'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Jill, freed!

Jill Carroll was freed today in Baghdad! She's reported to be in good shape. Fabulous news!

Now let's all work for the reease of everyone else illegally deprived of their liberty in the sad, sad country that Iraq has become.

Riverbend: read her!

I just read a stunning post by Riverbend, written yesterday. Read it and weep for Iraq.

US-Iraqi women's conference-- Part 2

... Monday afternoon, I took a bit of time out from the US-Iraq women's conference I was at to sit in a wifi zone in the hotel there and write up this JWN post about the conference.  It seems that while I was away, the differences of opinion that I had noted there between the Iraqi invitees-- and principally, the difference between those who stayed in Iraq throughout the whole sanctions era and those who lived as exiles in those years-- became much more pointed... to the extent that participants in this "peace" gathering had been standing up, yelling at each other, and threatening to walk out.

I guess the organizers and a couple of the US invitees intervened to try to calm things down.  When I got back there, the Benedictine US nun Sr. Joan Chittester, one of the organizers, was saying some pacific things about "well, now you've seen how democracy works.  Everyone has to at least stay and listen to everyone else's point of view."

That evening, there were a lot of inter-religious peacemakery things organized.  I'm not entirely sure about the cultural context of having people watch two women performing a classical Indian dance... The dance was fairly pretty to watch, but personally I was extremely hungry at that point (7:30 p.m.) having been up since 6 a.m.

Then yesterday morning we were back in the conference room again.  For that session, which was billed as lasting from 9 a.m. through 1 p.m.--with no break anywhere along the way!  can you imagine?-- the moderator was Kate Snow, another rising female star at ABC News who co-anchors the weekend edition of their morning show and was previously their White House correspondent.

Snow is another smart young network-groomed woman, like Elizabeth Vargas yesterday.  But completely out of her depth in this context, since it didn't take long before the (purely rhetorical) sparks began to fly there.  This session had been billed as having six Iraqi women speakers talking about "Fostering people-to-people dialogue: Changing attitudes and misperceptions".

The third of the speakers was Dr. Katrin Michael,  a Christian woman from the north of Iraq who had joined the Kurdish opposition in 1982; fled the country in 1988 after having survived a chemical weapons attack (date and details of which, uncertain); ended up in Algeria; barely escaped the fundamentalist violence there; ended up as a resettled refugee in Washington DC in 1997...  Where she still lives.  Nowadays, she does research there on Iraqi women's issues.

Her presentation was stridently "exilist".  She ended up making a loud appeal for Americans to join in fighting against the "terrorists" in Iraq, and said "we Iraqis are in the front line against the terrorists".  (She didn't note that there had been no jihadist militants in Iraq prior to the US invasion of 2003, whereas now, evidently, there are... ) 

She declared loudly a number of times that "I have forgiven"  the people who had harmed her earlier.  But honestly, the general tenor of her very accusatory presentation indicated strongly to me that there are plenty of people whom she has not even come close to forgiving.  Again and again, at one point, she said "I am a victim; I am a victim; I am a victim!"  (I felt like saying to her, "Katrin, my dear, I heard you the first time.  You are a victim.  But you know what?  At this point, everyone in Iraq is feeling very hurt, wounded, and fearful.  Everyont there is a victim.  And you're living there in Washington DC... ")

Michael, Lamia Talebani (who spoke a little later) and Judge Zakia Hakki (who spoke Monday-- and again yesterday) were the most ardent representatives of what I call the Iraqi  "exilist" viewpoint, that is, the view of those who (1) had spent the 1990s in exile, (2) had been among those most strongly advocating the use of US power to overtthrow the Saddamist regime, and who (3) until today remain supportive of  the 2003 invasion even if criticial of some of the details of  subsequent US actions in Iraq.  (Hakki did voice some such criticisms; so did Talebani.  They have both lived for at least part of the time since 2003 inside Iraq.  Katrin Michael, who has not spent time in Iraq since 200,3 did not voice any such criticisms .)

But before I  describe the argument, let me give a quick digest of what all the speakers on the main panel said.

First up was Adiba Hussain, a business woman and property owner who started off by saying "I never left Baghdad... even in 2003 I stayed in Baghdad."  Her presentation was mainly on the needs of women business owners.  She said quite forthrightly that the main thing hapering all business owners in Iraq was "the terrible effects of insecurity on the whole business community."  She mentioned the widespread climate of threats made against the persons and properties of business owners and the resulting flight of large amounts of Iraqi capital to neighboring countries.

The next speaker was Zainab al-Suwaij, the Iraqi-born executive director of the American Islkamic Congress, which she described as promoting a liberal version of Islam.  She had been born in Basra and had joined the uprising against Saddam that the Shiites there had launched in 1991, fleeing after it was violently suppressed by Saddam.

I should say that though; Suwaij had almost certainly been one of those exiles advocating  the US invasion of Iraq, she did not present herself as ideologically strident. At one pouint she said quite calmly (and probably, accurately),

She said the AIC has been running programs in a number of parts of the country since 2003:

She said the AIC had also lobbied during the Constitution-writing process for a quota for women in all governorate councils of 40%.  ("But we only got 25%.")

Suwaij concluded by saying the Iraqi women's two main needs at this point are: (1) economic empowerment, and (2) building a women's peace movement, "to help us resolve the post-conflict situation and to help us heal us heal our souls."

Then, there was Katrin Michael.

Then we had Buthaina Suhail, an extremely elegantly hijab-ed woman, described as the President of the "Iraqi Family Society".

She told us her uncle had been killed by Saddam Hussein in Lebanon.  She said, ""Most of the Iraqi people are with the new government..." The general tenor of her presentation was to admit that,  yes, it's true there are people who have been made into widows and orphans since 2003-- but there many more who suffered those things before 2003.  "And now at least we have women who are ministers and MPs; women allowed to travel, and so on."  She made an appeal against the "terrorists", but it was far less strident than Katrin Michael's.

Then we heard from Lamia Talebani, an agronomist who is also an artist who had spent most of the years 1963-2003.  (Apparently also a relative of PUK head Jalal Talebani.  I wish I'd asked her to confirm this in person.)

She made an eloquent and well organized presentation in which she talked about Iraq's neighbors thus:


She warned about the danger that, "the Americans are trying to have relations with people who hate America, and have even started talking  with the  terrorists who are fighting them rather than supporting their natural cultural allies."

Her category of 'America's natural cultural allies' was an interesting one., that I would have liked to probe more.  It seemed (by inference) to comprise mainly secular-minded liberals.

But she was clearly feeling under threat.  She said, "The only option for people who are American cultural allies in Iraq today is to choose between death, exile, and silence."

She did however say soon after that she judged that "civil war is impossible. There have always been conflicts in Iraq between culturally liberal people and religious extremists-- since the 1940s."

The last speaker was a  very elegantly dressed (no hijab) younger woman called Murooj Muneeb al-Hadethee, who said she had lived in Iraq "for the past five years".  She is a partner in a company called the Collage Group, which is (I think) mainly Indian in ownership.  She said that  one of the main grievances in the Iraqi business community was that the big US prime contracting firms ("Bechtel, for example") don't issue subcontracts directly to Iraqi firms for all their projects in Iraq, but rather, issue them to firms from other countries, inserting sometimes several layers of sub- and sub-contracters between the sums that Bechtel has to spread around and the Iraqi firms that are left at the bottom of the heap.

Anyway, the morning's discussion was supposed to be mainly about identifying and discussing the concrete needs of Iraqi women's organizations, so that in the afternoon the US invitees could start discussing how they could start to help meet some of these needs.

But we never really got to the discussion planned for the morning, at all.  Katrin Michael and Zakia Hussain got into a real shouting match against Faiza al-Araji and a woman called Entisar al-Ariabi, who has been here in the US for activities organized by the strongly anti-war organization Code Pink. 

Ariabi was every bit as strident-- speaking from the floor-- as Katrin Michael was, from the panelists's elevated dais. She stood up at the table where she was seated and started objecting to the use of the term "liberate" and other claims that Michael had made.  She said all Iraq's probalems had stemmed from the occupation and called for the withdrawal of US troops.

I was seated at the same table as Zakia Hussain.  She rose to her feet and started yelling back, acusing everyone who called the US presence of being an "occupation" of ignoring Saddam's  many crimes and indeed of having profited personally from them. 

Faiza stood up and said, "I'll say it again: I am glad that Saddam is gone-- but how many times do you want us all to say that? We didn't have to have a US invasion to get rid of him.  And now look what the US occupation is doing to our country.  The US troops should get out-- now!"

Poor old Kate Snow, sitting there in front of us in her fastidiously streaked and coiffed hair, had completely lost control of everything... And indeed, though the discussion stumbled along a little more after that, it completely fizzled out before noon and we were all given a very long lunch break....

In the afternoon session, the organizers made an attempt to get people refocused on "concrete projects".  I have to say I'm very familiar with this tactic, which was one of the main organizing principles of Search for Common Ground, when I was trying to run their non-governmental conflict resolution project in the Middle East  back in 1991-93.  Sort of, "If the big political conflicts look unsolvable let's try to 'build relationships' through working on some uncontroversial (and often fairly trivial) things instead."

I'm still a believer in some parts of this approach.  But I really don't think-- whether with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the intra-Iraqi conflict, or probably, conflicts anywhere else-- that you can do anything of lasting value through such projects unless the "big" political conflict is also resolved, too.  Exhibit number 1 in theis regard: the whole flurry of post-Oslo 'confidence-building' ventures at all levels.... and the collapse they all experienced with the collapse of the official peace talks in late 2000.

Also, though I believe strongly in talking to and listening to everyone, including those with whose views I very strongly disagree, still, I think when you're building a coalition to actually do something, especially something political like building a coalition against war and military occupation, then you shouldn't plan on including absolutely everyone within this coalition; otherwise you (we) would end up getting nowhere..

I'm not sure how the end of the conference came out, since I had to leave at 3:45 p.m.  People were sitting around tables again at that point, with each table hosting a discussion on possible projects in specific sectors  I am still not sure what was actually agreed.  GPIW has nothing up on their website yet about that.  But I'll try to let you know as soon as I learn anything.

... Anyway, I have lots more thoughts based on my experience at the GPIW conference.  One has to do with the absolutely necessary, organic link between any attempt to impose rule through foreign military domination and the spreading of financial corruption amongst all participants in this venture.

A number of the Iraqi women at the conference spoke about the debilitating effects-- for business owners and for all other Iraqis-- of the corruption that has become so omnipresent in their society since 2003.  It was the same story with the Fateh-led administration in post-1994 Palestine, of course.

Well, what do you expect-- if you have a governing mechanism that is not, actually, accountable to the people over whom it rules and whose interests it claims to represent-- but whose interests it is actually, on a daily basis, continuing to ignore?  Such a governing mechanism is one that is built centrally on a lie.  And participants in it cannot afford to allow the light of day to shine on the various payoffs and bribes they have received, that induced them to participate in it...

Democracy in Palestine

This from AP:

Hamas formally took power Wednesday, with the Palestinian president swearing in a 24-member Cabinet that includes 14 ministers who served time in Israeli prisons.

The ceremony, which came just a day after Israel's national election, ended a two-month transition period of ambiguity since Hamas' election victory in January.

With a Hamas government installed, the lines of confrontation with Israel were clearly drawn. Hamas insists it will not soften its violent ideology toward the Jewish state.

Israel's presumed prime minister-designate, Ehud Olmert, has countered that if Hamas will not bend, he will set the borders of a Palestinian state by himself and keep large areas of the West Bank.

With Hamas at the helm, the Palestinian Authority also faces a crippling international economic boycott.

"With Hamas taking over now, you can't have business as usual," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said...

In the slideshow that AP has of current and recent news photos from the region, there are images of massive and very peaceful Hamas demonstrations greeting the government's swearing-in, in Gaza. (Of course, some of the ministers had to be sworn in in Ramallah, since Israel won't allow even parliamentarians and PA government ministers of whom it disapproves to travel between the two portions of the OPTs.)

There were also images of Ismail Haniyeh and his Gaza-bound governmental colleagues all standing together outside the parliament building there, holding up their index fingers. It was an obvious visual reference to the images of people in Iraq and Palestine holding up ink-stained fingers after they participated in their recent, respective elections.

So, now we have a government responsible to a duly elected parliament installed in occupied Palestine. We don't yet have one in Iraq. But what will happen to the plans the Palestinian government has to build a better life for their people?

Let's see.

Democracy in Israel

HaAretz is now saying that the vote count there, with 99.5% of votes counted, gives this result for the 120-seat Knesset:

Kadima-- 28 seats

Labor-- 20

Shas-- 13

Yisrael Beitenu (Lieberman)-- 12

Likud-- 11

National Union/National Religious Party-- 9

Pensioner's Party (Rafi Eitan)-- 7

United Torah Judaism-- 6

Meretz-- 4

[All Arab parties]-- 10

Congratulations to my friends in Meretz for having retained their four seats! (At one point, they were forecast to lose two of them.)

The rise of the "Pensioners' Party", headed by longtime spy boss Rafi Eitan, was the big surprise. He was the man responsible for (1) capturing Adolph Eichmann and (2) running the very damaging spy Jonathan Pollard deep in the bosom of the US national-security apparatus in the 1980s...

(Hat-tip to Imshin for tha tlast link. She wrote today, "You wouldn’t believe how many youngsters I know who voted for the pensioners’ party, not to mention non-Russian’s who voted for Avigdor Lieberman..."

Now coalition formation will get seriously underway...

Czar George speaks

The US ambassador in Baghdad, Zal Khalilzad, has been working feverishly around the clock (but notably not behind the scenes) to try to make sure that his favored candidate (SCIRI's Adel Abdul-Mahdi) gets the premiership of the National Assembly that was elected-- let me see-- 104 days ago. The UIA bloc, of which SCIRI is a part, is the biggest bloc in the Assembly. But in an internal deliberation in early February the UIA's parliamentarians determined that its candidate for PM would not be Abdul-Mahdi but would continue to be Ibrahim Ja'afari of the Daawa Party...

Today, the NYT tells us that Khalilzad has escalated his campaign against Ja'afari by telling senior politicians in the UIA that Czar George W. Bush himself, sitting in his distant imperial capital, has now issued a ukaz (edict, fatwa, diktat... ) to the effect that:

Mr. Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister...

The NYT's Ed Wong reported that Redha Jowad Taki, described as a UIA parliamentarian and an aide to SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz Hakim, was one of those who accompanied Hakim to a meeting with Khalilzad last Saturday in which the US viceroy reportedly "told" Hakim,

to pass on a "personal message from President Bush" to the interim prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari... Mr. Khalilzad said Mr. Bush "doesn't want, doesn't support, doesn't accept" Mr. Jaafari as the next prime minister... It was the first "clear and direct message" from the Americans on a specific candidate for prime minister, Mr. Taki said.

...American officials in Baghdad did not dispute the Shiite politicians' account of the conversation, though they would not discuss the details of the meeting.

I note here-- yet again!-- that Wong routinely, throughout this piece, describes Hakim as "the head of the main Shiite political bloc", though in the February vote the UIA showed that not to be the case.

Referring to Hakim as "the head of the UIA, or "the most powerful politician in Iraq" actually obfuscates the whole story. A casual reader of stories making such designations would be left asking, "If Hakim is indeed 'the head' of the UIA bloc, and 'the most powerful Shiite politician in Iraq', then why on earth is Ibrahim Ja'afari still the UIA's candidate for PM?"

I note too that there are many Orwellian undertones to the whole story of the US intervention in this whole, extremely lengthy and high-stakes government-formation process in Iraq... In addition to the mere fact of the intervention, that is...

One is that, as I noted in this recent post, Zal and his cohorts keep talking about the need for government that pursues a vision of a "unified" Iraq-- but they are hard at work blocking the pol who has the most credibility as a proponent of Iraqi national unity--Moqtada Sadr-- from having any influence in the government. (Sadr still has a US 'arrest warrant' out against him. He has thrown his considerable political weight behind Ja'afari, who is not a forecful political figure in his own right.)

Another Orwellian undertone is that Zal and his cohorts fulminate in public against the activities of the 'sectarian militias'-- while at the same time they are working hard to bring into the seat of government power SCIRI, which runs the biggest, best-embedded, and most violent of these militias...

These things are not spelled out nearly enough in the MSM. (To say the least!)

At a broader level, though, I am impressed that despite 104 days of the US using all the levers of power at its control in Iraq-- US blandishments, promises, bribes, military operations, black operations, etc etc-- the UIA has stayed quite steadfast in refusing to allow Czar George and his viceroy to determine who will be the next PM.

In fact, if Zal now has to resort unequivocally to saying-- in a meeting with Hakim and his (presumably, all-SCIRI) aides-- that Czar George himself doesn't want Ja'afari in power, then this kind of direct, open intervention is already a mark of how weak and desperate his and the Bush administration's position has become!

(Bizarre, and to me a sign of weakness, too, that Zal would be seeking to 'pass on' this message to Ja'afari through Hakim himself... Actually, extremely bizarre indeed.)

I hope Ja'afari and Sadr both have very good personal-security details.

Also, of course that meeting was Saturday. Sunday the US military attacked (apparently) a Sadrist office/husseiniyah, and after that no UIA pols at all have been prepared to meet with Zal. And notably, it was after Sunday that Hakim's person, Taki, started talking to the press and spilling the beans about Czar George's ukaz-- presumably as a way of trying to distance SCIRI from any complicity in the anti-Ja'afai campaign. (One can just imagine the conversation: "Ed, I have to tell you that Mr. Hakim was deeply shocked-- shocked!-- to hear the content of the message the Americans were asking him to transmit"... )

As this piece by Knight-Ridder's Nancy Youssef and Warren Stroebel tells us, on Tuesday evening,

Salim al-Maliki, the minister of transportation and a member of the dominant United Iraqi Alliance [can anyone tell us from which party? -- HC], said al-Jaafari was still the slate's candidate.

"We do not accept interference by the United States or any other foreign body because it is an internal decision of United Iraqi Alliance," al-Maliki said.

Youssef and Stroebel also report there that the US has sent a message to Ayatollah Sistani asking his help in "getting us out of this impasse," as an unnamed official in Washington was quoted as saying.

What "impasse"? The "impasse" in the government-formation process in Iraq that has existed so far -- a fact of Iraqi political life that is now absolutely, indubitably harming the interests of the Iraqi people--is completely a creation of the US's anti-Jaafari blocking tactics.

These journos refer to "leading Shiite politician Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim"...

But they also, sensibly, wrote this:

Judith Yaphe, a Persian Gulf expert at the National Defense University in Washington, called the reported attempts to pressure al-Jafaari to resign "heavy-handed."

"They have to know that Sistani does not want to be seen as interfering in the political process," she said. "You're guaranteed to get the result that you don't want."

Israel election: the allure of 'separation'

HaAretz had a fascinating piece yesterday that was Ari Shavit's account of a fierce discussion he had with Kadima MK (and Labor defecter) Haim Ramon about the virtues of the 'spearation barrier' (the Wall) and the whole Kadima mindset of unilateral separation that goes with it.

Since this is certainly the main issue in today's election in Israel, I thought people might want to read the article. It's here.

Perspectives on Iraq

This is just to note that our friends Reidar, Shirin, and Salah have continued their good discussion on intra-UIA and UIA-US issues down on this JWN comments board.

Meanwhile, Juan Cole is still referring in a quite uncritical way to Abdel-Aziz Hakim as "the Iraqi Shiite cleric who heads the largest bloc in the elected parliament."

Iraqi and US women on war, occupation, peace

I'm here attending the two-day conference Creating our Common Future, which is billed as an "Iraqi and American Women's Summit". The morning's session was extraordinary. We had six Iraqi women and one man up there on the platform, in a lengthy panel discussion titled "Stories from the Ground", that was moderated by Elizabeth Vargas, the co-anchor of the big network news program that ABC News does every day.

Of the seven Iraqis, one (the ethnic Kurdish judge Zakia Hakki) was a strong cheerleader for the US invasion of, and continued presence in, Iraq; a couple-- including Faiza al-Araji and Dr. Rashad Zaydan (a pharamacist working with a charitable organization in Baghdad and Fallujah)-- were outspoken critics; and the rest were all somewhere in between.

I believe the Iraqi "delegates" here (not sure that anyone has actually been "delegated" to be here; but it sounds important, doesn't it?) have had some time meeting just with each other over the weekend.

And then just before lunch, the deep differences among the US invitees here became clear, too. First up there was Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictne nun who gave a truly inspiring, wonderful short sermon about the folly and tragedy of the whole war venture, and the need for us all "not to drink from the water of hate." Then there was Olara Otunnu, a Ugandan-American who's worked with the UN for a long time, including as Sec-Gen's Special Rep for Children and Armed Conflict. He gave a kind of generic plea for everyone to focus on the children, saying very little of any specificity to Iraq. And then we had Charlotte Ponticelli, who's the "Senior Coordinator for International Women's Issues" at the State Dept.

Sr. Joan had gotten a standing ovation from most of the 120 or so people present, for her oration. Ponticelli tried to follow that performance with some extreme rhetorical flourishes, and with continual references to "the courage of our Iraqi sisters who have stepped up to the plate"-- a very provincially American metaphor from (I think) baseball that most people from outside the US find quite mystifying... Exactly what plate it was the Iraqi women had "stepped up to", and what they were expected to do now they were there-- all that was left very general...

And she talked again and again about how her Bushite masters had "liberated" the Iraqis, and how much better things were in Iraq now than before 2003, etc.

It's been an interesting experience being in this gathering where the differences of opinion within each of the two bodies politic are so very, very evident.

I'm not sure exactly what the organizers are hoping to get out of the event. Oh, here's one early expression of their goals:

There are three projected outcomes to this summit:

-- The creation of an online community of Iraqi and American women who wish to exchange ideas and disseminate information through the medium of a website. This website can facilitate communication and provide opportunities for women from the United States and Europe to support their counterparts in Iraq with their resources and their expertise.

-- The establishment of a Women’s Faith Forum in Iraq to discuss women’s issues from different religious perspectives – with the aim of garnering greater acceptance for a diversity of views.

-- Issue a statement on the need to heal divisions between the Sunni and Shiite communities in Iraq and worldwide. [HC question: why should people from, of all non-Iraqi societies, the US think they have any particular role to play in this process?]

The ultimate success of this Summit, however, shall depend upon the emergence of spontaneous relationships and the open and frank exchange of ideas as well as of the expression of commitment of the participants to the amelioration of the condition of women in Iraq.

One of the main things that struck me this morning was the strong divergence in the narratives of the Iraqis who spoke... Not just about current events or current political proposals-- but their narratives of the past, and even the terms they used for everything.

Zakia Hakki, for example, talked at length about the degree to which Iraqis suffered under Saddam Hussein. She was effusive in her thanks to the Americans "who gave me refuge from Saddam's brutality and who then came to liberate our people". And she talked about the real present dangers from "the Baathists... the fascists... the terrorists", explaining that because of those dangers the US troops should stay. (Though she did also voice some pointed criticisms of some US actions in Iraq, including the public, high-level role that Zal Khalilzad has taken in trying to influence the government-formation process.)

Shahla Ali, who works for a human-services NGO called Counterpart International, talked about the mistakes the US had made by trying to pursue a top-down transformation of Iraqi society. She said the attempt to install full democracy was too rapid, and that the process would take more time...

Then Faiza spoke-- really well, imho. Here's a digest of what she said:

Right at the beginning, she stressed that she was, "speaking on behalf of the unknown Iraqis, who lived under Saddam and stayed there and survived there and survived sanctions and the invasion while staying inside their own country... "

"This war changed my life. After the war I stopped working as a business woman and a civil engineer and I thought about the future of my country and my people, who have been dying for three years...

"After three years we have the right to evaluate the war. The Iraqi people are the only ones who have the right to do this evaluation...

"Now we are living in darkness; it was not just under Saddam Hussein."

She talked about her feeling of great helplessness in 2004, when her car was stolen and she found she couldn't get any help from either a US patrol that wass nearby or from any Iraqi police, and realized that everyone in her country was very vulnerable... and how that feeling was compounded last year after her son Khaled was arrested from the university and taken away to a secret prison. "We paid thousands of dollars to release him... But then I thought what about the poor Iraqi people, who couldn't do that-- who will care about them?"

At one point, she said, "Saddam Hussein stole Iraq from the Iraqis, yes; but then the occupation also stole Iraq from the Iraqis."

She said that from her travels around the US, she had seen the degree to which the US public is not in support of the war-- "but the situation in Congress is very different." She also said-- with Elizabeth Vargas sitting right nearby, nodding sagely, that "The media here are the partners of the government in the war... They will never tell you the truth about the war."

She accused the US authorities of having fanned the flames of sectarianb and ethnic division in the country, underlining her own rejection of such an approach by saying three times, firmly, "I am Iraqi, I am Iraqi, am Iraqi." (She got some applause for that from a good proportion of the Iraqis in the room.)

At the end, she said, "The US should simply leave Iraq. leave Iraq for the Iraqis."

The next speaker was Pascale Warda, the head of the Assyrian Women's Union, and a former minister in the Iyad Allawi government. She went out of her way to deny the thesis that Iraqi Christians should be considered pro-American (by anyone) simply because they are Christians. "We are not the creation of the Americans," she said. "Our people were Christians in Iraq long before there was any United States of America, and before there was any Islam, even."

