Well, what should drop into our mailbox yesterday but the latest direct-mail fundraising appeal from CNI… And goodness, what an embarrassment to me now, my name is even on the letter as one of its four co-signers.
There was a fairly lengthy history to the drafting of this letter, which might make a good sub-chapter in a memoir or a roman à clef sometime.
While I was at CNI, I did learn much I hadn’t known before about direct-mail fundraising. But it’s kind of a dying art, these days, isn’t it?
By the way, CNI has still not announced my resignation, even though it went into effect on February 10. I wonder whether anyone receiving this fundraising letter, on which my signature appears and which is dated January 30, is of the opinion that I am still the Executive Director at CNI?
I do think they should have announced the resignation before now. The statement I issued about the matter is here.
Of course, a prudent leadership at CNI would have insisted that we negotiate the text of an announcement before the resignation went into effect. But on February 10, after I made one last attempt to negotiate the differences that remained between us (which were not huge), they informed me they were cutting off all further negotiations with me.
So this was one of a number of loose ends they left unresolved at that point. As I said, a prudent leadership might have paid a bit more attention to the details of the transition.
Israelis call for talks with Hamas
On February 15, Israeli ‘refusenik’ soldiers Arik Diamant and David Zonscheine published a short, tightly argued piece in the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ section under the title ‘Talk to Hamas’.
Here’s the core of their argument:
- An open dialogue with Hamas is clearly in Israel’s interest.
First, because Hamas was democratically elected in Gaza and has won the trust and respect of a significant part of the Palestinian people, anyone hoping to resolve this conflict will eventually need to bargain with the group.
Second, Hamas has proven capable of delivering peace and quiet to the citizens of southern Israel. As demonstrated before, Hamas has a strong hold on all organisations acting in Gaza and can enforce a truce.
Third, a prisoner exchange deal is our only chance to bring back the abducted IDF soldier, Gilad Shalit.
Diamant and Zonscheine are founders of the flagship, eight-year-old organization Courage to Refuse, which has organized a persistent campaign to refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories.
A few quick notes regarding news of Diamant and Zonscheine’s latest campaign:
- 1. Actually, it’s not a brand-new campaign. Back last November, the two men and their supporters were already issuing a public call, I think in Hebrew, for people to support their call for their government to talk with Hamas. That account notes that, at the Rabin Memorial Rally held in Tel Aviv on November 7, the pro-talks activists “managed to collect hundreds of signatures.”
2. They are not the only Israelis calling openly for their government to talk to Hamas. Back in March 2008, a Haaretz-Dialog poll found that 64 percent of Israelis favored their government talking directly to Hamas. (As reported here.) Former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy has been arguing since at least 2006 that Israel should talk to Hamas. In general, despite the occasionally heated and hateful rhetoric coming from some hard-right leaders in Israel, the public there has a far more realistic view of what’s needed for peace than do most Americans.
3. I just recall that in the long years before the Oslo Accord of 1993, the idea of “talking with the PLO” was a complete taboo within just about all of the U.S. political elite. But then– in the very instant it was revealed that the Rabin government in Israel had not just been negotiating secretly with the PLO for many months but also that it had concluded an entire interim peace agreement with it– the whole U.S. political elite turned on a dime… Members of congress, TV news anchors, big-name pundits, you name it: They were lining up and drooling to have their photos taken with Yasser Arafat.
This time around, regarding Hamas, it may end up being the same dynamic that will shake opinion in the U.S. But I certainly hope not… Not least, because the political elite in Israel (if not, perhaps, the entire populace) has shifted considerably to the right since Rabin’s day. Anyway, the U.S. can and should include Hamas in its peace diplomacy if it judges that is a wise thing to do. Why should have to wait for a seal of approval from the government in that tiny country in the Eastern Mediterranean?
4. Just a final note about Diamant and Zonscheine’s broader refusenik movement. In the waning days of apartheid South Africa, the End Conscription Campaign, which in the circumstances was an almost wholly “White” organization, played a huge role in organizing those “White” South Africans who wanted to start questioning and then oppposing the whole apartheid system. I think “Courage to Refuse” and the other anti-militarist movements within Jewish Israeli society have a similarly prophetic role to play. because after all, the occupation and all its iniquities are sustained only through the barrels of the IDF’s extremely sophisticated arsenal of highly advanced and mega-lethal guns. Wielding those guns in battle inevitably exacts a moral and psychological price from those forced to do it.
