Some friends have made the point, a propos of what I wrote here yesterday, that the Iron Cross is not a specifically Nazi insignia, but a longterm insignia of the German military. Thanks for that clarification.
They also make the completely correct point that it’s important to distinguish between things German and things Nazi.
I don’t have much time to write more here, right now. But I’ve just had a 30-minute phone conversation with Iain Levine, the over-all Director of Programs at HRW, about the Garlasco affair (which I’ll report on here as soon as I have time.) Meantime, very quickly, I want to clarify what my concerns in this regard are:
1. As a Quaker, I find it very troubling that anyone spends much of their free time collecting “military memorabilia”, from any military. I do believe this represents an unhealthy obsession with matters military. If my son had done this in his teens I would have been concerned enough. If he’d continued to obsessively pursue such a hobby till his 30s I would be very seriously worried. Collecting military memorabilia is not the same as collecting old lunch-boxes.
Garlasco’s out-of-hours involvement in this has certainly not been trivial, as the heft of his book reveals.
2. “Collecting” such memorabilia– which also involves a lot of trading, discussing, cataloguing etc–is not the same as being a serious military historian. Has Garlasco’s book, which was published in 2007 January 2008, garnered any pre- or post-publication reviews from serious military historians? Has it been cited by any? I have seen no indication that it has.
3. Within the broader universe of collecting military memorabilia, if that is what a person wants to do, I think one has to put a particular red flag beside Nazi-era German memorabilia, which in Garlasco’s case included an involvement with those from both Wehrmacht and SS units.
All of us who are concerned about the integrity of HRW’s work going forward need to gain a clear understanding of the nature of Garlasco’s collection. He has told HRW officers that it contains both German and American memorabilia from the WW-2 era. But in what balance? I think that information would be helpful.
Within this question of the “balance” of his collecting and related interests, it is relevant to ask why his first book-length publication was on the German artefacts rather than American or other artefacts.
… I think my colleagues and friends at HRW need to gain a very much fuller understanding of the nature of Garlasco’s out-of-hours collecting activity. I have not yet been able to talk to Marc directly. But if, as Levine reported, Garlasco really does want to minimize the damage this affair causes to HRW’s work, then he certainly needs to cooperate very fully, honestly, and in good faith with their efforts to gain that understanding.
One last point. Last night the powers-that-be at HRW did finally send me the text of the (quiet-ish) but apparently fully authorized statement they’ve been circulating on this affair.
Levine explained that the “quiet-ish” nature of this communication is because HRW don’t want to make too much of it in public at this point. But since just about everyone else in the world except me has now been given this text, I obviously am glad to be able to publish it in full here:
Continuing bad news for US/NATO in Afghanistan
Actually, perhaps trending pretty rapidly toward the truly catastrophic?
Joshua Fost of Registan blogged earlier today that “Ghazni Province is falling to the Taliban.” (Map and basic info on Ghazni are here.)
Later in Foust’s post, he seems to backtrack a bit, writing,
- There’s no way to know if that’s what is going on in Ghazni. There is almost no media presence there… and non-essential [US/NATO] units are starting to avoid the area (one friend told me the special forces there are advising non-SOF groups to stay away because of the danger). Without more information, we don’t know for certain how things are shaping up in the province as a whole, but given how many districts had zero voting during the elections (reportedly 11), it’s pretty clear the Taliban are claiming the province bit by bit.
The problems reported there regarding the recent election are part of the even broader crisis of governance and legitimacy that is facing the US/NATO presence in the country.
Today, too, the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission “annulled ballots from dozens of polling stations in Afghanistan’s presidential election… kicking off a lengthy fraud investigation that could keep Afghans locked in political uncertainty for months.”
Interestingly, Ghaszni was one of the three provinces described by the ECC with the most fraud identified in its reported election results.
On ABC TV news tonight, I heard US special envoy Richard Holbrooke expressing what seemed like a first attempt to fudge on the sanctity of the Afghan elections. He was arguing something like, “Oh, here are problems in elections everywhere… ”
Perhaps, Richard. But not problems on the order of the problems the ECC is uncovering.
Meanwhile, additional indications of the extent of the Taliban/insurgent influence in the country come from the series of maps at this website for the NGO International Council on Security and Development (though I don’t think the main there is completely probative.)