Next was Noha al-Agha, who works with a number of human-services NGOs. One interesting story she told was that she had started a "pen-pal" exchange between kids in some US schools and kids in some Iraqi schools... "But the American kids just wrote about all the fun things they were doing-- pajama parties and going bowling and playing sports-- and it made the Iraqi children very sad because they don't have the opportunity for such things. So I had to write to the principals of the American schools and ask them to ask the kids not to write about such things."

Then came Rashad Zaydan, whose version of Islamic hijab was almost exactly the same as the pious Sunni women I saw in Gaza. (Faiza and Shahla Ali were also wearing hea coverings that completely hid their hair. Zakia Hakki had a loose scarf over her hair that had some glittery beads in it. The other two women were bare-headed.)

Zaydan also introduced herself as "speaking for all the Iraqis who never left the country." (This is understandably a big issue in intra-Iraqi discussions... "Where were you in the 1990s, during the tough days of sanctions?")

She started with a long Muslim greeting and talked about t all the rights given to Muslim women in Kor'an... She also talked the generally high status given to women during the Baathist era in all fields including education. But she did note that under sanctions the situation of women, kids, and girls had deteriorated.

She said the three years of occupation had brought huge numbers of dead, detained, missing, and wounded. (She actually gave concrete numbers there, but I couldn't write them all down fast enough... I'll try to get 'em from her later.) She said she herself had to close down the pharmacy business she formerly ran because she cdn't drive there any moredue to the rampant insecurity; so now she works with a charitable society.

She laid out a six- or seven-point program for what she wanted the US to do now. These were the first three points:

(1) establish a timetable for complete withdrawal of troops;

(2) provide reparations for all the damages caused by the troops; and

(3) commit to real aid for a major reconstruction effort in the country...

The last speaker was Dr. Saeb Gailani, a phsyician who's a member of the Baghdad City Council. He estimated the number of dead since March 2003 as "more than 100,000." He referred to the period of mid-1970s through mid-1980s almost as a kind of "Golden Era"-- with very high levels of education in Iraqi society, and Iraqis able to aford interesting international travel, large numbers of Iraqi grad students studying overseas, especially in England, etc.

He said, "The US designed the breakup of the country... How can you make a country if every region, every governorate has the right to have its own representatives in foreign embassies, or to make its own constitution, or to make deals with outsiders. The dictatorship of the Saddam days has been replaced by another kind of dictatorship which is the theocratic dictatorship... "

The first question asked was what the panelists thought about issue of the withdrawal of US troops.

Zakia Hazzi talked about how women's rights had deteriorated under Saddam (from the Golden Era she claimed, back in the late 1950s). Referring to the Baathists repeatedly as "fascists", she also repeated a number of times the anti-fascist mantra of "Never Again!" Yes, she admitted we need a timetable. But not now. "Before the timetable, we need two things: the Iraqi Army should stand on its toes, andf the 'reconstruction aid' must really start to get through. Now, there is corruption from both sides, which we have to stop."

American mothers, she said, "should be proud of their soldiers in the miliary, because they are building a new future for Iraq."

Anyway, I probably better get back up to the conference room there...

Peace train, part 2

Thursday, I wrote here about the guy who came and asked if I could tell him where to get a pro-peace yard sign like the one we have, and how I gave him one there and then.

Before he left, he asked how much he could pay me. I told him they cost $5, but really not to bother. Before he left we introduced ourselves to each other: "By the way, I'm Helena"... "And I'm Phil. Nice to meet you."

Yesterday, I found $5 in our mail box. It was wrapped in a piece of paper saying, "Helena-- Thanks for what you're doing for our country-- Phil."

What a great end to the story.

Today, I came up to NYC by, yes, real metal train. And yes, I did get my bg BR piece almost completely written. 9,600 words. (And yes, that is the short version.)

...Terrible day (again) in Iraq, today. Oh my G-d.

Tomorrow I'm going to a "summit meeting" of pro-peace US and Iraqi women convened by the Global Peace Initiative of Women. Faiza will be speaking there... Maybe they'll have wifi in the hotel and I can blog it in near real time?

Who are the Palestinian militants?

I am getting increasingly fed-up with the way so much of the western MSM continues mindlessly to echo the refrain that the Hamas people are "militants". You almost always see the word "militant" attached to the name "Hamas" once or many times in any news report...

But the militants in the Palestinians arena these days are not Hamas people. Hamas has not undertaken any militant action at all against Israel (or anyone else) since the end of Setember 2005. And that brief single episode in September was the result of a ghastly, if perhaps understandable, mistake on its behalf. Prior to that, Hamas had maintained the discipline of the tahdi'eh ("calming") quite fully since the end of last March. And once the Hamas leaders recognized their mistake in September, they immediately reinstituted the discipline of the tahdi'eh.

The "militants" these days in Palestine are people affiliated with Fateh, not with Hamas.

Hamas is politically hardline, yes. But it is not now actively "militant." Writers and editors make a serious mistake-- whether wilfully, or through inattention-- if they fail to recognize the difference. We should give credit where credit is due to Hamas, for having shown so much discipline and self-restraint with respect to the tahdi'eh, which it has stuck to, remember, in the face of numerous continuing acts of anti-Palestinian violence committed by Israel over the past year.

Abu Mazen plays hardball (but not with Israel)

I regret that I didn't get to see PA president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) when I was in Palestine recently. It seemed that whenever I was in Gaza, he was in Ramallah, and vice versa. (He was also out of the country for a while there.)

Anyway, I did get to speak to some old friends who know him well. One man of great political smarts and great political connections told me, off the record, back at the end of February that,

Abu Mazen felt badly wounded by Hamas in the [January] election. Now he wants to humiliate them in return... That's why we're facing some months of wrangling between the President and the PLC.

Well, my friend was right. In the past few days, Abbas has launched a number of political initiatives designed to circumsrcibe Hamas's power, even though (or, in my friend's view, precisely because) Hamas trounced Abbas's Fateh Party at the polls. These intiatives have included moves to grab as many as possible of the (admittedly meager) levers of power at the disposal of the PA to his office in the Presidency, and away from control of the Hamas-led government.

(Ironic, of course, that when Abbas was the PM and Arafat was the Prez, the US had striven mightily and with great success to get these powers shifted to the PM's office... )

In addition, according to this article by Chris McGreal in today's Guardian, Abbas is delivering a letter to Hamas PM-designate Ismail Haniyeh today. According to "sources close to Mr Abbas" this letter "is intended to 'draw the battle lines' with Hamas, but it also serves as a warning to Israel and foreign powers that threats to sever aid and links are likely to strengthen rather than weaken the Islamist party.

McGreal said he "saw" the letter before it was delivered. (Was he able to read it as well, I wonder?)

Anyway, HaAretz'a Akiva Eldar also has a piece about this letter in his paper today (on Shabbat? How does that work? Maybe they just have an online edition on Shabbat?). He writes that though he didn't 'see" the letter itself, he and a group of other reporters were briefed about its contents by Abbas's aide Tayeb Abdel-Rahim.

Kind of interesting and significant, I think, that the content of this intra-Palestinian letter would, at a time of continuing, very tough conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, be briefed to Israeli reporters even before it is transmitted to PM-designate Haniyeh?

I guess the letter is part of Abbas's attempt, discreetly, to have some influence for the good on the Israeli elections. (I.e. by showing that he is "standing up to" Hamas, and therefore that "there IS someone to talk to on the Palestinian side"-- i.e. him.)

This was also, even more clearly, the intention of the interview that he gave to Eldar last Wednesday.

Eldar wrote there about Abbas that:

He is clearly weighing every word carefully, so that the message that "there is a partner" that he wants to convey to the Israeli public will not immediately become a right-wing election slogan. He is counting on the discerning to understand.

"You are going into very important elections," Abu Mazen says. "We are in a historic period, in which we must decide whether we will move toward peace and a better future for our children. I can promise that you have a partner for this peace. On the day after the elections you will find us ready to sit in negotiations with no prior conditions. The leadership of both peoples and also of the international community has a supreme responsibility to exploit this opportunity. It may be the last hope to accord the two peoples their right to live in security and stability. The coming generations will not forgive us if we let it slip by.

"If I am not a partner, ask yourselves who is a partner. I am one of those who signed the Oslo agreement and was a patron of the negotiations that were conducted prior to it in secret for eight months. I supported, and I continue to support, a clear peace plan, based on the legitimacy of international law, to which we all agreed, and on the road map. I have called ceaselessly for a hudna [cease-fire] in order to enable the continuation of negotiations, and I achieved a period of calm when I was prime minister.

"I have often swum against the current, but when our public hears from Israel that there is no Palestinian partner - that is something that I cannot explain. For example, in the matter of the prison in Jericho, when I call on all the Palestinian organizations to respect the agreements we signed, I am asked why the Israelis kidnapped the prisoners, contrary to our agreement with the Americans? What I am supposed to answer?

"I will remind you that on the day I was elected, there were attacks on Gaza and already then, one of your senior army personnel said that there is no partner for negotiations. I am afraid that Israel does not want negotiations and has found itself the excuse that it has no partner."

...

A large portion of the Israeli public will go to the polls in order to vote for Ehud Olmert's unilateral plan. What's wrong with that?

"Olmert's plan may bring about a 10-year hudna and a state with temporary borders. But it will not bring you peace. Plans like that leave the problem open, but do not resolve it. We saw what happens when the end of the conflict is postponed. I cannot promise you what will happen in the coming generations. According to Oslo, we were supposed to reach a final-status agreement by May 1999, and we saw what happened. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, Shimon Peres lost the elections and Benjamin Netanyahu destroyed everything. I am proposing to you to sit now and discuss the end of the conflict. I proposed to Peres and the Americans to open a back channel of talks, far from the spotlight. And I am convinced that within less than a year, we will be able to sign an agreement."

Can you offer the Israelis a two-state solution without the Palestinians' right of return to Israel?

"Our solution is based on the Beirut declaration of 2002, which was the biggest gift Israel received since its establishment. It has special importance because its origin is Saudi Arabia, the land of the Islamic holy places, and because all the Arab states and all the Muslim states at the conference declared their readiness for normalization with Israel after the occupation of the territories ends. Seventy percent of you supported the initiative, and it is a pity that it was shunted aside.

"As regards the refugees, Israel cannot disavow this problem morally and judicially. At Camp David both the Israeli delegation and the American delegation agreed that action is needed to find a solution. Give me reason why we should not sit at the table and continue the effort to find a settlement on the basis of the five options proposed to the refugees by President Bill Clinton in his blueprint, and on the basis of the Arab League declaration, according to which the solution must be just and agreed, on the basis of United Nations [General Assembly] Resolution 194."

Are you ready to say that the solution of the refugee problem has to be agreed to by Israel?

"Definitely, but I want to remind you that it was Ehud Barak who stated, at Camp David, that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. I propose that we sit and discuss the refugee issue like every other issue, which was raised in the Clinton blueprint or discussed at Taba. The negotiations were disrupted in September 2000 in the wake of Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount and the violent intifada that erupted after that. I did not stop calling for a cessation of the violence and I will not cease extending my hand in peace, even if this causes my downfall. But you are the strong side and it is in your hands to end the conflict.

"We must come to the negotiating table in good faith and with a genuine and true desire to resolve the conflict. I have to put myself in your shoes and you will put yourselves in my shoes. When each side understands the rights of the other, there is a chance that we will reach a solution. It will not happen if you ambush me in the corner in order to grab a slice here and a slice there. I accept the right of every Israeli citizen to live in security and within agreed borders, which are the borders of 1967. I know well the meaning of life in a situation of unstable security. On the other hand, we, too, have the right to live in an independent state in the 1967 borders, without fences, without settlements and without military attacks. You should know that not a day passes without a funeral here, without people being wounded and without arrests."

Will you agree to a territorial swap that will make it possible for Israel to retain some of the settlements?

"I do not rule it out. In the negotiations each side will present its requests. It will all be done according to international law. For years you said there is no Palestinian people and we refused to recognize Israel's existence. President Bush said that a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity has to be established alongside Israel. Translate that into facts on the ground."

I don't have time to write a long commentary on all this here. But I do want to say that I've admired Mahmoud Abbas for a long time. I first met him, in Tunis, in 1987 or so. (When I was Beirut in the '70s, he didn't spend much time there. Then, he was mostly in Qatar.) I remember during one of those meetings at the end of the '80s he said something to the effect that his strategy regarding Israel was "to hug it and love it and reassure it so much that in the end they'll be bound to give us our rights."

I think he has continued to hold to that theory to this very day-- despite what looks to me like considerable evidence that often when he reaches out to "hug" Israel, the Israelis just respond by kicking him in the face... As with the recent raid on the prison in Jericho, which was deeply humiliating for him.

I also believe that his plea to prove to Israelis that "there is a partner for negotiations" represents a serious misreading of the mood of 80% or more of Israelis which is one of repudiation of any idea of a negotiated peace, and embrace of unilateral Israeli actions. Kadima's strong position in the polls is just the tip of that iceberg.

I do continue to admire Abbas's immense moral courage in hanging on to a very principled (and determinedly nonviolent) political position in which, evidently, he must believe very deeply.

I do believe, though, that he and his allies in Fateh have completely failed to get any grip on the other part of the traditional Gandhian program of nonviolent action, which is to understand the absolute need for civilian mass organizing. In fact, I think it is many, many years since Fateh had any concept of civilian mass organizing, at all. Its leaders have always, continuously since about the mid-1970s (and maybe even before then) followed a path premised on the success of secret, elite-level negotiations with foreign governments, without devoting very much effort at all to building and maintaining effective and accountable organizations on the internal front.

That is where Hamas has clearly outperformed them. It was Hamas's civilian mass organizations and networks that rallied the people out to vote for the non-incumbent party back in January. Remember, Hamas had never competed in a national election before-- but it won, handily!

During my recent time in Palestine, I talked with PLO Executive Committee member Qais Abdel-Karim (Abu Leila), someone I've known for >25 years. Abu Leila is a longtime leftist-Arab nationalist. He recently won a seat on the PLC by running on a joint list (Badil) with the Palestinian People's Party-- the former Communist Party. Let's just say that Abu Leila understands political organizing very well indeed. He told me,

Hamas nowadays seems to be the only Leninist party we have here. They understand about 'serving the people.' And they have strong internal debate-- but you never hear about it from the outside: they have excellent internal discipline.

Also, their organization of the election campaign, and on election day itself, was very impressive. They didn't lose one vote through bad organization. They brought women in their 80s to the polling stations, in wheelchairs...

Anyway, as you can maybe see, I'm going through the notes of my trip here, trying to piece together some things I need for the big Boston Review piece I'm now writing. But I really needed to bookmark those Akiva Eldar articles and the McGreal article, as well, since I'll be traveling to NYC tomorrow and need to have all this stuff easily accessible on the web when I sit in Cakeshop tomorrow afternoon wifi-ing away.

So y'all, the readers, get the benefit of that here. If you have something constructive or informative to add re the issues I've been writing about, please do post them in the comments.

Harvard's shame (and Chicago's)

So it is indeed true. Harvard has indeed "removed its logo" from the footnoted version of the Mearsheimer/Walt study that is archived on a Keenedy School website, as HaAretz's Shmuel Rosner reported..

In addition,

The university also appended a more strongly worded disclaimer to the study, stating that it reflects the views of its authors only. The former disclaimer said merely that the study "does not necessarily" reflect the university's views.

This is totally shameful pandering on behalf of this money-grubbing institution of so-called "higher learning". (H'mm, I wonder what lesson about academic independence and the value of evidence-based research students are supposed to take from this episode?)

Universities and other research institutions publish studies all the time on the basis that these studies "do not necessarily represent" the views of the institution. (Which leaves it an open question as to whether the study in question does do so, or not.) That is what a commitment to the freedom of enquiry is all about.

So Harvard (and Chicago) now seem to be going quite a bit further when they now, in what was presumably a carefully considered statement of disclaimer on the front page of the web-archived version, state that,

The two authors of this Working Paper are solely responsible for the views expressed in it. As academic institutions, Harvard University and the University of Chicago do not take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty, and this article should not be interpreted or portrayed as reflecting the official position of either institution.

And then, the withholding of the Harvard logo is quite pathetic. Though really, since Harvard is indeed proceeding in this craven, pandery way, if I were Walt and Mearsheimer I would consider a "Harvard logo" to be a thing of very little value.

Interestingly, HaAretz also today carries a fairly nuanced evaluation of the M-W paper by Daniel Levy, a key Shimon Peres ally who was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Accord.

Levy expresses a couple of criticisms of the M-W paper. (I agree with him completely that M&W should have mentioned the Lobby's conflict with Bush I and Baker over loan guarantees, in 1991-92. Notable, because as I wrote in this book, (1) B&B "won" on the immediate issue of the loan guarantees; but then (2) they were majorly punished by the Lobby in the 1992 election; and Bush I's defeat in that election stood thereafter for the Clintonites and for Bush II as an object lesson in why they shouldn't even dream of confronting the Lobby... This, even though many solid analysts of US politics pointed out at the time that "it's the economy, stupid!" was even more central to Bush's electoral defeat. But the Lobby's ideological enforcers managed to get their view of things very "forcefully" across to all the pols... )

But Levy concludes,

their case is a potent one: that identification of American with Israeli interests can be principally explained via the impact of the Lobby in Washington, and in limiting the parameters of public debate, rather than by virtue of Israel being a vital strategic asset or having a uniquely compelling moral case for support (beyond, as the authors point out, the right to exist, which is anyway not in jeopardy). The study is at its most devastating when it describes how the Lobby "stifles debate by intimidation" and at its most current when it details how America's interests (and ultimately Israel's, too) are ill-served by following the Lobby's agenda.

The bottom line might read as follows: that defending the occupation has done to the American pro-Israel community what living as an occupier has done to Israel - muddied both its moral compass and its rational self-interest compass.

I heard Levy speaking at the big "America's Purpose" conference I went to in DC last September, where he said much the same thing, only in my recollection it was even stronger then, and definitely passionate.

In today's piece, Levy notes the recent proliferation of other critiques of the Lobby's role, as well as (of course) the criminal case proceeding against AIPAC senior staffers Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. Then he says:

Not yet a tipping point, but certainly time for a debate. Sadly, if predictably, response to the Harvard study has been characterized by a combination of the shrill and the smug. Avoidance of candid discussion might make good sense to the Lobby, but it is unlikely to either advance Israeli interests or the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Among the guidelines he advocates for Israelis seeking to participate in this debate, he says:

Israel must not be party to the bullying tactics used to silence policy debate in the U.S. and the McCarthyite policing of academia by set-ups like Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch. If nothing else, it is deeply un-Jewish. It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there.

He then apparently endorses one of M&W's key conclusions when he writes,

In the words of the Harvard study authors, "the Lobby's influence has been bad for Israel ... has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities ... that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists ... using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the broader goals of fighting extremism and promoting democracy in the Middle East." And please, this is not about appeasement, it's about smart, if difficult, policy choices that also address Israeli needs and security.

In short, if Israel is indeed entering a new era of national sanity and de-occupation, then the role of the Lobby in U.S.-Israel relations will have to be rethought, and either reformed from within or challenged from without.

Good sense, indeed.

And then, there is Shmuel Rosen's piece, linked to above, in which Rosen claims that the M&W has "many critics [who] claim that its academic quality is poor, and that it is essentially a political polemic rather than genuine academic research."

But if there are indeed so many of these critics, it's kind of interesting that Rosen can only find two individuals to quote by name in this regard. One is Marvin Kalb, whom he describes as "well-known researcher". Kalb, he writes, "said this week that the study fails to meet minimal academic standards."

Ho, ho, ho. Marvin Kalb, who is a veteran newsman with zero listed academic credentials, is lecturing Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer on minimal academic standards! That's rich.

And then there's that other well-known, well-credentialed academic specialist (irony alert here, folks) Eliot Engel a US Congressman from New York. Rosen writes that Engel, "in an interview with Haaretz this week, termed the study itself a form of anti-Semitism and said that it deserved the American public's contempt."

Rosen does report finding one academic "specializing in American foreign policy" prepared to criticize the study for presenting "a one-sided and utterly politically biased picture of the world." But this "fearless" upholder of the quest for truth is quite unready to be quoted by name, so we have zero way of gauging her or his real expertise.

... But then, after having totally failed to prove that there is anyone of any academic standing who has criticized the study on methodological grounds, Rosen does at least tell us what it was who reportedly pulled the money strings behind Harvard's shameful recent actions:

According to the New York Sun, Robert Belfer - who gave the Kennedy School $7.5 million in 1997 in order, among other things, to endow the chair that Walt now occupies - called the university and asked that Walt be forbidden to use his title in publicity for the study.

And gosh, yes, Harvard even caved to that. On that cover page, the true title of chair that Walt holds at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government is indeed withheld.

Money sure does talk. I guess we should at least be glad that Harvard does still graciously allow Mearsheimer and Walt to archive their footnoted version on one section of the university's website. But if I were them, I wouldn't bet that that would necessarily remain the case for very long, either.

(Robert Belfer update: On the Enron board; see more about his role in Enron's acts of financial and acounting legerdemain here. What a "fine" role model for the impressionable young minds being trained at Harvard, eh?)

Peace train gathering steam, oh yeah!

A really moving thing happened during our regular Thursday afternoon peace demo today.  There were about five of us there, stretched along the same rim of sidewalk at the big intersection outside the Federal Government Building in town where we always stand.  It was amazingly, gratifyingly noisy, with a greater proportion of motorists "honking for peace" than I remember, ever.  I was trying to shout a few words of conversation over my shoulder with my friend Virginia, while also holding up my "Honk for Peace" sign to the traffic moving in from the right and waving and establishing eye contact with the drivers as they approached. (Waving: friendly; often provokes a response in kind; plus it draws attention to us standing there.)

I didn't notice a guy who was walking along the sidewalk towards us till he stopped right near me and said, "Thanks so much for doing this, guys, I'm just back from there."
   
"Just back?" I said.  "In the military?"

"Yes.  Got back two months ago."

I turned to face him, reached out my spare hand, and grabbed him by the arm.  "I am so glad you came back safe," I said.

He looked as though he wanted to hug me, right there in the street.  But I was holding two signs in my left hand.  Plus, well, hugging a strange guy on the street didn't feel right.  So I kept holding his arm.  "Where were you?" I said

"Baghdad."

"You doing okay now?"

"Well, it's been hard finding work.  People don't want to hire me when they hear I still have a commitment to the military."

"That sucks!  But how's your head?  You having any nightmares?"

"Some."

"So make sure you get the help you need.  Say, you want to stand here with us a while?  We've got some spare signs."

"I'm not supposed to.  I'm still in the reserves.  But I'm really glad you folks are here.  That's bad there."

And then he walked away.  Afterwards, of course I wished I'd followed him, got his story, talked a bunch more to him.  But we didn't have many demonstrators today (I guess because of the peace march we also held last Monday.)  So I had just decided to stay on-mission there instead.

After he'd left, my friend Heather looked at me and said, "That was so moving.  I almost cried."  Me, I was biting back tears too.

... The general karma these days feels as though the head of anti-war steam is starting to rise faster and stronger than ever before.  And I don't think it's just here, in what some people call "the People's Democratic Republic of Charlottesville."  After all, what I'm looking at here are trends, over time...  Another example: three years ago, back at the beginning of the war, when I put my pro-peace yard sign out next to our driveway, one of the main things that happened was that people would steal it, or trash it, or rip it out and throw it down the nearby swale...

Then yesterday, after 18 months of no anti-war yard sign (but a couple of  election ones in there along the way), I planted out one of the spiffy new signs that C'vill Center for Peace and Justice has been selling.  On one side it says "End the war now" and on the other, "Wage peace."  (This time, they remembered to put the CCPJ web address at the bottom of the sign, too.  Great work!)

So I put it out, and less than three hours afterwards I hear a ring at our doorbell.  I go answer it, and there's a heavyset looking white guy standing there whom I've never met before.  "Excuse me, ma'am, but I wanted to ask where you get your yard sign.  I'd really like one like it."

"Ya... what?"

"I want to know how to get one."

So I told him I just, actually, "happened" to have a spare one in the garage.  Told him I needed to shut the door on him so the dog wouldn't get out on the street, and ran to get the spare sign from the garage to give it to him.

Amazing.

We've been doing our pro-peace work consistently, rain and shine, ever since before the war.  It feels great right now to feel such a strong shift in our direction.

OPT's: solid humanitarian info

This is Reliefweb's portal to solid, sector-by-sector information about the humanitarian situation i the Occupied Palestinian territories.

Through there you can go to this March 19 report from the UN's Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on the humanitarian impact of the closures of the Karni (al-Muntar) crossing. It stated,

Gaza requires 450MT of wheat each day to maintain bread supplies. The usual 30-60 day wheat stock kept in Gaza is exhausted. Other basic food commodities are in extremely short supply including dairy products and fruit. Rice and sugar are selling at more than twice their normal price and are also very difficult to find in stores.

