Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 64 – Info, analysis, discussion

Iraq: An occupation recedes

Congratulations to my Iraqi friends on the occasion of the significant (if not quite total) withdrawal of US military occupation rule from your cities and towns that has been taking place today according to the November 2008 Withdrawal Agreement between our two governments.
I wish you all the very best as you continue working to reconstruct lives, communities, and a nation that have been harmed very severely indeed by the actions and decisions of my government and its military (as well as by others.)
I am so sorry that we in the peace movement were unable to prevent the disastrous (and lie-based) decision our government took to invade your country in 2003. We tried, but we were not strong enough.
I hope that the rest of the US withdrawal, as mandated in the Withdrawal Agreement, goes ahead smoothly.
The PDF of the Agreement’s text can now be found here.) It stipulates, Article 24 (1) that:

All United States forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.

I hope, additionally, that we in the US peace movement can work effectively with our fellow citizens here to persuade our government to pay due reparations to your country for the harm we have caused you– though of course many of these harms can never be adequately “repaired.” The 600,000-plus Iraqi citizens killed by and as a result of the US invasion and occupation cannot be brought back to life. I mourn the loss of their lives and send compassion and love to the family members and friends they left behind.
But our government is now, even if with painful slowness, doing the right thing in withdrawing the troops and ending their occupation of your country. We shall try to make sure the rest of the withdrawal occurs according to, or in advance of, the agreed timetable.
Foreign military occupation is always, in itself, a major infringement of the rights of the residents of the area occupied. How could it be otherwise when military rule is established over an entire civilian population– and this military is, furthermore, in no way directly accountable to or connected by ties of common nationality to the residents of the occupied area?
As we Americans withdraw our military occupation regime from Iraq, we must equally work to ensure that Israel, a state to which we have given– and continue to give– an extraordinary level of all kinds of support, likewise speedily ends the military occupation regime that it has maintained for 42 years over the residents of the non-Israeli territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan; and that it withdraws its troops from those areas back inside its own borders.
The US has committed many bad–indeed, under international law, illegal– acts during its six years of occupation so far in Iraq. These included the mass detentions and the major abuses in the detention facilities; the complete (and quite illegal) transformation of the political and economic order in the country; use of excessive force in numerous military engagements; and so on.
However, one violation of international law it did not commit was to seek to implant its own citizens as settlers inside Iraq.
During Israel’s 42-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza it has committed all or nearly all of the same abuses the US committed in Iraq. (Including, after the free and fair Palestinian election of January 2006, it decided to work to overthrow the results of that election; and outrageously, it received full backing from Washington in that endeavor.) But in addition to all those violations of international law, successive Israeli governments since 1967 have also worked systematically to implant large numbers of their own citizens into the occupied areas.
This has constituted a major and ongoing infraction of the natural rights of the Palestinians and the Golani Syrians to the free use of their own land’s resources. It has also made the act of withdrawing from the occupied areas, as international law stipulates must happen, that much harder for any Israeli government to contemplate. But that is the fault of all those Israeli citizens who for 42 years now have participated in, profited from, supported, or condoned the settlers’ project. Now, Israelis need to take the settlers back into their own country.
When I was growing up in England in the 1950s and 1960s our country was also facing the demographic consequences of seeing an empire retract. English settlers had gone to many countries under British rule, in good faith and with the full backing of the British government. Many had lived in those other countries for some generations. Now, they had to face the choice of either living under the newly independent national governments of those countries, or of returning “home” to an England that many of them had never even seen before.
For the Israeli settlers, returning “home” to Israel will be, by comparison, an easy matter. They all know Israel well. They will not have to move far. Those who want to stay in their current settlement homes may be offered the chance to do so– but they would have to live peaceably as foreigners under the government of an independent Palestine and would have no special privileges at all over their Palestinian neighbors. It is also possible that the PLO/PA may negotiate a land swap arrangement that would transfer some portion of the settlement areas to Israeli rule; but many of the current settlers would not be covered by it.
Anyway, that is the Palestinian issue– though we Americans can understand what occupation rule means a lot better now that we have had six disturbing years of our own foreign-occupation rule in Iraq to look back on. So let’s wish the Palestinians and Israelis well in their pursuit of a fair and durable agreement that mandates not only peace but also the end of foreign military occupation and the complete withdrawal of the troops that have maintained it.
Today, though, is primarily a day for congratulating Iraqis (and Americans) on their progress towards this goal.