But also from this account by recently released NYT journo Steve Farrell of the four days he spent as a captive of Taliban in northern Kunduz province.
He wrote,
- There was no doubting the absolute force of their writ in the area southwest of Kunduz, which we traversed time and again, in an area of cornfields, rice plantations, mud brick villages, waterways and other farmlands, measuring perhaps eight miles long by three or four miles wide. They drove down lanes, through villages, stopping at will and talking to residents, boasting about how the people provided a willing intelligence service to them. The extent of volition was impossible to determine, but the Taliban were the only armed presence I saw there for four days.
Interestingly, they paid when they needed gas for the car, instead of just commandeering it, which they could have easily done. Some villagers appeared very friendly, others more wary and formally polite.
Motorists unfailingly gave way as soon as they saw a Taliban car coming in the other direction, and snapped to a smile and an Islamic greeting. Whether through consent or fear was impossible to read on the faces of villages who were rarely allowed glimpses of us, except at favored stops and safe houses…
All this makes me hope that the US and NATO militaries have well-developed “Emergency Plans” for the consolidation and subsequent evacuation of the units that have been spread so broadly throughout the whole of craggy Afghanistan over recent months. (Not least, because they were busy preparing for the election.)
But even more, I hope the Obama administration and its NATO allies have a political “Emergency Plan” for how they will ask the world’s non-NATO big powers and Afghanistan’s neighbors to help extricate them from this mess.
Of course, it will be quite normal for these other powers to require some kind of significant political quid pro quo for this.
… All this happening now, and tomorrow is another September 11…
Marc Garlasco’s little “hobby”
There is a huge commotion in the blogosphere about the fact that Marc Garlasco, the senior military affairs specialist at Human Rights Watch, has long sustained a hobby of collecting and writing about Nazi memorabilia.
I’ve thought this over lot since I first learned about it yesterday. Is collecting and writing a long book about Nazi memorabilia in his spare time something an employer like Human Rights Watch ought to be concerned about?
After consideration, I say Yes.
Now, it’s true that here in the US we have very strict protections for free speech. Thus, collecting Nazi uniforms and insignia and even wearing them in public– as Garlasco apparently was in this photo— is not illegal here. (Wearing them in public would be illegal in Germany and several other places.)
But to have him doing work on human rights in the daytime, while carrying on with this intensively pursued hobby in the evening? That is bizarre, and disturbing.
Even more so when you realize that a lot of the work he has done has involved dealing with Israeli officials and citizens, and analyzing the IDF’s operations.
It would be like employing someone to do child-protection work by day who goes home and collects pictures of naked or suggestively-clad children by night. For allegedly “artistic purposes”.
As Ron Kampeas of JTA wrote about Garlasco’s very enthusiastic pursuit of his hobby, “Ewwwww.”
Now, as y’all no doubt know, I’m on the Middle East advisory committee of Human Rights Watch. And I’ve been very disturbed indeed by the attacks the young, aggressively rightwing Israeli organization NGO Monitor has launched against the work HRW has done on the IDF’s combat behavior.
But right now, I’m looking at this page on NGO Monitor’s website, and agreeing with much of what they have there on this topic.
One thing (scroll down to Footnote 1) they have is a copy of a defense of Garlasco’s actions that someone– reportedly representing HRW– has posted into several blogs in recent days.
For NGO-M to post that text is a real service, since I haven’t been able to find an HRW response anywhere else– including on their own website. (I have a request outstanding to HRW Exec. Director Ken Roth for an interview on this issue.)
That reportedly-from-HRW text concludes thus:
- Garlasco is the author of a monograph on the history of German Air Force and Army anti-aircraft medals and a contributor to websites that promote serious historical research into the Second World War (and which forbid hate speech). In the foreword he writes of telling his daughters that “the war was horrible and cruel, that Germany lost and for that we should be thankful.”
To imply that Garlasco’s collection is evidence of Nazi sympathies is not only absurd but an attempt to deflect attention from his deeply felt efforts to uphold the laws of war and minimize civilian suffering in wartime. These falsehoods are an affront to Garlasco and thousands of other serious military historians.
Well, I’m not sure about Garlasco’s record as a “serious military historian.” By all accounts, his book, title “The Flak Badges”, seems to be an aid for collectors of such badges, not a work of serious military history.