Karni crossing (al Muntar) is the only source to import large-scale quantities of wheat and the commercial terminal for imports and exports of goods from Israel. As of today, Karni crossing has been closed 46 days or 60% of this year. (Four of the days (10-13 January -- 'Eid al Adha) were due to Palestinian decision making. ) In comparison, in 2005, Karni was closed for a total of 18% of the year and 19% of the year in 2004.

United Nations organisations are facing similar constraints. UNRWA has been unable to start its emergency food distribuition today because of insufficient wheatflour supplies. The World Food Programme reports that 3,594 MT of wheatflour contracted to local mills were unable to enter Gaza during the recent brief period Karni was opened.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) state that the reason for Karni's closure is the suspected presence of tunnels dug by Palestinian militants leading to the crossing. The IDF contends that it will not open the crossing until the Palestinian Authority (PA) digs several trenches to intercept these tunnels. Palestinian security services, at the request of the IDF, have dug four trenches, totalling more than 1.5 kilometres in length around the crossing, in an effort to find these tunnels. So far, none have been found.

The report also has a helpful-looking timeline. It makes depressing reading, mainly detailing how many times the IDF demanded that the Palestinians dig ever deeper and deeper trenches in order to discover those oh-so-elusive "tunnels". The only possible trace of possible tunnel-start was discovered on 20 January:

5 January: The IDF requests the Palestinian Authority (PA) to dig a trench west of the Karni crossing to intercept a possible tunnel leading to the crossing. The PA starts this work the same day, digging a 6 metre trench approximately 1km in length.

20 January: The PA completes the trench. According to the IDF, one tunnel was discovered, while according to the PA, a small hole, possibly the start of a tunnel, connecting to a water pipeline was discovered.

That trench was 6 meters deep. Later, the IDF demanded that the PA dig three more trenches, one of them "10m in depth, 300m long," Still no further evidence of anything even possibly resembling tunneling was found...

Two good blog discussions...

I wish I had more time to spend on moderating the discussions on this blog, which frequently become shrill and excessively combative. On the other hand, most readers are adults who can figure out for themselves whether and how to "read" the comments boards.

In general, though, the ability to have this kind of cross-continental, open-ended discussion is a treasure that I don't want to curtail too much. It really does allow for the creation of new knowledge and new understanding. (I have long believed that knowledge is an essentially social rather than individual creation... I mean, who taught Tom Hobbes and John Locke to speak and to express themselves, in the first place? Their ability to reason and to argue sure as heck didn't "grow like mushrooms out of the ground" at all.... Ooops, end of communitarian rant, here.)

So anyway, I thought readers might like to see some useful new knowledge being created in these two portions of the blogosphere:

-- Jonathan's recent post (and the subsequent discussion) on the constitution and meaning of the Hamas government lineup, and

-- Reidar Visser's comment (in particular), as posted onto my post here yesterday about the continuing, extremely high-stakes political wrangling in Iraq.

Once JWN readers and commenters see how constructive discussions like this actually work, and how they serve us all by expanding the available knowledge base, perhaps you will all be a bit more mindful that this effect does not occur if people get into name-calling of the "hateful Helena" (or "hateful anyone else") variety, or if they don't actually make an effort to contribute new knowledge or their own thoughtfully conceived questions to the discussion. Also, it doesn't really occur very easily if people go wildly off topic.

... One thing I've considered here is to see if anyone wants to take on the role of JWN's "Bernhard". Bernhard is the guy who started a parallel-universe blog called Moon of Alabama, where people could comment on Billmon's Whiskey Bar blog, after Billmon shut down his comment section. MoA has evolved quite a bit since then.

Bernhard's comments here are interesting. Actually, suddenly I'm thinking: why not ask Bernhard to run a JWN comment-site?

Does anyone have any other suggestions? Mail me.

Al-hamdu lillah!

Thank G-d! ... That CPT-ers Norman, Harmeet, and James were all freed today... And freed, moreover, by troops who found them and released them without firing a shot.

CPT had requested firmly, all along, that the attempts to free their people not be accompanied by any resort to violence. Indeed, it seems quite possible, from the way their discovery and release operation was described in that AP story, that key elements of the operation had been discreetly negotiated in some way... Certainly, many many attempts at such negotiation had been pursued over the nearly four months of their captivity.

CPT has this lovely statement on their site.

I join with them when they say:

We remember with tears Tom Fox, whose body was found in Baghdad on March 9, 2006, after three months of captivity with his fellow peacemakers. We had longed for the day when all four men would be released together. Our gladness today is made bittersweet by the fact that Tom is not alive to join in the celebration. However, we are confident that his spirit is very much present in each reunion.

Also this:

During these past months, we have tasted of the pain that has been the daily bread of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Why have our loved ones been taken? Where are they being held? Under what conditions? How are they? Will they be released? When?

Next week, Monday and Tuesday, I'm going to be at a "US-Iraqi women's summit" in NYC. Faiza al-Araji is going to be there, which will be great. She, of course, had her own story of having her son Khaled held in terrifying extra-legal detention in Iraq a few months ago.

So I'm thinking of the 12,000-plus Iraqis still held in extra-legal detention... and I'm thinking of the CSM's plucky, wonderful Jill Carroll.

But it's also great to know that those three 3 CPT-ers are safe, apparently not badly harmed, and will shortly be reunited with their families and friends. Thank G-d. And thanks, too, to the US and British troops who freed them "without firing a shot."

Pass the smelling salts!

So it now seems the delusional imaginings of one Israeli civilian woman "caused" the Israelis' entire, world-class armed forces to decide to close the Karni crossing for nearly all of the past six weeks.

At the time the crossing was first closed, Israeli spokespeople assured us that this was because they had evidence that Palestinians were digging dangerous tunnels somewhere close by. Today, HaAretz's Amos Harel tells us that,

A few weeks ago, the crossing was closed after a civilian employee thought she heard knocking underneath it, but searches uncovered no sign of a booby-trapped tunnel, and military professionals have since suggested that the government consider reopening the crossing.

The content of the Israeli reporting on this was such as to lead at least one good-faith observer-- frequent JWN commenter Jonathan Edelstein-- to conclude that, "The closing also occurred just after an explosion in a tunnel under the crossing."

Explosion! How scary! (But just, in fact, non-existent.)

Karni is, as JWN readers probably know, the main crossing-point through which goods from outside, including vital foodstuffs and medical/health supplies, can enter the Gaza Strip and the only one through which the Strip's exports (most of which are extremely perishable market-garden products bound for world markets) can be shipped... So those delusional imaginings of that one, quite possibly stressed-out Israeli woman were used as a pretext to impose the Israeli government's regime of tight economic strangulation on all 1.4 million of Gaza's people.

(I don't necessarily blame her, either. The whole tenor of the propaganda from the Israeli authorities is designed to keep the fires of anti-Palestinian fear and hatred well stoked among the Israeli populace... particularly during an Israeli election season.)

I would love to know, though, at what point the Israeli military professionals reached the determination that the "knocking" allegedly heard by that woman was not in fact related to any activity (or "explosions") in any non-existent Palestinian tunnel? It's quite possible they reached that conclusion pretty fast-- maybe, within hours... After all, tunnel-detection is something they have quite a lot of experience of doing, there in the Southern Command.

But regardless of how fast they discovered this, Karni remained closed... for weeks on end. At the insistence of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv it was re-opened briefly, Tuesday. But within 30 minutes Israeli authorities rammed it shut again.

And now, in the run-up to that great event in the march of global democracy, Israel's March 28 general election, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz is saying, according to Harel, that Karni should still be kept closed, "apparently partly out of fear of an election-eve attack." It strikes me that he's the one who really needs the smelling salts.

Whose unified Iraq, anyway?

It has seemed clear to me for some time now that, despite all the protestations of various US officials that what they most want to see is a "unified" Iraqi government stepping forward, in fact, what they most care about is not the 'national unity" aspect of the government, but rather that the new Iraqi government NOT be one formed on a basis of commitment to a speedy US withdrawal.

In fact, Ja'afari and Muqtada Sadr are very committed to a unified Iraq-- and Sadr has done more than any other Shiite politician to try to keep the links between the country's Shiite and Sunni populations as strong as possible. (A lot, lot more than, for example, Abdul-Aziz Hakim and his SCIRI party, which as we know has been associated with some of the worst of the anti-Sunni death squads in the country.)

Sadr, in addition, is deeply committed to winning a speedy and complete withdrawal of US occupation forces from his country-- this is, indeed, one of the main bases of his political relationship with the Sunnis.

The Americans have been using the Kurdish pols, and others, to continue to block the formation of a government led by Ja'afari, who is currently in alliance with Sadr. (The Americans have never withdrawn their "arrest warrant" against Sadr, the issuance of which back in April 2004 provoked some whole new rounds of very destructive fighting, both at the time and later in 2004.) For some reason, they don't like Sadr! Perhaps it's because of his consistently Iraqi-nationalist, anti-occupation stand?

I see that 97 days have now elapsed since Iraq's "landmark" December election. That's nearly 14 weeks in which the country has had no clear governance structure, and of course in the absence of such a structure the slide toward greater civil strife has only further continued.

Most recently, Washington has started deploying more actors to try to persuade Ja'afari to "do the right thing" (in Washington's eyes), and to step down in favor of SCIRI's favored candidate, Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a pro-Washington, pro-privatization person with a very slick political past. These actors have even included, it seems, a group of six US senators now in Baghdad. They were reported by AP to have, "pressured Iraq's leaders Tuesday to speed up formation of a national unity government, saying American voters were losing patience with Iraqi politicians and increasingly eager to withdraw troops." (Actually, this last part of the communication probably gave considerable heart to the anti-occupation pols in Baghdad, so it might not have entirely served the Bushies' purpose... )

But still, the imperial stance adopted by these senators is somewhat breathtaking... That they go trotting off to a foreign country and openly lecture the politicians there on how to run it?

... But of course the really big gun that Washington and its local viceroy, Zal Khalilzad, are now hoping to bring to bear on the Iraqi Shiite pols is political pressure from Teheran. Will this work in the way the US hopes, I wonder? That is, is Teheran going to be both willing and able to pressure Ja'afari to cede in favor of Abdul-Mahdi?

"Willing" is already, in my mind, a big question. And so is "able." It is probably worth re-reading all the trustworthy sources we have on the relations between Teheran's rulers and the various strands and personalities within the Iraqi UIA, to gain some guidance on these points.(Help, anyone? Reidar Visser, are you there?)

That AP piece cited above, which is by Vanessa Arrington and not their much more experienced and better-connected Hamza Hendawi, has this interesting tidbit near the end:

Al-Jaafari's bid for a second term is opposed by Kurds, Sunni Muslims and many secular politicians who claim he cannot unify the country. The Shiite leadership is under heavy pressure to drop him as candidate.

(Not true, by the way! Ja'afari is opposed by both main Kurdish parties, yes-- though a little bit of US palm-greasing could swiftly change that situation. But he is certainly not opposed by all the Sunni Muslim pols, or by all the secular politicians. I think Arrington's claims here are the result of her listening to too much crude US Embassy agitprop.)

But then, she reports this:

Yet interim Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi told reporters after meeting Iraq's top Shiite cleric Tuesday that "Dr. al-Jaafari is still the (Shiite) Alliance nominee."

The cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged Abdul-Mahdi and another Iraqi politician — Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Shiite bloc in parliament — to speed things up.

The aim should be to "form a national unity government as soon as possible," al-Sistani told the men, according to an aide. "Otherwise the people will not forgive you."

I have to say that the mendacity and Orwellian double-speak of the Bush administration people whenever they say anything about the Iraqis' government-formation process never cease to amaze me. They go on and on about claiming they want to see a "unified government", but are meantime stoking the Kurds and everyone else they have any influence with to resist the formation of the one form of unified government that looks both easily achievable and also democratically legitimate-- i.e., one led by Ibrahim al-Ja'afari. And they launch all kinds of accusation about Ja'afari's "divisiveness" while completely minimizing the bad effects of the anti-Sunni divisiveness perpetrated by SCIRI and its allies, as well as (in his day) by Iyad Allawi.

And... and... and...

Meanwhile, here's a very intriguing quote I found last night when I was reading the March 6, 2006 edition of The New Yorker. It's in an excellent article by Connie Bruck on the Bush administration's various machinations with Iranian expatriate pols over the years, all of which is certainly well worth reading.

Here's what she writes on p.54:

James Dobbins, the Bush administration's special envoy for Afghanistan, told me that in the prewar planning for Iraq "there was an intention that the U.S. would retain troops in Iraq-- not for Iraq stabilization, because that was thought not to be needed,[!] but for coercive diplomacy in the region. Meaning Iran and Syria."

Well, that was then, and now is now. Now, instead of the US being in a position to use "coercive diplomacy" (i.e. diplomacy backed by crude military threats) against Iran, Zal Khalilzad is instead begging Teheran to help him resolve the US's political problems inside Iraq...

Boy, I would love to be a fly on the wall in these negotiations... But much more than that, I would love to see an empowered, united Iraqi government emerging that is committed to winning Iraq's real national independence and sending the occupation army home.

The international courts discussion grows

Well, my article in Foreign Policy on international war-crimes courts has been getting a gratifying amount of attention. My intention in publishing it was, after all, to open up the discussion on this topic to include the previously under-heard point of view that questions or even criticises the general social utility of such courts...

This Thursday, I'm doing a call-in show on the topic on the San Francisco-based radio station KALW-FM. It's an NPR affiliate there. It runs from 1-2 p.m. Eastern Time, so I guess that's 10-11 a.m. Pacific Time.

Tune on in, Bay Area readers. And call in with all your questions.

How many times can I mention JWN in one hour, I wonder?

Also, FP just sent me a bunch of letters that they'll be running in response to my article in, I think, their next issue. Seven letters including only one that's supportive of my argument. Of the six critics, five are law professors. Vested interests, anyone? Okay, I know this is not totally a valid case for me to make-- I realise that these people are also voicing some substantive criticisms of my argument that need to be addressed... And indeed, will be, since FP are giving me a princely 400 words to come back at 'em...

Good. Maybe I could stir things up a bit by mentioning Ramesh Thakur's term "judicial colonialism" in there, somewhere?

So I see that one of these letters is from David Scheffer, now a law prof, previously Pres. Clinton's "Special Ambassador for War Crimes Affairs". Actually, it was hearing David talk about the criminal prosecutions program in post-genocide Rwanda that got me started on that whole entire research project and now soon-to-be book on Transitional Justice.

I remember it as though it were yesterday. It was September 2000, at a conference the Hilton Humanitarian Foundation was holding in Geneva, where David and I were both speakers. I heard him say something like, "Well, the Rwandan government's plan to prosecute all the perpetrators of the genocide is going ahead very well indeed. We're most pleased with their diligence. However, there is a bit of a backlog there, with currently around 135,000 suspects in jail and awaiting trial... And so far, unfortunately, the government has very little capacity to try them, so some of them have been there for more than five years already without having the chance to get into a courtroom... "

And I thought, Oh my G-d, that's huge! Especially given that the whole population of the country was then somewhere under 8 million. So I came away from the conference determined to start looking into it... and... and...

So when do I get to write the mega-long piece about Palestinian politics that I've promised to Deb Chasman at Boston review, you may ask?

Erm... maybe on the 6-hour train-ride going up to NYC this Sunday? Alternatively, I could reframe the piece from being mega-long to being short, sharp, and elegantly composed? Nah. That sounds even harder... Don't worry, I'll think of something... (Maybe blogging less could be an option?)

Palestinian polls, etc.

As part of the research for the big piece I'm writing this week on Palestine, I've found a couple of good portals to Palestinian polling and other info. This is a portal from Hanan Ashrawi's Miftah Center, that strives to aggregate data from all the Palestinian polling centers. It doesn't totally succeed, because it doesn't (yet?) include this poll, conducted March 9-11 by the An-Najah National University Center for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies, which has some interesting data...

Of course, the Palestinian pollsters all came in for huge criticism recently for not having forecast the Hamas victory in the January elections. Dr. Nabil Kukali of the Beit Sahour-based PCPO tried to address this issue in this early-February report. I didn't find totally convincing his claim there that the range of degrees of support that the opinion pollsters had found for Hamasshortly before the election, which were between 29% and 35%, "which lies ... on the tolerated edge of the margin of error." Hamas's final tally was 44% (of the national vote.) H'mmm.

But still, it was brave and honest of Kukali to try to reflect publicly on the problem, which is more than I've seen any of the others do.

I have addressed what I call the "person with the clipboard problem" in doing any opinion surveying, e.g. here, before. In addition, I believe cold-call-type, individualized opinion surveying has many more pitfalls than its practicioners generally admit. (For example, I nearly always refuse to participate, as a matter of principle and personal privacy, in any telephone-based opinion surveys. Call me ornery if you want. But if there's another chunk of people out there like me in this respect, as I'm sure there is, what does this do to the "validity" of such polls?) So I think we'd all do well to take such polls with more than a few grains of salt... What one can perhaps discern from them is trends, at best. (Even if the trend in question is merely one of resistance to poll-answering?)

But I digress.

Another interesting site I found in the course of this small research is Zajel, a useful looking news aggregator produced by the An-Najah University public relations department. Given the fact that, as Jonathan has told us, in the new Hamas-dominated cabinet, "At least four of the 24 ministers are drawn from the Najah faculty," the contents of this site-- which looks to be well maintained-- could give us a window into what is on the minds of people within Najah's general milieu.

Fabulous local peace demo today

The Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice held a fabulous peace demonstration today. We gathered outside Thomas Jefferson's Rotunda bulding at the north end of the University of Virginia "Grounds" and then walked the 2/3 mile along Main Street to the downtown. There were about 250 of us. (My friend David Slezak sat by the side of the road and counted us.)

I had found an old collection of our peace signs in the back of my garage. They augmented the ones we use every week on our Thursday peace vigil-- and we also had some really snappy new "Wage Peace" yard signs that CCPJ is selling/distributing. It was kind of poignant to see some of the old signs that expressed horror over the fact that the number of US dead had reached "1,000."

When we got downtown, our numbers swelled a bit more. Bill Anderson, the President of CCPJ, gave a great speech. Then a dozen members of the C'ville Women's Choir sang some really moving a capella numbers. There was a bit more singing; a man from the local Native-American community spoke a bit, and that was about it.

My friend Sarah reminded us that at the peace demo this time last year there were 55 participants.

I have to say it feels so great to me, after a big trip like the one I made to Israel and Palestine, to come back home-- home to Bill-the-spouse and the dog; home to the Charlottesville Friends Meeting (Quakers); and home to all my buddies in CCPJ.

The one notable problem in today's peace demo, though, was the near-total absence of University of Virginia undergrads. There were a few grad students, but just about none of the younger students. What a pity... We had some great younger kids, though. A couple of them held up home-made signs saying "Bush is stinky." I think our oldest participant was Jay Worrall, a stalwart of the local movements for social justice, inter-racial reconciliation, and peace who turned 90 earlier this month. (Jay is also a beloved member of our Quaker Meeting.)

Will there still be US troops in Iraq a year from now? I regret to say that I expect so. But if there are, then you can bet that CCPJ will be organizing another march.

ICC "gets" its first man

I just wrote a post over at Transitional Justice Forum about the ICC get its hands on its first indictee. He is Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

I raise a question there as to whether the timing of this is in some way a reaction to the fiascos of (1) the death of Milosevic and (2)the continuing deterioration of Saddam's trial in Baghdad, both of which developments have started to show that the broad "project" of using high-profile war-crimes trials to try to help heal grave political conflict has not been as successful as many in the human-rights movement previously hoped...

I'll be doing an hour-long call-in show on this issue, on some west-coast (US) -based radio station, later this week. Heck, I should probably get some more details about that so I can invite you all to tune in... All this is connected to the article I have on international war-crimes trials in the current issue of Foreign Policy.

Btw, I have now found a late-proof PDF version of this article and have posted it into the archive here, with a link on the JWN sidebar. (Readers should simply ignore the meaningless Latin, which is used there as a space-holder... Also, the blank spaces on the pages, which are where the mag's ads go.)

So now you can comment on the FP piece, here-- or on my post on the ICC, over there at TJF.

Marking this anniversary

One of the best ways to mark the third anniversary of this war: go read this, by Riverbend.

Another good way to do so, given the many organic links between the Iraq war and the Palestinian-Israeli situation: go read Laila's description of the noose of Israel's punitive economic siege tightening around Gaza.

Thank G-d for the blogosphere, which brings us these fresh, un-mediated voices of people-- including talented observers and writers who are women-- who are living in zones of conflict and stress.

The other thing I'm going to do today to mark the war anniversary, is take part in our local pro-peace march here in C'ville.

Zahhar as FM: it's official

Here's Jazeera English's report on the new PA cabinet list. Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar is, as was earlier predicted, the new Foreign Minister-designate. Which makes my recent interview with him all the more relevant.

Jazeera tells us that Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister-designate, told a joint news conference on Sunday that:

"I met Brother Abu Mazen (Abbas) and officially submitted to him the list of the cabinet"...

"The president is going to study the make-up of the government and its programme," he said, adding that the atmosphere of the meeting had been "positive".

The 24-member cabinet includes one woman and one Christian.

I wish Hamas had done a bit better on both those counts. Of course, the fact that the US and Israel mounted threats and other forms of pressure against many non-Hamas parties and individuals, in an attempt to have them not join a Hamas-led government, means that Haniya and Co. probably didn't have a whole lot of qualified female or Christian ministrables to choose from.

Note: these transliterations of the names as used here are probably not definitive. Some of them look very weird to me. Including I am still convinced that Zahhar needs two "h"s.

Iraq war launch on trial in Britain

Three years into the US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Blair government's decision to join the invasion effort is on trial in an obscure courtroom in Aldershot, west of London.

The actual case is a military-law prosecution of a New Zealand-born RAF medic called Malcolm Kendall-Smith, who is being tried for refusing to be deployed on a further tour to Iraq (which would be his third.) The charge is that he's "refusing to obey a lawful command". His defense is that the order to deploy is not lawful because-- as new papers recently revealed in Britain seem to indicate-- the original order to launch the war in which he's being asked to participate was itself not lawful.

The dedicated NZ journo Jon R. Stephenson had a piece in today's Sunday Star-Times describing the case, which continues.

Kendall-Smith's case is particularly interesting to me because there was another New Zealander, 90 years ago, who took exemplary and extremely brave actions in pursuit of his desire to be treated as a conscientious objector to all war. He was Archibald Baxter, a Christianity-inspired pacifist who was subjected to the most horrendous punishments and abuses by the New Zealand Army, which refused to recognize anyone's right to be a Conscientious Objector (CO) at the time.

Including, they sent Baxter to the front in France, completely against his will; and when he refused orders there to wear a uniform they gave him "Field Punishment Number 1" (I think it was), which essentially involved tying him nearly naked to a pole in a yard for a number of days, in a snowstorm.

Like Kendall-Smith, Baxter came from Dunedin in the South Island. Here's a link to info about Baxter's very moving memoir.

... So I'm pretty sure that Kendall-Smith won't face any punishment as brutal as that one. Indeed, according to this piece in The Independent, former SAS soldier Ben Griffin, who recently resigned because of his objections to the war, "had expected to face a court martial for his refusal to serve-- but instead was discharged with a glowing testimonial."

Does Kendall-Smith's defense have any chance of succeeding? It seems doubtful. But I wish the trial were getting more coverage in the MSM in both the UK and the US. Here, though, is a fairly full report from today's Independent.

Interview with Zahhar

AP is reporting today that Mahmoud Zahhar, one of the co-founders of Hamas, "most likely will be named foreign minister, according to a preliminary list of Cabinet ministers given to The Associated Press by officials in Hamas and the PFLP."

So I thought I should quickly write up the interview I conducted with Dr. Zahhar in his mosque-side Gaza home, after the end of evening prayers on March 6.  In it, he oozed self-confidence, and a determination that the Hamas government would not be making the kinds of concessions to Israel and the west that were what, in the view of many Hamas supporters, had led Mahmoud Abbas's Fateh Party into such a non-productive and humiliating dead end.

Zahhar described a Hamas program that for the next two years would focus on rebuilding the Palestinians' own society as much as possible, while quite possibly redirecting Gaza's economic links away from Israel and towards Egypt, and that would not necessarily involve any negotiations at all with Israel.  At one point, when I asked if Hamas could do anything to help reassure Israelis, he answered flatly, "They should be scared, because whenever they felt a sense of security they felt it would be okay to make aggressions... When they felt insecurity, was when they withdrew.  And that was a big victory for us."

We sat in a large, ground-floor reception room, near a corner in which stood two large flags: the green Hamas flag and the four-colored flag of Palestine.  An aide brought us first coffee, then tea, from a small kitchen at the far end of the room.  

Next to the kitchen I could see, incongruously, a small, beat-up Japanese sedan parked in an indoor garage that was not walled off from the reception room at all.  At one point,  Zahhar pointed to it.  "That's my car," he said.  "Did you see the expensive cars that the Fateh leaders drive?"  Later, he said, "The people saw the sacrifice that the Hamas leaders made for the people's interest."  He himself lost his son, Khaled, who was killed, along with a Zahhar bodyguard, when Israeli F-16s dropped an 1,100-pound bomb on his home in September 2003. That bombing was ordered the day after Hamas suicide bombers killed 15 young people-- including a number of soldiers-- at two locations inside Israel.  