Israel’s settlements: Beyond the freeze

To some extent, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is right. The big issue in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is not the freeze on additional settlement construction that’s being demanded by the US and its buddies in the ‘Quartet’. The big issue in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking is making the Israeli-Palestinian peace. A final peace, that is.
And as everyone including Israel’s own settlers realizes, winning that peace will involve a significant evacuation of the settlements that Israel has invested so heavily in putting into the occupied West Bank for the past 42 years.
Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak is being dispatched to Washington today to try to win some flexibility for Israel’s large settlement-building interests. Haaretz daily also reported today that Barak’s defense ministry has approved the immediate building of 50 new homes in the settlement of Adam– part of a plan that will eventually put 1,450 new homes there.
Around 500,000 Jewish Israelis now live in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem). Any move by an occupying power to settle its own citizens in occupied areas has since 1949 been deemed quite illegal under international law.
In today’s NYT, Ethan Bronner reported on an interview he got with Barak on the eve of the latter’s departure to Washington, that:

Barak is right to note that the real issue is that of securing the final peace. And it is not at all unreasonable for him to spell out what Israel’s expectations of such a peace would be, just as it is not unreasonable for the Palestinians to spell out what their expectations are, as well.
But Barak is wrong to imply that getting an immediate freeze on settlement building is somehow unrelated to the quest for a final peace between the two sides. At its root, after all, the big issue between Israelis and Palestinians is a dispute over real estate: who gets what.
International law stipulates that being an occupying power– as Israel is in the West Bank and in Syria’s Golan, or as the US has been for the past six years in Iraq– confers no rights at all to sovereignty over the territory occupied.
(Just this week, the US is taking the first big step toward the complete withdrawal from Iraq that was negotiated with the Iraqi government last November. And the US has never sought to exploit its position as occupying power by moving groups of permanent American “settlers” into Iraq.)
But throughout the 42 years Israel has been the occupying power in the West Bank, it has put those 500,000 Jewish-Israeli settlers in there. And the fact of their presence inside the West Bank already makes a complete Israeli withdrawal from the area thousands of times harder to contemplate than it would have been without them there– just as Ariel Sharon and other highly placed settlement boosters all along intended.
But the idea that the Israeli government would continue boosting the settlers’ numbers (and their consumption of scarce West bank resources like land and water) while the permanent-status negotiations continue defies belief, and should be seen as a major indicator of lack of Israeli good faith in the negotiation.
It is as if, during a property dispute I’d have with my neighbor here in Virginia, in which all the law indicates my ownership of the property in question, she blithely continued to build a new condo complex on the property. In agreeing to take on my suit against my neighbor, one of the first things a judge would do would be to issue a “cease and desist” order against her building operations.
In the Israeli-Palestinian dispute it is effectively the US that has for many years now taken on the role of “judge” in the dispute. “Cease and desist” is the very least this judge should require as a token of Israel’s good faith and good intent in the final-status negotiations that must surely soon get underway. (Otherwise, where is the territorial basis for the independent Palestinian state? Where are the provisions of international law that must undergird any agreement among the world’s nations if it is to have any durability or legitimacy?)
There is a good question, however, as to how much political capital President Obama should actually expend on trying to win Israel’s compliance with the “cease and desist” order. And here I think that so far he has played the diplomatic/political game quite effectively.
He and his officials have all remained quite firm on verbally requesting a complete settlement freeze, and on justifying that request in the public arena; but they have as yet undertaken no actual policy actions to hold Israel accountable for following through on that demand. My sense is that they are holding their political “big guns” for a confrontation with Netanyahu’s government that may well lie shortly ahead– over the big issue of the final-status peace.