I also share some of the concerns his critics have voiced about the actual military expertise Garlasco brought to the job at HRW, when he moved there after having worked in the Pentagon for eight years. Between 1995 and 2003 he had various jobs as a civilian employee of the Pentagon, doing military intelligence work including some work on targeting US cruise missiles.
But as I noted on JWN last year (including here), he made some serious– and very basic– mistakes during the Russian-Georgian war in identifying which country various cluster-bomb remnants came from… Even more disturbingly, perhaps, the HRW powers-that-be were frustratingly slow in correcting the incorrect accusations he originally made against Russia on this score, which were used by all the political forces in the west that were trying to mobilize public and even perhaps military support for Georgia at the time…
The crying shame of the latest revelations is, of course, that HRW is one of the most politically powerful of the numerous human-rights organizations that over the past nine months have compiled detailed documentation of the many laws-of-war violations committed by Israel (and some by Hamas) during last winter’s Israeli assault on Gaza.
So this whole series of revelations about Garlasco’s “hobby” threatens to distract a lot of attention from the well-documented claims that many excellent organizations– not just HRW– have pulled together about those violations.
And what happened to the people in Gaza last winter– and what continues to happen to them now, for goodness’ sake, as Israel still prevents them from engaging in even basic rebuilding of their shattered homes and lives– is a whole lot worse than “Ewwwww.”
Trashing one-staters with Hussein Ibish
This morning I dropped by the Woodrow Wilson Center, a serious think-tank here in Washington DC that’s headed by the near-iconic Lee Hamilton. They had a panel discussion that had been convened to help a man called Hussein Ibish launch a book he has just published, titled What’s Wrong with the One-state Agenda?
Now, as longtime JWN readers know, I’m personally agnostic on whether Palestinians and Israelis should aim at a one-state or two-state outcome to their lengthy and very damaging conflict. But I do think that anyone who discusses this topic– or, come to that, any other topic, either– has a duty to be fair-minded, and in particular not to mis-characterize the arguments of his/her opponents.
Sadly, that was just what Ibish was doing this morning. He stated so many things that were untrue about the position of one-state supporters! Here is a partial list of these untruths:
1. That “The one-state idea emerged in some Palestinian circles at the time of the Second Intifada”.
- No. The idea is much, much older in Palestinian politics than that. Indeed, the stated national goal of Fateh and the PLO from 1968 through 1974 was the establishment of a single and secular democratic state (SDS) in the whole area of Mandate Palestine. In 1974, the PLO moved toward reframing its goal as being the creation of a “national authority” in the West Bank and Gaza; but it didn’t jettison the idea of an eventual SDS until 1996. And even after 1996, attachment to the idea of an eventual SDS remained among many secular Palestinian nationalists, inside and outside the historic homeland. Among Islamist Palestinians, there is probably even greater attachment to the idea of a one-state outcome than there is among secular nationalists; but their version of the desired single state is, of course, an Islamist one.
2. “The one-state idea rejects Israelis.”
- Again, no. First of all, we should recall that the original authors of a one-state formula in modern times were brilliant Jewish members of the yishuv in Palestine like Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, both of them pioneers in the effort to establish a Hebrew-language university in Jerusalem. Their concept was for a binational unitary state in the whole of Mandate Palestine. My understanding of the position of the secular one-staters today is that they support essentially that same vision. Back in the 1960s, inside the PLO there were lots of discussions over which of Israel’s Jewish citizens should be “allowed” to remain in the SDS, once established– would it be those who were in Palestine before 1948, or only those there before “the start of the Zionist invasion” (roughly 1917), or which? Now, you don’t hear those very exclusionary discussions among one-state proponents. What you do hear is the idea that the single state they aspire to should no longer be one that privileges Jews over non-Jews– in immigration/naturalization policies, access to land and other national resources, or any other area of public life.
3. “The one-state idea is very confrontational against anything and everything Israeli.”
- This is not true, either. Go look, for example, at the biographies of the people who took part in the most recent big conference on the one-state idea, that was held in the Boston area back in March. Many of them are Israelis– both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis.
