Monthly Archives: January 2009

INAUGURATION DAY, JANUARY 20, 2008

Thank you Mr Bush – really
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 20, 2009

As America and much of the world now celebrates, let’s not forget the man who made all this possible: George W Bush. Had he been he merely been mediocre, merely a below-average president, America in its caution, America who — let’s not forget re-elected Bush and just a few months ago, at least for a few weeks, was quite enamored with Sarah Palin — this America, the one we’re still living in, might not have been ready to make the bold leap of electing an exceptional man of unquestionable talent. So let’s give thanks that George Bush really was the worst president ever and let’s give thanks that desperate times have become the catalyst for an imaginative leap.

On first full day, Obama will dive into foreign policy
By Michael D. Shear and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, January 20, 2009

President-elect Barack Obama will plunge into foreign policy on his first full day in office tomorrow, finally freed from the constraints of tradition that has forced him and his staff to remain muzzled about world affairs during the 78-day transition.

As one of his first actions, Obama plans to name former senator George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) as his Middle East envoy, aides said, sending a signal that the new administration intends to move quickly to engage warring Israelis and Palestinians in efforts to secure the peace.

Mitchell’s appointment will follow this afternoon’s expected Senate vote to confirm Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. And tomorrow afternoon, aides said, Obama will convene a meeting of his National Security Council to launch a reassessment of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Here’s a comment on George Mitchell’s appointment from my colleague, the co-director of Conflicts Forum, Mark Perry:

    Barack Obama has said that he would make Middle East peace a priority. George Mitchell’s appointment is a reflection of that commitment. There couldn’t be a better person to do this job.
    He couldn’t have made a better appointment.

Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis
By Ben White, The Guardian, January 20, 2009

The scale of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government’s long-planned and comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell. As a former Israeli government press adviser put it, in a wonderful bit of unintentional irony, “When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath?”

Despite a mass of evidence that includes Israel’s targets in Operation Cast Lead, public remarks by Israeli leaders over some time, and the ceasefire manoeuvring of this last weekend, much of the analysis offered by politicians or commentators has been disappointingly limited, and characterised by false assumptions, or misplaced emphases, about Israel’s motivations.

First, to what this war on Gaza is not about: it’s not about the rockets. During the truce last year, rocket fire from the Gaza Strip was reduced by 97%, with the few projectiles that were fired coming from non-Hamas groups opposed to the agreement. Despite this success in vastly improving the security of Israelis in the south, Israel did everything it could to undermine the calm, and provoke Hamas into a conflict. [continued…]

The myth of Israel’s strategic genius
By Stephen M Walt, Foreign Policy, January 19, 2009

Many supporters of Israel will not criticize its behavior, even when it is engaged in brutal and misguided operations like the recent onslaught on Gaza. In addition to their understandable reluctance to say anything that might aid Israel’s enemies, this tendency is based in part on the belief that Israel’s political and military leaders are exceptionally smart and thoughtful strategists who understand their threat environment and have a history of success against their adversaries. If so, then it makes little sense for outsiders to second-guess them.

This image of Israeli strategic genius has been nurtured by Israelis over the years and seems to be an article of faith among neoconservatives and other hardline supporters of Israel in the United States. It also fits nicely with the wrongheaded but still popular image of Israel as the perennial David facing a looming Arab Goliath; in this view, only brilliant strategic thinkers could have consistently overcome the supposedly formidable Arab forces arrayed against them.

The idea that Israelis possess some unique strategic acumen undoubtedly reflects a number of past military exploits, including the decisive victories in the 1948 War of Independence, the rapid conquest of the Sinai in 1956, the daredevil capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960, the stunning Israeli triumph at the beginning of the 1967 Six Day War, and the intrepid hostage rescue at Entebbe in 1976.

These tactical achievements are part of a larger picture, however, and that picture is not a pretty one. Israel has also lost several wars in the past — none of them decisively, of course — and its ability to use force to achieve larger strategic objectives has declined significantly over time. This is why Israelis frequently speak of the need to restore their “deterrent”; they are aware that occasional tactical successes have not led to long-term improvements in their overall security situation. The assault on Gaza is merely the latest illustration of this worrisome tendency. [continued…]

Gazans rally behind Hamas
By Charles Levinson, Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2009

sraeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as he announced a cease-fire in Gaza over the weekend, said Israel’s military objectives against Hamas had been met. But at least initially, the militant group appears to have gained what Israel and its Bush administration allies had long hoped they could damp: popular support.

“Hamas is now our army, the only ones fighting to defend the Palestinian people,” said Gaza resident Ahmed al-Sultan, standing outside the rubble of the north Gaza City home his family has lived in for 40 years. “I saw how they fight, their courage and their sacrifice, and so I’ve changed my opinion about them.”

Israeli tanks and troops continued to pull out of Gaza on Monday, the first full day of a truce between the Jewish state and Hamas, which rules the enclave. Gazans emerged from their homes seeking drinking water, firewood and missing relatives.

Mr. Sultan’s neighborhood of Toam was a sprawling landscape of destruction. Blocks of Palestinian homes have been leveled. His mother and sisters sat despondently at his feet in the deep ruts left by an Israeli tank.

Eighteen months ago, Mr. Sultan fought against Hamas during the group’s bloody takeover of the coastal territory. He’s a longtime member of the Palestinian Authority’s security services, which are controlled by the Fatah party, now led by moderate and Western-leaning Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

After it won control in Gaza, Hamas sentenced Mr. Sultan to death. He won a reprieve through a connected relative. Today, he calls the Palestinian Authority leaders he once served, who are based in the West Bank, “donkeys” and says Hamas, his onetime nemesis, are “rightful defenders of the Palestinian people.” [continued…]

Gaza operation weakens Palestinian Authority
By Richard Boudreaux, Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2009

With Israel and Hamas both claiming victory in the Gaza Strip, there is one clear loser: the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority, which desperately wants a peace accord with Israel and a unified Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel’s 22-day assault on Hamas-ruled Gaza made the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority look ineffective and marginalized, unable to stop the carnage. Popular support for its peace talks with Israel, already declining, now seems weaker than ever.

And a tentative cease-fire that left Hamas still in charge of Gaza threatens to reinforce the rift between the Palestinian territories, further setting back hopes for a settlement of the decades-old Middle East conflict.

At an Arab summit in Kuwait on Monday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas pleaded for a revival of the power-sharing arrangement that broke apart in 2007 when Hamas, an armed Islamist movement, ousted his secular Fatah forces from Gaza in a ruthless factional fight. [continued…]

Israel speeds withdrawal from Gaza
By Ethan Bronner, New York Times, January 20, 2009

Israel accelerated its troop withdrawal from Gaza on Monday with the aim of finishing by the inauguration of Barack Obama on Tuesday, as Hamas reasserted control over the rubble-filled streets and tens of thousands of Palestinians sought to cope with destroyed homes and traumatized lives.

Decomposing bodies continued to be uncovered in the worst-hit areas, with the death toll for the 23-day conflict that ended on Sunday passing 1,300, according to health officials here, as the fragile cease-fire between Israel and Hamas held. Policemen took up positions directing traffic and a few bulldozers began the enormous task of clearing the ruins. Garbage was everywhere, devastation rampant.

Hamas held its first news conference since the war began on Dec. 27, with two government spokesmen standing in front of a destroyed compound that had housed a number of ministries and asserting that their movement had been victorious. [continued…]

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NEWS & VIEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: January 19

Saudi Arabia to donate $1 billion to rebuild Gaza
By Diana Elias, AP, January 19, 2009

The Saudi king said Monday his country will donate $1 billion to help rebuild the Gaza Strip after the devastating Israeli offensive and told Israel that an Arab initiative offering peace will not remain on the table forever.

King Abdullah’s comments at an Arab economic summit in Kuwait City were his first since Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas declared a fragile cease-fire to halt three weeks of violence in Gaza that killed more than 1,250 Palestinians.

“Israel has to understand that the choice between war and peace will not always stay open and that the Arab peace initiative that is on the table today will not stay on the table,” said Abdullah during a speech. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Will Israel’s leaders be troubled by King Abdullah’s warning? I doubt it. What Saudi Arabia, Jordan (whose own Abdullah still insists the 18-year old peace process should not be abandoned) and Egypt have showcased over the last three weeks — whatever they might assert — is their own political impotence. If there is going to be any new initiative it seems more likely it will come from Ankara, Damascus of Doha.

Note:

    Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan criticized world leaders for leaving Hamas out of the peace process, saying it was a democratically elected political party.

    He also warned that the situation in Gaza could take on a very different dimension if “Western countries” did not show appropriate sensitivity toward Hamas.

    “This political party Hamas won an election with nearly 75 percent of the vote. The West, which has shown no respect for this embracing of democracy, is responsible for this situation,” Erdogan told a news conference.

And:

    Syrian President Bashar Assad says he’s prepared to work with US President-elect Barack Obama. “The new American government must be prepared to engage in a serious peace process. We are prepared for any form of cooperation,” Assad told Spiegel in an interview. But he has a few conditions.

    Until now, Bashar Assad says, his country has waged war against Israel, viewed Americans as its opponents and offered Hamas political chief Khaled Mashaal and other top leaders exile as well as employment opportunities. Nevertheless, Assad says, he sees opportunities for less violence. “We would be happy to do our part to stabilize the region,” he told Spiegel in an interview to be published on Monday.

    But he also insisted that his country’s relations with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran would not be dictated by outsiders.

    “Good relations with Washington cannot mean that we have bad ones with Tehran,” he said.

Parsing gains of Gaza war
By Ethan Bronner, New York Times, January 19, 2009

The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: “baal habayit hishtageya,” or “the boss has lost it.” It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.

“This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.

It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.

The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza, especially because Israel’s antirocket attacks in previous years had been more measured.

When Hamas’s prime minister, Ismail Haniya, appeared on Hamas television from his hiding spot last Monday, he picked up on the Israeli archetype, referring in Arabic to the battle under way as “el harb el majnouna,” the mad or crazy war.

For most, of course, feeling abused like this has created deep rage at Israel.

