By M.J. Rosenberg
Huffington Post
September 17, 2009
The AIPAC crowd is going to have a hard time with this. Israel's uber-hawk Defense Minister (and the most highly decorated soldier in its history), Ehud Barak, says that an Iranian nuclear weapon would not pose an existential threat to Israel.
Today's New York Times reports that Barak told Israel's largest paper Yedioth Ahronoth that "Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel." Asked specifically about a nuclear armed Iran, Barak said, "I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel."
Barak concluded: "Israel is strong, I don't see anyone who could pose an existential threat."
The threat, of course, is not to Israel's existence but to Israel's status as the region's only superpower, able to do whatever it wants whenever it wants to.
But don't expect this to mean that the "Bomb Iran" crowd here — which is the lobby and its cutouts — is going to shut up.
Contrary to what many believe, the lobby does not always follow the Israel line.
That is why Prime Minister Rabin tried so hard (unsuccessfully) to curb AIPAC. Upon his election as prime minister in 1992, he met with its leadership to tell AIPAC to butt the hell out. He intended to come to terms with the Palestinians and did not want AIPAC to get in his way. He also insisted on dealing with the US government directly and not through a surly intermediary. (His top aides specifically told AIPAC to fire Steve Rosen who, he knew, would use his dark powers to kill any Israeli-Palestinian agreement).
AIPAC ignored Rabin and continued its sabotage efforts.
In fact, a few years ago the Israeli government worked with the Palestinian Authority to devise an aid package for the Palestinian Authority that would help it withstand the threat from Hamas. This was before Hamas took over Gaza and the package was designed to gird the PA against the threat.
The Bush administration supported the package and thought it was urgent to keep Gaza under PA (not Hamas) control.
AIPAC, on the other hand, did not like the idea and its lobbyists went directly to the House Appropriations Commitee and demanded it be cut in half. The Israelis also went to the Hill to tell the same appropriators that Israel's own security needs dictated that the full package be delivered quickly to check Hamas. Of course AIPAC prevailed. And AIPAC celebrated that it could beat the White House, the Palestinian Authority and even the Israeli government. Kings of the Hill!
Only to a degree does the lobby operate in support of Israel. Mostly it is about preserving and extending its own power.
The Iran issue is its latest ticket. It will use it to raise money — it just built an eight story building in Washington complete with a gym and catering facilities — and, best of all, to make the United States government do what it wants.
As someone who worked at AIPAC for four years (before I came to my senses), I can personally attest to the fact that the organization is most decidely not about Israel. It is about AIPAC.
I wonder if Barak will back down after AIPAC calls to chew him out. Regardless, Barak's statement is now on the record.
Iran is not an existential threat to Israel. But the lobby might be.
M.J. Rosenberg is Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network. Previously, he worked on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years. He was also a Clinton political appointee at USAID. In the early 1980s, he was editor of AIPAC's weekly newsletter Near East Report. From 1998-2009, he was director of policy at Israel Policy Forum.
Mark says:
Well, I get the point that Rosenberg has an ax to grind about AIPAC, which may account for the over-the-top language that AIPAC might be an "existential threat" to Israel. I don't think that's going to win him friends and influence people among most of the people he's ostensibly trying to convince. Even if true, most people do not like to admit that they've been wrong about something about which they feel deeply and to which they've contributed blood, sweat, tears, and money. In any case, saying that AIPAC "is most decidedly not about Israel. It is about AIPAC" could be said about many other lobbying organizations in Washington if you just change the name and the cause. Pardon my cynicism, but that's business as usual in Washington, regardless of political affiliation or passion.
The more interesting issue, in my humble view, is the discussion about Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak's statement that Iran didn't pose an existential threat to Israel, even if it possessed a nuclear weapons. This raises some "interesting" questions: If, according to the Israel defense minister and the Israel prime minister (who later backed up Barak's statement), a nuclear-armed Iran does not pose an existential threat to Israel, then does that mean that a conventionally-armed Iran does not pose an existential threat to Israel? And if Iran, with a population of 66 million people and a large conventional military does not pose an existential threat to Israel then how would an effectively demilitarized tiny Palestinian state with a population of five or even six million pose an existential threat to Israel?
Now, I realize that just because the Israeli defense minister and prime minister say something does not make it correct. See, for example, the hubristic statements made by Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan and Israeli prime minister Golda Meir about the political situation in the Middle East just a week before the October 1973 Yom Kippur War broke out. But if they are correct, what does that say about the current and future situation, particularly when discussing the possibility of Israel attacking Iran's nuclear facilities?
I am not saying that a nuclear-armed Iran is a good thing or that the United States shouldn't be very concerned about Iran getting the bomb. And if there's anyone reading this who thinks that Iranian president Ahmedinajad is being truthful when he says that Iran's nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes then I have some prime swampland in Florida I'd like to sell you.
The real issue about Iran is that, as someone suggested recently, the Iranian leadership has not decided yet whether they want Iran to be a nation or a cause. So far they appear to lean towards wanting to be a cause (when the leaders aren't busy with their nepotistic money-skimming and money-laundering business activities). Add to that notion the fact that Iran — or at least the Iranian leadership — has at least one and probably two big chips on its shoulder and we have a less than promising horizon to contemplate.
What are those chips? Well, aside from the usual conspiracy theories, they're wounded pride and humiliation because the land now known as Iran, formerly Persia, already contained great and gifted civilizations when Europeans went around in animal skins and Mecca and Medina in Arabia were backwater oasis towns. How did mighty and civilized Persia come to be conquered by the uncivilized Arabs and fall behind the West?
In addition, given its existing record of supporting the adventures of Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip for Iranian purposes and not out of altruistic concern for the Lebanese or the Palestinians, the thought of the Iranian leadership having nuclear weapons does not give me warm and fuzzy feelings.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Palestine's Jewish minority
By Bill Glucroft
Common Ground News Service
September 17, 2009
COPENHAGEN - If we are to believe the pundits and partisans, relations between Israel and the United States have never been worse. The Barack Obama administration appears to be taking the toughest tone of any in recent memory. The Cairo speech didn’t help, leaving an already vulnerable-feeling Israel with the sense that it's getting thrown under the bus.
A major division is settlements. President Obama wants an immediate halt, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will agree at most to a partial pause. Even left-leaning Israelis feel the American demand is too much too soon; a 35-year problem shouldn’t be hurried.
There are now more than 285,000 settlers in the West Bank beyond East Jerusalem. Though many might be coaxed back to Israel proper following an agreement with the Palestinians, a menacing minority has made clear its intention of preventing peace at any price, while simultaneously claiming to be a non-issue. However this minority can become a non-issue if Israeli, Palestinian and international negotiators re-think the path to peace.
In every attempt, those involved in cutting deals between Israel and the Palestinians have always tried going through the settlers, a self-defeating tactic because doing so only gives them more power. A new approach is to outmanoeuvre them — set a border that’s defensible for Israel and functional for Palestine, and urge the settlers to either get behind that border, with government assistance, or become a Jewish minority in the Palestinian state.
That may seem unthinkable. Settlement expansion has been de facto Israeli policy for nearly as long as Israel has controlled the territory. To now hand them over to a Palestinian state would be to punish people for doing what their leaders encouraged them to do.
Except, while politicking postponed any clear decision-making on what should be done with land captured in 1967, the settlers were gaining numbers, and with numbers, strength which they use to promote interests detrimental to the whole. They demanded services at a huge expense to the treasury, they exposed soldiers to unnecessary danger and they defied court orders to cease and desist. The more extreme settlers use violence, leading a soldier-friend of mine to remark, “Hebron is the only place in the West Bank where a soldier feels safer around Palestinians than around Jews.” This is not behaviour a democracy should tolerate, nor tacitly condone.
An ultimatum to settlers would force them to choose between the modern state of Israel and its biblical promise, possibly encouraging many to acquiesce without major incident. Those who remain could retain their Israeli citizenship, with an open invitation to return, but would become Palestinian citizens. Living no differently from other Diaspora Jews, they would be subject to the laws and values of their state.
At first blush, a Palestinian Jew may sound like an oxymoron, but no more than Israeli Arabs — Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, who comprise more than 20 percent of the Jewish state's population. Since Palestine would have to resemble a democracy, as Israel does, there is no reason minorities could not live there. In fact, it could help Palestine feel like a normal country.
The idea of withdrawing Israel but leaving Israelis has yet to go mainstream, but there have been hints. Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said as much at the Aspen Ideas Festival in July, when he declared that Jews would be welcomed in a future Palestinian state. Gershon Baskin, co-director of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, suggested in a recent Jerusalem Post column to “link the rights, privileges and obligations of Palestinians in Israel to those of Jews in Palestine ... to close the gaps of discrimination against Palestinians in Israel and prevent the discrimination against Jews in Palestine.”
That’s a good idea, and should go further to require that Jewish holy sites that fall outside Israel be protected and accessible to non-Palestinians. This would ensure spiritual sovereignty over the land regardless of political jurisdiction.
The hard part would be getting the current Israeli government, which includes settler allies, to agree. The good news is that Prime Minister Netanyahu, though hawkish, is a pragmatist, whose relationship to ideologues remains one of convenience. He already believes in building the Palestinian economy, something hard to do with Israel’s security apparatus stifling the flow of goods, services and labour.
Netanyahu will pursue the most politically and financially expedient course and will only go so far in alienating Israel from the American administration. The influential foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, may have little compassion for Palestinians, but he cares deeply that Israel remains a Jewish state — more so than the particulars of the boundaries that come to define it.
Though a settler himself, Lieberman could be counted among those who might return to Israel under the right conditions, as evidenced by his decision to distance himself from the settlement issue when it became clear that it posed a conflict of interest.
Given their savvy, Netanyahu and Lieberman can find a way to circumvent the most ardent elements of the settler community, thereby minimising their political weight. If Israelis can see a Palestinian state as beneficial to them as it is for Palestinians, the settlers would become exactly what they say they are: a non-issue.
Bill Glucroft is a writer who has worked in Israel for both Zionist and Israeli-Arab organisations. He blogs at mediabard.org. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Common Ground News Service
September 17, 2009
COPENHAGEN - If we are to believe the pundits and partisans, relations between Israel and the United States have never been worse. The Barack Obama administration appears to be taking the toughest tone of any in recent memory. The Cairo speech didn’t help, leaving an already vulnerable-feeling Israel with the sense that it's getting thrown under the bus.
A major division is settlements. President Obama wants an immediate halt, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will agree at most to a partial pause. Even left-leaning Israelis feel the American demand is too much too soon; a 35-year problem shouldn’t be hurried.
There are now more than 285,000 settlers in the West Bank beyond East Jerusalem. Though many might be coaxed back to Israel proper following an agreement with the Palestinians, a menacing minority has made clear its intention of preventing peace at any price, while simultaneously claiming to be a non-issue. However this minority can become a non-issue if Israeli, Palestinian and international negotiators re-think the path to peace.
In every attempt, those involved in cutting deals between Israel and the Palestinians have always tried going through the settlers, a self-defeating tactic because doing so only gives them more power. A new approach is to outmanoeuvre them — set a border that’s defensible for Israel and functional for Palestine, and urge the settlers to either get behind that border, with government assistance, or become a Jewish minority in the Palestinian state.
That may seem unthinkable. Settlement expansion has been de facto Israeli policy for nearly as long as Israel has controlled the territory. To now hand them over to a Palestinian state would be to punish people for doing what their leaders encouraged them to do.
Except, while politicking postponed any clear decision-making on what should be done with land captured in 1967, the settlers were gaining numbers, and with numbers, strength which they use to promote interests detrimental to the whole. They demanded services at a huge expense to the treasury, they exposed soldiers to unnecessary danger and they defied court orders to cease and desist. The more extreme settlers use violence, leading a soldier-friend of mine to remark, “Hebron is the only place in the West Bank where a soldier feels safer around Palestinians than around Jews.” This is not behaviour a democracy should tolerate, nor tacitly condone.
An ultimatum to settlers would force them to choose between the modern state of Israel and its biblical promise, possibly encouraging many to acquiesce without major incident. Those who remain could retain their Israeli citizenship, with an open invitation to return, but would become Palestinian citizens. Living no differently from other Diaspora Jews, they would be subject to the laws and values of their state.
At first blush, a Palestinian Jew may sound like an oxymoron, but no more than Israeli Arabs — Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, who comprise more than 20 percent of the Jewish state's population. Since Palestine would have to resemble a democracy, as Israel does, there is no reason minorities could not live there. In fact, it could help Palestine feel like a normal country.
The idea of withdrawing Israel but leaving Israelis has yet to go mainstream, but there have been hints. Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said as much at the Aspen Ideas Festival in July, when he declared that Jews would be welcomed in a future Palestinian state. Gershon Baskin, co-director of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, suggested in a recent Jerusalem Post column to “link the rights, privileges and obligations of Palestinians in Israel to those of Jews in Palestine ... to close the gaps of discrimination against Palestinians in Israel and prevent the discrimination against Jews in Palestine.”
That’s a good idea, and should go further to require that Jewish holy sites that fall outside Israel be protected and accessible to non-Palestinians. This would ensure spiritual sovereignty over the land regardless of political jurisdiction.
The hard part would be getting the current Israeli government, which includes settler allies, to agree. The good news is that Prime Minister Netanyahu, though hawkish, is a pragmatist, whose relationship to ideologues remains one of convenience. He already believes in building the Palestinian economy, something hard to do with Israel’s security apparatus stifling the flow of goods, services and labour.
Netanyahu will pursue the most politically and financially expedient course and will only go so far in alienating Israel from the American administration. The influential foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, may have little compassion for Palestinians, but he cares deeply that Israel remains a Jewish state — more so than the particulars of the boundaries that come to define it.
Though a settler himself, Lieberman could be counted among those who might return to Israel under the right conditions, as evidenced by his decision to distance himself from the settlement issue when it became clear that it posed a conflict of interest.
Given their savvy, Netanyahu and Lieberman can find a way to circumvent the most ardent elements of the settler community, thereby minimising their political weight. If Israelis can see a Palestinian state as beneficial to them as it is for Palestinians, the settlers would become exactly what they say they are: a non-issue.
Bill Glucroft is a writer who has worked in Israel for both Zionist and Israeli-Arab organisations. He blogs at mediabard.org. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Israel's Gaza Vindication
By Jackson Diehl
The Washington Post
September 21, 2009
When it was launched last December, Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip looked to most people in Washington to be risky, counterproductive and doomed to futility. Not only pundits like me but senior officials of the Bush administration predicted that the Israeli army would not succeed either in toppling Gaza's Hamas government or in eliminating its capacity to launch missiles at Israeli cities. Instead it would subject the Jewish state to another tidal wave of international opprobrium and risk its relations with West Bank Palestinians and Egypt.
Mostly, we were right. But today, Operation Cast Lead, as the three-week operation is known in Israel, is generally regarded by the country's military and political elite as a success. The reasons for that are worth examining now that a new and even more hawkish Israeli government is weighing whether to flout Washington's prevailing opposition to a military attack on Iran.
Israel's satisfaction starts with a simple set of facts. Between April 2001 and the end of 2008, 4,246 rockets and 4,180 mortar shells were fired into Israel from Gaza, killing 14 Israelis, wounding more than 400 and making life in southern Israel intolerable. During what was supposed to be a cease-fire during the last half of 2008, 362 rockets and shells landed. Meanwhile, between late 2000 and the end of 2008, Israeli forces killed some 3,000 Gazans.
Since April there have been just over two dozen rocket and mortar strikes — or less than on many single days before the war. No one has been seriously injured, and life in the Israeli town of Sderot and the area around it has returned almost to normal. Israeli attacks in Gaza have almost ceased, too: Since the end of the mini-war, 29 Palestinians, two of whom were civilians, have been killed by Israeli action.