Zahhar was at the door of his home when the big bomb dropped.  He, his wife, and one of their daughters were among those injured in the bombing.

He speaks English well.  (I think he received some of his training as a physician in Britain.)   We exchanged greetings, and I asked how he was.  He sounded happy and confident as he responded, "I feel good today."   He referred to some far-reaching constitutional and administrative changes that the lame-duck, Fateh-dominated Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) enacted February 13, just before it dissolved and made way for the new PLC, elected January 25, in which Hamas held 74 of the 132 seats. He said,

I feel good because on February 13 the Fateh Council tried to change everything. But today in the Council, we overturned everything they tried to do there-- and then they withdrew from the Council! You know, we're going to reform everything here, and we're not going to allow the Fateh people to wrecks our plan to do that.

If Fateh doesn't work with us, then we can proceed with just the independents and the left parties and factions.  We can do it even without Abu Mazen. We invited them to join a national unity government, but now, we've heard that they decided not to come with us.

I noted that of the 150,00 or so people on the PA's payroll, who include around 60,000 people in the various 'security' services, many had reportedly gotten their jobs through Fateh's patronage networks, and suggested that many of these individuals might be scared of the prospect of Hamas's people coming in to run the ministries.  He said,

We're not going to touch the jobs of the Fateh people in government jobs at all-- provided they are are actually working at their jobs.  But we know there are thousands of people on the payroll who are false employees-- they don't even show up to work.  If we sort those out quite quickly, then we can already save a lot of money.

I asked about the policy a Hamas government would adopt towards the peace process with Israel.

We are speaking about nothing!  There is no peace process!  That was the mistake of Fateh: they believed there was a 'peace process'.  Fateh recognized Israel on 78% of Palestine [i.e., Israel within its pre-1967 borders], and Israel recognized the PLO and the PA on not one single inch of land.  Saeb Erakat [a key Fateh peace negotiator] even said that 'negotiations are our strategic goal.'  But they got nothing.

And yes, the Israelis tried to make problems between Hamas and Fateh.  But we are the majority.  Western research centers were saying that Hamas supporters made up somewhere between 12% and 18% of the population-- but these figures were fabricated.

(In fact, Hamas won 44% of the popular vote in the nationwide portion of the election. Fateh won 41%.  But Hamas's far greater organizational discipline brought it a stronger presence within the PLC than those raw proportions would indicate.)

Zahhar said, "People understood Fateh's ways, and their goals, and they clearly chose us as the alternative to that.  We used a clear, straightforward new language, that people responded to."

He seemed very confident that, despite the campaign that the Bush administration and other western powers were waging, to isolate and marginalize the Palestinians' new Hamas leadership, Hamas would survive-- and indeed, that the western countries would end up talking to Hamas:

We saw during Condoleezza Rice's recent visit to Arab countries, when she was trying to line up support from the Arab governments for Washington's policy of shunning us, in fact she was very unsuccessful.  From some of the Arab countries she visited, we got some very important statements [of dissent from her approach.]  From President Mubarak, from Saud al-Faisal, etc.

So whatever the attitude of the west now, they will come and talk to us in the end.  

The Arab countries are all ready to help us, and give us the support we need.  They know the difference between Fateh and Hamas.  Fateh ran such destructive policies towards the Arab states-- with Jordan, with Lebanon, during the Iran-Iraq war. Their history in the region is one full of bloodshed, and engagement in axes against this or that Arab state.  But the Arab states know that we are not playing with their security.

Besides, our phenomenon is present and known within the Arab countries.

I think this was a reference to the various national branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, the broad Islamist movement that incubated Hamas.  (It is not immediately clear to me whether the existence of large bodies of popular support for these other branches of the Brotherhood would necessarily incline US-supported  governments like those in Egypt or Jordan to be more eager to support Hamas-- or whether it make them more cautious about doing so.  But Zahhar was clearly portraying it as helpful to them.)

He said,

We also have strong support from public opinion in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.  We are much more respected even than Hizbullah [in lebanon]-- because people know that Hizbullah had two states that stood with them, but we are completely on our own.

Our strategy right now is twofold: to 'clean the Palestinian house', and also to clean up our people's relations with the Arab countries.  In our own house here, we need to find a good way to make the social and economic investments that are so badly needed here, and also to clean Palestinian society from collaborators.

He did not specify who these collaborators were.

I asked whether he thought Israel would allow a Hamas-led government to proceed with its internal 'house-cleaning' and socioeconomic reconstruction project.  He answered with some scorn in his voice:

Israel won't 'allow' Hamas to pursue our goals here.  They didn't 'allow' us to do so in the past-- but we did so anyway!

I asked how he foresaw a Hamas government proceeding in the tricky arena of international trade relations.  Ever since the birth of the PA in 1994, its economy has been tied to Israel's much larger, much wealthier economy through an agreement called the ' Paris Agreement ', which  delineates a single 'customs envelope' around the two countries.  Israel exercises complete control over the movement of all goods into and out of Gaza and the West Bank-- and this control continues, even regarding Gaza, and even after last summer's withdrawal of all of Israel's troops and settlers from the body of the Gaza Strip.  This control over all avenues for external trade has given Israel a stranglehold over the PA's economy that is even tighter than the one that apartheid South Africa used to exercise over its Bantustans.

The Paris agreement also allows Israel to control all aspects of bilateral trade between the two entities, a fact that it has exploited by treating the Palestinian areas as a captive markets for its own goods while placing extremely high, often insuperable, barriers on the Palestinians' ability to export their goods to Israel.

Zahhar spoke with calm determination about the prospect of Gaza breaking out of the Paris Agreement.  "An opening of our trade links to Egypt and through our seaport is a first option for us," he said.  

The Israelis have violated all the economic agreements from the Paris Agreement through to the Rafah Agreement [which was concluded with Secretary Rice's help just last November].  So we are not obligated to remain within them.

If we push ahead with regard to opening our border with Egypt, we can certainly make it work to the benefit of both sides.  You know, in September, right after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza,when our border with Egypt was unsecured-- we learned that our people spent $8 million in El-Arish in just ten days, because the prices of everything in Egypt are so much lower than the prices the Israelis impose on us here.

I mentioned a concern that some Palestinians had voiced: that if Gaza broke out of the Paris Agreement, this would split it off even more from the West Bank-- an area that remains under much tighter and more pervasive Israeli control than Gaza.  Zahhar was unfazed.  "Gaza is already cut from the West Bank," he said.  He noted that any switch by the Gazans from the customs envelope with Israel to a new economic link with Egypt, "should of course be by arrangement with Egypt."

He was harshly critical of the record of the Fateh-dominated security services:

We have 60,000 policemen and they can't even arrest one drug seller!  Now, the situation has become so chaotic that many families are even arming themselves  Everywhere, there's insecurity.

Our government will really need to work on many different things in parallel.  We need to get investment from the Middle East.  We need to build up many projects here: in the municipalities, in the health services, in education.  And at the same time, we need to speak politically with others, to win the rights of Palestinians both outside and inside Palestine.  We are their father.

We know the West Bank will continue to suffer from occupation, and the people there must resist that.

I asked what his expectation was regarding the policies Israel would follow after its election, March 28.

I expect that after the Israeli election there will be a further Israeli withdrawl in the West Bank...  You know, when Israel undertakes unilateral withdrawals, they are costless to us, because they do not tie us up in negotiations.  They are a big victory for us!

Nearly all the Hamas leaders and activists whom I interviewed viewed the prospect of  negotiations with Israel with considerable wariness, referring to Fateh's record in such negotiations and concluding that those negtoations had just been a very damaging trap.  But Zahhar was the most outspoken on this issue of any of them.  "The conflict should not be solved in our age, because the power equation here is not yet balanced," he said at one point. "... If the Israelis leave us alone a while, and want to come to talk to us later, then okay."

I noted that many Israelis were extremely fearful of Hamas, and asked him whether there was not something Hamas might do to use persuasion to budge Israelis-- or at least, those on the left who might be amenable to such persuasion-- toward more openness to Hamas's position.

He said,

What is the difference between Israeli extreme rightists and extreme leftists?  On central issues like Jerusalem and the right of return, there is no difference!  How can we persuade people who took away all our rights?

Mr. Arafat believed he could, and he helped some of these parties, even with cash.  But look where it got him!

They should be scared, because whenever they felt a sense of security they felt it would be okay to make aggressions, like in 1956, 1967, 1982.

When they felt insecurity, was when they withdrew.  And that was a big victory for us.

Later, he said about the election campaign then just getting underway in Israel, "We understand the political map in Israel: to get elected there, you need to have blood on your hands.  The only one who didn't was Shimon Peres-- and he didn't get elected."

He claimed that Hamas had received expressions of support for its position from many prominent political figures in the Arab world, including veteran Nasserist Mohamed Hassanein Haikal and others whom he described as "historic leaders".  He added,

Nowadays, we see many countries inviting us to visit.  But when Abu Mazen went to Qatar to ask for financial support there, they turned him down.

These days, the US presence in Iraq is helping the Palestinian people, because the failure of the US project there will certainly weaken Israel.  Also, the picture of the US as oppressing people-- at Abu Ghraib, or Guantanamo, or elsewhere-- all this increases anti-US attitudes.

Also, this issue with the [Danish] cartoons raised the feelings of Muslims against the West in general...

You know, when the PLO was hit in Lebanon in 1982, by the Israelis, no-one helped them.  Why?  because they had previously behaved so badly toward so many Arab peoples.  We are different.  Hamas is welcomed everywhere in the Arab world.

He described the visit that Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashaal had recently made to Moscow as

a breakthrough in our relations with the Quartet. And now, we are hoping to have a breakthrough with the Europeans, because they will not be prepared to follow the US forever.  You know, the boycott against Danish goods here in the Middle East reminds people of the 1973 oil boycott...

I asked what he predicted the Palestinian situation would look like in another two years.

I see a further Israeli withdrawal in the West Bank.  There will be a flourishing in our eceonomy and in our society.  We'll be represented in the international community, and people around the world will see a good example of how a people without resources can build strong industries.

He notably made no mention of peace talks with Israel during that time.

Almost alone among the Hamas leaders I talked to, Zahhar said that the victory the organization won in the January election had not come as any surprise to him.  "I told the Egyptians before that I thought we'd get 70 seats.  They said no, 40 or so.  So we got more than 70!"  He said that people who consider all Muslims to be terrorists were "deeply shocked" by the election result.  "But when they see how we run the institutions here, they'll be very surprised."

I asked about Hamas's relations with the Christians in Palestinian society, and with those Palestinian Muslims who are not as religiously observant as the Hamas people.  He referred to the electoral alliances they had entered into, with people in both of those camps, and noted that those alliances had worked well for everyone concerned.  "People will become persuaded by our actions," he said confidently.

They will stop opposing us once they see what we can achieve.  But what is the ideal of Fateh? As everyone can now see, they only have one ideal, and that is money.

I asked about Hamas's relations with Al-Qaeda.  He said,

I want to tell the American people: we are not against the American people, but we do note those individuals who support Israel's aggressions against us.

The Muslims are not against any other people.  In history we have been the most tolerant, and we have had relations with all other civilizations.  We believe in cooperation, not conflict.

Americans should understand: We are a moderate organization.  We are not Qaeda at all.

I had a few more questions.  But it was time for the next set of prayers.  (Actually, in the middle of the interview, the muezzin had sounded balefully out from the mosque across the street, and Zahhar took three or four minutes to say one set of prayers quietly under his breath, as he sat there in the chair next to me.  The rhythms of the prayer day are very important to the Hamas people I've encountered.)  On this occasion, though, Zahhar said he needed to go across to the mosque to pray. He also had another political meeting right after. I took my leave.

... I found Zahhar to be forthright, smart, self-confident, and fairly inflexible.  But above all I found him determined.  Earlier, one of his colleagues in the Hamas leadership had expressed quiet satisfaction to me that, though in 2003-2004 the Israelis tried to wipe out all of Hamas's top leadership-- and in the course of that, they did succeed in killing Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and four or five other top leaders-- "Still, we not only survived that wave of assassinations, but we also, in the election, showed that our organization emerged from it intact, and strong."

So maybe some of Zahhar's determination and self-confidence comes from the fact that he has personally embodied that spirit of tough survival.  Or maybe it comes from his religious faith.  Anyway, if Mahmoud Zahhar is indeed going to be the Palestinians' next Foreign Minister, the world's other diplomats will find him to be a man of clear vision and intelligence-- but very little of the kind of flexibility that the West is now seeking.

Tom Fox's last journey

Susan (Dancewater) over at Today in Iraq has posted the text of an email she got from Doug Pritchard, the Toronto-based co-director of the Christian Peacemaker teams, about Tom's last journey.

Did you know that CPT still has an active (remaining) team in Iraq, which as of mid-February had seven members? You can read about some of their activities here.

Anyway, here's Doug's email:

The U.S. Embassy arranged for Beth Pyles, a member of the CPT Iraq team, to travel to Anaconda, and she was able to keep vigil with Tom for the next 36 hours until his departure. Meanwhile, CPT’ers Rich Meyer and Anne Montgomery traveled to Dover [air-force base in Delaware, US, to which the bodies of deceased US soldiers are sent], and have been in the vicinity since 5 p.m. Mar. 11, keeping vigil and awaiting Tom's arrival. Pyles was present on the tarmac at Anaconda as Tom's coffin was loaded onto the plane for Dover. She reported that his coffin was draped in a U.S. flag. This is unusual for a civilian, but Tom may not have been uncomfortable with this since he had always called his nation to live out the high ideals which it professed. Iraqi detainees who die in US custody are also transported to Dover for autopsies and forensics. On this plane, right beside Tom's coffin, was the coffin of an Iraqi detainee. So Tom accompanied an Iraqi detainee in death, just as he had done so often in life.

At Tom's departure, Pyles read out from the Gospel of John, "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it" (1:5). In honour of Tom's Iraqi companion, she spoke the words called out repeatedly from the mosques of Baghdad during the Shock and Awe bombing campaign in March 2003, "allah akhbar" (God is greater). She concluded the sending with words from the Jewish scriptures, "The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD" (Job 1:21).

Dawn broke. The contingent of Puerto Rican soldiers nearby saluted. The plane taxied away. Venus, the morning star, shone brightly overhead as the night faded away. Godspeed you, Tom, on your final journey home to your family and friends.

Trouble in Fatehland

Oops, I knew the Israeli raid on the Jericho jail was a major humiliation for Abu Mazen, but now AP is reporting that several officials in his own Fateh Party are calling on him to resign because of it.

The report says:

During a meeting of senior Fatah officials Thursday evening, several suggested to Abbas that he resign and dissolve the Palestinian Authority, said Taysir Nasrallah, a senior Fatah activist from the West Bank city of Nablus.

Were the Palestinian government to be dissolved, Israel would be forced to step in as an occupying power and assume direct responsibility for the Palestinians. A dissolution of the Palestinian Authority also would render the victory of the Islamic militant Hamas in January parliament elections meaningless.

Well, who knows how this will turn out? Personally, I doubt strongly if Abu Mazen will do this. But if he did, would Hamas then be in a position of trying to preserve the PA?

Hamas's negotiating stance

Amira Hass has two interesting stories in today's HaAretz that describe important elements of the stance Hamas has adopted with regard to the two major challenges it faces: forming a Palestinian government and dealing with the international community. (Though actually, the "international" issue is an intimate part of the intra-Palestinian negotiations, too.)

In this piece is about the internal Palestinian negotiations. Hass tells us that Fateh's Central Committee decided late Thursday not to take up Hamas's invitation to join a national unity government.

She said that Hamas officials were still hopeful that some of the smaller parties/lists represented in the parliament might join a Hamas-led government. But she indicated that this effort also looked as though it would be unsuccessful, referring to, "The factions' apparent refusal to join a Hamas-led government."

She reported that the first of the three successive draft proposals that Hamas presented to the small parties (and perhaps also to Fateh as well?), "discussed considering negotiations with Israel only if the latter first recognizes the rights of the Palestinian people and guarantees a full withdrawal to 1967 lines."

This accords exactly with what Ismail Haniyeh, Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi, and Ghazi Hamad all told me on my recent trip, though some of them indicated that this "exchange of recognitions" could also be more simultaneous and reciprocal than Hass indicates.

If Hamas is indeed prepared to commit to a recognition of Israel, even though conditional, and if the international community is truly committed to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, then this Hamas position would surely give a good-faith international mediator a substantial starting point for brokering some kind of a simultaneous, reciprocal exchange of recognitions.

That second "if" there might seem like a big one. But why on earth should anyone in the international community expect Palestinians or anyone else to provide any kind of recognition of Israel having rights outside of its own national borders?

Hass reported the response of the Palestinian parties to Hamas's political overture as follows:

Fatah has said it cannot join a government that does not accept the "strategic" principle of negotiating with Israel, and Fayad has said he will not join a government without Fatah.

Other factions did not insist on negotiations, but wanted the basic principles to mention the Palestine Liberation Organization and its status as the representative of the Palestinian people, as well as the international decisions regarding a resolution of the conflict and a Palestinian state.

Fatah and Independent Palestine also want a mention of the 1988 PLO's declaration of independence, which, like the international decisions, imply recognition of Israel.

When I talked with the Hamas people, they were pretty scathing about the formula that Fateh people like Saeb Erakat have used, about having a "strategic" commitment to negotiations.

In this second piece, Hass reports on two indications of Hamas's policy regarding the conflict with Israel. She writes about the interview that CBS News conducted with the Gaza-based PM-designate Ismail Haniyeh... Oh, here is the CBS version of that, from which this is an excerpt:

though Hamas has sent suicide bombers into Israel, Haniyeh says he's never done any such thing and would discourage his kids from doing so.

"I've never sent anyone on a suicide mission," he said. "If one of my sons came to me and asked me that, I wouldn't even consider giving him my blessing."

Hamas hasn't sent any suicide bombers into Israel for more than six months. But if it restarts its terror campaign, Haniyeh will be at the top of Israel's hit list. He narrowly escaped assassination once before — three years ago, an Israeli F-16 bombed a house where he was meeting other Hamas leaders.

So what would it take for Hamas to renounce violence and recognize Israel's right to exist?

"That depends on Israel's recognition of a Palestinian state within the boundaries of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem," he said. "Only then can there be room for talks."

Israel calls all that "double talk." It says Haniyeh is the smiling face of Hamas' public relations campaign to soften its murderous image in the West.

But when asked if he could foresee a day when he would be invited to the White House to sign a peace agreement with the Israelis, he answered, "Let's hope so."

Words of hope and not hatred are a new vocabulary for Hamas.

So anyway, Amira Hass reports on that. She also reports on a speech the Damascus-based head of Hamas's overall political bureau, Khaled Mashaal, made at a memorial gatherial there Thursday night. (She doesn't provide a source for this, but I assume it could be in the Damascus or Beirut press... I didn't see it in Hayat... If any readers can provide a link to an Arabic-language original report or transcript of this, I'd be grateful.)

Here's what Hass writes about Mashaal's speech:

Running the Palestinian Authority will not deflect Hamas from its overriding goal of pursuing a long-term struggle with Israel, the leader-in-exile of the militant Islamist movement said in Damascus.

"Being in power is only a means to an end for Hamas," Khaled Meshal told a memorial gathering for a deceased Palestinian politician on Thursday night. "Power is not our ultimate goal.

"If it becomes one, let power go to hell. It will not hold us back from our targets which we hold dear," he said.

"We and the Zionists have a date with destiny. If they want a fight, we are ready for it. If they want a war, we are the sons of war. If they want a struggle, we are for it to the end," the Damascus-based leader Meshal declared.

"We have more stamina than Israel and we will defeat it, God willing," he said.

He also took a swipe at Fatah for its interim peace deals with Israel in the 1990s that led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"Those who talked about setting up a state before liberation lost both country and land," Meshaal said. "A country can only exist on liberated land."

Hamas rejected the 1993 Oslo accord and later Israel-PLO agreements which were never fully implemented and which have unravelled further since a Palestinian uprising began in 2000.

Meshal upheld the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to the homes they lost in the 1948 war - a red-button issue that has bedevilled past peace negotiations.

"I tell all the Palestinians: you will return to your homeland and nobody will stop you," he said.

"Our fate is to combine resistance and politics, but resistance remains the basis and politics only a branch."

Hamas has carried out nearly 60 suicide bombings against Israelis since 2000 but has largely adhered to a year-old truce.

It has said talks with Israel would be a waste of time.

Though I still haven't even started writing the longer piece I'll be writing on this whole question, I'd say that Hamas's negotiating position, as articulated (in slightly but not very different ways) by both Mashaal and Haniyeh, is very similar to the one Hizbullah pursued in Lebanon. Both positions feature, in particular, a strong aversion to getting drawn into interim negotiations that have any political content (as opposed to agreements that are merely technical ceasefires), and that could be seen as constraining in any way the organization's ability to continue its "legitimate resistance struggle" to regain the whole of its claimed land.

But how big is the land that Hamas is claiming? This is a key question.

Many of the Hamas people I spoke to indicated strongly that the pre-1967 boundaries of the West Bank and Gaza have real meaning for them. But I think it would be far better for them to become much more explicit about this so that their own people and the rest of the world could understand more clearly what it is they're fighting for. I recognize this is not easy for them, given: (1) The large numerical preponderance of 1948 refugees within all the key Palestinian constituencies except the West Bank; (2) the strength and clarity of their own previous claims to all of Mandate Palestine, and (3) the humiliating and abysmal failure of the Fateh-led project to establish a state in the West Bank and Gaza.

But still, as I said above, if the international community is truly committed to helping find a final resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, then there is something in Hamas's emerging stance to work with.

What's more, this "something" is completely in line with the position of the international community regarding the illegality of all of Israel's moves to annex and otherwise incorporate huge chunks of land that remain, 39 years after 1967, occupied territory. So it strikes me that international negotiators have no reason to refuse to engage with (and of course, to probe more deeply into) the Hamas position. Indeed, in the interests not just of local peace, but also of regional and global peace, I think they are duty-bound to do so.

39 years is a heck of a long time for these two peoples to have had to suffer the consequences of the international community's irresolution on this issue, and the failure of 39 years of Washington's highly partisan and patently unsuccessful domination of this diplomacy.

Poll on CBS News site on the war

CBS News' website has a little poll asking "Iraq, three years later; Was it worth it?" I just voted "no" and thereby discovered that 68.82% of respondents there agreed with me. Maybe if enough of us also voted there we could push that percentage even higher!

Nir Rosen from Iraq

The latest (March-April) issue of Boston Review has a riveting piece of reporting from Iraq by Nir Rosen. Nir is a fearless young reporter who has already racked up huge amounts of experience (and gathered good contacts) in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and other war zones.

This report includes interviews with several Sunni political leaders as well as some high-ranking Sadrists. It was conducted mainly during last Ramadan (October-Novermber). Though it's a bit dated, I think it still has real value.

Major new article on the pro-Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are two of the most important thinkers in the "realist" school of US foreign-policy analysts. Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Walt is the Academic Dean at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he holds the Robert and Renee Belfer Professorship in International Affairs.

These two men are not, as you can see, fuzzy-headed liberals who are marginal to the mainstream of policy discourse in the United States.

Now, they have a major new article in the upcoming issue of the London Review of Books on the power and detrimental role that the pro-Israel lobby in Washington has played over the years. (The LRB piece has no footnotes. But you can access a fully documented, PDF version of the longer article from which it was excerpted, if you click here. 211 endnotes, many of them very lengthy, to document just 48 pages of text... These guys are empiricists after my own heart!)

Here is some of what they argue in the LRB version:

Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

And this:

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy. [Emphasis by HC there, to signal my complete agreement, based on my own extensive experience.]

A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.

Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’

AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.

There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’

AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’

Regarding media-muzzling, the authors note calmly, "It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one." Indeed, I believe they tried to get the piece published in the US first, but failed.

They add:

Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’

News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.

The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy...

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

... Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

And this very important point:

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’

Actually, the whole of that section on the role of Israel and the Lobby in pushing the Bushies into the invasion of Iraq is very clearly and calmly written, and well worth reading.

Finally, this:

Can the Lobby’s power be curtailed? One would like to think so, given the Iraq debacle, the obvious need to rebuild America’s image in the Arab and Islamic world, and the recent revelations about AIPAC officials passing US government secrets to Israel. One might also think that Arafat’s death and the election of the more moderate Mahmoud Abbas would cause Washington to press vigorously and even-handedly for a peace agreement. In short, there are ample grounds for leaders to distance themselves from the Lobby and adopt a Middle East policy more consistent with broader US interests. In particular, using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians would help advance the cause of democracy in the region.

But that is not going to happen – not soon anyway. AIPAC and its allies (including Christian Zionists) have no serious opponents in the lobbying world. They know it has become more difficult to make Israel’s case today, and they are responding by taking on staff and expanding their activities. Besides, American politicians remain acutely sensitive to campaign contributions and other forms of political pressure, and major media outlets are likely to remain sympathetic to Israel no matter what it does.

The Lobby’s influence causes trouble on several fronts. It increases the terrorist danger that all states face – including America’s European allies. It has made it impossible to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a situation that gives extremists a powerful recruiting tool, increases the pool of potential terrorists and sympathisers, and contributes to Islamic radicalism in Europe and Asia.

