Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 81 – Info, analysis, discussion

What Khamenei really said. (text)

To hear the rolling US corporate media refrain, US President Obama’s extraordinary NowRuz day message to Iran was dismissed, rejected, rebuffed, and trashed by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in a speech delivered yesterday in Mashhad, Iran. See, for examples, the Fox, MSNBC, Washington Post, Voice of America, variations on the theme .
The Associated Press, the source for much of the negative reporting, even carried a commentary characterizing the rebuff as illustrating Iran’s “mindset.”
So say we all? Deja vu to 2003? Kool-aid anyone?
Not quite. At Reuters, a very different headline read: “Iran Sets Terms for US Ties,” and similarly, at the French News Agency (AFP): “Iran ready to change if US leads way.”
Ignored in most US media reports about Iran’s reactions was this rather positive comment from Iran’s foreign minister, as reported by the Iranian news agency:

Concerning US President Barack Obama’s message to Iranians on the occasion of Nowroz, Mottaki said,” We are glad that Nowroz has been a source for friendship and we are pleased that Nowroz message is a message for coexistence, peace and friendship for the whole world.”

In the extension here, see the full text of Khamenei’s remarks in English as pertain to ties to America. (Translation provided late today by BBC/OSC — the latter being the valuable US government “open source center” service.) Underlining highlights are my own.
For commentary, consider Farideh Farhi’s excellent analysis.
For my own part, Khamenei’s speech covers the standard list of Iran’s grievances with the US since the revolution, some old, some ongoing, like still frozen assets and the perceived US support of various “bandit” and “dise\integrating” forces around Iran’s periphery….

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Bantustan Days, Part 3: Sadness of a peace negotiator

I’m now continuing with my download of some of the notes
I took during my recent time in Palestine/Israel. Actually, I need to find a new heading for this feature. I
was thinking of “Notes from Bantustine”, which has
certain ring to it. But some of my more interesting notes are from within 1948
Israel where the situation is not that of apartheid/Bantustans as much as of a
fairly settled colonial-settler society– even though it is one that still has major
issues from its colonizing era unresolved.

When
we were writing our 2004 Quaker book on the Palestine-Israel conflict we made a
point of referring to the whole area of Mandate Palestine as either
“Palestine/Israel” or “Israel/Palestine”, alternating between the two forms.
That is one slightly clunky way to proceed. Personally I think the way that
post-1994 South Africa has dealt with some geographic naming issues– by
inventing completely new, culturally neutral or “inclusive” names for places to
replace the sometimes exquisitely culturally specific names used before– has
considerable merit. “The Holy Land” is another way to proceed, though it’s a
little pious-sounding. Also, as a Quaker I totally believe that all portions of
the earth are equally “holy”; and I think that the singling-out of the area of
Mandate Palestine as “the Holy Land” by many parties, including Western
Christians, has led to a world of competitive claims, jealousy, divisiveness,
and general trouble.

… So
anyway, since my note download starts with the week I spent in Ramallah, for now I can still use the “Bantustan days”
rubric. Okay, even recognizing, as I did here already, that Ramallah and other PA enclaves in the West Bank are “Not
exactly Bantustans.”

On February 18, I conducted a good, though short, interview
with Ghassan Khatib.
Khatib is one of the leaders of the Palestinian
People’s Party (PPP), formerly the Palestinian Communist Party, one of
the smaller Palestinian organizations that has been
affiliated with the Fateh-dominated PLO for many
years. Historically, the communists were the earliest supporters within the
Palestinian national movement of the twin ideas of recognizing Israel and
creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel—i.e., the two-state
solution. I think this was linked
to the PCP’s historic relationship with both the Soviet Union (back in the
day), given the USSR’s strong support for the creation of Israel; and also its
relationship with the Israeli Communist Party, especially since after the creation of the
Jewish state in 1948 the ICP became one of the main vehicles within which the
Palestinians who remained inside 1948 Israel had some ability to
organize their communities and to participate in Israeli politics.