Hamas, of course, remains in power and unmoved in its refusal to recognize Israel. It is still holding an Israeli soldier who was abducted in 2006. It is still smuggling material for weapons through tunnels under the Egyptian border and, if it chose to, could resume rocket attacks on Israel at any time.
The point, however, is that Israel has bought itself a stretch of relative peace with Hamas, just as its costly 2006 invasion of Lebanon has produced three years of quiet on that front. From the Israeli perspective, a respite from conflict is the most that can be expected from either group — or from their mutual sponsor, Iran.
"They will never change their ideology of destroying Israel," a senior government official told me last week. "But you can deter them if they are convinced you are not afraid of fighting a war."
But what of the grievous Palestinian suffering in the invasion — Israel itself counted 1,166 dead Gazans, including more than 450 civilians — and the international backlash that has caused? Just last week a U.N. commission headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone condemned what it called "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population," and suggested that responsible Israelis be hauled before the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.
Israel's leaders worried a lot about losing the war that way. But as they see it, they suffered only scratches. Egypt, which quietly collaborates with Israel's blockade of Gaza, came under pressure to change its policy but held firm. No Arab country toughened its stance toward Israel: According to the Obama administration, as many as five may be willing to offer diplomatic and economic concessions if Israel freezes its West Bank settlement construction.
Perhaps most significant, Hamas's rival for Palestinian leadership, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, is considerably stronger than it was before the war. Probably it will renew peace talks with Israel within weeks. As for the Goldstone report, the heat it briefly produced last week will quickly dissipate; the panel was discredited from the outset because of its appointment by the grotesquely politicized U.N. Human Rights Council.
The Gaza invasion was the second military operation Israel embarked on in less than 18 months despite disapproval from Washington. The other was its bombing of a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria in September 2007. Then, too, officials in Washington feared a dire diplomatic backlash or even a war between Israel and Syria. Nothing happened.
As they quietly debate the pros and cons of launching a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, Israel's political and military leaders no doubt will be thinking about that history. That doesn't mean they will discount American objections — Iran would be a far harder and more complex target, with direct repercussions for U.S. troops and critical interests in the region. But, as with Gaza, even a partial and short-term reversal of the Iranian nuclear program may look to Israelis like a reasonable benefit — and the potential blowback overblown.
The Washington Post
September 21, 2009
When it was launched last December, Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip looked to most people in Washington to be risky, counterproductive and doomed to futility. Not only pundits like me but senior officials of the Bush administration predicted that the Israeli army would not succeed either in toppling Gaza's Hamas government or in eliminating its capacity to launch missiles at Israeli cities. Instead it would subject the Jewish state to another tidal wave of international opprobrium and risk its relations with West Bank Palestinians and Egypt.
Mostly, we were right. But today, Operation Cast Lead, as the three-week operation is known in Israel, is generally regarded by the country's military and political elite as a success. The reasons for that are worth examining now that a new and even more hawkish Israeli government is weighing whether to flout Washington's prevailing opposition to a military attack on Iran.
Israel's satisfaction starts with a simple set of facts. Between April 2001 and the end of 2008, 4,246 rockets and 4,180 mortar shells were fired into Israel from Gaza, killing 14 Israelis, wounding more than 400 and making life in southern Israel intolerable. During what was supposed to be a cease-fire during the last half of 2008, 362 rockets and shells landed. Meanwhile, between late 2000 and the end of 2008, Israeli forces killed some 3,000 Gazans.
Since April there have been just over two dozen rocket and mortar strikes — or less than on many single days before the war. No one has been seriously injured, and life in the Israeli town of Sderot and the area around it has returned almost to normal. Israeli attacks in Gaza have almost ceased, too: Since the end of the mini-war, 29 Palestinians, two of whom were civilians, have been killed by Israeli action.
Hamas, of course, remains in power and unmoved in its refusal to recognize Israel. It is still holding an Israeli soldier who was abducted in 2006. It is still smuggling material for weapons through tunnels under the Egyptian border and, if it chose to, could resume rocket attacks on Israel at any time.
The point, however, is that Israel has bought itself a stretch of relative peace with Hamas, just as its costly 2006 invasion of Lebanon has produced three years of quiet on that front. From the Israeli perspective, a respite from conflict is the most that can be expected from either group — or from their mutual sponsor, Iran.
"They will never change their ideology of destroying Israel," a senior government official told me last week. "But you can deter them if they are convinced you are not afraid of fighting a war."
But what of the grievous Palestinian suffering in the invasion — Israel itself counted 1,166 dead Gazans, including more than 450 civilians — and the international backlash that has caused? Just last week a U.N. commission headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone condemned what it called "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population," and suggested that responsible Israelis be hauled before the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.
Israel's leaders worried a lot about losing the war that way. But as they see it, they suffered only scratches. Egypt, which quietly collaborates with Israel's blockade of Gaza, came under pressure to change its policy but held firm. No Arab country toughened its stance toward Israel: According to the Obama administration, as many as five may be willing to offer diplomatic and economic concessions if Israel freezes its West Bank settlement construction.
Perhaps most significant, Hamas's rival for Palestinian leadership, the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, is considerably stronger than it was before the war. Probably it will renew peace talks with Israel within weeks. As for the Goldstone report, the heat it briefly produced last week will quickly dissipate; the panel was discredited from the outset because of its appointment by the grotesquely politicized U.N. Human Rights Council.
The Gaza invasion was the second military operation Israel embarked on in less than 18 months despite disapproval from Washington. The other was its bombing of a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria in September 2007. Then, too, officials in Washington feared a dire diplomatic backlash or even a war between Israel and Syria. Nothing happened.
As they quietly debate the pros and cons of launching a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, Israel's political and military leaders no doubt will be thinking about that history. That doesn't mean they will discount American objections — Iran would be a far harder and more complex target, with direct repercussions for U.S. troops and critical interests in the region. But, as with Gaza, even a partial and short-term reversal of the Iranian nuclear program may look to Israelis like a reasonable benefit — and the potential blowback overblown.
The Gaza Report’s Wasted Opportunity
By David Landau
The New York Times
September 20, 2009
Jerusalem - Israel intentionally went after civilians in Gaza — and wrapped its intention in lies.
That chilling — and misguided — accusation is the key conclusion of the United Nations investigation, led by Richard Goldstone, into the three-week war last winter. “While the Israeli government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercises of its right to self-defense,” the report said, “the mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”
The report has produced a storm of outraged rejection in Israel. Politicians fulminate about double standards and anti-Semitism. Judge Goldstone, an eminent South African jurist and a Jew, is widely excoriated as an enemy of his people.
The report stunned even seasoned Israeli diplomats who expected no quarter from an inquiry set up by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which they believe to be deeply biased against Israel. They expected the military operation to be condemned as grossly disproportionate. They expected Israel to be lambasted for not taking sufficient care to avoid civilian casualties. But they never imagined that the report would accuse the Jewish state of intentionally aiming at civilians.
Israelis believe that their army did not deliberately kill the hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including children, who died during “Operation Cast Lead.” They believe, therefore, that Israel is not culpable, morally or criminally, for these civilian deaths, which were collateral to the true aim of the operation — killing Hamas gunmen.
It is, some would argue, a form of self-deception.
When does negligence become recklessness, and when does recklessness slip into wanton callousness, and then into deliberate disregard for innocent human life?
But that is the point — and it should have been the focus of the investigation. Judge Goldstone’s real mandate was, or should have been, to bring Israel to confront this fundamental question, a question inherent in the waging of war by all civilized societies against irregular armed groups. Are widespread civilian casualties inevitable when a modern army pounds terrorist targets in a heavily populated area with purportedly smart ordnance? Are they acceptable? Does the enemy’s deployment in the heart of the civilian area shift the line between right and wrong, in morality and in law?
These were precisely the questions that Israeli politicians and generals wrestled with in Gaza, as others do today in Afghanistan.
It is possible, and certainly arguable, that the Israeli policymakers, or individual Israeli field commanders in isolated instances, pushed the line out too far.
But Judge Goldstone has thwarted any such honest debate — within Israel or concerning Israel. His fundamental premise, that the Israelis went after civilians, shut down the argument before it began.
This is regrettable, for the report could have stirred the conscience of the nation. Many Israelis were dismayed at the war’s casualty figures, at the disparity between the dozen deaths on the Israeli side and the thousand-plus deaths, many of them of noncombatants, in Gaza.
Many Israelis were profoundly troubled by this arithmetic even though they supported Israel’s resort to arms in the face of incessant violation of their sovereign border by Hamas’s rain of rockets.
Judge Goldstone could have contended that just as Israeli leaders themselves have frequently called off pinpoint assassinations of terrorists because civilians were in the line of fire, so too they should have refrained from bombing and shelling Hamas targets in Gaza when that bombing and shelling was bound to exact a large civilian toll.
By approaching the Gaza war, and his report, from this perspective, Judge Goldstone could have opened debate and prompted reflection in Israel. Instead, by accusing Israel — its government, its army, its ethos — of deliberately seeking out civilians, he has achieved the opposite effect.
David Landau was the editor in chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz from 2004 to 2008.
The New York Times
September 20, 2009
Jerusalem - Israel intentionally went after civilians in Gaza — and wrapped its intention in lies.
That chilling — and misguided — accusation is the key conclusion of the United Nations investigation, led by Richard Goldstone, into the three-week war last winter. “While the Israeli government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercises of its right to self-defense,” the report said, “the mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”
The report has produced a storm of outraged rejection in Israel. Politicians fulminate about double standards and anti-Semitism. Judge Goldstone, an eminent South African jurist and a Jew, is widely excoriated as an enemy of his people.
The report stunned even seasoned Israeli diplomats who expected no quarter from an inquiry set up by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which they believe to be deeply biased against Israel. They expected the military operation to be condemned as grossly disproportionate. They expected Israel to be lambasted for not taking sufficient care to avoid civilian casualties. But they never imagined that the report would accuse the Jewish state of intentionally aiming at civilians.
Israelis believe that their army did not deliberately kill the hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including children, who died during “Operation Cast Lead.” They believe, therefore, that Israel is not culpable, morally or criminally, for these civilian deaths, which were collateral to the true aim of the operation — killing Hamas gunmen.
It is, some would argue, a form of self-deception.
When does negligence become recklessness, and when does recklessness slip into wanton callousness, and then into deliberate disregard for innocent human life?
But that is the point — and it should have been the focus of the investigation. Judge Goldstone’s real mandate was, or should have been, to bring Israel to confront this fundamental question, a question inherent in the waging of war by all civilized societies against irregular armed groups. Are widespread civilian casualties inevitable when a modern army pounds terrorist targets in a heavily populated area with purportedly smart ordnance? Are they acceptable? Does the enemy’s deployment in the heart of the civilian area shift the line between right and wrong, in morality and in law?
These were precisely the questions that Israeli politicians and generals wrestled with in Gaza, as others do today in Afghanistan.
It is possible, and certainly arguable, that the Israeli policymakers, or individual Israeli field commanders in isolated instances, pushed the line out too far.
But Judge Goldstone has thwarted any such honest debate — within Israel or concerning Israel. His fundamental premise, that the Israelis went after civilians, shut down the argument before it began.
This is regrettable, for the report could have stirred the conscience of the nation. Many Israelis were dismayed at the war’s casualty figures, at the disparity between the dozen deaths on the Israeli side and the thousand-plus deaths, many of them of noncombatants, in Gaza.
Many Israelis were profoundly troubled by this arithmetic even though they supported Israel’s resort to arms in the face of incessant violation of their sovereign border by Hamas’s rain of rockets.
Judge Goldstone could have contended that just as Israeli leaders themselves have frequently called off pinpoint assassinations of terrorists because civilians were in the line of fire, so too they should have refrained from bombing and shelling Hamas targets in Gaza when that bombing and shelling was bound to exact a large civilian toll.
By approaching the Gaza war, and his report, from this perspective, Judge Goldstone could have opened debate and prompted reflection in Israel. Instead, by accusing Israel — its government, its army, its ethos — of deliberately seeking out civilians, he has achieved the opposite effect.
David Landau was the editor in chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz from 2004 to 2008.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Finding my roots in Tel Aviv
Raised in England by Iraqi Jewish parents, Rachel Shabi 'blanded out' her family heritage to fit in with her peers. Years later, she has finally learned to embrace her parents' values and her own rich cultural mix.
By Rachel Shabi
The Guardian (UK)
16 May 2009
On television news, Arabs and Jews look as though they've been at each other's throats for ever. Fortunately, there are people around us with longer memories — people who, by the arc of their own lives, prove that this wasn't always the case.
People such as my parents: Iraqi Jews who migrated to Israel in the early 1950s and to England during the 1970s. My family, just like thousands of other Jewish families, had been at home in Middle Eastern countries for centuries; Jews neighbouring Arabs, co-nationalists living for the most part cordially and in peace. It seemed easy, instinctive and eternal — until it all fell apart.
Recently, I went back to Israel, where I was born, to research the stories of these Jews from Arab countries and find out what happened to them in the Jewish state. I wanted to bring their experiences back into the frame. In the process, I brought my parents, and my own family history, into much sharper focus, too.
If there was a defining moment, it came in a scruffy trade union building in Tel Aviv. A group of Israeli musicians gathers here in a boxy room each week — classically trained performers of a vintage that was adored in their country of birth, Iraq, but whose musical style did not quite fit the tastes of the Jewish state. It's sort of an all Iraqi-Jewish jam session, although they play a lot of Egyptian classics and the percussionists tap out oriental rhythms on darbukas, tambourines or tabletops. As I sat among them, it dawned on me that my mother — forever clapping an alien-sounding, misfit beat over western music while I was growing up in England - was simply marking out a rhythm that I couldn't hear. Her clapping retroactively became normal.
By the time my family moved to England, my father had lived in Turkey and France as a student, as well as Iraq and Israel — and had a fair idea of the social values he rated in a country. England ticked the right boxes. My mother had some reservations: wouldn't it be tough to raise children so far from a sprawling, close-knit family in Israel, whose love and support were surely more important than abstract ideals?
Those reservations about being far from "home" (I was never sure which one — Iraq or Israel) were sometimes nudged by the sort of migrant experiences that were typical of British life in the 1970s. Back then, Britain wasn't especially interested in my parents being Iraqi, or Israeli, or whatever. Perhaps they were just "foreign" — at any rate, that was how I tended to perceive them as a child. There were long trips in search of pitta bread and long waits for visiting relatives to bring us bottles of amba, the radioactively bright mango pickle that Iraqis seem addicted to. My mum admits that she would go to a pet-food shop for the unhusked sunflower seeds that she'd roast for us to crack open between our teeth as a snack. ("Yes, that's right, for the budgie," she'd tell the shopkeeper.)
I didn't realise then that the seed-cracking was a hallmark oriental habit — or that, in early Israel, public transport operators were so confounded by the carpets of seed husks that lined the buses, courtesy of passengers, that they erected signs to discourage the practice. When I was young, I didn't know the pet-shop story, either. Had my mum told me then, I'd have been embarrassed, as I was by all things that made me appear "foreign". A migrant kid, I assumed that blanding out my background would somehow make me more British, whereas all it could possibly achieve was to make me more bland.
I grew up with Arabic (or Judaeo-Arabic) cuisine: Iraqi breakfasts on Saturdays of overnight-boiled eggs, fried eggplants, mango pickle and salad stuffed into pitta pockets; ba'ba beh tamur, homemade date pastries that would surface around the Jewish festival of Purim; slow-cooked marrows that had been carefully emptied and restuffed with fragrant rice, meat and pine nuts; falafels and hummus in my lunchbox. The Arabic language was ever present — because my parents were always speaking it, or quoting parables or bits of poetry in it, or reading Jewish religious texts in Arabic over the Passover table. Arabic music was always in the background at home, either via treasured, battered cassettes or on crackly long-wave. There was never any doubt that Arab culture was an integral part of our Jewish home: respected, enjoyed and admired. But growing up, I wasn't really into it.
