Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 53 – Info, analysis, discussion

An exiled Palestinian visits “home”

I’ve been reading the blog entries that Palestinian-American writer and activist Nehad Khader has been posting about her first-time visit back to her grandparents’ homeplaces (here, etc.)
Amazing, heartfelt writing. (HT: Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.)
Nehad writes:

Also, see her post about the Palestinian embroidery exhibition she put on in Philadephia before she left on her trip.
New Jewish immigrants to Israel from around the world are all given– in addition, of course, to instant citizenship, the right to reside in the country endlessly, and generous baskets of social benefits– a set of experiences, carefully stage-managed by the state’s Ministry of Absorption, that is supposed to make them feel as though they are coming “home.”
There is not one iota of stage-management in Nehad’s experiences, or of artifice in her reaction to them.
It is intriguing to me how nowadays, Palestinians with western passports are among the most privileged of Palestinians, being abe to travel much more freely among the many places of Palestinian residence– inside Israel, in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the OPTs, Gulf countries, etc– than most of the Palestinians who still live in the Middle East.
Indeed, once you get to Gaza or the West Bank, the ability of Palestinians residing in those occupied areas to travel freely to visit close relatives in other places of Palestinian dispersal become almost zero.
Nehad was able to go to Syria, where she had spent her early years in the huge Yarmouk refugee camp. She went to Jordan (and of course found relatives there, too)… and now she’s in Israel.
The experience of being a Palestinian refugee today really is very different from what it was in, say, the 1950s. It’s true that Nehad and other Palestinians with western passports are among the luckiest, regarding the ability to travel. But nowadays, even many Palestinians living in Gaza or Lebanon, in the very worst of all the circumstances faced by Palestinians, can keep in some touch with relatives in other places through the internet, Skype, etc.
True, it is still nowhere near the degree of connectedness that people in rich and middle-income countries are coming to take for granted. But it’s a lot more connectedness than Palestinians had with each other in earlier decades… And of course, this has consequences.
One has been to keep a keep rich and textured sense of Palestinian-ness alive in all these places of dispersion. Another has been to make it just about impossible, in this century, to think of “splitting” the Palestinians currently resident in the OPTs from those of their brethren– including yes, in every family there, close family members– who have been forced to stay in the diaspora.
Thus, the rights, claims, and needs of the diaspora Palestinians cannot simply be ignored in the peacemaking, which is what the Israelis have always wanted– and what US diplomacy over the past 16 years essentially aimed at, too.
The Zionists have just about finished with their massive project of “gathering in” their people. The Palestinians’ roughly parallel project has not yet begun to be implemented.

Israel releases nine of 32 Hamas legislators

The Israeli government today released nine of the 32 Hamas-affiliated legislators, elected in June 2006, whom it had been holding since June 2006.
International law completely prohibits the detention of any persons when they’re captured solely to be held as hostages. But the basic criminality of the action– in the case of the captured legislators or any of the other thousands of Palestinians held without charge or trial in Israel’s infamous detention camps– has never for some reason caused western government to stop giving aid and succor to Israel.
The fact that Israel’s capturing of duly elected legislators— along with the numerous other actions Israel took to punish the winners of the 2006 election and the people who had elected them– went completely unpunished by western governments that proclaim a commitment to “democracy” also revealed most of those governments to be complete and unashamed hypocrites when it comes to taking the side of any Israeli government, even when it significantly violates international law.
But now, the release of these nine legislators signals the possibility that this situation of deep illegality on behalf of Israel and its backers in the international community is starting to be unspooled?
Will the release of these legislators be followed by the release of all the other Palestinian legislators– from Hamas and other parties– who are held by Israel without charge or trial, and in often very abusive conditions?
Will it also be followed by concerted international action to lift the quite inhumane siege that Israel has maintained on Gaza for many years, which was tightened significantly after Hamas’s electoral victory and then once again after the failure of Israel’s assault against Gaza last December to topple Hamas from power?
Since Gaza is still, under international law, a territory that’s under Israeli military occupation, Israel has special responsibilities under IHL for the welfare of the Strip’s residents. The fact that it has not only failed to meet those rsponsibilities but has also maintained a very damaging and inhumane policy of collective punishment against the 1.5 million Gazans for the past 43 months is almost certainly a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, that is, a war crime.
Certainly, all governments around the world that claim to uphold “the rule of law” should intervene vigorously to end Israel’s siege of Gaza. The aid convoys, very limited in capacity, that go to Gaza through Egypt or via the sea should be supported not only by a small number of plucky western activists and NGOs but by all governments that claim to support international law.
Does Israel’s release of these Hamas legislators– which may well have been carried out in response to pressure from western governments– signal that these governments are about to get tougher in their insistence on Israel’s compliance with international law in other ways, too?
I certainly hope so. The deliberately pursued suffocation and squeezing of Gaza by Israel, under the eyes of the watching world, has been a travesty of any concept of international “justice”. President Obama and his officials have “asked” Israel to lessen the conditions of the siege. Israel has done nothing to respond.
So what’s next?