Khatib was born in Nablus in 1954.
He was held in Israel’s system of “administrative” (i.e. no-trial) detention
from 1974 through 1977, a period when the PCP and other pro-PLO organizations
were doing a lot of effective organizing of Palestinian communities on the West
Bank. Later he went to the UK and got an
economics degree from Manchester University in the UK. I first met him in 1989
when he had just recently emerged from yet another spell of administrative
detention. The PCP/PPP had thrown its considerable organizing and intellectual
skills into the First Intifada, which started in December 1987. In the late 1980s,
the head of the PPP was Bashir al-Barghouthi, an
extremely smart and thoughtful man who suffered a severe stroke in 1997 and
died in 2000.

Khatib was a member of the
Jordanian-Palestinian delegation at the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 and of
the Palestinian team that participated in follow-up negotiations with Israel.
In 2002 he was appointed Minister of Labor in the PA, then in 2005-6 he was
Minister of Planning. These days he is a Vice-President at Bir
Zeit University, a little north of Ramallah. He came by to talk to me at the end of one of his
workdays there.

He was pretty pessimistic when we talked about the prospects
of any rapid reconciliation between Fateh and Hamas.
(And I see that in the
latest of his regular contributions to the “Bitter Lemons” discussion
forum, he still seems pessimistic. Go to that link to read his view of “the five obstacles” that still stand
in the way of the reconciliation.)

When I talked with Khatib
he—like the always well-informed Ziad Abu Amr, whom I’d talked with earlier in the day—noted
that one other significant problem could well arise from the fact that the head
of the team whom Fateh leader (and the PA’s hanging-on-by-one-thread president) Mahmoud Abbas sent to negotiate
with Hamas in Cairo was none other than the ever-controversial Ahmed Qurei, Abu ‘Ala.

Continue reading “Bantustan Days, Part 3: Sadness of a peace negotiator”

WP: “Truth About Forgiveness”

Today’s Washington Post (p. W8) features a compelling account of a father who 14 years ago lost a son — one of hundreds murdered every year in Baltimore. This father, Bernard Williams, nearly died from grief, until he figured out how to save himself from the pits of despair. He learned to forgive himself and … the killer of his son. It’s a gritty, heart-wrenching story; would any of us do as he did?
Williams received extraordinary help from a Lauren Abramson, a Johns Hopkins professor who runs a 11-year-old Community Conferencing Center, wherein “whole neighborhoods are invited to gather and solve problems.”
Abramson also facilitates conversations between victims and incarcerated offenders, in keeping with the worldwide “restorative justice movement.” Pioneered barely a quarter century ago by Howard Zehr, now of Eastern Mennonite University, the restorative justice method adjusts the focus away from punishing the perpetrator and towards the victim, emphasizing support for the afflicted, repairing the harm, and transforming all the parties.
Being an international politics specialist, I sat up and took note of the referenced benefits of forgiveness — as compared to the “benefits” of vengeance. Herein, we encounter Everett Worthington, a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University:

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Jerusalem’s Israeli mayor on US fundraising trip

The recently elected Israeli mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, is heading to the US this week on a fund-raising tour that will bring him to New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, San Francisco and Florida.
That report from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (HT: MondoWeiss) says Barkat:

hopes to reach out to American Jews and make them partners in revitalizing Jerusalem. To use his language, he sees them as “shareholders” in the city.

I hope that Barkat will receive the welcome that’s deserved by a man who’s at the cutting edge of the currently escalating campaign to ethnically cleanse the whole Eastern half of the city– which was quite illegally Anschlussed by the Israeli government in 1967– of its remaining Palestinian residents.
US citizens of all faith-groups, or none, and of all ethnicities need to understand clearly that:

occupied territory.

great new background resource

are forbidden to enter the city for pilgrimage, regular prayer, or other purposes.

In short, Barkat should be met wherever he goes on his current tour with a series of pointed questions that undermine the kind of propaganda points he will be making (as previewed in the NYT interview with him, which ran today.)

Those revelations of IDF violations in Gaza

Kudos to Haaretz for publishing the first English-language accounts of the “spill the beans” session held at Oranim Academic College February 13 in which dozens of IOF soldiers who had served in Gaza talked openly about many of the laws-of-war violations they saw their fellow soldiers committing there.
Yesterday Haaretz followed up, with the fullest English-language version to date of the session. This is an important text that bears close reading.
Especially this portion, from the testimony of a soldier codenamed Aviv:

According to Aviv he changed the orders he had gotten from “above” by using loudspeakers to give the residents of the houses five minutes to get out of them before the killing squads would go in.
“Above”, though: Where did those orders come from?
It seems that the problem of IDF violations in Gaza was not only (and perhaps not mainly) one of poor training and disorganization at the NCO level, as Pat Lang had earlier surmised, but one of fundamentally inhumane and possibly criminal orders being issued from the higher echelons.
After the Oranim revelations were published– they came out in Maariv, as well, though not I think in English there– the IDF promised it would launch an investigation and Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the IDF was still “the most ethical army in the world.” In light of the facts that have also been emerging– in the soldiers’ testmonies at Oranim, and elsewhere including here— about the incendiary and criminal tracts distributed to troops in Gaza by the IDF’s own rabbis, and about the widespread commissioning by IDF units of extremely hateful and anti-humane T-shirts, Barak’s bleating is outrageous and the idea that the IDF itself can ever satisfactorily “investigate” its own deep culture of supporting and condoning laws-of-war violations (= war crimes) is completely non-credible.
By the way, the whole of Uri Blau’s piece there about the inciteful T-shirts is worth reading. The soldiers he interviews there who’ve been involved in commissioning, selling and/or designing some of the many designs of these T-shirts make quite clear that the designs receive advance approval from officers or NCOs before they are distributed within the units.
A few final notes:
1. Palestinian survivors of the atrocities in Gaza and local and international human rights groups had earlier produced numerous reports, since almost the first days of the war, about the IDF’s widespread commission of law-of-war violations in Gaza. Asked about those reports, IDF spokesmen nearly always issued strong denials, though where the evidence was incontrovertible they said they would investigate what had happened themselves. (No signs, though, that they ever did so.) These spokesmen should be held accountable for their lies. They include reserve officer Michael Oren, now back to his day-job teaching students at Georgetown University in Washington DC.
2. At a broader level, Israel as a state, the IDF as an army, and the responsible officials within the IDF should all be held completely accountable for these reported violations which– as now described by numerous IDF soldiers themselves– certainly mount to the level of war crimes. The ROEs or standing orders mandating this behavior, these soldiers say, came “from above.” Everyone in the world concerned about the commission of atrocities, and most especially those of us who are US taxpayers and thereby also morally responsible for IDF actions, need to gain a complete understanding of what the ROEs were and who signed off on them; and we need to see the responsible levels within the IDF or the Israeli government punished and excluded from the future exercise of power. Until this happens, all officers in the higher echelons of the IDF should be considered possibly culpable.
3. As clearly described by the soldiers in the Oranim meeting, and as previously revealed in any number of reports, one of the highest priorities of the IDF in the Gaza operation was to avoid IDF casualties to the highest degree possible– even where this would involve increasing the risk of harm to civilians. This was because of the effects of Israeli war dead on domestic Israeli politics both during the lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful IDF campaign in Lebanon 1982-2000 and the effects of Israeli war dead during the 2006 debacle in Lebanon: Inflicting a lot of damage on Gaza, and being seen by everyone in the world as being quite ready to do so, was an important part of what was meant when Israeli leaders described the war’s goal as being to “increase the credibility of Israel’s deterrence.”
International humanitarian law, by contrast, requires that members of military units be prepared to take additional casualties among their own numbers in order to avoid harm to civilians; and the IDF’s own “permanent” ethics code states

will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.

During the Gaza war, that ethical norm clearly got over-ridden at some level. At what level, and by whom?
4. The tendency of many Israelis to engage in hand-wringing self-referentialism continues. Jeffrey Goldberg comments on his blog,

the Jewish people didn’t struggle for national equality, justice and freedom so that some of its sons could behave like Cossacks. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not equating the morality of the IDF to that of Hamas. The goal of Hamas is to murder innocent people; the goal of the IDF is to avoid murdering innocent people. But when the IDF fails to achieve its goal, and ends up inflicting needless destruction and suffering, it sullies not only its own name, but the name of the Jewish state…

His post there is titled “How far has the IDF fallen?” Um, Jeffrey, how about if the IDF, in which you once served, apparently with pride, has always or very often been like this in the past… ?
5. Some Israelis and pro-Israelis just love to wax poetic about how sensitive the IDF’s soldiers are… how they not only shoot but they engage much more sensitively in the activity known as “shooting and crying.” Possibly the most mendacious and nauseating version of this sentiment is the one piously intoned by Golda Meir in 1969:

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.