As it turns out, scores of Israeli children were experiencing something similar at that time. Approximately half the population of Israel is from Arab or Muslim countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen. Known as Mizrahi ("Eastern") or Sephardi Jews, they arrived in Israel during various periods following its creation in 1948. Jews of Mizrahi origin were for many years the majority in Israel — until the arrival of just under a million migrants from the former Soviet bloc during the early 1990s reshuffled the ethnic pack. Mizrahis grew up in a Jewish society that was desperate to yoke to Europe and belittled the Arab world as an uncivilised cultural desert. The majority Mizrahis were assumed by the ruling European minority to be bearers of an inferior culture that should not come to represent or define the Jewish state. And, inevitably, many of those Mizrahi children internalised this story.
Interviewing for my book, it was easy to understand the Mizrahis who described how they had spent childhoods faking their own identities — in a country that encouraged its Mizrahi population to ditch those "backward" oriental habits. One professor told me he'd badgered his father into changing the family surname to something that wasn't a telltale mark of Mizrahi origin, and now feels shame each time he visits his father's grave and sees the bogus name on the headstone. Another, of Moroccan origin, described how she invented a French persona for herself, forbidding her parents from speaking Arabic or playing oriental music. Others described how they erased their guttural oriental accent: vocals that are integral to Hebrew — a Semitic language, the sister of Arabic, but which Israel decided would be tonally "wrong" for the Jewish state. (I remember how I used to practise my English vowels until they lost the slightest foreign twang.) And these stories repeat so many times over in Israel — recollections of masked origins, buried roots, trashed biographies; blanded-out backgrounds.
This wasn't uniformly the case. Countless Mizrahis retained their home culture in Israel, often in defiance and against the odds. When their Europeanised co-nationalists pronounced Mizrahi culture to be inferior, some just said: "And who are you, exactly, to decide on that?" Meanwhile, many of those Mizrahis who did sever roots are now trying to reconnect with those forsaken origins — reclaiming their real family names, reinstating the oriental vocals, rediscovering their home culture. Yair Dalal, a world-acclaimed Israeli musician of Iraqi origin, describes a realignment process that occurs when he sends his Mizrahi students home to practise a piece of oriental music. "They come back a week later and say: 'My dad started to sing the song I was playing.' And that's the connection. That person is back on track."
Getting back on track means that — to my good fortune — I now appreciate more fully my parents' Iraqi dimension. I'm aware of the irony: that researching a book on how Israel patronised its Mizrahi citizens made me realise how I'd patronised my Mizrahi parents. But, as my good-natured parents might say in Iraqi Arabic: "Ahsan min maku." (Better than nothing.)
They remain dedicated followers of Iraqi and other Arabic culture in the UK. They shop for favourite foods at Iraqi grocers, chronicling the storekeeper's arrival in England, lamenting the tragedy of Iraq and raising colourful Arabic curses to the foolish western interference in that country. They remain forlorn at the closure of London's Kufa gallery, an Iraqi cultural centre that shut down a few years after the second Gulf war. They loved the British Museum's recent Babylon exhibition and attended many of the related events.
My parents remain absorbed in the small print of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the wider region. They're connected to and care about Israel — it was home — but still it bugs them, politically and culturally: "Why don't they pronounce this word properly, as it is written in Hebrew?"; "Why can't they spell Arabic street signs correctly?"; "Why, in the name of God, do they care so little about the Middle East?"
Happy Englanders, they are equally invested in and committed to British politics and culture — they won't miss Question Time; they are friends of the Opera House; they are as likely to bemoan politically spineless New Labour policy as they are morally bankrupt Israeli policy. They span these worlds effortlessly, showing how easy it can be to bridge binaries, how seemingly polar opposites — Arab or Jew, east or west — can reside together comfortably in the same space, the same skin.
• Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands by Rachel Shabi (Yale University Press, £18.99).
By Rachel Shabi
The Guardian (UK)
16 May 2009
On television news, Arabs and Jews look as though they've been at each other's throats for ever. Fortunately, there are people around us with longer memories — people who, by the arc of their own lives, prove that this wasn't always the case.
People such as my parents: Iraqi Jews who migrated to Israel in the early 1950s and to England during the 1970s. My family, just like thousands of other Jewish families, had been at home in Middle Eastern countries for centuries; Jews neighbouring Arabs, co-nationalists living for the most part cordially and in peace. It seemed easy, instinctive and eternal — until it all fell apart.
Recently, I went back to Israel, where I was born, to research the stories of these Jews from Arab countries and find out what happened to them in the Jewish state. I wanted to bring their experiences back into the frame. In the process, I brought my parents, and my own family history, into much sharper focus, too.
If there was a defining moment, it came in a scruffy trade union building in Tel Aviv. A group of Israeli musicians gathers here in a boxy room each week — classically trained performers of a vintage that was adored in their country of birth, Iraq, but whose musical style did not quite fit the tastes of the Jewish state. It's sort of an all Iraqi-Jewish jam session, although they play a lot of Egyptian classics and the percussionists tap out oriental rhythms on darbukas, tambourines or tabletops. As I sat among them, it dawned on me that my mother — forever clapping an alien-sounding, misfit beat over western music while I was growing up in England - was simply marking out a rhythm that I couldn't hear. Her clapping retroactively became normal.
By the time my family moved to England, my father had lived in Turkey and France as a student, as well as Iraq and Israel — and had a fair idea of the social values he rated in a country. England ticked the right boxes. My mother had some reservations: wouldn't it be tough to raise children so far from a sprawling, close-knit family in Israel, whose love and support were surely more important than abstract ideals?
Those reservations about being far from "home" (I was never sure which one — Iraq or Israel) were sometimes nudged by the sort of migrant experiences that were typical of British life in the 1970s. Back then, Britain wasn't especially interested in my parents being Iraqi, or Israeli, or whatever. Perhaps they were just "foreign" — at any rate, that was how I tended to perceive them as a child. There were long trips in search of pitta bread and long waits for visiting relatives to bring us bottles of amba, the radioactively bright mango pickle that Iraqis seem addicted to. My mum admits that she would go to a pet-food shop for the unhusked sunflower seeds that she'd roast for us to crack open between our teeth as a snack. ("Yes, that's right, for the budgie," she'd tell the shopkeeper.)
I didn't realise then that the seed-cracking was a hallmark oriental habit — or that, in early Israel, public transport operators were so confounded by the carpets of seed husks that lined the buses, courtesy of passengers, that they erected signs to discourage the practice. When I was young, I didn't know the pet-shop story, either. Had my mum told me then, I'd have been embarrassed, as I was by all things that made me appear "foreign". A migrant kid, I assumed that blanding out my background would somehow make me more British, whereas all it could possibly achieve was to make me more bland.
I grew up with Arabic (or Judaeo-Arabic) cuisine: Iraqi breakfasts on Saturdays of overnight-boiled eggs, fried eggplants, mango pickle and salad stuffed into pitta pockets; ba'ba beh tamur, homemade date pastries that would surface around the Jewish festival of Purim; slow-cooked marrows that had been carefully emptied and restuffed with fragrant rice, meat and pine nuts; falafels and hummus in my lunchbox. The Arabic language was ever present — because my parents were always speaking it, or quoting parables or bits of poetry in it, or reading Jewish religious texts in Arabic over the Passover table. Arabic music was always in the background at home, either via treasured, battered cassettes or on crackly long-wave. There was never any doubt that Arab culture was an integral part of our Jewish home: respected, enjoyed and admired. But growing up, I wasn't really into it.
As it turns out, scores of Israeli children were experiencing something similar at that time. Approximately half the population of Israel is from Arab or Muslim countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen. Known as Mizrahi ("Eastern") or Sephardi Jews, they arrived in Israel during various periods following its creation in 1948. Jews of Mizrahi origin were for many years the majority in Israel — until the arrival of just under a million migrants from the former Soviet bloc during the early 1990s reshuffled the ethnic pack. Mizrahis grew up in a Jewish society that was desperate to yoke to Europe and belittled the Arab world as an uncivilised cultural desert. The majority Mizrahis were assumed by the ruling European minority to be bearers of an inferior culture that should not come to represent or define the Jewish state. And, inevitably, many of those Mizrahi children internalised this story.
Interviewing for my book, it was easy to understand the Mizrahis who described how they had spent childhoods faking their own identities — in a country that encouraged its Mizrahi population to ditch those "backward" oriental habits. One professor told me he'd badgered his father into changing the family surname to something that wasn't a telltale mark of Mizrahi origin, and now feels shame each time he visits his father's grave and sees the bogus name on the headstone. Another, of Moroccan origin, described how she invented a French persona for herself, forbidding her parents from speaking Arabic or playing oriental music. Others described how they erased their guttural oriental accent: vocals that are integral to Hebrew — a Semitic language, the sister of Arabic, but which Israel decided would be tonally "wrong" for the Jewish state. (I remember how I used to practise my English vowels until they lost the slightest foreign twang.) And these stories repeat so many times over in Israel — recollections of masked origins, buried roots, trashed biographies; blanded-out backgrounds.
This wasn't uniformly the case. Countless Mizrahis retained their home culture in Israel, often in defiance and against the odds. When their Europeanised co-nationalists pronounced Mizrahi culture to be inferior, some just said: "And who are you, exactly, to decide on that?" Meanwhile, many of those Mizrahis who did sever roots are now trying to reconnect with those forsaken origins — reclaiming their real family names, reinstating the oriental vocals, rediscovering their home culture. Yair Dalal, a world-acclaimed Israeli musician of Iraqi origin, describes a realignment process that occurs when he sends his Mizrahi students home to practise a piece of oriental music. "They come back a week later and say: 'My dad started to sing the song I was playing.' And that's the connection. That person is back on track."
Getting back on track means that — to my good fortune — I now appreciate more fully my parents' Iraqi dimension. I'm aware of the irony: that researching a book on how Israel patronised its Mizrahi citizens made me realise how I'd patronised my Mizrahi parents. But, as my good-natured parents might say in Iraqi Arabic: "Ahsan min maku." (Better than nothing.)
They remain dedicated followers of Iraqi and other Arabic culture in the UK. They shop for favourite foods at Iraqi grocers, chronicling the storekeeper's arrival in England, lamenting the tragedy of Iraq and raising colourful Arabic curses to the foolish western interference in that country. They remain forlorn at the closure of London's Kufa gallery, an Iraqi cultural centre that shut down a few years after the second Gulf war. They loved the British Museum's recent Babylon exhibition and attended many of the related events.
My parents remain absorbed in the small print of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the wider region. They're connected to and care about Israel — it was home — but still it bugs them, politically and culturally: "Why don't they pronounce this word properly, as it is written in Hebrew?"; "Why can't they spell Arabic street signs correctly?"; "Why, in the name of God, do they care so little about the Middle East?"
Happy Englanders, they are equally invested in and committed to British politics and culture — they won't miss Question Time; they are friends of the Opera House; they are as likely to bemoan politically spineless New Labour policy as they are morally bankrupt Israeli policy. They span these worlds effortlessly, showing how easy it can be to bridge binaries, how seemingly polar opposites — Arab or Jew, east or west — can reside together comfortably in the same space, the same skin.
• Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands by Rachel Shabi (Yale University Press, £18.99).
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Saddam revisited as Iraq accuses Syria of sheltering Baathist bombers (and my comments)
In the Saddam-Hafez era, they hanged each other's bombers
By Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK)
September 11, 2009
In Damascus and Baghdad, it almost feels like the old days. Mutual abuse and recriminations, the recalling of ambassadors — and only a matter of time, perhaps, before Syria and Iraq break diplomatic relations.
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, demands an international tribunal because Syria won't hand over a couple of Iraqi Baathists whom he blames for the suicide bombing deaths of at least 100 civilians in Baghdad. Syria snaps back that it's always been a refuge for those facing "injustice".
Twenty years ago, Saddam Hussein and Hafez el-Assad sent bombers to Damascus and Baghdad to blow up each other's cities. Now Maliki and Hafez's son, Bashar, are attacking each other. For all the tribal connections, historical relations, the "fraternal" love of Arab unity — Syria likes to call itself the "beating heart of Arabism" — it seems the two neighbours will go on roaring at each other in time-honoured fashion.
In the Saddam-Hafez era, they hanged each other's bombers in public, Syria's agents swinging slowly in the breeze in Baghdad's public squares while Saddam's killers performed the same act in Damascus. These days, things are a little more civilised. The Iraqis don't actually capture any bombers — they have already vaporised themselves — but they call upon international law while the Syrians pose as the refugee safe haven of the Middle East.
Yet Syria clearly has the better memory, Maliki the shorter. Back in the bad old days of mutually hostile Syrian-Iraqi Ba'athism, Maliki and Jalal Talabani — now the President of Iraq — sought refuge in Damascus from the fury of Saddam's regime. Both were grateful — or at least they were then — that Hafez had taken mercy on their souls and welcomed them to the "mother of the Arab nation" (another Syrian sobriquet). Today, the Syrians have been quick to remind the pair of this act of generosity — and to point out their hypocrisy.
"Syria never handed over people who took shelter from the threat of injustice, arbitrary acts and death," the official Al-Thawra newspaper announced. "... they [Maliki and Talabani] all know what their fate would have been if Syria had such political morals." The Syrians have not denied that Mohamed al-Younis and Satam Farhan are in Damascus — al-Younis was a senior member of Saddam's Ba'ath party — but have demanded proof of their involvement in the Baghdad bombings, something which Damascus believes (correctly) that the Iraqis will find it hard to provide.
But the hypocrisy that Syria condemns can be discovered on both sides of the border. I met the Syrian general in charge of building barriers and watchtowers along the Syrian-Iraqi frontier in what he clearly believed was a genuine effort to prevent the transit of insurgents into Iraq. But the last time I met the family of a suicide bomber in Lebanon — he assaulted an American convoy in western Iraq, very close to the Syrian border — I was told by his uncle that the man had "gone to Iraq because it was easier to cross the Syrian border to attack American soldiers than it was to cross the Lebanese border and attack the Israeli enemy".
In truth, there was always a gritty, no-nonsense but sometimes understanding relationship between Ba'athists in Iraq and Syria, even when Saddam was ruling. The founder of the party, Michel Aflaq, was a Syrian Christian who ended his days in Iraq. According to his family, his tomb was badly damaged after the 2003 American invasion — it lies in what is now the American-controlled Green Zone. As Ba'athists themselves, therefore, al-Younis and Farhan are merely "brothers" — brothers, indeed, who can no doubt add to Syria's formidable intelligence about American military strategy and Maliki's forces inside Iraq.
But Al-Thawra's praise of Syria's political integrity needs to be read with an eye on history. Syria never handed over people threatened with death, it tells us. But wasn't there a Kurdish guerrilla leader — a man called Abdullah Ocalan — who was nurtured by the Syrians, supported by the Syrians, threatened with death by the Turks, and then summarily told to leave Damascus when the Turks threatened military action against the Assad regime? And after various peregrinations in Africa, did he not end up in the hands of the Turkish secret service? He languishes to this day in a Turkish jail.
Mark says:
Robert Fisk has been routinely denounced over the years as being "anti-Israel" and "anti-Arab." Conversely, he's also been denounced for being "pro-Israel" and "pro-Arab." Of course, those who denounce him for being one can't conceive of him being denounced for being the other.