Why Blair wants Dahlan to retake Gaza?

The Mail Online’s Nick Pisa recently put together a great series of photos of Tony Blair, Middle East envoy extraordinaire (very extraordinaire!) reclining and romping aboard various rich people’s luxury yachts between 2004 and roughly last week.
Pisa wrote,

Tony Blair still has some rich friends. The ex-prime minister was spotted yesterday living it up on board a £150million superyacht as a guest of the world’s fourth richest man…

Blair is, as we know, the person charged by the Quartet with “responsibility” for getting the Palestinian economy up and running. To that end, he and his staff have taken over a whole floor of rooms in the very expensive American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem– even though Blair is only there for roughly six weeks a year…
But of course, with Blair’s penchant for big luxury yachts now well established over the years, he’s going to need somewhere in “Palestine” for his rich friends to come in and pick him up, isn’t he?
Blair’s personal income has been estimated to be above $7 million/year. Average incomes in the OPTs are, I believe, a little lower than that.
Gideon Rachman (to whom goes the HT for the Mail Online story) writes that though there’s been much speculation about Blair becoming the first “President” of the EU, with all the anti-materialist pieties he’s spouting these days it looks more as if he’s running for Pope.
Rachman comments on these pieties:

I would take it all a bit more seriously if Blair hadn’t spent part of the summer as a guest on “Rising Sun”, a vast yacht, owned by Larry Ellison, the Californian billionaire.

Afghanistan debate: The missing international ingredient

With amazing rapidity, an extremely serious debate has erupted in Washington over whether the war in distant Afghanistan can be won, and therefore whether it is worth continuing to try to fight it. The apparent skulduggery that surrounded the recent elections certainly contributed to that, by making it suddenly seem even more improbable that a ‘nation-building’ program could be successfully completed any time in the foreseeable future.
Yesterday, the weighty paleo-conservative commentator George Will weighed in, arguing in the WaPo that it’s “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan”
Yesterday, too, the NYT editorial board hosted an entire discussion on the topic of “Is It Time to Negotiate With the Taliban?” The answer, from just about all their eight expert contributors, was “Yes”.
This, while the commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal is on his way to Washington where he is widely expected to argue for an increased commitment of US troops to the the theater, and pursuit of an accelerated campaign of counter-insurgency/nation-building there.
Today, the WaPo’s David Ignatius waded into the debate, arguing for a “Middle Way” between shooting and talking in Afghanistan.
Also today, the WaPo hosted a forum of six outside contributors to reply to George Will. All except Andrew Bacevich were arguing for continued, and if necessary increased, US military engagement.
Just about everywhere else in the US public discourse, this issue is now being just as hotly debated… But nearly all these discussions fail to mention one factor that is vital both to the hope of Afghanistan’s people ever regaining some amount of internal stability and to the hope of the US forces avoiding a complete catastrophe there: That is, the fact that there are numerous other, significant but non-western, states that have strong interests in Afghanistan and a significant ability to intervene helpfully there in a number of ways.
The way most of the discussion here in the US is being conducted you’d think the whole “story” about Afghanistan consists of an outsize US super-hero trying to deal with a large number of very complicated (and generally rather ungrateful and un-cooperative) Afghan actors, with some bit parts being played by NATO allies and the still-troublesome government of Pakistan.
But if we admit– as I think we must– that the US is ways over-stretched in Afghanistan and needs to find a way to radically reduce its presence, a question immediately arises as to how to do that. Thinking about that challenge only in the context of “talking to the Taliban” or not talking to them misses a large part of the point.
Three additional questions that immediately arise are:

How

In addressing all these questions the international– that is, beyond-NATO and beyond-Pakistan international– context of the whole situation in the country becomes key.
Afghanistan sits in a central Asian arena in which China, Russia, and Iran all have strong interests. Ways stronger and more compelling, indeed, than the interests the US claims to be pursuing in the country!
But thus far, Washington has worked to sideline the degree of influence that any of these actors can have on political-strategic decisionmaking in and regarding Afghanistan. That prerogative has been reserved for– of all bodies!– the explicitly western, and anti-Russian military alliance, NATO.
This, even though over recent months NATO has become a lot more reliant on Russian transit rights for the very survival of its troop presence in Afghanistan. (As I’ve written quite a lot about here over the past couple of years.)
Over years past as I wrote a lot about what was needed for the US to be able to undertake a withdrawal from Iraq that was speedy, total, and generous, I always– like the 2006 Iraq Study Group– stressed the advantage of the US drawing all of Iraq’s neighbors into a serious negotiation of the post-withdrawal “rules of the game”; and I argued, too, that the UN had a special ability to convene and lead such a negotiation.
As it happened, in Iraq, as the Bush administration came last year to accept the need for a full US withdrawal it managed to do so with only minimal coordination from those of Iraq’s neighbors that it still hoped to marginalize and oppose (mainly Iran.) But of course, the failure to have an effective all-neighbors forum for Iraq continues to hamper Iraq– though not so much so, the US, as it withdraws.
In Afghanistan, the geostrategic situation that US forces face if and when they contemplate a withdrawal is significantly different. In Afghanistan, the significant neighbors include two of the world’s veto-wielding “big powers”. Also, in Afghanistan, the sheer logistics of a withdrawal are very much more complex than in Iraq. There’s no handy and compliant neighboring staging post such as those provided near Iraq by Kuwait, Jordan, and Turkey… And in case anyone hadn’t noticed this, the terrain within and around Afghanistan is mighty hard to traverse or operate within!
So even just in organizing the logistics of any significant US/NATO drawdown from Afghanistan– let alone the politics and diplomacy of how to do that– the US will be forced to coordinate closely with the country’s “neighbors” (broadly defined). And those will include Russia, China, and Iran.
How will that go? Who knows? What seems clear to me is that, for now, many in the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and in Putin’s inner circles in Moscow must be relatively happy to see NATO bashing its had against a brick wall inside Afghanistan– degrading its capabilities by the day as it does so, while also acting as an ever-increasing drag on the US national budget.
So they might not be in any big hurry to help Washington out… On the other hand, since the main effect of US actions thus far inside Afghanistan has been to allow the Talibs to reconstitute, and since the Talibs pose a much more present threat to China and Russia (and also to Iran) than they do to the US, at some point I imagine these powers may well become happy to step in and help the US exit from the quagmire.
For a price.
Anyway, in all of this, the UN will play an increasingly important role. It is still, after all, the main place where inter-big-power business gets done in the world.

State-building: Palestine

Conventional wisdom here in DC has it that the Palestinians somehow need to “prove” they’re capable of running a state before they’re allowed to have one….
Never mind that the Palestinians are an extremely– one might even say, obsessively– well-educated bunch of people… Never mind that during the 1950s and 1960s, the proto-state administrations that were built all up and down the Arab coast of the Gulf were all established overwhelmingly by Palestinians… Never mind that in Palestine, the PA had built up one entire set of administrative institutions in the West Bank and Gaza, some of which functioned pretty well under the circumstances of occupation– but they were then all smashed to smithereens in the paroxysm of destructive vengeance unleashed by Ariel Sharon in 2002…
No, never mind all that history. The CW here in Washington DC says that the Palestinians, yet again, have to “prove” their capabilities before they can be allowed to have a state. (As if their backwardness in administrative affairs was the major impediment to their gaining their independence!)
And Salam Fayyad is earnestly setting out to supply the required proof to the Americans on this score… and doing this by trying to build (yet again) the institutions of a Palestinian proto-state in, thus far, just the occupied West Bank.
Fayyad’s whole approach has now been very forcefully challenged by the veteran Palestinian social activist Dr Mustafa Barghouthi.
Barghouthi argues for a hard-hitting program of action for national liberation built around these four basic pillars:

On the crucial issue of resistance, he writes:

In all its forms, resistance is an internationally sanctioned right of the Palestinian people. Under this strategy, however, it must resume a peaceful, mass grassroots character that will serve to revive the culture of collective activism among all sectors of the Palestinian people and, hence, to keep the struggle from becoming the preserve or monopoly of small cliques and to promote its growing impetus and momentum.