(Barf.)
Ah, well, it is not just the “sons” of the Arabs who are getting killed by the IDF these days… It is also their babies, their grandmothers, their sick, their halt, and their lame.
But here’s a memo to the ghost of Mrs. Meir and to all other Israelis who try to appear oh-so-“sensitive” as they go about, or try to condone from afar, the IDF’s murderous and criminal actions: No-one is “forcing” you to act this way. The Israeli government as a body, and individual Israelis who serve in their nation’s army, all have a choice. One choice is to end occupation; end the attempt to dominate and oppress your neighbors, the Palestinians; and make real peace. The other is to carry on with the murderous business as usual. It’s up to you to choose.
But please, if your choice is to carry on with the killing and destruction, don’t come to us to expect any sympathy for the choice you made.

‘Birthright’ project provoking problems in Hillel?

I heard recently from a friend whose cousin is the director of a “Hillel” Jewish student-life program at a west-coast US university that she (the cousin) had been having a problem with the imposition from some outside funders that Hillel employees play an active role in supporting the racist/Zionist “Birthright” project that sends American Jewish students on an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel, supposedly with the aim of strengthening their connection with that country.
Now it seem my friend’s cousin is not the only Hillel employee having problems with the orders to run the Birthright (or, in Hebrew, “Taglit”) project. Read this intriguing blog-post from Chanel Dubovsky, an employee of the Hillel center at Columbia/Barnard in New York.
She writes,

a program whose agenda is to make them rabid, unquestioning supporters of its actions?

This is great news. It indicates that young, educated Jewish people in the US have become far more prepared than hitherto to buck the many “circle the wagons” and discourse-suppression pressures from within their own faith-group, to challenge the often nepotistically appointed leaders of the mainstream Jewish organizations, and do their own thinking from sound first principles about the rights and wrongs of the Israeli government’s actions…
And that these critically questioning students are able to have an increasing impact on those co-believers who like Chanel Dubovsky are a few (or maybe more than a few) years older than they.

“Gaza first” on the horizon?

