paved.
Bottom line: We should think of George W. Bush not just as someone who has launched a terrible and quite unnecessary war that has wrecked Iraq, destabilized the Middle East, and given Osama Bin Laden a virtually free pass to roam around the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border at will– but also as someone who has significantly aided the spread of nuclear weapons around the world while undermining the global mechanism that is best-placed to contain and then reverse the spread of nuclear weapons.
What an extremely dangerous man.
Jerusalem: writing, visiting, talking
I had a good day in Jerusalem today. Starting with writing,
writing, writing. Yesterday after I got back to the Jerusalem
Meridian Hotel, I started writing my second piece for Salon– about the
Hamas women in Gaza, and about Hamas more generally… And I’d hope to
finish it yesterday, too. But I have so much material from Gaza
rattling around in my notebook and in my head that it took a while for
it to settle down and “compose”… So I only made a start on the
article yesterday evening.
This morning I got up, had a quick breakfast in the hotel’s beautiful old stone-arched
restaurant, then told myself, “Helena, write!”
Actually, I also had the hope of a rather interesting interview in Tel
Aviv today, but by around 10 a.m. the guy’s executive assistant had
called to say it wouldn’t, after all, work out. So I got to
continue with my writing instead. And shortly after 2 p.m. the
Salon piece was done– in at just under 3,000 words. I
don’t think the shape is perfect– I find it really, really hard to
compose anything, let alone a longer piece like this, completely on the
small laptop screen, without doing any printouts. (I’m a big fan of
self-editing on hard copy.) But it is what it is. There’s a
professional editor there at Salon at work on the piece, so let’s hope
he can rebalance whatever needs to be rebalanced in it. Maybe
it’s two pieces, anyway? Or one main piece and a sidebar? I
guess we’ll see.
Holed up in a quiet hotel room writing, and eating from room service.
It’s not a bad situation to be in– especially if, as is now the case,
the room in question has a fabulous view out over the Mount of Olives,
pierced on its ridge by the two towers of the Augusta Victoria Hospital
and the Hebrew U. Mount Scopus campus. But after nearly 24 hours
of this holed-up-in-room-writing regime, I definitely needed to
walk. I had nearly an hour to spare before I was due to go visit
my old Palestinian-Armenian friend Albert Aghazarian, who lives in the
Old City, so I decided to take a roundabout route to his place there.
What a fabulous, intriguing city Jerusalem is, especially for
pedestrians. When I was in Gaza, I was once again acutely aware
of how lucky I am to be able to come to Jerusalem whenever I want
to. Some of the Palestinians I talked to there had never visited
this city. Some hadn’t been able to visit it for many years
now. It was actually easier for Gazans to get to Jerusalem during
the height of the first intifada than it became after the conclusion
iof the Oslo Accord. But the Gazans all long for the city
intensely. A large, glowing image of the Dome of the Rock is the
main decoration in many public places there (as, indeed, throughout the whole
Palestinian diaspora)
… Well, my route to Albert’s place turned out to be a bit more
roundabout than I had expected. He’d reminded me I needed to go
to the Armenian Convent of St. James and ask for his house there.
So I walked along Salaheddine Street to the Old City walls, and then
southwest along the outside of the walls a bit till I reached the
Damascus Gate. (It was cold out. It’s been a blustery day here today: the first real
time in all my visit that I’ve been glad to have the warm wool coat
that I almost jettisoned ten days ago because it seemed such a pain to
have to carry it around.)
In front of the Damascus Gate there’s a broad stone plaza that’s linked to the gate by a wide stone footbridge where
normally a row of older Palestinian women from the villages around will
sit and sell their herbs and other produce. Most of these women–
both the ones sitting outside the gate and the far greater number of
their sisters who sit at various points throughout the Old City– wear
the intricately embroidered dresses that are an important part of their
dowry and their identity. The other day when I was at the
Damascus Gate, a gaggle of Israeli soldiers was hanging around the
footbridge, with another soldier silhouetted in the high little window
in the high stone battlements above the gate.
Today’s CSM column on Gaza
Here’s my column in today’s CSM. (Also here.)
I should just tell you one thing about the donkey carts mentioned in the story (and featured, I see, in the subhead they gave it.). In the late 1980s, that traditional form of trasnportation had just about disappeared from Gaza. But the strict regime of collective punishments the IOF imposed on the Palestinians during the first intifada included– along with weeks-long lockdowns, mass arrests, public humiliations of local elders, etc etc etc– the imposition of ever more complex and bizarre regulations on the owners of motor vehicles. At that point, many car-owners in Gaza, which is much flatter and much poorer than the West Bank, simply gave up the attempt to keep a car on the road, and switched back to donkey- or horse-drawn carts. It was a very vivid example of the de-development trend that Israel’s lengthy occupation imposed on the Gazans.