Meanwhile, by rhetorically holding firm on the settlement-building issue they have been able to educate many key members of the US Congress about the importance of the territorial issues underlying it, and about Netanyahu’s lack of good faith in this negotiating arena. They have also quietly but steadily been building the domestic constituency inside the US for forthright action on securing the final peace.
For the Palestinians and the Arab states, an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank is currently seen as an essential precursor to the resumption of any final-status talks with Israel. This is a cautious position that is solidly rooted in the Palestinians’ 18-year history of negotiating with Israel.
In the Oslo Accord of 1993, which was only an interim agreement between the PLO and Israel, both sides committed to completing their final-status peace agreement before 1999… But that deadline slipped by. From 1996 through 1999 Israel’s prime minister was Benjamin Netanyahu. He almost totally refused to negotiate final-status issues with the Palestinians, agreeing only reluctantly to engage on negotiations on a very few, very small, further “interim” steps. Meanwhile, throughout those post-Oslo years, Israel’s settlement-building program went into high gear.
So by 1999 the Palestinians did not have the promised final-status peace agreement; and meanwhile the territorial base on which they could hope to establish their state had been significantly further eroded.
Then in Annapolis in November 2007, no less a figure (!) than Pres. George W. Bush publicly vowed that his final peacemaking would result in securing the text of a final-status peace agreement before the end of his presidency. It didn’t happen. Indeed, as his presidency entered its final days Israel was pounding the Palestinians in Gaza extremely harshly and the very shaky peace talks that had been underway with Mahmoud Abbas fell completely apart, having gotten almost nowhere.
Oh, and throughout the period of what was once lauded as “the Annapolis process” Israel’s government implanted many additional thousands of settlers into the West Bank. That, in spite of what were supposed to be its commitments under the 2002 Road Map.
Fool me once, shame on you? Fool me twice, shame on me? Fool me three times– what?
That history certainly fuels much of the stress that the Palestinians– all Palestinians– place on the need for a settlement freeze. But they too, all of them, also share Ehud Barak’s view that the biggest imperative right now is not (just) a settlement freeze. And it is not (just) the lifting of a few roadblocks here or there in the West Bank; it is not (just) improving the quantity and mix of freight that Israel allows into Gaza, or Israel’s release of some proportion of the 11,000 Palestinian “security” detainees it currently holds in its prisons…
After all, any or all of those actions if taken by Israel can very easily be reversed so long as Israel is the still the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza. Recall how Likud strategic-affairs thinker Efraim Inbar talked about this in the amazingly candid interview he gave me back in March.
What the Palestinians, like Ehud Barak and also (if his rhetoric is to be believed) Benjamin Netanyahu, seek above all is a final-status peace between these two nations.
Yes, of course the two sides will enter into this negotiation with widely differing opening “requirements” and requests. That is natural. But if the US is to help midwife a final peace between them that is sufficiently fair to everyone concerned that it ends up being durable, then this peace must take international law as a starting point that can help it sift through and give due consideration to the claims and desires of both parties.
Pres. Obama has expressed his commitment to winning a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace since his earliest days in office. Thus far he has not defined a deadline for reaching this goal. (It’s probably wise to be a bit cautious on that, given the debacle of Bush’s ‘Annapolis’ deadline.)
But Obama has been lining his ducks up for a peace push in a very smart way.
So now, if Ehud Barak and prime minister Netanyahu are saying they absolutely cannot bear to be pressured on the settlement-building issue, Obama and his team should politely but firmly usher them into the next diplomatic chamber.
That’s the one where the US, the ‘Quartet’, the Palestinians, and the other Arab parties are all sitting down ready to negotiate the final peace.
And probably, that is also the point at which Washington should start implementing firm accountability measures against Israel for any further violations it enacts of the order to “cease and desist” building settlements. Accountability measures, after all, cannot be implemented against only one party to this negotiation.