“If you want to make peace with the Palestinians, they are tired of bombs, drones and planes,” said Mohammad Abu Muhaisin, a 35-year-old resident of the southern city of Rafah who is affiliated with Fatah, the rival to Hamas that rules in the West Bank and was ejected from Gaza in June 2007. “But a guy whose child has just been killed doesn’t want peace. He wants war.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — As Tzipi Livni makes her own personal assessment of gains from the war, she cannot have failed to notice that despite frequent reports that Kadima was being bolstered by the military campaign, their polling numbers have actually got worse. On December 27, AP reported:

    A poll by the Dahaf Research Institute showed Livni’s Kadima Party winning 29 of parliament’s 120 seats — the same number it has now — and Netanyahu’s Likud taking 26 if elections were held today. A TNS Teleseker survey gave Kadima 31 seats to Likud’s 29.

The Jerusalem Post today reports that a Channel 2/Ma’agar Mohot poll predicted a 31-23 Likud victory over Kadima, while a Channel 10/Dialog poll said Likud would win 29-26.

As for what Ehud Olmert hopes to gain from the war, perhaps it could be viewed as one of the most audacious efforts at jury tampering in history.

A return to square one
By Alastair Crooke, The Guardian, January 19, 2009

On Saturday evening, Israel announced not a ceasefire – in the sense of an agreement between the parties to end a conflict – but a decision that its forces will unilaterally halt their fire. It said it would await the Hamas response, any timetable for a withdrawal of Israeli forces being contingent on an end to rocket fire from Gaza.

Yesterday, the resistance movements in Gaza, including Hamas, unilaterally announced a cessation of military action for one week, by the end of which time they demand that all Israeli forces should have departed Gaza. Implicit in this initiative is the threat that, were they to fail to leave within seven days, Hamas and the other groups would resume the firing of rockets into Israel.

At one level, this unilateralist outcome resolves none of the core problems that were at the source of the conflict in the first place. Hamas remains in control in Gaza; its military capacity has not been substantially degraded: 40 missiles were fired at Israel on Saturday, and at least a further 16 were launched before Hamas announced the ceasefire yesterday. And nothing has been settled in terms of the opening of the crossings from Israel into Gaza, or in respect of the Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza. The release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli captive, has not advanced. [continued…]

Israel fears wave of war crimes lawsuits over Gaza offensive
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz, January 19, 2009

Israel is preparing for a wave of lawsuits by pro-Palestinian organizations overseas against Israelis involved in the Gaza fighting, claiming they were responsible for war crimes due to the harsh results stemming from the IDF’s actions against Palestinian civilians and their property.

Senior Israeli ministers have expressed serious fears during the past few days about the possibility that Israel will be pressed to agree to an international investigation of the losses among non-combatants during Operation Cast Lead; or alternately, that Israelis will be faced with personal suits, such as happened to Israeli officers who were accused of war crimes in Britain for their actions during the second intifada.

“When the scale of the damage in Gaza becomes clear, I will no longer take a vacation in Amsterdam, only at the international court in The Hague,” said one minister. It was not clear whether he was trying to make a joke or not. [continued…]

‘Tungsten bombs’ leave Israel’s victims with mystery wounds
By Raymond Whitaker, The Independent, January 19, 2009

Erik Fosse, a Norwegian doctor who worked in Gaza’s hospitals during the conflict, said that Israel was using so-called Dime (dense inert metal explosive) bombs designed to produce an intense explosion in a small space. The bombs are packed with tungsten powder, which has the effect of shrapnel but often dissolves in human tissue, making it difficult to discover the cause of injuries.

Dr Fosse said he had seen a number of patients with extensive injuries to their lower bodies. “It was as if they had stepped on a mine, but there was no shrapnel in the wounds,” he said. “Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.” However, the injuries matched photographs and descriptions in medical literature of the effects of Dime bombs.

“All the patients I saw had been hit by bombs fired from unmanned drones,” said Dr Fosse, head of the Norwegian Aid Committee. “The bomb hit the ground near them and exploded.” His colleague, Mads Gilbert, accused Israel of using the territory as a testing ground for a new, “extremely nasty” type of explosive. “This is a new generation of small explosive that detonates with extreme power and dissipates its power within a range of five to 10 metres,” he said.

According to military databases, Dime bombs are intended for use where conventional weapons might kill or injure bystanders – to kill combatants in a house, for example, without harming people next door. Instead of being made from metal, which sprays shrapnel across a wide area, the casing is carbon fibre. Part of the motive for developing the bombs was to replace the use of depleted uranium, but Dr Fosse said the cancer risk from tungsten powde was well known. “These patients should be followed up to see if there are any carcinogenic effects,” he said. [continued…]

Gazans confront shattered lives
By Hamada Abu Qammar, BBC, January 19, 2009

All day, thousands of Gazans have been rushing back to their neighbourhoods to see what is left after Israel’s campaign of bombing and shelling.

Gaping holes and fire-blackened cars litter the streets in the areas hit hardest by the fighting.

I have spoken to some people who say they have not even been able to find their way round their bomb-damaged neighbourhoods, never mind find the remains of their homes.

Many simply turned round and returned to the UN-run schools they fled to amid the fighting.

But for some Gazans even attempting to return home is virtually unimaginable. [continued…]

Scale of Gaza destruction emerges
BBC, January 19, 2009

The full scale of devastation in Gaza following Israel’s three-week offensive is becoming clear, after both Israel and Hamas declared ceasefires.

UN official John Ging said half a million people had been without water since the conflict began, and huge numbers of people were without power.

Four thousand homes are ruined and tens of thousands of people are homeless. [continued…]

Another war, another defeat
By John J. Mearsheimer, The American Conservative, January 26, 2009

Even before Hamas came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel’s wishes. Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s closest adviser at the time, candidly stated that the disengagement from Gaza was aimed at halting the peace process, not encouraging it. He described the disengagement as “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Moreover, he emphasized that the withdrawal “places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner where they hate to be.”

Arnon Soffer, a prominent Israeli demographer who also advised Sharon, elaborated on what that pressure would look like. “When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

In January 2006, five months after the Israelis pulled their settlers out of Gaza, Hamas won a decisive victory over Fatah in the Palestinian legislative elections. This meant trouble for Israel’s strategy because Hamas was democratically elected, well organized, not corrupt like Fatah, and unwilling to accept Israel’s existence. Israel responded by ratcheting up economic pressure on the Palestinians, but it did not work. In fact, the situation took another turn for the worse in March 2007, when Fatah and Hamas came together to form a national unity government. Hamas’s stature and political power were growing, and Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy was unraveling.

To make matters worse, the national unity government began pushing for a long-term ceasefire. The Palestinians would end all missile attacks on Israel if the Israelis would stop arresting and assassinating Palestinians and end their economic stranglehold, opening the border crossings into Gaza. [continued…]

The violence network
By Eric Calderwood, Boston Globe, January 19, 2009

After several days of following the Al-Jazeera coverage of Gaza, I’ve never seen a live interview with an Israeli, neither a politician nor a civilian. In the Al-Jazeera version, the Gaza conflict has only two participants: the Israeli army – an impersonal force represented as tanks and planes on the map – and the Palestinian civilians, often shown entering the hospital on makeshift stretchers. There are few Hamas rockets and no Israeli families. It’s not hard to see why Al-Jazeera is accused of deliberately inflaming regional enmity and instability.

But in a larger sense, Al-Jazeera’s graphic response to CNN-style “bloodless war journalism” is a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera’s brand of news – you could call it “blood journalism” – takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could.

For an American, to watch Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Gaza is to realize that you’ve become alienated not just from war, but even from the representation of war as a real thing. As Americans, we’re used to hearing the sound of heavy artillery, machine guns, and bombs in action films and video games. Yet here on the news, they seem strangely out of place. You could argue that Al-Jazeera uses images of civilian violence to foment public outrage against Israel. This might well be true. At the same time, these images acknowledge human suffering and civilian death and stand strongly against them – and in doing so, foment outrage against war itself. [continued…]

Hamas rising
By Fawaz A. Gerges, Middle East Online, January 17, 2009

I have just returned from the Middle East and witnessed how Israel’s assault on Gaza is radicalizing mainstream Muslim opinion. Shown endlessly on Arab and Muslim television stations, the massive killing of civilians is fueling rage against Israel and its superpower patron, the United States, among mainstream and moderate voices who previously believed in co-existence with the Jewish state. Now, they are questioning their basic assumptions and raising doubts about Israel’s future integration into the region.

Many professionals, both Christian and Muslim Arabs, previously critical of Hamas, are bitter about what they call Israel’s “barbaric conduct” against Palestinian noncombatants, particularly women and children. No one I have encountered believes Israel’s narrative that this is a war against Hamas, not the Palestinian people. A near consensus exists among Arabs and Muslims that Israel is battering the Palestinian population in an effort to force it to revolt against Hamas, just as it tried to force the Lebanese people to revolt against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. But Hezbollah weathered that Israeli storm, acquired a sturdier immune system and became the most powerful institution in Lebanon. In so doing it shattered Israeli deterrence, delivered a blow to US Mideast policy and expanded the influence of Iran, Hezbollah’s main supporter in the region.

In my recent travels I was struck by the widespread popular support for Hamas — from college students and street vendors to workers and intellectuals. Very few ventured criticism of Hamas, and many said they felt awed by the fierce resistance put forward by its fighters. Israel’s onslaught on Gaza has effectively silenced critics of Hamas and politically legitimized the militant resistance movement in the eyes of many previously skeptical Palestinians and Muslims. Regardless of how this war ends, Hamas will likely emerge as a more powerful political force than before and will likely top Fatah, the ruling apparatus of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority. [continued…]

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HAMAS DECLARES A COUNTER-CEASEFIRE – Updated

Hamas announces cease-fire in Gaza, gives IDF week to leave
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, January 18, 2009

Hamas announced an immediate ceasefire by its militants and allied groups in Gaza on Sunday, giving Israel a week to pull out its troops from the coastal territory.

The move came after Israel announced a unilateral cease-fire late Saturday, ending its offensive against the Palestinian Islamist group in Gaza.

“Hamas and the factions announce a ceasefire in Gaza starting immediately and give Israel a week to withdraw,” said Ayman Taha, a Hamas official in Cairo for talks with Egypt on a truce deal.

