Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 60 – Info, analysis, discussion

East Jerusalem / West Jerusalem

Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now did a great post on their blog recently showing how wildly inaccurate PM Netanyahu was when he claimed, Sunday, that Palestinians can buy homes and live in West Jerusalem.
Netanyahu made this mendacious claim to buttress his argument that “it should be quite okay” for Jewish Israelis to construct homes and live in occupied East Jerusalem.
But as Lara– and a number of others have pointed out– it is just about impossible for Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to “move over” and live in West Jerusalem, since most of the housing there is on what is called “Israeli state land”, whose sale, or rather long-term lease, to people who are not either Israeli citizens or certifiedly Jewish people from elsewhere is forbidden under a covenant between the government and the Israel Lands Authority.
However, neither Lara nor her primary source, Israeli attorney Daniel Seidemann, mention two other highly relevant aspects of the situation regarding access to housing in West Jerusalem:

Qa’adan case

are properties that rightfully belong to Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from that half of the city

Um Kamel al-Kurd

It simply isn’t so.
I note that Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Association has even weighed in on this issue, saying incredulously to Netanyahu:

Wen? Eyfo?

By the way, Lara Friedman also has an informative interview with Seidemann here about the settlers’ projects in Sheikh Jarrah. And if you go to to the Ir Amim webste (English here) you can find a lot more information about the planning/settling/demographic situation in Jerusalem. Including you can download a good description— with map– of the settlers’ plans for Sheikh Jarrah.

Up on the Roof…. in Tehran

From the rooftops of Tehran, “Laleh Azadi” sends us an extraordinary essay, a “scream” into the darkness, rich with irony and insight, sadness and hope. Worth pondering in full, consider these excerpts:

“We put all our emotions into screaming “Allahu Akbar” into the night from the rooftops. We must stay under the radar during the day but the night brings a small sense of freedom. The streets are quiet and the heat has subsided so we can breath and use our voices. The calls that begin around 10 p.m. each night have gained strength since last Friday. There are more voices — both desperate and defiant — from young and old, men and women. It is the way we remind each other not to give up all hope, and it is our call for a leader.”

There’s something haunting here. In the west, we tend to associate darkness with fear, foreboding, even evil. The darkness is something we “curse.” Yet for Iranian reformists, the night becomes a sanctuary, a source of courage.
Laleh gives us more than raw emotion; she provides a different window for the outside world to comprehend the terms of the struggle:

“For many, this movement is about reclaiming the spirit and intent of the Islamic Revolution — even if most of us were born after it. We want to fight for the principles our parents fought for thirty years ago — the right to be free from tyranny, the right to choose, and the right to a voice. We see Khamenei and Ahmadinejad moving the Islamic Revolution away from democratic pluralism and towards authoritarianism.”

By day, the loudest voices of protest presently come from senior clerics, something Laleh wishes to explain:

“It might seem surprising to outsiders that the loudest voices of dissent are coming from the religious seminaries and Muslim clerics in Qum, but this is not unusual for Iran. Since the revolution, human rights activists, feminists, and even left-leaning politicians have found their greatest ally in Islam. Hence, the use of the color green — the color of Islam — for this resistance movement. It is as if to say to the conservative clerics who rule the country, “You cannot suppress us with religion. The martyred Imam Hussein is our example and Islam is our religion. It protects us, gives us a voice, and compels us to be compassionate for all humanity.”

In Laleh’s real world, all is not black and white, nor is it velvet. It’s green.

Iran battle lines 101

Quick items for keeping up with the ongoing legitimacy crisis within Iran:
1. Excellent IPS review by Farideh Farhi of the fault lines in Iran, as revealed in Rafsanjani’s Friday Prayers speech and blistering reactions.

It is now clear that the Islamic Republic’s ever-present political frictions and cleavages can no longer be managed in ways they have been in the past, either through behind-the-scenes lobbying at the top or selective repression or some combination of the two….
Adding to the drama was the immediate appearance on Rafsanjani’s personal website of a headline in which he recalled the early years of the revolution. “The term fear has no meaning for us,” it said. “For every generation, there is a test. Issues related to society and people are the most important tests.”