Equally worrying, the Lobby’s campaign for regime change in Iran and Syria could lead the US to attack those countries, with potentially disastrous effects. We don’t need another Iraq. At a minimum, the Lobby’s hostility towards Syria and Iran makes it almost impossible for Washington to enlist them in the struggle against al-Qaida and the Iraqi insurgency, where their help is badly needed.

There is a moral dimension here as well. Thanks to the Lobby, the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the Occupied Territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians. This situation undercuts Washington’s efforts to promote democracy abroad and makes it look hypocritical when it presses other states to respect human rights. US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation appear equally hypocritical given its willingness to accept Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which only encourages Iran and others to seek a similar capability.

Besides, the Lobby’s campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy. Silencing sceptics by organising blacklists and boycotts – or by suggesting that critics are anti-semites – violates the principle of open debate on which democracy depends. The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyses the entire process of democratic deliberation. Israel’s backers should be free to make their case and to challenge those who disagree with them, but efforts to stifle debate by intimidation must be roundly condemned.

Finally, the Lobby’s influence has been bad for Israel. Its ability to persuade Washington to support an expansionist agenda has discouraged Israel from seizing opportunities – including a peace treaty with Syria and a prompt and full implementation of the Oslo Accords – that would have saved Israeli lives and shrunk the ranks of Palestinian extremists. Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights certainly has not made Israel more secure, and the long campaign to kill or marginalise a generation of Palestinian leaders has empowered extremist groups like Hamas, and reduced the number of Palestinian leaders who would be willing to accept a fair settlement and able to make it work. Israel itself would probably be better off if the Lobby were less powerful and US policy more even-handed.

There is a ray of hope, however. Although the Lobby remains a powerful force, the adverse effects of its influence are increasingly difficult to hide. Powerful states can maintain flawed policies for quite some time, but reality cannot be ignored for ever. What is needed is a candid discussion of the Lobby’s influence and a more open debate about US interests in this vital region. Israel’s well-being is one of those interests, but its continued occupation of the West Bank and its broader regional agenda are not. Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided US support and could move the US to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel’s long-term interests as well.

Well, let's hope they are right to argue that "reality cannot be ignored forever." But US politicians (and most MSM editors) have done a darn' good job of ignoring it for the past 39 years. One big key to success, I think, is to push for meaningful campaign-finance reform in the country. This would help to eliminate or at least severely reduce the role of money in US elections. (Of course, most outlets of the MSM would have grave reservations about this, because a large chunk of their income is derived from election-related advertising.)

Campaign finance reform would also be good for democratic life in the US, altogether.

But until we can achieve that, or find other ways to reduce the heinous, anti-democratic role played by AIPAC and all its affiliates in US public life, one really good role is played by those who like Mearsheimer and Walt are prepared merely to tell the truth about what has been happening in our country's politics.... Thanks for your labors on this, guys!

CSM column on the Israeli election

The CSM today published my column on the Israeli election (here and here). It underlines the fact that in this election, the main platform plank of the front-running party is that, as I write, it will,

turns its back on 58 years of Israeli commitment to negotiating peace with its neighbors, promising voters instead that a Kadima-led government is ready and eager to draw Israel's borders quite unilaterally.

Perhaps I was too generous. Perhaps I should have written, "58 years of Israeli avowals of commitment to negotiating peace"... Since if there had been a real commitment to a negotiated peace over these past 39 years, then successive Israeli governments would surely not have devoted a lot of effort and resources to implanting lavish, Jews-only colonies in the heart of the occupied territories?

But still, until now, those avowals of committment to a negotiated peace have been politically important in many ways. Crucially, they have allowed the US a big "in" to play the key role of "third party mediator" that since late 1973 has dominated all attempts at negotiations.

But if Israel-- the major beneficiary of US "foreign aid" funding over all those decades-- is now openly saying, "to heck with negotiations", then where does that leave the US? Merely as Israel's main backer, I would say, without any longer also enjoying the fig-leaf of being the main peace-broker between it and its neighbors.

As I note in the column, Olmert has said that his unilateralist plans

had been shared with the Bush administration, which "refrained from public comment." He implied this gave him at least an yellow light to go ahead.

I believe that those fearless members of the US press corps who attend State Department or White House briefings should follow up aggressively on this issue. If I were one of them, here are the kinds of question I would ask:

-- Is it true that envoys of Mr. Olmert have shared with you his plans for unilaterally delineating Israel's final borders by 2010?

-- What is your reaction to this proposal?

-- What impact do you think this proposal has on the US's long-held commitment to the idea that all details of the final status between Israel and the Palestinians, including the border and all other issues, should be the subject of negotiation between the parties?

-- If an Israeli government proceeds with this expansionist plan, what impact will this have on US readiness to continue according Israel massive political and financial support?

-- What do you say to President Mahmoud Abbas and those other Palestinians who have taken great political risks over a number of years to promote and pursue the path of winning a negotiated peace with Israel?

Well, I'm sure you get my drift. But I doubt if many members of the inside-the-beltway press corps will push very hard on questions like these.

By the way, I wrote the piece before Olmert's latest "unilateralist spectacular", the raid on the Jericho prison. Laila el-Haddad's been doing some great blogging about it. (1, 2, 3.)

New Visser paper on Sistani's role

I've just gotten the time to read this paper, which Iraqi-Shiite affairs expert Reidar Visser sent me. It is his assessment of the role that Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has played in Iraqi politics in recent years-- and of the role that Sistani might be expected to continue to play in the future.

Visser is a careful, apparently very knowledgeable historian. This paper, which runs 33 pages of PDF file, single-spaced, is thoroughly documented and (for me) well worth the time it took to give it a fairly careful read. Long-time JWN readers will know that I've long been intrigued with trying to understand Sistani's role-- and I've made a few of my own guesses, some probably fairly wrong-headed, along the way. (That's why I really appreciate being able to profit from Visser's careful scholarship.)

He is fairly adamant about his methodology. In an atmosphere where many people claim on occasion to speak for Sistani, Visser tries to restrict himself to a consideration of the bayans that are issued directly by the Ayatollah himself, usually through his own website. (Interestingly, we learn toward the end of Visser's paper that the site is maintained by Jawad Shahristani, who is the head of Sistani's office in Qom, Iran. Visser notes that this "entails certain editorial prerogatives, and asks the "heretical but necessary question" as to whether these prerogatives have allowed Shahristani "to pursue a Sistani policy of his own... [O]nce a pronouncement is produced, the decision whether to publish it or not may well have been controlled from Iran as much as from Iraq." But he concludes that, "As of today there is however no convincing documentary basis for insinuations of this kind."-- pp.26-27.)

So the main thrust of Visser's careful study of the website material reveals to him three distinct periods in Sistani's engagement with overt Iraqi politics: first, a period of general quietism toward political affairs, which lasted from the Saddam era and through around June 2003; then a period of much greater engagement, between June 2003 and October 2004; and finally, from November 2004 until today, "there has been evidence of a return to seclusion and a renewed preoccupation with matters concerning the Shiite faith and the protection of its religious infrastructure." -- p.7.

Visser documents these shifts-- and in particular, the strong role that Sistani played in 2004 in overthrowing Bremer's original "caucus" plan for a transitional government and insisting on the holding of one-person, one-vote elections for both the transitional government and the final government. At the same time, he was making many pronouncements and interventions in favor of Iraq remaining a unitary state, and in favor of the shari' religious law having a strong role in the Constitution.

In that period, too, Sistani came to issue some interesting bayans on the issue of the wilayat al-faqih (the Rule of the Jurisprudent) in which he seemed to stray very far from the opposition that his own earlier religious mentor, Ayatollah Abul-Qasim Khoei, had evinced toward the concept. Visser writes that though Sistani's apparent embrace of the concept was greeted with jubilation in Teheran, where many regime people assumed that meant he was bowing to the supremacy of their own faqih there, Ayataollah Khamenei, in fact Sistani never gave any explicit recognition to the identification of Khamanei as faqih. When asked, Who is this faqih? Sistani merely answered, “The just jurisprudent acceptable to all the believers." Which, Visser says, could even be interpreted as possibly referring to Sistani himself...

But, Visser notes, the period of active (and remarkably effective) engagement in Iraqi politics came to an end at the end of November 2004, and since then Sistani has returned to being a sort of delphic figure who concerns himself mostly with arcane matters of ritual and observance, leaving his followers to guess, and make claims and counter-claims, when it comes to questions of concrete political guidance:

The statistics of public statements by Sistani in the period after December 2004 show how the ayatollah gradually resumed a much more passive and reluctant attitude to the Iraqi political process. In the 17 months preceding that period, he issued 40 bayans, of which at least 14 explicitly tackled transitional issues in Iraqi politics; in the subsequent 14 months the total figure was down to 15, and no more than 3 dealt with the process of creating a new political system for the country. Beyond statistics, the very manner in which these pronouncements were delivered had changed. Gone was the assertive Sistani, now he appeared terse and dragging his heels.

Many had expected Sistani to issue another fatwa for the January 2005 elections, to provide guidance for the Shiites in this first exercise in democracy in Iraq since the 1950s. In the end none materialised.

Visser's explanation for this shift is really interesting. He suggests that we would all do well to remember that Sistani is not just more Iraqi political figure, but rather an esteemed figure in a particular kind of religious-theological institution that has a decidedly global purview.... So the implication is that Sistani intervened in Iraqi politics when that seemed to serve his other, broader goals, and abstained from doing so when such intervention no longer seemed necessary to secure those other goals.

In conjunction with Sistani's withdrawal since december 2004, of course, within Iraqi politics we have seen protracted standoffs and lack of decisiveness within the predominating Shiite UIA coalition-- both last year, and this year-- with a resulting deadlock in much of the national politics. Most notably this year, we've seen the standoff between SCIRI and the Sadrists, two trends that, as I understand it, support very different visions of the poltical shape of the country. (SCIRI has earlier expressed strong support for deep decentralization of rule in the country, while the Sadrists have expressed support for Iraq-wide national unity.)

Now, if we are to take seriously the bayans that Sistani issued in 2004-- and there's no reason not to-- then he is also a strong supporter of Iraq remaining as much as possible a unitary state. So he would seem to be in Moqtada Sadr's camp on this. But at the same time, Sadr is still considered in so many, very important ways to be "still an upstart"-- and this, within the context of Sistani's presumably strong support for the integrity of the strict religious hierarchy atop which he now sits. So it would be hard for Sistani to give strong support to Sadr against SCIRI, whose leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim outranks Sadr exponentially within the religious hierarchy.

This could also perhaps provide a reason for Sistani to be sitting out the longstanding battle for power between SCIRI and Moqtada? Anyway, Visser points to a key "e-mail fatwa" that Sistani allegedly distributed last October, in the lead-up to the referendum on the Constitution, in which he seemed to back away from his earlier strong opposition to the decentralization (or as Visser and many others describe it, "federal") approach to Iraqi governance.

It is also possible that Sistani, who is 75 years old and already in August 2004 had to take the (for him) drastic step of traveling to London for angioplasty, is quite simply losing some of his physical strength. (A possibility that should lead to some concern about "succession" issues, except that as Visser notes, the emergence of a marja' al--taqlid is not a question of straightforward designation, as with a new Pope, but much more organic and less well-defined.)

In the wake of last month's bombing in Samarra, however, Sistani issued a statement (handwritten Arabic there) with a number of interesting points. He called on his followers not to retaliate against Sunni mosques, but rather to demonstrate peacefully in the streets. He also said that the givernment security forces should shoulder their full responsibilities-- but if they couldn't, then "the believers" would have to ensure public security. (Which reads like a green light to the two big and many smaller Shiite militias... )

Anyway, Visser has some additional arguments in his paper indicating that the role of the marja'iya in Iraqi politics will most likely be a long and strong one-- especially if the mujtahids get to have a big say in who gets onto the Constitutional Court, which is a distinct possibility. He judges that the Western powers,

may have underestimated the desire for Islamic legislation that is shared by a broad section of Iraq’s Shiites – from Muqtada al-Sadr supporters to adherents of Sistani. They may also have exaggerated the difference between a system controlled by a single cleric (dismissed as “the Iranian theocratic dictatorship”) and a polity whose legislation may ultimately be controlled by a body of clerics (praised as the “fundamentally different Iraqi democracy”, even though its supreme constitutional court may well be nonelected and dependent on an extra-systemic and latent supreme faqih, with secular judges reduced to an appendage). Overlooked is the fact that the majority population in both these countries share the ultimate goal of a society governed according to Islamic law; it is on the finesse of the methods for reaching the goal that varying interpretations of wilayat al-faqih come into play. Thus, instead of maintaining the fictitious model of Iran and Iraq as being two worlds apart with regard to Islamic politics, it may be useful for Western powers to prepare for cooperation with a regime in Iraq which will share many features with its Iranian neighbour – and that without being in conflict with its so-called “quietist” ayatollahs in Najaf. (p.33)

One last footnote is in order, I think. Visser probably finished this paper largely before the samarra explosions, at a time when it looked probably much more likely than it does today that the US-designed transitional "project" might proceed, however creakily, to somewhere near its intended destination. That is in much greater doubt now. Even if the squabbling pols and Amb. Zal Khalilzad succeed in cobbling together something called an "Iraqi government", will it really be able to exercize any meaningful degree of governance over the country at this point? I'm not sure about that. It strikes me as equally likely that the whole US transition "project" will just fizzle, with or without an Iraqi "government" at the helm.

If the project fizzles, then a much greater degree of uncertainty, civil strife, and civil disorder may well loom. And in those circumstances, the socio-political power of the religious hierarcgies and their associated militias will be much greater than they are now. And they are already pretty powerful. I guess we westerners all need to learn as much as we can at this point about how these hierarchies actually work, and how their participants and leaders view the world. Once again, Reidar Visser does a good job of illuminating these points for us.

Pictures from Palestine/Israel

I'm still a bit uncertain about posting photos into the blog. Both because I'm uncertain about digital photography in general and because I know they take a lot of space/time for people with slow connections to get access to. So I uploaded them onto my home website and shall provide links here.

Here goes.

Here are photos from my visit to the Jabaliya camp Islamic preschool, in Gaza, as described in my Salon article on the Hamas women: classroom scene, phys ed session, teachers doing puppets, writing teacher.

Here are two views-- taken by the talented Laila el-Haddad-- of the Salah Foundation Girls' School in Deir al-Balah (also described in the Salon article): the school's mosque and library building, and a classroom block.

Here is the truly 1984-ish crossing point from Ramallah to Jerusalem, at Qalandiya: first, the general approach from the Ramallah side, then some of the graffiti-- a work by Banksy on the left and a nice image of Gandhi on the right.

You can only see one, 30-foot-high concrete-clad Israeli watchtower in that first picture.... So you've arrived at Qalandiya from Ramallah or el-Bireh, most likely in a car or a share-taxi-- you can see these vehicles all turning around there at the crossing point. Then you go on foot with all your bags or sick granny or whatever through a break in this wall just to the left of the watch-tower and then traverse the weird lunarscape of gashed-into rock and earth beyond it, walking 100 yards to the under-construction "terminal" there, which has complex gate systems that lead you to a no-man's land on the other side. The lunarscape and the no-man's land are also studded with two or three free-standing watchtowers, 30-feet and 40-feet high. And there's also a lot of other construction there. You walk along a trash-strewn walkway to another short segment of wall, beyond which are the vehicles that take you to locations within the next sections of wall-- either al-Ram, walled in right ahead of you to the left, or to Jerusalem itself, for which you dip down to a little place on the right where small buses wait to gather people who have the favored Jeusalem passbooks. The bus then inscribes a huge arc to the southwest-- on "Israelis only" roads in this completely apartheided road system-- and then arrives to the bus depot on Jerusalem's Nablus Road.

These are some scenes I noted in Tel Aviv/Jaffa when I took the walk described in this JWN post: the seaside monument to Jewish illegal immigration into Palestine, IDF female soldiers slouching toward Jaffa with their guns, a mosque in the shadow of the David Intercontinental Hotel,a display on Deir Yassin in the Irgun Museum, exterior view of the Irgun Museum, and a small slice of Old Jaffa.

Three pics from Jerusalem: the Damascus Gate to the Old City, with some IOF soldiers visible over to the right; Palestinian herb vendors at the Damascus Gate-- notice the beautiful embroidered dresses some wear for their daily work!-- and finally just a little view through a postern in the middle of a busy shoopping street-- with a T-shirt vendor to the right.

Here are some pics from the showroom of the Atfaluna ("our children") school and project for the deaf in Gaza City, which is an oasis of calm and focused industry right there on Filasteen Street: embroidered bags, embroidered cushions, and a general view of the shop/showroom there. If anyone wants to buy some of their beautiful products (and help their project and their clients by doing so) then I can assure you their goods are beautifully made, beautifully finished, and their order fulfillment/distribution system is little short of miraculous.

Olmert's campaign brings down the walls of Jericho

Ehud Olmert continued his election campaign today by (1) traveling to the West Bank settlement of Ariel and telling its residents they would be included inside the news borders he plans to draw for Israel, and (2) sending the IOF's tanks and bulldozers in aganst the PA prison in Jericho holding PFLP leader Ahmed Saadat.

I suppose that on the scale of aggressive actions taken by Israeli PMs during election campaigns-- oh ain't Israeli "democracy" wonderful!-- this was not as bad as Shimon Peres's infamous 1996 invasion of South Lebanon.

On this occasion, the British seem clearly to have connived in the Israeli action. Since 2002, the British had been keeping three of their own monitors (and intermittently, supervising monitors from other countries, too) in the Jericho Prison... That was part of an international deal whereby Ahmed Saadat, who was wanted by the Israelis for his role in the killing of Tourism Minister Rahavam Ze'evi but had taken refuge with Arafat in the Muqata during the long siege of spring 2002, was allowed to leave the Muqata. A PA security court gave Saadat and some colleagues a quick trial for the killing of Ze'evi, and sentenced him to a lengthy prison sentence, which was served in Jericho with the British monitors specially deployed there to check on the adequacy of his confinement...

As this well-written piece by the Guardian's Chris McGreal spells out, the local Israeli commander was just waiting this morning for the British monitors to leave before they stormed the prison compound. How amazing! Do the Brits expect anyone to believe the story that they had not colluded with the Israelis at all in this? After all, Col. Ronnie Belkin, interviewed by McGreal there, would most certainly not have had his assault force sitting there around the pirson for many days just "on the off-chance" that the British monitors might all take it into their heads to leave the site together at some point...

Of course, if the British had stayed there, it is very unlikely that the Israelis would have dared storm the prison by force.

I believe that two Palestinians were killed in the assault. BBC t.v. had some very strong images of IOF bulldozers smashing into the prison building while, presumably, there were still people inside. And of course there are also the images of Saadat and his collagues being led away from the prison by the Israeli soldiers, dazed, after holding out there for some ten hours-- and also of a big group of prisoners (or prison guards?) who were forced to strip down to their underpants and stand around in public in them, at the orders of the IOF assault force.

Britain is of course represented in the Quartet through its membership in both the EU and the UN. Given Britain's defiant dereliction of its contracted duty to the PA under the 2002 agreement, PA President Mahmoud Abbas is quite right to have protested very strongly. But actually, the PA is to a large extent the dependent ward of the international community. So why should any powerful member of the international community, like Britain, feel it needs to listen to Abbas, anyway?

In the absence of their quasi-state authority having any power to protect even its own institutions from the assault of the occupying forces and the perfidy of London, angry Palestinians later smashed up various British installations, and kidnaped a number of westerners in the occupied territories. Not at all a constructive way to make their grievances known, I realise. But in the Palestinians' present state of almost complete powerlessness, I guess it was what they felt they had left to them.

Bushite meddling in Iran-- backfiring?

Today's WaPo had a very interesting article by Karl Vick and David Finkel, that was datelined Teheran and titled U.S. Push for Democracy Could Backfire Inside Iran.

The lead is this:

Prominent activists inside Iran say President Bush's plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote democracy here is the kind of help they don't need, warning that mere announcement of the U.S. program endangers human rights advocates by tainting them as American agents.

In a case that advocates fear is directly linked to Bush's announcement, the government has jailed two Iranians who traveled outside the country to attend what was billed as a series of workshops on human rights. Two others who attended were interrogated for three days.

The workshops, conducted by groups based in the United States, were held last April, but Iranian investigators did not summon the participants until last month, about the time the Bush administration announced plans to spend $85 million "to support the cause of freedom in Iran this year."

"We are under pressure here both from hard-liners in the judiciary and that stupid George Bush," human rights activist Emad Baghi said as he waited anxiously for his wife and daughter to emerge from interrogation last week. "When he says he wants to promote democracy in Iran, he gives money to these outside groups and we're in here suffering."

The reporters also quote Abdolfattah Soltani, a human rights lawyer who co-founded a human rights defense group with Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, as saying of the Bushies' announcement of the new "pro-democracy" funding for Iranian oppositionists, that

"Unfortunately, I've got to say it has a negative effect, not a positive one... This is something we all know, that a way of dealing with human rights activists is to claim they have secret relations with foreign powers... This very much limits our actions. It is very dangerous to our society."

One other aspect of this story that concerns me is that the workshops that Emad Baghi's wife and daughter (and two other individuals associated with him) had attended were conducted-- in fairly shady-seeming circumstances, in Dubai-- by something called the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict.

If indeed this "center" has become entangled in pushing forward the Bush administration's agenda of regime change in Iran, then it seems to me it is dragging the whole name and concept of nonviolent social action into the mud.

Of course, one tip-off there is the name. Few good Gandhians-- that is, people struggling nonviolently for a more egalitarian and just world-- would proudly put the word "conflict" into the title of their organization.

The ICNC is a US-based organization. The US-- my country-- is the country that on a daily and continuing basis perpetrates the most violence of any country in the world. Since the invasion of Iraq that it so arrogantly launched in March 2003, scores of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, some at the hands of US forces and others because of the social chaos that the callous US military occupation of Iraq has engendered. In Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq, in Guantanamo, Bagram, and other locations around the world, US interrogators and jailers are inscribing their violence onto the bodies of thousands of detainees held in contravention of the laws of war.

Surely, therefore, any individual or organization that is based in the US and that espouses the cause of nonviolence has a primary responsibility to struggle first and foremost for the changing of the policies of our government? The ICNC website says nothing about this at all. Instead, the organization seems to be exploiting the name of "nonviolence" and using a distortion of the principles of that great anti-colonial struggler Mahatma Gandhi merely to further Washington's imperial agenda.

Oh well, the Bushites shamelessly exploit all the principles of religion. Why should they treat the principles of nonviolence any differently?

Salon.com article on Hamas women

Here is my second piece for Salon.com, up on their site today. Once again, if you're not a subscriber you'll have to sit through a small ad before you can read it.

Shoot, I forgot to remind them to put something about JWN into the tagline.

My body meanwhile is a little in crazysville. I flew back to Boston Saturday, a seven-hour time difference from Jerusalem. Sunday I did a quick revision of the Salon piece (which I wrote the first draft of, Thursday and Friday). Sunday I also gave a talk for the Cape Ann Forum between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. It was on the theme of "The Perfect Storm" of challenges to the US in the Middle East. I chose the theme long ago-- and only when I got there to Gloucester, Massachusetts did I realize that the movie of that name was both set and shot there!

I managed to stay awake, on my feet, and relatively coherent till 9 p.m.

Yesterday I flew back to Virginia and started writing a CSM column to deadline. But my brain stopped working around 7 p.m. so I got up this morning at 5 a.m. to finish it. Since then I've taken my first run for three weeks, done laundry, been lying around.

But it's nice to see the piece up on Salon.

Milosevic's death

I find two aspects of Milosevic's death in UN custody yesterday quite interesting. The first is what his death actually tells us about the value of using criminal prosecutions to do a "truth establishment" exercise (and the linked question of the reactions to his death in different political spheres.) The second is the continuing tale of the toxicological aspects of his death.

Regarding the value of criminal trials in "establishing a historical record" about past atrocities-- which is one of the main goals people are seeking when they support such trials-- Milosevic's death, and the suicide in UN custody earlier this week of the "lesser" defendant Milan Babic, have underlined the problems with the fact that criminal trials always revolve centrally around the actions and culpability of named individuals.

Then, if key indicted individuals should somehow "escape" from the control of the court-- whether through a death, a suicide, or through becoming in some other way "unfit to be tried"-- the trial stops right in its tracks. And not only the issue of the guilt or innocence of the accused individual is left hanging-- indeed, given the presumption of innocence, he has to continue to be presumed innocent after his death-- but also the whole broader "truth establishment" venture stops dead in its tracks.

Recognizing this fact, tribunal spokesperson Christian Chartier is quoted here as saying: "This is tragic for the truth... This is tragic for the victims."

I note that truth commissions don't suffer from this extreme vulnerability to the physical status of a small number of individuals.

The reactions to Milosevic's death have been interesting in this regard. (See my discussion of this issue, too, in my comment to this post over at Transitional Justice Forum.)

The BBC's Jon Silverman (whom I met once, in Rwanda) has a piece on their website titled simply, Worst outcome for Milosevic tribunal.

Silverman writes that M's death:

raises questions which may tarnish the reputation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and undermine confidence in war crimes justice generally.

First, was it a mistake to roll all the charges relating to Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia - more than 60 in all - into a single trial?

