What’s with ‘direct negotiations’?

It is such a shibboleth in U.S. foreign-policy discourse these days– to say that such-and-such an issue on the final-status agenda between Israelis and Palestinians “must be solved through direct negotiations between the parties”. But why? Why on earth should the Palestinian representatives be forced into a position of being shut in a room one-on-one with representatives of their Israeli occupiers/dispossessors, with that highly unequal “negotiation” being the only one that’s allowed?
I mean, after Saddam Hussein had occupied and politicided Kuwait in 1990, did anyone in the U.S. and elsewhere say to the Kuwaiti Emir that if he wanted his people’s rights restored he should sit one-on-one in room with Saddam, with that negotiation being the only one that was allowed??
Of course not.
So why should Washington be continuously trying to force the Palestinian negotiators to resolve their issues with Israel through direct negotiations with the very state and government that has occupied and continues on a daily basis to spatiocide them?
Look, I think I understand where this demand– which was originally an Israeli demand– that the various Arab parties should sit down and negotiate peace with them directly, face-to-face, came from. It came from the sense that many in earlier generations of Israelis had, that they were upset at the refusal of their Arab neighbors to give their state due recognition as a neighboring state in the region; and they said that it would give them a lot of useful reassurance if they could gain the “recognition” of having their Arab neighbors deal directly and respectfully with them.
I have two comments on that:

    1. The PLO already gave the State of Israel full recognition, in the letters that were exchanged at the time of Oslo in 1993. And after that, PLO leaders sat down with the Israelis to negotiate both a final peace and numerous ‘interim’ agreements, on too many occasions to count. But none of those ‘direct negotiations’ led to anything like a workable final peace. Indeed, from the Palestinian point of view, the situation on the ground continued to get progressively worse after Oslo, as with every year that passed the Israeli authorities continued to gobble up more and more Palestinian land for their settler colonies.
    2. The Israeli leaders, and increasing portions of the Israeli public, don’t actually seem to give a toss these days about either the “acceptance” of their Palestinian or other Arab neighbors, or even the alleged “value” of direct negotiations with them. Right now, this seems to have become much more an American shibboleth and demand, than it is an Israeli one.

