Saturday reading: Two plans for the West Bank

One of the docs I’m reading today is the full text of the “Fayyad Plan”, aka the Program of the Thirteenth PA Government. If you recall that the PA was formed in 1994 to be the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority, you can see how far behind the curve the US-led peace process has fallen…
Fayyad’s plan is not yet online as far as I can see. But I’ll let y’all know as soon as it is.
The second doc I’m reading today is certainly online. It’s a series of blog posts on the Haaretz website by a woman from San Mateo, California called Allison Speiser.
Her most recent post, on August 20, was titled “Making Aliyah to the West Bank: Touchdown!”
“Making Aliyah” is the “cute” way that Zionists and their supporters refer to the act of emigrating from other countries to Israel. Under Israeli law, any Jewish person who does so gets instant citizenship and a package of “absorption” benefits. Palestinian indigenes expelled from the country 61 years ago are still not, however, allowed to return to their homes there.
Other notable posts from Speiser this year have included these:

She seems like an interesting person. She apparently gave the limit of $2,300 to Obama’s election campaign last year. She refers repeatedly to “the West Bank”, instead of saying “Judea and Samaria/ Yehudah ve Shomron” as the hardline Israeli ethnonationalists do.
In her latest post, she writes,

    When you watch the steady stream of cars and buses in each direction, it is hard to imagine that anyone would think of this area as anything other than just another part of Israel – and yet there are clear signs that we are in a separate place. The West Bank.
    I still think about the signs, posters and graffiti that I saw in our first few days here. There is graffiti stating ‘Kahane was right’, ‘Gush Katif – we won’t forget and we won’t forgive’ and other notations indicating the right-wing leanings of the residents here. Bumper stickers tell a similar tale. There were also printed posters telling America to mind its own business and some hardline statements toward Obama and his recent demands on Israel. Seeing these posters as a brand new olah from America gave me mixed feelings – or perhaps just a weird feeling.

There is something interesting going on in her mind. She “saw” those apparently disturbing signs of her new neighbors’ rightwing views “in our first few days here”– but apparently she doesn’t still “see” them today? Does she perhaps, actually physically “see” them but not any longer pay them any heed? Has their presence become somehow normalized for her?
Then this:

    I wonder how I will deal with the big picture questions my kids will ask about bombs, rockets and what the green line is all about. I wonder how I will explain to them why some people use the term “Occupied Territory.” I wonder how I will explain to my kids what a “Palestinian” is.
    I feel strongly that this land is ours, that we have every right to live here and that we must do everything possible to hold on to this land. I want my kids to feel the same way I do, and to ascribe to the same beliefs as I do – doesn’t every parent? But I also feel that it’s important to teach all sides of the story so that people learn to look at an issue from all angles.

Oh my, look at those quotes around the “Palestinian”, and the “occupied territory.” But at least, she seems to be trying to keep something of the liberal values she apparently grew up with in California.
In the March post, she gave us a possible clue as to why– of all the possible places a new immigrant to Israel could choose to go and live– she (and I assume also her husband, though he seems oddly absent from her descriptions of the decision-making) decided to go and live in a West Bank settlement.
The post starts with an evocation of the highly stage-managed episode in late summer 2005 when the Sharon government evacuated the (yes, always quite illegal) Jewish settlements from Gaza…
Then, she writes,

    Although it was not me sitting on the roof then, and it was not me being led away, it’s a scenario that is not all that hard to imagine in my life. And I do imagine it. This summer, we will move to Israel. In all likelihood, we will move to a small yishuv (town) in the Shomron (northern West Bank) outside of the security fence still being built. We will be moving outside of the major blocs that many agree will be part of any future pull out.
    In 1967, Israel was viciously attacked by Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria also contributed in some way to the offensive. At the end of the war, Israel had gained control of several key pieces of land including the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. They attacked Israel, Israel won the war and won control of land. Borders are redrawn at the end of many, many wars. Anywhere else in the world, and that would be the end of the story. But not in Israel.
    The status of the land often referred to as “occupied territory” is complicated, lacks a simple solution that would satisfy all sides and is beyond the scope of this post. To that end I encourage everyone to do their homework, become informed members of the conversation. I do plan on making my home on land that I feel should belong to Israel, but I will also abide by any final decision made by the Israeli government. While the debate rages on, I’ll continue to protest, demonstrate, vote and argue. I hope that the government will see things my way and keep the land. But at the end of the day, I know its also important for us to be strong as one people and move forward as one people. So if that day in August ever does come, I’ll sit peacefully on top of my roof, make sure that my point was heard… and then wait for them to take me away.

So it strikes me her decision to migrate directly from San Mateo, California to a settlement in the West Bank may well have been motivated by financial considerations, more than conviction.
By going to this settlement, she becomes assured of: (a) higher social benefits and lower housing costs for herself and her family than if they’d moved to someplace inside Israel, and (b) a good prospect that, as part of the eventual settlement with the Palestinians, they will get a handsome “relocation” pay-off from the government– and financially underwritten no doubt, then as always, by Mr. & Ms. US taxpayer.
By the way, the comments under that March blog post are pretty interesting.