I don't think Fisk is really any of those. If you follow his columns over the long run — and not go by just one or two that are chosen to "conclusively demonstrate" that he is "pro-Arab" or "pro-Israel" — it is possible to conclude that he is really just very cynical and takes the attitude of "a pox on all your houses." That is neither "pro" nor "anti."
I often disagree with Fisk, but as my faithful readers know from this blog and from my previous e-mail postings which preceded the blog, my purpose is to provide insights and explanations into views and and perceptions — not to convince or change minds or propagandize. Therefore I find it useful to occasionally draw your attention to one of his columns.
In the case of the preceding article, I think it's a case of "the more things change the more they remain the same."
By Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK)
September 11, 2009
In Damascus and Baghdad, it almost feels like the old days. Mutual abuse and recriminations, the recalling of ambassadors — and only a matter of time, perhaps, before Syria and Iraq break diplomatic relations.
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, demands an international tribunal because Syria won't hand over a couple of Iraqi Baathists whom he blames for the suicide bombing deaths of at least 100 civilians in Baghdad. Syria snaps back that it's always been a refuge for those facing "injustice".
Twenty years ago, Saddam Hussein and Hafez el-Assad sent bombers to Damascus and Baghdad to blow up each other's cities. Now Maliki and Hafez's son, Bashar, are attacking each other. For all the tribal connections, historical relations, the "fraternal" love of Arab unity — Syria likes to call itself the "beating heart of Arabism" — it seems the two neighbours will go on roaring at each other in time-honoured fashion.
In the Saddam-Hafez era, they hanged each other's bombers in public, Syria's agents swinging slowly in the breeze in Baghdad's public squares while Saddam's killers performed the same act in Damascus. These days, things are a little more civilised. The Iraqis don't actually capture any bombers — they have already vaporised themselves — but they call upon international law while the Syrians pose as the refugee safe haven of the Middle East.
Yet Syria clearly has the better memory, Maliki the shorter. Back in the bad old days of mutually hostile Syrian-Iraqi Ba'athism, Maliki and Jalal Talabani — now the President of Iraq — sought refuge in Damascus from the fury of Saddam's regime. Both were grateful — or at least they were then — that Hafez had taken mercy on their souls and welcomed them to the "mother of the Arab nation" (another Syrian sobriquet). Today, the Syrians have been quick to remind the pair of this act of generosity — and to point out their hypocrisy.
"Syria never handed over people who took shelter from the threat of injustice, arbitrary acts and death," the official Al-Thawra newspaper announced. "... they [Maliki and Talabani] all know what their fate would have been if Syria had such political morals." The Syrians have not denied that Mohamed al-Younis and Satam Farhan are in Damascus — al-Younis was a senior member of Saddam's Ba'ath party — but have demanded proof of their involvement in the Baghdad bombings, something which Damascus believes (correctly) that the Iraqis will find it hard to provide.
But the hypocrisy that Syria condemns can be discovered on both sides of the border. I met the Syrian general in charge of building barriers and watchtowers along the Syrian-Iraqi frontier in what he clearly believed was a genuine effort to prevent the transit of insurgents into Iraq. But the last time I met the family of a suicide bomber in Lebanon — he assaulted an American convoy in western Iraq, very close to the Syrian border — I was told by his uncle that the man had "gone to Iraq because it was easier to cross the Syrian border to attack American soldiers than it was to cross the Lebanese border and attack the Israeli enemy".
In truth, there was always a gritty, no-nonsense but sometimes understanding relationship between Ba'athists in Iraq and Syria, even when Saddam was ruling. The founder of the party, Michel Aflaq, was a Syrian Christian who ended his days in Iraq. According to his family, his tomb was badly damaged after the 2003 American invasion — it lies in what is now the American-controlled Green Zone. As Ba'athists themselves, therefore, al-Younis and Farhan are merely "brothers" — brothers, indeed, who can no doubt add to Syria's formidable intelligence about American military strategy and Maliki's forces inside Iraq.
But Al-Thawra's praise of Syria's political integrity needs to be read with an eye on history. Syria never handed over people threatened with death, it tells us. But wasn't there a Kurdish guerrilla leader — a man called Abdullah Ocalan — who was nurtured by the Syrians, supported by the Syrians, threatened with death by the Turks, and then summarily told to leave Damascus when the Turks threatened military action against the Assad regime? And after various peregrinations in Africa, did he not end up in the hands of the Turkish secret service? He languishes to this day in a Turkish jail.
Mark says:
Robert Fisk has been routinely denounced over the years as being "anti-Israel" and "anti-Arab." Conversely, he's also been denounced for being "pro-Israel" and "pro-Arab." Of course, those who denounce him for being one can't conceive of him being denounced for being the other.
I don't think Fisk is really any of those. If you follow his columns over the long run — and not go by just one or two that are chosen to "conclusively demonstrate" that he is "pro-Arab" or "pro-Israel" — it is possible to conclude that he is really just very cynical and takes the attitude of "a pox on all your houses." That is neither "pro" nor "anti."
I often disagree with Fisk, but as my faithful readers know from this blog and from my previous e-mail postings which preceded the blog, my purpose is to provide insights and explanations into views and and perceptions — not to convince or change minds or propagandize. Therefore I find it useful to occasionally draw your attention to one of his columns.
In the case of the preceding article, I think it's a case of "the more things change the more they remain the same."
'Jews harvesting Algerian kids' organs' (and my comments)
By Haviv Rettig Gur
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
September 14, 2009
The anti-Semitic blogosphere and many Arab and Muslim media outlets are aflutter in recent days over accusations of an international Jewish conspiracy to kidnap Algerian children and harvest their organs.
Unlike the multiple conspiracy theories about Jews circulating among radical fringe organizations online, this one seems to be gaining momentum on mainstream Arab and Muslim Web sites.
According to the story, first reported by Algeria's Al-Khabar daily, bands of Moroccans and Algerians have allegedly been roaming the streets of Algeria's cities kidnapping young children, who are then transported across the border into Morocco. From the Moroccan city of Oujda, the children are then purportedly sold to Israelis and American Jews, who then harvest their organs for sale in Israel and the United States. The organs are said to fetch anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000.
The source for the Al-Khabar report seems to be a Dr. Mustafa Khayatti, head of the Algerian National Committee for the Development of Health Research. Khayatti reportedly claimed that several Jews were arrested in New York in connection with the trade. He claimed Interpol knew of the situation and was leading the investigation into the abductions.
"The arrest of Jewish organ trafficking gangs does not mean that the danger has gone; top officials and specialists in this issue assert that there are other Jewish gangs who remain active in several Arab countries," Khayatti was quoted as saying.
Picking up on the Algerian report, the official Iranian news agency PressTV claimed that the Jewish group "is said to be connected to Israeli Rabbi Levi Rosenbaum, who was recently arrested in New Jersey for the direct involvement in importing human organs."
The report also ran without scrutiny on certain American news outlets, including the Web site of the California-based American Arab weekly Watan.
With its rapid online dissemination, the report has begun to draw fire from those worried about the ease with which such a story, lacking any evidence, can spread in the Muslim world.
The report "sounds as [though] Dr. Khayatti is well connected within the FBI and has access to Interpol documents," but this was not the case, wrote Hassan Masiky, a reporter for the American Moroccan news service MoroccoBoard.com.
"Needless to say, neither Al-Khabar nor PressTV provided a source for their story, other than an obscure low-level Algerian bureaucrat," Masiky complained.
"What is dangerous in this work of fantasy is the plot to package the true story of the arrest of Rabbi Levi Rosenbaum in New Jersey with the nonsense, nightmarish tale out of Algeria," he said.
Masiky noted that the Algerian-Moroccan border was closed and carefully watched by the countries' armies. It was therefore difficult to ascertain how such a plan could be implemented without help from the Algerian state.
"To their credit, the Algerian authorities, up until now, did not ask their Moroccan counterparts for an official investigation, as most Algerians ask themselves: Who are these kidnapped children? Where are their parents? Who conducts these organ harvesting operations? How are the children and the organs transported from Morocco to Israel? And more importantly, how can the Algerian army allow such illicit traffic to go unabated?" Masiky wrote.
The Iranian PressTV noted in its coverage that the report followed claims made in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet last month of an IDF conspiracy to harvest organs from kidnapped Palestinians.
The connection indicated "a possible link between the Israeli military and the mafia of human organs detected in the US," the Iranian report said.
Aftonbladet, too, did not offer evidence in its article, relying on claims by a handful of Palestinians who spoke to the reporter.
Mark says:
Conspiracy theory begets conspiracy theory and the webs that are weaved are not the "conspiracies" but instead are the "connections" and "facts" that are mustered to support these theories. "Evidence" is made up and inconvenient facts are ignored. And proponents and supporters and weavers of conspiracy theories follow the classic courtroom strategy:
If you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue the law, attack the plaintiff or witness.
Note the language quoted from the "reports" in this article:
Dr. Mustafa Khayatti "claimed..." (On what basis and what evidence? None is provided.)
"Top officials and specialists in this issue assert..." (Who are those "top officials" and "specialists"?)
"...is said to be..." (Who said?)
Conspiracy mongers are particularly fond of using the passive tense, not only because their writing skills usually leave something to be desired but because it allows for passivity in thinking and logic and adds to the deliberate vagueness of "evidence" to support the claims of conspiracies.
But let us also be clear. In the case of what turned out to be a real conspiracy — Iran-Contra back in the late 1980s — President Reagan famously excused it with an exquisite use of passive language: "Mistakes were made." Apparently those "mistakes" were self-created out of thin air and therefore no one was responsible.
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
September 14, 2009
The anti-Semitic blogosphere and many Arab and Muslim media outlets are aflutter in recent days over accusations of an international Jewish conspiracy to kidnap Algerian children and harvest their organs.
Unlike the multiple conspiracy theories about Jews circulating among radical fringe organizations online, this one seems to be gaining momentum on mainstream Arab and Muslim Web sites.
According to the story, first reported by Algeria's Al-Khabar daily, bands of Moroccans and Algerians have allegedly been roaming the streets of Algeria's cities kidnapping young children, who are then transported across the border into Morocco. From the Moroccan city of Oujda, the children are then purportedly sold to Israelis and American Jews, who then harvest their organs for sale in Israel and the United States. The organs are said to fetch anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000.
The source for the Al-Khabar report seems to be a Dr. Mustafa Khayatti, head of the Algerian National Committee for the Development of Health Research. Khayatti reportedly claimed that several Jews were arrested in New York in connection with the trade. He claimed Interpol knew of the situation and was leading the investigation into the abductions.
"The arrest of Jewish organ trafficking gangs does not mean that the danger has gone; top officials and specialists in this issue assert that there are other Jewish gangs who remain active in several Arab countries," Khayatti was quoted as saying.
Picking up on the Algerian report, the official Iranian news agency PressTV claimed that the Jewish group "is said to be connected to Israeli Rabbi Levi Rosenbaum, who was recently arrested in New Jersey for the direct involvement in importing human organs."
The report also ran without scrutiny on certain American news outlets, including the Web site of the California-based American Arab weekly Watan.
With its rapid online dissemination, the report has begun to draw fire from those worried about the ease with which such a story, lacking any evidence, can spread in the Muslim world.
The report "sounds as [though] Dr. Khayatti is well connected within the FBI and has access to Interpol documents," but this was not the case, wrote Hassan Masiky, a reporter for the American Moroccan news service MoroccoBoard.com.
"Needless to say, neither Al-Khabar nor PressTV provided a source for their story, other than an obscure low-level Algerian bureaucrat," Masiky complained.
"What is dangerous in this work of fantasy is the plot to package the true story of the arrest of Rabbi Levi Rosenbaum in New Jersey with the nonsense, nightmarish tale out of Algeria," he said.
Masiky noted that the Algerian-Moroccan border was closed and carefully watched by the countries' armies. It was therefore difficult to ascertain how such a plan could be implemented without help from the Algerian state.
"To their credit, the Algerian authorities, up until now, did not ask their Moroccan counterparts for an official investigation, as most Algerians ask themselves: Who are these kidnapped children? Where are their parents? Who conducts these organ harvesting operations? How are the children and the organs transported from Morocco to Israel? And more importantly, how can the Algerian army allow such illicit traffic to go unabated?" Masiky wrote.
The Iranian PressTV noted in its coverage that the report followed claims made in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet last month of an IDF conspiracy to harvest organs from kidnapped Palestinians.
The connection indicated "a possible link between the Israeli military and the mafia of human organs detected in the US," the Iranian report said.
Aftonbladet, too, did not offer evidence in its article, relying on claims by a handful of Palestinians who spoke to the reporter.
Mark says:
Conspiracy theory begets conspiracy theory and the webs that are weaved are not the "conspiracies" but instead are the "connections" and "facts" that are mustered to support these theories. "Evidence" is made up and inconvenient facts are ignored. And proponents and supporters and weavers of conspiracy theories follow the classic courtroom strategy:
If you can't argue the facts, argue the law. If you can't argue the law, attack the plaintiff or witness.
Note the language quoted from the "reports" in this article:
Dr. Mustafa Khayatti "claimed..." (On what basis and what evidence? None is provided.)
"Top officials and specialists in this issue assert..." (Who are those "top officials" and "specialists"?)
"...is said to be..." (Who said?)
Conspiracy mongers are particularly fond of using the passive tense, not only because their writing skills usually leave something to be desired but because it allows for passivity in thinking and logic and adds to the deliberate vagueness of "evidence" to support the claims of conspiracies.
But let us also be clear. In the case of what turned out to be a real conspiracy — Iran-Contra back in the late 1980s — President Reagan famously excused it with an exquisite use of passive language: "Mistakes were made." Apparently those "mistakes" were self-created out of thin air and therefore no one was responsible.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Not Even Two Hundred Dollars!
By Diana Mukkaled
Asharq Alawsat (London)
September 11, 2009
Would any rational person be surprised at the international media’s fixation with the case of Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein who stood trial in Sudan for wearing trousers? Why wouldn’t it be considering all the circumstances of the case, which attracted and deserved the attention that Arab and international press have shown?
Why would anyone be surprised as this case is going on in a country where the president is wanted for war crimes, and in a country that has witnessed wars and crises that have claimed the lives of nearly one and a half million of its people and yet the judicial authority exerted much effort to try a woman for wearing trousers?
Perhaps the Sudanese court should have attempted to save face for its judges by dropping the case instead of remaining in a state of confusion and attempting to hide behind the offer that it presented to Lubna Hussein. It gave her the option of paying US $200 or facing a one-month prison term instead of punishing her with lashes. She chose imprisonment and appeal, and refused to pay any amount whatsoever for her freedom. Lubna seemed completely convinced with what she was defending, and this alone deserves some deliberation.
The attention given to the trial of Lubna Hussein is not exaggerated nor has it been prioritised at the expense of other important causes and the fates of our troubled [Arab] nations, as claimed by some angry people who considered her trial a farce and undeserving of all the noise and attention it received.
Loubna’s case is the core of our crisis, as the authorities that issue odd sentences — that underestimate people’s intelligence and dignity — cannot be trusted with people’s fates.
The authority that tried Lubna and thousands of Sudanese women (48 thousand women were detained in Khartoum in 2008 because of the way they were dressed) is unable to protect its people against violations, oppression and killings.
The obsession with women and women’s issues, and how women dress, act or talk, makes many authorities too incompetent to issue rulings and pass laws in order to control what they consider evil.
We must express our admiration for Lubna and the 48 others who demonstrated in court during the trial. Lubna’s decision to continue with the case that could have been ended by paying US $200 suggests that there is some hope amid such a pessimistic and absurd atmosphere whether in Sudan or the region as a whole. Lubna’s decision to continue fighting was exercised by one woman alone in a society that shows no tolerance towards similar cases. How can we turn a blind eye to the scores of women who are being arrested in the space of one year in Khartoum because of the way they are dressed?