So on the one hand it’s moderately good news when Hillary Clinton or someone says that Israel should absolutely not be building new settler housing in East Jerusalem. But it is really pretty appalling that in the next breath she will say something like, “because the final status of East Jerusalem should still be on the agenda of the direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Like downtown Kuwait City? They expected the Kuwaiti Emir to sit down and negotiate that with Saddam, with no other factors intervening?
Okay, I am a realist, and I understand it is highly unlikely that anyone in the international community as it’s currently configured is going to do for Palestine what the international community did for Kuwait in August 1990. The U.S. and U.N are not, this time around, about to assemble a massive international military force and end the Israeli occupation through brute force.
But there is still such a thing as international law, and international legitimacy; and they, surely, should be the guide to the final outcome in Jerusalem and the rest of the OPTs and OSTs, just as much as they were in Kuwait, 20 years ago.
International legitimacy: “The inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force”, as stressed in resolution 242 and reiterated in 338. International law: The outright ban on any occupying power moving parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory. Etc., etc.
The whole concept of ‘direct negotiations’ between Israelis and Palestinians has been given an extraordinarily long run for its money. It started in the backdoor negotiations that led to Oslo, and continued in one way or another until, really, Sharon turned his back on the whole idea of negotiating with the PLO/PA, back in 2003-05. I guess Olmert and Condi Rice tried to kick some life back into the concept at Annapolis. But that whole sorry experience just proved how dead the horse was by then.
It strikes me that the continued insistence on just trying to resolve this conflict through direct negotiations, without any application of international law or international legitimacy, or any real support from outside for those important pillars of the international system, is a recipe for either the Israeli sumo kings ramming a highly inequitable (and therefore unsustainable) “peace agreement” down the throats of the Palestinian negotiators– or, for continued deadlock and conflict, under the cover of which Israel’s settlement construction program will continue apace.
For an “unsustainable” agreement achieved in just this way, think back to Israel’s short-lived peace with Lebanon, 1983.
… It strikes me, too, that this fondness that ways too many members of the US political elite have for “direct negotiations” stems to some degree from a fuzzy but dangerous misreading of what happened in South Africa. There is always this stress on “where’s the Palestinian Mandela?”, isn’t there? And this idea that through the sheer force of his personality, vision, and whatever else, Mandela was quite “miraculously” able to soften the Afrikaners’ hearts and persuade them to see the error of their ways, “allow” full political rights to the disfranchized 85% of the citizens who were not “White”, and join in singing Kumbaya, etc.
Baloney.
The Afrikaners found themselves “persuaded” to negotiate as a result of many factors. Among them: the fact that they’d suffered a damaging military setback in Angola, as a result of the over-extension of their forces there; the fact that the ANC’s mass-civilian arm, the UDF, had sustained a huge, rolling intifada throughout just about the whole of the country over a number of years, making massive tracts of it quite ungovernable; and the ANC still sustained a modest military capability (which had been founded, remember, by that very same Nelson Mandela, a man with a nuanced view of the relationship between mass movements and military threats)… PLUS, back in the 1970s the UN had declared apartheid to be a “crime against humanity”, and by the end of the 1980s, South Africa’s “Whites” were certainly feeling the effect of having been systematically shunned for several years by many of the international constituencies they cared most about.
So it wasn’t the sheer “magic” of Nelson Mandela sitting in the conference room near Pollsmoor prison with Pik Botha and F.W. de Klerk that led to the unraveling of the settler-colonial project in South Africa. It was Nelson Mandela, backed up by a powerful and disciplined ANC movement– and also, by that time, by just about the whole moral and economic power of the international community.
If F.W. De Klerk and his minions had had full and continuing access to U.S. arsenals and U.S. and E.U. free trade agreements in 1989-90, do you think De Klerk would have been suddenly “transformed” by having one-on-one meetings with Mandela??
So why do we imagine that Benjamin Netanyahu or any other Israeli leaders would be any different?
Get real, America. Stop engaging in all these fuzzy misreadings of what went on in South Africa. And let’s get back to upholding the real and very necessary principles of international law and international legitimacy– and using all the instruments of our national power to back them up.

Obama solidly with Israel in U.N. Rights Council

Okay, maybe I’ll have to reel back all those commentaries about a growing rift between the Obama administration and Israel. This week, in the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, in two out of five of the votes on matters related to Israeli government policies in the 43-year-occupied territories, the U.S. was the only country that voted against a resolution that otherwise had the unanimous support of Council members. (Hat-tip, indirectly, to CWF.)
One of these votes was about the Palestinians’ oft-reconfirmed right to self-determination. That resolution (A/HRC/13/L.27),

    reaffirms the inalienable, permanent and unqualified right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including their right to live in freedom, justice and dignity and to establish their sovereign, independent, democratic and viable contiguous State; also reaffirms its support for the solution of two States, Palestine and Israel, living side by side in peace and security…

The U.S. representative voted against. The other 45 members voted in favor.
Then there was this very important resolution (A/HRC/13/L.28), in which the Council

    condemns the new Israeli announcement on the construction of 120 new housing units in the Bitar Elite settlement, and 1,600 new housing units for new settlers in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Ramat Shlomo, and calls upon the Government of Israel to immediately reverse its decision which would further undermine and jeopardize the ongoing efforts by the international community to reach a final settlement compliant with international legitimacy, including the relevant United Nations resolutions; urges the full implementation of the Access and Movement Agreement of 15 November 2005, particularly the urgent reopening of Rafah and Karni crossings [into Gaza], which is crucial to ensuring the passage of foodstuffs and essential supplies, as well as the access of the United Nations agencies to and within the Occupied Palestinian Territory; calls upon Israel to take and implement serious measures, including confiscation of arms and enforcement of criminal sanctions, with the aim of preventing acts of violence by Israeli settlers, and other measures to guarantee the safety and protection of the Palestinian civilians and Palestinian properties in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem; demands that Israel, the occupying Power, comply fully with its legal obligations, as mentioned in the Advisory Opinion rendered on 9 July 2004 by the International Court of Justice; and urges the parties to give renewed impetus to the peace process.