Feeling Jewish hate in Jerusalem’s Silwan

Richard Silverstein had a chillingly informative post on his blog this week that contained an English translation of a short piece Israeli journo Meron Rapoport wrote about a recent visit to the large Jewish settlement being established in the heart of the ancient Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, in East Jerusalem.
(Thanks for posting that, Richard.)
Rapoport wrote,

    There were three of us – Ilan the director, Michael the cameraman, and me, the interviewee. We were making a film that explores the overt institutional discrimination against this East Jerusalem neighbourhood’s Palestinian residents…
    Even before we manage to position our camera, a group of religious girls comes up the path (we could tell they were religious by their skirts). They were around eight to ten years old, smug and beautiful chatterboxes. One of them slowed down beside us. “Film me”, she said amiably. “What would you like to tell us”, we asked. “I want to say that Jerusalem is a city that belongs to us, the Jews”, she said while walking – “it’s just a shame there are Arabs here. The Messiah will only come when there’s not even a single Arab left here”. She walked on. The girls giggled and sauntered along with her.
    …[T]wo young women came up the path. They are seventeen or eighteen years old. Secular, evidently not local residents. One of them stood in front of the camera. “Take my picture”, she fawned. “Do you want to be interviewed”, we asked her. “Yes”, she said. She’s from Gan Yavneh, came to visit Jerusalem, the City of David, she said. “Why the City of David in particular”, we asked. “Because this is where David was a king, this is a very important location for the Jewish people. It’s just a shame there are Arabs here. But soon all the Arabs will die, God willing, and Jerusalem will be ours alone”. She walked on.
    Two minutes went by. An Orthodox family came up the path. The husband, dressed in black, asked Ilan the director: “say, do both Arabs and Jews live in this neighbourhood?” “Both Palestinians and Jews”, Ilan replied, “but the majority is Palestinian”. “That’s temporary”, the Orthodox man allayed his concerns; soon there will be no Arabs left here.
    I look at Ilan and Michael. Barely a quarter of an hour had passed since we arrived; we had not interrogated anyone about their attitude to Arabs, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or about the future of Jerusalem. We just stood in the middle of the street. Like pylons. The hatred poured on in our direction, like a river to the ocean. Freely, naturally.

The piece was originally published in Hebrew, here. The translation was by Keren Rubinstein.
I think it was important that Rapoport noted that he and his colleagues hadn’t even started asking their questions before “The hatred poured on in our direction, like a river to the ocean… ”
As Richard wrote in his blog post, Rapoport’s piece looks like a short prose equivalent of the two “Feel the Hate” videos that Max Blumenthal shot in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv earlier this summer.
This kind of blind inter-group hatred is tragic, wherever it occurs: a symptom of a very deep spiritual wounding.
But it is also particularly dangerous when it is promulgated amongst– and comes to be embraced by– a group of people who have guns and all the other appurtenances of state power to back them up and are capable of acting on their hate-fueled fantasies.
Much has been said about the role of “incitement” in stoking the antipathy that many Palestinians have for the Israelis. (The fact that Israel has been maintaining a belligerent, intrusive, and land-grabbing military occupation over East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and Gaza for 42 years now is also, of course, relevant to Palestinians’ feelings.)
But how about the role of “incitement” in helping form the views of these Jewish Israelis? Where did they get them from?
In particular, where did the youngsters get their views from?
Definitely worth investigating.
I can believe that some of this hatred arose from the horror and tragedy of past Palestinian actions against Israeli civilians. (But we can only allow that to be a factor inasmuch as we allow the much greater horrors and tragedies that Israel has visited upon Palestinians also to be factor, for them.)
But is there no incitement by politicians, educators, and other community leaders involved in this generation of Israeli hatred? Of course there has been incitement.

Obama team needs to align its rhetoric NOW

In the pronouncements he made at the very beginning of his presidency, Obama said– quite correctly– that the United States has its own strong interest in seeing the speedy conclusion of a fair and durable Palestinian-Israeli peace.
But in yesterday’s press briefing, Assistant Sec. of State P.J. Crowley said the following:

    Our objective is to get them vested in formal negotiations. And in those formal negotiations, we will tackle the hard issues that we know exist, and get not only to the finish line, but get across the finish line.
    Ultimately, this is not a process by which the United States will impose conditions on Israel, on the Palestinian Authority, on other countries. This is – ultimately, the judgment as to both getting to negotiations and getting to a successful conclusion is something that the parties will have to make. We, the United States, are prepared to help them.

On the face of it, this looks just like the characterization of the US role as nothing more than that of a “facilitator” that lay at the core of the failures of both the Clinton administration and the GWB administration to secure the Final Peace Agreement between Israel and Palestine.
If the US just “facilitates” the mediation– while continuing to give Israel unparalleled assistance in the financial, security, and political spheres– that adds up to nothing more than being complicit in Israel’s continued grave violations of international law in the occupied territories. US aid to Israel needs to be made tightly conditional on Israel complying with the demands of international law and of US diplomacy.
Of course, Crowley has spent just about all of his career in the State Department in a situation where mouthing these kinds of things was what was required if an employee there wanted to have any chance of promotion. So perhaps it’s not surprising he’s still mouthing them.
Haaretz’s Natasha Mozgovaya reported that the White House “had nothing to add” to Crowley’s comments.
So many people who should be paying attention are on vacation these days!
The Obama administration will certainly not succeed in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy if it sticks to the “facilitator” role. Crowley and everyone else who speaks for it needs to start quietly but consistently reassuring Americans and everyone else that the administration will be firmly pursuing our own country’s undoubted interest in this matter, including through the considered use of all the instruments of policy at its command.

