If there is a viable two-state solution in Israel/Palestine…

… then my judgment is that it will lie somewhere between the cluster of ‘plans’ that emerged between December 2000 and mid-2003– the ‘Clinton parameters’, ‘Geneva Accord‘, and ‘Nuseibeh-Ayalon Plan‘, which collectively we can call CGNA– and the Arab Peace Plan proposed by Saudi Arabia and adopted by the Arab League meeting in Beirut in 2002.
Probably, closer to the Arab Peace Plan.
The Arab Peace Plan is the only one of these that has the explicit support of (in this case, a large number of) the regional governments concerned, including the Palestinian Authority. The Clinton Parameters were then-Prez Clinton’s restatement of what he understood to be the points of convergence between negotiators from the then-outgoing Ehud Barak government in Israel and negotiators from Yasser Arafat’s PA. The Geneva Initiative was a well-meaning and well-funded Swiss project, undertaken after Ehud Barak fell from power, to get some of Israel’s out-of-government pro-peace actors to reach an agreement on details of a possible peace agreement with people very close to (still in office) Yasser Arafat. Nuseibeh-Ayalon was a similar attempt, focused on one pro-Arafat Palestinian and an Israeli figure who had previously been head of the Shin Beth.
One problem with all the CGNA projects is that they did not involve in any way either Hamas or that vast portion of the Palestinian nation (five million or more people– a number greater than that of Palestinians now living in the land of Mandate Palestine) who now live outside Mandate Palestine. These diaspora Palestinians include around 2.5 million UNRWA-registered refugees and an equally large or larger number of Palestinian exiles who still have demonstrable claims on property and national rights inside Palestine but who are not, for various reasons, registered refugees.
Another problem with the CGNA projects is that they completely ignored the requirements of international law, which underline the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, the complete illegality of a country planting its own settlers in land it holds only through belligerent military occupation, and the right of refugees to return to the land of their origin.
The problem with the Arab Peace Plan is that deliberations on it did not involve Israel’s seven million people, a good proportion of whom– though by no means all– could be expected to object to its international-law-based insistence on a complete Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines and the return of Palestinian refugees to their ancestral homes and farms.
Back in 2000, and perhaps as late as 2003, it looked plausible– sometimes even advisable– to many people in the US and elsewhere in the west to proceed with Israeli-Palestinian “peacemaking” according to a model that relied on US monopolization of the whole process. Given the immense power of the pro-Israel and indeed also the pro-settler lobbies within the US political system, this tipped the balance systematically against any fair and equal consideration of Palestinian rights, claims, and needs.
In April 2004, President Bush went further than any previous US president in bowing to the demands of the pro-settler lobby when he gave Israeli PM Sharon a letter saying,

    In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers [i.e. West bank settlement blocs], it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949 [i.e. the pre-1967 lines], and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.

Though this letter has often been seen as an important new “fact” in the Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, it actually has no force of law whatever and is merely an exchange of views between two government leaders. Neither George W. Bush nor any other US president is, after all, the “boss of the whole world” or of the Middle East; and pronouncements by the US president have no particular force in international law, though they– as in the case of this letter– considerably complicate the efforts of diplomacy.
The entire US diplomacy from, or before, the time of the ill-fated Oslo Agreement of 1993 until now has also been very centrally based on “letting the two parties to this dispute work it out between themselves.” This approach built on a generally attractive opposition to the idea of imposed peace settlements. On the other hand, it built on and further propagated a myth that the two parties in question were in some way “equal” in stature and power. They never have been. Israel is a long-established state with its own power in the international system and its own army. The Palestinians are not a state but a dispersed and dispossessed people, some 3.8 million of whom now live directly under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
How can representatives of the prisoners “negotiate” on an equal basis with jailers who currently hold them captive, controlling their economy and their every movement, and who have repeatedly shown their readiness to use blunt force to control, punish, and impose their will on the imprisoned people?
Those were the structural problems behind all the attempts (some well-meaning, some perhaps not) to reach simply a “bilateral” agreement between the two sides, with the US government playing merely a role to “facilitate” that negotiation. A more accurate description of that version of the US role would be that it was to protect that extremely inequitable encounter between the imprisoned and his jailer from any demands for equity or international legal standards that might come from outside the closed room of their “negotiation”.
Hamas and other Palestinian groups always rejected that model of negotiation. Many other actors in the Arab world, including many Arab governments, also always had strong reservations about it. The Arab Peace Initiative poses a distinct contrast to the CGNA approach, primarily because it is based on international law and makes no assumption about the special or authoritative value of highly inequitable “direct, bilateral negotiations.”
Meanwhile, in the five years since George Bush’s extremely arrogant letter of 2004, the US’s relative position within world politics has been tumbling. There still seems to be a working assumption in much of Washington that the US can continue to monopolize Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, and apply ground-rules very similar to those it has used since 1993; but I believe that Pres. Obama and his advisers will rapidly discover that this is no longer the case.
A more truly international, UN-based and international law-based approach is the only sure way forward. (This could also, incidentally, provide Obama a sort of “Well, the UN made me do it” argument with which to counter the storm of internal criticism he’ll doubtless get from the pro-settler constituencies in both the Jewish and evangelical-Christian communities in this country, when and as he moves towards a more even-handed and law-based approach. After all, the US citizenry very evidently does need the active support of a range of other world powers at this point, if it is to avoid complete cataclysmic disasters happening to our badly over-stretched armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, or further, even worse additional disasters striking our already badly battered national economy.)
So what would an international-law-based outcome look like on the ground? Probably, something very much closer to the Arab Peace Initiative than to the CGNA plans. The 470,000 illegal settlers whom successive Israeli governments have planted into the occupied West Bank (including occupied East Jersualem) and the 17,000 it has planted into Golan will just have to deal with this. Perhaps some of them would be willing to stay where they are under Palestinian (or in Golan, Syrian) governance; and perhaps those new governments could help to arrange some sort-out for the complex property issues involved if some settlers did choose to stay. But extra-territorial civil status of any kind for these (former) settlers would be a quite unworkable can of worms. They have lived as completely privileged “Lords of the Land”, lording it arrogantly over their dispossessed Palestinian neighbors for far too long to allow any “special civil status” arrangement to be viable.
The vast majority of the settlers will simply have to go back and live in Israel proper; and the Palestinian (and Syrian) governments can then decide in a fair and inclusive way how the very lovely housing stock thereby released can be allocated among the many claimants from among their respective citizenries.
Special arrangements could be made to protect the access of religious pilgrims from the Jewish and other faiths to holy sites in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank; and perhaps some special religious institutions could be built near those sites to service those pilgrims– but still under the national sovereignty of the rightful Palestinian government. The Muslim and Christian authorities in sovereign Palestine might also want to gain reciprocal access and facilities for pilgrims from Palestine who want to visit holy sites and graveyards inside Israel.
But one central point here is that, while claims for “pilgrimage access” and the facilities attendant thereto should always be considered with favor by national authorities, the idea that pilgrimage or any other kind of religious claims can provide any kind of property or sovereignty “right” in international law is plainly untenable… What would Rome look like now if every Catholic from anywhere who now is able to go and pray there thereby acquired a “right” to settle in Rome, instantly become an Italian citizen, and then take over Italy and make it into their own new kind of religio-national state?
Another central point: We need to be able to identify who the “primary stakeholders” to this conflict are. They are, surely, members of the following groups:

    a) All Israeli citizens, whether ethnically/religiously Jewish, or ethnically Palestinian/Arab;
    b) All Palestinians, including both those who currently residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza and those forced into exile from mandate Palestine over the past 61 years, and the descendants of those “original” exiles.

Each person who is a member of one of these groups should count as one, and none as more than one, to use the old Benthamite definition of human equality. And though many of the rest of us– American Christians, French Jews, Buddhists from China, or agnostics from Sweden– may have special feelings of affection (or even religious longing) for various aspects of life or objects of devotion in that area of Israel/Palestine, we are not actually, direct stakeholders at all. We are outsiders, and have no special claims.
There are around seven million Israeli citizens. And though the counting of Palestinians– especially those in the diaspora– is less precise, the total of Palestinian “insiders” and “outsiders” (but excluding those 1.2 ethnic Paestinians who are citizens of Israel) doubtless comes to more than 7.5 million, perhaps a lot more.
A person does not lose his claim to be a Palestinian if he leaves his home under situations of duress and is thereafter denied the right to return to it; and nor do his children lose the rights they would otherwise have had to and in their homeland, simply because their parents were refugees. This principle of the continuation of the property and political rights of refugees is well founded in international law. In the political settlements of recent years in South Africa, Bosnia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, those exiled from their homeland were included in voting and referendum processes on an equal basis with those who were never thus exiled. Palestinians are no different.
(Hence, incidentally, I find the arguments of many of those who discuss the “demographic threat” that Israel now faces as the number of Palestinians in mandate Palestine starts to overtake the number of Jews residing there quite ill-directed. Everyone who uses those arguments has already assumed the longterm disfranchisement and marginalization of that majority of the Palestinian people forced to live in complete exile from their homeland for, in many cases, the past 60 years… Some of those exiles have found citizenship and a modicum of a decent life elsewhere. A troubling number have not. But whether they have or not, nothing has happened that annuls the full citizenship rights they have as part of the Palestinian citizenry.)
… So, to return to the main topic of this post, if there is a two-state solution in Palestinian/Israel that is viable at the all-important political level, then it will be one that lies somewhere between the CGNA guidelines and those of the Arab Peace Plan-cum-international law approach, but most likely closer to the latter than to the former.
I know a lot of people who put a lot of effort into the Geneva Initiative. And I know a lot of people for whom the name “Clinton” is itself (fairly inexplicably to me) quite golden. But I think the advocates of these two approaches, and of Nuseibeh-Ayalon, need to understand that their approaches were centrally flawed because they so deeply excluded and marginalized the claims of the Palestinian exiles and of international law. I urge everyone who worked hard on behalf of any of the CGNA plans now to work just as hard promoting the Arab Plan.
My gut sense is that it will be extremely hard, if not impossible, for all, or indeed, for many at all, the claims of the Palestinian refugees to their lands and homes in Israel to be met. (And the provision of UN GA resolution 194 which detailed that right of return also prescribed that the returnees should live peaceably in their homes under the prevailing government, which might not be easy for them to accept, anyway.) But the needs of most of the refugees could surely be sufficiently met through some combination of compensation for properties lost and an expression of remorse from government authorities in Israel for the harm caused in the fighting of 1947-49.
Meantime, it is the needs and claims for political and other forms of inclusion of that vast body of the Palestinian refugees who are also exiles from historic Palestine that now need urgently to be brought back into the peacemaking agenda. If their needs and claims can be sufficiently met within the contours of a politically robust Palestinian state, then a two-state solution can still– not without difficulty– be salvaged.
But this needs to start happening very soon indeed. In this JWN post yesterday I outlined the seven important steps that President Obama should take, to get us on speedily on the path to this.
If a two-state solution cannot be salvaged, then the only alternative– down the road– will be an inclusive, South-Africa-style, one-state solution within Mandate Palestine. But that outcome will be far harder, and more damaging, for the region to get to than the presently offered road to a workable two-state outcome. It would involve, most likely, regionwide turmoil and upheaval on a scale we have not seen yet, that would directly threaten supply lines vital to the US and other world powers, and also the peace and security of the entire world system.
It would be the height of folly and recklessness for President Obama to even risk going anywhere near that road. Using the opportunity that’s presently offered to work with the world community to win a viable two-state outcome may look difficult. But it is by far the wiser course. And with a substantial portion of both the world and the US citizenry urging him on, he can start to spell out visions of an Arab-Israeli theater at peace that have been literally unimagineable for most of the past 60 years.