This time: 46 to 1, with no abstentions.
On a resolution condemning Israeli actions in occupied Syrian Golan, the U.S. was also the only country to vote against, though this time there were 15 abstentions.
There were also a couple of resolutions in which the U.S. was not the only country to vote against. These included, very importantly, the one calling on both Israel and the authorities in Gaza to conduct the credible, independent investigations into allegations of gross rights abuses that have been called for by both the Goldstone Report and the General Assembly.
Regarding this resolution, the U.S. was joined in its opposition to it by Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, and Ukraine; and eleven states abstained from voting. But 29 members of this important council supported the resolution.
In another significant resolution– one calling on Israel to end its 43-year-old occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza– and to immediately lift the siege imposed on Gaza, the U.S. was joined in its opposition by eight other states: Belgium, France, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; seven states abstained; and 31 voted for it.
Why does Obama feel he has to do this? Why not just abstain?

Aluf Benn on how Netanyahu misread America

Benn has a great piece in Friday’s Haaretz about the overweening self-confidence with which PM Netanyahu launched his ‘triumphal visit’ to AIPAC this week– and how seriously he misread the situation in Washington:

    Netanyahu hoped things would turn out differently when he set out Sunday night to make a serious show of strength in Washington. By means of his speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention, the prime minister wanted to prove to Obama that American Jewry and Congress are backing him in face of the administration’s demand to stop construction in the settlements in the West Bank and to desist from judaizing East Jerusalem. Apparently the premier believed the public opinion polls that said Israel is more popular than Obama in the eyes of the American public.
    … [Netanyahu] notes frequently to aides, politicians and journalists that Israelis don’t understand America like he does. That they see only the president and the administration, and don’t understand the power of Congress, the lobbying groups and the think tanks.
    This week the premier put his experience and outlook to the test. But Obama also had received a shot in the arm. Just hours before meeting with Netanyahu, he had signed the health care reform law for which he had fought so hard. That was the president’s test… the president emerged as a winner and a hero. Thus, after months of eulogies by politicians and public disappointment with his performance, Obama is perceived once again as the leader of the pack.
    Netanyahu, by comparison, is perceived as a pushover when he concedes to his partners and political rivals.

I hope this is true…

Allawi’s bloc comes first in Iraqi election

Reidar Visser has his usual, extremely helpful commentary on the news from Baghdad, here. Bottom line, there: To Maliki’s surprise, his State of Law Alliance got only 89 seats to the 91 won by Allawi’s Iraqiyya.
Given that the parliament now has 325 seats, these two leaders will have to jockey hard to reach the simple majority (or preferably, something significantly better than a simple majority) that is required to govern… Which is why the Iraqi National Alliance (INA), with 70 seats, the Kurdistan Alliance (= KDP + PUK) with 43, and even perhaps some of the non-KA Kurds, the ‘minorities’, and Tawaffuq will have a chance at playing kingmaker.
As we see in Israel, it is not always the largest party that is able to make a coalition. As we see in Israel, too, (and saw in Iraq in 2006) there is always a chance of blocs that went into the election unified breaking up during the post-election coalition-forming period. (And the Iraqi supreme court has just expressly ruled that this is permissible.)
Visser points to the importance of the first elections that will occur: those for House Speaker and President. He downplays the importance of the presidency; and it’s true it will be less than it has been. But during the coalition-forming process the Head of State can play a key role through the decision of which bloc-leader to ask first to try to assemble a governing coalition. (Hey, that might even happen in the U.K. this time, if neither major party wins a clear victory: Then at last, 58 years into her monarchy, Queen Elizabeth will have a curcial role to play!)
Viseer gives this schedule of what should happen next in Iraq:

    if certification [of the election and its results] takes place around 1 April, a meeting of the new parliament must be held within 15 April, a new president must be elected within 15 May, a PM nominee must be identified by 1 June, and a new cabinet must be presented for approval by parliament before 1 July. The psychological deadline is likely to be the start of Ramadan around 10 August and the scheduled completion of withdrawal of US combat troops by 31 August.

H’mmm. It might well take longer than that. But I know that the folks in the Pentagon are extremely eager that nothing be allowed to delay the scheduled drawdown of the U.S. troop presence. So I see a fairly large possibility of Washington working intently behind the scenes to try to get big neighbors Iran and Saudi Arabia to cooperate in finding a way for the government-formation to go smoothly in Baghdad. I expect Tehran will cooperate in this venture– up to a point. Not so sure about the Saudis, but there probably are conditions under which a deal can be worked out. Maybe other big powers– in the region and the world– will also cooperate in trying to make this work. But throughout this whole election process, you’ve had this palpable sense of U.S. power in the region shrinking. Interesting. I guess the Kurds will have to look elsewhere, very fast, for some new form of patronage .
And talking of the Kurds, look at those results from Nineveh and Kirkuk. In Nineveh, the KA only got 8 out of the 34 seats (with maybe 3 allies from the ‘minorities’ there? maybe fewer than three?) In Kirkuk, the KA split it 6-6 with Iraqiyya. It certainly doesn’t looks as though the KRG will be getting bigger any time soon.

“Israel’s ‘consensus on Jerusalem’ has cracked” — Ben Meir

Today’s Haaretz carries a very significant op-ed from Yehuda Ben Meir, a former MK from the National Religious Party who, looking at the results of two recent polls asks,

    Who would have believed that we would reach a situation where more than 40 percent of the public supports a construction freeze in East Jerusalem and only half say building should continue? The significance of these surprising numbers is that the Jewish consensus on united Jerusalem has been cracked, if not shattered.

The polls he cited were:

    a Haaretz-Dialog poll, [in which] 48 percent of the respondents said Israel should continue building in all parts of Jerusalem, even if the price is a rift with the United States, while 41 percent said Israel should stop building in East Jerusalem until the end of negotiations with the Palestinians, [and] a Mina Tzemach poll, where 46 percent said building in East Jerusalem should be frozen and only 51 percent opposed such a move.

The present significance of these findings lies in the argument, very frequently made by Israel’s defenders here in the U.S., that “the administration shouldn’t put any pressure at all on the Israeli government because it will only cause Israeli voters to dig in their heels and become more hard-line, and the attempt to use pressure will therefore backfire.”
In fact, the last time a U.S. president attempted to use some (though not many) elements of real pressure on an Israeli government, which occurred under Pres. Bush I and Secretary of State James Baker in 1991-92, the attempt proved notably effective in Israeli terms. In the Israeli elections of June 1992 the Israeli public, seeing the pressure from Washington and assigning an appropriate value to the maintenance of strong relations with the U.S., voted out the inflexible, Likud Party government of Yitzhak Shamir and voted in Labour’s Yitzhak Rabin, who was perceived– quite rightly– as being a much more successful manager of Israel’s always vital relationship with the U.S. administration.
(The Bush-Baker campaign of calling Israel to some degree of account for its performance on the perennial issue of settlement building also did not, contrary to what the AIPAC types and neocons claimed, prove to lead to Bush I’s failure in his elections in 1992. What had the most effect then was, as we should all remember, “the economy, stupid!”)
Yehuda Ben Meir migrated from the U.S. to Israel in 1962. His current views place him at the leftward end of the spectrum of “nationalist-religious” thinking in Israel. I certainly hope he has a wide following there.
He writes,

