Palestinian society supports Goldstone, criticizes Abbas

A glance at the Maan News website today shows Palestinian society rising up to urge strong endorsement of the Goldstone Report’s recommendations, and criticizing Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO for blocking/delaying that action.
The most searing report comes from Gaza:

    Families of Gaza war victims voiced their disappointment with the Palestinian request to postpone discussion of the Goldstone report at the UN Human Rights Council.
    “This is not a political issue,” families said countering US demands leading to the quashing of the resolution that the report “be discussed in a constructive and non-divisive manner.” “This is a purely humanitarian issue,” families insisted, “if Israeli leaders are not held accountable this could happen again.”
    Gathering in the Al-Salam neighborhood east of Jabaliya, families who lost everything protested. The Samounis, the Balousha’s the Subbehs the As-Silawis, the Rayyan’s and the Abed Rabbos stood in Gaza and demanded the requests of the Goldstone report, to take Israel to the International Criminal Court for its actions, be put into action.
    “No one has the right to give up on our rights,” one member of the Samouni family said. He had been with the over 50 Samouni men, women and children trapped in one home, who lost 26 members including 10 children and seven women over the course of just over a day on 3 January.
    A member of the Rayyan family, whose patriarch Nizar Rayyan was a Hamas leader, lost Nizar’s four wives and ten children, Hayam Timraz, Nawal Kahlout, Eyman Kassab, Sherin Udwan, and ten of his children, Ghassan, Abdul-Qadir, Ayah, Maryam, Zaynab, Abdul-Rahman, Aysha, Halima, Osama and Reem who were between four and 17-years-old. All fourteen were killed, along with Nizar in the first days of January.
    One of Nizar’s surviving children said she had been looking forward to seeing the Israeli leaders who ordered the strike on her family home put on trial for their crime.

Then, we have this appeal from the Palestinian human rights organizations that the UN General Assembly take urgent action to follow up on the report.
They write,

    In particular we call for the following:
    · That the General Assembly recommends to member states of the UN, and to the Security Council, that the basis of any negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians must be grounded in international law.
    · That UN member states adopt a principled and determined stance, using the powers granted to the General Assembly under Resolution 377 A (V): ‘Uniting for Peace’ to: (1) recommend that Israel be subjected to the full weight of collective measures until its occupation of the OPT is ended and the rights of the Palestinian people are achieved; and (2) ensure that the recommendations of the Goldstone Report are followed in full in order to ensure that there is full accountability for the crimes committed in Gaza.

The participating organizations are:

    Al-Haq
    Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights
    Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre
    ADDAMEER Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
    AL-DAMEER Association for Human Rights – Gaza
    Defence for Children International – Palestine Section
    Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling
    ENSAN Association for Democracy and Human Rights
    Ramallah Centre for Human Rights Studies

Many of these groups also participated in a parallel, and even broader initiative, reported here that explicitly critizes the decision by Abbas and the PLO (which runs the Palestinans’ international diplomacy) to bow to US/Israel pressures to delay the Human Rights Council’s action on the Goldstone Report.
This petition says,

    This deferral denies the Palestinian peoples’ right to an effective judicial remedy and the equal protection of the law. It represents the triumph of politics over human rights. It is an insult to all victims and a rejection of their rights…
    The justifications given by the Palestinian leadership regarding the decision to defer are inappropriate. Consensus is not required, the United Nations system works on a majority basis. Since the beginning of the UN, and over the course of the Israeli occupation begun in 1967, consensus has rarely been acquired. The UN was established to represent the will of the nations of the world; it is inevitable that there will be dissent and disagreement. Decisions must rest on the will of the majority.
    As human rights organizations we strongly condemn the Palestinian leaderships’ decision to defer the proposal endorsing all the recommendations of the Fact Finding Mission, and the pressure exerted by certain members of the international community. Such pressure is in conflict with States international obligations, and is an insult to the Palestinian people.
    As human rights and civil society organizations concerned with rights and justice, we declare that we will double our efforts to seek justice for the victims of the violations of human rights and international law in Palestine without delay.
    The groups signing the statement included:
    Adalah * Addameer * Aldameer * Al Haq * Al Mezan * Arab Association for Human Rights * Badil * Civic Coalition for Jerusalem * DCI-Palestine * ENSAN Centre * ITTJIAH * Independent Commission for Human Rights * Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre * Palestinian Centre for Human Rights * Ramallah Centre for Human Rights Studies * Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling *

Criticism has also, understandably mounted to the level of politics.
In Gaza, five Palestinian factions, convened by Islamic Jihad, issued an explicit condemnation of the role played by the Abbas/PLO leadership.
That Maan report says this:

    the factions, including Hamas, the DFLP, the PFLP and the PPP, collectively expressed their condemnation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) decision to have debate over the report quashed at the UN Human Rights Committee on Friday.