With respect to the Egyptian-Palestinian-Israeli triangle as it manifests regarding Gaza, I’d add the following general notes:
1. Egypt and Hamas share a strong interest in preventing Gaza’s 1.5 million people from spilling out in any lasting way into Egypt. Gaza is very constrained for so many people, certainly– especially since, under current circumstances, they also need to be growing a lot of their own food there. But the 75% of Gaza’s people who are refugees from inside Israel still have live claims on homes, farms, and arable land inside Israel. Hamas works to keep those claims alive. For its part, the Egyptian regime simply doesn’t want to have additional Palestinians inside Egypt; while a large segment of the Egyptian population actively supports Hamas’s campaign to keep the Palestinian refugees’ claims alive.
2. The Egyptian and Israeli governments share an interest in reducing Hamas’s political power and influence as much as possible. (Hence their collaboration in maintaining the siege.) However, the Egyptian government faces significant constraints from its own citizens that prevent it from going too far to oppress/crush/exterminate Hamas. No foreseeable Israeli government– either the present one, the incoming one, or a Livny government that might replace Netanyahu after a period– will face any such constraints from its own citizens. The dynamic in Israeli society has been shifting rapidly toward support for more and more hardline policies toward the Palestinians in general, and particularly toward those pesky Gazans who refused to bow to the IDF’s will during the recent assault on their communities. Would there be effective international constraints on an attempt by Netanyahu to send the military in to “finish the job” in Gaza? At this point, I do not know.
3. However, just to further complicate matters a bit, I’d note there is also a potential for shared Hamas and Israeli interests with respect to Gaza, including– or perhaps especially– under Likud. Netanyahu has talked about trying to offer the Palestinians an “economic peace”, rather than a real peace. This proposal is far from new; and every time the Israeli occupiers of the West Bank and Gaza have attempted it in the past it has been either a complete sham or a miserable failure, or both. And I still think that, regarding the West Bank, it is a completely useless, actively fraudulent, and dangerously diversionary proposal that should be completely spurned. How on earth can the highly atomized Palestinian enclaves of the West Bank ever be expected to mount anything like a viable economy so long as the Palestinian heartland continues to be quadrillaged by the literally hundreds of IDF-controlled internal checkpoints that choke off every hope of economic opportunity or normal human life? However, in the present circumstances in Gaza, Gaza might provide a focus for something similar to the kind of “economic peace” that Netanyahu talks about. It could do this most easily if Israel simply and sincerely abandoned all its remaining claims to control all the access points into and out of the Strip, and the complete control it currently operates over the Strip’s population register, and allowed Gaza to reconnect to the world economy through Egypt and through Gaza’s own air and sea access points. This, incidentally, is what Mahmoud Zahhar and other strong currents in the Hamas leadership have talked about for several years now. (See e.g. by March 2006 interview with Zahhar.) Egypt is not so enthusiastic about this, seeing a risk that the Palestine Question might bleed more deeply into Egyptian politics under this scenario than Mubarak feels happy about. However, if Netanyahu should prove motivated and able to persuade Washington of the virtues of what would be (effectively) a “Gaza-first option” for the Palestinians– would Mubarak’s agreement to it be far behind? I think not.
… I’ve been thinking aloud, really, in this post so far. “Gaza first” proposals have, of course, been offered to the Palestinians many times over the years, and the main response of the PLO Palestinian leaders has always been to worry that “Gaza first” might all too easily become “Gaza only”… That is, that the “Palestinian state” they sought would be established not in the 22% of historic (Mandate) Palestine that they claimed in the 1988 “Declaration of Independence”, but just in the 1.27% of historic Palestine that lies within the Gaza Strip.
However, there is no way whatsoever that Hamas or any other Gaza-based leadership would sign off on any “final peace” with Israel that would involve giving up on the longstanding Palestinian claims to Jerusalem and to satisfaction on the refugee issue. No way. So if a Palestinian administration did emerge in Gaza that would have control over its internal affairs and over economic affairs including economic and other forms of (non-military) links to the outside world, and would undertake to abide by a reciprocal armistice/ceasefire with Israel for some presumably pre-agreed duration that would not be a final resolution and ending of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
But it could provide some important relief to the people of Gaza (and to the residents of southern Israel, though can say based on my recent visit to Sderot that their lives seem outstandingly good right now, in comparison with those of their fellow-humans right across the border with Gaza)
Meantime, the campaign would obviously continue for a speedy and durable resolution of the whole broader conflict including its important dimensions regarding Jerusalem and the refugees.
Would a new form of “Palestinian Authority” based in Gaza be any less able to negotiate a final peace agreement with Israel’s leaders than the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallastan has been over the past 15 years? We might note that during the 15-year life of the Ramallastan PA it completely failed to hold its Israeli interlocutor to the important, Oslo-based commitment that the terms of a final peace would be completely agreed within five years. It completely failed to halt Israel’s settlement-building project. (Indeed, Arafat gave the whole settling project a completely new lease on life when he agreed that Israel could carve a whole new settlers-only road system deep into the West Bank under the guise of so-called “bypass roads”.) And the Ramallastan PA completely failed to provide any meaningful protection at all to the chronically embattled Palestinian population of occupied Jerusalem…
Actually the list of the failures of the Ramallastan PA’s failures, from a Palestinian-nationalist perspective, goes on and on and on.
Anyway, I’m not trying to second-guess or predict Hamas’s decisionmaking on this point. Just to note that one version of a “Gaza first” option may be on the table under Netanyahu, and that Hamas’s response to it may be surprisingly positive. But who knows? Netanyahu might instead just succumb to the still-high popular pressure to go back in to Gaza to “finish the job.”