I have particular respect for Jewish citizens of Israel who are prepared to stand up and reject and oppose the highly discriminatory form of ethnonationalism that their country embodies to this day, as it has since 1948. They are important voices of conscience, on a par with those White South Africans who in the dark days of Apartheid spoke up against the discrimination on which their state was built (and of which they were, as they clearly understood, the unwilling beneficiaries.) But the Palestinian citizens of Israel who speak up for a one-state outcome are equally important. Ibish seemed to forget about their existence completely in his speech. Many of them, including significant intellectual figures like Asaad Ghanem or Nadim Rouhanna, see the one-state formula as meeting their community’s needs much, much more effectively than a two-state formula ever could.
4. “The one-state rhetoric exists on college campuses in the US, the UK, and Europe. But it is not connected to real politics in the US– or indeed, even in Palestine.”
- The implication here is that it’s just a fringe phenomenon, with no real resonance. (Well, if that’s the case, then Ibish is going to have a hard time trying to sell a book that deals with this topic– so he was doing a tight juggling act there: trying to tell this largely inside-Washington audience that the one-state phenomenon was important enough to care about, but still demeaning it as only a “fringe” view.)
But the fact is, as a political idea within the Palestinian community this idea is neither a “new” one, as noted above, nor a fringe one. Many Palestinians look at it with great realism, understanding that it won’t be easy to achieve it– but also, judging that there is little remaining hope left, now, for the establishment of a viable two-state outcome, and that therefore the other major item that has long been on their menu of possible political goals needs looking at once again…
Well, in sum, Ibish seemed to be carefully assembling and erecting a straw man of how he wanted to portray the one-state idea to this audience, so that then he could rip it down. It was not a seemly performance.
These are matters of deadly, even existential, import for Palestinians everywhere. So I think the least that should be required of anyone trying to have a serious impact within this discussion is the basic sense of fairness of not wilfully mis-characterizing either the arguments or the standing of her or his opponents.
Ibish is a Lebanese-American who gained serious credentials as a Palestinian-rights activist through the good work he did with Electronic Intifada.* But for quite some time now he’s been working with the (Very) American Task Force on Palestine, an organization that just– by a hair– manages not to be a complete sock puppet for the US State Department. For example, both Ibish and VATFP president Ziad Asali, who spoke in the comments section at today’s event, stressed that there needs to be a complete freeze on Israeli settlement building if the plan to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel is to succeed.
And that differs from the State Department position, how? Um, actually, I’m not entirely sure… because of course, the folks in the State Department do also say the same thing from time to time. But they don’t want to take the next step of imposing actual costs on Israel for its continued defiance of this request…
And no, neither do Ibish and the VATFP, it seems. Well anyway, Ibish was openly derisive this morning about the growing worldwide movement to impose some combination of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel.
… The Crisis Group’s Rob Malley was also on the panel. His contribution was much more instructive. Later…
* Update Fri a.m.: Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada sent the following clarification: “While it is true that Hussein and I often wrote articles together in our personal capacities during the second Intifada, Hussein never worked for the Electronic Intifada, and never contributed any articles to EI. EI did on a few occasions republish articles he and I had co-authored for other publications. But we do that with many people. I just wanted to clarify that for the record.” ~HC
500 new settlement homes in Jerusalem…
When will this end???
BBC:
- Israel says it is pushing ahead with delayed plans to build almost 500 more homes for Jewish settlers in Jerusalem.
The project is for the Pisgat Zeev settlement in annexed East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in the 1967 war.
The announcement comes two days after Israel said it would build 450 new homes for settlers in [other parts of] the West Bank…
In GWB’s 2002 ‘Road Map’, Phase 1 was supposed to include both an Israeli settlement freeze and energetic and effective efforts by the Palestinian side to stop anti-Israel violence.
Anti-Israel violence has been just about dormant since January 18. Both the Ramallah-based PA and the Gaza-based PA have taken many energetic and effective steps to stop it.
But Israel has simply carried on with these settlement-expansion plans, saying it “might” agree to some very partial slowdown on new construction, sometime in the future.
What if the Palestinians– from either Ramallah or Gaza– said and did something similar?
What if they said, “Oh, we might agree to put some curbs on anti-Israeli violence, at some point in the future. But for now, we’re going to undertake 50 additional suicide bombings and 45 additional rocket attacks, and meanwhile let’s keep on endlessly negotiating about the freeze on anti-Israeli violence?”