Why this American peace diplomacy is different

Many people, including Chris Toensing and Mouin Rabbani at Merip and many of the commenters here at JWN, find it hard to believe that Barack Obama’s Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy will be much different than that of the US presidents who have preceded him. Look, I can understand why people who followed Obama’s sometimes pander-y election campaign closely, and then watched him remain studiously silent (“one president at a time!”) while the US-supplied Israeli military rained death and destruction on Gaza’s people for 23 days, might find it hard to believe that the new president truly might be inclined to take up the task of returning the US to a more even-handed role in Arab-Israeli diplomacy– and to take up this task, moreover, as one of his first and seemingly highest priorities upon coming into office.
But I think the doubters are wrong. Or, at the very least, that they don’t have enough feel for the nuance of policy and the possibility– at this time perhaps more than any other in recent decades– of a determined and smart US president undertaking a radical realignment of the US posture back towards a fair-minded and effective peace diplomacy.
I have been following Palestinian-Israeli affairs very closely for more than 34 years now. My first book was a pretty ground-breaking study of the politics of the PLO: It came out in 1984, has been translated into several languages, and has been used as a textbook in universities in both Palestine and Israel. (Remarkably enough, it’s still in print.) I’ve been hounded and harassed by the powerful pro-Israel groups in the US for many years because of the positions I’ve articulated in favor of Palestinian rights, Palestinian humanity, and fundamental fairness… And I can honestly say that I have never seen an incoming US president launch his Arab-Israeli policy with such urgency, sensitivity, and intelligence.
(I wasn’t here in the US when Jimmy Carter came into office in January 1977. I saw him on last night’s Jon Stewart show, talking about his new book, which is yet another tome about “Peace in the Holy Land.” I think what the hugely popular Stewart is doing to rehabilitate the still much-maligned Carter in the US is great. But I don’t think even Jimmy Carter came into office with a Middle East policy that was as powerful and focused as Obama’s… )
To a certain degree, I think the ‘troika’ of Olmert, Barak, and Livni that’s now ruling Israel handed Obama his present opportunity for real change on a plate, when they made their momentous decision to launch an ‘exemplary punitive campaign’ against Gaza back on December 27. Obama and all who work for him are notoriously tight-lipped, so we won’t know for, perhaps, many years precisely what effect the events of December 27 through January 20 had on the president-elect. And remember: those events included not only the Tel Aviv troika’s launching of the reckless, destructive, and ultimately counter-productive war but also the advanced state of panic that war engendered among all of Washington’s allies in the Arab world, and– perhaps equally importantly– the vainglorious and completely arrogant comments that Olmert made publicly about Bush and Rice simply bending to his will. But it seems clear to me that those events likely did a lot to force changes in the policy decisions that Obama would otherwise have taken.
Absent the events of those 25 days we might well have had: Hillary Clinton in charge of all Middle East policy– as had definitely been the message given, back when her appointment as Secretary of State was first announced; Dennis Ross at her right hand as premier ‘interpreter’ and adviser on Arab-Israeli developments for the highest decisionmaker on these issues; and thus, a far more incrementalist and one-sided approach to the diplomacy than we have seen from the Obama presidency thus far.
It’s certainly significant that Obama has now taken this entire portfolio out of the hands of the woman whose main experience of the issue has been as spouse and consort of the endlessly foot-dragging and manipulative Bill Clinton and then as Senator from the deeply lobby-influenced state of New York. And I think what Obama has done with the portfolio thus far has been great: the conveying of signals of very serious intent and commitment “from Day One”, with those phone calls to leaders in the region; the appointment of George Mitchell, and the strong messages of true presidential support for his mission; and most recently, yesterday’s interview with Al-Arabiya.
Sure, Obama has also said a lot in all these encounters that is deeply engrained boiler-plate for any US president to say: about the centrality of his commitment to the security of Israel, and so on, and on, and on. And sure, he has said absolutely nothing about trying to reach out to Hamas in any way, shape, or form.
Hey, just in case nobody noticed this, it’s also important to remember that Hamas doesn’t actually crave a public relationship with Washington, either. Its leaders certainly don’t see that as something that’s in their interests– and in the circumstances you can see why. This fact makes them noticeably different from, say, the Yasser Arafat of 1988, who was quite happy to go down on his knees and grovel, or jump through endless hoops, if he could only win a nod of public support from Washington… But Hamas is different.
So today is the one-week “anniversary” of Barack Obama’s presidency. In just these seven short days, he’s already started to make a difference. Mitchell is already in Egypt, where he met with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. Arab League head Amr Moussa, and Egypt’s foreign minister and much-beleaguered president are also on his call-list before he heads off for Israel. He is not due to meet anybody from Hamas, though this AFP report says it’s possible he might travel to Gaza.
By the way, the elected (and then besieged and bombarded) Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas has sent Obama a letter congratulating him on his election, which he described as “a day of victory for the human struggle for freedom.” Haniyeh also urged Obama to support the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom and national independence. Interesting…
Anyway, I’ve been thinking through some of what Obama could and should be doing over the coming days and weeks if her really wants to push the Arab-Israeli peacemaking forward in a determined and successful way.
He should:

    1. Give swift and real backing to an intra-Palestinian reconciliation between Fateh, Hamas, and the other factions. This would be huge turnround from the policies pursued by the Bush administration since January 2006. Bush gave weapons, training, funds, and all other forms of support to Mahmoud Abbas’s Fateh leadership on condition that Fateh would use the weapons to subvert the Hamas government that was duly elected in January 2006. After Fateh and Hamas briefly reconciled February 2007, the US’s key agents inside Fateh subverted that agreement, too and made extensive preparations to mount an actual coup against Hamas in Gaza that spring, as David Rose has documented… The whole policy of bringing Fateh back to power in the OPTs with US-supplied guns has failed miserably. After Israel’s war on Gaza, both Abbas and Fateh are hanging on for dear life. Their only hope for some form of political survival is through a new agreement with Hamas. And Hamas needs Fateh (with or without an extremely weak Abbas) to some degree, too. Fateh or its allies can be the public face that do the formal negotiations with Israel and provide international political cover for Hamas. It remains possible that the Hamas leaders don’t see having such a “cover” as providing them any real benefit. But they’ve given many signals that, on some basis, they would welcome a reconciliation with Fateh. This time, the US should not stand in the way. Indeed, it should give real support to the move.
    2. Find a reliable way to communicate quietly with the Hamas leaders. This could be through a government, like the Turkish, Qatari, Swiss, or Yemeni government. It could be through the CIA (though I’m not sure Hamas would be open to that.) Or it could be through private individuals trusted by both sides. But a lot of signaling and brainstorming needs to be done.
    3. Re-engage the United Nations, in particular, in high-level sponsorship of the peacemaking. For the past seven years he UN has been in the shameful role of “junior partner” in the Quartet that was established in 2002. But an Arab-Israeli peace that is fair and durable is in the interest of all the peoples of the world. The US has no compelling claim, in 2009, to be recognized as a “uniquely qualified” peace broker. Obama has called, quite rightly, for a new relationship between Washington and the UN, and has sent his closest foreign-policy aide and adviser, Susan Rice, to be his ambassador there. As part of her role, she and the president should invite the UN to bring its considerable powers and legitimacy much more centrally into the peacemaking.
    4. Take speedy action to stabilize the Gaza crasefire and start to rehabilitate Gaza. The ceasefire remains very fragile, as we saw already today, and the situation of scores of thousands of Gaza’s worst-hit homeless people remains dire. They must not be used any more as pawns in Israel’s power games! Obama should send a strong message to Tel Aviv that he expects Israel to prolong and strengthen the ceasefire, not subvert it. Also, US and NATO ships have a big presence in the eastern Mediterranean. Why can’t they or non-military US ships be used to convey large amounts of cement and other building materials to points near Gaza’s shores, with final ship-to-shore delivery undertaken by non-military aid agencies in conjunction with local NGOs? The US can take many actions that underline to Israel’s vengeful government that it cannot continue to hold its jackboot on Gaza’s neck.
    5. Make some clear and authoritative (re-)statements of American principles on peace-related issues well before Israel’s February 10 elections. These should certainly include statements underlining clear US opposition to any further Israeli investment in the settlement-building project and promising serious financial and political consequences if any additional settlement housing or other infrastructure is indeed built. Other such statement might include statements of support for “land for peace”, for “the non-acquisition of territory by force”, for the need for a cooperative regionwide arms control regime, a shared Jerusalem open to followers of all faiths, and so on.
    6. Make clear and repeated statements of the United States’ own strong interest in seeing the remaining strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict resolved. For too long, Washington policy has been dominated by the dreadful Dennis Ross view that “the US can’t want peace more than the parties themselves.” That argument has been used as a major justification for a diplomatic quietism that has been a cover, actually, for continued, very generous US financial and military help to Israel that has completely underwritten Israel’s pursuit of its illegal policy of land-grabbing settlement-building in the West Bank and Golan and its very destructive launching of periodic wars, assassination campaigns, and other acts of lethal physical violence against its neighbors. The US is absolutely not “neutral” between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And now, since the US has 140,000 troops strung out in very vulnerable positions inside Iraq, this matters a lot. The US certainly has its own strong interest in a rapid de-escalation and resolving of tensions between Israel and the Arab world.
    7. Restore full diplomatic relations and a good working relationship with Syria as fast as possible. This one strikes me as a no-brainer. The US has had no ambassador in Syria since 2005, and the harsh sanctions that have been maintained on Damascus under both the anti-terrorism policy and the Syrian Accountability Act of 2003 have inflicted real pain on Syrian that the country’s people, not surprisingly, resent a lot. Syria will be an essential part of any successful peace diplomacy. It withdrew all its troops from Lebanon in 2005, and maintained intriguing and constructive proximity peace talks with israel for a year until Israel decided to attack Gaza in December. George Bush and his Middle East adviser, Elliott Abrams, worked hard for many years to topple the Asad regime in Syria. It ain’t going to happen. (Asad is actually a whole lot more popular with his country’s citizens than the US-supported regimes in Egypt and Jordan are with theirs.) Plus Asad, unlike say his allies in Hamas, is actually very eager to have a good relationship with Washington.

Let’s see how many of these steps Obama takes by, say, February 10.
All the indications from Israel are that the politicians there are very closely attuned to the signals coming out of Washington– now, as always.
Washington really has been the central lifeline of the Jewish state for many decades now. Now, let’s see how Barack Obama uses that power.

Smart Power 101

WARNING: There will be a test
Goldilocks was very tired by this time, so she went upstairs to the bedroom. She lay down in the first bed, but it was too hard. Then she lay in the second bed, but it was too soft. Then she lay down in the third bed and it was just right. Goldilocks fell asleep.
That’s beds. Now let’s consider power that’s not too hard, not too soft. It’s just right. What do we call it? Call it Goldilocks power? No, that won’t sell in Peoria. The new in crowd knows what to call it — ‘smart power.’
Here’s Hillary Clinton, the new Secretary of State, in her opening statement at her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

    We must use what has been called smart power, the full range of tools at our disposal—diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural—picking the right tool, or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of our foreign policy. This is not a radical idea. The ancient Roman poet Terence declared that “in every endeavor, the seemly course for wise men is to try persuasion first.”