The significance of the decisions taken by Lubna to continue with the fight against laws that are unfair to Sudanese women is immense and almost as immense as our pessimism. This significance can defeat our continuous pessimism regarding the possibility of developing our region and putting an end to its crises.
The decision of the Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein to appeal and proceed with the legal case, even though it was an individual act, should be supported by women’s rights organizations in the region, and especially by media representatives, but words and sympathy alone will not be enough.
Diana Mukkaled is a prominent and well-respected TV journalist in the Arab world, thanks to her phenomenal show "Bil Ayn Al Mojarada" (By The Naked Eye), a series of documentaries around controversial areas and topics which airs on Lebanon's leading local and satellite channel "Future Television."
Asharq Alawsat (London)
September 11, 2009
Would any rational person be surprised at the international media’s fixation with the case of Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein who stood trial in Sudan for wearing trousers? Why wouldn’t it be considering all the circumstances of the case, which attracted and deserved the attention that Arab and international press have shown?
Why would anyone be surprised as this case is going on in a country where the president is wanted for war crimes, and in a country that has witnessed wars and crises that have claimed the lives of nearly one and a half million of its people and yet the judicial authority exerted much effort to try a woman for wearing trousers?
Perhaps the Sudanese court should have attempted to save face for its judges by dropping the case instead of remaining in a state of confusion and attempting to hide behind the offer that it presented to Lubna Hussein. It gave her the option of paying US $200 or facing a one-month prison term instead of punishing her with lashes. She chose imprisonment and appeal, and refused to pay any amount whatsoever for her freedom. Lubna seemed completely convinced with what she was defending, and this alone deserves some deliberation.
The attention given to the trial of Lubna Hussein is not exaggerated nor has it been prioritised at the expense of other important causes and the fates of our troubled [Arab] nations, as claimed by some angry people who considered her trial a farce and undeserving of all the noise and attention it received.
Loubna’s case is the core of our crisis, as the authorities that issue odd sentences — that underestimate people’s intelligence and dignity — cannot be trusted with people’s fates.
The authority that tried Lubna and thousands of Sudanese women (48 thousand women were detained in Khartoum in 2008 because of the way they were dressed) is unable to protect its people against violations, oppression and killings.
The obsession with women and women’s issues, and how women dress, act or talk, makes many authorities too incompetent to issue rulings and pass laws in order to control what they consider evil.
We must express our admiration for Lubna and the 48 others who demonstrated in court during the trial. Lubna’s decision to continue with the case that could have been ended by paying US $200 suggests that there is some hope amid such a pessimistic and absurd atmosphere whether in Sudan or the region as a whole. Lubna’s decision to continue fighting was exercised by one woman alone in a society that shows no tolerance towards similar cases. How can we turn a blind eye to the scores of women who are being arrested in the space of one year in Khartoum because of the way they are dressed?
The significance of the decisions taken by Lubna to continue with the fight against laws that are unfair to Sudanese women is immense and almost as immense as our pessimism. This significance can defeat our continuous pessimism regarding the possibility of developing our region and putting an end to its crises.
The decision of the Sudanese journalist Lubna Hussein to appeal and proceed with the legal case, even though it was an individual act, should be supported by women’s rights organizations in the region, and especially by media representatives, but words and sympathy alone will not be enough.
Diana Mukkaled is a prominent and well-respected TV journalist in the Arab world, thanks to her phenomenal show "Bil Ayn Al Mojarada" (By The Naked Eye), a series of documentaries around controversial areas and topics which airs on Lebanon's leading local and satellite channel "Future Television."
Normalisation
By Nermeen Murad
The Jordan Times
September 14, 2009
I don’t know exactly when and how the word “normalisation” came to signify visiting occupied Palestinian land or dealing with Palestinians.
Ever since I can remember I have heard or read statements from professional associations lambasting one party or another for “normalising”. Of course I have yet to hear these professional associations lead a campaign on anything that has to do with their mandate as unions representing the rights of professionals, but that is another story for another day.
Back to normalisation. A trip by Jordanian journalists to the Israeli occupied West Bank has somehow been categorised as normalisation. The Jordan national football team holding friendly games with its Palestinian counterpart has also been apparently lodged under the heading of normalisation. A planned trip of Jordanian engineers to a conference in the West Bank in support of Palestinian engineering is being held contingent on the issuing of visas from the Palestinian Authority and not the Israeli embassy.
It really bothers me that the anti-normalisation camp has been allowed to indoctrinate the Jordanian people into believing that it would somehow be treason if we interacted with Palestinian institutions and attended or held events on their land.
Even if the price of maintaining that interaction and consolidating Arab presence in the West Bank does mean that we allow Israeli stamps on our passport, it is a small price to pay in return for lifting the isolation imposed on Palestinians by their occupier and now, it seems, perpetuated by, I believe, the well-meaning anti-normalisation camp in Jordan.
Why can’t Jordanian journalists visit the territories occupied by Israel and reiterate their Arab identity, and refuse to bow to the Israeli occupiers or give them the leeway to corner the Palestinians on their own without our support?
Why don’t our journalists regularly go and report on the atrocities committed against the Palestinians in the name of occupation? Why can’t our football, basketball, tennis and all other sports teams regularly visit and train with their Palestinian counterparts?
I also want to understand what would happen if instead of going to Sharm El Sheikh for the Eid holiday we went to Jerusalem and got to know exactly what is going on there and to our relatives, friends, family friends, ex-family friends, colleagues’ families and friends.
Why can’t we continue to cross over regularly and stay in their hotels, eat in their restaurants, buy their products, spend our money for them and in their support? Every single one of us, regardless of our origin, has a connection to someone who lives on Palestinian land and who would appreciate our support, whether moral or financial.
Under the headline of avoiding normalisation, we have left the Palestinians to fend for themselves for decades and have given them very little tangible moral support to help them stand fast in the face of an intimidating, racist and prolonged occupation.
We have to understand that the Palestinians are feeling strangled, isolated, shunned and alone in their struggle with Israel. It isn’t enough to maintain slogans denying Israel’s existence while burying our head in the sand so as not to see that it really does exist. Not only does it exist, it is also systematically building walls around the subjugated Palestinians to keep them apart from the rest of the world; and we appear to aid its objective by building “anti-normalisation” walls which further institutionalise their isolation.
The only way that people who want to see Palestine liberated can really contribute to the cause is by helping the Palestinians not only withstand the occupation but also flourish, morally and economically, despite the occupation. Palestinian businesses must profit, Palestinian schools and universities must educate and produce new generations of well educated and forward-looking individuals, and the Palestinian labour market must find outlets for work in Arab-owned factories and construction projects.
Palestinians must be given hope for a better future. Arabs must be the ones who give them that hope but not through a jihad that massacres more Palestinians than Israelis or by staying away from the occupied lands for fear of a stamp on our passports. We must normalise our relations with the Palestinians and their institutions.
The Jordan Times
September 14, 2009
I don’t know exactly when and how the word “normalisation” came to signify visiting occupied Palestinian land or dealing with Palestinians.
Ever since I can remember I have heard or read statements from professional associations lambasting one party or another for “normalising”. Of course I have yet to hear these professional associations lead a campaign on anything that has to do with their mandate as unions representing the rights of professionals, but that is another story for another day.
Back to normalisation. A trip by Jordanian journalists to the Israeli occupied West Bank has somehow been categorised as normalisation. The Jordan national football team holding friendly games with its Palestinian counterpart has also been apparently lodged under the heading of normalisation. A planned trip of Jordanian engineers to a conference in the West Bank in support of Palestinian engineering is being held contingent on the issuing of visas from the Palestinian Authority and not the Israeli embassy.
It really bothers me that the anti-normalisation camp has been allowed to indoctrinate the Jordanian people into believing that it would somehow be treason if we interacted with Palestinian institutions and attended or held events on their land.
Even if the price of maintaining that interaction and consolidating Arab presence in the West Bank does mean that we allow Israeli stamps on our passport, it is a small price to pay in return for lifting the isolation imposed on Palestinians by their occupier and now, it seems, perpetuated by, I believe, the well-meaning anti-normalisation camp in Jordan.
Why can’t Jordanian journalists visit the territories occupied by Israel and reiterate their Arab identity, and refuse to bow to the Israeli occupiers or give them the leeway to corner the Palestinians on their own without our support?
Why don’t our journalists regularly go and report on the atrocities committed against the Palestinians in the name of occupation? Why can’t our football, basketball, tennis and all other sports teams regularly visit and train with their Palestinian counterparts?
I also want to understand what would happen if instead of going to Sharm El Sheikh for the Eid holiday we went to Jerusalem and got to know exactly what is going on there and to our relatives, friends, family friends, ex-family friends, colleagues’ families and friends.
Why can’t we continue to cross over regularly and stay in their hotels, eat in their restaurants, buy their products, spend our money for them and in their support? Every single one of us, regardless of our origin, has a connection to someone who lives on Palestinian land and who would appreciate our support, whether moral or financial.
Under the headline of avoiding normalisation, we have left the Palestinians to fend for themselves for decades and have given them very little tangible moral support to help them stand fast in the face of an intimidating, racist and prolonged occupation.
We have to understand that the Palestinians are feeling strangled, isolated, shunned and alone in their struggle with Israel. It isn’t enough to maintain slogans denying Israel’s existence while burying our head in the sand so as not to see that it really does exist. Not only does it exist, it is also systematically building walls around the subjugated Palestinians to keep them apart from the rest of the world; and we appear to aid its objective by building “anti-normalisation” walls which further institutionalise their isolation.
The only way that people who want to see Palestine liberated can really contribute to the cause is by helping the Palestinians not only withstand the occupation but also flourish, morally and economically, despite the occupation. Palestinian businesses must profit, Palestinian schools and universities must educate and produce new generations of well educated and forward-looking individuals, and the Palestinian labour market must find outlets for work in Arab-owned factories and construction projects.
Palestinians must be given hope for a better future. Arabs must be the ones who give them that hope but not through a jihad that massacres more Palestinians than Israelis or by staying away from the occupied lands for fear of a stamp on our passports. We must normalise our relations with the Palestinians and their institutions.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
They Feed Our Illusions (and my comments)
By Mshari Al-Zaydi
Asharq Alawsat (London)
September 9, 2009
Those who carried out the 11 September 2001 attacks, were they extremist Serbian nationalists, no it was the Israeli Mossad, no, pardon me, it was a US group of Seventh Day Adventists! Not at all, the one who carried out the terrible attacks was the US Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]!
The suggestions and imaginary illusions continue to pour in the direction of evading the real consequences of the reality, which is that those who carried out the 11 September attacks were Muslim youths who believe in a hard-line interpretation of Islam, who are led by Osama Bin Laden, and who are encouraged and were then encouraged by millions of Muslims.
The idea that the Serbs were the ones who carried out the 11 September attacks to take revenge for US interference in the Serbs' war against Bosnia and the Croats was pronounced by Hasanayn Haykal, symbol of Arab political journalists who follow the pan-Arab direction. He said it days after the explosions took place (Lebanese Al-Safir newspaper 1 October 2001).
The idea that the attacks were carried out by the Israeli Mossad (the source of all evils and mysterious events that some people do not have the stamina to investigate and scrutinize) was suggested by the Islamist writer Fahmi Huwaydi, who believed that Al-Qaeda could not carry out such an operation, but the Mossad could (Kuwaiti Al-Watan newspaper 25 September 2001).
As for the idea that the explosions were carried out by a US group called the Seventh Day Adventists, it was pronounced by the presenter of the Science and Belief program, Mustafa Mahmud (Al-Ahram 22 September 2001).
All these suggestions and scenarios indicate the extent of the control of wishful thinking over us. This is because the common factor among all these ideas is to put the responsibility on the shoulders of a party other than the Arab and Muslim party, i.e., a party that is not us. I remember that there were some who spoke of the involvement of the Colombian drug cartels in these attacks. What is important is that the involved side is someone other than us, even if this one is a blue jinn. The owners of these suggestions do not burden themselves with thinking of the events and analyzing them in order to reach the closest possible point to the truth, as the researcher Saqr Abu-Fakhr says in his book, "Religion and the Mob."
From this we can understand the enthusiastic celebrations with which our Arab media, and our semi- and even quarter-intellectuals met the delusions of the French journalist Thierry Missan that what took place on 11 September was merely a "terrifying deception" carried out by the United States itself, and hence it killed 5,000 people, and bombed the Defense Department building and the World Trade Center twin towers!
The main purpose of all these contorted ideas is to kill the questions, and to exonerate the cultural self from responsibility. If the ones who carried out these explosions were Serbs, Mossad, Seventh Day Adventists, Colombian gangs, or the CIA, it would be meaningless to question us about extremism, the culture of fanaticism and religious excess, the need to revise the concepts that establish religious violence, and all this continuous headache of questions that keep hammering on the mind of the society. The matter is easy with these conspiratorial illusions, and presenting critical questions becomes meaningless "intellectual luxury" and verbosity.
With these images, the entire issue is reduced to saying that there are conspiracies that no one knows about except those in the know, but we are a perfect nation with a healthy society, culture, and civilization (where are all these now?!). However, we are targeted and warred upon. We are the main preoccupation of the world. The world wants to oppress us, prevent us from rising, and rob our wealth.
Conspiracy is neither an illusion nor an abstract idea; it is part of the world of politics, and it has happened, and still is happening. The aim is not to deny its existence or to ridicule that it has taken place at certain periods and in specific cases, and that it will take place again, because conspiracy is a part of the practice of political wars. Many people in the world are obsessed by the conspiracy theories, and there are films and novels about this group of people, who do not see anything in front of them other than a conspiracy or a potential conspiracy.
However, in the societies that are free from injured pride, historic-role complex, and regrets of being backward in civilization, they do not allow such group of people to undertake the decision making in important and sensitive issues; in these societies such issues are studied with complete, or as close as possible to complete, objectivity in order to protect the state and the decision making from the impact of fleeting emotional feelings. Even if some hysterical people, such as the journalist Thierry Missan, were to emerge at certain times, as a fleeting fit of hysteria, they soon would fade away in the sea of the ruling rationalism.
However, our situation is the opposite of their situation. We continuously enable these people, listen to them, and rely on anything that anyone says that would tickle our sentiments, and inflame our imagination with sensational conspiracies. The defeat of 1967 was a foreign conspiracy, so were the 1956 aggression and the 1948 catastrophe. The appointment of Anwar al-Sadat as president of Egypt was a conspiracy. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was a conspiracy, and the West deliberately enticed Saddam into it. Osama Bin Laden is a conspiracy. All the religious fanaticism, and the dozens, even hundreds of suicide bombers, who flood our land with blood and torn bodies, are nothing but tools of a conspiracy that is managed from abroad (the nature and type of this abroad vary according to the prevailing circumstances and enemies).
This type of thinking reflects a deep-rooted perplexity, and a continuous fear of facing up to the naked truth. It is true that facing up to the truth is bitter and painful, but this is temporary bitterness and pain that soon will go away, and putting up with this is better and more beneficial than resorting to intellectual drugs and evasion tricks.
Does this mean self-hatred and shedding one's identity and culture? This question is meaningless, because man cannot shed his skin; if he did he would turn into an appalling freak, or perhaps he would die completely, because the skin is what protects the body, and hence the soul that uses the parts of the body.
Therefore, this question, which is presented always whenever the idea of self-criticism is put forward, is meaningless. If our problem with our prevailing way of thinking were restricted to the 11 September explosions, the situation would be easy, and we would believe the conspiracy theories, be they the Serbian scenario, the Mossad scenario, the Colombian scenario, or even the blue jinn scenario. However, our problem has not been restricted to the story of 11 September. Before and after the 11 September events we have gone through dozens of crises that have led us to this reality, which I do not think pleases any rational Muslim or Arab.