(Interesting that Hamas allowed Islamic Jihad to take the lead on organizing that petition. Also, the signatories for Hamas were relatively low level. I guess the natinal-level leadership is still hoping the reconciliation deal with Fateh will work out in the near future.*)
But it’s not only the Gaza branches of these factions that are criticizing Abbas and the PLO leadership. Criticism has also come from the Ramallah-based Minister of Social Affairs, Majida al-Masri, a member of the DFLP’s politburo.
That Maan report says that Masri,

    called the stance of the Palestinian ambassador to the UN “contradictory to Palestinian national consensus,” and a move that “angered friends and allies of the Palestinian people.”
    The DFLP leader also accused the PLO, of which Hamas is not a member, of making a decision that “deepened Palestinian rivalry and posed questions about the motives for such a stance and the decision makers who gave directives.”
    She called in the Palestinian leadership to “reconsider what happened and learn the lesson to avoid repetition of such situations in future.”

No word yet on whether she will resign her PIA post in protest…

Goldstone’s mission gets key acknowledgment

While Israeli PM Netanyahu has been trying to downplay the importance of the Goldstone report, denigrate its principal author, and generally discredit the UN Rights Council’s whole venture of commissioning it, acknowledgment of the report’s real importance has come from unlikely source: the hawkish American-Israeli commentator Yossi Klein Halevi.
Back in August, it turns out, Klein Halevi had already judged that,

    The Goldstone report may well mark the end of Israel’s limited wars against terrorist groups. Israel cannot afford to continue to be drawn into mini-wars against terrorists hiding behind their own civilians to attack Israeli civilians, given that each such conflict inexorably draws the Jewish state one step closer toward pariah status. Limited victories on the battlefield are being turned into major defeats in the arena of world opinion.

Hat-tip Jim Lobe for finding that.
I happen to agree with Klein Halevi’s broad judgment on this point. (If we set aside his use of a designations like “terrorist groyups”, “hiding behind their own civilians”, etc… I mean, that is boiler-plate for people like YKH.)
Still, his core judgment there– that Israel may, for political reasons, no longer be able to undertake massive military assaults against neighboring populations of the kind it undertook in 2006 and late 2008– seems to me a sound and very important one.
There are a number of reasons why I agree with that. One key one is that those assaults were only possible because Israel received total political/diplomatic shielding for those actions (and significant support in terms of arms supplies, too) from George W. Bush’s Washington.
But he is no longer “there” for Israel any more. I do believe that in this respect, the presence of Obama in the White House marks a difference from the days of GWB.
Meanwhile, though, another trend has been occurring in world affairs, as well: the noticeable lessening in the global power balance the former Uberpower, the US. (As I noted in my IPS piece yesterday.)
Next time, if a belligerent Israeli leader wanted to launch an atrocity-laden assault of that nature– against the population of Gaza, or East Jerusalem, or Hebron, or Lebanon– I truly do not believe any US president could shield him from the speedy intervention of international bodies. And the revelations of the Goldstone report (as of all the previous reports on the suffering of Gaza’s people, as widely disseminated both during and since the 23-day assault) have aroused a new kind of conscience and strong disquiet among many, many US citizens, including Jewish Americans.
So while I’m not saying “another Gaza” is impossible, I agree with Klein Halevi that it seems increasingly unlikely. Partly because of Goldstone’s work. But most because no power in the modern world can behave as Israel behaved in Gaza last winter and not have its actions widely publicized, and not have those actions subjected to deep popular revulsion all around the world.
Hullo! We are no longer in the 19th century!
In his piece, Klein Halevi was casting around for ideas of things the Israeli military could do, if the “Gaza option” (or the “Dahiyeh Doctrine” as it is also known) no longers looks like an effective strategy. The suggestion he makes is a strange one:

    [This] untenable situation may well leave Israel no choice but to return to the post-1967 policy of preventing altogether the presence of terror enclaves on its borders. Better, Israelis will argue, to deal decisively with the terror threat and brace for temporary international outrage than subject our legitimacy to constant attrition, even as the terrorist threat remains intact.