Hats off to Diamant, Zonscheine, and their comrades!
Far-right Israeli gov’t cracks down– on members of US Congress!
Well, they do say that those whom the Gods want to destroy, first they make crazy… And here is the evidence that it this is indeed happening in today’s Israel. The ultra-right in Israel has always attacked many members of the ethnic-Palestinian leadership in Israel for being “anti-patriotic”, “traitorous”, or a “fifth column”. But in recent weeks, a really vile proto-fascist organization called Im Tirzu has come out with a campaign of unprecedented vituperativeness against such pillars of the left-Zionist establishment as Naomi Chazan, a former deputy Speaker of the Knessset who is the chair of New Israel Fund.
Just scroll down in this recent post by the indefatigable Didi Remez to see the grotesque caricature of Dr. Chazan that Im Tirzu published recently.
And now, Israel’s hard right has gone even crazier. Yesterday, the foreign ministry, which is headed by the ultra-rightists Avigdor Lieberman and Danny Ayalon, even intervened to prevent four visiting members of the U.S. Congress from meeting Israel’s president, the veteran politician and former prime minister Shimon Peres!
The four are are William Delahunt (D-Mass.), Bob Filner (D-Calif.), Lois Capps (D-Calif.), and Mary Jo Kilroy (D.-Ohio)
The foreign ministry reportedly sought to block their visit with Peres because the short regional tour on which the four are traveling was organized by J Street, the newish Jewish organization in town that proudly describes itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace”, and Churches for Middle East Peace, a much smaller pro-peace advocacy group that is also a staunch supporter of Israel’s existence and security. (Full disclosure: I sit on the Leadership Council of CMEP.)
No word on whether Peres himself, who used to the head of the Labour Party and who always used to pride himself on being pro-peace, tried to over-ride the foreign ministry in the matter.
This morning, Rep. Delahunt issued a statement noting that the group had just returned from Sderot in southern Israe, “where we had a very emotional meeting with the Mayor and residents from whom we better understood the trauma and pain they have endured…
He added,
- We were puzzled that the Deputy Foreign Minister has apparently attempted to block our meetings with senior officials in the Prime Minister’s office and Foreign Ministry – questioning either our own support of Israel or that we would even consider traveling to the region with groups that the Deputy Foreign Minister has so inaccurately described as “anti-Israel.”
In our opinion this is an inappropriate way to treat elected representatives of Israel’s closest ally who are visiting the country – and who through the years have been staunch supporters of the US-Israeli special relationship.
We would respectfully ask the government for a clarification of its stance toward this and future delegations. There are undoubtedly a range of opinions in this country as there are in the United States on how best to secure our common goal of peace and security for Israel and all the peoples of the region.
It is unwise for anyone to take disagreements as to how to accomplish our common goals and purpose – which is to achieve peace and security – and to misrepresent those differences as questioning support and concern for the state of Israel itself.
Delahunt, I should note, has been one of the wisest members of congress on issues relating to Iraq in recent years. Back in 2007, he sponsored some key hearings in which he made an honest attempt to listen to, understand, and engage with the range of views of the elected parliamentarians in Iraq– including parliamentarians who were strong opponents of the US’s continued military presence there.
At a broader level, it’s important to note, too, that support for Israel has nearly always, historically, been a lot stronger in the Democratic Party here in the US, than in the Republican Party. If Lieberman and Ayalon now feel ready to treat four Democratic members of congress in such a humiliating way, that marks a sea-change in US-Israeli relations.
Of course, these four courageous members of Congress will need all the help they can get from fair-minded citizens in their own constituencies and around the country, because almost certainly the chorus of anti-J Street organizations in this country, from AIPAC on down, will most likely seek to punish them during the coming months as they seek the funds they’ll need to get re-elected next November.
Jerusalem between two states and one
In the event of a two-state solution to the Palestine-Israel dispute, what are the options for governing Jerusalem? This was the question I started to explore in the presentation I gave at the U.N. conference in Malta last Friday. I have now edited the paper I presented there sufficiently that I can publish a preliminary version of it here. (This is not a final version. If anyone wants to cite it, please contact me, and I’ll let you know how you can refer to it.)