Anyway, go read the whole of his program there.
Dr. Mustafa has considerably more legitimacy and political credibility in Palestinian society than Fayyad. It’s based on the lengthy, dangerous, and visionary work he has pursued since the early 1980s to organize Palestinians throughout the OPTs in the crucial field of grassroots medical relief. Because of his strong and sustained emphasis on grassroots self-organization and self-empowerment he has always been 100 times more “political” than Fayyad. (Hence his strong and now long-sustained call for national unity; a topic on which, at the political level, Fayyad is strangely silent.)
At the end of the article, Barghouthi makes some points about a one-state versus two-state solution that seem a little unclearly written. Maybe I’ll write him and ask for some clarifications.
But the four-point program looks excellent.

Naomi Klein and her Hebrew-language publisher discuss BDS

… in this excellent interview, from Cecilie Surasky of Jewish Voices for Peace.
The words of Klein’s publisher, Yael Lerer– a Jewish Israeli– are particularly hard-hitting. She says,

I don’t see how this future can be achieved without international pressure

Big appreciation to all three of these people. Who are all, as it happens, female.
By the way, they also deal really well with the principal anti-BDS arguments made by Uri Avnery– namely that people are not calling for a boycott of North Korea or Burma, so why Israel; and that that a boycott will only force Israelis into a defensive and even more intransigent crouch.