Now, I think the only possible reading of that is that he is urging the Israeli military to strike even harder, deeper, and more decisively next time round, rather than being– as he had claimed they were– so very half-hearted and pussy-footing in 2006 and late 2008.
But regarding the 2006 assault against Lebanon, that is certainly not the case. Klein Halevi wrote,

    Israel’s two unilateral withdrawals – from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 – both resulted in the creation of terror enclaves on its borders, negating long-standing strategy. The policy of prevention was replaced by a policy of containment.
    That policy of containment was expressed in the 2006 operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and by this year’s operation against Hamas in Gaza. In both those mini-wars, Israel opted not to uproot the terrorist enclaves, hoping that the partial flexing of Israeli power would deter further aggression.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Olmert and Halutz’s war aim in 2006 was– as I documented here— nothing less than the destruction of Hizbullah, through a combination of two (over-lapping) strategies: both direct physical destruction, and inflicting such harsh physical punishment on the whole of Lebanese society and its national infrastructure that the Lebanese people would “turn against” what remained of Hizbullah, repudiating it and dismantling it completely.
Well, that didn’t work, did it.
So 30 months later, when Olmert launched the second of the two horrendous assaults with which his name should forever be linked, he and his people were careful not to promise more than what they were confident of achieving. This time, not the complete “destruction” of Hamas, but its downgrading to a point where its capabilities had been considerably reduced. But oh, they were still trying as hard as they could for both decapitation and destruction… Which, once again, they failed to attain.
So now, Klein Halevi, judging that neither of those assaults was successful, is arguing for something even harsher next time.
I wonder what’s been smoking? His prescription is completely unrealistic if Israelis want to retain even a sliver of respect from the international community– or, to win any acknowledgment or cooperation from its neighbors.
Unrealistic or not, though, his prescription still constitutes extremely dangerous incitement, and should be treated as such.

Palestinian political update

The first stage in the Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange deal related to long-held Israeli POW Gilad Shalit took place today, with the exchange of 19 Palestinian women prisoners for a two-minute video of Shalit, that showed him apparently well, and well treated.
This exchange is a ‘first payment’ by each side on a deal that is expected to eventually involve Shalit’s return to his family in Israel and Israel’s return to their families of some 1,000 of the 11,000 or so Palestinian political prisoners it currently holds, the vast majority of them noncombatants, most of whom have never had anything even resembling a fair trial.
Ma’an reports that Mahmoud Abbas, the time-expired president of the Palestinian Interim Authority, vowed today “to continue efforts toward releasing every prisoner who has spent decades in Israeli jails.”
This is fairly pathetic. Everyone in Palestine (and elsewhere) knows that Abbas played no role whatever in the negotiations, which have been conducted between the elected Hamas leadership in Gaza and the Israeli government, using Egypt and Germany as intermediaries.
Maan reported from Gaza that the elected PIA prime minister Ismail Haniyeh

    said the swap was ‘a victory for the resistance and the Palestinian will,’ adding that it ‘opened the door for a respectable deal.’
    … Haniyeh also praised Egypt and Germany for their collective role in wrapping up the deal…
    The Gaza leader said the Islamic movement had handled the exchange in a way that put national interests first, by demanding that women and girls affiliated with various factions be released rather than just Hamas.

Two things occur to me. First, that Germany’s fairly recent involvement in the prisoner exchange negotiations seems to have added some good momentum to the effort. Egypt had been doing the mediating all alone ever since Shalit was captured in June 2006, and hadn’t achieved anything. Germany has long experience of the many small steps involved in such negotiations– dating back to when German mediators orchestrated complex swaps of spies from both sides during the Cold War in Europe.
More recently, German mediators organized the several big swaps of live prisoners and human remains carried out between Israel and Hizbullah over recent years.
I imagine that the Egyptian authorities could have been as successful as the German if they’d really wanted to. But they never really did. So it was interesting that in the end the Israelis agreed to involve the Germans as well.
The second thought that occurs to me is that the Shalit-related prisoner-swap process should, hopefully, proceed through at least one further step, and may involve more than one further step. Some reports, for example, speak of a step whereby Shalit gets released to the egyptians and a further one when he gets sent home to Israel.
But anyway, throughout this whole period, the Hamas negotiators will be getting a lot of attention in the region and beyond; and among Palestinians and other Arabs the vast preponderance of that attention will almost certainly be favorable… And all that Abbas can do, meanwhile, is stand on the sidelines.
Not good for his political standing.
Several other things have been denting his standing badly recently, as well. Including the humiliating decision he took to participate in the three-way with Netanyahu last week (even though Israel’s settlement construction continues apace)– and equally humiliating decision his people made yesterday to drop its request that the UN Human Rights Council refer the Goldstone Report to the Security Council.