Note especially Farhi’s emphasis on the eclectic and yet unified nature of the opposition movement. Echoes of 1979.
2. Further quotes and analysis by Muhammad Sahimi of critiques from Leader Khamenei and reformist rebuttals.
For the Leader, it seems “the real people… those with real intellect…. think about and follow God….” the riotous corrupt by contrast are castigated as slaves to the foreign body. For Musavi,

“Many of the prisoners are well-known and have served the political system and the country for years. Who is going to believe that they colluded with foreigners to sell out the country’s national interests? Is this not an insult against the nation?”

3. Call by ex President Khatami for a “referendum” as the only way to resolve the crisis:

“I would like to add a point here and declare explicitly that, the only way out of the present crisis is relying on people’s vote and holding a referendum.”

4. Ayatollah watch: Sahimi’s run-down this morning of hotly contradictory clerical statements regarding the recent elections. Contrary to an absurd commentary put out by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy earlier this month, Iran’s clerical centers have neither been silent nor unified.
5. For the puzzled, I highly recommend a lively hour with my mentor, Professor R. K. Ramazani, available via podcast here. Many of the questions are basic — yet profound.

Web-streaming radio appearance this evening

Arab Voices, out of Houston, will be airing a one-hour discussion with me this evening, starting at 8 p.m. EST. You can also listen over the Intertubes.

How occupations end

We here in Washington DC currently have a front-seat view of how a country undertakes the ending of the military occupation by its ground forces of another country’s territory.
Today, Iraq’s elected PM Nuri al-Maliki will be meeting with Pres. Obama in the White House. Top on the agenda of their talks will doubtless be continuing disagreements over the implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement (SOFA) that the two governments concluded last November, which mandates a complete withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Yes, there have been some disagreements between the two governments over how the WA will be implemented. But seeing how the US is now in the process of pulling its troops out of Iraq over the next 30 months can inform us a lot about some of the issues involved in ending Israel’s continuing military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.
Over the past 20 years, we’ve actually seen a lot of military occupations being brought to an end. This is not rocket science. Here’s what we now know:
1. An occupation can end as a result of an agreement negotiated between the occupying power and a “sufficiently legitimate” governing authority representing the occupied area’s indigenous residents; or the occupying power can attempt a unilateral, essentially un-negotiated withdrawal. A third alternative: Of course, occupations can also be ended– as the German occupations of European countries, the Japanese occupations of Asian countries, and Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait all were– by the direct application of military force.
2. Examples of the second (unilateral) kind of withdrawal include the US’s withdrawal from the portions of southern Iraq it occupied in the course of the 1991 Gulf War, and Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from just about all of southern Lebanon. The Us withdrawal from Iraq occurred in the context of a ceasefire agreement the two governments hastily concluded; but that agreement did not end the overall state of hostilities between Saddam’s government and the US.
3. Unilateral withdrawals, because they do not end the state of hostilities between the parties, merely rearrange the furniture for the continued pursuit of those hostilities.
4. The “withdrawal” from Gaza that the Israeli government claims it undertook in 2005 did not, actually, end Israel’s formal status under international as the occupying power in Gaza, since Israel retained its control over all Gaza’s contact points with the outside world and over Gaza’s air-space; it also retained the “right” under international law to send its troops back into Gaza whenever it wished.
If Israel had not still been seen, under international law, as the occupying power in Gaza, last December’s massive Israeli assault against the Strip including the large-scale incursion of Israeli troops into it would of course have been seen as an international aggression, triggering the intervention of the UN Security Council under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. That did not happen, because Gaza is still under the same Israeli military occupation that it has been continuously since 1967. What happened in 2005 was not the ending of Gaza’s occupation, but a rearranging of the way Israel organized it.

Continue reading “How occupations end”

Eldar and Kipnis on Golan

Akiva Eldar recently published a short piece in Haaretz about the recent book on Golan and the history of the Israeli-Syrian conflict written by Yigal Kipnis.
Kipnis is a resident of the settlement of Maale Gamleh in southern Golan. He is one of a group of Golan settlers who says they would be prepared to evacuate their present homes in the interest of a final-status peace between Israel and Syria.
Golan has been under belligerent military occupation by Israel since June 1967. In 1981, the Israeli parliament “extended Israeli jurisdiction” to the area– a step that is the equivalent of all-out annexation. (Such as the Israeli parliament did to occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.) Some 18,000 Israeli settlers and 17,000 indigenous Syrian citizens live on Golan. The Syrian Golanis are the remnants of a once much larger civilian Syrian population there; the rest all fled almost immediately after the collapse of the Syrian army’s defensive positions there during the 1967 war.
Kipnis’s book, “The Mountain That Was As a Monster” (Magnes Press), is an account of the history of the always fraught Syrian-Israeli relationship and includes an assessment of the way that Israelis have nearly always felt fearful about the prospect of the Syrian army coming once again to the Golan Plateau. (Hence its title.)
Of course, in the context of any conceivable Syrian-Israeli peace, all of Golan– including the elevated plateau– would be substantially demilitarized subsequent to the full Israeli withdrawal from the plateau that the Syrians have always, quite justifiably, insisted on. So the “fears” of the Israelis about the heights are quite groundless; but they go back a long way.
In his article, Eldar reports,