My basic argument is that if you want to have a two-state solution then that will require either redividing Jerusalem– and there really seem to be few good options for doing that– or else, if you want to keep Jerusalem whole, then that will require revisiting some new version of the old “Corpus separatum” model for the city.
And whichever of those options you choose, it will require having a high level of coordination between the governments of the two states. Indeed, the level of coordination between the two states will need to be so high that it may well seem either a short step from there– or even, perhaps, easier altogether– not to bother about having two separate states but rather to move straight to some form of unitary state system for the whole of Israel/Palestine.
From this point of view, grappling with the question of how to share control of Jerusalem can be seen as a productive way to ease into a conversation about how to share control of the whole area of Mandate Palestine.
Hillary’s contortions on Iran
I don’t know if the Cirque du Soleil is accepting new applicants for starring roles, but Hillary Clinton certainly seems to have been going through great contortions in the arguments she’s been trying to make about Iran in recent days.
In the “Townterview” (!) that she held in Qatar yesterday, she was very evidently trying to build a case for U.S. intervention– quite possibly, including forced regime change– in Iran, based on the allegedly anti-democratic nature of recent developments in that country.
This was a supplement to the arguments the U.S. government has made for many years now, that it must “keep on the table” the “option” of launching a war against Iran based on the Tehran government’s alleged violations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT.)
Sound familiar?
Of course it is. This kind of slippery bait-and-switch regarding the casus belli on the basis of which Washington plans to launch a war of aggression against another sovereign country is exactly what we saw from George W. Bush (and his dreadful poodle, Tony Blair), in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Then, as now, when it seemed that the arguments about the alleged “necessity” of going to war based solely on the arguments made about WMDs seemed unconvincing to many around the world (including the U.S.’s own citizens), the U.S. administration used feats of rhetorical legerdemain to try to claim that, well, just in case the WMDs arguments weren’t convincing enough, well then, how about those arguments concerning democratization and human rights?
What did Hillary actually say in Qatar?
She said,
My grandfather goes looking for his own grave (and other Maltese mysteries)
Ninety-five or so years ago a teenager in New Zealand, hearing news of the– perhaps still “heroic”– early phases of the British involvement in the Great War, was desperate to enlist, but too young to do so. So he borrowed his elder brother’s birth certificate and went to enlist in the Otago Rifles.
(What on earth were his parents thinking?)
I believe his name was Cyril Howard Marlow. His brother’s name was George Stanley Marlow, so that was the name Cyril adopted upon enlistment.
The family have, as yet, no records of the early months of his service. But I think that by August he was in Gallipoli, and perhaps had been there for some months already.
Conditions of service for all the New Zealanders who fought in World War I were extremely harsh, and they were achingly far from home. (There was even a Maori Battalion. Can you imagine the kinds of assignments they got, and how those Maoris serving a distant British king felt about it all?)
Gallipoli is a 20-mile-long peninsula that forms the northern shore of the vital Dardanelles Strait, that links the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara. The British imperial war command wanted to take the peninsula from the Ottoman Empire, and Australians and New Zealanders formed a significant part of the invasion force that landed in April 1915. Things did not go well for any of the invaders… By August 1915 they were badly bogged down; and that month saw some notable setbacks for them, as the nimble Ottoman defenders commanded by the 34-year-old Lt.-Col. Mustafa Kemal found ways to trap them and push them back.
(I’ve blogged previously about the importance the Gallipoli battles paradoxically came to have in the formation of Australian and N.Z. national identity, including here.)
So, back to Cyril Howard Marlow… What we do know about the lad is that, most likely, he was wounded at Gallipoli and evacuated on one of the stream of hospital ships that carried the casualties from there to military hospitals the British rapidly organized on the island of Malta.
On September 12, 1915, he died in one of those hospitals. He was buried under the name he’d used to enlist with, that of George Stanley Marlow, in the military cemetery at Pieta (Our Lady of Sorrows), a small town just outside the Maltese capital, Valetta.
Today, I went to visit his grave. The meticulous record-keeping of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) enabled me to find it fairly easily.
George Stanley Marlow was my grandfather. He lived in London by the time Cyril Howard died. Seven months after Cyril’s death, George’s wife gave birth to their first child, who was my mother.
