(H/t Pulse)
Looting the Holy Land
Yearly Archives: 2010
Ahmadinejad in Lebanon
While the Iranian president’s visit to Southern Lebanon is being portrayed in the Western media largely in terms of an act of provocation directed at Israel by an antagonist and intruding regional power, the historical ties between that part of Lebanon and Iran span centuries.
Nicholas Blanford writes:
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tours Lebanon’s border with Israel today, he may pause a moment to consider that Iran owes its existence as a Shiite nation to the ancestors of those living in these rural hilltop villages.
Iran wasn’t always the center of Shiite scholarship
In the early 16th century, the center for Shiite scholarship was in an area known as Jabal Amil, a rugged hill country that conforms closely to the geographical perimeters of modern-day south Lebanon. When Shah Ismael I, the Safavid ruler of Iran, introduced Shiism as the state religion in the 16th century, he turned to the scholars of Jabal Amil to help promulgate the new faith.
Dozens of scholars traveled to Iran, settling there, marrying, learning Persian, and involving themselves in the rivalries and intrigues of the Safavid court. It was the beginning of a linkage of families and learning between two Shiite communities lying at opposite ends of the Middle East that remains today.
Reports that Ahmadinejad received a hero’s welcome are put in perspective by Nussaibah Younis, who writes:
The support that Ahmadinejad enjoys in Lebanon’s Shia heartlands can be compared to the support that a corporate sponsor might expect from Manchester United fans: bored gratitude. The biggest cheer that Ahmadinejad’s speech managed to raise out of the crowd came when he thanked Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, as a “dear warrior and scholar”.
Nasrallah was the real star of the show. Rumours that he might appear in person at the rally drew large expectant crowds. Though there was a sigh of disappointment when Nasrallah only appeared via video link, the forceful and impassioned clarity with which he spoke whipped the crowd into a flag-waving and slogan-chanting frenzy. Nasrallah spoke mindfully of his larger audience in Lebanon, and tried the novel approach of presenting Iran’s foreign policy as “unifying”. He praised Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for issuing a fatwa forbidding Muslims to react to the Qur’an burning-fiasco in the US with “similar acts”, claiming that Iran was acting in the best interests of Christian-Muslim unity.
He also congratulated the Iranian cleric for his handling of a highly controversial London conference in which a little-known Shia activist disparaged Aisha, the wife of the prophet Muhammad, who is highly revered by Sunnis but considered a traitor by many Shias. Iran’s supreme leader Khamenei had responded with a statement forbidding insulting talk about the wives of the prophet, thereby – according to Nasrallah – acting as a force for unity between Sunnis and Shias.
Many Lebanese would have a lot to say about claims that Iran is a “unifying force in the region”, but the speech did make clear that Nasrallah’s crowd appeal is unmatched and that his power among many Shias does not need to be enforced by Iran. If anything, Hezbollah deftly staged a welcome for Ahmadinejad designed to encourage the Iranians to dig deeper and give more generously to Hezbollah’s cause.
How did 1938 turn out to be such a long year?
“It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany and it’s racing to arm itself with atomic bombs,” Benjamin Netanyahu declared four years ago.
By 1942, Germany had snared itself in the disastrous Battle of Stalingrad — but let’s allow Netanyahu some latitude with his metaphor and assume that it’s still 1938 and that Iran’s race has merely suffered a few interruptions.
So, it’s still 1938 and Iran’s Hitler has come to Israel’s border to survey the nation he intends wiping off the map.
In anticipation of this historic moment, Aluf Benn wrote last month:
Netanyahu will have a one-time opportunity to stop the new Hitler and thwart the incitement to genocide. Ahmadinejad will pay his first visit to Lebanon and devote an entire day to a tour of the southern part of that country. He will visit sites where Hezbollah waged battles against Israel and, according to one report, he will also pop over to Fatima Gate, just beyond the border fence at Metula. The route is known, the range is close and it is possible to send a detail across the border to seize the president of Iran and bring him to trial in Israel as an inciter to genocide and Holocaust denier.
The media effect will be dramatic: Ahmadinejad in a glass cage in Jerusalem, with the simultaneous translation earphones, facing grim Israeli judges. In the spirit of the times, it will also be possible to have foreign observers join them (David Trimble of the Turkel commission was a leader of the “try the Iranian president” initiative ).
There are also operational advantages: Iran will hesitate to react to its president’s arrest by flinging missiles, out of fear for their leader’s life. It will also be possible to capture Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who will no doubt emerge from his hiding place and accompany Ahmadinejad. Israel will have high-ranking hostages it will be able to exchange for Gilad Shalit.
And if the world has any complaints, it will be reminded that the Americans invaded Panama in order to arrest its ruler Manuel Noriega – and only for dealing drugs, a far smaller offense than incitement to genocide.
Of course, the idea also has disadvantages. Ahmadinejad might be killed in the action and Iran would embark on a cruel war of revenge. The precedent of arresting leaders would endanger Israeli personages suspected abroad of crimes against humanity or murder (according to the Goldstone report and the flotilla report ). Ahmadinejad could be acquitted and make Israel look like a bully and Netanyahu a fool.
Nevertheless, how can Netanyahu refrain from an action to stop Hitler’s heir, when the year is already 1939, if not 1940? According to Netanyahu’s reasoning, if he refrains from acting history will condemn him for “not preventing a crime,” as with Margalit Har-Shefi, who didn’t stop Yigal Amir from assassinating Yitzhak Rabin.
Benn’s point was not to advocate a reckless course of action but to underline the difference between rousing rhetoric and statesmanship.