Parabéns, Brazil!

Fabulous news that Brazil “won” the 2016 Olympic Games!
I am really sorry Obama put his international status so visible into the ring for Chicago– and then lost. (But I always thought him going after it so intently was a big mstake, as I explained earlier this morning.
At IPS, Mario Osava reported (happily) that Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that Brazil has “the happiest and most creative” people in the world, and deserved this opportunity.
At Daily Finance, Ryan Blitstein noted the sizeable movement amongst Chicago’s citizens who had opposed the Olympic bid. He also reported that big US corporations had spent $72.8 million just on the campaign to get Chicago as far as the Copenhagen run-off.
He concluded,

    That’s more than the budget of the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago [the city’s major non-governmental social-service agency], and it doesn’t count the untold millions worth of in-kind contributions from major law firms and other consultants.
    In a city with well over 500,000 people living below the poverty line, that’s serious cash. The best that locals here can say is that, with the city losing its bid, at least they know another $250 million or more won’t be wasted to gear up for 2016.

At Foreignpolicy.com, Eduardo Gomez wrote,

    For those familiar with Brazil’s athletic history, today’s decision seems only natural. The country breathes sports — everything from Nascar racing, to volleyball, to soccer, to martial arts. And more importantly, perhaps, to the International Olympic Committee, the country has a long history of hosting international sporting events. In 1963, for example, Brazil hosted the Fourth Pan American games in São Paulo, drawing in thousands of competitors and spectators. The Pan American Games were once again hosted in 2007 in Rio, providing even more recent evidence of Brazil’s commitment and ability to host international games.
    Wisely, however, Lula did not rely on this culture and history alone to propel his bid. In recent years, the president seems to have been taking notes on how other countries have increased their odds. Among the lessons he garnered was the importance of physically attending the presentation and vote to stake his claim. He noted then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s efforts in 2007, for example, when Blair traveled to Copenhagen, made a strong case for London, and came home with the 2012 summer games. In 2005, then President Vladimir Putin showed up before the Olympic Committee in Guatemala to lobby for Russia’s bid to host the 2014 Winter Games, which he won. Following in their footsteps, Lula made it very clear early on that he was planning to travel to Copenhagen to fight for Brazil’s right to the Olympics. In sharp contrast, U.S. President Barack Obama announced he would attend only at the last minute. Loving soccer as he does, Lula no doubt saw this as a competitive challenge — one that he clearly gamed masterfully.
    While in Copenhagen, Lula was also very strategic in his country’s presentation before the committee. He brushed aside concerns of violence and crime in Rio, and to the president’s credit, the Olympic Committee praised Brazil for recent security improvements. Lula also claimed that the Olympics would help build Brazil, and especially the city of Rio de Janeiro, by providing jobs for the poor, integrating civil society, and building a spirit of peace and cooperation through sport. Such a prospect no doubt appealed to the committee as this goal was one of the original touted benefits of the modern Olympics Games, dating back to their genesis at the end of the 19th century.
    Most important, though, was Lula’s argument that Brazil deserved and needed the Olympics. Richer countries had had their turn, Lula said, and now it was Brazil’s chance. Brazil ranks 10th among the world’s wealthiest countries, but it is the only one of them never to have hosted the games. It will be the first South American country to do so.
    International sports tend to mirror politics. Today’s decision will reveal, yet again, that Brazil is an emerging power, and that it has the talent, infrastructural capacity, and political commitment needed to play competitively in global political (and athletic) games.

Go, Brazil!