So I’m interested to see that– even after the short, alleged honeymoon period of post-Oslo, then the second intifada, and the Israeli disengagement– the donkey-carts have persisted, They comprise probably about 20% of the vehicles I saw on the roads in Gaza. Every morning I would wake to the clip-clop of their metal-shoed hoofs on the road by the fishing-port, and the intermittent braying of some donkey, somewhere. Hey, I’m starting to miss Gaza already– though I realize that what I regard as a funky and distinctive feature of the local scene probably represents for most Gazans yet another reminder of the economic de-development into which they’ve been forced.
Chaos, closure, and the Gaza greenhouses
One commenter wrote that when I wrote here recently about the greenhouses in Gaza that an American Jewish group helped hand over to the Palestinians last year, the source I quoted, Khaled Abdel-Shafi “had not told the whole story.” That commenter, RB, then helpfully provided URLs to some earlier versions of this story, which featured accounts of some serious looting of greenhouse paraphernalia that took place immediately after the “handover”.
This September 13 story referenced by RB tells us that, “Jihad al-Wazir, the deputy Palestinian finance minister, said roughly 30 percent of the greenhouses suffered various degrees of damage.”
Actually, Abdel-Shafi did tell me about the looting. He explained to me that because of the Israelis’ firm insistence on not coordinating any aspect of their departure with the PA, it was almost impossible for the PA to arrange to deploy sufficient security forces into the greenhouse region, or to make a plan on how to secure the greenhouses, before the IOF soldiers simply up and left the greenhouse areas in, as I recall it, the wee hours of one morning in early September.
However, despite the setback caused to the Palestinians’ plans by the looting, the Palestinian Economic Development Company did manage to get some decent-sized crops of specialty items out of those greenhouses– as did the owners of other existing large Palestinian greenhouse operations up and down the Strip in the most recent (indeed, ongoing) growing season.
But the most recent part of this story remains the fact that the Israeli government has not lived up to its commitment under last November’s “Rafah Agreement” to keep the Karni goods crossing– the only way for these ultra-perishable goods to reach the international markets for which they were grown– fully open to expedite their transit to these markets.
Reuters told us yesterday that,
- [A] report, prepared by a U.S. Agency for International Development contractor and obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, estimated agriculture losses in Gaza due to the closure of the Karni crossing at more than $450,000 per day.
The Palestine Economic Development Co., which manages the greenhouses left behind by evacuated Jewish settlers, has been losing more than $120,000 a day, the report estimated.
The greenhouse project was launched with much fanfare late last year as a sign of Gaza Strip’s potential after Israel’s withdrawal.
A border deal brokered by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was supposed to clear the way for Gaza to increase sharply its agricultural exports.
But a World Bank report released on Monday found “no sustained improvement” in the movement of goods across Karni before or after Israel’s Gaza pullout, completed last September.
Israel closed Karni for 21 days between Jan. 15 and Feb. 5. It was closed again on Feb. 21 after a mysterious explosion in the area and has remained closed because of “continued security alerts”, the army said.
The phenomenon of the looting in the abandoned Israeli settlements and the greenhouses reminds me of the story of the looting in Baghdad in the days aftere the fall of Saddam Hussein. In both cases, you had these elements:
- (1) A population that had been living under a lot of socioeconomic pressure for a long time, and in which many of the norms of respect of property rights had seriously broken down,
(2) A population, moreover, that lacked trusted police forces, and
(3) A much more powerful military actor that through its actions had caused the change that left the major security vacuum, which some — though certainly, in both cases, far from all– elements of the population sought to exploit… and an actor that crucially had made no preparations at all to deal with the very foreseeable probability of this security breakdown— indeed, that seemed almost wilfully oblivious to such consequences.
I think this case needs to be included in my intermittent study of military occupation-ology. Today, I drove back through northern Gaza from Gaza City to the Erez Crossing. The landscape was generally very bleak. The population density throughout the Gaza is enormous, and vast portions of the landscape are covered with raw concrete dwellings, two, three, and four stories high. Trash and sand blew across the rutted streets, and there were vast areas of rubble from the remains of former Israeli settlements and military bases. Actually, the most colorful thing is the election-related flags that still fly high above the buildings and utility poles… green for Hamas, yellow for Fateh, and red for the Popular Front. They are so numerous! And today they were all snapping smartly in a brisk wind.
Anyway, as we drove those few miles, I thought: what a contrast here, or in Iraq, with the situation in Germany or Japan after just a few years of US military occupation… In those earlier occupations, the US made it clear from the get-go that it had no ambitions to control either the land, the resources, or the population of those occupied areas, and that it would not maintain its military-occupation rule over them for any longer than was absolutely needed. In both areas, moreover, the occupying had a long-prepared and well executed plan for the rehabilitation of the indigenous society at all levels, including the socioeconomic and the political.
But Israel in the West Bank and Gaza? … Or the US in Iraq? What terrible betrayals, in both cases, of the “trust” that running a temporary military occupation over someone else’s country represents.
(Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is coming up to its 39th burthday this June.)