Color revolutions and political branding: A guide for the perplexed

The ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran has its paradoxes– not least among them the anomaly of seeing young people out on the streets of Tehran in outfits that seemed openly defiant of Islamic dress norms while they also sported a color that many Muslims consider represents their religion.
The choice of that color, and of the accompanying rallying cry of “Allahu-akbar”, seemed like deliberate attempts to build alliances between the often pro-secular west-o-philes of North Tehran and important reformist branches of the country’s ruling hierarchy. (The lack of any real agreement between these two portions of the movement over whether the goal is to reform the country’s Islamic system or to overthrow it is probably one of the movement’s most notable weaknesses.)
But the use of the ‘green’ branding did seem like a bit of a master-move, regardless how things turn out. For me, it evoked first and foremost the great marching song of the old Sinn Fein/IRA struggle for Irish independence: “Oh, we’re all off to Dublin in the green, in the green… ”
In the Irish context, of course, “Orange” is also an extremely potent marker. Note that when the successfully independent Irish Republicans designed their national flag, it cleverly incorporated the orange along with the green– in much the same way that the flag of democratic South Africa cleverly incorporates all the main colors and themes of that country’s previously warring parties.
Here in the US, I think one of the most moving civil war memorials of all is the court-house at Appomattox, the spot where Robert E. Lee submitted the surrender of the Army of Virginia. Now preserved as a historical site, the courthouse has a thought-provoking wall of photos of the war dead: the ones matted with Confederate grey are checkerboarded somberly across the whole wall with those matted with Yankee blue. There’s a lot to be said, I think, for undertaking a good mash-up of everyone’s formerly partisan symbols at the end of a civil war.
In Palestinian politics, green is the color used by Hamas, while Fateh uses yellow (on the right here.) Orange is the color used by Moustapha Barghouthi’s still-small Mubadara party.
Shift focus to Lebanon, and confusingly there it’s Hizbullah, which is broadly allied to Hamas, that uses yellow, while the somewhat-in-competition Amal movement uses green.
The Grand-daddy of the present wave of pro-west “color revolutions” is the “Orange Revolution” of 2004-05 in Ukraine.
Oh, by the way, that last image comes from the website of the Green movement in the European parliament. Numerous countries have Green Parties these days, of course, with their “green” signifying their environmentalist concern. Can’t forget them…
Okay, moving along from 2005 we then had the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia. I can’t find any satisafactory images from that, such as would quickly clarify for me whether the “rose” actually refers to a color or a flower.
But while we’re in that part of the color spectrum we cannot forget the feisty US women of Code Pink.
And then there is Thailand, which earlier this year had back-to-back “red” and “yellow” movements trying to take over the capital. That development prompted the Asia Society’s Jamie Metzel to call for the creation of a new movement to bring the two sides together. Okay, what he really called for was an especially Thai form of an “orange” revolution: mashing up the symbols, again.
On a longer time-scale, the most lasting of all color brandings of political movements in modern times has almost certainly been the association of red with socialism and/or communism. That association has held true in almost every country except the US (and perhaps Thailand?)
In the US, for some unknown reason, political analysts started some time ago talking about “red states” and “blue states”– with red signifying the Republican Party, and blue the Democrats. Maybe this is related to the exceptionalism American culture displays on other matters related to socialist movements, like the US’s choice of what seems like a fairly random day in early September to celebrate “Labor Day”, when every other country I know of that honors its working people does so on May 1st.
One final note about political branding. I still think one of the most powerful symbols anyone anywhere has ever developed is the peace symbol. It was designed in 1958 by the anti-war British designer Gerald Holtom, who said it was based on the semaphore symbols for “ND”– nuclear disarmament.
He also wrote this about the development of the design:

“I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.”

Fifty-one years later, and we still have a lot of reason to be in despair about the number of nuclear weapons in the world… But Holtom’s symbol is still a powerful and immediately recognizable mobilization tool for peace activists.
In the comments here, it would interesting to learn of other uses of color branding by non-governmental political movements around the world. I am sure I have missed some above!

My IPS analysis on Iran crisis ripples

… is here. Also archived here.
Of course, the 1,200-word format is ways too short to give due consideration to all the actual and potential ripples from the recent crisis in Iran; and as it happened what I ended up giving shortest shrift to in the piece was the effects Iran’s internal crisis will inevitably have on the prospects for ramping down the still very dangerous confrontation between the US and Iran over Iran’s nuclear technology program.
So what the article dealt with mainly were the also very important arenas of Iraq, the balance in the Persian Gulf more generally, Arab-Israeli peacemaking, and Afghanistan.
On Gulf balance issues, I just went back and re-read this December 2003 JWN post, ‘Geopolitics of the Gulf 201’. It still looks pretty helpful today (along with its precursor, ‘Geopolitics of the Gulf 101‘.
I had written about the effects of the Iran crisis on the nuclear issue in this June 20 post on JWN. I see that Laura Rozen has a new post on her blog on (mainly) this topic. Hat-tip for that, btw, goes to the interesting new blog being produced by Trita Parsi’s National Iranian-American Council.
The bottom line from the ‘experts’ cited by Rozen on how the Iranian crisis will affect the prospects for Obama getting a negotiated resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue is really all over the place.
She quotes Parsi himself as saying,