Hamas also demanded that Israel open all of the Gaza Strip’s border crossings to allow in food and other goods to meet the “basic needs for our people.”

Damascus-based Hamas official Moussa Abu Marzouk confirmed the cease-fire on Syrian television. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment (updated) — It looks like Hamas has succeeded in grabbing the diplomatic initiative here by turning the tables on Israel. Israel said it will pull out of Gaza if the rocket fire stops but now Hamas is going to demonstrate that it retains command and control of Gaza by giving Israel a week to clear out. That leaves Israel in a bind. If they start pulling out right away they will appear to be complying with Hamas’ terms. If they drag their feet and as a consequence rocket fire resumes, they will appear to have squandered an opportunity to end the fighting.

The crucial element — from Hamas’ point of view — is that by maintaining a disciplined truce it provides a very visible demonstration that it retains control on the levers of power in Gaza. This sends a strong message to Israel and the rest of the world: Hamas was not crushed and it has the capacity and willingness to engage in a truce.

And the underlying message is the message that Israel and its allies have thus far been extraordinarily obstinate in refusing to learn: Hamas is not going away. They can either be fought or engaged but those who still cling to the fantasy of Hamas’ annihilation are nursing a destructive delusion.

UPDATE: Although Israel initially said it wanted “to allow the dust to settle and see how Hamas reacts” before it would start pulling troops out of Gaza, the fact that Israel began pulling troops back almost immediately after Hamas made its own ceasefire declaration, suggests — even if Israel won’t admit it — that they are implementing a deal. Both sides have a stake in maintaining an uncompromising posture but what we are witnessing now is mutually understood language being translated into actions.

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CALLING FOR A BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT AND SANCTIONS AGAINST ISRAEL

British academics take a stand against the Israeli occupation
The Guardian, January 16, 2009

The massacres in Gaza are the latest phase of a war that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force, one capable of resisting Israel’s ongoing appropriation of their land and resources. Israel’s war against the Palestinians has turned Gaza and the West Bank into a pair of gigantic political prisons. There is nothing symmetrical about this war in terms of principles, tactics or consequences. Israel is responsible for launching and intensifying it, and for ending the most recent lull in hostilities.

Israel must lose. It is not enough to call for another ceasefire, or more humanitarian assistance. It is not enough to urge the renewal of dialogue and to acknowledge the concerns and suffering of both sides. If we believe in the principle of democratic self-determination, if we affirm the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation, then we are obliged to take sides… against Israel, and with the people of Gaza and the West Bank.

We must do what we can to stop Israel from winning its war. Israel must accept that its security depends on justice and peaceful coexistence with its neighbours, and not upon the criminal use of force.

We believe Israel should immediately and unconditionally end its assault on Gaza, end the occupation of the West Bank, and abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders. We call on the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps to oblige Israel to comply with these demands, starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions. [See the over 300 academic signatories]

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ISRAEL ACCUSED OF WAR CRIMES

Israel accused of war crimes over 12-hour assault on Gaza village
By Fida Qishta and Peter Beaumont, The Observer, January 18, 2009

Israel stands accused of perpetrating a series of war crimes during a sustained 12-hour assault on a village in southern Gaza last week in which 14 people died.

In testimony collected from residents of the village of Khuza’a by the Observer, it is claimed that Israeli soldiers entering the village:

  • attempted to bulldoze houses with civilians inside;
  • killed civilians trying to escape under the protection of white flags;
  • opened fire on an ambulance attempting to reach the wounded;
  • used indiscriminate force in a civilian area and fired white phosphorus shells.

If the allegations are upheld, all the incidents would constitute breaches of the Geneva conventions. [continued…]

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EDITORIAL & ANALYSIS: Israel’s ceasefire

Olmert’s “mission accomplished”
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 18, 2009

“We won,” Ehud Olmert declared to the Israel public on Saturday night. His declaration of victory coincided with the implementation of a unilateral ceasefire — it might better simply be called a fleeting Inauguration lull. A tourniquet will be applied to Gaza for just along enough that Israel can claim it did its best not shower blood on Washington’s parade.

It is important for Israel that this be a unilateral ceasefire because for its current leadership there is greater political jeopardy in being perceived as having made a deal with Hamas than there is in the likelihood that the fighting will drag on without any clear resolution.

Israel’s ideological investment in the claim that Hamas cannot be negotiated with provides the conceptual bedrock for the argument that the organization must be crushed. For that reason, Israel has been concerned that Hamas’ solid record in being able to enforce last year’s truce must now be obscured (as I previously documented) and negotiations at establishing a real truce take place without Israel demonstrating good faith.

Obama’s challenge, once in three days he is forced to engage in a crisis that he has thus far merely “monitored,” is quite simple: Can he approach this issue in the same spirit with which he has already demonstrated he intends to confront every other issue — by being practical, pragmatic and empirical?

The roadblock to political progress right now is ideological intransigence — on the Israeli-US side. This has led to the current implausible situation: the idea that a ceasefire can be set in place without Hamas’ agreement. It’s like watching a driver who is stuck in the mud and who insists the best way of getting out is by spinning his wheels even faster. This is not a practical, pragmatic or empirical way of dealing with the problem.

Obama’s inclination at this point may well be that he does not want to rush into a situation where the risks seem high and the rewards elusive. Yet he is surely realistic enough to be able to see that Israel’s myopic leaders are incapable of digging themselves out of the crisis they have created.

On one point Obama needs to be absolutely clear right from the outset: the charade in which the US and its allies persist in talking about making “progress” in the “peace process” needs to be abandoned. The process has broken down; it has failed. Those who still claim that they are inching the process forward have as much credibility as the auto executives in Detroit who claim they are the visionaries who can save America’s car industry.


By Amjad Atallah and Daniel Levy, The Guardian, January 18, 2009

The unilateral nature of the Israeli declaration is no coincidence. In Saturday’s declaration of a ceasefire, Israel is hoping to send the message that Hamas is not a legitimate actor.

So who is the ceasefire actually with? It is, not coincidentally, consistent to some extent with the Egyptian-Turkish-Hamas negotiations which called for a ceasefire for 10 days during which the parties would agree to border crossing mechanisms, followed by an Israeli withdrawal, and an opening of the borders to humanitarian and economic aid.

However, by making the ceasefire a unilateral affair, accompanied only by an arrangement with the US (with whom Israel signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on Friday regarding the prevention of weapons smuggling), Israel can continue its attempts to politically isolate and ostracise the Hamas government in Gaza.

That obviously serves the election campaign narrative of the Israeli governing coalition – yet if Hamas has no political stake in maintaining the ceasefire, it obviously will have little incentive to keep the peace. No one watching the news in the last weeks will have missed Hamas officials shuttling back and forth to Cairo and Doha for both the private and public relations component of preparing a ceasefire. There was a practical reason for the diplomatic activity that included them – they were the ones ruling Gaza. [continued…]

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OBAMA, ISRAEL AND HAMAS

America’s second chance to engage with Hamas
By Tony Karon, The National, January 18, 2009

Barack Obama said last month that his election offered “a unique opportunity to reboot America’s image around the world and in the Muslim world in particular”, and that he planned to make a speech in a Muslim capital during his first 100 days in office denouncing terrorism and emphasising shared values. In the wake of the three-week bloodbath Israel has inflicted on Gaza, it should be clear to Mr Obama that he would be wasting his breath.

Hostility towards the US in the Muslim world is not based on a misunderstanding of America’s values: it is based on a clear vision of America’s policies. The bombs and missiles that destroyed Gaza, and the aircraft that delivered them, are American. And Washington blocked ceasefire efforts, in line with Israel’s wishes, to give its military efforts more time.

Seeking the overthrow of Hamas through an economic blockade of Gaza while boosting Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank has been the main thrust of US policy there for the past three years. Gaza has demonstrated the bloody futility of that policy, and Mr Obama will be judged in the Muslim world largely by how he reacts to that failure. Responding in an effective and balanced way requires a decisive break from the policies of his predecessors, which is not something he has shown a great willingness to do And yes, that’s predecessors, plural: a new policy needs to avoid the errors of both the Bush administration and the Clinton one before it. [continued…]

The war as warm-up act for Obama
By Gershom Gorenberg, Haaretz, January 18, 2009

The diplomatic timing for the war looked lovely. The U.S. president who loved military action was still in power, though fading into the shadows. The new president, dynamic and popular, hadn’t yet entered office. There was no one to interfere, to pressure us to stop.

We don’t know if the Olmert-Livni-Barak triumvirate deliberately picked that window of opportunity. If so, it already looks like another of the war’s mistakes – perhaps the only welcome miscalculation. For instead of preventing American involvement, their decision to go to war on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration may well force him to intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian arena and push for a diplomatic solution.

In recent months, foreign-policy experts from Obama’s camp have debated whether there’s any point in a new peace initiative. Robert Malley, known as the most dovish veteran of Bill Clinton’s peace team, has written – surprisingly – that such an effort is hopeless. In an article in the New York Review of Books (written with Hussein Agha), Malley argues that the weakness of Israel’s leadership and the Palestinian political rift will prevent a two-state solution at present. Arguing the opposite, former ambassador Martin Indyk – who is likely to join the Obama administration – writes in Foreign Affairs of the “urgent need for a diplomatic effort.” The Middle East can’t be ignored, say Indyk and co-author Richard Haass. It will “force itself onto the U.S. president’s agenda.”

The Gaza War proves Indyk’s thesis. After the years of neglect under Bush, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has blown up again, on Obama’s doorstep. Grim photos appear in the media. Relations between Israel and Turkey, both American allies, are crumbling. While careful not to conduct foreign relations before the inauguration, Obama promised last week that his team would become “immediately engaged in the Middle East peace process.” At her confirmation hearing for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton spoke of the “tragic humanitarian costs” borne by Gazans and of the incoming administration’s “determination to seek a peace agreement.” [continued…]

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REGIONAL IMPACT OF THE WAR ON GAZA

Al Jazeera: Discussing the Arab divide over the Gaza war

Al Jazeera: Gaza-West Bank divide grows

Hamas rising
By Fawaz A. Gerges, Middle East Online, January 17, 2009

I have just returned from the Middle East and witnessed how Israel’s assault on Gaza is radicalizing mainstream Muslim opinion. Shown endlessly on Arab and Muslim television stations, the massive killing of civilians is fueling rage against Israel and its superpower patron, the United States, among mainstream and moderate voices who previously believed in co-existence with the Jewish state. Now, they are questioning their basic assumptions and raising doubts about Israel’s future integration into the region.