Eyal Weizman’s “Hollow Land”– Read it!

I’ve been reading a most amazing book: Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, by the Israeli architect and social activist Eyal Weizman. (He is on the board of the excellent human rights organization B’tselem.)
This book is so much more than a work of dry architecture criticism! It is a deeply engaged, thoughtful, and far-reaching exploration of many of the ways in which physical “space” impacts and is impacted by Israel’s ongoing projects of colonial implantation in Palestine.
I started reading it for the excellent chapter it has on the Israelization/Judaization of Jerusalem, and was transfixed by this sentence about planning norms in the city under Israel’s control (p.47): “For the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem, unlike the Jewish residents, hardly anything was ever planned but their departure.”
One of the the things I really like about the book is the illustrations. There are scores of them, most of them in color; and they’re excellently integrated into the text. If you’ve never been to the OPTs and want to gain a vivid idea of the topography of the place– as well as its geography of human control, displacement, and spatiocide– then this book is a great place to start.
He has a whole chapter on checkpoints, which makes horrible, grisly reading, given how massively these locations of control deform the everyday life of all the West Bank’s Palestinians. It’s prefaced by a simple, full-page photo taken within the Allenby Bridge crossing point between the occupied West Bank and Jordan. The photo is taken from over the shoulder of a PA passport-control officer, looking out through the (presumably bullet-proof) glass at a receding tide of glum-faced Palestinian supplicants.
In the caption, photographer Miki Kratsman recalled about taking the shot that,

    When I positioned myself over the shoulder of the Palestinian border policeman to take this photograph, I suddenly heard voices calling behind me: ‘Zooz! Zooz!’ (‘Move! Move!’ in Hebrew). Only then did I realize that behind the mirror [behind her] were the Israelis. When I tried to take a photograph of the mirror I was removed from the terminal by the angry Palestinian policeman.

Weizman has, of course, chapters on the Wall and on settlements. He also has two brilliant chapters on the human topography of the Israeli way of war. One of these is on “innovations” developed by the IOF in urban warfare, and the other on the IOF’s use of Palestinian airspace in war–with a long segment on the use of airborne platforms, usually drones, to undertake targeted killings.
Both these latter chapters are quite extraordinary, since Weizman seems to have gained the confidence of several high-ranking IOF generals sufficiently to get them to talk with great apparent frankness about the way they view the use of both ground-space and airspace in their operations.
In the book’s Postscript he writes:

    Anyone living in, visiting Israel or living under its regime is well aware of the diffusion of the military in all spheres of life. Many officers and soldiers were willing to talk, mostly anonymously, about military operations, tactics, and procedures. Among the most fertile sources for this work were interviews with Shimon Naveh, a retired officer and former director of the military Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI). I thank him for being forthcoming…

Indeed he was. A large portion of the material in the two chapters on urban warfare and air war came from Naveh, who I think retired as a Brigadier-General and from his colleague Aviv Kochavi, who was commander of the Gaza front in 2005-06.
It seems that Weizman was interviewing Naveh and Kochavi at a time when they and much that they had created through OTRI was suddenly becoming somewhat discredited within the Israeli military. It was a tumultuous time in the IDF general staff in 2005-2006. Naveh, Kochavi, and the whole OTRI institution had apparently been operating under the patronage of former chief of staff, accused war criminal, and present vice-premier Moshe Ya’alon. Then, when Dan Halutz took over as chief of staff in 2005 he dismantled OTRI. But I guess that Naveh felt that many of the lessons he had been teaching Israeli officers at OTRI were being taken by them into the war against Lebanon in July-August 2006….
But, as Naveh acknowledged in an October 2006 interview that Weizman cites (p.214), “The war in Lebanon was a failure and I had a great part in it. What I have brought to the IDF has failed.”
Well, it failed in Lebanon where Hizbullah had built up a very smart and disciplined network of defensive formations that were relatively well-armed– at least, well-armed in comparison to the Palestinians of the refugee camps of Jenin and Balata where Naveh and his people had developed their ghastly tactics of control, even if not at all well-armed, in comparison with the IDF.
Weizman gives us numerous examples of the high-end, “structuralist” and “post-modernist” intellectualizing that Naveh brought to his planning of the assaults the IDF launched against several densely populated Palestinian areas in 2002-2006…
One of OTRI’s big innovations was to plan “swarming” raids in which the Israeli soldiers would advance from several points around the perimeter of, say, a refugee camp, towards the middle, all at once– and in many cases moving right through the homes of the camp’s terrified Palestinian residents, while those residents were still cowering wherever they could within whatever was left to them of their homes.
Read his fuller description of what happened in those raids, on p.194.
He concludes with this:

    The unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home has been experienced by civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation…

Then, on p.217, he writes very perceptively about the IOF’s theories regarding where exactly it needs to be:

    One of the primary aims of the new tactics developed by OTRI is to release Israel from the necessity of being phsyically present within Palestinian areas, but still able to maintain control of security. According to Naveh, the IDF’s operational paradigm should seek to replace presence in occupied areas with a capacity to move through them, and produce in them what he called ‘effects’, which are ‘military operations such as aerial attacks or commando raids … that affect the enemy psychologically and organizationally.’ The tactics developed at OTRI and other institutes with IDF command, thus have the aim of providing tools for replacing th older mode of territorial domination with a newer ‘de-territorial’ one, which OTRI called ‘occupation through disappearance.’