Fayyad, Maliki, the Americans

Over the weekend I finished reading the 37-page program that Salam Fayyad, the PM in the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority (PA) produced for the new, and still western-funded ‘government’ that he heads in Ramallah.
Readers can find the text of the program here. (HT: John Knight.)
It is a typical technocrat’s document– lengthy, larded with Jargon-of-the-Month formulations, and resembling nothing so much as the overly wordy “workplans” that people applying for grants from western funding organizations are required to submit to them. (Wonder why?) Much of it even sounds very admirable: lots of emphasis on things like “accountability” and “good governance” and other equally worthy goals.
But to note only that is to completely miss the point of this document, I think. Despite the strong emphasis on technocracy, this is an intensely political document. Indeed, the skirting of the most evident political issues facing the Palestinian people is, in a sense, the main point of this document. It embodies the politics of “anti-politics”; that is, it aims to provide an alternative to the division between Fateh and Hamas that currently– along with, of course, Israel’s continued massive campaign against all manifestations of Palestinian rights or interests– plagues the Palestinian people.
That is what we should expect, perhaps, of Fayyad, a personally decent man who made the choice to be parachuted into Ramallah as, essentially, the tool of the Americans back in 2005.
He’s been playing a complicated game ever since. He is not a man with a history in any branch of the extremely lengthy and hard-fought campaign of resistance to Israeli occupation. He comes without his own political network, and has to rely almost completely on the US-mobilized funding that comes to him as PM of the PA in order to try to build support from Palestinians.
In the 2006 parliamentary elections, he and Hanan Ashrawi were the only two people elected to the parliament from the list that they’d formed. Hamas won those elections handily, of course. Fayyad and all other non-Hamas people were warned strongly away from participating in the Hamas-backed government. However, in the National Unity Government formed in March 2007, he was named Finance Minister– indicating, presumably, that he had the confidence of both Fateh and Hamas at that time.
But in June 2007, when the US-backed forces of Fateh/Contra leader Dahlan launched the disastrous coup that broke up the NUG, Fayyad was the US-backed figure who was thereafter installed in Ramallah as ‘Prime Minister’, in a completely unconstitutional way.
So for him now to speak of “accountability” and “good governance”, etc is inherently non-credible.
He has, however, been trying to pull off what we might call the “Nuri al-Maliki move”. Over in Iraq, Maliki was installed as Prime Minister as a result of elections administered by the occupying US military and according to constitutional “rules” that had been largely dictated by the US occupation. Nonetheless, Maliki has tried to carve out a space for independent Iraqi decisionmaking that is not totally dominated by Washington; and he has had some success in that, I think.
Most notably, during the tough negotiations of last fall over the SOFA agreement long demanded by the Americans, Maliki succeeded in transforming the SOFA into a Withdrawal Agreement; and he got written into it a date certain for the complete withdrawal of all US forces from the country, which the Bushites had never wanted.
So the first question has to be: Is Maliki’s success in that regard replicable by Fayyad (or anyone else) in Palestine?
There are structural differences, to be sure. The US, when it intervenes in Palestinian politics, does so not as the direct occupying power– as it has done in Iraq– but as a sort of proxy for the Israeli occupying power. The consequence of this is that regardless of what Keith Dayton or other Americans who work very closely with Fayyad might want to do, actually the IOF is a far bigger presence. And though the Americans might want to see Fayyad “succeed” as a PM, there’s a large chunk of opinion in the Israeli political elite that really does not want to see any Palestinian administration “succeed” anywhere west of the River Jordan, whether in Ramallah or Gaza City.
That’s one big difference.
Another difference that stems from the fact that in Palestine the US is really a proxy for the real occupier whereas in Iraq it was the real occupier is that in Iraq, the dynamics of the situation got around to the place where even the people in the Bush administration ultimately judged that it was in the US’s interest to withdraw from the damaging and expensive confrontation in Iraq, and therefore from Iraq itself. So they had, if you like, an increasingly strong incentive to see Maliki (or someone!) succeed in building something of a sustainable indigenous governing capacity there.
In Palestine, however, the US is taking no losses in blood or even, in any direct way, treasure, from the continuation of the occupation. Hey, they and the Israelis even got the Europeans to pick up most of the tab for running the apparently endless occupation! (And the occupying army’s own forces, meanwhile, are suffering almost no casualties there.)
But this indicates that the US has correspondingly less strong of an interest in “withdrawing” from its role in Palestine, and therefore less of a motivation for seeing a sustainable indigenous government “succeed”. It becomes more optional for them, if you like.
Though in the broader regional and international context, I would say that the American people’s interest in seeing a fair and sustainable resolution of the Palestine Question is quite compelling. But that’s a broader argument; and maybe it doesn’t hit the decisionmakers in the Obama White House with quite the same urgency as the need to stanch the erosion of US blood and treasure in Iraq but getting the heck out of the country has done to them, and even before them, the Bushies.
So, can Fayyad pull off the “Nuri al-Maliki move”?
Other factors, I think, intervene as well. Maliki had two distinct advantages when it came to arm-wrestling with the Americans who’d installed him. (And we should remember that he wasn’t even their first choice. He was imposed on them back in early 2006 by a situation in which the Americans already demonstrated their inability to control all the key levers of political power inside Iraq.)
The first of his advantages has been the parliament there. despite all the evident problems in the electotal system, nonetheless the parliamentarians developed some real capability as a force overseeing some of the key actions and initiatives of the Maliki government. As I understand it, it was largely the very nationalist-minded pressure from the parliamentarians that stiffened Maliki’s spine on the SOFA issue and resulted in him winning the Withdrawal Agreement.
Fayyad, for obvious reasons, looks unlikely to be able to rely on allies in parliament to act as a counter-weight to US pressure.
And the second of Maliki’s “advantages” in his relationship with his country’s occupiers– I put that word in scare-quotes, advisedly– has been the strong influence that Iran won inside the Iraqi political system from the very moment that the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein. I am not privy to the extent to which Maliki (like most other figures inside the current Iraqi political firmament) has become reliant on Iranian help in, often, even the most basic aspects of personal and political survival. But the fact that the Iranians have been able to sustain webs of significant influence throughout just about all the different parts of the reconstituted Iraqi forces means that most Iraqi pols today are not completely reliant on the Americans for their physical survival. Which of course, has made it easier for them to “stand up to” the Americans on key issues like the WA.
Iran’s influence deep within Iraq’s security structures is, however, a very mixed “blessing” for many Iraqis: one that will most likely cause deep problems within the country for many years to come.
Fayyad, for his part, has no such “counter” to any pressures the Americans and Israelis might put on him…