Many professionals, both Christian and Muslim Arabs, previously critical of Hamas, are bitter about what they call Israel’s “barbaric conduct” against Palestinian noncombatants, particularly women and children. No one I have encountered believes Israel’s narrative that this is a war against Hamas, not the Palestinian people. A near consensus exists among Arabs and Muslims that Israel is battering the Palestinian population in an effort to force it to revolt against Hamas, just as it tried to force the Lebanese people to revolt against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. But Hezbollah weathered that Israeli storm, acquired a sturdier immune system and became the most powerful institution in Lebanon. In so doing it shattered Israeli deterrence, delivered a blow to US Mideast policy and expanded the influence of Iran, Hezbollah’s main supporter in the region.

In my recent travels I was struck by the widespread popular support for Hamas — from college students and street vendors to workers and intellectuals. Very few ventured criticism of Hamas, and many said they felt awed by the fierce resistance put forward by its fighters. Israel’s onslaught on Gaza has effectively silenced critics of Hamas and politically legitimized the militant resistance movement in the eyes of many previously skeptical Palestinians and Muslims. Regardless of how this war ends, Hamas will likely emerge as a more powerful political force than before and will likely top Fatah, the ruling apparatus of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority. [continued…]

Al Jazeera: Gaza doctor’s tragedy caught on Israeli TV

Gaza doctor receives angry reception at press conference

When Israel acts, Congress applauds. No debate required
By Glenn Greenwald, The American Conservative, January 26, 2009

In most of the world, the Israeli attack on Gaza is viewed as an intensely controversial act and, more commonly, an excessive, unjustifiable, and brutal assault on a trapped civilian population. But not in the United States—at least not among America’s political and opinion-making elite. Here one finds a bipartisan consensus as simplistic as it is unquestioned: Israel’s bombing campaign and invasion of Gaza are right and just, and it is the duty of the U.S. to support these actions unequivocally.

From the moment Israel began dropping bombs on Gaza, leaders of America’s two major political parties rushed to announce their total support, competing to see who could most fulsomely praise the offensive. So complete was the agreement that they all seemed to be reading from the same script. While other Western governments issued even-handed statements condemning both Israel and Hamas and their diplomats worked furiously to forge a ceasefire agreement, America’s political leaders stood on the sidelines, cheering with increasing fervor.

When it comes to Israel’s various military actions, there is far more dissent within Israel, where one commonly finds prominent, vehement criticism of the Israeli government, than there is within the U.S., where such criticism is all but nonexistent. Indeed, in the U.S. Congress, there is far more unqualified support for Israel’s wars than for America’s own. [continued…]

Israel’s message
By Ilan Pappe, London Review of Books, January 14, 2009

In 2004, the Israeli army began building a dummy Arab city in the Negev desert. It’s the size of a real city, with streets (all of them given names), mosques, public buildings and cars. Built at a cost of $45 million, this phantom city became a dummy Gaza in the winter of 2006, after Hizbullah fought Israel to a draw in the north, so that the IDF could prepare to fight a ‘better war’ against Hamas in the south.

When the Israeli Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz visited the site after the Lebanon war, he told the press that soldiers ‘were preparing for the scenario that will unfold in the dense neighbourhood of Gaza City’. A week into the bombardment of Gaza, Ehud Barak attended a rehearsal for the ground war. Foreign television crews filmed him as he watched ground troops conquer the dummy city, storming the empty houses and no doubt killing the ‘terrorists’ hiding in them.

‘Gaza is the problem,’ Levy Eshkol, then prime minister of Israel, said in June 1967. ‘I was there in 1956 and saw venomous snakes walking in the street. We should settle some of them in the Sinai, and hopefully the others will immigrate.’ Eshkol was discussing the fate of the newly occupied territories: he and his cabinet wanted the Gaza Strip, but not the people living in it. [continued…]

Self-deception and the assault on Gaza
By David Bromwich, Huffington Post, January 16, 2009

What prompts the fantasy that you can “kill all the terrorists” without sowing the seeds of new terrorism? Partly, the fantasy comes from the idea that any civilian deaths you cause will be forgiven; but, much more, it derives from the secondary fantasy that civilian deaths will go mainly unwitnessed. They will be recorded as numbers, perhaps, but they will pass out of the awareness of the world. That is not the way things work, of course. There are people in the world — not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of millions — who feel more closely allied to the killed than they do to the killers.

“Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” In every culture and every civilization, to kill the innocent is evil. Fifty civilians who live in a neighborhood where one terrorist has built a hidden sniper’s nest are understood to be innocent. If you kill the fifty, you have done something worse than not killing the one.

Yet to put it like that brings up the revaluation of state terror that entered our language with the Sharon-Bush doctrine, first propounded in 2001-02. According to the Sharon-Bush doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist — that is, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a terrorist — you are yourself as blamable as the terrorist and are as appropriate a target of destruction. This, no matter what the impediments on your freedom of movement, no matter how unconscious you may be of the existence of the terrorist, no matter how much your toleration of him may have been driven by fear. [continued…]

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ISRAEL’S LEADERS ARE NOT SIMPLY WAR CRIMINALS; THEY ARE FOOLS

Israel’s leaders are not simply war criminals; they are fools
By Sir Gerald Kaufman, House of Commons (British Parliament), January 15, 2009

I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine.

I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than I can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel. One of them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of them. The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration awarded to him, which he presented to me.

I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir was my friend, as was Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the Negev for Israel in the 1948 war of independence.

My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.

On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians—the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that

    “500 of them were militants.”

That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.

The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.

Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.

The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said:

    “You make peace by talking to your enemies.”

However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million more on the West Bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.

It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.

Sir Gerald Kaufman has been a Member of Parliament since 1970 and when the Labour Party was in the oppostion served as Shadow Environment Secretary, (1980-1983), Shadow Home Secretary (1983-1987) and Shadow Foreign Secretary (1987-1992). Since 1992 he has been one of the Labour Party’s most influential back-benchers.

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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENT: January 15

Hamas: We will not accept Israel cease-fire demands
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz, January 16, 2009

Hamas will not accept Israeli conditions for a cease-fire in Gaza and would continue armed resistance until the offensive ends, Khaled Meshal, the leader of the Palestinian Islamist group, said on Friday.

Speaking at the opening of an emergency meeting on Gaza in Doha, Meshal called on the leaders present to cut all ties with Israel.

Meshal joined Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in making the surprise appearance at the summit, aiming to show their weight in diplomatic efforts surrounding the Gaza crisis.

Hamas is set to send a delegation to Cairo later on Friday to discuss Egyptian efforts to mediate a cease-fire in Gaza, a Hamas official told Al Jazeera television. [continued…]

Turkish PM: Israel should be barred from UN
By Selcan Hacaoglu, AP, January 15, 2009

Turkey’s prime minister on Friday said Israel should be barred from the United Nations while it ignores the body’s calls to stop fighting in Gaza.

“How is such a country, which totally ignores and does not implement resolutions of the U.N. Security Council, allowed to enter through the gates of the UN (headquarters)?” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

Erdogan’s comments reflected a growing anger in Turkey, Israel’s best friend in the Muslim world, over Israel’s Gaza operation.

He spoke before U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was due to arrive in Ankara to discuss the conflict. Ban is on a weeklong trip to the region to promote a truce after both sides ignored a U.N. resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire.

“The U.N. building in Gaza was hit while the U.N. secretary-general was in Israel,” Erdogan said. “This is an open challenge to the world, teasing the world.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Erdogan is right: Israel is thumbing its nose at global opinion with a conviction — so far well-founded — that it can act with impunity. Likewise, the killing of Hamas’ Interior Minister Said Sayyam, one of the group’s three most senior leaders, in an airstrike on Thursday, was, Haaretz reported: “apparently an attempt by Israel to deliver an image of victory in its offensive against Hamas.”

A victory blow in the minds of Israel’s leaders, but is this the way to secure a ceasefire? Israel’s leaders seem to have acquired the diplomatic finesse of the Soprano Family.

By mid-week, it seemed as though the imminent inauguration of Obama along with Israel’s desire to cut a deal on an intelligence agreement for which Condoleezza Rice’s signature would be needed before she left office today — that these factors in combination with a widening consensus that Israel could not accomplish any more militarily, seemed to suggest that before the end of the week an agreement would be reached on an initial ceasefire.

What the Israel’s don’t seem to have grasped is that is that if a ceasefire comes into effect before Obama takes office, this will serve Israel’s interests much more than Hamas’.

Israel now appears to be acting out a victory lust. Israel and its leaders have become intoxicated by their destructive capabilities to a point where they have lost their grip on reality. Israel is in a state of national psychosis.

Hamas after the Gaza war
By Khaled Hroub, Open Democracy, January 15, 2009

“The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people”, said Moshe Yaalon, the then Israel Defence Forces (IDF) chief-of-staff in 2002. The war launched by Israel in the Gaza strip at the end of 2008 is designed in part to force the Hamas movement too to internalise this belief. It will not and cannot work; indeed, it is my argument that the war will have the opposite effect.

After three weeks of intense and round-the-clock attacks by air, land and sea, Israel is far from achieving either its immediate aim of halting rocket-attacks from Gaza or the larger “psychological” aim enunciated by Moshe Yaalon. It has become apparent that the war itself will instead convince many more Palestinians that their ability again to withstand an assault by the fourth most powerful army in the world is a source of their power rather than their weakness.