Kipnis writes that from the perspective of the Galilee panhandle inhabitants, who until June 1967 had been bombarded from the east, the image of the Syrian Golan as a “monster” is justified. However, in his opinion, a precise examination of the Israeli-Syrian conflict reveals that the sense of threat and fear has existed, perhaps even more so, on the other side – looking from the mountain to the valley, from Syria into Israel. Kipnis argues that the Syrian’s fear of Israel grew stronger in direct proportion to Israel’s increasing military might and superiority over Syria. Exaggerated fear and mistaken information, he wrote, fed into each side’s perception of the other as demonic.

I don’t know if Kipnis writes this in the book, but it is also certainly the case that the Israeli military’s current positions atop the heights and also in the upper reaches of Jebel al-Shaikh (Mount Hermon) allow them to directly overlook Damascus, which is not far away, and to peer deep into the Syrian interior beyond.
If all those heights are demilitarized and a trustworthy monitoring and verification regime is installed there, neither side need live in fear.
Even more importantly, once Israel has a final-status peace with Syria– which will certainly help pave the way for an Israeli-Lebanese peace– then for the first time Israel will have no immediate neighbor with whom it is at war and who has any substantial military capability able to threaten Israel’s homeland. This means Israeli society can become transformed from the militaristic, national-security state it has been since its founding into a much more normal form of state. Military spending can be ramped down considerably, and young Israelis (and young Syrians) need no longer have to serve as conscripts in their army.
What a great prospect.
In the context of a final-status Syrian-Israeli peace, citizens of each country will be able to visit each other’s countries. And if Israel has also concluded a sustainable and fair final-status peace with the Palestinians at that point, the possibilities for extensive normalization of relations are enormous.
However, many or most Jewish citizens of Israel remain until now unpersuaded by those prospects. They prefer the idea that they alone can dominate Golan’s fertile plateau and its rolling hills and streams.
Netanyahu’s national security adviser Uzi Arad recently had this exchange with Haaretz’s Avi Shavit:

For strategic, military and land-settlement reasons. Needs of water, wine and view.

Too bad about that language in all the relevant UN resolutions about “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, eh?

Israeli and pro-Israeli propaganda: Nuttier every day!

These are just two of the nuttier arguments currently being made by Israeli and extremist pro-Israeli propagandists. The first is a claim from a pamphlet that was distributed to IDF troops for some months, until recently. The second, which simply assumes that all his listeners will share his own inherent racism against citizens of Saudi Arabia, is an argument made by Ron Dermer, director of policy planning for Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu.
You could say that the increasing nuttiness of the arguments made by propagandists/hasbaristas close to Israeli official circles is an indication of their panic and desperation, now that it’s become clear that some of their earlier claims won’t hold up to the light of day. (“The Israeli army is the most moral army in the world”; “No-one wants peace more than the government of Israel”; etc etc.)
That interpretation of what’s happening may well be valid. But we should remember two other things, too. First, there are apparently plenty of well-connected pro-Zionist people both in Israel and elsewhere who apparently believe claims as outlandish as these ones. Second, Israel’s pro-settlement extremists still command plenty of real coercive power– and they seem increasingly inclined to use it as it becomes clear their claims to be allowed to roam freely and settle over all of the West Bank are meeting an unprecedentedly firm challenge from the US government.
On the extent of the belief in the hasbaristas’ outlandish claims, Haaretz’s Ofri Ilani tells us that the booklet containing the one about the “Vatican-Hizbullah” connection

the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America

the chief rabbi of Safed

Ilani reports that the “story” in the booklet,

is narrated by a man named Avi, who says he changed his name from Ibrahim after he left Hezbollah and converted to Judaism. Avi says he was once close to Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, and describes Hezbollah’s purported close relationships with the Vatican and European leaders.