Make no mistake about it, Israel’s longstanding project of implanting its own citizens as settlers into the occupied territories is also an act of great violence. The settlement project steals for the settlers land and other natural resources that rightfully belong to the Palestinians. And the whole machinery of repression that the government of Israel maintains maintain against the OPT’s rightful Palestinian residents, in order to protect the settlers, constitutes a huge edifice of ongoing structural violence, punctuated and maintained by the many acts of direct physical violence that the occupation forces take against the lives and persons of the Palestinians.
500 new settlement homes in Jerusalem? The Netanyahu government is just gleefully poking its finger in Pres. Obama’s eye.
Stephen Walt is right. It’s time to get tough.
When election results are disputed: Afghanistan, etc
When election results are strongly disputed from within the community they were held in, this represents–obviously– a deep crisis of power and legitimacy within that community.
That’s the case in Iran today, more than three months after their disputed election. It was also the case in the US in November-December 2004, lest anyone forget…
That post-election dispute was brought to an end by a fiat from the US Supreme Court; and the Supremes’ notably undemocratic ruling then met with surprisingly rapid acceptance from the vast majority of voters, even Democrats. (How different would the history of our country and the world be if Al Gore had been inaugurated in 2001? Who can know?)
But whether you liked what the Supremes did in December 2000 or not, at least in our country there are mature institutions of national governance that were able to withstand, contain, and end the deep internal division over who won the November 2000 election.
And then, there’s Afghanistan.
Mature institutions of national governance? Um, no.
That’s why I think Brian Katulis and Hardin Lang have things rather wrong in the post they have on the Af-Pak blog today, in which they seem to be assuming that somehow (they don’t say how), a new and somewhat capable president will emerge there in the relatively near future, and will be able to get on relatively easily with the tasks of ending the country’s very, very serious insurgency and its urgent tasks of governance reform.
Not so fast, guys! Why are you assuming that, from that very flawed and now deeply contested election anyone can easily emerge as a winner and start to get on with such tasks?
(I guess Katulis and Hardin have some personal/professional investment in the August 20 elections being generally seen as having been “successful”, since they went to the country as part of one of the internatinal election-monitoring teams? On the other hand, if you think that the real mission of an international election-monitoring team is to monitor and uphold the idea that elections must be, and be seen to be, free and fair, then maybe they should not be so quick in assuming that this one was well-run enough to generate a legitimate winner.)
Those most at risk, if the dispute over the election results turns into all-out fighting between Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, are of course Afghanistan’s long war-battered people, who would have to put up with that new conflict tearing up that society along with all the other conflicts that are already wracking it.
But the US-NATO position in Afghanistan is also at risk if the US doesn’t have an Afghan ruling “partner” who has at least some semblance of internal and international legitimacy.
And right now, NATO itself is coming under huge strains from the Afghan war.
Who was it who first said “NATO must go out-of-area or go out of business?” (F. Stephen Larrabee, 1993.)
“Out of business” is now a much more live possibility than it was back then.
B’tselem’s figures on Gaza assault toll
The Israeli human-rights group B’tselem today released its final report on the death toll in Gaza from the highly asymmetrical fighting of last December-January.
Their figures differ a little from those released yesterday by the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
PCHR put the complete death toll among Gazans at 1,419. B’tselem put it at 1,387. That’s a difference of 32 people. The difference could perhaps be explained by what they were counting: PCHR was counting the number of Palestinians “killed during the Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip”, while B’tselem was apparently counting Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces.
B’tselem also counted the number of Israelis killed during the 22 days of fighting:
- Palestinians killed 9 Israelis during the operation: 3 civilians and one member of the security forces by rockets fired into southern Israel, and 5 soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Another 4 soldiers were killed by friendly fire.
Given the intensity of combat operations, friendly fire deaths are not particularly surprising.
PCHR counted that 1,167 non-combatants were killed, along with 252 “resistance activists.” It specified that,
- The non-combatants include civilians and civil police officers who were not involved in hostilities, [who are] protected persons of international humanitarian law. Investigations conducted by PCHR indicate that 918 civilians were killed… The civilian victims include 318 children… and 111 women.