In a nutshell: The solution before we go through any talk or sidelines is that if we do not change our way of thinking we will continue to repeat these saddening distractions in an absurd and tragic way. We repeat the same words at every problem. It is said that you will not get a different result if you are using the same method!
I say these words as in a few days we will commemorate the eighth anniversary of 11 September 2001. We will remember that many of us celebrated it and its deeds, while at the same time the ideas of the conspiracy and the foreign side became widespread. I do not know how we can take pride in a deed, and at the same time we are pleased that someone tells us that there are foreign sides that did that deed, and it was not us!
Abu-al-Ala al-Maarri [famous Arab poet 973-1057 AD] was right when he said: In every generation there are falsehoods to condemn it, has any generation ever been uniquely well-guided?
Mshari Al-Zaydi is a Saudi journalist and expert on Islamic movements and Islamic fundamentalism as well as Saudi affairs. Mshari is Asharq Al-Awsat’s opinion page editor, where he also contributes a weekly column.
Mark says:
One of the strangest (or saddest) justifications by a number of Arab "intellectuals" for believing that the 9/11 attacks had to have been an Israeli Mossad or Mossad-CIA conspiracy was "the fact" that they were obviously the result of excellent discipline and coordination and especially long-term planning. These so-called intellectuals claimed that such features were the obvious hallmarks of the Mossad and/or CIA and could not possibly have been carried out by Arabs who, these "intellectuals" asserted, are incapable of long-term planning, discipline, and coordination.
Upon reading these particular conspiracy mongers, I thought at the time — and until now — that if I or any other Western writer had published such drivel we would have been denounced as racists and worse — perhaps even as Orientalists. But these Arab "intellectuals" — who had spent most of their careers denouncing the sins and crimes of Western colonialism and imperialism and Western neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism and, of course, Zionism — obviously could not perceive the ludicrous ironies that their fevered imaginations had produced.
I must point out that other Arab intellectuals did ridicule and rebuke these particular conspiracy mongers (although some of them still believed that the Mossad and/or CIA was responsible, although not because Arabs were "incapable" of doing such a thing — but that's another story). However, as Mshari Al-Zaydi makes plain in his article above, the spirit is still very much alive and flourishing — including the belief in some quarters that Arabs couldn't have pulled off 9/11 because Arabs are not capable of long-term planning, discipline, and coordination.
Asharq Alawsat (London)
September 9, 2009
Those who carried out the 11 September 2001 attacks, were they extremist Serbian nationalists, no it was the Israeli Mossad, no, pardon me, it was a US group of Seventh Day Adventists! Not at all, the one who carried out the terrible attacks was the US Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]!
The suggestions and imaginary illusions continue to pour in the direction of evading the real consequences of the reality, which is that those who carried out the 11 September attacks were Muslim youths who believe in a hard-line interpretation of Islam, who are led by Osama Bin Laden, and who are encouraged and were then encouraged by millions of Muslims.
The idea that the Serbs were the ones who carried out the 11 September attacks to take revenge for US interference in the Serbs' war against Bosnia and the Croats was pronounced by Hasanayn Haykal, symbol of Arab political journalists who follow the pan-Arab direction. He said it days after the explosions took place (Lebanese Al-Safir newspaper 1 October 2001).
The idea that the attacks were carried out by the Israeli Mossad (the source of all evils and mysterious events that some people do not have the stamina to investigate and scrutinize) was suggested by the Islamist writer Fahmi Huwaydi, who believed that Al-Qaeda could not carry out such an operation, but the Mossad could (Kuwaiti Al-Watan newspaper 25 September 2001).
As for the idea that the explosions were carried out by a US group called the Seventh Day Adventists, it was pronounced by the presenter of the Science and Belief program, Mustafa Mahmud (Al-Ahram 22 September 2001).
All these suggestions and scenarios indicate the extent of the control of wishful thinking over us. This is because the common factor among all these ideas is to put the responsibility on the shoulders of a party other than the Arab and Muslim party, i.e., a party that is not us. I remember that there were some who spoke of the involvement of the Colombian drug cartels in these attacks. What is important is that the involved side is someone other than us, even if this one is a blue jinn. The owners of these suggestions do not burden themselves with thinking of the events and analyzing them in order to reach the closest possible point to the truth, as the researcher Saqr Abu-Fakhr says in his book, "Religion and the Mob."
From this we can understand the enthusiastic celebrations with which our Arab media, and our semi- and even quarter-intellectuals met the delusions of the French journalist Thierry Missan that what took place on 11 September was merely a "terrifying deception" carried out by the United States itself, and hence it killed 5,000 people, and bombed the Defense Department building and the World Trade Center twin towers!
The main purpose of all these contorted ideas is to kill the questions, and to exonerate the cultural self from responsibility. If the ones who carried out these explosions were Serbs, Mossad, Seventh Day Adventists, Colombian gangs, or the CIA, it would be meaningless to question us about extremism, the culture of fanaticism and religious excess, the need to revise the concepts that establish religious violence, and all this continuous headache of questions that keep hammering on the mind of the society. The matter is easy with these conspiratorial illusions, and presenting critical questions becomes meaningless "intellectual luxury" and verbosity.
With these images, the entire issue is reduced to saying that there are conspiracies that no one knows about except those in the know, but we are a perfect nation with a healthy society, culture, and civilization (where are all these now?!). However, we are targeted and warred upon. We are the main preoccupation of the world. The world wants to oppress us, prevent us from rising, and rob our wealth.
Conspiracy is neither an illusion nor an abstract idea; it is part of the world of politics, and it has happened, and still is happening. The aim is not to deny its existence or to ridicule that it has taken place at certain periods and in specific cases, and that it will take place again, because conspiracy is a part of the practice of political wars. Many people in the world are obsessed by the conspiracy theories, and there are films and novels about this group of people, who do not see anything in front of them other than a conspiracy or a potential conspiracy.
However, in the societies that are free from injured pride, historic-role complex, and regrets of being backward in civilization, they do not allow such group of people to undertake the decision making in important and sensitive issues; in these societies such issues are studied with complete, or as close as possible to complete, objectivity in order to protect the state and the decision making from the impact of fleeting emotional feelings. Even if some hysterical people, such as the journalist Thierry Missan, were to emerge at certain times, as a fleeting fit of hysteria, they soon would fade away in the sea of the ruling rationalism.
However, our situation is the opposite of their situation. We continuously enable these people, listen to them, and rely on anything that anyone says that would tickle our sentiments, and inflame our imagination with sensational conspiracies. The defeat of 1967 was a foreign conspiracy, so were the 1956 aggression and the 1948 catastrophe. The appointment of Anwar al-Sadat as president of Egypt was a conspiracy. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was a conspiracy, and the West deliberately enticed Saddam into it. Osama Bin Laden is a conspiracy. All the religious fanaticism, and the dozens, even hundreds of suicide bombers, who flood our land with blood and torn bodies, are nothing but tools of a conspiracy that is managed from abroad (the nature and type of this abroad vary according to the prevailing circumstances and enemies).
This type of thinking reflects a deep-rooted perplexity, and a continuous fear of facing up to the naked truth. It is true that facing up to the truth is bitter and painful, but this is temporary bitterness and pain that soon will go away, and putting up with this is better and more beneficial than resorting to intellectual drugs and evasion tricks.
Does this mean self-hatred and shedding one's identity and culture? This question is meaningless, because man cannot shed his skin; if he did he would turn into an appalling freak, or perhaps he would die completely, because the skin is what protects the body, and hence the soul that uses the parts of the body.
Therefore, this question, which is presented always whenever the idea of self-criticism is put forward, is meaningless. If our problem with our prevailing way of thinking were restricted to the 11 September explosions, the situation would be easy, and we would believe the conspiracy theories, be they the Serbian scenario, the Mossad scenario, the Colombian scenario, or even the blue jinn scenario. However, our problem has not been restricted to the story of 11 September. Before and after the 11 September events we have gone through dozens of crises that have led us to this reality, which I do not think pleases any rational Muslim or Arab.
In a nutshell: The solution before we go through any talk or sidelines is that if we do not change our way of thinking we will continue to repeat these saddening distractions in an absurd and tragic way. We repeat the same words at every problem. It is said that you will not get a different result if you are using the same method!
I say these words as in a few days we will commemorate the eighth anniversary of 11 September 2001. We will remember that many of us celebrated it and its deeds, while at the same time the ideas of the conspiracy and the foreign side became widespread. I do not know how we can take pride in a deed, and at the same time we are pleased that someone tells us that there are foreign sides that did that deed, and it was not us!
Abu-al-Ala al-Maarri [famous Arab poet 973-1057 AD] was right when he said: In every generation there are falsehoods to condemn it, has any generation ever been uniquely well-guided?
Mshari Al-Zaydi is a Saudi journalist and expert on Islamic movements and Islamic fundamentalism as well as Saudi affairs. Mshari is Asharq Al-Awsat’s opinion page editor, where he also contributes a weekly column.
Mark says:
One of the strangest (or saddest) justifications by a number of Arab "intellectuals" for believing that the 9/11 attacks had to have been an Israeli Mossad or Mossad-CIA conspiracy was "the fact" that they were obviously the result of excellent discipline and coordination and especially long-term planning. These so-called intellectuals claimed that such features were the obvious hallmarks of the Mossad and/or CIA and could not possibly have been carried out by Arabs who, these "intellectuals" asserted, are incapable of long-term planning, discipline, and coordination.
Upon reading these particular conspiracy mongers, I thought at the time — and until now — that if I or any other Western writer had published such drivel we would have been denounced as racists and worse — perhaps even as Orientalists. But these Arab "intellectuals" — who had spent most of their careers denouncing the sins and crimes of Western colonialism and imperialism and Western neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism and, of course, Zionism — obviously could not perceive the ludicrous ironies that their fevered imaginations had produced.
I must point out that other Arab intellectuals did ridicule and rebuke these particular conspiracy mongers (although some of them still believed that the Mossad and/or CIA was responsible, although not because Arabs were "incapable" of doing such a thing — but that's another story). However, as Mshari Al-Zaydi makes plain in his article above, the spirit is still very much alive and flourishing — including the belief in some quarters that Arabs couldn't have pulled off 9/11 because Arabs are not capable of long-term planning, discipline, and coordination.
The West Bank's Deceptive Growth
By Zahi Khouri
The New York Times
September 9, 2009
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long tried to substitute the slogan of “economic peace” for genuine progress with the Palestinians on the political front.
Yet the International Monetary Fund’s projected growth of 7 percent in the West Bank for 2009 is largely the result of Palestinian reforms undertaken in spite of the obstacles Israel continues to place in the way of Palestinian development.
Too many in the West remain unaware of the impediments to economic development — not to mention political freedom — we Palestinians continue to face.
Some Israeli checkpoints have been dismantled, but any Palestinian businessman will tell you that with over 600 checkpoints and roadblocks still scattered across the West Bank, we remain in a tenuous economic position.
Few domestic or foreign investors are willing to invest in the Palestinian economy, and many Palestinian businessmen holding passports of friendly countries, even the United States, are being denied passage through Israel.
The economy of the West Bank has deteriorated over the past decade as a result of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement, which severely hamper trade and labor mobility.
These restrictions, combined with Israel’s fragmentation of the West Bank, remain the greatest impediment to economic development in Palestine. This includes Israel’s forced isolation of occupied East Jerusalem, long the economic heart of Palestine, from the rest of the West Bank.
According to a June 2009 World Bank report, real G.D.P. in the occupied Palestinian territory has declined by a “cumulative 34 percent in real per capita terms” since September 2000. Given this, even the most minimal Israeli gestures cannot help but bring improvement.
The I.M.F.’s projected growth, however, will be a one-off (as was growth in 2006) if Israel fails to improve the prospects for Palestinian trade and development.
As Oussama Kanaan, the I.M.F. chief of mission in the West Bank and Gaza, stated, “If the relaxation of Israeli restrictions does not continue in the remainder of the year, real G.D.P. per capita would decline further in 2009, along the same trend started in 2006.”
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad made a similar point when he asserted, “The Israeli restrictions still pose obstacles to the improvement of the economy.” In other words, 7 percent growth is no sure thing.
In any case, Palestinian economic growth is not a substitute for serious and meaningful negotiations aimed at ending Israel’s occupation and establishing an independent, viable and sovereign Palestinian state.
I am all for economic improvement, but not as a substitute for peace — nor its manipulation by Mr. Netanyahu to manage and normalize the occupation while trying to sell Israel’s benevolence to the rest of the globe. Self-determination and statehood alone hold the keys to unlocking Palestine’s economic potential.
I monitor Mr. Netanyahu’s economic and political intentions closely because in 1995 I left a comfortable life on Park Avenue in Manhattan to become the founder and chief executive of the Palestinian National Beverage Co.
Initially, the undertaking thrived. We continue to employ over 300 Palestinians, but we have struggled in recent years as a consequence of Israeli restrictions. Mr. Netanyahu’s economic and political dictums determine whether we grow or contract. He wields this immense power over us, although Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had no role in his election.
The foundation upon which our economy rests is dangerously rotten. Israeli spreading settlements, checkpoints and roadblocks that fragment the occupied Palestinian territory; Israel’s illegal Wall and its permit system that severely restrict where Palestinians can live and work; and Israel’s continuing siege of Gaza all not only threaten our nascent economic recovery, but threaten the very possibility of a two-state solution.
The alternatives to a two-state solution are either an apartheid state, which is unacceptable to Palestinians, or one binational state, which Israeli Jews reject.
Mr. Netanyahu is selling us a bill of goods with the claim he can manage the situation with economic improvement. He is wrong. Without a political outcome that secures Palestinian territorial rights, including East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and a just outcome for refugees, more conflict lies ahead.
President Obama recognizes this. President Mahmoud Abbas recognizes this. Yet Mr. Netanyahu somehow thinks he can charm Palestinians, who are daily reminded of the occupation under which they suffer, with a 7-percent growth bubble.
If President Obama wants to be a real friend to Israelis and Palestinians, he must insist that Israel stop settling Palestinian land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and abide by international law.
A settlement freeze is a crucial first step to salvaging the two-state solution, as well as Israel’s credentials as a genuine partner for peace. Seven-percent growth and an illusionary calm are no substitute for this.
Zahi Khouri is the chief executive of the Palestinian National Beverage Co.
The New York Times
September 9, 2009
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long tried to substitute the slogan of “economic peace” for genuine progress with the Palestinians on the political front.
Yet the International Monetary Fund’s projected growth of 7 percent in the West Bank for 2009 is largely the result of Palestinian reforms undertaken in spite of the obstacles Israel continues to place in the way of Palestinian development.
Too many in the West remain unaware of the impediments to economic development — not to mention political freedom — we Palestinians continue to face.
Some Israeli checkpoints have been dismantled, but any Palestinian businessman will tell you that with over 600 checkpoints and roadblocks still scattered across the West Bank, we remain in a tenuous economic position.
Few domestic or foreign investors are willing to invest in the Palestinian economy, and many Palestinian businessmen holding passports of friendly countries, even the United States, are being denied passage through Israel.
The economy of the West Bank has deteriorated over the past decade as a result of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement, which severely hamper trade and labor mobility.
These restrictions, combined with Israel’s fragmentation of the West Bank, remain the greatest impediment to economic development in Palestine. This includes Israel’s forced isolation of occupied East Jerusalem, long the economic heart of Palestine, from the rest of the West Bank.
According to a June 2009 World Bank report, real G.D.P. in the occupied Palestinian territory has declined by a “cumulative 34 percent in real per capita terms” since September 2000. Given this, even the most minimal Israeli gestures cannot help but bring improvement.