Continue reading “Smart Power 101”

Obama continues to move fast, surefootedly…

…on Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Yesterday he gave an interview to Hisham Milhem of al-Arabiya TV channel. That was in connection with the ceremony at the White House where he sent off former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell on his first “special envoy” fact-finding trip to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, France, and Britain.
The NYT wrote:

    “The charge that Senator Mitchell has is to engage vigorously and consistently in order for us to achieve genuine progress,” Mr. Obama said in the Cabinet Room of the White House, according to The Associated Press. “And when I say progress, not just photo ops, but progress that is concrete.”

It is significant that Obama himself is taking such a high-profile interest in this mission. It seems Mitchell will report back to him more than to Hillary Clinton.
Also, though Rob Malley is quoted in the NYT piece as saying there’s not much political work that can be done before Israel’s Feb.10 elections, I disagree strongly with that assessment.
Obama is already doing some of the much-needed political work! He’s doing it by appointing Mitchell so very early in his term and by sending him off the region so quickly, too.
What he’s doing is signaling, at the very highest level possible, that the US has its own very strong interest in the Arab-israeli peace process making rapid progress at this time.
That sends exactly the right message to Israeli voters, who need to think carefully whether they want to elect a party/leader who could be expected to clash early on with this politically popular and sure-footed US president.
Of course we want more details as to what kind of a peace agreement Obama plans to work for. Probably he’ll let us know more when he’s heard back from Mitchell.
But to say he’s not doing any political/diplomatic work on the peacemaking right now is just plain wrong.

Petraeus’s serious Russia mistake

Last Tuesday, the NYT reported that US Centcom chief David Petraeus announced that, to support the NATO campaign in Afghanistan, NATO now had “transit agreements for commercial goods and services in particular that include several countries in the Central Asian states and also Russia.”
Turns out Wonderboy Petraeus jumped the gun badly on that. (HT: B of Moon of Alabama.) Thursday, Russian General of the Army Alexei Maslov told the news agency Itar-Tass definitively that,

    “No official documents were submitted to Russia’s permanent mission in NATO certifying that Russia had authorized U.S. and NATO military supplies transit across the country.”

Turkmenistan also denied having reached a transit agreement with NATO.
Last August, you’ll recall, NATO decided to break off the “partnership”-type arrangement it had with Russia, in protest at Russia’s military actions inside sovereign Georgia.
But NATO also badly needs Russia, if it is to find any kind of a viable alternative to the debilitating reliance it has on Pakistan, to get supplies in to the NATO war effort in deeply landlocked Afghanistan. (Oops, maybe Pres. Bush and his advisers should have looked at a map of Central Asia before they decided to invade and occupy Afghanistan?)
Since August, the Russians have linked the question of NATO-transit-rights-to-Afghanistan to that of restoring the NATO-Russia partnership agreement. (Russia also has several other live concerns about US military policy in the countries on its western border, including the future of the missile defense system Bush insisted on planting into Poland and the Czech Republic.) That’s why Gen. Maslov and other Russian leaders were quick to deny Petraeus’s claim he already had the transit agreement with them.
Today, Russia’s envoy to NATO did get a meeting with the alliance’s 26 member-ambassadors, after which the participants indicated that the restoration of the full former level of relationship might happen as soon as next month.
Tough luck for the reckless, pro-American Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili who actually started the war with Russia last August with, presumably, the aim of drawing NATO troops into his country in his defense.

Continue reading “Petraeus’s serious Russia mistake”

Note to a young Israeli friend

One notable thing that happened at our panel discussion on Gaza, at Georgetown University Thursday night, was that a young Israeli student directed a question at me asking why I had said that “all Israelis are stupid”– and also asserting that her country had had “no choice” but to launch the war on Gaza.
I replied that I had never said “all Israelis” are stupid– though I had certainly pointed out the counter-productive nature, from every point of view, of the decision her country’s government had made to launch the most recent war; and I’d pointed out too, with some sadness, that that decision seemed to have received high levels of support from Jewish Israelis.
But certainly not from all of them– as I had also pointed out in my main presentation.
What I’d referred to specifically was this extremely insightful (and courageous) article, published on December 31 in the WaPo by a Jewish Israeli social-work lecturer called Julia Chaitin. Chaitin, by the way, lives in southern Israel so has a deep understanding of the concerns and fears of the people who live there.
Her whole article is worth reading and re-reading. She wrote:

    This war is wrong. It is wrong because it cannot achieve its manifest goals — long-term “normal” life for the residents of the Negev region. The war is morally wrong because most of the victims are Palestinian and Israeli civilians whose only “crime” is that they live in Negev or Gaza. This war is wrong because it is not heading toward a viable solution of the conflict but is instead creating more hatred and greater determination on the part of both peoples to harm one another. It is wrong because it is leading to stronger feelings that we have nothing to lose by striking further, with greater force. This war is wrong because, even before the last smoke rises from the rubble and the last ambulance carries the dead and wounded to hospitals, our leaders will find themselves signing a new agreement for a cease-fire.
    And so this is an unnecessary, cruel and cynical war — a war that could have been avoided if our leaders had shown courage during the months of the cease-fire to truly work toward creating better lives for people whose only crime is that they live in the south.
    Since the Israeli air force began bombing Gaza, it has been almost impossible to speak openly against the war. It is difficult to find public forums that welcome a call for a new cease-fire and for alternative solutions to the conflict — ones that do not rely on military strength or a siege of Gaza. When people are in the midst of war, they are not open to voices of peace; they speak (and scream) out of fear and demand retribution for the harms they have suffered. When people are in the midst of war, they forget that they can harness higher cognitive abilities, their reason and logic. Instead, they are driven by the hot structures of their brains, which lead them to respond with fear and anger in ways that are objective threats to our healthy survival. When people are in the midst of war, voices calling for restraint, dialogue and negotiations fall on deaf ears, if their expression is allowed at all…