In this, the 1.5 million Palestinians under siege in Gaza are writing a new chapter in their own uncompleted modern history. They are also demonstrating a more general lesson of warfare: that wars and armed conflicts have unexpected consequences, including often the creation of a new reality quite different from what it was launched to achieve. [continued…]

Someone must stop Israel’s rampant madness in Gaza
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz, January 16, 2009

Someone has to stop this rampant madness. Right now. It may seem as though the cabinet hasn’t decided on the “third stage” of the war yet, Amos Gilad is discussing a cease fire in Cairo, the end of the fighting seems close – but all this is misleading.

The streets of Gaza Thursday looked like killing fields in the midst of the “third stage” and worse. Israel is arrogantly ignoring the Security Council’s resolution calling for a cease-fire and is shelling the UN compound in Gaza, as if to show its real feeling toward that institution. Emergency supplies intended for Gaza residents are going up in flames in the burning warehouses. Thick black smoke is rising from the burning flour sacks and the fuel reserves near them, covering the streets.

In the streets, people are running back and forth in panic, holding children and suitcases in their hands, helpless as the shells fall around them. Nobody in the diplomatic corridors is in any hurry to help those unfortunates who have nowhere to run. [continued…]

How the Gaza war could end: three scenarios
By Tony Karon, Time, January 16, 2009

Pressure is mounting on Israel and Hamas to find a way of ending the war in Gaza. Both sides have responded positively, if tentatively, to Egyptian proposals for a phased truce that would begin with a lull in fighting for a defined period (10 days by some accounts). That interlude would then allow for the brokering of a more comprehensive cease-fire. But each side’s goals from any truce remain antagonistic to those of the other, and reaching an agreement that bridges the vast gap between them remains a Herculean diplomatic challenge.

Even before the Israeli invasion began late December, Hamas had offered to renew its six-month cease-fire with Israel on condition that the border crossings from Egypt and Israel into Gaza be opened. Those crossings have been closed as part of a strategy of imposing economic deprivation on the people of Gaza in the hope that they would turn on Hamas; Israel remains reluctant to agree to reopen them as part of a cease-fire deal, since that would be claimed as a victory by Hamas. Hamas also insists on a full and immediate withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza. Israel is reluctant to comply until mechanisms are in place to prevent Hamas rearming.

Israel’s declared purpose in launching Operation Cast Lead was to halt Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza, and prevent Hamas from being able to rearm through smuggling weapons from Egypt. Israel remains committed, however, to a long-term goal of ending Hamas control of Gaza, and it insists that the movement should gain no “recognition” or “legitimacy” as part of any truce — a tough call since Hamas is the key combatant on the Palestinian side. [continued…]

Inquiries show Olmert version of UN Gaza vote spat closer to truth than Rice’s
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz, January 16, 2009

Inquiries with people uninvolved in the spat between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reveal that his version of the lead-up to America’s vote on last week’s Security Council resolution is closer to the truth than hers.

Last Wednesday, the only proposal on the council’s table was a completely one-sided Libyan resolution. Since it was clear to everyone that the United States would veto it, Israel had no reason to worry. But then, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a former senior World Bank official, decided that this was the moment to make use of his Washington connections.

Fayyad persuaded the Americans to support a softened version of the resolution, which called for a prompt cease-fire, hoping that such a resolution would speed up the ongoing truce talks. He asked the British and French for help, and they agreed. Rice signaled her French and British counterparts, Bernard Kouchner and David Miliband, that she was on board. [continued…]

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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: January 15

UN headquarters in Gaza hit by Israeli ‘white phosphorus’ shells
By Sheera Frenkel and Philippe Naughton, The Times, January 15, 2009

Memo to Obama: Leave “war on terror” behind and talk to Hamas and Taliban
By Olivier Roy, NPQ, January 14, 2009

From Gaza to Kandahar, the new Obama administration is confronted with two kinds of Islamist movements: the ones with a global agenda (al-Qaida and its local subsidiaries) and the others with a territorial and national agenda (Taliban, Hamas, most of its Iraqi opponents). There is nothing to negotiate with the global jihadists, but the Islamo-nationalist movements simply cannot be ignored or suppressed.

Hamas is nothing else than the traditional Palestinian nationalism with an Islamic garb. The Taliban express more a Pashtu identity than a global movement. The Iraqi factions are competing not over Iran or Saudi Arabia, but over sharing (or monopolizing) the power in Iraq.

The “war on terror” during the Bush years has blurred this essential distinction by merging all the armed opponents to U.S.-supported governments under the label of terrorism. The concept of a “war on terror” has thwarted any political approach to the conflicts in favor of an elusive military victory. [continued…]

‘War on terror’ was wrong
By David Miliband, The Guardian, January 15, 2009

Seven years on from 9/11 it is clear that we need to take a fundamental look at our efforts to prevent extremism and its terrible offspring, terrorist violence. Since 9/11, the notion of a “war on terror” has defined the terrain. The phrase had some merit: it captured the gravity of the threats, the need for solidarity, and the need to respond urgently – where necessary, with force. But ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken. The issue is not whether we need to attack the use of terror at its roots, with all the tools available. We must. The question is how.

The idea of a “war on terror” gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The reality is that the motivations and identities of terrorist groups are disparate. Lashkar-e-Taiba has roots in Pakistan and says its cause is Kashmir. Hezbollah says it stands for resistance to occupation of the Golan Heights. The Shia and Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq have myriad demands. They are as diverse as the 1970s European movements of the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, and Eta. All used terrorism and sometimes they supported each other, but their causes were not unified and their cooperation was opportunistic. So it is today.

The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Baby steps in the right direction are to be welcomed but David Miliband’s recognition that the concept of a “war on terror” has been counterproductive only goes so far. What he advocates is replacing the Bush paradigm with the Thatcher paradigm: “The best response is to refuse to be cowed.” Up to a point…

The problem is that this philosophy — we will not let the terrorists disrupt our lives — does nothing to address the grievances that are being channelled into violence.

Resistance movements don’t come out of nowhere. If you want to dismantle a resistance movement, cutting off the flow of weapons doesn’t go to the root. You have to take away the foundation of the movement by showing that there are effective non-violent means through which its aims can be achieved.

Many Israelis will counter that there is no political approach to an organization like Hamas if its sole aim is the destruction of Israel.

Hamas’s actions, however, paint a different story than the rhetoric with which it gets stereotyped.

Qassam rockets and calls for the destruction of “the Zionist entity” do not pose an existential threat to Israel. Hamas’s willingness to hold the reigns of government, on the other hand, places it in a much more vulnerable position than it would be in as a purely militant organization. In other words, by pursuing practical political goals Hamas has taken a bigger risk than it would have had it chosen to remain outside the political domain. (Well before it entered the democratic arena, it had demonstrated its ability to survive a campaign of Israeli “targeted assassinations” and “surgical strikes.”)

Suppose the attempted US-backed coup through which Mohammed Dahlan’s security force tried to oust Hamas in June 2007 had succeeded. And suppose Fatah and the Palestinian Authority had effectively swept Hamas off the political stage. Would this have destroyed Hamas? Of course not. The Islamist group would simply have re-focused its efforts on militant operations while Israel’s “peace partner” would be wringing its hands saying it was doing all it could to limit attacks on Israel. Gaza would have been spared the current onslaught but rockets would still be fired on Israel — as they were before Hamas won the elections.

The irony is that if Israel ever decides it really wants to negotiate peace, the group that can really deliver is the group most Israelis want to see destroyed.

But this isn’t news to Israel’s current leaders. Despite all their claims that they refuse to negotiate with Hamas that is what they are currently doing — again through Egyptian mediation. The difference now from the negotiations last summer is that Hamas will not be satisfied with a verbal understanding on which Israel can renege. This time the deal — if there is one — needs to be codified in a written agreement.

Al Jazeera: Gazan babies born into war

The IDF has no mercy for the children in Gaza nursery schools
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz, January 15, 2009

The fighting in Gaza is “war deluxe.” Compared with previous wars, it is child’s play – pilots bombing unimpeded as if on practice runs, tank and artillery soldiers shelling houses and civilians from their armored vehicles, combat engineering troops destroying entire streets in their ominous protected vehicles without facing serious opposition. A large, broad army is fighting against a helpless population and a weak, ragged organization that has fled the conflict zones and is barely putting up a fight. All this must be said openly, before we begin exulting in our heroism and victory.

This war is also child’s play because of its victims. About a third of those killed in Gaza have been children – 311, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, 270 according to the B’Tselem human rights group – out of the 1,000 total killed as of Wednesday. Around 1,550 of the 4,500 wounded have also been children according to figures from the UN, which says the number of children killed has tripled since the ground operation began.

This is too large a proportion by any humanitarian or ethical standard.

It is enough to look at the pictures coming from Shifa Hospital to see how many burned, bleeding and dying children now lie there. History has seen innumerable brutal wars take countless lives.

But the horrifying proportion of this war, a third of the dead being children, has not been seen in recent memory. [continued…]

Children suffer in Israel’s war on Gaza

War on Hamas saps Palestinian leaders
By Isabel Kershner, New York Times, January 15, 2009

Israel hoped that the war in Gaza would not only cripple Hamas, but eventually strengthen its secular rival, the Palestinian Authority, and even allow it to claw its way back into Gaza.

But with each day, the authority, its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and its leading party, Fatah, seem increasingly beleaguered and marginalized, even in the Palestinian cities of the West Bank, which they control. Protesters accuse Mr. Abbas of not doing enough to stop the carnage in Gaza — indeed, his own police officers have used clubs and tear gas against those same protesters.

The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas’s support seems to be growing at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, already considered corrupt and distant from average Palestinians.

“The Palestinian Authority is one of the main losers in this war,” said Ghassan Khatib, an independent Palestinian analyst in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “How can it make gains in a war in which it is one of the casualties?”

Israel is proposing, with the tacit agreement of Egypt and the United States, to place the Palestinian Authority at the heart of an ambitious program to rebuild Gaza, administering reconstruction aid and securing Gaza’s borders. But that plan is already drawing skepticism. Mr. Khatib, for example, called the idea of any Palestinian Authority role in postwar Gaza “silly” and “naïve.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Since George Bush has been the preeminent proponent of this piece of strategic folly, it seems fitting that he should be remembered in what I now dub The Bush Law.

How does it work?

Find an opponent you want to weaken and then set about making him stronger. Find an ally you want to strengthen and then set about making him weaker.