IPS piece on Egypt’s diplo challenges

I had a new piece up on IPS yesterday, titled ” Pressure Mounts on Egypt to Deliver Results”. You can find it on IPS here and on my analysis-archive here.
I’ll confess I got two small items of fact wrong in the first edition of the piece– the one I sent to IPS. The number of Hamas pols captured by Israel in the West Bank Thursday was reportedly ten, not 20 as I’d written. And it was presumptive incoming Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, not incoming PM Netanyahu, who said not long ago that Egypt could “go to hell.”
I have tried to have these corrections made on the IPS site but it hasn’t happened yet. Hopefully soon. I have made them in my own archived version of the piece.
They do not alter the analysis in any substantial way. Egypt is under pressure from the Palestinians and many other Arabs for its failure to deliver agreements on any of the three negtiations it is currently running, as well as for its continued collaboration with Israel’s project to maintain the tight siege around Gaza.
In the western MSM, the discourse about Middle East regional politics is still completely dominated by the Iran issue; the policies of regional actors are dissected endlessly for whether these actors are “for” or “against” the US-Israeli campaign against Iran. Shorthand for this is the dyad of terms “moderate” and “extremist.”
However, the vast majority of citizens– and quite a few governments– in the Arab world do not see things in these terms. Indeed, they do not consider Iran to be the main threat/challenge that their region faces. They are more concerned about Israel’s coercive power in the region, and in particular its manifestation with regard to the Palestinian issue.
In addition, there is a whole rich history of inter-Arab dealings that has almost nothing to do with the “moderates/extremists” frame into which US commentators like to squeeze the politics of the entire region.
I tried to capture the “Egypt” aspect of this regional dynamic in the IPS piece. Mubarak really is sitting on a hot potato in these negotiations– and he seems, crucially, to be getting little support in his diplomatic efforts from anyone in Washington.

Obama’s NowRuz Message: “A New Beginning”

About an hour ago, the White House web site released a startling video message from President Obama to all those who celebrate NowRuz, the (Persian) New Year.
Taking advantage of the single most important holiday season in Iran, the text of President Obama’s message emphasizes “respect” and signals “a new beginning” in America’s policy towards Iran.
The first subtle, yet critical change is the audience: Obama is speaking “directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” No more condescension in speaking only to Iran’s people, as if inviting them to rise up and change their system at America’s command. Such “interference,” whether by the Bush or Clinton Administrations, tended to stiffen resolve, close minds, circle wagons; In short, it backfired.
Obama sets the backdrop for his different approach by recognizing Nowruz as an integral part of Iran’s “great and celebrated culture,” and that despite the strains between Iran and the US, the holiday season reminds us “of the common humanity that binds us together.” In many ways, Nowruz in Iran is like the American holidays of Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, Easter, and Halloween — all compressed within two weeks. Friends, family, gifts, fun — “and looking to the future with a renewed sense of hope.”

“Within these celebrations lies the promise of a new day, the promise of opportunity for our children, security for our families, progress for our communities, and peace between nations. Those are shared hopes, those are common dreams.
So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran’s leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.“

It appears then that Dennis Ross is not controlling US Iran policy after all. No more (un-)”smart power” language of “carrots and sticks,” which Iranians view as fit for “donkeys.”
Obama isn’t forgetting the differences, but he is offering Iran a different path, a choice, one that doesn’t threaten Iran with being “obliterated,” invaded, or, “regime changed” if it doesn’t “cry Uncle” first. To the contrary, Obama calls upon Iran to live up to its own heritage:

“The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right — but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization.

That “greatness is not the capacity to destroy,” but rather an “ability to build and create…” exchanges, partnerships, commerce, where “old divisions are overcome,” and where Iran, its neighbors, and the outside word can live in security and peace.
The road to that future “won’t be easy,” especially given “those who insist that we be defined by our differences” (whether that be “neocons” in Iran, Israel, or the US). Yet remarkably, Obama invokes the 13th Century Persian poet Sa’di as the sage on our potential common ground:

“The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence.“

“With the coming of a new season, we’re reminded of this precious humanity that we all share. And we can once again call upon this spirit as we seek the promise of a new beginning.”

I anticipate with Trita Parsi, President of the National Iranian American Council, that “[t]his historic message… will be the topic of conversation at every Norooz celebration in Iran and in America.”
Obama is doing something fundamentally different than Bush II, at the level of “strategic intent” to change the nature of relations between the US and Iran, to not just seek “tactical” cooperation on Iraq, Afghanistan, on oil shipping.
As a footnote, I am intrigued that much of Obama’s message to Iran follows suggestions that my own mentor, R.K. Ramazani, sketched in an early February oped on what “respect” means to Iran.
Less than a week later (on Feb. 9th), even Iran’s President Ahmadinejad also picked up on the respect theme:,

“The new US government… wants to create change and follow the path of talks. It’s very clear that true change should be fundamental and not tactical. It’s clear that the Iranian nation will welcome genuine changes. The Iranian nation is prepared to talk. However, these talks should be held in a fair atmosphere in which there is mutual respect.”

Make it so.