Putting all the charges into a single trial had the result that no verdict at all was ever pronounced against Milosevic, since the single mammoth trial that chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte insisted on through thick and thin hadn't finsihed before M died, whereas if the trial had been broken up into three constituent segments tried separatey, at least one of those might have been completed by now. (His trial started in 2002.)

The BBC also has this interesting page containing reactions from two Serbs, one Kosovar, and one Bosnian to the news of his death.

Of the Serbs, one, an anti-Milosevoc activist, says: "I thought I'd feel relief or closure. Instead, I feel mixture of sadness and immense anger. This one has got away. Although he spent the last years of his life imprisoned, justice has not been served." The other said,"This is a sad time for Serbia. Many were not happy about what he did during his rule. But he defended the right of Serbia to express itself in the world... The death of Milosevic is the result of the arrogant criminal policy of the US and Nato."

The Kosovar said, "I am happy that he died. He deserves this because he killed more than 200,000 people... I witnessed what his regime was responsible for. I hope he rests in hell. But this is the end of an era. He is dead. This could be a new start for the Balkans."

The Bosnian said, "I would be a happy man if he was pronounced guilty and died in the next second. But by dying like this, he will become part of the Serb mythology, which already has martyrs from World War II and from the 1389 Battle of Kosovo against the Ottomans... I would prefer it if we were still part of Tito's Yugoslavia. We had a much better life then."

Interesting reactions, indeed.

Meanwhile, the wire services have some interesting tidbits regarding Milosevic's toxicological status at the time of his death.

The background to this is that he has long had a heart condition, which has been under treatment by (I believe) Dutch doctors under the supervision of the UN detention facility. Recently he made a strong appeal to the court to be allowed to travel to Moscow for treatment for his heart condition, but that request was turned down.

He and his attorney had apparently been expressing worries recently that he was being poisoned.

His attorney requested yesterday that his body be sent to Russia fort autopsy. But that request was turned down, and the autopsy was performed today by Dutch doctors. (Personaly, I believe that it would have been better to have had a broad international team overseeing the autopsy.) The Dutch pathologists' results have not yet been made public. But AP has this intriguing tidbit, that says:

Traces of a drug used to treat leprosy and tuberculosis were found in a blood sample taken in recent months from former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, a Dutch news report said, citing an unidentified "adviser" to the U.N. war crimes tribunal.

The report came hours after Milosevic's legal adviser showed journalists a letter the late Serb leader wrote Friday, one day before his body was discovered in prison, alleging that he was being poisoned.

The report was on the text service of the Dutch state broadcaster, NOS. It did not identify its source further...

The NOS report did not identify the drug found in Milosevic's blood "in a test done in recent months," but said it could have had a "neutralizing effect" on his other medications.

Reuters meanwhile has this from Moscow:

Doctors treating Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague suspected he was secretly spitting out the medicines they gave him, the head of a Russian clinic said on Sunday.

"The treatment they gave him was just to give him medicines for high blood pressure and they suspected he was not taking them," Leo Bokeria, head of the Bakulev Cardio-Vascular Surgery Center in Moscow, told Russia's NTV television station.

"They carried out tests to check for the presence of the medicine in his bloodstream because they thought that he was hiding it in his cheeks."

Bokeria added: "In the conditions in which he was being held, it was impossible to help him."

Anyway, let's hope the toxicology situation becomes clearer over the days ahead. (It would be nice to have clear autopsy results on Yasser Arafat, too, one of these days, eh? Rumors that he was poisoned with some slow-acting agent still persist in Palestine.)

But the question about the value of war-crimes courts in helping establish the "truth" about past atrocities is a broader and longer-lasting one, I think

Kissinger and Haig on Iraq/Vietnam

At a forum here in Boston yesterday, former Nixon advisor Al Haig said that the Bushies are repeating a mistake made in Vietnam by not applying the full force of the military to "win" the war in Iraq:

"Every asset of the nation must be applied to the conflict to bring about a quick and successful outcome, or don't do it," Haig said

Actually, it's not totally clear to me that Haig was saying there that the US still should be trying toi "apply the full force of the military"-- or was the quoted statement perhaps meant as a critique of the Bushies' past actions? Well, I wasn't there, so I'll have to trust the reporting of that AP reporter as to what Haig meant.

Either way, though-- what an incredibly stupid, irresponsible, and I would say even borderline criminal statement!

Has Haig forgotten that back in March-April 2003, the US did win a decisive military victory in Iraq? Fat lot of good it did them! This is not now and never has been a war that could be won solely on the battlefield. The application of more forces, even of "every asset of the nation", whether back in March 2003 or now in 2006, could not have "won" the war if there wasn't a vision for how to translate that military victory into a political victory.

If Haig was indeed urging that now, in 2006, the US should be applying "every asset of the nation" to the war in Iraq-- just exactly what military targets does he advocate that they target? And how, once they've achieved that, do they intend to transform that new military situation into a political victory?

At the same event, which was a forum on the Vietnam war held at the Kennedy Library, the ageing Henry Kissinger was also on the platform.

Here's some of his interaction with questioners from the audience:

He refused to directly respond to a question, submitted by the audience and read by a moderator, that asked if he wanted to apologize for policies that led to so many deaths in Vietnam.

"This is not the occasion," Kissinger said. "We have to start from the assumption that serious people were making serious decisions. So that's the sort of question that's highly inappropriate."

In another audience question, Kissinger was asked whether he agreed that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, and, if so, was he responsible for the 2 million people the Khmer Rouge killed?

"The premise that the bombing of a 5-mile strip led to the rise of Khmer Rouge and the murder of two million people is an example of masochism that is really inexcusable," he said.

These responses are interesting. Wth regard to the first one, why is his assumption that a suggestion that he apologise for the Vietnam-era deaths is not "serious"? An apology could be an extremely serious political act-- as when, for example, President Clinton apologized to the Rwandans for the US's failure to act to stop the 1994 genocide.

His response to the second question is simply an example of out-and-out evasion of any responsibility.

What a sad, sad old guy.

Here's what he said about the US invasion of Iraq:

Kissinger also spoke about the war in Iraq, saying he supported the invasion.

"We have a jihadist radical situation," he said. "If the U.S. fails in Iraq, then the consequences will be that it motivates more to move toward the radical side. This is the challenge."

What a jumbled argument. In 2002-early 2003, there was no "jihadist radical situation" in Iraq. (Even today, that is not the main thing that's going on there.) Yes, since April 2003, some very serious "jihadist radical" elements have emerged in Iraq. But that emergence cannot be used, ex post facto, to justify the invasion. And nor can it be used to justify the continued US military occupation of the country-- especially since it is precisely under the circumstances of that occupation that the "jihadist radical" elements have emerged.

Why did anyone ever take this sorry old guy's "intellect" seriously at all? He strikes me as just a muddled, highly irresponsible, imperialistic old bully.

Ted Meron and the Israeli settlements

Israeli researcher Gershom Gorenberg has an important new book coming out about the first decade of Israel's pursuit of its settlement policy in the occupied territories, 1967-77. This recent piece in HaAretz tells us some of the important things in the book, which is titled "The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977."

The HaAretz piece quotes Gorenberg as saying, "The title means that the Labor movement leaders had no organized plan to keep the territories, but even without a plan, they each made major decisions that when taken in aggregate, accidentally created the Israeli empire in the territories."

The HaAretz piece indicates the degree to which the US administrations of those years underestimated the seriousness and intent of the Israeli settlement project.

In an article of his ownin Friday's New York Times, Gorenberg focuses on one particular aspect of the early years of the settlement venture: the degree to which the Israeli governments of those years understood that the settlements were a violation of international law, but proceeded with building them anyway.

He writes:

In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War. An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked "Top Secret," Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally, "My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

In the detailed opinion that accompanied that note, Mr. Meron explained that the Convention — to which Israel was a signatory — forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was "undoubtedly 'occupied territory,' " he wrote.

Mr. Meron took note of Israel's diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not "normal" occupied territory, because the land's status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.

But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: the international community would not accept it and would regard settlement as showing "intent to annex the West Bank to Israel." The second was legal, he wrote: "In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory." For instance, he noted, a military decree issued on the third day of the war in June said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.

There is a subtext here. In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: if the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity — in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

This is very interesting. I guess I never knew that Theodor Meron-- a Holocaust survivor who went on to become a professor at New York University law school, then the president of the International Criminal Tibunal for Yugoslavia-- had been the legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry in that critical period.

Gorenberg writes:

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.

Well, yes and no. But neither can 38 years of Israel's completely unilateral pursuit of its settlement-building project undo the whole body of international humanitarian law.

I think it's excellent that Gorenberg has given new life to that judgment that Meron reached 39 years ago. It would of course have been great if Meron, today a very respected international jurist, had spoken out some more about this question throughout the intervening years, to reinforce the crux of what he wrote in that memo. I don't recall hearing of him ever speaking out about it. I've read a number of his books on international humanitarian law, and don't recall him ever dealing with the question of the status of the occupied territories as occupied territories or the illegality of building civilian settlements therein.

Maybe I should go and ask him about these things the next time I'm in The Hague...

RIP Tom Fox

My heart is so heavy I don't know what to write... about the discovery of Tom Fox's dead body.

Go the CPT's website today and you can read the agonized statement they've put out about his loss. You can also see a picture of him at one of the recent anti-Wall demonstrations in Palestine.

I never met Tom personally but many of my Quaker friends know him, some quite well.

I hope he didn't suffer too much.

I hope Jim, Harmeet, and Norman aren't suffering too much, now. Also Jill Carroll. Also, all people illegally deprived of their liberty in Iraq. I'm praying for them all.

I flew back to the States today, so I'm still feeling a little disoriented and out of it. I'm doing a speaking gig north of Boston tomorrow evening-- Gloucester Town Hall, 7 p.m., I think.

The CPT statement starts:

In grief we tremble before God who wraps us with compassion...

I'm thinking of a God who can wrap us all in mercy and compassion. Bismillahi rrahmani rrahim.

Bil'in Friday

I decided to go down to Bil'in today, to the weekly anti-Wall demonstration that the villagers have been running there for more than a year now. I went with a great group of women from Ramallah, who included Neta Golan, an Israeli activist who is married to a Palestinian and lives in Ramallah with him and their two kids, and Anne X., a nAmerican woman of almost 70 years of age who also lives in Ramallah.

We had made the stunningly beautifully drive from Ramallah through the steep hills west to Bil'in in two cars, with some other people, so I didn't meet Anne till we got to the village. The moment I met her she handed me a keffiyeh and said, "Here, quick put it on, the tear-gas is coming our way." And it was.

We were a little late for the main event, which had been a procession from the village mosque down to the place where the line of Wall cuts right across an access road the villagers had always used to get to their lands that are now being taken from them by the line of the Wall. It was kind of hard to see what was happening, as the lines of Israeli soldiers and of demonstrators kept dissolving and reforming in different clumps. There were probably about 30-40 soldiers there, that I saw, and maybe 50-60 demonstrators. The demonstrators seemed to be, just over half of them, Palestinians, most of the rest Israeli peace activists, and a smattering of "internationals." There were quite a few press people there, too, and a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance.

I talked a little with Rateb Abu Rahmeh, a man from the village who teaches social work in the Al Quds Open University. He explained that he's a member of the village's Popular Committee which has been maintaining this action as a creative, nonviolent protest for all this time. (The villagers who are owners of some of the land cut off by the Wall here are also maintaining a challenge to its location in the Israeli courts. Akiva Eldar wrote about that in HaAretz earlier this week.)

Rateb told me that every week the Friday anti-Wall demonstration has a different theme. This week, they had made a large model of a graveyard, 30 meters by 10 meters, to commemorate the nine local people who have been killed in connection with anti-Wall protests. And they carried that to the Wall as their protest. "The Israelis broke up the model graveyard. They also broke my wrist," he said, showing me the bandaged hand he was shielding inside his jacket.

Rateb seemed like a very interesting person and I'd like to write more about him. But the only other thing I have time to note here is the very easy, friendly relations I saw between the Israeli anti-Wall protesters and their Palestinian colleagues. In fact, the Israeli protesters seemed great: very active and dedicated and committed to the discipline of nonviolence. Also, they played a special role in reproaching the young soldiers there in their own language.

Actually, many of the men in the village speak Hebrew. Bil'in is so close to the Green Line that until the latest intifada most of the village men would go to work in Israel-- and, one of them told me, some of them still do.

As the demonstration came to an end, everyone drifted back to the main part of the village. Some of the Israeli "Border" Guards came after the departing demonstrators, and there were a few skirmishes between them and some youngsters who started throwing stones as the soldiers approached. The soldiers lobbed few canisters of tear gas and we heard some much sharper bullet shots ring out, too. But the Israeli demonstrators-- most of whom were, it seemed, self-described anarchists-- seemed very at ease with the villagers, some of whom invited them into their homes for tea, and sat and chatted at length with them in Hebrew.

Hamas lawmaker on Islam and society

This is an interesting and significant short public exposition, in English, of the views of a Hamas legislator on how he sees the role of Islam in society. (And actually, on a bit more than that, too.)

It's from the online publication Bitterlemons-international, which is a joint project of the Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher and the (outgoing) PA Minister of Planning, Ghassan Khatib.Until now, Hamas has refused to participate in any of the joint Palestinian-Israeli "people to people" type projects that have proliferated since about 1990. I imagine that reluctance will continue. But it's interesting that Yehya Mousa contibuted this to BLI.

Pathetic threats from Bolton

What a contrast between the bellicose rhetoric and actions that the Bush administration deployed against Saddam Hussein's regime three years ago and the pathetic bleats it is issuing against Iran today. Back in 2002-2003, the Bushies were threatening (and preparing to use) a concerted military attack in order to meet the strong "concerns" it had voiced about Saddam's WMD program. Today, the worst threat that hawkish ambassador to the UN John Bolton can muster is to suggest that,

if the Security Council doesn't take tough action, the United States might look elsewhere to punish Iran — possibly by rallying its allies to impose targeted sanctions.

Many things have happened in the interim, of course. Firstly, the US military has become majorly bogged down in Iraq, where 130,000 US troops are deployed in positions extremely vulnerable to attack-- especially by any forces sympathetic to Teheran, of which there are many inside Iraq. So Washington has zero possibility of mounting any credible threat of a major military intervention against Teheran. Bolton and Co. have ramped up the rhetoric against Iran a lot in recent months. But it is all hot air. Its major effect has been to stiffen Iranian defiance in response.

Second, of course nobody this time round, after what happened in Iraq, would take seriously any amount of questionable "information" the Bushies might claim they had that would point to an Iranian breakout from the NPT. And let's remember that Iran still has not broken out of the NPT.

(AP reported Thursday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on state television that, "We don't want to be the ones to remind [everyone] who was right and who was not in Iraq, although the answer is obvious,")

Third, the Bushies themselves have taken major steps to shred the NPT, culminating in last week's decision to give India a completely free pass on its defiance of the whole NPT approach to cooperative, multilateral nonproliferation efforts.

My base-line on nuclear nonproliferation is firstly that I am strongly committed to creating a world without any nuclear weapons (or other WMDs), and secondly I believe that using a cooperative multilateral path is by far the best path to get to that goal. From this point of view, the NPT regime has its flaws-- primarily, because it privileges those five countries that were deemed to be "nuclear weapons states" back at the time the treaty was concluded in 1968. But the NPT has some strong advantages, too. It aspires toward becoming a single, universal franework from nuclear non- and de-proliferation. (So it's a pity the US never expended any real energy trying to get proven proliferators like Israel, Pakistan, and India to join it-- back in the past time when such pressure might have made a real difference.) And Article Six commits all states including the nuclear-weapons states to participating in good faith in negotiations for a complete and general disarmament.

Certainly, the NPT is a much stronger and more egalitarian framework for nonproliferation efforts than the Bushies' preferred approach of building selective alliances on a purely political basis around the world-- an approach that surely, as with Israel and India (and the countries that have acted in response to those two), has merely spurred the further proliferation of nuclear weapons.

So far, the Iranians have been at pains to say that their aim is to develop a peaceful nuclear energy capability. Though who honestly knows what their longterm intentions are? But developing peaceful nuclear capacity is precisely what is allowed-- or even, supposed to be facilitated-- by the NPT. (It is probably quite unwise on longterm environmental grounds... but that's another issue.) President Ahmedinejad has meanwhile done very well politically, at home, by portraying the US campaign against the plan as an attempt to deny Iran's access to peaceful nuclear technology that is of real value to the country's longterm development. He, and many other Iranian leaders, seems in general very happy to portray Iran as "standing up to Washington's bullying." (And some degree of support for this position can be felt far beyond Iran's own borders.)

This, from AP yesterday:

"The people of Iran will not accept coercion and unjust decisions by international organizations," Ahmadinejad said, according to state television. "Enemies cannot force the Iranian people to relinquish their rights."

"The era of bullying and brutality is over," he added.

My best judgment at this point is that if either the US or Israel take action against the Iranian nuclear program, the response-- and not just from Iran, indeed, perhaps not even from Iran at all-- would most likely be broad and highly detrimental to the stability of the present, already very fragile strategic "order" in the Middle East. What's more, I am sure that the decisionmakers in Washington and Israel all understand this. Hence the bleatiness of Bolton's rhetoric.

We should not forget, though, that Israel's raid against Iraq's Osirak reactor was undertaken in the context of a hard-fought election campaign in Israel, in 1981. Is there any ffear that a besieged Olmert, fighting for his political life at the polls, might seek to launch a repeat performance?

So far, I don't think so. Hawkish former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon told a US audience yesterday that Israel could launch an attack on Iran that would set back its nuclear program "by several years". He hinted that this attack might come from submarine-launched missiles, not just from the air. (But I wonder where the Israeli subs would be located for this? Interesting question.) But according to that same Ha'Aretz report,

Ya'alon also warned that Iran would clearly hit back hard in the event of such an attack, and cited Tehran's long-range Shihab missiles, Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah has in its possession, and Qassam rockets that Palestinian militants habitually fire into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip. He added that a rise in oil prices could be further fallout from such an assault.

I also note that retaliatory action could well be launched against the US troops in Iraq, since no-one in the world would imagine that israel would take such an action against Iran without getting at least an orange light, if not a green light, from Washington first.

(Former Israeli Air Force commander Eitan Ben-Eliyahu told HaAretz that speaking publicly about these things in the way Ya'alon had done, could be harmful.)

Also of note from today's HaAretz on the Iran-nuclear question, this from Reuven Pedhatsur:

There could not have been a worse timing for the signing of the nuclear pact between the U.S. and India last week. While President Bush is leading the international campaign against the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, it legitimized India's nuclear program, and thus granted India the status of a legitimate nuclear power in every respect.

This happened two years after he announced with great resolve that new nuclear powers should not be added to the list of the five nuclear powers, and eight years after the American administration imposed sanctions on India after it conducted a series of nuclear tests.

Tehran can rub its hands with glee, reading the details of the agreement that Bush signed with Indian Prime Minister Singh.

...When Bush was asked at the joint news conference with the Indian prime minister why the U.S. is rewarding a state that conducted nuclear bomb testing in 1998 and did not sign the NPT, and what message he was sending to other countries, the president responded with "what the agreement says is that things change and times have changed."

That's not a particularly successful response, nor does it strengthen the American position as the country that is supposed to lead the campaign to prevent nuclear weapons from reaching other countries.

...[T]he American president has greatly harmed the chances of denying nuclear weapons to Iran. From now on, the U.S. will find it difficult to present a morally authoritative position in its negotiations vis a vis the Iranians. And then there's the Israeli angle. If India is accepted by the Americans as a legitimate member of the nuclear club, and even wins some nice benefits from it, it is possible that the time has come to start thinking about certain steps along the nuclear path it paved.

Bottom line: We should think of George W. Bush not just as someone who has launched a terrible and quite unnecessary war that has wrecked Iraq, destabilized the Middle East, and given Osama Bin Laden a virtually free pass to roam around the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border at will-- but also as someone who has significantly aided the spread of nuclear weapons around the world while undermining the global mechanism that is best-placed to contain and then reverse the spread of nuclear weapons.

What an extremely dangerous man.

Jerusalem: writing, visiting, talking

I had a good day in Jerusalem today.  Starting with writing, writing, writing.  Yesterday after I got back to the Jerusalem Meridian Hotel, I started writing my second piece for Salon-- about the Hamas women in Gaza, and about Hamas more generally... And I'd hope to finish it yesterday, too.  But I have so much material from Gaza rattling around in my notebook and in my head that it took a while for it to settle down and "compose"... So I only made a start on the article yesterday evening.

This morning I got up, had a quick breakfast in the hotel's beautiful old stone-arched restaurant, then told myself, "Helena, write!"  Actually, I also had the hope of a rather interesting interview in Tel Aviv today, but by around 10 a.m. the guy's executive assistant had called to say it wouldn't, after all, work out.  So I got to continue with my writing instead.  And shortly after 2 p.m. the Salon  piece was done-- in at just under 3,000 words.  I don't think the shape is perfect-- I find it really, really hard to compose anything, let alone a longer piece like this, completely on the small laptop screen, without doing any printouts.  (I'm a big fan of self-editing on hard copy.)  But it is what it is.  There's a professional editor there at Salon at work on the piece, so let's hope he can rebalance whatever needs to be rebalanced in it.  Maybe it's two pieces, anyway?  Or one main piece and a sidebar?  I guess we'll see.

Holed up in a quiet hotel room writing, and eating from room service. It's not a bad situation to be in-- especially if, as is now the case, the room in question has a fabulous view out over the Mount of Olives, pierced on its ridge by the two towers of the Augusta Victoria Hospital and the Hebrew U. Mount Scopus campus.  But after nearly 24 hours of this holed-up-in-room-writing regime, I definitely needed to walk.  I had nearly an hour to spare before I was due to go visit my old Palestinian-Armenian friend Albert Aghazarian, who lives in the Old City, so I decided to take a roundabout route to his place there.

What a fabulous, intriguing city Jerusalem is, especially for pedestrians.  When I was in Gaza, I was once again acutely aware of how lucky I am to be able to come to Jerusalem whenever I want to.  Some of the Palestinians I talked to there had never visited this city.  Some hadn't been able to visit it for many years now.  It was actually easier for Gazans to get to Jerusalem during the height of the first intifada than it became after the conclusion iof the Oslo Accord.  But the Gazans all long for the city intensely.  A large, glowing image of the Dome of the Rock is the main decoration in many public places there (as, indeed, throughout the whole Palestinian diaspora)

... Well, my route to Albert's place turned out to be a bit more roundabout than I had expected.  He'd reminded me I needed to go to the Armenian Convent of St. James and ask for his house there.  So I walked along Salaheddine Street to the Old City walls, and then southwest along the outside of the walls a bit till I reached the Damascus Gate.  (It was cold out. It's been a blustery day here today: the first real time in all my visit that I've been glad to have the warm wool coat that I almost jettisoned ten days ago because it seemed such a pain to have to carry it around.)

In front of the Damascus Gate there's a broad stone plaza that's linked to the gate by a wide stone footbridge where normally a row of older Palestinian women from the villages around will sit and sell their herbs and other produce.  Most of these women-- both the ones sitting outside the gate and the far greater number of their sisters who sit at various points throughout the Old City-- wear the intricately embroidered dresses that are an important part of their dowry and their identity.  The other day when I was at the Damascus Gate, a gaggle of Israeli soldiers was hanging around the footbridge, with another soldier silhouetted in the high little window in the high stone battlements above the gate.

The gate is the real, proper, kind of entrance to what was built 400 years ago as a fortified city: that is, you go in and you immediately have to take a couple of quick turns under various potential portcullis or boiling-oil arrangements: not an easy gate to storm into with a 16th century cavalry.  Then you're at a relatively high point inside the city.  The stone-paved street in front of you leads quite steeply downhill for 50 yards, between all kinds of small shops and raucous street vendors, and then immediately forks into two.  I took the left fork, down Al-Wad Street, which is quieter than the other fork, the Souq Khan al-Zeit, which is a long, often suffocating beehive of vendors and shoppers.

The Old City is a complex, three-dimension jigsaw of a stone rabbit warren (wrapped up in an enigma.)  You'll be walking along, say the bustle and hubbub of Souq Khan al-Zeit and you'll look sideways and see some beautiful calm steps leading up under a sunlit arch.  Or you can occasionally catch a glimpse of an interior courtyard, or a small garden.  But the main thing in the city is Jerusalem limestone in all possible colors and configurations: arches, steps, cantilevered little rooms, dark hallways, tiny tunnels, mysterious side-alleys; bleached white, glowing godlen, lichened and dark, rose-colored, or honey-buff.  And people!  Whether the Palestinian traders in Bab al-Silsila Street trying to sell you their mishmash of Jewish, Palestinain, and imported-from-China tchotchkes, or the yeshiva student slipping along an alley on his way to the Kotel to pray, or a massive long skein of Christian tourists from Nigeria shivering in the cold and anxiously trying to keep up with their tour-guide, or a group of three women trying to maneuver a large (though still symbolic)  wooden cross around a tight corner, or a large family of Orthdox Jews talking in loud Brooklyn accents in a courtyard in the Jewish Quarter...