Of course, the prime example of this approach is Gaza.
Weizman makes clear, too, that the IOF’s concept of the Wall in the West Bank is that it should be permeable from west to east, even while it is expressly designed to block permeability from east to west. (Another “one-way mirror”, we could say.)
Anyway, I could write a lot more about this excellent book. Just the chapter on the IOF’s use of assassination as a policy of the Israeli state is worth re-reading several times…
In describing in great– and very helpfully illustrated– detail the technical nuts and bolts of how, exactly, Israel has been pursuing its policy of spatiocide, control, and exclusion against the Palestinians, this book makes a fine complement to Jonathan Cook’s Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair.

Settlements– or the final peace?

There has been a lot of chirping and noise in the media about whether Sen. George Mitchell and Israeli PM Netanyahu might be close to some kind of a deal on a cutback in the Israeli settlement construction, and on what terms.
See Haaretz, the Jewish Daily Forward, the Guardian, etc.
Mitchell and Netanyahu met in London yesterday, and issued a terse statement that made clear that the “conversation” between them will continue. (As Laura Rozen also noted.)
But surely, what all of us should focus on and press for at this point is not the settlement freeze but rather the central goal of speedily securing a final peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis (and FPAs between Israel and Syria and Lebanon, respectively, as well; though those can be far easier to nail down.)
Yes, I know that Israel’s continued perpetration of the grave breach of the Geneva Conventions that’s constituted by its implantation of civilian residents into the occupied West Bank is an impediment to the resumption, let alone the completion, of the negotiations for an Israeli-Palestinian FPA.
But let’s keep some perspective. Any FPA will include a detailed map of the final border between Israel and the long-overdue Palestinian state. At that point, Israel can presumably build anything it wants– consonant with not infringing anyone’s rights– in the area that will lie on its side of the border. But on the Palestinian side of the finally delineated border, Israelis should expect that not only will there be no new settlement construction, but beyond that, the settlers already living there will have to either leave or, if they remain, to do so as law-abiding residents under Palestinian sovereignty.
Problem solved.
According to some reports, Obama is planning to have won final agreement on the FPA within the two years. These very condescending– and actually, inaccurate– writers in the Guardian claim that this timetable is “viewed as unrealistic by Middle East analysts.”
Well, I’m a Middle East analyst of lengthy experience, and I don’t view this timetable as unrealistic, at all. Indeed, given the huge volume of preliminary work that’s been done on all the issues connected with the FPA, I think it could be completed within nine months or less– if Obama has the backbone to really push for it.
That would involve him working closely with all the partners in the international community who want to see this peace concluded. In the first instance, all these pro-peace forces should reach and declare their agreement on the basis in international law and diplomacy on the basis of which the peace talks will be convened. This includes, of course, all the relevant resolutions of the United Nations and other provisions of international law.
All relevant parties, including of course both Israelis and Palestinians should then be invited to participate in the peace talks to be convened on the internationally agreed basis. And if one party– Israel, say– should balk at the terms of reference for the resumed peace talks, then the Security Council would be apprised of that and would proceed as it sees fit.
Israel’s unilateral reluctance to take part in a diplomatic effort that is based on well-known norms of international law and practice cannot be allowed to impede the progress of the peace effort.
This is the battle that Obama needs to be prepared to fight, if he really wants to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict– not a shadow “battle” over whether, in the interim before the securing of the FPA, Israel would be “allowed” to build 200 or 300 settler housing units here or there.
Remember that these “battles” over a possible settlement freeze have already eaten up the first seven months of Obama’s current term. And they have achieved little, except perhaps to educate a few additional members of the US Congress about the harsh reality of Israel’s ongoing, quite illegal land-grab in the West Bank.
These “battles” over a settlement freeze are real time wasters! Obama should go for the FPA right now.
And yes, I do fully understand that the participation of every Israeli government since 1967 in the project to implant settlers, illegally, into East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and Golan, has continued without a break through all of those years. And that it even accelerated after the Oslo “interim” accord of 16 years ago.
I understand, too, how deeply the presence of the always pampered settlers and the continued, government-fueled growth in their numbers offends the Palestinians of the OPTs and sows ever deeper despair in their hearts as they watch the territorial base of their longed-for state being eaten up and concreted over before their very eyes.
Danny Rubinstein had a great quote from a Palestinian in 2006: “I look out of the window and see my death getting near.”
I understand, too, how hard it is for Mahmoud Abbas, or Salam Fayyad, or any Palestinian leader to agree to sit down and talk with an Israeli government so long as Israel’s perpetration of these atrocities continues day by day.
But that is why, if the peace talks are to succeed, they need to be held on the clear basis of UN resolutions and international law and practice. Having those principles as the basis for the negotiation will give Palestinians some of the assurance that they need that the international community will be supporting their legitimate rights in the negotiation.
Because we all need to understand, too, that continuing to describe the negotiation only— or even mainly– as a bilateral encounter between Israelis and Palestinians, one in which perhaps the Americans play only a very thin role as “mediators” or “facilitators”, is a sure recipe for diplomatic failure. And the US government, if it acts in such a “facilitating” role, would be fully complicit in all the conflict that would inevitably ensue.
So let’s have international law restored to its rightful position as the basis of this negotiation. Let’s get the negotiation for the FPA started.
And most important of all– 16 years after the briefly flickering “promise” of the Oslo “interim” accord– let’s get the final peace agreement between these two long war-battered peoples concluded.