    The Israeli public knows the difference between historical Jerusalem and those Arab neighborhoods that have never been part of the city. Therefore, the entire Jewish people, and the U.S. government as well, fully supported the restoration of the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City because this was justified. It embodies the revival of the Jewish people in their land, as well as their connection to the sites of their heritage and their right to possess them. Dispossessing Arabs of their homes and attempts to take over clearly Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem are not accepted by the world, including most American Jews, and according to the poll results, not even by a large part of Israel’s Jewish population.

I find the claim about the U.S. government “supporting” the restoration of a Jewish synagogue in the Israeli-occupied portion of the city interesting. Let’s hope the U.S. government gives equal support to the restoration of the hundreds of Christian and Muslim holy places and cemeteries in the area of 1948 Israel, eh?
But that’s a side-issue. The main issue is that, according to the poll figures Ben Meir refers to, the recent apparent sparks of a possible U.S. campaign to start once again holding Israel to account for its (actually illegal) program of settlement building in the occupied areas have not caused the claimed “backlash” in Israel… Indeed, they may well even have spurred more Jewish Israeli voters to think deeply and sensibly about the value of the vast amounts of support they get from Washington (and from my tax-dollars.)
—
One last note: Many opinion polls in Israel report only the views of Jewish Israelis, ignoring the views of the 21% of the country’s citizenry who are ethnic Palestinians– or, they report the views of the two groups separately. It is not clear whether the two polls Ben Meir cited asked their questions of all Israelis, or only of Jewish Israelis. But the way he interpreted the results makes it seem as if he was referring only to the reported views of Jewish Israelis. The views of Palestinian Israelis should, of course, in any society claiming to be democratic, be given proportional weight to those of Jewish Israelis.

Great graphics for a BDS effort

Jam’a al-yad, an artists’ collective in Beirut, produced half a dozen powerful posters during the city’s recent Israeli Apartheid Week. Though the most prominent captions on them are in Arabic, those could easily be translated into other languages, too.
You can access and download PDF versions of the posters here. Peronally, I don’t endorse the one that seems to advocate stone-throwing, but the rest look great.

Yezid Sayigh on Hamas, Fayyad

The distinguished Palestinian historian and analyst Yezid Sayigh gave a tremendous talk Friday at the Palestine Center in Washington DC, where he reported on a recent, four-day visit to Gaza and assessed the situation and standing of the two rival Palestinian administrations in Gaza and Ramallah.
While he started off by noting that both the administrations have succeeded in stabilizing themselves since the terrible rift that occurred between them in June 2007, a lot of the content of what he said seemed clearly to indicate that he thinks the Hamas-led administration in Gaza has been significantly better at achieving more public goods at less cost than the Fayyad administration in Ramallah.
Sayigh is Professor of Middle East Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and is currently a visiting senior fellow at the crown center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He is also the author of the magisterial 1997 book Armed Struggle and the Search for a State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993, from Oxford University Press.
Kudos to Brandeis for having brought someone of Sayigh’s stature and breadth as a scholar to stay there for this semester. And special kudos, of course, to the Palestine Center for hosting this talk. You can see the whole video of it, I think, here.
I can’t do complete justice to the talk here, so I urge you to go and listen to it yourselves. But I wanted to share my impressions of some of his key insights and get them into the written-in-English public arena.
The original event was supposed to feature two speakers: Sayigh talking about Ramallah and Khaled Hroub, from Cambridge, UK, talking about Hamas. However, Hroub could not get his flight to DC– because of the BA strike, I think, rather than any ‘Flying While Arab’ security issues. So Sayigh stepped in and gave us his analysis of both administrations; and we were lucky to hear it.
He referred to Ismail Haniyyeh’s government in Gaza as “the elected government” and the Fayyad government in Ramallah as “the emergency government.” Later he made a point of noting that– while he has great personal affection for Salam Fayyad– the Fayyad government is wholly unconstitutional, while he described the Haniyyeh government as “partly constitutional.”
He underlined, regarding the Fayyad government, both the unconstitutionality of the way it was established and has been maintained since June 2007, and the rights-abusng nature of many of the practices of the security forces that are supposedly under Fayyad’s command.