“It’s very tough for the president to engage in a serious manner within the next three-to six months because of how the Iranian government has been conducting itself… It’s politically far more difficult for him to pull this off,” than before the Iranian government crackdown on opposition supporters. “I’m not saying it’s impossible.”

Then she quotes Georgetown University’s Daniel Byman as saying,

“Some people are more optimistic, some are less… To me, we can hope to have more leverage, but we could have less. My impression is, we were going to try [engagement]. If it didn’t work, we’d move on. We would not be naïve that it would work.”

That is a fascinating quote, for two reasons. First, he is frank in admitting he does not know which way it will go. Second, what’s this thing about “moving on”? It strikes me that is almost certainly a reference to a plan that if the negotiations didn’t work the US would attack Iran militarily, or allow Israel to fire the first shot in that.
Scary.
Anyway, I’ll try to get back to this topic more when I can.

Democratic Westphalianism, or The Principles

By Dominic Tweedie

Publisher’s note: In one of the discussions here we recently got into a consideration of the Treaty of Westphalia. Dominic Tweedie (aka Domza) proposed that the topic needed a lot more examination. I agreed, and invited him to lead off this discussion. He got back with amazing rapidity with a launch-text for this discussion. Thanks, Dominic!
I am very happy indeed to put this up on JWN. Given the importance of the topic commenters are hereby freed from the 300-word limit; but maybe try to keep them below 1,000 words? Also, I’ll try to follow the discussion on the comments board as closely as I can, and to keep it serious and on-topic. ~HC

We have been quarrelling over Iran. We have no sure common idea of the path to follow or of what we have in common at all. What are we? Concerned? Interested? Compelled? On what common ground could we stand? Where, in the past, have such ties bound? Internationalism goes back to Lafayette, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Byron, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and most powerfully, to the International Brigade that fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and to Che Guevara, the extraordinarily successful champion of the wretched of the earth, who was born of a white-settler family in Argentina.
Historical internationalism would also have to include “liberation theology”, and the “pedagogy of the oppressed” as championed by Paulo Freire.
The fully constituted independent nations of the earth are more numerous than ever. At about 200, they have probably doubled in number in living memory, and now for the first time in history they cover almost the entire habitable land-surface of the planet. The available common model for internationalism is therefore the anti-colonialism that has led to this proliferation of free nation-states. The next available common model is the 1939-1945 World War against fascism, in whose shadow we have all lived.
For those who used to be involved in it, it is still a surprise that the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) that was such a poor relation for most of its three decades of life, appears now in retrospect as a mighty exemplar of both these compulsive strains of internationalism: anti-colonialism and anti-fascism. How, then, did the AAM work?

Continue reading “Democratic Westphalianism, or The Principles”

The “Piece Church”