Syria-Iran tussle over Iraq?

As the US withdrawal from Iraq become an increasingly firm prospect, the tussle is now quite predictably intensifying among the war-shattered country’s neighbors for influence over what remains of it.
One intriguing example of this is the very serious spat that erupted yesterday between largely Iranian-backed Iraqi PM, Nuri al-Maliki, and the government of Syria.
At issue are Maliki’s allegations that the extremely deadly bombings of last Wednesday were the work of Baathist networks whose leaders have been sheltered by Syria, and his demand that Syria hand them over to Iraq for trial. The Syrians deny that the wanted men, Mohammad Younis al-Ahmed and Sattam Farhan, are in their country, and point out that they have roundly condemned the bombings.
This new conflict between Baghdad and Damascus is serious– and its timing seems very surprising. Just last week, Maliki undertook a seemingly very successful and lovey-dovey visit to Damascus. He and his Syrian counterpart agreed to set up a “strategic cooperation council”. They agreed to ” establish a mechanism for high-level military dialogue” and pursue many joint economic opportunities.
And in a joint statement, they said,

    “The fraternal relationship between Syria and Iraq is characterized by strong social and pan-Arab ties, as well as common history, culture and neighboring relations of both countries.”

Well, so much for that “fraternal relationship”, eh?
What seems to have happened is that Baghdad’s relationship with Syria has gotten tangled up in the internal power struggle now going on inside the Iraqi regime over how closely it should align with Iran.
When I was in Damascus in June, several of the close-to-power people we talked with there were at pains to note two significant things about Iraq: (a) that the Syrian government considers stabilizing the regime there to be a high priority for them, and (b) that despite Damascus’s long and close strategic relationship with Iran, Syrians see their goals for Iraq as very different from, and sometimes clearly at odds with, those of Iran.
Damascus’s goal for Iraq, they said, is that Iraq should be stable, Arab, and basically secular. Iran’s goal, they allege, is that Iraq should be Shiite-dominated and basically follow Tehran’s theocratic model of governance regardless of whether this threatened the unity and stability of Iraq as a whole.
Damascus’s policy on all this is also influenced by the degree to which the Syrian government, which is basically secular and depends a lot for its internal stability on its pan-Arab credentials, feels it is getting support from other significant Arab powers, principally Saudi Arabia. When Syrian-Saudi relations are tense– as they were from 2005 until about three months ago– then the Syrian government feels less confident about risking a rupture with Tehran.
Right now, both Syria and Saudi Arabia probably feel they have a shared interest in minimizing the amount of influence Tehran can exercise over the Baghdad government– though I doubt if policymakers in either of those governments feel they can eliminate Iran’s influence completely, in the same way that Saddam Hussein was able to do, through the exercise of great internal repression, so long as he was in power…
That there is a huge internal tussle going on right now in the heart of the Iraqi regime is quite evident– though the actual line-ups and interests at work there are still extremely murky.
Last Wednesday’s bomb blast came six years to the day after the fateful August 19 bomb blast of 2003 that killed UN envoy Sergio Vieira De Mello and inaugurated a new period of considerable post-invasion political instability within the country. This year’s August 19 blast killed more than 100 people and left the finance and foreign ministry buildings pertaining to the Maliki government substantially wrecked.
Shortly after the blasts, the ethnically Kurdish Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, voiced the serious allegation that they were the work of senior security officers within (other parts of) the regime. I find Juan Cole’s logic in claiming that the bombings were aimed at the blocs/parties in control of the targeted ministries to most likely be valid.
The education ministry was also targeted, though not I think as badly hit. It is controlled by a branch of Maliki’s own Daawa Party. The finance ministry has been in the hands of ISCI (whose leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim died in Iran earlier today.) Foreign affairs has, obviously, been largely run and staffed by ethnic Kurds.
I disagree, however, with Juan’s other main conclusion: that the bombings were likely the work of former Baathists, rather than Qaeda-related networks. I also think his allegation “Iraqi Sunni Arab resistance in exile in Syria… are running terrorist cells inside Iraq”, and that these networks were connected withe August 19 bombings, is a serious one that he does nothing whatsoever to authenticate or provide a source for.
But it is, certainly, murky. And all the more so because of the political developments that have been erupting within the coalition that’s been more or less “running” Iraq since 2007, under the different forms of tutelage provided by both the US military and the Iranian theocrats.
On Monday, Raed Jarrar had this fascinating analysis of what’s been going on.
In his view, it was Maliki who took the initiative in breaking his links with what Raed calls the “gang of four”: that is, the two Kurdish parties, ISCI, and the (Sunni) Islamic Accord Party. In his view, Maliki was doing this for these reasons:

    1- Demographic cleansing: Al-Maliki is against partitioning Iraq now. The gang of 4 have been following and promoting a separatist agenda aimed at creating sectarian/ethnic/religious regions that are self governed instead of having a strong central government in Baghdad running the country. The gang of 4 have been supporting the cleansing campaigns directly and indirectly for years. Al-Maliki’s recent attempts to reverse ethnic and sectarian cleansing and remove all walls in Baghdad were faced by fierce criticism by the gang of four. Following last week’s organized attacks in Baghdad, Hoshyar Zibari (a kurdish separatist who happened to be Iraq’s minister of foreign affairs) claimed the reason behind the attacks is Al-Maliki’s plan to remove the partitioning walls!
    2- Central government vs. regional powers: Al-Maliki is now for keeping and even increasing the powers of the central government. Mainly because he’s fighting for his own position’s authorities, and because he’s catering to the Iraqi public opinion that, according to numerous polls, favors a model where the central government runs a united and sovereign nation.
    3- Ending foreign intervention(s): Al-Maliki’s support for a plan where ALL U.S. troops must leave Iraq has been against the gang of four’s interests. They realize that the U.S. is there protecting them and supporting their weak and unpopular regime, and more importantly, the US is fighting their fight against other Iraqis.

(Raed also expressed this important conclusion: “There is a lot of violence coming ahead, but this does not mean in anyway the US occupation should last for an extra day… There is nothing that the US can do to fix the situation other than leaving Iraq completely and stopping all forms of intervention in Iraq’s domestic issues.”)
The WaPo and NYT accounts of the political split inside the Baghdad regime both seem to attribute much more of the momentum for the split to the non-Maliki side than to him… But I tend to respect Raed Jarrar’s feel for intra-Iraqi politics more than I do that of any of those western journos.
And meanwhile, from Syria, came this analysis piece today from the always well-informed Sami Moubayed.
First of all, Moubayed lays out a very well argued refutation of the accusations of Syrian complicity in last week’s bombings. Then he asks,

    why blame Syria? Clearly, from the contradicting remarks of Iraqi ministers, Black Wednesday puts many top officials in very difficult positions. It proves just how weak and divided they are – exposing them before ordinary Iraqis who are furious at the rising death toll and want answers from their elected representatives.
    … Nobody in Iraq wants to know who carried out the Wednesday attacks, because reality would expose dramatic mismanagement of government office. That in turn would drown many parliamentary hopefuls in January’s elections. It therefore suits all officials to cover up for their shortcomings by blaming Syria.
    Nobody in the Iraqi government would dare blame Iran or Saudi Arabia, because of the financial and military clout these countries have in Iraq, along with their respective army of followers. Left standing is Syria, which happens to be Ba’athist and still has Iraqi fugitives on its territory.
    In recalling their ambassador from Damascus, the Iraqis will have to deal with the aftershocks in their relationship with Syria. Iraq needs the Syrians much more than Damascus needs Baghdad. Iraq needs it for economic issues related to the pumping of oil and rebuilding of the war-torn country. It needs it to mediate explosive conflicts between Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds, whose leaders were all one-time residents of Damascus and still have excellent relations with the Syrians.
    Iraq needs it to police the Syrian-Iraqi border, and to continue playing host to over 1 million Iraqi refugees based in Syria since 2003. Iraq needs Damascus to mediate talks between Maliki and both Ba’athists and Sunni tribes. It also needs the Syrians to legitimize the Maliki regime, or whatever succeeds it in January, in the eyes of ordinary Iraqi Sunnis who have historically looked towards Syria for shelter and support.
    When Syria decided to open an embassy in Baghdad in late 2008, this greatly legitimized Maliki in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis, who until then saw him as nothing but a sectarian clown who had nothing but animosity for the Sunni community and wanted to punish it collectively for having produced Saddam Hussein.
    It is one thing when countries like Jordan or Egypt recognize Maliki and legitimize his administration, but a completely different matter when this is done by Syria, a country that remains dominated by a strong brand of Arab nationalism that is appealing to the Iraqi street.
    In as much as the sending of an ambassador was symbolic for the Syrians, recalling him is equally symbolic, and will cause plenty of damage for the prime minister, who needs a broad constituency among Sunnis and Shi’ites in preparation for the elections.

Well, let’s see how this plays out.
I just wish we had some kind of leading body in the international community who could get the leaders of Iraq and all its neighbors into one room together and get them to agree on strict codes for non-intervention, nonviolence, and de-escalation of tensions among them.
But alas, we have no such body. After many years of systematic US downgrading of the role and efficacy of the UN, the UN is just a shadow of what it should be today. And the US itself is clearly incapable of playing a neutral, calming role like this.

Palestinians and Israelis reclaiming a village’s memory

I just got the latest mailing from the great Israeli organization Zochrot, about a tour they organized last Saturday to the ruins of the Palestinian village al-Damun.
This report is written is such a vivid and humanistic way, it really brings to life the pain and other emotions of those ethnic-Palestinian Israelis who took part! (Scroll down to see the photos there, too.)
The report says,

    All those who participated in the tour received a copy of the booklet, “Remembering al-Damun,” prepared especially for the occasion. The refugees requested many additional copies to send to those who were exiled from their land and now live in other countries. Most of them are in Lebanon, and some are in Europe and the United States. “This booklet will reach Canada,” said one of the refugees. In 1948 lived in al-Damun more than 1500 residents. About half of them remained in Israel, and, together with their descendents, live nearby, but they’re forbidden to return and are unable to reclaim their property.