Later, the couple had another daughter, and then a much longed-for son. The son was named Howard Norman, in memory of his paternal uncle, deceased at Gallipoli, and his maternal uncle Norman Williams, who also perished in World War I.
Howard Norman Marlow enlisted as an aviator in World war II and was killed in North Africa.
The cemetery in which Cyril Howard Marlow lies is a testament to the tragedy and criminality of war. The grave he is buried in– like all those in the WW-I section of the cemetery– contains the bodies of three deceased servicemen. The CWGC says on its website that this because of the difficulty of digging numerous, appropriately deep graves during the conditions of war. That’s as may be. But what also became evident from the walk I took around the cemetery was that in the weeks between late August 1915 and the middle of October, the Commonwealth soldiers were being buried there at an extremely fast rate. In fact, just about all of the graves I saw in the section of the cemetery, which contains the crammed-together remains of more than 1,300 soldiers– most of them Brits but with a strong representation of “ANZACs”– had dates of death listed in just that short, seven-week period of late summer 1915.
If those were the ones who survived long enough to die on Malta, imagine how many more died in the hospital ships along the way and had to be buried at sea. Imagine how many more died on the field of battle itself.
So I guess that Cyril Howard was “lucky” to survive as long as he did and to end up buried in a sweet, peaceful cemetery in Pieta, Malta, in a place where his great-niece can come visit his grave.
One of my sisters tells me that my grandfather came to Malta once, to visit his little brother’s grave. That must have been an odd sensation– seeing your own name on a gravestone.
But he died in 1956 or so, when I was still a little girl, so I can’t ask him about it.
… And then, of course, I can’t help but contrast my own ability to go pay my respects at the grave of this ancestor, and the way the CWGC carefully tends the graves of the British dead around the world, with the way the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles has been trying to tear up the extremely ancient Ma’moun Allah (“Mamilla”) cemetery in West Jerusalem.
I am really delighted to see that various U.S. civil rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild, have been taking up the campaign to stop the Wiesenthal Center in its tracks there. Their project, which is to build a so-called “Museum of Tolerance” right on the site of that ancient cemetery, is an outrage.
Malta: Notes from the conference, part 2
Washington long ago—under Henry Kissinger– elbowed the United Nations completely out of the lead role that, by all rights, it should play in spearheading the search for lasting peace between Israel and all of its neighbors, including the Palestinians. And under George W. Bush, Washington was even able to formalize the subordination of the U.N. to Washington’s diktats in the matter, through its inclusion as a junior member in that new and at some levels quite anomalous outfit, the “Quartet”.
But the U.N. is not only a set of principles and policies; it is also, certainly, a bureaucracy. And there are two little chunks of it whose budgets are still justified primarily in terms of the contribution they can make to the pursuit of Palestinian rights.
This means holding conferences. Lots of them. The Division on Palestinian Rights is sponsoring the one I have just been participating in, here in Malta. Next month, they’re having one in Vienna; and in May they’ll be in Istanbul. The pace seems dizzying.
So you can certainy ask, “What are all these conferences good for?” And when I am at one—this one has been my third—there are always some periods of time when I ask that question. These usually come when some elderly Palestinian or other Arab participant bloviates, usually from the floor, for ways longer than is necessary or helpful.
But still, jaw-jaw is always better than war-war, so one grits one’s teeth and bears it.
These gatherings do also have some significant uses, however. I would describe them roughly as follows:
More signs of Mitchell’s sidelining
There’s been quite a bit of talk in the conference here about the way that George Mitchell has either been sidelined or has for other reasons faded from the scene. Of course, it’s not just Mitchell that has been sidelined, it’s the whole justice-based and vigorous U.S. pursuit of peace that his appointment back in January 2009 seemed to promise.
So today the NYT tells us that Sec. Clinton and three of her top aides are fanning out to the Middle East in a concerted campaign to–
…make a push for Palestinian-Israeli peace? No!
Rather, they’re trekking out to try to line regional leaders up behind the latest step in the (AIPAC- and Likud-driven) campaign to ratchet the pressure up inexorably against Iran.
And who are these envoys?
Well, there’s Hillary herself, who’s going to Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Then, there’s her Under-Secretary for political affairs, Bill Burns, who’s going to Syria.