B’tselem, by contrast, is not quite so sure how to characterize the conbatant/non-combatant status of the police killed. They write that of those killed,
- 773 did not take part in the hostilities, including 320 minors and 109 women over the age of 18. Of those killed, 330 took part in the hostilities, and 248 were Palestinian police officers, most of whom were killed in aerial bombings of police stations on the first day of the operation. For 36 people, B’Tselem could not determine whether they participated in the hostilities or not.
There is very little difference between these two reports regarding the numbers of women and children killed. The main differences are in how they distribute the adult male death among combatants and non-combatants.
The B’tselem report notes that this about the Israeli military’s claims about the Palestinian death toll:
- Israel stated that 1,166 Palestinians were killed in the operation and that 60% of them were members of Hamas and other armed groups. According to the military, a total of 295 Palestinians who were “not involved” in the fighting were killed. As the military refused to provide B’Tselem its list of fatalities, a comparison of names was not possible. However, the blatant discrepancy between the numbers is intolerable. For example, the military claims that altogether 89 minors under the age of 16 died in the operation. However, B’Tselem visited homes and gathered death certificates, photos, and testimonies relating to all 252 children under 16, and has the details of 111 women over 16 killed.
Of course, definitions and methodology are very important in such documentation. B’tselem is counting 320 “minors”, meaning presumably under the age of 18, but only 252 “children under 16”. It is also very specific about the methodology it used to verify each claimed death of a minor.
I dare say that when we see the final report in English from PCHR, they too will be specific about the methodology they used. I have great respect for the careful work and documentary objectivity of the PCHR, which is Palestinian and operates under extremely difficult circumstances from its downtown Gaza headquarters. I would imagine that its researchers have the opportunity to do even more meticulous fieldwork than that done by B’tselem, which is based in Jerusalem and has faced many obstacles placed by the Israeli authorities in being able to get its research teams into Gaza.
I was just looking at this news article by AP’s Karin Laub today. It is built around B’tselem’s release of its report.
I really question why she gave such prominence to that report, while making only a fleeting reference to PCHR’s work and not even mentioning it by name? Is it because she is in based in Jerusalem, or because she is reluctant to give any credence to the work of a Palestinian organization?
Anyway, the big discrepancies are not between the reporting of B’tselem and PCHR, but rather those between the reporting of these human-rights groups and the Israeli military.
Especially as regards the numbers of deaths of minors.
Laub reported that,
- The military said Wednesday that it believes B’Tselem’s findings are based on flawed research, including reliance on what it said are exaggerated death tolls by Palestinian human rights groups.
This is a serious libel.
Quite clearly, B’tselem has met that (quite evidently fabricated) “concern” by explicating the time-consuming and sometimes actually dangerous methodology it used in the case of reported deaths of minors.
And what “methodology” did the Israeli military use in its compilation of its numbers.
American power has limits? Who knew?
Steve Clemons tells us today that
- Afghanistan, like Iraq, is sending the impression to the rest of the world that America is at a “limit” point in its military and power capabilities.
Well, duh.
He goes on to say,
- Limits are very, very, very bad in the great power game — and Afghanistan is yet again, an exposer of monumental limits on American power.
Now, Steve is usually an intelligent and reasonable person. So I’m mystified why he is giving the impression here that the US had no significant “limits” on its great-power capabilities until the Iraq war; and that the relatively sudden “revelation” that there are such limits is both surprising and “very, very bad.”
C’meon, Steve. Yeah, maybe you grew up more in the era of post-Cold War US uberpowerdom than I did. But even then, there were always limits on US power.
And you know what, for any kind of a realist, knowing there are limits and figuring out how to work effectively within them is a good thing, not a bad thing.
It was GWB and his crowd who thought there were no limits, and that they could make their own history regardless of other powers or other interests.
… Steve’s piece was basically about Afghanistan. Neither he nor anyone else has yet been able to explain to me why the US (which is located halfway round the world from Afghanistan) and NATO– in which the allies are also very geographically and culturally distant from Afghanistan– could ever be conceived to be the ideal tools for “pacifying” Afghanistan.
Let’s have a whole lot more realism in this discussion. Including by recognizing there are limits to US power.
Israel’s assault on Gaza: The final toll
The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has now published (PDF, in Arabic) its final tally of the human cost of last winter’s Israeli assault on Gaza.
The English version is expected to be out next week.