So those are the Palestinians who, along with the courageous Jewish Israelis of Zochrot, were interested in rediscovering and marking the remnants of al-Damun village on Saturday.
The other sons and daughters of the village– the ones from families that crossed the not-distant border with Lebanon during the fighting of 1948– have not been allowed to return anywhere near their ancestral homes in the 61 years since then, and have been living stateless in the ever-insecure refugee camps and gatherings of Lebanon.

What’s up in Iranian Kurdistan?

At the very end of a long news report from Tehran in today’s WaPo came this intriguing tidbit:

    Also on Sunday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard forces killed 26 members of Iranian-Kurdish insurgent groups, said Brig. Gen. Mohammad Pakpour, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
    The groups operate mainly from Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, and Iranian officials often accuse the United States of supporting them with weapons and money.

You would think that at a time of intense American interest in the internal stability of Iran, that news would have gotten a bit more prominence?
Also, of course, because the Iranian province of Kurdistan is where the three US hikers who had crossed the border, apparently by mistake, were arrested by the Iranian border security on July 31.
They have since been interrogated. Obama’s national security adviser, Jim Jones, has described them as innocent and called for their speedy release.
The news of the recent RG crackdown there underlines the risks the three US citizens were taking when they chose to hike in that mountainous region, where the exact national border is at many points not clearly demarcated.
AFP had more details of the latest Revolutionary Guards crackdown in Iranian Kurdistan.
It said that Pakpoor,

    said the operation had delivered a “massive blow” to the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK) and other Kurdish rebel groups.
    He gave no indication of the period in which the killings took place but said that no guards forces were killed in the operation.
    The commander vowed a further “crackdown on any instigators of insecurity directed by foreign or internal counter-revolutionaries” in the region.
    Western Iran, which has a sizeable Kurdish population, has seen deadly fighting in recent years between Iranian security forces and PJAK rebels operating from rear-bases in neighbouring Iraq.
    The group is closely allied with the Turkish Kurdish rebel group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is listed as a terrorist group by Ankara and much of the international community.

The sources referred to in this Wikipedia entry on PJAK, which include Sy Hersh’s November 2006 article on various Bush administration efforts to foment regime change in Iran, also show (Reuters) that one of the earliest steps the Obama administration took after coming into office was to put PJAK onto the US terrorism list.
That was done on February 4, based on a judgment that PJAK is a front organization for the Turkish-Kurdish guerrilla/terrorist group, the PKK, which has been on the list for many years.
Anyway, I wish we could get better coverage in our big media here in the US of developments– whether in Iranian Kurdistan, Iranian Baluchistan, or elsewhere– that might well be linked to the US government’s continuing or past funding of efforts aimed at regime change in Iran.
One final note. With the US designation of PJAK as a terrorist group, I’m assuming that from that point on no US funds would go to PJAK or to any organizations affiliated with it. But how about before February 4? If there was indeed some US funding for PJAK-related bodies before February 4, it is very possible those groups might still have been operating till now on the basis of that funding…
Anyway, all such funding ought immediately to cease as it is a gross interference in the internal political life of another country. In addition, by nearly all the accounts of Iranian democrats, US government funding or the allegations thereof have seriously undermined the success of their efforts.

Hints of Obama’s peace plan–but a notable J. Diehl mistake

Jackson Diehl broke some important news in today’s WaPo:

    As the U.N. General Assembly meets in late September, Obama aims to announce the opening of a new negotiating process between Israelis and Palestinians, along with “confidence-building” steps by Israel, the Palestinian Authority and a number of Arab governments. Though Obama will not offer a specific American “blueprint” for a peace settlement — as a number of Arab governments have urged him to do — he will probably lay out at least a partial vision of the two-state settlement that all sides now say they support, and the course that negotiations should take. More significantly, he intends to set an ambitious timetable for completing the peace deal — something that will please Arabs but may irritate Israel.

This is not new. At Annapolis in November 2007, Pres. Bush also “announce[d] the opening of a new negotiating process between Israelis and Palestinians, along with ‘confidence-building’ steps by Israel, the Palestinian Authority and a number of Arab governments.”
And there, too, Bush, “set an ambitious timetable for completing the peace deal.” It was by the end of his presidency.
Now, here we are, seven months after the expiration of that deadline, and not even one concrete step has been taken along the path back to securing the final peace agreement.
Also, in the nearly two years since Annapolis, Israeli settlement construction has continued apace– quite in defiance of what Bush requested of the Israelis there.
So forgive me if I’m not yet impressed by what Diehl is reporting.
David Ignatius– whose political savvy I trust a bit more than I trust Diehl’s– confirms that there are big peace-diplomacy moves being planned. But he described them a bit differently:

    The Arab-Israeli breakthrough that Obama has been seeking since his first day in office will near the make-or-break point this week as his Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, meets with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. If they can agree on terms for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction, that would open the way for talks on creating a Palestinian state.
    But along the way, there’s politically draining haggling…
    The White House is debating whether Obama should launch his initiative with a declaration of U.S. “parameters” for a final settlement. The Arabs favor such a statement, as do many U.S. experts such as Brzezinski. But Mitchell is said to favor a more gradual approach, in which Israelis and Palestinians would begin negotiations and the United States would intervene later with “bridging” proposals.