IPS piece on global power shifts and Iran

It’s here. Also archived here.
One bottom line is here:

    In 2003, Russia and China were unable (both in strictly military terms, and in terms of global power equations) to block the invasion of Iraq. But since 2003, Russia has stabilised its internal governance considerably from the chaotic state it was still in at that time, and China has continued its steady rise to greater power on the world scene.
    Two developments over the past year have underlined, for many U.S. strategic planners, the stark facts of the United States’ deep interdependence with these two significant world powers. One was last autumn’s collapse of the financial markets in New York and other financial centres around the world, which revealed the extent of the dependence the west’s financial system has on China’s (mainly governmental) investors.
    The other turning point has been the serious challenges the U.S. faced in its campaigns against Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Earlier this year, Pakistani-based Islamist militants mounted such extensive attacks against convoys carrying desperately needed supplies to U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan that Washington was forced to sign an agreement with Moscow to open alternative supply routes through Russia.
    Russia and China both have significant interests in Iran, which they are now clearly unwilling to jeopardise simply in order to appease Washington.

The other is here:

    Thursday brought dramatic evidence of the growing weight of non-western powers in policies toward Iran. What is still unclear is when there will be evidence of any parallel growth in their influence in Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy.

Obama wrong on the Olympics

As a US citizen, I have to say I think it is completely wrong for our president to use public resources to support the bid of his hometown, Chicago, to host the 2016 Olympics. He’s especially wrong to do this because, before he intervened, the main contender was Brazil.
The US has hosted the Olympics numerous times, including in recent years. South America has never hosted an Olympics. Brazil is a significant, upcoming country on the world scene. In recent years it has also pursued– and won– a significant case in the WTO’s arbitration system against the US government’s continued provision of subsidies to cotton farmers that have wiped out the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers in Brazil and other low-income countries.
Why on earth would Obama– who claims he wants to build better relations with the rest of the world– want to pit the prestige of the US presidency against Brazil on the Olympics issue? Why couldn’t he simply have let the decision take its course, or even, given a small boost to Brazil’s bid in some way?

Some good news on Iraq

Okay, it’s still way too early for any celebrations. But just as the US announces the acceleration of its troop withdrawal from Iraq, the careful analyst Reidar Visser has had three intriguing posts on his blog (1, 2, 3) that bring us modestly good political news from inside Iraq.
(Of course, it’s worth exploring the causal links between these two phenomena… )
In the first of Reidar’s posts, he probed the oil dimension of the changing balance of power between Baghdad and the Kurdish regional center, Arbil, in these months as the Kurds’ longtime protectors and enablers from the US military decrease their footprint and power in the country.
He concluded:

    With Iraqi nationalism on the rise since the last local elections it would be prudent of the Kurds to gradually climb down from the maximalist policies that brought [the small Norwegian oil-exploration company] DNO and other smaller foreign oil companies to Kurdistan in the first place. There may still be a role to play for foreign companies in the north, but it seems increasingly clear that any such project will need a green light from Baghdad in order to be sustainable.

In the second, he looked at the Kirkuk dimension of the shifting Baghdad-Arbil balance. He writes,

    Iraqi public opinion has gradually coalesced around the view that Kirkuk is an integral part of the Iraqi state and even constitutes an Iraqi microcosm through its multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian demographic character. In turn, the shift towards stronger Iraqi nationalist currents has led to greater criticism of the post-2003 Kurdish attempts to define Kirkuk as a “disputed territory” and its policies to strengthen the Kurdish population presence in the city centre, which historically had a closer connection to the Iraqi plains and was culturally dominated by Turkmens…
    Reflecting this greater concern for Kirkuk’s status in Iraq and the perceived need to protest the policies of Kurdification (and specifically the possibility of elections being manipulated), a group of nationalist parties known as the 22 July trend last year secured the insertion into the provincial elections law of special clauses that excepted Kirkuk from the local elections pending agreement on interim arrangements that could ensure a more just procedure for choosing the governorate council. The attempt to find a solution stalled, but the point had been made: For the first time since the fateful mention of Kirkuk as a “disputed territory” in the 2004 Transitional Administrative Law, Iraqi politicians had effectively managed to reverse some of the tendency towards ever greater fragmentation in post-war Iraq.