Turkish FM mediating between Iraq and Syria

As long-time JWN readers are aware, I have always been worried about the prospect that as the US military decreases its presence in Iraq, many of the country’s neighbors would rush in to fill the resulting security vacuum and the contest between them could escalate in many unpredictable ways. That was why I strongly urged– from long before the Iraq Study Group endorsed this necessary recommendation– that as the US withdraws either Washington or, preferably, the UN should convene a high-level meeting of Iraq, the US, and all Iraq’s neighbors to work out a code of conduct for the behaviors of all parties with regard to Iraq; and preferably also establish a UN-based monitoring and incident-resolution mechanism to follow up on compliance with those agreements.
The US government hasn’t done that, though the troop withdrawal is already well underway and some serious tensions have already been emerging. And neither has the UN done much to put into place such a plan.
I guess for both the US and the UN, the ‘sensitivity’ of including Iran in any such arrangement seems like a real obstacle. (I wish, obviously that the UN had a lot more independence from US tutelage at this point.)
But now, Turkey seems to be stepping into the conflict-reduction role in a significant way. Today, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is scheduled to pay consecutive visits to Iraq and Syria to try to resolve the conflict that’s erupted since the Iraqi government accused Syria of harboring the opposition leaders who, Baghdad alleges, orchestrated the bombings of various Iraqi ministries on August 19 that killed 95 and wounded more than 600, many of them ministry employees.
Davutoğlu became foreign minister only a couple of months ago. But before that, as a much respected foreign-policy intellectual, he was a special adviser to Turkish PM Rejep Tayyip Erdoğan. In that role, he spearheaded a fascinating– though ultimately unsuccessful– series of “proximity talks” between Syria and Ehud Olmert’s government in Israel.
The idea that Turkey may be in a position to help Iraq and its six neighbors keep tensions among them to a minimum as US power recedes may seem counter-intuitive, since for a couple of generations many Iraqis, Syrians, and other Arabs retained a degree of remembered resentment against Turkey over the oppressive role the Ottoman Empire played against ethnic-Arab nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, I was surprised during my last few visits to Syria to discover the degree to which Syrians in and close to government– and Syrians in general– seem to have “gotten over” those sensitivities.
Indeed, many Syrians I’ve spoken to in the past couple of years speak of Turkey as something of a current role model for them. Many Syrians look at the success that Turkey has had in dealing with challenges like economic development, finding an internal balance between the forces of secularism and Islamism, finding an external balance between ‘east’ and ‘west’, the challenges posed by Kurds and other national minorities– and they wish they could emulate them.
The same is true, I think, of many other Arabs.
This doesn’t mean that, among Iraq and all of its neighbors, there are NO remaining sensitivities regarding Turkey’s role in the region. But it does mean there is considerably more scope for a leading Turkish role in reducing the kinds of tensions I’m worried about in the whole peri-Iraq theater than many people (self included) would have thought possible even five or ten years ago.
By the way, the watchword of the academic work Davutoğlu has done on Turkey’s foreign policy is that it should be aimed not just at “zero problems with the neighbors”, but also at intense engagement with the neighbors. (And yes, that includes Armenia, where the Erdogan government has taken some notable steps towards reducing earlier tensions.)
You can read two of my recent evaluations of Turkey’s new regional role here and here.
Turkey now has good relations with Iraq and all of its neighbors– including Iran– as well as with the US, which will continue to be a power in the region even as it departs. Turkey is, of course, a full member of NATO and retains numerous other very good links with the west.
I do wish, though, the Ban Ki-Moon and the weight of UN legitimacy was also a lot more involved in this peri-Iraq tension reduction effort.

BDS: Avnery’s dangerous argumentation

I have a lot of respect for the veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery. The first time I met him was in the PLO headquarters in Tunis in the late 1980s– a place that was anathema to both of our governments, but to his a lot more than to mine. (Indeed, for him as an Israeli it was actually illegal to meet with PLO people then.)
However, the argument he published yesterday that was against the burgeoning BDS movement was had some deeply flawed and dangerous arguments in it.
Over at Mondoweiss, Anees of Jerusalem has highlighted one serious (and apparently very racist) flaw in Avnery’s argument. His criticism was of these statements:

Blacks in South Africa are very different from the Israelis, and from the Palestinians, too. The collapse of the oppressive racist regime did not lead to a bloodbath, as could have been predicted, but on the contrary: to the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee.

Actually, Avnery’s argument there is not only racist– with the clear implication that the Palestinians (“unlike the blacks of South Africa”) are indeed intent on a bloodbath; but also illogical.
Because yes, it is true that a “bloodbath” was what was widely predicted in South Africa after the fall of the apartheid regime– but western liberals went along with the sanctions campaign notwithstanding that.
… And then, it didn’t happen. So what good are the predictions of western liberals in regard to South Africa or Palestine, anyway??
Anyway, Anees was right to call Avnery on the racism of his argument there.
I want to call Avnery on a couple of other aspects of his argument.
First, he plays a deliberately deceptive numbers game.
He writes,