So from Al-Wad Street  I slipped left into the Souq al-Qattanin, which has been nicely rehabbed since I was last there-- by, I believe, the Palestinian Welfare Society. Halfway along it I found a gate I hadn't seen before leading to something called the Al-Quds University Jerusalem Studies Center.  I went in.  Hey, maybe I could find my old Oxford buddy Sari Nuseibeh who's the President of Al-Quds University and whom I've been trying (in an off-and-on way) to see ever since I got here.  Inside there was a clean, hushed courtyard, with not a soul in any of the offices leading off it. I spied a nice stone staircase in one corner and climbed it.  Who knew where it might lead?  The noise and bustle of the Souq had completely disappeared.  I climbed up to a spot that I suppose might have been on the souq's roof-- it was rather hard to tell-- and looked behind me at a stunning view of the Dome of the Rock's gold dome, and the more austere and classically shaped grey dome of  Al Aqsa.

Sadly, that walkway didn't lead anywhere.  I went down, rejoined the Souq al-Qattanin, and walked along to the far end-- which turned out to be an entrance into the two mosques' Noble Sanctuary (which is also, I guess, the plinth of the destroyed Jewish temple?)  Four Israeli police officers lounged at the gate and told me I could not go in.  "On whose orders is that?" I asked.  "The Waqf," said one (that is, the Muslim religious endowment that runs the holy places).  "The Israeli police," said another.  They talked a little among themselves.  "Both institutions together," they concluded.

So I got another glimpse of the mosques through that gateway, and turned back.  Now, time was getting short and I needed to hurry.  I had a general idea of where the city's Armenian Quarter is-- it is one of the four areas into which the Old City was divided under the Ottoman millet system, the others being the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Quarters. I walked briskly along to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, then struck left towards the small piazza at the base of David's Tower.  An insistent tour-guide assailed me there.  I assured him I didn't need to hire him, but he was nice enough to tell me exactly where I'd find the Armenian Convent of St. James.  It involved walking along the rather barren expanse of Armenian Patriarchate Street for a little while-- "under the arch", as he said-- and then I'd find it on the left.  However, I took an entire left turn too early, and ended up wandering through a maze of small, very blank-walled streets in the Armenian Quarter, searching with increasing desperationn for the Convent of St. James.  Many of the walls there are liberally plastered with a "Map of the Armenian Genocide".  But I thought it would have a lot more useful to have had a few actual maps of street-plan and major attractions posted there as well. At one point I thought I'd found my destination, and turned in to the gateway relieved.  But a startled old man popped out of a kiosk and peering at me through bottle-bottom eye-glasses said, "No, you need the Convent, not the Monastery."

Well, I did find it soon after.  Once again, a big arched stone entrance pierced with a large heavy door which in turn is pierced by a smaller postern.  Once again the watchful door-keeper, eager to offer help.  "Albert's house?" he said, and taking me by the arm he walked me to the end of the entrance-way, pointed across a large, bare stone courtyard within and said, "You see that staircase?  Don't go up it.  Look for the doorway underneath and ring the bell."

Albert, his wife Majdoleine, and their kids live in a warren of rooms set around their own internal courtyard here.  Majdoleine led me in across the courtyard as the first drops fell in a rainstorm that soon after became almost a tempest.  But we sat snugly sipping tea in the room where Albert works these days: its arched walls all piled high with books.

Albert Aghazarian was a key spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation that attended the breakthrough first Arab-Israeli peace talks at Madrid in October 1991, and he continued to work with the Palestinian delegation-- which was led by the veteran Gaza political figure Haidar Abdel-Shafei-- throughout the months that followed.  I last saw him in summer 2002, when he received a large delegation of Quakers of which I was part.  This time, as then, I found him intensely disappointed with the way things had turned out, angry, and pessimistic.  "We are heading for Armageddon," he said at one point.  "But anyway, Zionism is finished... These people think they can achieve anything with raw power-- without trying to understand other people at all.  It's like the attitude of the people at the very dawn of the colonial age, in the 16th century: all brute power and arrogance...  The Americans are just as bad as the Zionists."

He said he had retired almost completely from public life now, and he spends most of his time working on translations.  He told me he speaks seven languages -- which is not an unusual number for Armenians of his generation.  (Armenian, Turkish, Greek, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French.)  His kids, he said, "only speak four."

At four o'clock he settled in to his usual afternoon pastime of watching the world news digest that Hizbullah's TV station, Al-Manar, produces every day, and that he picks up with his satellite dish.  "It is really well done, really professional," he said.  "You can learn such a lot just by watching this."  I watched a little with him, then decided to get on my way.

Of course, I got lost trying to get out of the Armenian Quarter, as well.  Or rather, I got lost in the absolute maze of the Jewish Quarter.  At one point I mounted one set of steep steps (smelling strongly of cat-piss after the recent rain), and then up another, and another-- and I found myself on a broad-strectching stone and concreted roof area, punctuated by the humps and bumps and the occasional square grid of a ventilation hole through which I could peer down onto one of the Palestinains souqs some 30 or 40 feet below.  Which souq?  I hadn't a clue.  I was quite lost, and the pathway that had brought me up here had just sort of fizzled out.  I retraced my steps, thought I had found my way out... and then the second or third time I ended up in Bab al-Silsila Street once again I knew I had to focus a littlke harder on my direction finding.

... So eventually, fairly tired, I arrived at the American Colony Hotel, with just 15 minutes in hand to read my newspaper in one of its intesnely gentrified lounges before my "date" with the former Deputy Knesset Speaker Naomi Chazan.  (Back in 1989, Bill and Lorna and I lived for two months in the American Colony. In those days they had a nice, plainly furnished, separate house across the street from the more famous courtyarded main structure. And if you were a journalist you could get a room there for around $60... That was before the Swiss management of the hotel discovered there are plenty of "journlists" with very deep pockets indeed. They jacked their prices up by about 44% and gentirified the whole place and we haven't stayed there since.)

After Naomi came in, we settled down in a corner of the bar (so she could smoke, ugh; but who am I to stop her?) and chatted for nearly an hour and a half. Naomi has worked for many years with the leftist Meretz Party.  She's not on Meretz's electoral list this year.  ("And as result, everyone in the party is a lot nicer to me than they used to be in the old days.  Then, I always felt the knives were out all around me.  But now, suddenly, everyone wants to be my friend!  They treat me like a kind of elder statesman.")  She was on the party's Platform Committee, and expressed a lot of authorial pride in the platform that they (or she?) produced.

One of the several things she expressed concern about  was the possibility of a low voter turnout.

The way she looked at the possibilities coming out of the election were as follows.  "You should think of Kadima as a road.  The question is, will it be the pivot party after the election-- the party without which no-one else can form a government.  That depends on how wide the road is, and how wide the shoulders are to each side of it.  If the road is just a narrow lane, then it won't be a pivot."

She said she thought Kadima needed 35 seats to emerge as a clear pivot party. (Today's latest poll in Ha'Aretz gives it 37.)  She thought it was also possible, however, that the rightist parties would emerge strong enough to be a pivot party-- though for them, given the smaller chances they'd have of attracting coalition partners from the left, the threshold to become the pivot was higher: 45 seats. (Today's poll gives them 35.)  She thought that if Kadima is the pivot party, then it might have a number of interesting ways to form a coalition, depending on width of the two "shoulders".  One possibility she spokle of is Kadima and Labor and Avigdor Leiberman's Yisrael Beitenu party forming the crux oif a coalition-- that is, without Likud.  But could we expect Israel's Amir Peretz to join Kadima's firmly unilateralist policy toward the Palestinians, I asked.  "Absolutely," she said.

I'm too tired to write anything more about what she said.  But I should just note that she said she'd attended a really great International Women's Day gathering in Tel Aviv yesterday.  It was organized by Na'amat, the organization of Israeli working women.  They had invited a mnumber of Palestinians speakers, some of whom had made what Naomi described as fairly fiery anti-occupation speeches.  "But well ended up dancing there together," she said.  She said-- need this be added?-- that no Hamas women had been on the roster.

As we walked out, there was a phalanx of dark-suited security men, in the middle of which we saw the white-maned, slightlly smug-looking figure of Jim Wolfensohn. Also, the US Consul-General.

Today's CSM column on Gaza

Here's my column in today's CSM. (Also here.)

I should just tell you one thing about the donkey carts mentioned in the story (and featured, I see, in the subhead they gave it.). In the late 1980s, that traditional form of trasnportation had just about disappeared from Gaza. But the strict regime of collective punishments the IOF imposed on the Palestinians during the first intifada included-- along with weeks-long lockdowns, mass arrests, public humiliations of local elders, etc etc etc-- the imposition of ever more complex and bizarre regulations on the owners of motor vehicles. At that point, many car-owners in Gaza, which is much flatter and much poorer than the West Bank, simply gave up the attempt to keep a car on the road, and switched back to donkey- or horse-drawn carts. It was a very vivid example of the de-development trend that Israel's lengthy occupation imposed on the Gazans.

So I'm interested to see that-- even after the short, alleged honeymoon period of post-Oslo, then the second intifada, and the Israeli disengagement-- the donkey-carts have persisted, They comprise probably about 20% of the vehicles I saw on the roads in Gaza. Every morning I would wake to the clip-clop of their metal-shoed hoofs on the road by the fishing-port, and the intermittent braying of some donkey, somewhere. Hey, I'm starting to miss Gaza already-- though I realize that what I regard as a funky and distinctive feature of the local scene probably represents for most Gazans yet another reminder of the economic de-development into which they've been forced.

Chaos, closure, and the Gaza greenhouses

One commenter wrote that when I wrote here recently about the greenhouses in Gaza that an American Jewish group helped hand over to the Palestinians last year, the source I quoted, Khaled Abdel-Shafi "had not told the whole story." That commenter, RB, then helpfully provided URLs to some earlier versions of this story, which featured accounts of some serious looting of greenhouse paraphernalia that took place immediately after the "handover".

This September 13 story referenced by RB tells us that, "Jihad al-Wazir, the deputy Palestinian finance minister, said roughly 30 percent of the greenhouses suffered various degrees of damage."

Actually, Abdel-Shafi did tell me about the looting. He explained to me that because of the Israelis' firm insistence on not coordinating any aspect of their departure with the PA, it was almost impossible for the PA to arrange to deploy sufficient security forces into the greenhouse region, or to make a plan on how to secure the greenhouses, before the IOF soldiers simply up and left the greenhouse areas in, as I recall it, the wee hours of one morning in early September.

However, despite the setback caused to the Palestinians' plans by the looting, the Palestinian Economic Development Company did manage to get some decent-sized crops of specialty items out of those greenhouses-- as did the owners of other existing large Palestinian greenhouse operations up and down the Strip in the most recent (indeed, ongoing) growing season.

But the most recent part of this story remains the fact that the Israeli government has not lived up to its commitment under last November's "Rafah Agreement" to keep the Karni goods crossing-- the only way for these ultra-perishable goods to reach the international markets for which they were grown-- fully open to expedite their transit to these markets.

Reuters told us yesterday that,

[A] report, prepared by a U.S. Agency for International Development contractor and obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, estimated agriculture losses in Gaza due to the closure of the Karni crossing at more than $450,000 per day.

The Palestine Economic Development Co., which manages the greenhouses left behind by evacuated Jewish settlers, has been losing more than $120,000 a day, the report estimated.

The greenhouse project was launched with much fanfare late last year as a sign of Gaza Strip's potential after Israel's withdrawal.

A border deal brokered by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was supposed to clear the way for Gaza to increase sharply its agricultural exports.

But a World Bank report released on Monday found "no sustained improvement" in the movement of goods across Karni before or after Israel's Gaza pullout, completed last September.

Israel closed Karni for 21 days between Jan. 15 and Feb. 5. It was closed again on Feb. 21 after a mysterious explosion in the area and has remained closed because of "continued security alerts", the army said.

The phenomenon of the looting in the abandoned Israeli settlements and the greenhouses reminds me of the story of the looting in Baghdad in the days aftere the fall of Saddam Hussein. In both cases, you had these elements:

(1) A population that had been living under a lot of socioeconomic pressure for a long time, and in which many of the norms of respect of property rights had seriously broken down,

(2) A population, moreover, that lacked trusted police forces, and

(3) A much more powerful military actor that through its actions had caused the change that left the major security vacuum, which some -- though certainly, in both cases, far from all-- elements of the population sought to exploit... and an actor that crucially had made no preparations at all to deal with the very foreseeable probability of this security breakdown-- indeed, that seemed almost wilfully oblivious to such consequences.

I think this case needs to be included in my intermittent study of military occupation-ology. Today, I drove back through northern Gaza from Gaza City to the Erez Crossing. The landscape was generally very bleak. The population density throughout the Gaza is enormous, and vast portions of the landscape are covered with raw concrete dwellings, two, three, and four stories high. Trash and sand blew across the rutted streets, and there were vast areas of rubble from the remains of former Israeli settlements and military bases. Actually, the most colorful thing is the election-related flags that still fly high above the buildings and utility poles... green for Hamas, yellow for Fateh, and red for the Popular Front. They are so numerous! And today they were all snapping smartly in a brisk wind.

Anyway, as we drove those few miles, I thought: what a contrast here, or in Iraq, with the situation in Germany or Japan after just a few years of US military occupation... In those earlier occupations, the US made it clear from the get-go that it had no ambitions to control either the land, the resources, or the population of those occupied areas, and that it would not maintain its military-occupation rule over them for any longer than was absolutely needed. In both areas, moreover, the occupying had a long-prepared and well executed plan for the rehabilitation of the indigenous society at all levels, including the socioeconomic and the political.

But Israel in the West Bank and Gaza? ... Or the US in Iraq? What terrible betrayals, in both cases, of the "trust" that running a temporary military occupation over someone else's country represents.

(Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is coming up to its 39th burthday this June.)

More Gaza

Well, guess who I've been hanging out with in Gaza these past couple of days...

If you guessed Ismail Haniyeh, well yes, you could be right. (Did you see this bellicose statement from Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, warning that Haniyeh is "not immune" from being assassinated? Or this, from Olmert saying Haniyeh should fear for his life if Hamas militants resume their attacks on Israel?)

If you guessed Dr. Mahgmoud Zahhar, you could be right.

And if you guessed Leila el-Haddad, the talented author of "Raising Yousuf" and the Gaza correspondent of the Al-Jazeera English-language website, you'd be right, too.

It's been a huge pleasure getting to know Leila a bit. She's the same age as my son, which is fun. She's also a plucky mom-journalist trying to juggle a zillion things. She's a Palestinian from Gaza, got a BA from Duke University and an MA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She could be working here as a journalist along with her spouse and child except that--

Her spouse is a Palestinian originally from Haifa, who was born in the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in Lebanon just three months before the Israeli-backed Flangist forces stormed the camp in 1976. He carries the travel document that the Lebanese government gives to Palestinian residents of Lebanon. And guess what--

The Palestinians don't have the right to control who comes in and out of Gaza. Even after the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from the Strip: Israel still gets to detrmine that. So Leila's Palestinian husband is among that majority of Palestinians who are actually forbidden from coming to Gaza. He can't even come under "family reunification."

So anyway, she's working here. He's actually doing a medical residency in the States. They have a long-distance commuter marriage. Luckily she has a great set of parents who have recently retired-- both of them were phsyicians-- and she and her two-year-old, Yousuf, live with them.

What I love about her blog is her sense of connectedness to the society here.

Discussions in Gaza

I've had some interesting conversations since coming here. Yesterday I conducted an interview with Ghazi Hamad, the managing editor of the Hamas weekly, Al-Resalah. (Here's their online edition.) Today I interviewed two of the six newly elected Hamas women MPs, Jamila Shanty and Mariam Farhat (Um Nidal). I also interviewed Khaled Abdel-Shafi, the head of the UN Development Program's Gaza office.

I got great material in all these interview. But I don't have time to write them all up now, so I'll start by giving you a few of the most important points from Ghazi Hamad. This portion was when I'd asked him how Hamas intended to deal with the three demands placed on Hamas by the international community:

We don't want to go into a clash with the international community. There are some issues on which we can be flexible, and some we can't...

We see that they ask us to make commitments, but not Israel. This is a problem for us.

We accept a state in the 1967 borders. And a long truce means we can stop all the attacks.

Before the elections we said we opposed all the agreements previously reached with Israel. Now we say we can consider all of them. (At another point he said, "Hamas has been moving very fast toward the Red Line issue of recognition, saying we can rule within the 1967 borders. We know we have further to go.")

We have a problem when they demand that we recognize Israel. It's difficult for us because it would be recognizing the Israeli occupation--as Khaled Meshaal says. But we say we accept the 1967 borders.

... Hamas is not ready to sell the political decision for money. Don't ask us to do that.

... Arafat gave them everything they asked for-- including saying that they could keep the Gush Etzion [settlement bloc.] And you see how they treated him!

But if Israel would say publicly that Gaza and the West Bank are occupied territories, and that they could give us a timetable to withdraw all their settlers, even over three years or four years-- that is what we need to hear from them. But now Olmert is saying that he'll keep 'unified' Jerusalem and keep the big settlement blocs, and he won't recognize our right of return. What is there to talk about?

... We don't expect to see a political solution in the next 3-4 years because the rightist parties will be ruling in Israel. But we will not be isolated. We'll move carefully. We don't want to get trapped in the muddy lake of negotiations!

Actually, there was a lot more in the interview, so I need to write the whole thing up a lot better. (Right now I'm composing online, on an internet link on someone else's phone connection. Not ideal, but a lot better than nothing.)

The two women were really interesting...

Jamila Shanty is a non-nonsense woman in maybe her late forties. She bustled into the room where we met at the Gaza office of the Palestinian parliament in a very business-like way and with a broad smile on her face. Like most of the women here in Gaza she wears a long, dark-colored loose coat-type garment and a big hijab headscarf that's tucked in at the sides to prevent any strand of hair escaping. She also toted a heavy, old-looking briefcase full of papers.

Shanty has worked as a teacher for most of her life, and also has an MA degree in, I think, English-- anyway, she speaks fairly good English. (Slightly better than my Arabic.) Now, she teaches philosophy and psychology at the Islamic University-- or at least, she did until she was elected, as Number 3, on Hamas's nationwide list of candidates.

She said she'd been active with Hamas women's organizations for many years. She spoke about how inspired she had been by the teachings of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, including his teachings on the need for women becoming empowered in education and in the public sphere, in general... How, for example, he used to insist that the mosques give plenty of room for women to worship and to hold lectures, as well as (separately) room for men. Though she herself never married, she explained that Hamas also believes that mothers have an important job to do at home, and that their child-rearing efforts are an important part of the political struggle. "But women should also join in activities outside the home," she said.

She said her two preferences for committee assignments in the new parliament are the Political Committee and the Legal Committee.

Mariam Farhat is a fairly famous Hamas woman, since she is the mother of three young men who engaged in (and lost their lives in) suicide operations against Israelis. I'm not sure how many Israelis the three of them killed as well. I talked with her some about how she felt about her sons' operations. She said she had encouraged the young men to sign up for them. "Even though I'm a mother and I love them so much, still there is a priority which is to fight for our rights," she said. "So though it was painful when they died, still I also felt happy, because I am convinced both that they went to heaven and would have a life so much better than our life here, and that their sacrifice helped our Muslim cause... Anyway, how do American mothers feel when they send their boys off to fight and perhaps die as they launch attack operations in Iraq-- or Israeli mothers when they send their sons against us here?"

(Ghazi Hamad separately said that, "We felt that by using the gun we would deny the Israelis the sense of security that they crave. So by doing that we forced even Ariel Sharon to recognize the need for a Palestnian state.")

The conversation with Khaled Abdel-Shafi was extremely depressing. He underlined that the whole "Rafah agreement" that Condi Rice "negotiated" through some very visible shuttle diplomacy in the wake of Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza last year had turned out to be extremely disappointing for the Palestinians, primarily because the Israelis have implemented so few of their commitments under it. Also, that that noncompliance predated Hamas's Jan. 25 election victory-- though it has gotten a lot worse since then, too.

Looking at the economic situation in general, he described it as "worse than ever." He talked a little, too, about how depressing it was-- after working for 13 years in Gaza for UNDP, and after having helped launch a number of development projects of which he felt quite proud, to see that whole "economic development" agenda now in danger of being thrown aside as the international community turned its focus more toward purely "relief" operations. (Relief operations classically don't do much if anything to build the acapacity of the recipient societies. Instead, they merely increase longterm economic dependency and thus undermine the goal of real development.)

He and others here also have some very depressing reports about what happened with the much-vaunted "greenhouse operation" that Jim Wolfensohn (not a poor man) and a group of well-meaning Jewish Americans had organized and funded at the time of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.... Basically, the story was that the greenhouses (for which the departing settlers received a $14 million payment from the American group) were handed over to the Palestinians in far worse shape than the Palestinians had been led to expect. The Palestinian Investment Fund then spent $30 million to get them up and running, and to grow the first crop and get it to market. But at that point-- just after Hamas's election victory-- the Israelis closed the Karnei freight crossing and the entire crop-- strawberries, peppers, cut flowers, etc etc-- had to be trashed. (The other option would have been to dump it on the Palestinian market and depress prices for the many other existing Palestinian growers.)

"The Palestinian took the greenhouses under pressure," he said. "Originally they didn't want to take them because they knew that they only point of this operation would be to raise export crops... The Palestinians didn't need more greenhouses for their own domestic consumption-- they already had 12,000 greenhouses for that. But they knew that exporting these products would always be something completely at the whim of Israel, because of the problem of access to the markets... Sadly they were proved right. But they lost a lot of Palestinian money trying to make it work."

Weekend Haaretz

One of the interesting things about being in Israel is to be able to read the paper versions of English-language Ha'Aretz and the Jerusalem Post... However good it is to read content on-line, still, there's something special about newsprint!

The weekend edition of H'Aretz, which came out yesterday, had a number of really interesting articles:

This well-researched piece by Akiva Eldar, which is worth reading in full, tells us about the failure of the government to live up to its commitment to destroy settlement outposts that were constructed not just-- as all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories have been-- in clear contravention of international law but also, in contravention of Israel's own laws about such construction activities.

Eldar writes:

Next Wednesday will mark a year since the modest ceremony at which the outposts report was submitted to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Instead of an answer to the obvious question, "What has happened since then," the author of the report, former state prosecutor and attorney Talia Sasson, suggests visiting Migron, in the Binyamin region. This outpost starred in the report as a symbol of systemic collapse.

It all began in April 2002, with a fake antenna, "a pole with a costume," as the Israel Defense Forces' brigade commander told Sasson. Pinhas Wallerstein, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council and a public servant, gave a commitment in writing that the antenna would not develop into another illegal outpost. But it ended up as such - the permanent home of 150 families, with public buildings, roads, lighting and so on.

"I am not naive about the state's conduct in the territories," says Sasson, "but in the case of Migron, it is a matter of establishing a settlement on private land that belongs to Palestinians, without a government decision and without any legal status. And as if that were not enough, it is the public coffers that are paying for the tractors that broke the road through to the outpost and funded the public buildings there. It is important to understand that every day that the state allows the settlers to hold on to the land is another day of violating the law and human rights. A state that respects its desire to be democratic cannot accept this phenomenon. I put very grave findings on the government's table, but to my great regret, what there was is what there is and apparently also what there will be."

Sasson notes that at least half a dozen outposts the High Court of Justice ordered evacuated are still standing. The court handed down this decision after the Defense Ministry and the area commander told it that the outposts are not legal and that therefore the government must evacuate them. "This is a serious and unparalleled failure at the government level," says Sasson decisively.

And indeed, despite the government's explicit commitment - in the framework of the road map plan - to dismantle the 24 illegal outposts that have been established during the terms of Sharon's governments, not a single outpost has been evacuated. Had it not been for the petition by Peace Now, even the nine houses at the Amona outpost would have remained standing.

I had a good talk with Eldar as couple of days ago. He did say that he thinks that after the failure of the extremist settlers to prevent last summer's disengagement from Gaza, he thinks the settlers are "in deep crisis". He said that whereas previously, most Israeli elections have been fought over the issue of how (or wherther) to make peace with the Palestinians, "This time the issue is not about peace; it's about quiet. It's about conflict management, not conflict resolution."

Though he sees Kadima's position as representing this broad public sentiment at this time, he said he thought the longer-term outlook for the party isn't very good. "The Kadima Party is a cocktail party," he said. "It's not yet the end of Labour and Likud... Israel has seen a whole series of these 'third parties' that have come and gone, and most likely Kadmia will be like the rest of them."

He said that the Hamas victory in the OPTs hadn't affected the Israeli electrions much-- "except that it seems to prove to many Israelis that 'there's no-one to talk to.' So it's made Labour more irrelevant."

Well, talking of Labour, Ha'Aretz also had a lengthy, very informative (to me) interview with new Labour head Amir Peretz. He presented himself very much as a plucky outsider who has fought for his values and will keep the interests of Israel's huddled masses front and center in his work. (Not surprisingly, since his power base was with the Histadrut trade-union federation. Additionally, he's of Moroccan Jewish background, which makes him doubly an 'outsider'.)

Here's what he said about the 'peace process':

There will be a wave of terrorist attacks. People will test you, they will test what you are made of.