This analysis is so true. I have seen it in many, many theaters of conflict… That people who normally have full command of their capacities for both rational thought and human empathy suddenly lose those faculties when they’re thrown into a situation of great– and often officially stoked– mass fearfulness.
Hey, we’ve certainly seen that happen in the USA in the past eight years… (Thank goodness that for now, at least, we seem to have escaped from the worst of that mass fear here, though many of its effects still linger.)
Anyway, thinking a bit more about Julia Chaitin’s marvelous article these past couple of days, I have also been thinking about the generally sad state of the Israeli peace movement.
Remember back in 1982 when, after the revelations of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, some 600,000 Israelis took to the streets in utter disgust, and just about forced the downfall of the government? That was fully one-fifth of the country’s entire population at the time!
Where is the Israeli peace movement today– at a time when it’s been revealed that roughly the same number of civilians as died in Sabra and Shatila were killed directly by the IDF itself in Gaza? (Whereas in S&S, Sharon’s IDF had subcontracted the killing work to the Lebanese Falangist militias.)
The general weakness of Israel’s peace movement is a cause for real sadness. It also means the politics of the peacemaking that’s so badly needed now will be much more complex than it might otherwise have been.
However, the fact that there is no broad peace movement of the kind there was from, roughly, 1978 through 1998 means that the Jewish Israeli voices we do hear speaking out clearly in favor of ending the occupation(s), concluding fair and durable peace agreements, and building a culture of mutual respect with Israel’s neighbors are more valuable than ever…
Voices like those of Julia Chaitin… or Naomi Chazan (most recently, here and here), or Uri Avnery and his colleagues at Gush Shalom…
And as for sad old argument that Israel “had no choice” but to launch the war against Gaza? There are numerous other things it could have done to defuse tensions along its border with the Strip, other than launch the “shock and awe” war of December 27- January 18.
The Israeli government could have:

    1. Placed considerably more value on the tahdi’eh (ceasefire) it concluded– through the Egyptian intermediary– back last June, and sought to fulfill the terms of that ceasefire and then use it as a basis for building an even more robust agreement with Hamas and the rest of the Palestinians. It didn’t do that. It did nothing to lift the siege, as the Hamas negotiators would happen as the ceasefire progressed. That ceasefire had a six-month initial term, and for the first four and half months it was pretty well observed by both sides. But then, on Nov 4– election day in the US– the Israeli government authorized a large-scale IDF operation against Gaza that directly contravened the terms of the ceasefire and set in motion a new cycle of violence that, though it went through ups and downs, set the stage for the failure of the ceasefire-extension negotiation.
    2. Even though the ceasefire-extension negotiations at the end of November and the beginning of December were held in a situation of cross-border tensions, still, the Israeli government could have pushed for a successful extension and strengthening of the ceasefire. True, the Hamas negotiators made clear they would only do so if the Israelis agreed to lift the siege of Gaza. So why didn’t the Israeli government make strenuous efforts to explore ways for that to happen– even including ways to verify that the re-opened borders would not allow a significant rearming by Hamas? Those ways exist. They are being actively explored by the diplomats right now. So why– as both Chaitin and Chazan write– did Israel have to go through this ghastly and damaging war in order to arrive at a diplomatic place it could have reached in mid-December without launching that war at all?
    3. In general, if someone is doing something that really bothers or harms you, there are always scores of ways that intelligent people can use to try to prevent them from taking those harmful acts. So maybe Israel didn’t want to talk to Hamas directly? It could talk through the Egyptians or the Turks, or numerous other potential intermediaries. So Hamas had its own conditions, too? Why not? They are people, after all, and could not be expected simply to lie down under the harsh siege forever without demanding that it be lifted. (Also, a blockade/siege is, strctly speaking itself an act of war.) Besides, having a Gaza population that is busily engaged in economic development and through that development acquires an increasing socio-economic stake that it would be reluctant to put at risk in a renewal of hostilities with Israel surely makes a lot more sense, for Israelis, than having 1.5 million neighbors in Gaza who feel a deep sense of grievance and also feel they have little or nothing to lose in any new round of hostilities?

Well, now at least we have a president in Washington who has called on his supporters to “lay aside childish things”… and hopefully childish attitudes of selfishness, self-referentiality, and racism, as well.
So let’s hope that the six million Jewish Israelis can now join this new global movement and grow up a bit… grow out of thinking that their needs always have to come first and that they can behave as they darn’ well please in wrecking their neighbors’ lives.
I’m just not sure that this can happen fast enough to change the outcome of the election in Israel February 10. When, as I’ve noted before, Israel’s opposition Likud Party now looks very well positioned to pull of a significant victory.
(Which is, as I’ve also noted, yet another way in which the present Israeli government’s decision to go to war looks totally stupid and counter-productive. Oh my. War and fear really do have the most amazing capacity to addle people’s brains… )

American weapons, Palestinian suffering, and the needs of peace

The United States is very far from a “neutral party” in the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. As I’ve noted before, the US government not only gives Israel essential political support (e.g. by blocking resolutions at the security Council); it also provides most of the high-tech arms the Israelis use against their opponents including during the assault on Gaza.
This recent short report by Bill Hartung and Frida Berrigan shows that,

    Israel’s intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S.-supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars:
    · During the Bush administration (from FY2002 through FY2009) Israel has received over $21 billion in U.S. security assistance, including $19 billion in direct military aid under the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program.
    · The bulk of Israel’s current arsenal is composed of equipment supplied under U.S. assistance programs. For example, Israel has 226 U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter and attack jets, over 700 M-60 tanks, 6,000 armored personnel carriers, and scores of transport planes, attack helicopters, utility and training aircraft, bombs, and tactical missiles of all kinds.
    · During 2008 alone, the United States made over $22 billion in arms sales offers to Israel, including a proposed deal for as many as 75 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters worth up to $15.2 billion; nine C-130J-30 aircraft worth up to $1.9 billion; 4 Littoral combat ships and related equipment worth as much as $1.9 billion; and up to $1.3 billion worth of gasoline and jet aviation fuel.