The I.M.F.’s projected growth, however, will be a one-off (as was growth in 2006) if Israel fails to improve the prospects for Palestinian trade and development.
As Oussama Kanaan, the I.M.F. chief of mission in the West Bank and Gaza, stated, “If the relaxation of Israeli restrictions does not continue in the remainder of the year, real G.D.P. per capita would decline further in 2009, along the same trend started in 2006.”
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad made a similar point when he asserted, “The Israeli restrictions still pose obstacles to the improvement of the economy.” In other words, 7 percent growth is no sure thing.
In any case, Palestinian economic growth is not a substitute for serious and meaningful negotiations aimed at ending Israel’s occupation and establishing an independent, viable and sovereign Palestinian state.
I am all for economic improvement, but not as a substitute for peace — nor its manipulation by Mr. Netanyahu to manage and normalize the occupation while trying to sell Israel’s benevolence to the rest of the globe. Self-determination and statehood alone hold the keys to unlocking Palestine’s economic potential.
I monitor Mr. Netanyahu’s economic and political intentions closely because in 1995 I left a comfortable life on Park Avenue in Manhattan to become the founder and chief executive of the Palestinian National Beverage Co.
Initially, the undertaking thrived. We continue to employ over 300 Palestinians, but we have struggled in recent years as a consequence of Israeli restrictions. Mr. Netanyahu’s economic and political dictums determine whether we grow or contract. He wields this immense power over us, although Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had no role in his election.
The foundation upon which our economy rests is dangerously rotten. Israeli spreading settlements, checkpoints and roadblocks that fragment the occupied Palestinian territory; Israel’s illegal Wall and its permit system that severely restrict where Palestinians can live and work; and Israel’s continuing siege of Gaza all not only threaten our nascent economic recovery, but threaten the very possibility of a two-state solution.
The alternatives to a two-state solution are either an apartheid state, which is unacceptable to Palestinians, or one binational state, which Israeli Jews reject.
Mr. Netanyahu is selling us a bill of goods with the claim he can manage the situation with economic improvement. He is wrong. Without a political outcome that secures Palestinian territorial rights, including East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and a just outcome for refugees, more conflict lies ahead.
President Obama recognizes this. President Mahmoud Abbas recognizes this. Yet Mr. Netanyahu somehow thinks he can charm Palestinians, who are daily reminded of the occupation under which they suffer, with a 7-percent growth bubble.
If President Obama wants to be a real friend to Israelis and Palestinians, he must insist that Israel stop settling Palestinian land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and abide by international law.
A settlement freeze is a crucial first step to salvaging the two-state solution, as well as Israel’s credentials as a genuine partner for peace. Seven-percent growth and an illusionary calm are no substitute for this.
Zahi Khouri is the chief executive of the Palestinian National Beverage Co.
What Can We Learn About Mohamed Atta From His Work as a Student of Urban Planning?: Part I (and my comments)
Mark says:
This is the first in a series of articles by Daniel Brook on the connections between urban planning and architecture and the leader of the 9/11 attacks, Muhammad Atta, who did his master's thesis in urban planning at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany. There are several themes that should hopefully catch your notice in these articles (I will post the succeeding articles in the following days). For example, a number of terms (e.g., Oriental) are used but not always in the "expected" ways. The present is not always just a continuation of the past and many things that we assume always were may actually be relatively recent developments. And what we sometimes assume to be "Islamic" or "Arab" (a reflection of the view that the present is just a continuation of the past) is not necessarily "Islamic" or "Arab" but had their origins elsewhere.
Finally, you will no longer see this kind of reporting when the "mainstream media" goes belly up.
The Architect of 9/11
In Aleppo, Syria, Mohamed Atta thought he could build the ideal Islamic city.
By Daniel Brook
Slate.com
September 8, 2009
A month after 9/11, Fouad Ajami wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "I almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian [at] the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center." While the Middle East scholar had never met the lead hijacker, Ajami knew his type: the young Arab male living abroad, tantalized by yet alienated from Western modernity, who retreats into fundamentalist piety.
Eight years after 9/11, we still almost know Mohamed Atta. We can almost see him, a gaunt and spectral figure making his way through Hamburg's red-light district en route to his radical storefront Al-Quds Mosque. We still vividly recall his ominous visa photograph. But the man in that photograph remains a cipher, his eyes vacant. How did those eyes see the world?
We'll never know for sure, but part of the answer may lie in a document he left behind, one that has strangely gone largely unexamined: his master's thesis in urban planning. While the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian street toughs tapped for their brawn, Atta was chosen for his brains. Trained as an architect in his native Egypt, he went on to pursue a master's degree in city planning at the Hamburg University of Technology, in Germany.
In the climate after 9/11, when attempts to understand the terrorists were often seen as apologies for them, the thesis Atta wrote was not given close scrutiny. Newsweek, among other outlets, reported that the thesis lashed out at the imposition of modernist high-rise buildings on Arab cities, but only its chilling dedication — "My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death belong to Allah, Lord of the worlds" — got wide coverage. When the British Prospect magazine sent a reporter to Hamburg a few months after Sept. 11, she dismissed out of hand the idea that Atta's academic work was worth considering. After securing an interview with Atta's thesis adviser, professor Dittmar Machule, the reporter concluded it was "ludicrous that Atta's ideas on how to preserve an old quarter of Aleppo are regarded as a window into his terrorist's mind." Machule bolstered this impression, telling the Associated Press that the thesis had "no anti-Americanism, no anti-Zionism, no anti-Christianity, just good thinking."
Perhaps the subject — the architecture of a little-known Syrian city — sounded too esoteric to be relevant. But it always struck me as a missed opportunity to understand Atta — and, perhaps, to understand what led him to commit his hideous crime. So I went to Hamburg to see what I could learn about the thesis. I then retraced Atta's academic research across three continents, interviewing those who knew him as an urban-planning student and trying to see the places I visited through Atta's eyes — those of a keen architectural observer wearing ideological blinders.
I met with professor Machule at his office in Hamburg, where he keeps the only known copy of Atta's thesis under lock and key. While Machule acknowledges that publishing the document would be in the public interest, he worries Atta's father, a retired EgyptAir attorney who maintains his son's innocence, would sue if the document were published without family consent. But Machule was willing to walk through the thesis with me. I sat in the spot where Atta gave his thesis defense in 1999, and together we made our way through the German document section by section. Machule translated portions of it and responded to my questions. The thesis was also heavy on visuals — photographs, maps, and sketches of proposed redevelopments.
The subject of the thesis is a section of Aleppo, Syria's second city. Atta describes decades of meddling by Western urban planners, who rammed highways through the neighborhood's historic urban fabric and replaced many of its once ubiquitous courtyard houses with modernist high-rises. Atta calls for rebuilding the area along traditional lines, all tiny shops and odd-angled cul-de-sacs. The highways and high-rises are to be removed — in the meticulous color-coded maps, they are all slated for demolition. Traditional courtyard homes and market stalls are to be rebuilt.
For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project to restore the Islamic culture of the neighborhood, a culture he sees as threatened by the West. "The traditional structures of the society in all areas should be re-erected," Atta writes in the thesis, using architectural metaphors to describe his reactionary cultural project. In Atta's Aleppo, women wouldn't leave the house, and policies would be carefully crafted so as not to "engender emancipatory thoughts of any kind," which he sees as "out of place in Islamic society."
The subtitle of the thesis is Neighborhood Development in an Islamic-Oriental City, and the use of that anachronistic term — Islamic-Oriental city — is telling. The term denotes a concept rooted in 19th-century European Orientalism, according to which Islamic civilization and Western civilization are entirely distinct and opposite: The dynamic, rational West gallops toward the future while the backward East remains cut off from foreign influence, exclusively defined by Islam, and frozen in time. In his academic work, Atta takes the Orientalist conceit of two distinct civilizations, one superior, the other inferior, and simply flips the chauvinism from pro-Western to pro-Muslim.
Today, the "Islamic-Oriental city" is a teetering intellectual edifice that survives only on the right-wing fringes of academic Middle East studies, in the imagination of tourists seeking to experience the "authentic" Thousand and One Nights Arabia, and, as Atta's work makes clear, in the minds of Islamist radicals. Ironically, there could hardly be better evidence for the fallaciousness of the "Islamic-Oriental city" concept than the urban history of Aleppo and specifically of its Bab al-Nasr neighborhood, the old city quarter that Atta describes — and egregiously misinterprets — in his thesis.
Professor Machule told me he found Atta's reactionary plans for the neighborhood impractical but not objectionable. "He made a proposal for a design which seems to be from the 17th century," Machule said. "I would say this is not realistic, these are dreams. But why should young people not have dreams?" Atta's ideas about the role of women conflicted with Machule's sensibilities, but the professor said he saw the benefit of training a talented Egyptian who could bring Western urban planning techniques — if not Western architectural styles — back to the Arab world. When Atta refused to shake the hand of the lone woman on his thesis defense committee, Machule explained to her that he meant no offense by it, that this was simply his strict Muslim practice. Atta received high marks.
Degree in hand, Atta left Germany. A few months later, over a Ramadan feast in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden informed him that he would be a martyr. Atta did not choose the World Trade Center as a target; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mechanical engineer now commonly called "the architect of 9/11," did that, likely because his nephew Ramsi Youssef had tried and failed to level the buildings in 1993. But when Atta was told he would lead a mission to destroy America's tallest and most famous modernist high-rise complex — the apotheosis of the building type he dreamed of razing in Aleppo — he may have felt the hand of divine providence at work.
Daniel Brook is the author of The Trap: Selling Out To Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America and has written on architecture for Harper's and Metropolis, among other publications. He is at work on a book about the architecture of Westernization. Travel for this series was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
This is the first in a series of articles by Daniel Brook on the connections between urban planning and architecture and the leader of the 9/11 attacks, Muhammad Atta, who did his master's thesis in urban planning at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany. There are several themes that should hopefully catch your notice in these articles (I will post the succeeding articles in the following days). For example, a number of terms (e.g., Oriental) are used but not always in the "expected" ways. The present is not always just a continuation of the past and many things that we assume always were may actually be relatively recent developments. And what we sometimes assume to be "Islamic" or "Arab" (a reflection of the view that the present is just a continuation of the past) is not necessarily "Islamic" or "Arab" but had their origins elsewhere.
Finally, you will no longer see this kind of reporting when the "mainstream media" goes belly up.
The Architect of 9/11
In Aleppo, Syria, Mohamed Atta thought he could build the ideal Islamic city.
By Daniel Brook
Slate.com
September 8, 2009
A month after 9/11, Fouad Ajami wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "I almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian [at] the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center." While the Middle East scholar had never met the lead hijacker, Ajami knew his type: the young Arab male living abroad, tantalized by yet alienated from Western modernity, who retreats into fundamentalist piety.
Eight years after 9/11, we still almost know Mohamed Atta. We can almost see him, a gaunt and spectral figure making his way through Hamburg's red-light district en route to his radical storefront Al-Quds Mosque. We still vividly recall his ominous visa photograph. But the man in that photograph remains a cipher, his eyes vacant. How did those eyes see the world?
We'll never know for sure, but part of the answer may lie in a document he left behind, one that has strangely gone largely unexamined: his master's thesis in urban planning. While the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian street toughs tapped for their brawn, Atta was chosen for his brains. Trained as an architect in his native Egypt, he went on to pursue a master's degree in city planning at the Hamburg University of Technology, in Germany.
In the climate after 9/11, when attempts to understand the terrorists were often seen as apologies for them, the thesis Atta wrote was not given close scrutiny. Newsweek, among other outlets, reported that the thesis lashed out at the imposition of modernist high-rise buildings on Arab cities, but only its chilling dedication — "My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death belong to Allah, Lord of the worlds" — got wide coverage. When the British Prospect magazine sent a reporter to Hamburg a few months after Sept. 11, she dismissed out of hand the idea that Atta's academic work was worth considering. After securing an interview with Atta's thesis adviser, professor Dittmar Machule, the reporter concluded it was "ludicrous that Atta's ideas on how to preserve an old quarter of Aleppo are regarded as a window into his terrorist's mind." Machule bolstered this impression, telling the Associated Press that the thesis had "no anti-Americanism, no anti-Zionism, no anti-Christianity, just good thinking."
Perhaps the subject — the architecture of a little-known Syrian city — sounded too esoteric to be relevant. But it always struck me as a missed opportunity to understand Atta — and, perhaps, to understand what led him to commit his hideous crime. So I went to Hamburg to see what I could learn about the thesis. I then retraced Atta's academic research across three continents, interviewing those who knew him as an urban-planning student and trying to see the places I visited through Atta's eyes — those of a keen architectural observer wearing ideological blinders.
I met with professor Machule at his office in Hamburg, where he keeps the only known copy of Atta's thesis under lock and key. While Machule acknowledges that publishing the document would be in the public interest, he worries Atta's father, a retired EgyptAir attorney who maintains his son's innocence, would sue if the document were published without family consent. But Machule was willing to walk through the thesis with me. I sat in the spot where Atta gave his thesis defense in 1999, and together we made our way through the German document section by section. Machule translated portions of it and responded to my questions. The thesis was also heavy on visuals — photographs, maps, and sketches of proposed redevelopments.
The subject of the thesis is a section of Aleppo, Syria's second city. Atta describes decades of meddling by Western urban planners, who rammed highways through the neighborhood's historic urban fabric and replaced many of its once ubiquitous courtyard houses with modernist high-rises. Atta calls for rebuilding the area along traditional lines, all tiny shops and odd-angled cul-de-sacs. The highways and high-rises are to be removed — in the meticulous color-coded maps, they are all slated for demolition. Traditional courtyard homes and market stalls are to be rebuilt.
For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project to restore the Islamic culture of the neighborhood, a culture he sees as threatened by the West. "The traditional structures of the society in all areas should be re-erected," Atta writes in the thesis, using architectural metaphors to describe his reactionary cultural project. In Atta's Aleppo, women wouldn't leave the house, and policies would be carefully crafted so as not to "engender emancipatory thoughts of any kind," which he sees as "out of place in Islamic society."
The subtitle of the thesis is Neighborhood Development in an Islamic-Oriental City, and the use of that anachronistic term — Islamic-Oriental city — is telling. The term denotes a concept rooted in 19th-century European Orientalism, according to which Islamic civilization and Western civilization are entirely distinct and opposite: The dynamic, rational West gallops toward the future while the backward East remains cut off from foreign influence, exclusively defined by Islam, and frozen in time. In his academic work, Atta takes the Orientalist conceit of two distinct civilizations, one superior, the other inferior, and simply flips the chauvinism from pro-Western to pro-Muslim.
Today, the "Islamic-Oriental city" is a teetering intellectual edifice that survives only on the right-wing fringes of academic Middle East studies, in the imagination of tourists seeking to experience the "authentic" Thousand and One Nights Arabia, and, as Atta's work makes clear, in the minds of Islamist radicals. Ironically, there could hardly be better evidence for the fallaciousness of the "Islamic-Oriental city" concept than the urban history of Aleppo and specifically of its Bab al-Nasr neighborhood, the old city quarter that Atta describes — and egregiously misinterprets — in his thesis.
Professor Machule told me he found Atta's reactionary plans for the neighborhood impractical but not objectionable. "He made a proposal for a design which seems to be from the 17th century," Machule said. "I would say this is not realistic, these are dreams. But why should young people not have dreams?" Atta's ideas about the role of women conflicted with Machule's sensibilities, but the professor said he saw the benefit of training a talented Egyptian who could bring Western urban planning techniques — if not Western architectural styles — back to the Arab world. When Atta refused to shake the hand of the lone woman on his thesis defense committee, Machule explained to her that he meant no offense by it, that this was simply his strict Muslim practice. Atta received high marks.