"I do not think that the most extreme person of peace and the person of peace for whom peace is the most sacred goal can allow himself to put up with terrorism. We have to ensure that there are no showcase operations here, or collective punishment, but I will have greater legitimatization for fighting terrorism than any other candidate."

You have a limitation in the security sphere.

"If I have to decide the size of the cannon that fires at the exposed areas in Gaza, I have a limitation. But if I have to balance between the human damage entailed in that firing and the military consideration, I have an advantage over everyone else."

Still, people are asking themselves whether Amir Peretz is capable of managing a security crisis and of piloting the defense establishment.

"I think it does Israel harm to have a chief of staff above whom is a defense minister who is a super-chief of staff and above him a prime minister who is the super-super-chief of staff. It is also not the case that the prime minister sits in the Pit [the war room] when some army unit embarks on an operation. I think it's correct for nonmilitary observers also to sit at the table where the decisions are made. Did [Israel's third prime minister Levi] Eshkol have more military experience than I do? Even Churchill did not have greater military experience than I do."

... One of the most important issues in the next term will be whether to bomb Iran. Are you built to make a decision like that?

"I think I'm more capable than any of the other candidates of making a decision. My advantage over the others is that the moment the bombing of Iran appears as a possible mode of action, from that moment I must not sleep day or night in order to try and prevent that. The wisdom is not to reach a point where you say there is no choice, all options have been exhausted. The question is what to do before that happens. And I think this is my advantage over the others. I'm trying to forge a policy that will shape reality and I'm not willing to have reality dictate policy to me."

...I assume the dream includes peace. Will there be peace in the coming decade?

"The optimal scenario is massive aid from humanitarian organizations to the moderate Palestinian forces so that within two years Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] can dissolve the parliament after Fatah cleans up its corruption. If that happens, the results of those elections will be totally different. On the other hand, if we starve the Palestinians, w'e'll get the opposite result."

What is the permanent border we are heading for? The Geneva Initiative border?

"I don't think we have to accept the Geneva border. Geneva went too far, from my point of view. In general the Geneva Initiative was harmful rather than beneficial to the process. But the line of demarcation for the border will be 1967. It will be impossible to evacuate the settlement blocs of Gush Etzion and Ma'aleh Adumim, but we will have to give compensation for them - either a great deal of money or territories."

Well, not everything I'd like to see there, but notably more forthcoming than Kadima head Ehud Olmert or his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. Also notable: that Peretz went out of his way to meet with Abu Mazen recently.

Talking of the idea that Peretz "lacks security experience", I had an interesting talk with Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) spokesman Adam Keller the other day. He said he had become so enamored of Peretz-- for his social agenda as well as his peace agenda-- that for the first time in years he'd gone round to his local Labour Party office (in Cholon, south of Tel Aviv), to volunteer to work on the election.

So since Cholon has a large population of Russian immigrants, the task he was given was to stuff Russian-language Labour Party flyers into people's mail-boxes. He showed me the stack of flyers: you open each one up and there's a whole row of pictures of pro-Labour generals, with quotes from them saying how much they support Labour... I and that's before you get to the visage of Peretz (looking chubby cheeked and full-mustached-- "just like Rafiq Hariri" as a friend of mine said.)

What else, while I'm in the Weekend HaAretz? There was this lovely story titled The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie that was basically a tour of some of the historic residences of the two West Jerusalem neighborhoods of Talbieh and Katamon, described as "two prestigious neighborhoods in Jerusalem's western part that were established during the British Mandate by wealthy Arabs." The writer, David Kroyanker, continues:

In Talbieh, all of the inhabitants were Christians of the highest socioeconomic class. In Katamon, Christians lived alongside Muslims and the neighborhood's status in the eyes of the Arab population of the city was second to Talbieh. In third place were Abu Tor and Baka.

After the Arab inhabitants left their homes in the 1948 war, Jewish families moved into them. At the beginning of the 1950s the government decided that some of the houses in Talbieh would serve as official residences for government ministers and other senior officials.

Indeed, of the nine houses featured in the article, six had been built by Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee in 1948, one had been built by an Egyptian Jewish family prior to 1948, and two were built in the 1950s.

In and after the fighting of 1948, there was complete ethnic cleansing of "the other" on both sides of then-divided Jerusalem-- with the exception of the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University, which retained its "island" position on the ridge east of the Old City. I have the figures somewhere (but not here) of the number of Jewish residents forced to leave Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem that year, and the number of Palestinian residents forced to leave Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem... The number of Palestinians ethnically cleansed from the city was far, far higher than the number of Jews ethnically cleansed.

Then in 1967, the city was allegedly "reunified" through the Israeli military conquest of its eastern portions. jewish Israelis immediately moved in to take control not only of the properties they had left behind in 1948, but also of vast additional swathes of land, where over the intervening 39 years some 200,000 Israelis settlers have been planted.

In the spirit of "reunification" do you think the expelled Palestinian residents of West Jerusalem were given any reciprocal right to reclaim the properties that their families, too, had been forced to leave behind in 1948?

... That would be a resounding "No."

In fact, West Jerusalem is one of the most homogenously all-Jewish areas in the whole of Israel.

So that makes it all the more poignant to read a piece like David Kroyanker's... Take this description, for example:

5. 'Golda's kitchen'
(Formerly Villa Haroun al-Rashid); 18 Marcus Street, Talbieh

This three-story building, in which there are four apartments, is one of the most impressive and splendid in Talbieh. This structure, one of the first in the neighborhood, was built by businessman Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat in 1926 and bears the name of one of the caliphs of Baghdad and a hero of "The Thousand and One Nights," Haroun al Rashid. The name of the house appears on the wooden frame on its main entrance, as well as on ceramic tiles in Arabic and Latin characters on the facade and at the side entrance.

The main entrance into the apartment on the ground floor, which looks out over a large garden, is via an elaborate staircase that leads to a covered veranda. In the past there was a modest, plastered concrete structure on the roof that served as servants? quarters during the period of the Mandate.

During the first years of the state this was the official residence of then minister of labor and housing, Golda Meir. It is said that this is where "Golda's kitchen" was founded - the place where she concocted "political delicacies" with the top Mapai people...

Then there's this one:

3. Villa Jamal
Almost became the PM's residence; 9 Alkalai Street, Talbieh

This large and luxurious two-story house was built in 1934 by Christian Arab businessman Anis Jamal. A number of members of the Jamal family built beautifully designed houses in Talbieh that put a stamp of architectural uniqueness on the neighborhood. Anis' wife, Tabitha Jamal, was a Russian noblewoman and her cousin was British actor Peter Ustinov; his father was the Russian consul in Jaffa before World War I.

After the Jamal family left its home, in the spring of 1948, the building served as a center for the Lehi underground movement in the city. At the beginning of the 1950s there was a proposal that the building be used as the prime minister's official residence, but David Ben-Gurion rejected it on the grounds that it was not proper to use a property that belongs to absentee Arab owners for official purposes.

Well, that was then and now is now, huh? Jewish Israelis have always admired the beautiful houses that the Palestinians had built all around Jerusalem-- but especially in its western neighborhoods... But at least back in Ben Gurion's day, Israel's first PM thought it "not proper" to live in a house owned by an "absentee" family. How things changed in subsequent years. The list in this article includes not only "Golda's kitchen" but also the "Levi Eshkol house", the "Olmert house", the "Netanyahu house"-- all of which were properties "cleansed" of their Palestinian owners in 1948.

Coming to Gaza

The taxi took around 75 minutes to drive from Jerusalem down to the Erez checkpoint at the northern end of Gaza.  Two years ago, when I was trying to enter Gaza to do some consulting for a US-based NGO, I waited here at the main entrance to the crossing-point for about five hours before it started to get dark and I decided to hitch a ride back to Jerusalem with some passing UN bureaucrats.  This time, my Israeli press pass worked like a charm.  The Israeli army girls behind the counter had me fill out one form-- I believe I was signing something to the effect that I understood that going to Gaza was very dangerous but I was going anyway-- and then told me to walk on through.  That was literaly all there was to the border formalities at this end.

They indicated that I walk "straight through".  There was a sort of maze of gates, concrete blocks, watchtowers, little trailers, concrete blocks and so on outside.  As I approached a one-way turnstile one of the security people said, "No!  Gate No. 2!"  So I went through gate No. 2 and entered the beginning of a long, covered and enclosed walkway.  It was  maybe about 25 feet wide.  The "walls" on each side were made from the same sections of preformed concrete that the "Wall" in the West Bank-- and indeed, the wall that surrounds Gaza-- is also built.  That is, sections of concrete walling about four feet wide and to one side of me about 8 metres tall, to the other, about 6 metres tall, each section sitting on its own heavy 20-inch-high solid footing.  Above the tops of the walls there were light metal structures that gave a few inches more open height for ventilation and also provided a frrame for the canvas that formed the "roof" of the tunnel.  Somewhat bizarrely, these canvases were in different colors-- starting out blue, then moving to pink and green, all of which gave the light inside the tunnel  some interesting tones. 

I am the only person in this tunnel, which has two sides to it, divided by a metal fence....

On my side there is just one single broad walkway.  On the other side, which is for pedestrians seeking to enter Israel, the walkway has been divided by metal dividers into three separate "lanes."  I imagine when it was built there was some idea that many laborers from Gaza would be traveling to work in Israel every day, in which case they would be penned up in those lanes  (as I have seen them penned up, but in more promitive structures, on this side of the Erez checkpoint on previous occasions.)

After about 150 yards, there is a bend in the tunnel, and beyond it two sets of metal heavy metal gates.  H'mm, I try to push the first one open.  It doesn't give.  I see a call button and push it.  Nothing happens, then there is a loud groaning and the first gate in front of me starts to wheeze open on a heavy hydraulic hinge.  I look up: yes, there are indeed video cameras up there watching for me to have arrived.  Maybe I didn't even need to push the call button?

That gate wheezes shut.  I am penned in between the two sets of gates.  I look around for another call button, but this time, before I find it the second gate starts to push automatically open at the command of well-hidden hands.  After that one, there is another kink in the tunnel.  But I am immediately assailed by a young man pushing a very primitive cart who insists on hoisting my wheelie bag and shoulder bag onto the cart.  We walk on along additional pastel-tinted expanses of tunnel.  The porter, who is Palestinian, kicks at some of the trash on the floor.  "See this?" he says.  "Israelis!  Dirty, dirty!  Wait till you see the Palestinian side."

When we do get to the "Palestinian" section of the tunnel there's another bend in the walkway, and the construction of the tunnel changes markedly.  Now, the walls are less tall, and the pastel-colored canvases have been replaced by corrugated tin roofing.  And yes, the floor does look as though it has recently been swept, though to be honest there's so much dust all around here that the only way to keep a concrete floor like this really clean would be to give it a good go-over with water and a squeegee, which evidently has not been done here.  Seventy yards or so of walking along the "Palestinian" tunnel brings me to their checkpoint.  I am directed to, I think, the women's section: two middle-aged women with broad Gazawi smiles and hijab scarves sitting in a small room behind a counter.  One of them registers my passport number.  "Ameriki?" she says.  "Welcome to Balestine."  And that's it.  Here I am in Gaza.

Later, I'm sitting at lunch in a restaurant overlooking the fishing harbor that serves-- you guessed!-- absolutely fabulous fish.  Little yellow boats are bobbing in the harbor.  Some boys are having fun riding past on one of the donkey-carts that is still a major means of transportation around the Strip.  My friends the parliamentarian Ziad Abu Amr and the psychiatrist Iyad Sarraj are talking about the stress and strain of living in Gaza, and making various assessments of the national political situation.  I haven't seen Iyad for many years.  I haven't been to Gaza for nearly four years; haven't seen Ziad for two years...  I listen avidly and put in the occasional question.

It is a large restaurant with a pleasing view out over the harbor. And did I mention the sensational food?  Grilled sea-bass, sweet and tender calamari rings, spicy prawns, hummus, and a wide variety of salads and pickles...

On a langorous Friday (weekend) afternoon, the three of us are the only people lunching there.

Kaplan making sense?!

I don't think I've ever agreed with much at all of what Robert Kaplan-- just one of a long string of western male writers who trail around the world imagining themselves to be Joseph Conrad-- has written in the past. So imagine my surprise today when I read this piece in the WaPo in which Kaplan seems to have come round almost completely to the view of the world I've been articulating for many years now.

It includes these important truths:

Physical security remains the primary human freedom. And so the fact that a state is despotic does not necessarily make it immoral. That is the essential fact of the Middle East that those intent on enforcing democracy abroad forget.

For the average person who just wants to walk the streets without being brutalized or blown up by criminal gangs, a despotic state that can protect him is more moral and far more useful than a democratic one that cannot.

Also this:

The lesson to take away is that where it involves other despotic regimes in the region -- none of which is nearly as despotic as [Saddam] Hussein's -- the last thing we should do is actively precipitate their demise. The more organically they evolve and dissolve, the less likely it is that blood will flow. That goes especially for Syria and Pakistan, both of which could be Muslim Yugoslavias in the making, with regionally based ethnic groups that have a history of dislike for each other. The neoconservative yearning to topple Bashar al-Assad, and the liberal one to undermine Pervez Musharraf, are equally adventurous.

Kaplan was an eager supporter of the decision to topple Saddam. Now, he seems to be hedging his bets-- or would you say this paragraph qualifies almost as a mea-culpa?

In the case of Iraq, the state under Saddam Hussein was so cruel and oppressive it bore little relationship to all these other dictatorships. Because under Hussein anybody could and in fact did disappear in the middle of the night and was tortured in the most horrific manner, the Baathist state constituted a form of anarchy masquerading as tyranny. The decision to remove him was defensible, while not providential. [Meaning-- what??] The portrait of Iraq that has emerged since his fall reveals him as the Hobbesian nemesis who may have kept in check an even greater anarchy than the kind that obtained under his rule.

No, I don't think it's a mea culpa. But still it's great to see someone who has been such an inspiring figure for the architects of various US military adventures since the early 1990s suddenly starting to urge caution.

(Hat-tip to spouse for telling me I should read that. It was interesting to see that George Will had a piece urging US caution re Iraq on the same op-ed page... Those two, and Frank Fukuyama: quite interesting how the debacle in Iraq is starting to fragment the previously existing bloc of US militarists of both left and right.)

Articles in Salon.com, Foreign Policy

So the piece I wrote for Salon on Hamas went up onto their site last night. It's here. If you don't have a subscription you just have to sit through a little ad thing that comes on, before you can read it.

This is a new experience for me, writing for an online publication. I was sued to a whirlwind news cycle back when I worked for Reuters in the 1970s. Recently, in my 'composed' writings I've become used to a much more leisurely pace. (Btw, my piece on international courts is now up on the Foreign Policy website, but there's a strict pre-registration thing you need to go through there if you want to read it.)

On the other hand, I've also been blogging for three years-- and that can be just as immediate as you (I) want it to be.

My CSM columns typically have a turnround time of some 2-3 days. Working on the Salon piece felt fairly similar to that.

Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Walls

Well, I just heard I got my Israeli press pass.  This is excellent news.  One of the main reasons I need it is that being the bearer of a press pass is the only way foreigners and Israelis get to cross into Gaza at all these days.  Of course, once I've got it no doubt there are all sorts of other fascinating things I can do with it.

I'm still in Tel Aviv.  I've been hanging around waiting for an interview that now (nearly 6 p.m.) looks as though it ain't going to come through for me.  All Israeli political figures are incredibly busy these days, organizing their campaigns for the March 28 elections.  I even had a hard time getting an "appointment" with Naomi Chazan, the former deputy Knesset Speaker from the leftist Meretz Party, whom I think of as a dear friend.  Oh well, I understand...

Actually, one thing quite a few Israelis have remarked on since I came here has been how indifferent much of the public seems to be to the whole campaign.  Usually, politics in Israel is a 24/7 obsession.  But as much as I can figure out from listening to radios in taxi-cabs, that portion of the media seems much more interested in Hamas (or as Israelis say it, "Khamas") and Abu Mazen than they are in their own politicians. Go figure.

Also, I haven't seen one single recognizably electoral billboard or informally posted flyer on the hoardings in the streets yet.  There are plenty of billboards bearing the ayatollah-like image of the Shas Party's spiritual mentor Rabbi Ovadia Youssef-- not just billboards, but massive displays on the sides of buses, etc etc.  But people say even that even there, the "message" is not political at all, but one that features some kind of religious exhortation.

In fact, Youssef's bearded and turbaned visage on these billboards and displays is quite reminiscent of the parades of beared and turbaned ayatollahs who (along with their own religious homilies) grace many of the billboards of Hizbullah-dominated South Lebanon or come to think of it of the posters for Hamas I saw in the West Bank, which have an impishly grinning photo of a (bearded, headscarveded) Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.

.. Well, anyway, late this morning, cellphone clutched in hand, I decided to walk down the seaside promenade to the old city of Jaffa that's perched on a hilly promontory that juts out into the Mediterranean just over a mile south of Tel Aviv's city center.  The seaside promenade is beautiful: much nearer to sea-level than the Corniche in Beirut, and much cleaner and better appointed.  As I walked briskly along I passed a few groups of older guys sitting together on folding chairs playing shesh-besh (backgammon) almost exactly as they would be doing at the very same time on the Beirut Corniche...

As in Beirut, there's lots of traffic whizzing along on the non-sea side of you, and there are palm-trees and the occasional snack-vendor.  But another difference is the wide expans of beach here in Tel Aviv, that runs between the promenade and the gently lapping sea.  In Beirut, the Corniche is perched above a rocky coastline.  A few people swim from it.  But mainly there it's fishermen between the Corniche and the sea-- and the waves often come crashing up against the rocks and against the Corniche itself.

So anyway, I'm walking along and I see a rather interesting-looking structure beside the promenade.  (The road by now has veered away from us.  There's quite an expans of tough-looking grass right here.) So this structure looks like an old Arab stone house (arches, etc) that has fallen into some desuetude and then had an entire sqaur-ish glass-and-steel structure put on top of it.  I'm intrigued and go closer.  A sign announces it's a little museum called the "Etzel Museum".  Okay, I still don't know what Etzel is-- maybe it's the name of the building?  Maybe the name of a famous painter whose works are featured here? Who knows?  I fork over my 10 shekels for the entry fee and then it suddenly dawns on me:  Etzel is the Hebrew acronym for the Irgun Zvai Leumi-- the infamous militant ("terrorist") Zionist group that incubated Menachem Begin and the whole of the Likud Party.  And this is their museum!  (Actually, as I learned later, just one branch of a larger museum they have elsewhere in town.)

So this is really interesting.  Quite apart from the fact that I've been making quite a bit of a study of how it is that, as and after conflicts wind down, the affected societies choose to memorialize them, particularly through built memorials and museums.  But the Irgun, for goodness sake!  And to come upon this place quite by chance at a time when many in Israel have been calling on Abu Mazen to organize his own "Altalena".  Altalena was a boat full of weapons (from France) that the Irgun had been bringing in to Palestine at the time of the fighting in 1948.  David Ben-Gurion, the head of the biggest Zionist organization (the forerunners of the Labour Party) demanded that the Irgun hand over thte weapons to the unified Haganah fighting forces.  The Irgun refused, and Ben Gurion seized control of the boat by force.  (This was just a little bit north of here, I think.)  There were a number of fatalities in that fighting, even.... So that was their big moment of bringing all the fighting forces under the command of the central state.  It's certainly worth noting that Ben Gurion didn't take that step until one month after the British had withdrawn and the Zionist had celebrated the foundation of their independent state.  But now, people have been wanting Abu Mazen (and before him, Yasser Arafat) to "take on" the militants in Palestinian society long before the Palestinians have even the tiniest little piece of actual sovereign independence-- or even, any guarantee at all that sovereign independence is on its way...

So, the Etzel Museum.  Established, I believe, with the help of the Ministry of Defence Museum Unit.  My (American) tax dollars at work!  At work, moreover, glorifying and memorializing the actions of a group of people who took lethal violent actions against both Palestinian civilians (in Deir Yassin, and elsewhere-- as fulsomely celebrated in this museum) and against British troops.  Indeed, there in one corner of the museum is mockingly displayed the "Wanted" poster issued by the British for the entire leadership of the Irgun after they kdinaped and hanged two British Army sergeants.

It's quite well done as a museum.  This place memorializes only ther actions the Irgun took in 1947 and 1948-- though those were pretty crucial years for it, all in all.  There a section on Deir Yassin-- a small Arab village just west of Jerusalem whose houses still stand empty today as a silent memorial to the killings (and complete ethnic cleansing) that the Irgun committed there in April 1948.  Wikipedia has a very full entry on the events there, and quotes a Bir Zeit University study that found that,


Anyway, the museum has a little section on that, one on the fighting in the Wadi Nisnas area of Haifa, one about fightinbg they took part in right here, in the Manshiyeh area just north of Jaffa, and a few others about battlles and other military actions the Irgun took part in those years.  Also, a large display about the Altalena incident.  One room was given over as a sort of memorial room to the Irgun fighters who died in action, and another was organized as a lecture room with seating for maybe 80-100 people, a lectern, and a movie screen.

There was only one other visitor there this morning.  There were two staff people-- a guy in a kippa who gave all my bags a very thorough searching and a youing woman who did speak some English, took my entrance money, and  also sold me a rather handsome book about the Irgun in English, written (she told me) by the person who organized the museum, Joseph Kister, and published in 2000 by the Ministry of Defence Publishing House and Museum Unit.  The young woman offered to play the 20-minute Englisjh-language movie they have there, for me.  But I really didn't have time for that and demurred.  I took a bunch of pics both inside and outside the museum.  Maybe I'll get them up onto the blog sometime.

So I walked the short remaining distance to the outskirts of Old Jaffa, took a few pics of the Hassan Bek Mosque, bought a sandwich from one of the Palestinian-owned stores nearby, and hopped into a cab to go to my next interview which was down in Cholon, south of Tel Aviv.

As we went there, at one point the cab whizzed by a structure that was almost certainly a prison-- high concrete walls topped withmany layers of razor wire, and punctuated by watch-towers.  But it was in the middle of just a regular, fairly high-density urban neighborhood... So here's what someone had done to try to soften its impact on the neighbors:  They had painted gaudy murals on at least two of the outer walls of the structure-- mainly a blue background with frolicking, bad-Chagall-like figures floating around in it... But then on one of the walls, they had added some 3-D images including one that looked as though it was a man pushing out of the wall... It looked like a rather sick mockery of the fate of those imprisoned (I assume) inside there... But the cab was going too fast for me to see any more.

Of course, painting large oppressive concrete walls to try to "normalize" them for those Israelis who are sometimes forces to look at them is something the Israeli authorities do a lot more frequently elsewhere-- primarily, with regard to those sections of the infamous West Bank Wall that curve around anywhere near where Israelis live or travel.  For example, I've seen at least two different "artistic" treastments given to the Israeli side of the wall at different points.  On the (US-funded!) "bypass" road that curves around urban Jerusalem to the northwest and ends up near the Qalandiya checkpoint, there's a long (though not very high) portion of the Wall that runs along the western side of the road... Here, Israeli painters have put in repeating images of a flat-topped stone arch with a green field, horzon, and blue sky visible under each arch... So the visual effect as you drive quickly by is that you're driving along parallel to something like an aqueduct over to your left there.  (Wall?  What Wall?)

The graffiti on the Palestinian side of the Wall is, needless to say, far less mendacious and palliative in intent.  Over on the Palestinian side of the Ramallah-enclosing Wall at Qalandieh there's a rather nice work by the London graffiti artist Banksy.  (I think it's this one.)  There's also a really lovely, large stencilled image of Gandhi -- and a whole bunch of very political graffiti.  And there's this image, too which I hadn't realized is another Banksy creation.

... One last question is it better to "beautify" urban prisons, or not?  I am always shocked when I walk along Helene Hamalacha Street in Jerusalem (which I do quite often-- partly because it's nice to walk along Queen Helena Street and partly because it goes where I need it to go)... because it goes along the side of the Israelis' "Moscobiyya" prison where political prisoners are kept in isolation cells.  The Moscobiyya's structure is an old pilgrim hostel from the 19th century that wass established by the Tsarina Elizaveta or some other Russian princess of that era.  I think it's only one story high, and most of the sides have a series of largish rectangular windows-- one each, perhaps, for each of the original pilgrims' room within.  But on the side that goes along Helene Hamalacha Street each of these windows has been boxed in with a really ugly metal box with a sloping 'roof' that only has a few small holes punched in it for light and ventilation.  I have talked to a number of Palestinian political leaders who've spent time in this prison, including Faisal Husseini and Ghassan al-Khateeb.  Their descriptions of the treatment they received there-- vomit-stinking bags over their heads, stress positions, lots of disorientation techniques, etc etc-- makes my stomach lurch every time I walk along the street and think that people inside there might be receiving that kind of treatment right now.  (Neither Faisal nor Ghassan was, as far as I recall, ever charged with anything.  They were just among the thousands of Palestinian political organizers arrested and held without trial for months, sometimes years at a time.)

So there we are.  I wonder what the theme of today's slightly meandering little travelogue could be said to be...  Maybe "walls".  Tomorrow-- Jerusalem!  And then on Friday, I hope-- Gaza!

Wolfensohn letter, text

I just want to bookmark the link to the version of James Wolfensohn's letter of February 25 that was acquired by the WaPo and published yesterday.