So according to Ignatius, the settlement freeze is still in active play as a gateway to be traversed before Obama gets the parties back to the final-status talks. That’s a bad strategy, in my view.
Ignatius is also telling us that the administration is divided on whether to present a US peace plan now, or not.
Diehl ends his piece with some serious– and I would say quite possibly deliberate and ill-intentioned– mistakes of both facts and analysis.
He writes:

    Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who turned down a far-reaching peace proposal by Israel’s previous government less than a year ago, is still insisting he won’t begin talks without a complete settlement freeze. And Hamas, which governs 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, remains implacable in its refusal to recognize Israel.
    The recalcitrance that Obama has already encountered is a reminder of the famous maxim of former secretary of state James A. Baker III, considered a master of Middle East diplomacy. The United States, he said in 1991, “can’t want peace more than the parties.” In taking on the issue now, Obama is, in essence, trying to prove that wisdom wrong. If he succeeds he will probably deserve to be called a president who can do everything.

Here are the mistakes of analysis:

    1. Diehl says that the peace proposal Olmert made to Abbas was “far-reaching”. The implication is that it was also “generous”, and that Abbas was foolish or recalcitrant to turn it down– and therefore can’t be expected to be flexible today. From everything we know about the peace proposal Olmert made to Abbas (e.g. from the end of this article) it didn’t look at all “generous”– and by most standards it was not at all “far-reaching.” But Diehl’s echoing of the old “Palestinian leader turns down a generous Israeli offer” trope is intended once again– as after the whole Camp David 2 debacle in 2000, to paint even the most “moderate” Palestinians as intractable.
    2. Diehl writes that Hamas remains implacable in its refusal to recognize Israel True. But no-one in Israel or the west is recognizing them, either– or, recognizing and being prepared to respect the victory they won in the 2006 elections. In a successful peace negotiation, exchange of recognitions usually comes as part of the end of the peace agreement. It should not be required upfront– and certainly not only in a unilateral way…. And meanwhile, Diehl says nothing at all about the serious moves that Hamas has made to communicate its very real interest in supporting negotiations for a two-state outcome. Once again, Diehl’s lazy shorthand here lays an inappropriate amount of blame on Palestinians.

But finally, there was Diehl’s most egregious and most telling mistake– a mistake of raw fact. That was when he attributed to Sec. James Baker the terrible little dictum about “the United States can’t want peace more than the parties.”
That was not Baker. That was Clinton and Pres. George W. Bush.
This mistake matters.
Why? Because as Diehl wrote, Baker was indeed a master of Middle East diplomacy. But he won his very real achievements in that field by pursuing a policy based on the very opposite of the quite irresponsible sentiment expressed in that phrase.
Under Clinton and Bush II, by contrast, those leaders’ easy reliance on the “can’t want a peace more.. ” mindset meant that they never vigorously pushed for anything in the diplomacy on the basis that securing a fair and durable peace was in the strong interest of Americans.
That was what led to the reliance of those two presidents on the idea that “the parties” should just be left to negotiate the terms of a peace settlement just between themselves.
In the context of the Palestinians, whose entire country is under Israel’s military occupation, that approach is crazy. The very best it could ever lead to would be something like the deals that Marshall Petain or Vidkun Quisling struck with the occupying Nazis.
Did anyone expect the Emir of Kuwait simply to sit in a room alone with Saddam Hussein in August 1990 and “negotiate” a peace with him, with no other parties or considerations of international law intervening?
Small wonder that first of all Arafat and then even the very pro-peace-minded Mahmoud Abbas turned down the extremely pusillanimous and demeaning deals that were all they were ever offered under those circumstances.
And thus, small wonder than neither Clinton nor Bush II ever presided over the securing of a final peace.
And meanwhile, throughout all those 16 years, Israel’s implantation of additional Jewish settlers into the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) continued apace… And so did the anger of Muslims and others around the world who saw the US as continuing to bankroll and support every action of the Israeli government.
Where was international law in all this? Where were the resolutions of the United Nations? Where was firm and principled US diplomacy?
Out of the window!
So please, Jackson Diehl, let’s have no more of your mendacious re-writing of history.
A fair and durable peace in the Arab-Israeli region is certainly in the interests of Americans and everyone else in the world who upholds fairness and international law, and is offended to see it being flouted on a daily basis by Israel in the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.
And if any particular “party”, such as the Netanyahu government in Israel, does not see such a peace as being in its own interest?
Then the US, whose fate and reputation in the world is necessarily tied very closely to Israel’s behavior, will just have to “want” the peace more than that party; and should proceed with the policy steps that are necessary in order to win it.
Those steps would certainly not include continuing to give Israel generous financial, political, and military help that is quite unlinked to Israel’s behavior in the occupied territories.
And yes, it was James Baker and his president who were the most recent US leaders
to make that point clear, and to establish that conditionality quite firmly within US policy.