It can also be described as: What George Bush could have learned from George Costanza — but never did.

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EDITORIAL: Israel’s election war

The election war
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 14, 2009

How many Palestinians do you need to kill in order to become prime minister of Israel? It seems like a legitimate question right now. It’s also a Goldilocks kind of question: What’s just right — enough but not and too many?

As Israel’s February election comes closer, the contours of the campaign argument are starting to emerge. The deadline for wrapping up the war — the US Presidential Inauguration — is just days away and after that comes the task that for Livni, Barak and Olmert may prove far more difficult to accomplish than was their success in selling the war.

Right now, even if outside Israel in places such as the British parliament where they have been branded as “war criminals” and “mass murderers,” inside Israel the war triumvirate is riding high. Serious trouble though is looming ahead.

Once the fighting stops the global media is eventually going to be let inside Gaza and the scale of devastation and carnage is not only going to be broadcast around the world but will also filter into Israel. Rocket fire into Israel, even if only sporadic, is likely to continue.

For Israelis, the question: Is this a just war? (to which they have almost universally answered yes), will shift to the much more difficult question: What have we accomplished?

Already it is becoming clear that the IDF and the war triumvirate are going to have a hard time giving a positive answer to this question. From the get-go everyone was disciplined about managing expectations by claiming that the destruction of Hamas was not the goal of the war. It wasn’t for lack of such a desire but because no rational analysis foresaw such a possibility.

The rational goal — the one adopted because it was felt that this is what could make this a “winnable” war — was deterrence.

The dictionary definition of deterrence is simple and familiar: Measures taken by a state or an alliance of states to prevent hostile action by another state.

That clearly requires some modification when applied to a non-state actor but the outcome should nevertheless be the same. If deterrence is working, then the enemy is deterred from acts of hostility — but this isn’t the idea that the authors of the war on Gaza want to sell. This is why the post-war effort is going to be much more difficult than the war itself.

Under the Livni-Barak-Olmert command the definition of deterrence is all about changing the enemy’s perceptions of Israel without necessarily fundamentally changing the enemy’s behavior. This is a way — it bears a certain legalistic brilliance — through which it is supposed to be possible to say “we won”, even though Hamas is still firing rockets at Sderot, or at the very least still retains the capacity to do so.

This is what Haaretz now reports:

Senior defense establishment officials believe that Israel should strive to reach an immediate cease-fire with Hamas, and not expand its offensive against the Palestinian Islamist group in Gaza.

During meetings of the Israel Defense Forces General Staff and of the heads of the state’s other security branches, officials have said that Israel achieved several days ago all that it possibly could in Gaza.

The officials expressed reservations about launching the third phase of Operation Cast Lead, preferring for it to remain a threat at this stage.

They added that it is better to cease the offensive now, just several days before the inauguration of new U.S. President Barack Obama.

Israel has proven, the officials said, that it is no longer deterred from either launching such an operation, from a confrontation with Hamas, from deploying ground forces or from using reservists.

What does that mean in plain English? If Hamas thought that Israel was hamstrung by a policy of restraint, the government of Gaza now knows that Israel is willing to let loose without fear of causing huge civilian casualties or receiving international condemnation. Israel is no longer deterred from liberating the full force of its violent capabilities.

This is about deterrence and how to become free from it. It’s not that Hamas has been deterred; it’s that Israel is now undeterred.

For a government and a population that, irrespective of what might objectively seem to be the case, felt shackled in challenging its enemies, there might be something persuasive about this non-deterrence argument.

Benjamin Netanyahu however — the man still likely to become Israel’s next prime minister — has a rather simple counter argument. Unless Israel has a “clear victory” meaning that Hamas’ capability to attack Israel has been “crippled”, then the war has not been won.

Once again, Israel will go to the polls and Hamas will have the casting vote. Can Tzipi Livni provide any convincing argument as to why Hamas should not vote for Netanyahu?

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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP: January 14

Netanyahu casts himself as player on a world stage
By Donald Macintyre, The Independent, January 14, 2009

At any other time there would be nothing notable about Benjamin Netanyahu reminding everyone that he thinks that “at the end of the day” there is “no alternative” but to “bring down” Hamas. But at a time when the ostensible aims of the war Israel has waged for 18 days have fallen rather short of that, it can hardly fail to have an impact. The leader of the right-wing opposition party Likud, and the man the polls predict could become prime minister in less than a month’s time chose to do it, moreover, during a fluent session with foreign journalists in which – for much of the time at least – he cast himself as a statesman comfortable on the global stage and determined to remain above party politics at a time of war.

He said he was looking forward, if elected, to working with Senator Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State, without the slightest hint of the friction that existed between him and her husband, President Bill Clinton, when the Likud leader was prime minister in the Nineties.

Justifying a vote by a Knesset committee this week to ban two Arab parties from contesting the elections, he smoothly quoted a remark by the rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza that “democracy allows all the freedoms except the freedom to destroy democracy”. And even at his most bellicose, he eschewed the rhetoric his main rival, Tzipi Livni, has unashamedly used about Israel “going wild”. Instead he declared at one point of the many hundreds of Palestinian casualties: “We grieve for every one of them; we genuinely do,” before adding, inevitably: “But a responsible government does not give immunity to criminal terrorists who fire at us while using civilians as a human shield.” [continued…]

Binyamin Netanyahu demands ‘crippling’ of Hamas
By Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, January 13, 2009

Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s rightwing opposition leader and favourite to win next month’s elections, said today Israel needed a “clear victory” against Hamas and that the movement should “ultimately be removed” from Gaza.

He called for a victory against the Islamist movement “that will cripple its capability” to attack. “At a minimum, the firing of rockets must stop and the smuggling corridors that have enabled Hamas to smuggle thousands of rockets into Gaza must be sealed,” he told a news conference. “We are fighting a just war, perhaps the most just war there is.” [continued…]

Olmert ignoring calls from Barak, Livni for immediate Gaza truce
By Aluf Benn, Amos Harel, Anshel Pfeffer and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz, January 14, 2009

Defense Minister Ehud Barak is promoting a week-long “humanitarian cease-fire” in the Gaza Strip. In contrast, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert believes the military operation still has not achieved its goals.

Olmert is delaying a meeting with senior ministers in an effort to allow the military operations in Gaza to continue. [continued…]

Diplomats: Gaza op causing long-term harm to Israel’s image
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz, January 14, 2009

A few days ago, I met a European ambassador stationed in Israel. The man, a great friend of Israel, launched an emotional monologue and spoke from the bottom of his heart.

“Make no mistake,” he said. “I understand why you embarked on the operation in Gaza, and many of my colleagues also understand and even support it, but a few days ago you started to cross red lines.”

The ambassador continued, reiterating his support and his love for Israel. “We too would like to damage Hamas, we too would not sit by quietly if they were firing rockets at us,” he said. “It was clear to us that innocent people would be hurt in any operation in Gaza, and we were prepared to accept that up to certain limit, but in the past few days it seems that your action is getting out of control, and the harm to civilians is tremendous.”

The straw that broke the camel’s back for that ambassador was the Red Cross report from Gaza that small children had been found wounded, near the corpses of their mothers, under the ruins of their homes, and other reports of civilians on the verge of dying in places ambulances could not reach because of the fighting.

“The international organizations in Gaza are talking about 200 dead children,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain these things to myself, never mind to my government,” added the ambassador. “Your action is brutal and you don’t realize how much damage this is causing you in the world. This is not only short term. It’s damage for years. Is this the Israel you want to be?” [continued…]

British parliamentarian says Israeli leaders are ‘mass-murderers and war criminals’
By Paul Woodward, The National, January 14, 2009

A statement by the British foreign minister David Miliband on “the appalling situation in Gaza” drew strong responses from both sides of parliament.

The Labour Member of Parliament Peter Kilfoyle asked the minister to “undertake to ensure that no arms at all go to Israel at the moment, given that it is guilty in many people’s eyes of state-sponsored terrorism with its activities in the Gaza strip”.

The Conservative MP Sir Patrick Cormack asked the minister to inform Britain’s Israeli ambassador “that many of us who have been in this House for a very long time and who have been proud to call ourselves friends of Israel now feel ashamed because Israel is not behaving as a civilised state should behave”.

The Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman said: “In congratulating [Mr Miliband] on steering resolution 1860 [calling for an immediate ceasefire] through the United Nations Security Council, may I ask him what the international reaction would be if Hamas had slaughtered nearly 900 Israelis and subjected nearly 1.5 million Israelis to degradation and deprivation? Is it not an incontrovertible fact that Olmert, Livni and Barak are mass-murderers and war criminals – [Interruption.] Yes. And they bring shame on the Jewish people whose star of David they use as a flag in Gaza, but whose ethos and morals go completely against what this Israeli government are doing.”

The MP Marsha Sing pointed out that condemnation has brought no relief to the people of Gaza. “The killing goes on. Is it not time for stronger action? Is it not time that we expelled the ambassador of Israel and brought our ambassador back from Israel? Is it not time that we called for international sanctions against Israel?” [continued…]

Hamas may survive offensive, Israel says
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, January 14, 2009

Israeli military officials said Tuesday that their 18-day offensive in the Gaza Strip had weakened Hamas but that a knockout blow was unlikely. The conflict showed no signs of ending as diplomats reported little progress in negotiating a cease-fire.

The Israeli officials said their strategy was to squeeze Hamas militarily as they try to pressure the Islamist movement into a truce that would include a long-term commitment to stop firing rockets into southern Israel. Some Hamas leaders have said they are willing to cut a deal, but others have pledged to continue fighting.

Despite public vows by Israeli politicians to destroy Hamas’s military capability, Israeli officials said Tuesday that the movement had lost only a fraction of its fighters and retained a large stockpile of rockets and other armaments. A “few hundred” Hamas fighters have been killed, out of a total force of 15,000, according to a senior Israeli military official. [continued…]

The War in Gaza: A view from the Arab street
By Alastair Crooke, Royal United Services Institute, January 12, 2009

The round of international diplomacy that has just concluded has left this part of the Arab world incredulous, extremely angry and polarised. The demonstrations in Syria this weekend were marked by use of extreme slogans seldom heard in public, and images of Osama bin Laden were paraded at protests in Jordan. The feel is of strategic tremors that hint at some fundamental shifting of the plates of Muslim opinion.