In the booklet, “Avi”– ~~who quite likely doesn’t exist, and never has~~; scroll down to Richard Silverstein’s comment about him– also purports to describe the close links between Hizbullah, various rich European organizations and individuals, and

all sorts of Israeli organizations that erode the standing of the IDF … We have a special budget for encouraging [Israeli] politicians and journalists who serve our purposes. Every opinion piece that conforms to our position is rewarded generously.

So right there we see the “Avi” booklet embodying in its own text a link with the campaign we have seen being waged for a while now by official and semi-official bodies in Israel against the human rights groups– some of them, gasp, European-financed!– that have been working to document the rights abuses by all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To claim that because a human rights organization raises money from Saudi citizens (while also working with them to build their capacity to improve their government’s rights performance), that in itself makes the work of the organization suspect– or, in Ron Dermer’s ridiculously overstated words, that it “speaks to the collapse of the human rights community”– is equally nutty. But this argument, too, is perhaps believed by significant numbers of people in Israel and elsewhere who have been fed on a steady diet of anti-Arab racism for many years now.
Regarding the continuing, actual capability and propensity of extremist Zionist groups to accompany their anti-Arab propaganda and ideology with acts of clearly racist violence, we need only read this account of what some settler extremists did near Nablus today:

The racist propaganda produced by extremists in and close to Israel’s current government authorities is bad enough, in itself (even if it appears to most sane people to be quite plainly nutty.) But the potential of this propaganda to whip up acts of continuing racist violence should also not be under-estimated.

WaPo bows cravenly to pro-Israel lobby

On Thursday, the WaPo published the following, completely craven “Correction”:

It is a Jewish neighborhood built on land captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and annexed to Israel as part of Jerusalem’s expanded municipal boundaries.

So the WaPo quite simply endorses whatever Israel says is the case??
It is not just the UN that has failed to “acknowledge” the annexation/Anschluss of East Jerusalem to Israel. The United States has never either “acknowledged” or– more to the point– supported the view that east Jerusalem is part of Israel, either. And neither have just about all the other countries of the world (except, um, Micronesia… )
The International Court Of Justice, when it issued its 2004 ruling on Israel’s Apartheid Barrier, came out unequivocally against the idea that Israel could unilaterally annex any part of the land occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem.
So why does the WaPo endorse Israel’s Anschluss of East Jerusalem (and Gilo)? What kind of back-stage campaign was waged between June 26 and july 16 to “persuade” the ailing newsrag to do this?
This plunge in standards is all on a par with publisher/heiress Katharine Weymouth’s shameless pimping of her newsroom.
But still, we should all send the paper letters of strong protest at this latest debacle.

US military chafes under Iraq Withdrawal Agreement

Oh, pity the retreating hegemon– just for a fleeting second– as it starts to realize the implications of the drawdown of ts forces from Iraq, in compliance with the Withdrawal Agreement (PDF) concluded last November.
The WaPo’s Ernesto Londono and Karen De Young reported from Baghdad today that on July 2, two days after the deadline for the withdrawal of US forces from all the cities of Iraq,

“stop all joint patrols” in Baghdad.

have kept several combat battalions assigned to urban areas and hoped those troops would remain deeply engaged in training Iraqi security forces, meeting with paid informants, attending local council meetings and supervising U.S.-funded civic and reconstruction projects.

U.S. troops intend to engage in combat operations in urban areas to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.

Hullo?! Earth to Gen. Bolger! Why did he think it would somehow be “okay” to keep “several combat battalions assigned to urban areas”?
Maybe he should go and read the text of the Withdrawal Agreement, as duly concluded between his (and my) government and the Government of Iraq last November.
The WA states, Article 24, clauses 1 and 2:

All United States combat forces shall withdraw

no later than June 30, 2009

And in Article 4, clauses 1, 2, and 3:

shall be conducted with the agreement of the Government of Iraq. Such operations shall be fully coordinated with the Iraqi authorities

as defined by the Government of Iraq

So it really is small wonder that the combat battalions Bolger had kept deployed– and also quite frequently employed– inside Baghdad and other cities since June 30 have been running into a lot of opposition from the Iraqi forces, and perhaps also from some para-military formations operating with the knowledge of the Baghdad government.
For example, as the waPo writers note, on Thursday night there was a mysteriously sourced “rocket strike on a U.S. base in Basra on Thursday night that killed three soldiers. ”
But why were those US soldiers still inside Basra at all?
Bolger says that the US forces inside urban areas have been engaging in operations to “to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis”?
Threats to whom? Threats to themselves and their own– at this point illegal– presence inside the cities, it seems.
Just get the heck out of the cities, Gen. Bolger! That is what our government agreed with the Iraqi government would happen.
But thus far, it apparently hasn’t. So it is the US forces that have been contravening the terms of the WA. And no amount of “spinning/lying/dissembling” on Gen. Bolger’s behalf can change that.
It is not clear to whom Bolger sent the reported email. But evidently he was venting some of his frustrations there:

“Our [Iraqi] partners burn our fuel, drive roads cleared by our Engineers, live in bases built with our money, operate vehicles fixed with our parts, eat food paid for by our contracts, watch our [surveillance] video feeds, serve citizens with our [funds], and benefit from our air cover,” Bolger noted in the e-mail.

Poor cry-baby. He imagines the Iraqi people should be grateful that the US military marched in and smashed up their country?
Here’s another reading assignment for him:
Article 5 of the Withdrawal Agreement, “Property Ownership”:

Just get out, Gen. Bolger. Stop chasing phantoms and your own tail there. I am sure that once the Iraqi people and their government see you exiting the cities fully as per the WA, and complying with all its other terms, they will be happy to leave you alone.
The WA and international law demand that you withdraw from the cities, and only come back in with the explicit agreement of the Iraqi government. And guess what, the US public and Congress are in strong support of the WA.
(I’ll just note parenthetically here that the WaPo piece is also larded with allegations from un-named US officials that, under Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki’s rapidly expanding sovereignty, all kinds of Iranian-backed splinter groups– with pathetically mis-transliterated names– are now active in Iraq and striking at US targets. That’s what I mean by chasing phantoms… )

D. Makovsky and M. Sfard on the Palestine Question

On Wednesday, I went to two intriguing discussions in Washington about different aspects of the Palestine Question.
The first was a seven-person round-table discussion on the US Institute of Peace’s recent report Hamas: Ideological Rigidity and Political Flexibility. The seven people included the report’s two authors, Paul Scham (formerly of Americans for Peace Now; now a visiting prof at the University of Maryland and Executive Director of its Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies), and Osama Abu-Irshaid, the imam of a mosque in Northern Virginia and founding editor-in-chief of Al-Meezan. It also included a moderator and four other people, all of them male and almost none of them with the degree of expert knowledge of Hamas’s politics that I have.
But hey, USIP has to keep its Congressional source of funding flowing, so I guess the very cautious people there felt they couldn’t have anyone who has actually conducted (and published) as much research on Hamas as I have!
… Anyway, there were a couple of interesting exchanges there. Some of the most interesting involved David Makovsky, a long-time pro-Israeli propagandist who is currently the director of the “Project on the Middle East peace process” at the pro-AIPAC Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Listening to Makovsky marshalling his very misleading (and often simply mendacious) claims and arguments was made bearable only because the other panelists and the moderator, the WSJ’s Cam Simpson, all did a good job of having a decent, fact-based, and realistic discussion on the issues.
I’ll get back to Makovsky in a moment.
… From USIP I biked along to the New America Foundation where Michael Sfard, a Jewish Israeli lawyer and the legal adviser to the excellent Yesh Din anti-occupation organization, was talking about “Settlements and the Occupation.”
New America is such an agile, tech-savvy organization that they already have the16-minute video record of that session available for your viewing there. Along with Sfard, it features the indefatigable NAF duo of Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah.
Sfard made several important points in his presentation. He noted that the maps of where the settlement boundaries are inside the West Bank always greatly understate the depth of the disruption, fear, and exclusion that the presence of the settlements, their (often Jews-only) feeder roads, and other Israeli objects and facilities have on the lives of the area’s 2.3 million indigenous Palestinians.
He said,

He argued, too, that even if the Obama administration succeeds in winning a complete freeze on settlement construction from the Netanyahu government, even that would count for little unless there is also a complete freeze on planning for new construction in the settlements.

Continue reading “D. Makovsky and M. Sfard on the Palestine Question”