One wonders what the “Prince of Peace” would have to say about “bringing a piece” to Church. Tonight, the New Bethel Church, in Louisville, Kentucky will be “packing it (guns) in the pews” to “celebrate our rights as Americans.”
That’s right, Pastor Ken Pagano is urging his flock to bring their weapons to his Assemblies of God church. Talk about “fire and brimstone.” Open guns must be unloaded; concealed firearms … well, they won’t be checked.
An AG Professor friend who knows Ken Pagano tells me that Pagano is a reasonable, well-educated conservative chap. (with a Doctorate of Ministry) My friend suspects this event to be more about publicity to attract new members to a small church. Indeed, Pagano has received much media attention, even appearing on Fox News.
Pagano asserts that he wants to celebrate how “God and guns were part of the foundation of this country,” that if we didn’t have guns, we wouldn’t have America. Any proceeds from a “raffle” at his bring-your-guns-to-church-day, he says, will “go to charity.” (Would that be the NRA?)
Pagano says he wants to start a dialogue, that he just wants to “promote responsible gun ownership,” that he is open to considering other approaches. Then again, who would want to “dialogue” with someone toting a semi-automatic machine gun?
I wonder too about the fears driving this. We’ve heard about horrible shootings in churches lately. The solution isn’t to bring more “pieces” into the church, but more peace. If matters get really bad, then metal detectors and security. The notion of weapons in a modern sanctuary “creeps me out” — as a person of faith. I wonder too if there’s a good bit of ole’ time southern revanchism afoot here, as I’ve heard all too much “chatter” about “the black man who is going to take away our guns.”
Pagano apparently revels in the attention and is undaunted by the few criticisms he’s heard: “I don’t see any contradiction in this. Not every Christian denomination is pacifist.”
On that point, Pagano does not know his own church’s history. Until 1967, the Assemblies of God Church was officially an antiwar, pacifistic, and peace-seeking church; even today, youth from that church are able to claim “conscientious objector” status. (though very few do)
For more on this lesser known history, I recommend a new book by Paul Alexander: PEACE TO WAR: Shifting Allegiances in the Assemblies of God. Alexander chronicles how the former peace church (among the fastest growing worldwide) devolved into a war church — and suggests how it might yet reclaim a middle position, for the sake of its own witness.
Paul Alexander, a Professor at Azuza Pacific University, deserves a wide reading in “charismatic” circles — his book was even favorably reviewed by Amos Yong of (Pat Robertson’s) Regent University.
Alexander runs a new organization called, “Pentecostals and Charismatics for Peace and Justice.” (strange as that may sound to those who recall my lament about “the mother of all sermons” here at JWN” ) Alas, I doubt his influence is felt very far – yet. Shunned by the AG and mega-evangelical presses, his book was jointly published by two Mennonite Houses. (kudos to Cascadia & Herald)
As for tonight’s gun-fest, cameras are banned, to protect the “privacy” of the gun owners. No doubt. Maybe one of those courageous Iranian protesters with cell cameras can get a peek for us?
As far as I know, the Assemblies of God church hierarchy has remained muzzled about Pagano. The silencer ought to be removed. Or are guns and war the only “fire” left in the soul of the Pentecostal church these days?

Note to commenters, #2

We have recently had a small “group” of new commenters here, all expressing similar views that relied on completely unsubstantiated allegations and verged on hate-speech.
Turns out these “commenters” are all one person but operating under different names like “Asfour”, “Victor”, “Firouz”.
This sock-puppetry completely violates the spirit of discussion the rest of us have here. It’s also a way whereby the author of these posts can evade the discourse-hogging guideline. He or she has now been banned from the site.

Meshaal responds to Obama, Take Two

Hamas head Khaled Meshaal has now told the whole world what he told me (and a little before me, Joe Klein) on June 4.
Namely this (from Al-Jazeera):

What’s new there from what he told me is his spelling out that Hamas welcomes the movement toward a dialogue without [pre-]conditions. I think that was already highly implicit in what he told me. The Word Doc of the complete transcript of my interview with him is here.
I guess the other thing that’s notable about today’s statement is that it was addressed primarily to an Arabic-language audience. So it is significant, and of course good, that he’s saying the same things to both English-language and Arabic-language audiences.

How effective is Obama’s Palestine policy?

I have been among the many criticizing Obama for moving WAYS too slowly on Arab-Israeli and specifically Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking. However, evidence is now emerging that his “slow and steady” approach is bearing some significant fruit:
Item #1: Marc Lynch, just back from a quick trip to Israel and the West Bank, blogged this last night:

only

Item #2: On Tuesday, JTA reported this:

some 49 percent of American voters call themselves supporters of Israel, down from 69 percent last September, and only about 44 percent of voters believe the United States should support Israel — down from 71 percent a year ago