Hartung and Berrigan have tracked US arms transfers to Israel for some years now. Go to that link above– and to the onward links from there– to learn more details, including about which US military-industrial corporations won those contracts from the Pentagon, which helped yet further to boost their shareholders’ profits.
I was interested to be reminded how many F-16s Israel has in its air force. 226! What on earth are they all for? Where on earth do they even park that many large hulks of metal?
The F-16s and Israel’s Apache helicopters performed many deadly deeds in the recent war, including destroying a university, several schools, and the seat of the Palestinians’ elected legislature. I also learned Thursday that the headquarters of the truly excellent Gaza Community Mental Health Program was badly damaged in the shelling. (More details here.)
Someone– I forget where– quoted a Hamas supporter as saying if the Israelis really are as terrified of the Palestinians’ arsenal of extremely primitive rockets as they claim to be, then he would be happy to trade that entire arsenal for just one of Israel’s F-16s. Well, the IOF would still have 225 other F-16s left, of course. But you get the general drift of the argument…
Meantime, we US citizens need to start holding our own government– administration and congress– accountable for the absolutely vital, multi-pronged support it has given to Israel’s war on Gaza.
We should call for a total ban on all arms supplies to the Middle East pending the conclusion of final-status peace agreements between Israel and its three neighboring nations of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Those peace agreements will certainly include provisions for longer-term follow-on arms control and security regimes. But we need to start implementing this arms embargo now. Perhaps it will help persuade Israelis that they need to solve their problems at the negotiating table, not by sowing death and destruction among their neighbors.
But if the US goes on arming one side to the conflict while pretending to be a “neutral mediator” in the peacemaking?? That idea is simply laughable.

Swiss parliamentarians visit Gaza

Kudos to the delegation of Swiss parliamentarians who are visiting Gaza at the invitation of the duly elected Palestinian legislative Council.
That Maan news report also notes that Switzerland was,

    the only European country to support the draft UN resolution from the Human Rights Council that condemned Israel’s “grave human rights violations in the Palestinian territories.”
    The delegation reinforced their earlier stance during their visit, saying what they saw was evidence of war crimes.
    On the assassination of de facto Minister of the Interior Sa’id Siyam, the delegation noted the illegality of assassination for political purposes under international law. They further condemned the assaults on the members of PLC, including the continued detention of PLC speaker Aziz Dweik.
    On arriving to Gaza the delegation was received by PLC member Ismail Al-Ashqar of Hamas, and Head of the Committee of Security and Internal affairs in the PLC Salem Salamah. The Gazan leaders expressed their discontent over Europe’s silence over the Gaza war, adding that it “gave Israeli the justification to continue its destruction and war against the Palestinians.”
    He demanded the Swiss and European parliaments pressure the international court to ensure Israeli war criminals are brought to a speedy trial.

I have thought for a while now that Switzerland, Norway, and Turkey are three countries well positioned to try to open good channels of communication with Hamas. (Qatar, China, and Russia could also provide valuable help in this.)
Those of us around the world who support national self-determination for oppressed, colonized, and occupied peoples, and the respect of democratic principles need to focus centrally on these values in the weeks and months ahead. While it is good for human-rights organizations to focus on Israel’s war crimes, I worry there’s a chance that too much energy will be expended in that essentially bacward-looking task rather than on the broader, forward-looking task of doing all the political things that are necessary to secure a final peace agreement between israel and all its neighbors within the shortest time possible.
At the end of the day, it is only a final peace agreement that includes ending the occupation(s) and the Palestinians winning their true national independence that can assure the ending of this situation of occupation and control by a despotic foreign military power. If the occupation isn’t ended and a final peace secured, then the tragedies and atrocities of the past months will be followed by repeat performances as sure as night follows day.
Anyway, even though there is currently a situation of fragile ceasefire, this is still a situation in which the rights of the Palestinians– in Gaza, in the West Bank, and those in exile– are being significantly abused on a major and continuing basis.
End the occupation! Secure the final peace!

Discipline — What Good Is It?

Pat Lang has pointed out that “the IDF/IOF does not routinely have any professional cadre of well-trained sergeants capable of enforcing discipline.” This factor has allegedly contributed to Israeli soldiers acting badly.
The inference is that such behavior would never occur in well-trained armies.
Or would it?

Continue reading “Discipline — What Good Is It?”

Ill-disciplined IOF left its mark in Gaza

Amnesty International has a new blog carrying extracts from field reports made by its researchers. In this post, Friday, Donatella Rivera writes about the physical detritus the IOF soldiers left behind them in many of the private homes they took over and occupied in Gaza. (HT: Badger of Missing Links.)
She wrote:

    Every one of these houses we visited was in a shocking state. All the rooms had been ransacked, with furniture overturned and/or smashed. The families’ clothing, documents and other personal items were strewn all over the floors and soiled and, in one case, urinated on. In one house in the Sayafa area in north Gaza, several cardboard boxes full of excrement were left in the house – although there was a functioning toilet which the soldiers could have used.
    Walls were defaced with crude threats written in Hebrew, such as “next time it will hurt more” and, in one house, a drawing of a naked woman…

This is very reminiscent of the traces left behind by IOF soldiers on various rampages including in West Beirut in 1982, where the excrement was often left on the belongings of city residents.
Rivera added this:

    Chris Cobb-Smith, the military expert in our team who was an officer in the British Army for 20 years, was staggered at what he saw and the behaviour and apparent lack of discipline of the Israeli soldiers.
    “Gazans have had their houses looted, vandalised and desecrated. As well, the Israeli soldiers have left behind not only mounds of litter and excrement but ammunition and other military equipment. It’s not the behaviour one would expect from a professional army,” he said.