Continue reading “Yezid Sayigh on Hamas, Fayyad”

The new Baker initiative

Former Sec. of State James Baker has been helping to roll out a new report, issued by the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, Texas, that urges the Obama administration to put forward its own proposal for the final-status boundaries between Israel and Palestine.
The whole report is available in PDF form here. It is interesting because it is the result of a quiet, “Track 2” diplomatic effort convened by the institute over the past year and a half, in which un-named Israeli and Palestinian participants worked together to present and discuss their own proposals for where the final boundary between the two states should lie, if indeed there are to be two states.
In Haaretz yesterday, Akiva Eldar referred to a recent interview with the National Journal in which Baker– who of course is most famous in the Middle East for the hard-nosed way he dealt with Likud PM Yitzhak Shamir over the settlements issue back in 1991-92– displayed that he is still prepared to play hardball with the present Likud PM.
Eldar quoted him as saying there:

    “I would also stress that United States taxpayers are giving Israel roughly $3 billion each year, which amounts to something like $1,000 for every Israeli citizen, at a time when our own economy is in bad shape and a lot of Americans would appreciate that kind of helping hand from their own government. Given that fact, it is not unreasonable to ask the Israeli leadership to respect U.S. policy on settlements.”

Eldar also reported on a phone interview he conducted with Ed Djerejian, who’s the founding director of the Baker Institute and a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Syria, and Russia.
Djerejian told Eldar,

    “The Arab-Israeli conflict, and especially the Palestinian issue, remains one of the most contentious and sensitive issues in the entire Muslim world. Osama bin Laden exploits the plight of the Palestinians, as does [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad … This has a direct influence on the United States, which is expending its blood and treasure fighting insurgencies in overwhelmingly Muslim Iraq and Afghanistan.
    “We would be naive to think that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will eliminate the problems of terrorism and radicalization in the Islamic world, but it will go a long way toward draining the swamp of issues that extremists exploit for their own ends.”

All excellent analysis. And a very important argument that we should all keep on making…
I was intrigued, however, to read as much as I could of the report itself in order to:

    a) Figure out as well as I could at what “level” the Palestinian and Israeli participants were operating, and crucially, How close are they to actually being able to represent the positions of their respective national leaderships?
    b) Learn the content of the “U.S. compromise proposal”– actually, three different options for a “compromise proposal– that the Baker Institute people were urging.

On the first of those points, there seemed to be no evidence in the report as to who these people. I believe, based on other evidence, that Yasser Abed Rabboo, who was Abu Mazen’s long-time designated lead person in the “Geneva Initiative” process was one of the participants on the Palestinian side, which would make that team fairly authoritative vis-a-vis the Ramallah leadership.
But who were the Israelis? I don’t know. But whoever they were, on p.5 it makes clear that they were operating on the basis of “reported positions put forward by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert”– which indicates they were people far closer to Olmert’s Kadima Party than to Netanyahu’s Likud.
Which is interesting and very significant.
The initial map those Israelis put forward, which represents a swap of 7.03% of the West Bank’s land against an equal amount of land from inside post-1949 Israel, is on p. 63. On pp. 65 and 67 are maps that are described, on p. 5, as “reflecting reported positions put forward by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.” They represented a swap of 1.9% of the land of the West Bank for land inside post-1949 Israel, on the same 1:1 basis.
Interestingly, regarding the situation in occupied East Jerusalem, the “Palestinian map” presented in the report involved far fewer territorial concessions to Israel in Greater East Jerusalem than did the map that participants in the Geneva Initiative signed off on last September. (Which indicates that Abu Mazen’s position on East Jerusalem has hardened noticeably since then.)
And then, there are the three different options the Baker Institute itself proposes that the Obama administration should choose between if– as Baker and Djerejian urge– Obama moves rapidly to put forward, and hopefully also press very hard for, its own proposal for the final borders.
These three options are mapped out in full on pp. 101, 103, and 105. The first of those represents a 4.0% land swap, the second a 3.4% swap, and the third a 4.4% swap. (It is very common on U.S. diplomatic memorandums for the writer to end up presenting three options, with the hope that her or his boss will pick the “middle” one.)
Details of how these options differ in a number of sensitive areas are presented in the earlier pages.
I don’t have time to write much more about this report. I just want to close by noting three things:

    1. The Baker Institute seems to have proceeded in the continuing spirit of the disastrous April 2004 letter in which Pres. Bush assured PM Sharon that the U.S. supported a territorial outcome that would take major account of the existing facts on the ground, i.e. Israel’s completely illegal settlements, and in particular the large settlement blocs. And indeed, the way the various details are portrayed in the maps seems extremely settler-centric– i.e. just about all the maps are described as addressing the issues around this or that settlement bloc, not around the concerns of this or that large Palestinian urban center. Instead of calling an area the “Gush Etzion area”, why not call it “Greater Bethlehem”, and start from the concerns of the Palestinian Bethlehemites who are considerably more numerous than the (illegal) residents of Gush Etzion and who have suffered already for 43 years from the illegal grabbing of their lands. Where is any ethic of care or of respect for human equality in the Baker Institute’s approach?
    2. All the lines proposed on all the maps presented, by all three “parties” there, are extremely complex and sinuous… in many cases almost ridiculously so.
    3. If it was close-to-Kadima people who participated on the Israeli side, then why would we have any reason to believe Netanyahu might be interested in any part of this approach? And/or, is this all part of some plan to needle Netanyahu by trying to deal with Kadima instead of him?

Bush’s invasion of Iraq, seven years on

    My thanks to AP for having compiled and published these (most likely conservative) figures today:

U.S. TROOP LEVELS:
March 31, 2003: 90,000.
October 2007: 170,000 at peak of troop buildup.
March 1, 2010: Just over 96,000.
COALITION TROOP LEVELS:
Number of countries that participated in “Coalition for the Immediate Disarmament of Iraq” at the start of the war: 31, including the United States.
As of August 2009, all non-U.S. coalition members had withdrawn from Iraq.
PRIVATE CONTRACTORS:
Number of U.S. private contractors in Iraq as of August, 2008: 190,000.
CASUALTIES:
Confirmed U.S. military deaths as of March 19, 2010: at least 4,385.

Continue reading “Bush’s invasion of Iraq, seven years on”

Deborah Amos’s ‘Eclipse of the Sunnis’

Yesterday I went to a book talk that National Public Radio’s Deborah Amos gave about her new book Eclipse of the Sunnis; Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East. She’s an engaging person and a smart reporter who’s been working in the Middle East for many years now.
The talk was ways too short for my taste! In the course of of it, she explained that when she started the book, she had intended for it to be about Iraqi exiles, in general; but then it transmuted itself into a book that’s more about “the eclipse of the Sunnis.” She also noted that the title arouses very different reactions from western and Arabic audiences, with the latter being quite shocked by it while most westerners see nothing shocking in it at all.
Well, I’ve read a couple of chapters now, and I don’t really think the title is perfect. Not least because there is– as she had told us at the talk– one whole chapter there about the Christian Iraqis who make up roughly 15% of the exiles, though only 3 % of the national population.
The book seems to have been reported mainly from Syria and Jordan.
In her talk yesterday, Amos stressed that the exile from Iraq has been particularly harsh for many or most Iraqi exiles because back home they had mostly been people with good educations, and a fair or high degree of financial and professional standing. So the loss of that sense of security– and the fact that, for many of these families, they now find the children are getting far worse educations than their parents, or no education at all, and that so little help has been given them– has in any cases made the come-down particularly hard to bear.
These refugees do not, she said, fit most people’s stereotypical idea of what a ‘refugee’ looks like. And she added that this was really the first time this had ever happened to such a huge swathe of the middle- and upper-middle class of a country.
Actually, I’m not so sure about that latter point… It was also, after all, what happened to just about the whole of the middle- and upper-middle-class of Palestine during the nakba of 1947-49.
There’s another parallel in these two situations, too– though she gives this fact no acknowledgment. In the Introduction she writes,