The report is titled “Targeted Civilians”. The Palestine News Network today published a digest, in English, of PCHR’s main findings today:
- According to PCHR’s documentation, 1,419 Palestinians were killed during the Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip. This number includes 1,167 non-combatants (82.2%) and 252 resistance activists (17.8%). The non-combatants include civilians and civil police officers who were not involved in hostilities, the protected persons of international humanitarian law. Investigations conducted by PCHR indicate that 918 civilians were killed (64.7% of the total number of victims). The civilian victims include 318 children (22.4 % of the total number of victims and 34.7% of the number of civilian victims) and 111 women (7.8% of the total number of victims and 12.1% of the number of civilian victims). According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, at least 5,300 Palestinian were wounded during the offensive. This number includes at least 1,600 children (30%) and 830 women (15.6%); at least 2,430 children and women were wounded, 45.6% of the total wounded.
According to PCHR’s documentation, IOF completely destroyed 2,114 houses (2864 housing units) affecting 3,314 families (19,592 individuals). They also partially destroyed 3,242 houses, (5,014 housing units) affecting 5,470 families (32,250 individuals). A further 16,000 houses at least sustained various degrees of damages as a result of bombardment and destruction, including the burning of dozens of houses in different areas. Approximately 51,453 individuals were made homeless.
The latest offensive was the most violent, brutal and bloodiest since the beginning of Israeli occupation in 1967.
The PNN report also includes what looks like a verbatim version of the report’s “Conclusion and recommendations” section.
Hamas-related negotiations moving forward?
The negotiations for a prisoner-exchange agreement between Hamas and Israel seem to have entered a new, more productive phase, with the news– first reported by Xinhua— that Norwegian officials have now joined German officials in nailing down the details of the prisoner swap.
As reported by Xinhua from Gaza, the deal that’s emerging will involve swapping Hamas-held Israeli POW Gilad Shalit for some 1,000 Palestinian prisoners:
- According to the sources, Israel will free 450 prisoners as soon as Shalit is handed to the Egyptian authorities and another 550 prisoners will be released once the soldier arrives in Israel.
Israel currently holds around 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners, many of whom have been in prison– or detained without trial– for many years. Around 30elected Palestinian legislators, most of them from Hamas, are among those held.
Norway’s involvement in the swap now being negotiated, Xinhua said, would include providing a home for some of the Palestinian prisoners whom Israel will not allow to stay inside the occupied territories.
Germany’s involvement in mediating this issue, first revealed about ten days ago, has some political significance. Germany has previously been involved in most of the (often large-scale) prisoner swaps conducted between Hizbullah and Israel. In all these mediations, Germany’s security services have built on experience of fine-tuning the often complex modalities of these swap operations that they gained during some of the spy-swap operations they orchestrated– also between often very distrustful parties– during the Cold War.
Germany’s involvement in the current Hamas-Israel mediation marks a bit of a setback for the Egyptians, who as the past months have dragged on showed that they were either incapable of nailing down the agreement or, actually, rather unwilling to do so.
Israel’s agreement to work through Germany (as well as, still, Egypt) also elevates Hamas’s political standing a bit, nearer to the political standing that Hizbullah has in West European circles.
Hamas head Khaled Meshaal was in Cairo Sunday, where he held talks with the Egyptian officials who are working not just on the prisoner-swap file but also on the attempt to reconcile Hamas with Fateh sufficiently for the two to agree on a joint negotiating position with Israel and on the holding of new Palestinian elections next January.
One of the big issues on the reconciliation agenda has always been how to find a formula whereby Hamas can join the PLO for the first time ever. It is the PLO that will be negotiating the final peace agreement with Israel– if indeed that negotiation ever happens.
Today, PNN reported from Ramallah that Salim Zaanoun, the Fathawi president of the PLO’s “parliament”, the Palestine National Council (PNC), has been in Egypt discussing formulas for bringing Hamas into the PNC. He will next go to Gaza to pursue those discussions.
I am interested by the role that the Egyptian secretary-general of the Arab League, and former Foreign Minister, Amr Moussa is reported as playing in these negotiations. Does this mark a dimunition of the power of the Egyptian intel boss Omar Suleiman, who previously ran them all on his own? I don’t know…
Anyway, it looks as though things are moving in both these negotiation now.
Roughly two or three years too late, I would say… (All that suffering over the years in between!)