No, indeed it is not. And nor are the numerous, well-reported incidents in the Gaza rampage in which IOF soldiers shot Palestinian civilians at point-blank range.
Col. Pat Lang provided a partial explanation for the IOF’s lack of discipline in this early-January blog post.
Writing about the close contacts he had with Israeli military during his time as a professional US soldier, he observed that, unlike in the US when it had a mainly conscript army, the IDF/IOF does not routinely have any professional cadre of well-trained sergeants capable of enforcing discipline and standards– including standards of keeping within the requirements of the Laws of War– on the often poorly trained infantry brigades made up of reservists or conscripts.
Regarding the conscript units in the IOF ground forces, he wrote:

    As a result, a non-reserve infantry or tank company in the field consists of people who are all about the same age (19-22) and commanded by a captain in his mid 20s. What is missing in this scene is the voice of grown up counsel provided by sergeants in their 30s and 40s telling these young people what it is that would be wise to do based on real experience and mature judgment. In contrast a 22 year old American platoon leader would have a mature platoon sergeant as his assistant and counselor.
    – As a result of this system of manning, the IDF’s ground force is more unpredictable and volatile at the tactical (company) level than might be the case otherwise. The national government has a hard time knowing whether or not specific policies will be followed in the field. For example, the Israeli government’s policy in the present action in the Gaza Strip has been to avoid civilian casualties whenever possible. [Well, its stated policy, anyway… ~HC] Based on personal experience of the behavior of IDF conscripts toward Palestinian civilians, I would say that the Israeli government has little control over what individual groups of these young Israeli soldiers may do in incidents like the one yesterday in which mortar fire was directed toward UN controlled school buildings.
    … One might say that in war, s–t happens. [See above ~HC] That is true, but such behavior is indicative of an army that is not well disciplined and not a completely reliably instrument of state policy. In my travels in the west Bank in March of 2008, it was noticeable that the behavior towards Palestinian civilians of IDF troops at roadblocks was reminiscent of that of any group of post-adolescents given guns and allowed to bully the helpless in order to look tough for each other. I think the IDF would be well advised to grow some real sergeants.

I think this provides a valuable part of the explanation of what happened in Gaza. But the other part, surely, has to do with the racism that’s so prevalent in Israeli society: the sense that the Palestinians– living in Gaza or elsewhere– are not really fully human, and certainly not deserving of the basic human decency that all fellow-humans deserve.
Back in West Beirut in 1982, my recollection is that it was some of the apartments owned by the more middle-class Palestinians there that got trashed (and excrement-dumped) the worst… As though the IOF soldiers, were so taken aback to see Palestinians living lives that looked just as clean and well-ordered as their own (or cleaner?) that they felt the need to trash all that cleanliness and good order… to drag the Palestinians down into the muck where they felt they all belonged.
(See also this account by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen of what the IOF soldiers did in the home of a little girl called Mona– along with killing both her parents, that is.)
I am just recalling, too, that in Caroline Elkins’s excellent book about the British military’s colonial campaign against the Kenyan independence movement in the 1950s, one of the notable punishments meted out in the massive concentration camps the British erected was to force those stalwarts who refused to bow to their demands to run around for hours, in public, with leaking buckets of excrement on their heads. As Elkins wrote, part of the intention seemed to be to buoy up the view of the British and other soldiers there– who might otherwise have been forced to have some grudging admiration for the steadfastness and dignity of their captives– that the captives really were just muck-covered sub-humans, after all.
Regarding the IOF, one of the stated goals of those who launched this latest Israeli “war of choice” was to “restore the credibility of Israel’s military deterrent” by demonstrating that the Israeli ground forces– which had performed extremely poorly, from a military point of view in Lebanon in 2006– had now been rebuilt and were “back in tip-top condition.”
Militarily, well, yes perhaps that is so. But after all, what on earth use could tank battalions ever really be, militarily, within the close and crowded confines of Gaza’s cities and refugee camps? And massed infantry was never sent in, lest– presumably– too many Israeli soldiers’ lives should get lost to Palestinian fighters well dug into their very familiar and complex home terrain.
So actually, what got proven about the ground forces at the level of military capability? Not very much.
But at the moral level, a lot was proven, namely their ill-discipline (including in leaving useful military goods behind them) and the wanton brutality, arrogance, and vengefulness with which they behaved.
I am repeatedly surprised by the wilful blindness of Israeli political and military leaders who can’t see that these traits and behaviors are massively counter-productive to their people’s longterm wellbeing. How on earth do they think that such behaviors will help make the region in which they live more peaceful and thus provide the basis for Israel’s own longterm security?
Ah well, I guess that critique is equally applicable at the “macro” level, in terms of the decision the Israeli pols made, in the first place, to launch yet another in the now-lengthy series of its wars of choice that attempt to force their neighbors to submit to their will. This was the sixth such war since 1982. And none of them has ever, from 1982 on, turned out well for Israel in the political-strategic arena.
But it’s important not to lose sight of the micro level, either. For in the crucible of the micro level of the way actual human persons relate to each other a long-overdue regional peace can be significantly hastened– or once again delayed.