The searing images emerging from Gaza have long since undergone a subconscious transfiguration: from originally being about Hamas they have metamorphosed into an archetypal image of Israel attacking the Gazan people, the Palestinian people and Islam. Happening as they did during Ashura, the Shia commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussein – providing the backdrop to the speeches by the Secretary General of Hezbollah Sayed Hassan Nasrallah that have gripped the region – the attacks have Islamiised political discourse and given events in Gaza the aura of Hussein’s sacrifice in the face of injustice. [continued…]

Gaza: A pawn in the new ‘great game’
By Alastair Crooke, Asia Times, January 14, 2009

As Europeans watch the humanitarian disaster in Gaza unfold on nightly news bulletins, many may wonder why this crisis seems to have left their governments groping in such apparent fumbling disarray. The answer is that it is the result of policies pulling in opposite directions – of an acute irreconcilability at the heart of their policy-making.

What has happened in Gaza was all too foreseeable. A few Israelis forewarned about this coming crisis, but the appeal of the “grand narrative” – of a global struggle between “moderates” and “extremists” – overrode their warnings to the Israeli electorate.

The thesis that literally “everything” must be done either to lever “moderates” into power, or prevent them from losing power – euphemistically called “supporting moderation” – lies at the heart of the Gaza crisis. [continued…]

When Israel expelled Palestinians
By Randall Kuhn, Washington Times, January 14, 2009

In the wake of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this analogy: “Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico.”

Within hours scores of American pundits and politicians had mimicked Barak’s comparisons almost verbatim. In fact, in this very paper on January 9 House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor ended an opinion piece by saying “America would never sit still if terrorists were lobbing missiles across our border into Texas or Montana.” But let’s see if our political and pundit class can parrot this analogy.

Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players. [continued…]

‘Bin Laden’ recording calls for holy war over Gaza conflict
By Peter Walker, The Guardian, January 14, 2009

A new audio message purportedly from the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, has called for all Muslims to launch a holy war to stop the Israeli offensive in Gaza, according to Islamist websites.

The recording, which the websites said was by Bin Laden, also condemned Arab governments for preventing their people from acting to “liberate Palestine”.

“Our brothers in Palestine, you have suffered a lot … the Muslims sympathise with you in what they see and hear. We, the mujahideen, sympathise with you also,” Reuters reported the speaker as saying in the 22-minute tape titled A Call for Jihad to Stop the Aggression Against Gaza. “We are with you and we will not let you down. Our fate is tied to yours in fighting the crusader-Zionist coalition, in fighting until victory or martyrdom.” [continued…]

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EDITORIAL: The government of Israel does not make US policy — or does it?

Olmert’s bitch
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 13, 2009

Many Americans cherish a vicarious pride in the power of the US presidency.

The idea that the President of the United States holds the most powerful office in the world, translates into a sense of immense collective power. Were these same Americans to discover that the president takes his marching orders from a petty crook who governs a country of seven million, they would be shocked, outraged and humiliated as American power was exposed as being hollow at its core. Yet how else can we interpret the play of power between Israel and the United States, if Ehud Olmert can be taken at this word?

Last week, as global leaders felt compelled to respond to a popular outcry of rage provoked by Israel’s barbaric assault of Gaza, the UN Security Council became the focal point of unavoidable pressure to act — even if its action was utterly symbolic and totally ineffectual. But what was unprecedented was that for once, the United States was prepared to stand in solidarity with other nations calling for an immediate ceasefire.

Israel’s prime minister saw the danger of an awkward precedent being set and thus made it clear that Israel would not tolerate what it seemed to regard as a diplomatic act of insubordination.

“In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favor,” Olmert said.

“I said ‘get me President Bush on the phone’. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care. ‘I need to talk to him now’. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

“I told him the United States could not vote in favor. It cannot vote in favor of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favor.”

As Olmert recounted this course of events while giving a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, it seemed apparent that he took a certain pride in the fact that Condoleezza Rice had been “shamed” by the about-face that the US, under her leadership at the UN, was forced by Israel to take.

A State Department official felt compelled to assert that, “The government of Israel does not make US policy.”

The evidence seems to suggest otherwise.

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NEWS & VIEWS ROUNDUP & EDITOR’S COMMENTS: January 13

Al Jazeera: Hamas popularity worries Arab governments

Why the massacre in Gaza continues
By Patrick Seale, Middle East Online, January 12, 2009

As Israel’s barbaric war in Gaza enters its third week, there are four main reasons why its wholesale slaughter of Palestinian civilians continues unchecked.

The first is the terrible weakness of the UN Security Council in carrying out its declared task of maintaining international peace and security. Its inability to halt Israel’s aggression is largely due to the overly-intimate — some would say unhealthy — U.S.-Israeli relationship.

The second reason is that, as Hamas is the only Palestinian movement putting up armed resistance to Israel, it is the only remaining obstacle to Israel’s mastery of the whole of historic Palestine. Israel knows that if it fails to secure Hamas’ unconditional surrender, it will in due course have to enter into peace talks, and cede territory to an eventual Palestinian state — something it has long sought to avoid. At this decisive moment in the 100-year old Israeli-Palestinian struggle, there is, therefore, much at stake for both sides.

The third reason is the debilitating divisions in the Arab and Muslim world, which have robbed it of any effective leverage on events. These divisions are myriad — between so-called ‘moderate’ Arab states and their ‘radical’ rivals; between those who have made peace with Israel and those who have not; between those who rely on American aid and protection and those who do not; between those who loathe and fear Iran and those who rely on it for support; between Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims. This is by no means an exhaustive list. [continued…]

Israeli leader warns Hamas of ‘iron fist’
By Ibrahim Barzak and Christopher Torchia, AP, January 13, 2009

Iraeli troops advanced into Gaza suburbs for the first time early Tuesday, residents said, hours after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned Islamic militants of an “iron fist” unless they agree to Israel’s terms to end the fighting. Hamas showed no signs of wavering, however, with its leader, Ismail Haniyeh, saying the militants were “closer to victory.”

Despite the tough words, Egypt said it was making slow but sure progress in brokering a truce, and special Mideast envoy Tony Blair said elements were in place for a cease-fire.

Sounds of the battle could be heard clearly before dawn Tuesday around the city of 400,0000 as the Israeli forces, backed by artillery and attack helicopters, moved into neighborhoods east and south of Gaza City. Israeli gunboats shelled the coast from the west. [continued…]

Hamas: Israeli missile killed captured soldier
Ma’an, January 12, 2009

Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades said they captured an Israeli solider, who was taken to a safe location which was then bombed by the Israeli military.

Militants took the captured soldier to a home in Gaza, which was tracked by the Israeli army and targeted by Israeli warplanes only hours after the Israeli soldier was taken to the building, Brigades members clamied.

The Israeli military has made no comment on the report.

The soldier was killed instantly, the statement said, and presumed that Israeli military commanders would prefer to have their soldiers killed than have to negotiate their release or admit their failure at the hands of the Palestinian brigades. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Is this report a piece of Hamas psy-ops as it fights the information war? Quite possibly. Even so, it points to what is likely the IDF’s — and equally the Israeli government’s — greatest fear: that at the end of this war Gilad Shilat is no longer the only Israeli prisoner of war.

Israel finds a spirit of unity in its righteous fury
By Paul Woodward, The National, January 13, 2009

At a cabinet meeting on Sunday, the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said: “Israel is nearing its goal [of changing] the security situation in the south so that our citizens can experience security and stability in the long term. We must not, at the last minute, squander what has been achieved in this unprecedented national effort that has restored a spirit of unity to our nation.”

Absent from that spirit are Israel’s Arab political parties and as a consequence they have been banned from Israel’s upcoming elections, The Associated Press reported.

After the 27-member Central Elections Committee reached its decision, Member of the Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, from the United Arab List-Ta’al told MK David Tal (Kadima), “You went to war as an elections campaign strategy. Every vote for Kadima is a bullet in the chest of a Palestinian child.” The Balad chairman, Jamal Zahalka, told the Kadima member: “You drink Palestinian blood. You are a racist.”

Mr Tibi later told the press in response to the decision that “this is a racist country. We are accustomed to these types of struggles and we will win,” Ynet said. [continued…]

Gaza crisis is having ‘profoundly unhealthy’ effect on UK Muslims, minister warns
By Allegra Stratton, The Guardian, January 12, 2009

The Israeli onslaught in Gaza is having a “profoundly acute and unhealthy” effect on British Muslim communities and “patience is running out”, a government minister has said.

The justice minister, Shahid Malik, told the Guardian there was “immense anger” in British Muslim communities over developments in the Middle East. He said: “There is a real feeling of helplessness, hopelessness and powerlessness among Britain’s Muslims in the context of Gaza and the sense of grievance and injustice is both profoundly acute and obviously profoundly unhealthy.”

The comments by Malik, the first Muslim to be made a minister in any British government, were echoed by the Conservative shadow security minister, Pauline Neville-Jones, who said she was concerned at the effect the conflict was having on radicalism in the wider Arab world. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, is to make a statement to the Commons on Gaza later today. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — While Israel currently indulges in the apparent intoxication of its war fever, convinced by its own sense of righteousness that it is immune from any lasting damage from an international backlash, governments such as that in Britain are aware that the dangers of a domestic backlash are very real.

The next time we see a “martyrdom” video created by some hapless Western-born jihadist who decided to inflict his rage on innocent passers-by, it seems almost certain that high if not uppermost among the grievances he will be expressing will be his outrage at having witnessed the massacre of fellow Muslims in Gaza — a massacre that neither Arab nor Western governments had either the will or the power to prevent.

Mindful of this danger, the governments that Israel now takes for granted as its allies will sooner or later be forced to reconsider whether this strategic alliance has become an unacceptable liability.

If Israel’s go-it-alone spirit becomes a lonely reality, the hubris with which it is now buoyed up will evaporate as it wakes up to the fact that it has placed itself in a strategically untenable position.