Item #3: Rep. William Delahunt’s “Sense of the House” bill that spells out support for a two-state solution and for George Mitchell’s peace mission, now has 105 co-sponsors, reflecting the success of the campaign that the White House and several pro-peace organizations have undertaken to slowly and steadily build congressional support for thse positions.
These are all key pieces of evidence that Obama’s strategy is working… Though it has until now been, as I said, a painstakingly slow one.
I completely recognize that the removal of, actually, just a handful of the roadblocks with which the Israeli occupation stifles normal life, including normal economic life, in the West Bank is a thin ‘achievement’ indeed. (The PDF of the UN-OCHA’s latest weekly update on the situation is here.) Also, steps like that or, for example, an increase in the number or types of goods Israel allows into Gaza each week, are incredibly easy to reverse.
We can recall, too, what the cocky Likudnik strategic thinker Efraim Inbar told me about what he expected from Obama when I spoke with him back in March:

“The Americans may push us some, so we’ll remove one or two outposts or one or two roadblocks. We’ll play with the Americans.”

And meantime, the occupation as a whole grinds on and on and on… and so does Israel’s expropriation of additional amounts of Palestinian land, its construction of additional blocks of settler-only housing, and its continued maintenance of military law over the 2.3 million Palestinians of the West Bank and of a punishingly tight siege against the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza…
It is that big problem of the occupation that Obama has set himself to tackle. And so far he’s taken only baby steps toward doing so.
But here’s the important thing: In taking those baby steps and in presenting the Palestinian-Israeli issue in the way he has to the US public and Congress, Obama has actually succeeded in building up, rather than diminishing, the support his approach in the US public and Congress. That is unprecedented for US Presidents trying to move towards a more even-handed Arab-Israeli peace policy.
One of my friends who works this issue intensely reports that Sen. Mitchell has actually spent just as much time “working” key members of Congress on the issues as he has doing fact-finding in the Middle East.
However, I don’t think anyone in or out of the administration judges that “just” getting a few more West Bank roadblocks removed, or a few settlement outposts theatrically “demolished” (only to be re-erected someplace else the very next day, as has often happened in the past), or “just” getting the Israeli military’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) to add beans into the “diet” of the Gazans this week, or potatoes next week, or whatever, is going to solve this problem.
Everyone understands this is above all a political/diplomatic problem; and if Obama and Mitchell don’t take some significant steps at the level of authoritative diplomatic engagement pretty soon, then the whole, still perilously fragile balance in the Arab-Israeli region could still, oh so easily, explode.
That, at a time when the US military is working overtime to finetune the modalities of a safe exit from Iraq, the situation in Iran remains extremely murky, and NATO’s entire situation in Afghanistan/Pakistan is poised on a logistical knife-edge.
So the actions Obama and Co. have taken until now– expressing a firm stand on Israeli settlement construction (though not, actually, doing anything yet to hold Israel accountable on that score), and expressing a firm stand on opening up the crossings into Gaza (again, without any actions to implement it)– are in a sense an overture to the main, that is diplomatic, act that should, and I believe will, follow.
They have also served to both test and prepare public opinion in both the US and Israel for the main act. (And the results of that ‘testing’ would, I think, encourage them to move ahead even more boldly.)
But when will they make the big diplomatic move? Nobody knows. This team has proven incredibly good at holding its cards close to its chest.
It’s also good at using a little tactical deception when it wants to. For example, until today, nobody has a clue whether Dennis Ross’s latest move– over to the National Security Council, from the State Department, is a move up, sideways or into some form of bureaucratic sidelining. As Politico’s usually very well-informed Ben Smith writes: “As for how much influence he’ll have, we’ll have to wait and see.”
For my part, I believe Ross will now come more effectively than before under the command of General Jim Jones, who runs a tight ship on the NSC. But as Smith says, we’ll have to wait and see.

Me in the CSM, on bringing in Hamas

The piece I wrote on this topic Monday is now on the CSM website.
As JWN readers might guess, I had a lot more I wanted to say about this subject. I also wanted to include a little paragraph about Jimmy Carter’s great role. But that 800-word limit is deadly.
Maybe later today I’ll have a bit of energy left to expand on some of the arguments in the piece, here on JWN. But meantime, go read it; link to it on your blogs; and let’s discuss the arguments it makes, here on JWN with our usual courtesy.
This topic needs a lot more exposure and discussion than it’s gotten within the US until now.