And in the third post, he links to one of his longer Historiae studies which, he writes, shows that,

    In terms of Iraq’s maturation from a sectarian to an issue-based kind of politics, Maliki’s list represents considerable progress, although it was not quite as wide-ranging as some had hoped for…

All this seems to me to be good news, even if still only modestly so. Iraq’s people have suffered so much from the intense social and political fragmentation precipitated the US invasion of March 2003– and in many cases almost directly instigated by the occupation forces– that moves like these that seem to strengthen the peaceful political interaction and sense of shared national fates and national interest of the country’s different groups can only be welcomed.
(Another, smaller piece of good news from Iraq is that the blog-based book— “blook”– that Faiza Jarrar and two of her talented sons, Raed and Khalid, published last year about the first year of the US occupation of their country has now won an award. Congratulations, the Jarrars! I plan to write more about the book when I can. But first– my big confession– I need to buy and read it… They are all such wonderful, humane observers and great writers, and during those early months of the occupation I was strongly reliant on their blogged reports of what life was really like for the Iraqis under occupation.)

Happy 60th birthday, China!

China’s 1.3 billion citizens have today been celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Republic.
Of course, much remains to be done to ensure that China’s people can enjoy all the rights to which they’re entitled. But the founding of the PRC brought to an end more than a century of warlordism and internal strife– circumstances which, as we Americans have come to (re-)learn all too vividly through the experiences of our government in Iraq and Afghanistan, are deeply harmful to everyone’s rights, including, far too frequently, the right to life itself.
After the Chinese Communist Party came to power in Beijing in 1949 it made many very serious mis-steps, including during both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But since the late 1970s the country has been on a much steadier path, and the economic and social rights of its people have shown amazing and very valuable improvement. Their civil and political rights situation has improved more slowly; but it has, nonetheless, improved. (For more on this, see Chapter 4 of my 2008 book, Re-engage! America and the World After Bush.)
Another big problem has been the uneven development of these rights. But the CCP leaders seem well aware of this, and intent on addressing it.
One aspect of the rise of China that particularly impressed me was the fact that the Beijing government never got caught up in the nuclear arms-racing that consumed so much of the financial and political energies of the US and the former Soviet Union. I imagine that holding the line, as Beijing did, on maintaining only the “necessary minimum deterrent” might have seemed hard or even unwise to some Chinese strategic planners, aware as they were of their country’s past vulnerabilities to the mega-lethal meddling of outside (mainly European) powers. But it was the right decision.
The CCP’s leaders have evidently made a number of other decisions, as well, over the past two decades that signaled clearly a judgment that the development of forms of power other than military power would serve them better in the modern world than just raw military power. China’s emergence onto the Asian and world scenes over the past two decades has been marked by three notable features:

    (1) It has been characterized by the use of economic, cultural, and diplomatic power rather than military power;
    (2) It has been pursued by playing within, and calling for the strengthening of, the existing “rules of the game” in international relations, rather than by challenging those rules; and
    (3) It has been accompanied by Beijing’s continuous issuance of reassurances that China’s rise/emergence is, and will continue to be, peaceful.

So yes, I am a bit disturbed by the need China’s rulers evidently feel to celebrate the PRC’s 60th birthday with some huge-scale military parades. But they have lots of other forms of parades and celebrations going on, too. (Check the portal I link to in the first paragraph.) And they have every reason to celebrate.
Happy birthday, China!

Good start on Goldstone, Michael Posner

Michael Posner, who’s the US’s Assistant secretary of State for Human Rights, Democratization, etc, spoke about the Goldstone Report at the UN Human Rights Council today. He called on Israel, as well as Hamas, to,

    utilize appropriate domestic [judicial] review and meaningful accountability mechanisms to investigate and follow-up on credible allegations…”
    “If undertaken properly and fairly, these reviews can serve as important confidence-building measures that will support the larger essential objective which is a shared quest for justice and lasting peace,” he said.
    … Posner reiterated Washington’s view that the Council paid “grossly disproportionate attention” to Israel, but said that the U.S. delegation was ready to engage in balanced debate.