Palestine Question now absent from Obama’s agenda

The Palestine Question now appears to have fallen off Pres. Obama’s agenda. In his early days in office he took some impressive steps toward principles-based and constructive engagement in the diplomacy on this issue, which is one of stronger impact worldwide now than it possibly ever has been in the past.
On Obama’s second day in office he (and Secretary of State Clinton) announced the appointment of Sen. George Mitchell as special representative on Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking. In the speech in which he described Mitchell’s mandate, in the interview he gave Al-Arabiya television, and in other events during his first week in office Obama made some forceful statements about the need for strong US engagement in the search for a durable two-state solution between the Palestinians and Israel.
That was two months ago. Since then, nothing.
This matters, because the Palestine Question is one of burning– and increasing– relevance to publics throughout the Middle East, and in the Muslim world far beyond that region. It acts as one much-watched litmus-test of how much moral (and thereby also political) authority this new US president will be able to retain for his, and my, country over the years ahead.
Strong outside engagement in the diplomacy on the Palestine Question is needed now because the long-pursued tactic of “having the two parties sort it out between themselves” clearly hasn’t worked. Instead, over the 18 years of “bilateral direct negotiations” since Madrid, the pro-negotiation camp in each of the two societies has shrunk to near-zero; much harder-line and intransigent political forces now predominate.
As of now, if we say “outside engagement”, the key role in providing that would have to come from Washington, in good part because the actions of successive US presidents over the past 35 years have emasculated the capabilities of the UN, which should more naturally and appropriately have retained the lead peace-brokering role that it previously had. (If Washington truly cannot perform on the peacemaking, the lead role may yet devolve back to the UN; other permanent members of the Security Council might insist on this if Washington’s policy throws the Middle East and the world into too much further chaos.)
Washington’s engagement needs to be at the presidential level precisely because Israel’s well-organized networks of support inside the US have succeeded in turning the Palestine issue into a dangerous hot potato for all lesser oficials. All the power of the presidential “bully pulpit”– that is, the president’s power to lead through the clear articulation of a principled position married to the taking of clear and compelling steps to secure that vision in timely fashion– needs to be harnessed to the issue.
Instead of which– ?
If you go to the main “Foreign Policy” page on the White House website you have to scroll down quite a way in the priority-ranked listing of topics there before you come to any relevant item. This is the item headed “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, which comes in third under the subhead “Renewing American Diplomacy.”
What it says there is really disappointing, and a clear sign of presidential inattention to the issue. It is just an outdated and clearly quite inappropriate cut-and-paste from some pre-inaugural document:

Obama and Biden will make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a key diplomatic priority from day one. They will make a sustained push — working with Israelis and Palestinians — to achieve the goal of two states, a Jewish state in Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security.

No mention of Israels assault on Gaza and subsequent escalation of its campaign to punish the Strip’s people through harmful blockade. No mention of Mitchell’s mission or any other post-inaugural developments at all.
Then, right after the other items in “Renewing American Diplomacy” comes an entire sub-section headed “Israel”, which contains this in full:

Israel

* Ensure a Strong U.S.-Israel Partnership:

* Support Israel’s Right to Self Defense:

* Support Foreign Assistance to Israel:

Once again, meaningless electoral boiler-plate. Okay, probably not meaningless, because these are clear policies that are evidently being pursued by the administration with no even cosmetic attempt to provide “balance.”
Look, I guess I can understand why the Palestine Question has fallen off Obama’s agenda. He has a lot of other things to deal with right now– primarily, the economy.
But Palestine can’t wait. He came out of the starting gate well on the issue, back in his first week in office. Since then, nothing. No actions– or even words, from him– to force the full implementation of humanitarian law for Gaza’s long-punished people.
(And only a couple of half-hearted bleats on this issue from Mitchell and Clinton. They said a few words about some of the more outrageous aspects of Isarel’s collective-punishment siege of Gaza, and then did nothing, frittering away thereby any moral or political authority they might have had on the principles involved.)
No actions– or even words– from anyone in the administration on Israel’s continued detention of more than three dozen duly elected Palestinian legislators.
No actions from Obama– and just a few words from Clinton– about Israel’s stepped-up demolitions of Palestinians homes in occupied Jerusalem. (And once again, the fact that she said something and then no consequences followed makes here and her boss both look impotent.)
No word from Obama to save the appointment of Chas Freeman.
As Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” That is what seems to be happening on the Palestine Question these days.