And there are her two Deputy Secretaries, for Policy and Administration… James Steinberg (Policy) will be going to Israel, and Jacob Lew (Administration) will be going to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan.
And when was the last time we heard any major news about George Mitchell? (Yawn.)
Malta: Some notes from the conference, tweeting, etc
I have wifi inside the conference hall here, which is nice. I did a bit of tweeting already– here.
The appearance of the US ambassador here just now was interesting. On one hand, it’s a welcome new development to see a high-level US official participate in a UN gathering on Palestine. Otoh, he insisted on not sitting on the podium with the rest of the participants in this morning’s session, but had negotiated them giving him a separate lectern so he could not be photographed under the big backdrop saying that says “International Meeting in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace.” Plus, the content of his presentation included a strong and quite a-historical anti-Hamas diatribe and repeated appeals to participants in the conference to stop whining about the hurts of the past, etc etc. Altogether, he was far more patronizing than he probably knew, and probably far more than he’d intended.
He was followed by a rep from the parliament of the Russian Federation who spoke in completely fluent Arabic and talked about K. Meshaal’s recent productive visit to Moscow, the need for a resolution to be based on international law and legitimacy, etc. A huge contrast!
In Malta, discussing Jerusalem
Well, on Thursday I was finally able to get out of Washington… I had a long layover in Munich yesterday and got here to Malta, to the U.N. conference on Palestine, about an hour after the start of the session I was scheduled to speak in… No matter, they were running hopelessly behind schedule, so the session started around 20 minutes after I appeared. I didn’t have time to print out my presentation but delivered it by read it on my laptop. Not ideal, but not too bad, I felt.
Wow. I’m really impressed with the U.N. information system. They already have a press release out about the session I took part in, and you can read there the words I would have delivered in dulcet tones had I not been rushing a little through the end of my presentation on Jerusalem. (I gave them the text on a thumbstick. Must get it back.)
Working on the paper, which I did Wednesday and in the Munich transit lounge yesterday, really helped me think through several things about the Jerusalem Question that have been rattling around inside my head for a while now. I argued there that thinking seriously about how to establish a fair and sustainable governance system in Jerusalem could actually help everyone perform the same task regarding the whole of the area of Mandate Palestine… And numerous people– going back to early work that Naomi Chazan, Rashid Khalidi, and others did ways back in the 1980s, and continuing until today– have done some good, often very fair-minded and visionary work on Jerusalem issues.
Within a two-state model for the whole of Mandate Palestine, Jerusalem could be either divided or shared under some form of a corpus separatum model, and I explored in the paper how we might design a CS 2.0 for Jerusalem that would not have the imperialistic overtones of CS 1.0. Dividing it between the two states would almost certainly be a horrendous process, and could lead to the prolongation of many of the gross inequities of the existing, settler-dominated order things there. (See, for example, the Geneva Initiative’s proposal for how to divide Jerusalem.)
It also would still require a huge amount of coordination between the governments of the two states– something that Mick Dumper underlined in this important recent essay.
Wouldn’t it be better, therefore, to go back to the old CS model and explore how that could work in the two-state context– which was, after all, the context in which the CS idea was first presented, during the Partition Plan of 1947, which remains the UN’s last definitive word on territory and governance issues in the whole of Mandate Palestine.
I note, too, that the EU has recently, slightly tentatively, revived its interest in the CS idea.
So you could look at how to devise a fair, sustainable CS model for Greater Jerusalem in the context of a two state solution… and each of the two states could indeed have its national capital well within the city.
My idea of this is laid out a bit more in my paper. As soon as I’ve cleaned it up a bit, I’ll upload it here for you all to see.
Alternatively, once you’ve done all that work on how to govern Jerusalem, why bother with preserving those other territorial units within Mandate Palestine (the rest of the independent states of Israel and Palestine)? Why not just expand the concept of the shared Jerusalem to the whole area and have one state in it that is equitably shared, accountably governed, and to which everyone with a legitimate claim on the land could return?
… Anyway, those were some of my ideas. I also underlined the perilous, extremely oppressive situation in which Jerusalem’s 260,000 Palestinians are currently forced to live and the hair-trigger nature of the situation in the city, which must be of great concern to the whole world community.