But is the US also ready to withhold all its economic, political, and military support from either of these accused parties that fail to carry out thorough investigations into the facts alleged by Goldstone, I wonder?
Before Posner was appointed to his present position in February he was the president of an excellent organization called Human Rights First– formerly, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. So he must know Judge Goldstone pretty well from the work both of them did in the 1990s.
Also, HRF has done some great work on various Middle East-related issues, including Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Israel-Palestine. I imagine it would have been hard for Posner to stay in his present job if he’d been forced simply to throw the Goldstone Report into the trash-can.
Goldstone did, it is true, call firstly on the relevant state authorities on both sides to carry out credible and rigorous investigations into the war crimes and crimes against humanity that he alleged. But he also requested the international community– in the form of the UN Human Rights Council and the Security Council– to remain seized of the matter and to ensure that those investigations take place.
So let’s wait and see.
As I wrote here a couple of weeks ago, it’s right to recognize that there’s some tension between the future-oriented demands of peacemaking in any situation of ongoing conflict and the backward-looking demands of the whole quest for “accountability”.
I think Posner has done a good job in arguing how the carrying out of credible investigations by the two national authorities can itself be a step that builds confidence. (Much better than the attempt Susan Rice made, to argue that the demands of accountability should simply be jettisoned altogether.)
However, my expectation that this government in Israel will want to ‘build confidence” in the way Posner suggests– or indeed, in any of the other ways it’s been requested to do so by the Obama administration– is very low, asymptotic to zero.
And meanwhile, as I noted in that earlier post, Israel as occupying power continues, day after day after day, to impose on Gaza’s people living conditions that are extremely inhumane and continue to constitute, as Goldstone argued, a quite illegal pursuit of collective punishment on all 1.5 million of them.
So set aside questions about “the past” and “the future” for a moment.
What is Washington doing to end that illegal behavior, which is being carried out on a continuing basis in the present by that state that is so heavily dependent on our generosity, Israel?
I guess to me, as a US citizen, that’s the most burning issue. At this point, I’m not sure how much it’s worth for Pres. Obama to try to get either the Israelis or the Palestinians (or other Arabs) to undertake “confidence-building steps” toward the other.
But what I do know is that it’s the US itself that now needs to build the confidence of the vast majority of the people in the world in the integrity and fair-mindedness of our government, which continues to cling onto its long-held role as the dominant mediator in this conflict.
That’s why we need to see the US both doing effective follow-up on Goldstone and– even more urgently– taking concrete actions to lift Israel’s inhumane siege of Gaza.

Israel’s religio-nationalists considered

Peter Martin had a very informative article in Saturday’s Toronto Globe & Mail about the rapid emergence of a new kind of religio-nationalists in Israel.
They even, he says, have a new name: “Hardal”– a cross between “haredi” (an ultra-orthodox Jewish believer) and Mafdal, Israel’s longstanding National Religious Party.
The piece starts like this:

    Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has come a long way.
    No longer are they the inward-looking anti-Zionists who only cared that the government provide them with money for their separate schools, welfare and exemptions from military service. These days, many of the Haredim – the word means “those who tremble” in awe of God” – have joined with right-wing religious Zionists to become a powerful political force.
    They now are equipped to redefine the country’s politics and to set a new agenda.
    Two decades ago, they were confined mostly to a few neighbourhoods in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Today, they have spread throughout the country, in substantial numbers in several major communities, as well as building completely new towns only for their followers.
    One Haredi leader who almost won Jerusalem’s mayoralty race last fall, boasts that, within 20 years, the ultra-Orthodox will control the municipal government of every city in the country. And why not? Of the Jewish Israeli children entering primary school for the first time this month, more than 25 per cent are Haredi, and that proportion will keep growing. There are between 600,000 and 700,000 Haredim in Israel, and they average 8.8 children a family…

Martin includes quite a lot of quotes from Dr. Nachman ben Yehuda, who has a book on the Hardal coming out next year.
He writes,

    Ironically, considering these religious leaders have made such use of the democratic process, they continue to say democracy is not consistent with Halacha.
    “In many ways these guys are closer to Islamic fundamentalists than to anything else,” Prof. Ben Yehuda said.
    They also do not shrink from violence.
    Prof. Ben Yehuda’s research found that violence is the number-one criminal infraction among Haredim. He also found that most of that violence is for political purposes.
    This past summer witnessed many vivid examples…

He makes a short reference to the relatively recent entry of some haredim into the IDF. A bigger story there, though, is probably the rise up the officer corps in recent years of substantial numbers of non-haredi religio-nationalists, and their influence within the IDF’s rabbinate.
Anyway, a fascinating article. I wonder when we’ll see one like it in a mainstream US publication?