    Iraqis are tied to their homeland through technology… There is no model for this middle-class exodus in the Arab world. In chat rooms and on cellphones, web cameras, and blogs, a larger Iraq exists. The community of exiles is in daily contact waiting for word from home that it is time to come back. The rest of the region is waiting, too.

Well, I’m not sure how many Palestinian homes Amos has been into recently. But the Palestinian diaspora is significantly more far-flung (and more populous) than the Iraqi diaspora… Moreover, at this point, every single Palestinian family, except for a few families that all have citizenship in Israel, has close family members distributed among five or six different countries or jurisdictions. And they all try to keep in good touch with each other, and with relatives back “home”, using Skype and blogs and every other electronic means at their disposal. Indeed, the distribution of this new(-ish) technology among Palestinian refugees has done more than just keep the sense of national belonging intact; I think it has also been working to create an entirely new kind of sense of national belonging. Maybe, even of a “virtual Palestine”, that is in no way removed from the concerns of the terrestrial one.
Just like the Iraqi refugees.
But I think that’s a quibble. As far as I can see, Amos has written a book that sensitively portrays the deep sadness of the exiles and the very many challenges they face. She also seems honest about the degree of responsibility our country must bear for their fate.
On p. xv she writes:

    This new exodus was not the narrative that the Bush administration wanted to project, or acknowledge, and remained invisible for much of the world. The U.S. security plan known as the surge was an American success story, but it was a sideshow for those forced out of hoes and neighborhoods in a power struggle that used displacement and exile as a weapon. More Iraqis left the country in 2007 than in 2006, the year that the surge got underway. The international Organization for Migration… was tracking widespread displacements in 2007; the movement inside the country had increased by a factor of 20. Thirty thousand additional U.S. troops, spread out across Baghdad, brought no return of the exiles… on the ground the Sunni-Shiite divide was still steeped in blood.

In her talk yesterday, which was hosted by the Women’s Foreign Policy Group here in DC, Amos said that her understanding is that most Iraqi exiles are watching the results of the recent elections carefully, and that if Allawi does well they will have more reason to consider returning home than if anyone else wins. His Iraqiyya bloc is the only one with any significant Sunni members in it.
She noted that candidates who’d earlier risen to prominence with the (U.S.-funded) Sunni “Awakening” groups were doing really badly.
(Also doing badly, according to Visser, has been Ali Faisal al-Lami, the executive director of the Debaathification commission. That should make many of the exiles happy!)
Anyway, though I disagree a little with some of the judgments Amos makes in her book, all-in-all I think it’s a really excellent and important volume. Everyone here in the U.S. who might want (and perhaps understandably so) to forget as much as they can about the Bush years and all the really terrible decisions Pres. Bush made– including the decision to invade Iraq– needs to remember that those decisions had far greater, and graver, consequences on the people of Iraq than they have had on our people. Deborah Amos does a great job of taking us into the lives, concerns, and essential humanity of some of the millions of Iraqis displaced from their homes as a result of our country’s invasion.

Continue reading “Deborah Amos’s ‘Eclipse of the Sunnis’”