Degree in hand, Atta left Germany. A few months later, over a Ramadan feast in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden informed him that he would be a martyr. Atta did not choose the World Trade Center as a target; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mechanical engineer now commonly called "the architect of 9/11," did that, likely because his nephew Ramsi Youssef had tried and failed to level the buildings in 1993. But when Atta was told he would lead a mission to destroy America's tallest and most famous modernist high-rise complex — the apotheosis of the building type he dreamed of razing in Aleppo — he may have felt the hand of divine providence at work.
Daniel Brook is the author of The Trap: Selling Out To Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America and has written on architecture for Harper's and Metropolis, among other publications. He is at work on a book about the architecture of Westernization. Travel for this series was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Monday, September 7, 2009
How come we don't have more colorful leaders?
By Ray Hanania
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
September 7, 2009
In spite of all the news Palestinians and Israelis produce each day, we really are pretty boring people. I mean, we have nothing on the Japanese.
The big news in Japan last week is that Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of incoming Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, says she traveled to Venus in the 1970s in a UFO. She's talking about the planet, not a 'happy place' or the local beauty spa.
Mrs. Hatoyama detailed the unusual trip in her book called Most Bizarre Things I've Encountered.
I have racked my brain to think of anything that even comes close to that in the many stories about Palestinians and Israelis.
There was a rumor once that during the peace process (remember that?), Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin wagered at the roulette table at the Jericho casino. Arafat offered Rabin double or nothing on "returning" the West Bank.
IN TRUTH, most of the stories about Palestinians and Israelis are about tragedies, missed opportunities, name-calling, the blame game and, sadly, continued violence.
I did read an Israeli press release reporting that a Palestinian prisoner in one of the country's many prisons had been killed by a "nonlethal weapon." I could only imagine what might have happened had the weapon been lethal.
On another occasion, Hamas leaders tried to explain that Martyr Mouse was merely an orphaned cartoon character whose family had been blown up by Israeli cartoon characters during a siege at a cartoon checkpoint near a cartoon settlement. And the mouse suffered from a slight lisp that distorted everything it said.
When Martyr Mouse urged kiddies to "do their best to kill the Jews," all it was trying to tell young Palestinians who watch Hamas television was to "do their best to fill the news." It must work, because Hamas does "fill the news."
Still, it would be kind of cool if we could get Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to set aside all the heavy problems and talk about some of his own unusual experiences.
I can see Netanyahu, cold and calculating as only a prime minister could be, playing a wildly romantic character in a Hollywood movie. For all his hard-lining, some Palestinian women have compared him to the late Paul Newman.
The same Palestinian women have told me they think Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reminds then of Mahatma Gandhi, the fearless and nonviolent leader of India. Of course, there isn't any salt to fight over in Palestine like there is in India. And while Gandhi used to gum his own leather into soft shirts and wraps, Abbas leaves all the cooking to the women.
Still, neither has ever taken a trip to another planet. Nor have they been kidnapped by aliens.
Although come to think of it, I wonder how Palestinians and Israelis might react if a UFO landed atop the wall (fence, barricade, whatever) and declared that the Holy Land belonged to them and they wanted it back.
DO YOU think that might be enough to push Palestinians and Israelis to join together against someone besides each other? Everyone says that if Palestinians and Israelis could just resolve their conflict, they could become the most powerful combined force in the Middle East.
Sadly, Palestinians and Israelis are not as lucky. All we have is run-of-the-mill conflict. Anger. Hatred. Violence.
Nothing unusual, strange or hard to believe, like visiting Venus in a spaceship.
We can only hope, though.
The writer is a columnist, stand-up comedian and Chicago radio talk show host. You can hear his program every afternoon at 16:00pm Israel time on-line at www.RadioChicagoland.com.
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
September 7, 2009
In spite of all the news Palestinians and Israelis produce each day, we really are pretty boring people. I mean, we have nothing on the Japanese.
The big news in Japan last week is that Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of incoming Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, says she traveled to Venus in the 1970s in a UFO. She's talking about the planet, not a 'happy place' or the local beauty spa.
Mrs. Hatoyama detailed the unusual trip in her book called Most Bizarre Things I've Encountered.
I have racked my brain to think of anything that even comes close to that in the many stories about Palestinians and Israelis.
There was a rumor once that during the peace process (remember that?), Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin wagered at the roulette table at the Jericho casino. Arafat offered Rabin double or nothing on "returning" the West Bank.
IN TRUTH, most of the stories about Palestinians and Israelis are about tragedies, missed opportunities, name-calling, the blame game and, sadly, continued violence.
I did read an Israeli press release reporting that a Palestinian prisoner in one of the country's many prisons had been killed by a "nonlethal weapon." I could only imagine what might have happened had the weapon been lethal.
On another occasion, Hamas leaders tried to explain that Martyr Mouse was merely an orphaned cartoon character whose family had been blown up by Israeli cartoon characters during a siege at a cartoon checkpoint near a cartoon settlement. And the mouse suffered from a slight lisp that distorted everything it said.
When Martyr Mouse urged kiddies to "do their best to kill the Jews," all it was trying to tell young Palestinians who watch Hamas television was to "do their best to fill the news." It must work, because Hamas does "fill the news."
Still, it would be kind of cool if we could get Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to set aside all the heavy problems and talk about some of his own unusual experiences.
I can see Netanyahu, cold and calculating as only a prime minister could be, playing a wildly romantic character in a Hollywood movie. For all his hard-lining, some Palestinian women have compared him to the late Paul Newman.
The same Palestinian women have told me they think Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reminds then of Mahatma Gandhi, the fearless and nonviolent leader of India. Of course, there isn't any salt to fight over in Palestine like there is in India. And while Gandhi used to gum his own leather into soft shirts and wraps, Abbas leaves all the cooking to the women.
Still, neither has ever taken a trip to another planet. Nor have they been kidnapped by aliens.
Although come to think of it, I wonder how Palestinians and Israelis might react if a UFO landed atop the wall (fence, barricade, whatever) and declared that the Holy Land belonged to them and they wanted it back.
DO YOU think that might be enough to push Palestinians and Israelis to join together against someone besides each other? Everyone says that if Palestinians and Israelis could just resolve their conflict, they could become the most powerful combined force in the Middle East.
Sadly, Palestinians and Israelis are not as lucky. All we have is run-of-the-mill conflict. Anger. Hatred. Violence.
Nothing unusual, strange or hard to believe, like visiting Venus in a spaceship.
We can only hope, though.
The writer is a columnist, stand-up comedian and Chicago radio talk show host. You can hear his program every afternoon at 16:00pm Israel time on-line at www.RadioChicagoland.com.
The hollowness of the one-state agenda
By Hussein Ibish
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
September 8, 2009
On college campuses in the United States and the United Kingdom, and increasingly among grassroots activists in the West generally, the cause of ending the Israeli occupation and securing independence for a Palestinian state is being abandoned in favor of a much more far-reaching goal of replacing Israel with a single, democratic state for all Israelis and Palestinians, including all of the refugees. Until now, this rhetoric has been largely unchallenged from a pro-Palestinian perspective, which has probably been a significant factor in its appeal.
My new book, “What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda?”, traces the development of this agenda and interrogates its assumptions and claims.
The outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, which inflicted profound suffering and created deep ill-will on both the sides of the Palestinian-Israeli divide, bolstered stridently nationalist perspectives among Israelis and Palestinians. For many, it prompted a negative re-evaluation of what kind of peace was possible and desirable.
In Israel, this was manifested in the collapse of the “peace camp,” a radical shift to the political right and the election of Ariel Sharon, who became prime minister. Among the Palestinians, Islamists, especially Hamas, gained significant ground. In the Palestinian diaspora, where support for Hamas is limited and, especially in the United States, politically untenable and even legally risky, this same disillusionment and radicalization was largely expressed through the rise of the one-state agenda.
More generally, the one-state agenda reflects the conclusion that Israel will never agree to seriously end the occupation and allow for the creation of a fully sovereign, viable Palestinian state, therefore that negotiations and diplomacy are pointless. At the end of Part One of my book I pose a series of pointed questions that are not usually addressed to, or have been insufficiently answered by, one-state advocates, and that in many cases their sympathizers have not adequately considered. Here are the six of them:
First, if Israel will not agree to end the occupation, what makes anyone think that it will possibly agree to dissolve itself? If Israel cannot be compelled or convinced to surrender 22 percent of the territory it holds, how can it be compelled or convinced to surrender or share 100 percent of it?
Second, what, as a practical matter, does this vision of a single, democratic state offer to Jewish Israelis?
Third, what efforts have Palestinian and pro-Palestinian one-state advocates made in reaching out to mainstream Jews and Israelis and to incorporating their national narrative into this vision?
Fourth, how do one-state advocates propose to supersede or transcend Palestinian national identity and ambitions? Why is it that no significant Palestinian political party or faction has adopted the one-state goal?
Fifth, how, apart from empty slogans about largely nonexistent and highly implausible boycotts, do one-state advocates propose to realize or advance their vision? What practical steps do they imagine and what is their road map for success?
And sixth, since they reject both Palestinian independence and the ongoing agenda of infrastructural and institutional development presently defining the strategy of what they consider the “quisling” Palestinian Authority, what do one-state advocates, as a practical matter, offer those living under occupation other than expressions of solidarity and interminable decades of continued struggle and suffering?
It is striking that the most ardent and tenacious one-state advocates seem to be taking a great deal of their time in even starting to formulate answers to these questions. Assad AbuKhalil, who comments on anything and everything on his blog, has remained strangely silent. Ali Abunimah, who is surely the most ardent and prolific one-state proponent in the United States, and who also runs a well-read blog, also appears at a loss for words. Even the overgrown juvenile delinquents at the Kabobfest blog, who have exhibited signs of suffering from a cybersphere version of Tourette’s syndrome, are also strangely passing up what would seem to be a golden opportunity to repeat their usual accusations about “traitors” and “collaborators.”
I have no doubt that sooner or later a response, and hopefully a calm and thoughtful one, will be forthcoming from some of the committed one-state advocates. But the amount of time it is taking for them to offer any sort of answer to these extremely relevant questions suggests, perhaps, that they are proving difficult to formulate and quite possibly were not anticipated.
But there surely must be a considerable burden of proof on those proposing that the Palestinian national movement abandon its long-standing goal of ending the occupation, which is based on a huge body of international law and reflects a regional and international consensus, in favor of a grand experiment in almost entirely uncharted waters that poses significant risks and offers uncertain benefits. One-state proponents have an obligation to explain how exactly they think they can achieve the extraordinary task of compelling or convincing Israel to effectively dissolve itself.
Unless it offers answers to simple, clear and obvious questions such as these, the one-state rhetoric will be an agenda for accomplishing very little if anything. Rather it will merely be a convenient vehicle for rejecting any and all things Israeli and adopting a position of uncompromising confrontation.
This is not an abstract intellectual exercise. Those seeking to liberate the Palestinian people cannot allow themselves to be beguiled by the narcissistic thrill of “winning” an academic debate on campuses while contributing nothing, even doing harm, to the causes of peace and Palestine.
Hussein Ibish is a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine in Washington, DC. His book is available for free download or purchase on the website of the American Task Force on Palestine (americantaskforce.org). He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star.
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
September 8, 2009
On college campuses in the United States and the United Kingdom, and increasingly among grassroots activists in the West generally, the cause of ending the Israeli occupation and securing independence for a Palestinian state is being abandoned in favor of a much more far-reaching goal of replacing Israel with a single, democratic state for all Israelis and Palestinians, including all of the refugees. Until now, this rhetoric has been largely unchallenged from a pro-Palestinian perspective, which has probably been a significant factor in its appeal.
My new book, “What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda?”, traces the development of this agenda and interrogates its assumptions and claims.
The outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, which inflicted profound suffering and created deep ill-will on both the sides of the Palestinian-Israeli divide, bolstered stridently nationalist perspectives among Israelis and Palestinians. For many, it prompted a negative re-evaluation of what kind of peace was possible and desirable.
In Israel, this was manifested in the collapse of the “peace camp,” a radical shift to the political right and the election of Ariel Sharon, who became prime minister. Among the Palestinians, Islamists, especially Hamas, gained significant ground. In the Palestinian diaspora, where support for Hamas is limited and, especially in the United States, politically untenable and even legally risky, this same disillusionment and radicalization was largely expressed through the rise of the one-state agenda.
More generally, the one-state agenda reflects the conclusion that Israel will never agree to seriously end the occupation and allow for the creation of a fully sovereign, viable Palestinian state, therefore that negotiations and diplomacy are pointless. At the end of Part One of my book I pose a series of pointed questions that are not usually addressed to, or have been insufficiently answered by, one-state advocates, and that in many cases their sympathizers have not adequately considered. Here are the six of them:
First, if Israel will not agree to end the occupation, what makes anyone think that it will possibly agree to dissolve itself? If Israel cannot be compelled or convinced to surrender 22 percent of the territory it holds, how can it be compelled or convinced to surrender or share 100 percent of it?
Second, what, as a practical matter, does this vision of a single, democratic state offer to Jewish Israelis?
Third, what efforts have Palestinian and pro-Palestinian one-state advocates made in reaching out to mainstream Jews and Israelis and to incorporating their national narrative into this vision?
Fourth, how do one-state advocates propose to supersede or transcend Palestinian national identity and ambitions? Why is it that no significant Palestinian political party or faction has adopted the one-state goal?
Fifth, how, apart from empty slogans about largely nonexistent and highly implausible boycotts, do one-state advocates propose to realize or advance their vision? What practical steps do they imagine and what is their road map for success?
And sixth, since they reject both Palestinian independence and the ongoing agenda of infrastructural and institutional development presently defining the strategy of what they consider the “quisling” Palestinian Authority, what do one-state advocates, as a practical matter, offer those living under occupation other than expressions of solidarity and interminable decades of continued struggle and suffering?
It is striking that the most ardent and tenacious one-state advocates seem to be taking a great deal of their time in even starting to formulate answers to these questions. Assad AbuKhalil, who comments on anything and everything on his blog, has remained strangely silent. Ali Abunimah, who is surely the most ardent and prolific one-state proponent in the United States, and who also runs a well-read blog, also appears at a loss for words. Even the overgrown juvenile delinquents at the Kabobfest blog, who have exhibited signs of suffering from a cybersphere version of Tourette’s syndrome, are also strangely passing up what would seem to be a golden opportunity to repeat their usual accusations about “traitors” and “collaborators.”
I have no doubt that sooner or later a response, and hopefully a calm and thoughtful one, will be forthcoming from some of the committed one-state advocates. But the amount of time it is taking for them to offer any sort of answer to these extremely relevant questions suggests, perhaps, that they are proving difficult to formulate and quite possibly were not anticipated.
But there surely must be a considerable burden of proof on those proposing that the Palestinian national movement abandon its long-standing goal of ending the occupation, which is based on a huge body of international law and reflects a regional and international consensus, in favor of a grand experiment in almost entirely uncharted waters that poses significant risks and offers uncertain benefits. One-state proponents have an obligation to explain how exactly they think they can achieve the extraordinary task of compelling or convincing Israel to effectively dissolve itself.
Unless it offers answers to simple, clear and obvious questions such as these, the one-state rhetoric will be an agenda for accomplishing very little if anything. Rather it will merely be a convenient vehicle for rejecting any and all things Israeli and adopting a position of uncompromising confrontation.
This is not an abstract intellectual exercise. Those seeking to liberate the Palestinian people cannot allow themselves to be beguiled by the narcissistic thrill of “winning” an academic debate on campuses while contributing nothing, even doing harm, to the causes of peace and Palestine.
Hussein Ibish is a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine in Washington, DC. His book is available for free download or purchase on the website of the American Task Force on Palestine (americantaskforce.org). He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