Demands grow for Gaza war crimes investigation
By Chris McGreal, The Guardian, January 13, 2009

Israel is facing growing demands from senior UN officials and human rights groups for an international war crimes investigation in Gaza over allegations such as the “reckless and indiscriminate” shelling of residential areas and use of Palestinian families as human shields by soldiers.

With the death toll from the 17-day Israeli assault on Gaza climbing above 900, pressure is increasing for an independent inquiry into specific incidents, such as the shelling of a UN school turned refugee centre where about 40 people died, as well as the question of whether the military tactics used by Israel systematically breached humanitarian law.

The UN’s senior human rights body approved a resolution yesterday condemning the Israeli offensive for “massive violations of human rights”. A senior UN source said the body’s humanitarian agencies were compiling evidence of war crimes and passing it on to the “highest levels” to be used as seen fit. [continued…]

Gaza abuse allegations must be properly investigated, says Miliband
By Andrew Sparrow, The Guardian, January 12, 2009

Allegations about Israeli or Hamas abuses during the conflict in Gaza need to be investigated, David Miliband told MPs today.

In a statement on the Gaza crisis, the foreign secretary said more than 800 Palestinians had been killed, “apparently 250 of them children – the most terrible statistic of all”.

He reiterated the government’s demands for an immediate ceasefire and said allegations of war crimes needed to be properly investigated. [continued…]

Mideast dream team? Not quite
By Roger Cohen, New York Times, January 12, 2009

The Obama team is tight with information, but I’ve got the scoop on the senior advisers he’s gathered to push a new Middle East policy as the Gaza war rages: Shibley Telhami, Vali Nasr, Fawaz Gerges, Fouad Moughrabi and James Zogby.

This group of distinguished Arab-American and Iranian-American scholars, with wide regional experience, is intended to signal a U.S. willingness to think anew about the Middle East, with greater cultural sensitivity to both sides, and a keen eye on whether uncritical support for Israel has been helpful.

O.K., forget the above, I’ve let my imagination run away with me. Barack Obama has no plans for this line-up on the Israeli-Palestinian problem and Iran.

In fact, the people likely to play significant roles on the Middle East in the Obama Administration read rather differently.

They include Dennis Ross (the veteran Clinton administration Mideast peace envoy who may now extend his brief to Iran); James Steinberg (as deputy secretary of state); Dan Kurtzer (the former U.S. ambassador to Israel); Dan Shapiro (a longtime aide to Obama); and Martin Indyk (another former ambassador to Israel who is close to the incoming secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.)

Now, I have nothing against smart, driven, liberal, Jewish (or half-Jewish) males; I’ve looked in the mirror. I know or have talked to all these guys, except Shapiro. They’re knowledgeable, broad-minded and determined. Still, on the diversity front they fall short. On the change-you-can-believe-in front, they also leave something to be desired. [continued…]

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DEMOCRACY AT WORK — ISRAELI STYLE

Democracy at work — Israeli style:
Israel bans Arab parties from coming election
Joseph Federman, Associated Press, January 12, 2009

Israel on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, drawing accusations of racism by an Arab lawmaker who said he would challenge the decision in the country’s Supreme Court.

The ruling by parliament’s Central Election Committee reflected the heightened tensions between Israel’s Jewish majority and Arab minority caused by Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip. Arabs have held a series of demonstrations against the offensive.

Parliament spokesman Giora Pordes said the election committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the motion, accusing the country’s Arab parties of incitement, supporting terrorist groups and refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Arab lawmakers have traveled to some of Israel’s staunchest enemies, including Lebanon and Syria.

The 37-member committee is composed of representatives from Israel’s major political parties. The measure was proposed by two ultranationalist parties but received widespread support. [continued…]

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EDITORIAL & VIEWS: Is the US ready to become even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

A new peace process demands new language
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 12, 2009

If almost 1,000 Israelis had just been killed and another 3,000 wounded, Israel as a nation would take justifiable offense at anyone who suggested to them that now was the time to return to the negotiating table. To approach ones enemy in such a moment is the ultimate expression of defeat.

For Palestinians in this moment, with no state, with no practical support from their vocal allies, a refusal to accept defeat is the thread upon which hangs their dignity and their hopes for a self-determined national identity.

If the Obama administration wants to grasp the political opportunity created by the current crisis, a clear and meaningful starting point can come through adopting new language for framing the issues.

“Choosing talks over terror” (see Richard Haass’ commentary below) is a repudiation of the Bush paradigm that has consistently devalued negotiation yet it reaffirms the language of the war on terrorism.

For over two weeks, a 1.5 million Palestinians have been terrorized. It would be absurd to claim otherwise. At any other time in any other location, if a state was raining down missiles and bombs on a population that was being encouraged to flee even while it was simultaneously being caged in, such a state would be accused of mercilessly terrorizing that population.

The choice that Palestinians — and Israelis — need to be persuaded to make is between negotiation and armed confrontation.

Only when our language refrains from taking sides can we begin to be seen as even-handed.

Secondly, if the US wants to grade the region’s actors in a meaningful way, it’s time to toss out another key element in the Bush paradigm: the idea that the Middle East is divided between “moderates” and “extremists.”

Instead of flattering US allies by calling them moderates, we should be paying attention to which countries and populations have a greater appetite for democracy and which regimes are nurturing or supressing that appetite. While none of America’s friends count well on that score, as the global Democracy Index indicates the most fertile ground for democratic development in the Middle East is among Palestinians.

When the seeds of Palestinian democracy started to take root in 2006, it was the US, Israel and Europe who were intent on aborting the birth of democracy (see the Christian Science Monitor commentary below for an excellent account of the US-sponsored sabotage of Palestinian democracy). The mistrust this democratic betrayal has engendered has created a huge obstacle that can only be removed by a new and tangible demonstration by the so-called facilitators of peace that they are now pursuing this goal in good faith. So far, the only clear message that has gone out across the region is that Israel enjoys unequivocal Western support however it chooses to act. That message provides no basis for a peace process.

An inside story of how the US magnified Palestinian suffering
By Norman H. Olsen and Matthew N. Olsen, Christian Science Monitor, January 12, 2009

Hamas never called for the elections that put them in power. That was the brainstorm of Secretary Rice and her staff, who had apparently decided they could steer Palestinians into supporting the more-compliant Mahmoud Abbas (the current president of the Palestinian authority) and his Fatah Party through a marketing campaign that was to counter Hamas’s growing popularity – all while ignoring continued Israeli settlement construction, land confiscation, and cantonization of the West Bank.

State Department staffers helped finance and supervise the Fatah campaign, down to the choice of backdrop color for the podium where Mr. Abbas was to proclaim victory. An adviser working for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) explained to incredulous staffers at the Embassy in Tel Aviv how he would finance and direct elements of the campaign, leaving no US fingerprints. USAID teams, meanwhile, struggled to implement projects for which Abbas could claim credit. Once the covert political program cemented Fatah in place, the militia Washington was building for Fatah warlord-wannabee Mohammed Dahlan would destroy Hamas militarily.

Their collective confidence was unbounded. But the Palestinians didn’t get the memo. Rice was reportedly blindsided when she heard the news of Hamas’s victory during her 5 a.m. treadmill workout. But that did not prevent a swift response.

She immediately insisted that the Quartet (the US, European Union, United Nations, and Russia) ban all contact with Hamas and support Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza. The results of her request were mixed, but Palestinian suffering manifestly intensified. The isolation was supposed to turn angry Palestinians against an ineffective Hamas. As if such blockades had not been tried before.

Simultaneously, the US military team expanded its efforts to build the Mohammed Dahlan-led militia. President Bush considered Dahlan “our guy.” But Dahlan’s thugs moved too soon. They roamed Gaza, demanding protection money from businesses and individuals, erecting checkpoints to extort bribes, terrorizing Dahlan’s opponents within Fatah, and attacking Hamas members.

Finally, in mid-2007, faced with increasing chaos and the widely known implementation of a US-backed militia, Hamas – the lawfully elected government – struck first. They routed the Fatah gangs, securing control of the entire Gaza Strip, and established civil order. [continued…]

Bring in the diplomats
By Richard Haass, Newsweek, January 10, 2009

Every crisis holds within it the seeds of opportunity, and this one is no exception. But to take advantage of it, Washington must give Palestinians a reason for choosing talks over terror. The only way to do this is to demonstrate that talking—negotiating—will deliver more than fighting.

Sooner rather than later the new president should publicly articulate the contours of what the United States believes would constitute a just settlement of the Middle East conflict. This means calling for the establishment of a viable Palestinian state based on 1967 lines, with territorial compensation for those borders altered to take into account Israel’s large settlement blocs and legitimate security requirements. Palestinian refugees would receive financial compensation and the right to settle in the new country of Palestine but, with few exceptions, not in Israel. Palestinians would enjoy some foothold in Greater Jerusalem (so that they could claim it as their capital) and authority over Muslim holy places.

Aid and investment can also strengthen the hands of moderates, although it needs to be complemented by easing the movement of goods and people in and out of the West Bank and Gaza. It is essential to rein in Israeli settlement activity lest Palestinians conclude their state will never be viable. And it’s worth trying to drive a wedge between Hamas and Syria. The United States should join with Turkey in mediating between Syria and Israel. A deal ought to be possible in which Israel returns all of the Golan Heights (which are then demilitarized for a set period of time) in exchange for peace and a halt to Syrian support for Hizbullah and Hamas. The United States would then ease economic sanctions against Damascus.

We have learned in Iraq and elsewhere that political and economic progress cannot take place without security. This means we should continue to build up Palestinian police and military forces. It could also mean creating an international force, possibly one drawn from Arab and Islamic countries, to maintain calm in Gaza. The alternative is to depend on Israeli deterrence and Hamas’s restraint, which as recent events demonstrate are prone to breaking down.

It is too soon to know whether the moderates would win out over the radicals or, as happened in Northern Ireland, many of the radicals would evolve and become more moderate. This should be encouraged; over time, elements of Hamas might conclude that their only hope of realizing a Palestinian state is by trading in their guns. Those willing to embrace this approach could become part of a Palestinian coalition government. [continued…]

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