No, regarding Israel and Palestinians the situation is not “the very opposite” of what it was in South Africa. There are around six million Jews in Israel (and maybe 99.9% of them oppose the BDS campaign; or maybe fewer than that.) But there are some 5.5 million ethnic Palestinians in the area under Israeli control– and an additional five million or more Palestinians forced to live in exile from homeland.
Avnery just wipes the Palestinian exiles from his tally-board of political relevance as if they have no legitimate say in anything!
Well, that is one huge problem with his numbers game.
Don’t you think it would be important to Avnery as a peace activist that Palestinians moldering in refugee camps in Lebanon or elsewhere might finally be able to say, “the world is with us”?
But apparently, he doesn’t care.
Another problem with his argument comes where he tries to say that the Israelis have nothing in common with the Afrikaners– because only the Israelis suffered the Holocaust, and besides, many Afrikaners were pro-Hitler.
But guess what. The Afrikaners were also acting from a very deep sense of past community hurt and community vulnerability. They were the people for whom the whole concept of “concentration camps” had been invented in the first place, for goodness sake!
And they too, like many Jewish ethnonationalists in Israel, had a profound sense of having been “called” by their G-d to create their settler state in Africa.
So the two peoples have many similarities in their core culture. But one big difference is that the Israelis have not thrown up their “Frederik De Klerk” figure yet: a national leader who over time came to recognize the equal humanity and equal rights of the long-despised “other.”
What can all of us do to help persuade Jewish israeli society to generate its own De Klerk?
Wide-reaching BDS may indeed be one of the best ways.
But at a very minimum, in the first instance, all those governments in the west that espouse the cause of human equality and human freedoms should absolutely stop the generous and quite unconditional subsidies they continue to give to the Israeli state and business community.
See also the close critique of Avnery’s argument by the South African Ran Greenstein, that Avnery’s own organization was good enough to publish, here.
… Regarding Avnery, this is sadly not the first time I’ve had to remark on the limits of this veteran campaigner’s vision. Earlier this month, I wrote about the plea he had written to his fellow veteran in the peace movement Dov Yermiya, urging Yermiya not to go ahead with his planned renunciation of Zionism as a guiding philosophy.

Neve Gordon and BDS: Update

Most JWN readers are probably well aware of the firestorm of controversy that erupted after Neve Gordon, the chair of the Politics Department at Israel’s Ben Gurion University published this op-ed in the L.A. Times August 20, in which he argued that if a two-state outcome in Israel/Palestine is to be won then outsiders must engage in a widespread campaign of Bycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) to this end.
After he published that, BGU president Rivka Carmi circulated a letter saying, among other things,

“…This kind of Israel-bashing detracts from the wonderful work that is being done at BGU and at all Israeli universities. Academics who entertain such resentment towards their country are welcome to consider another professional and personal home.”

The thinly veiled threat in her letter then aroused much further condemnation from supporters of academic freedom around the world.
Now, Sydney Levy has an excellent update at Muzzlewatch about all the reactions to the Neve Gordon affair.
Gordon has received some good support from fellow-academics at BGU and around the world. Levy tells us that Prof. Uri Ram, that head of BGU Sociology and Anthropology Department, has stated that,

Should he be fired as head of the Political Science department due to his political opinions I shall call on all department heads in the University to resign as well, in support of Gordon and in protest of the violation of his rights, civil freedom and the University establishment in Israel.”

It is certainly true that BGU has for many years hosted a faculty that is far more open-minded in its views than the faculties at most of Israel’s heavily state-controlled universities. Check out the list of their “Notable faculty members” here.
It includes such voices of conscience as Oren Yiftachel and Danny Rubinstein.
I should add that during the many years when Benny Morris was quite unable to get a job in the history department of any other university in Israel because of the work he had done uncovering Israel’s expulsionist campaigns against the Palestinians in the war of 1947-48, it was finally BGU that offered him a position. (His formerly leftist political views, as we know, later swung radically to the right.)
Yiftachel, Rubinstein, and (the earlier version of) Morris all found a welcome at BGU so long as it was run by the social-justice-minded economist Avishay Braverman. Bt a couple of years ago he left BGU to run for election near the top of the Labour Party’s list. Now he is one of the handful of leading Labourites who have followed Ehud Barak into the Netanyahu government.
Meanwhile, BGU’s presidency was taken over by Rivka Carmi, a physician. Her commitment to academic freedom seems extremely thin– especially compared with Braverman’s.