For all those inside and outside Israel who swallowed Netanyahu’s rhetoric however, this is a telling moment to reflect on the proposition that the clown from Tehran — provocative as he might be — can seriously be compared to Hitler. Anyone who still clings to this notion must now consider its corollary: that if Ahmadinejad is Hitler, then Netanyahu — through his inaction — turns out to be a Chamberlain not Churchill.
So how truly significant is it that Iran’s president is currently now enjoying all the honors of a visiting head of state (even though he isn’t one)?
Rhami Khouri puts the drama in perspective and says:
[Ahmadinejad’s] visit represents a blow to Washington’s strategy of bringing Lebanon firmly into its orbit.
For most Arab governments, the Iranian-Hizbullah connection represents everything they fear for their own incumbency: armed Shiite movements inside countries where mostly Sunni Muslim Arabs dominated public life; popular resistance movements that do battle according to their own strategic calculations; Iranian meddling in Arab affairs; and, Arab mass movements that connect with compatriots across the region in their common opposition to and defiance of conservative Arabs, Israel and the US itself.
So at some levels it is understandable why so many people in the region and abroad are making a lot of noise about the Iranian president’s visit to Lebanon. At another level, though, that of substance vs. symbolism, this is a pretty routine event that does not necessarily break new ground, but mainly reflects and emphasizes existing political realities that generate frenzied, nearly hysterical, reactions on both sides.
The irony is that by elevating his importance on the international stage while his real challenges come from home, no one serves Iran’s president as more effective publicists than do Israel and the United States.
As Meir Javedanfar notes:
Ahmadinejad has never been more unpopular in Iran, not only with the public but also his conservative allies and the clergy. By going to Lebanon, he is going to one of the last places where the Islamic Republic still has genuine support. When he speaks in Bint Jbeil, unlike in Iran, schools won’t be closed and civil servants won’t be threatened with dismissal unless they attend the president’s speech. People will voluntarily turn up because they genuinely support the Islamic republic and will pay respect to almost any senior Iranian politician.
By going to Lebanon, Ahmadinejad will primarily be using the occasion to try to strengthen his support back home with the public, and with the Revolutionary Guards, whose support is important to him. He will also be trying to outshine his rivals such as Ali Larijani and Hashemi Rafsanjani by using the trip to say that he is the true face of Iran abroad, and not them.
This development will also benefit supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who is most probably very concerned about Ahmadinejad’s flagging popularity.
What is important to note is that such a visit did not take place when Khatami was president. If anyone deserves to be in southern Lebanon, it is him, and not Ahmadinejad. Israel evacuated southern Lebanon in May 2000 on Khatami’s watch, not Ahmadinejad’s.
However, Khamenei did not send Khatami to southern Lebanon because he was not worried about his unpopularity. In fact, compared with Ahmadinejad, he was far more popular. The opposite is true about Ahmadinejad and this is why Khamenei, for the sake of his regime, is sending him there.
The RealNews Network has an interesting report on Ahmadinejad’s posture as an anti-capitalist.
Might the US be holding a fugitive Mossad agent in secret detention?
Eight months after the murder of the Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai, two reports in the last few days present intriguingly contradictory pictures.
First came a Wall Street Journal report on Friday with the headline, “In Global Hunt for Hit Men, Tantalizing Trail Goes Cold.”
The Journal has followed this story more closely than any other US newspaper and this report contained some interesting new information — such as that one of the key suspects, recently using the name Christopher Lockwood, had previously used the identity of a young Israeli soldier, Yehuda Lustig, who was killed during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Still, as the headline suggested, investigators were no closer to tracking down Lockwood or any of the other suspects widely assumed to be Israeli Mossad agents. An Israeli who had been arrested in Poland, extradited to Germany and then released on bail in August, swiftly returned to Israel.
The trail has gone cold — but not according to Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the Dubai chief of police. He told The National on Monday that in fact a major suspect was arrested two months ago by a Western country but authorities in that country have requested that no information about the arrest should be made public.
The Abu Dhabi newpaper reported: “The country that arrested the suspect two months ago is not believed to be European.”
So which Western countries do we already know are involved in the case? The only non-European Western country that suspects are known to have traveled to after the murder is the United States.
A suspect traveling as an Irishman, Evan Dennings, entered the US on January 21, the day after Mabhouh’s body was found. And another suspect traveling with a British passport under the name, Roy Allan Cannon, casually entered the US on February 14, right in the middle of the period when the story was receiving global media attention.
The Journal now reports on these suspects that:
Their passport details showed up in a U.S. border-control system that collects electronic manifests of international flights and screens them against passenger watch lists, according to people familiar with the probe and to investigation documents reviewed by the Journal. That suggested the suspects had boarded planes bound for the U.S. The information was passed to international investigators involved in the case, raising hopes of a capture.
But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has since said it doesn’t have records of the two suspects in its system.
It doesn’t have the records — meaning the records have vanished? Been handed over to a different agency, such as the FBI? Or what?
Something doesn’t add up here.
If it turned out that a suspected murderer who belonged to Mossad was arrested in the US, there’s no doubt that the Obama administration would be in a quandary about how to proceed. The one thing we can sure of is that it would guard its actions with the utmost secrecy.
Israel is ceasing to be a Jewish state and turning into a state for some Jews
Carlo Strenger has an interesting op-ed in Haaretz. It’s worth reading the whole piece (part of which appears below). Comments of mine follow.
There is nothing left to say about how bad, harmful and useless the new citizenship law is: Labor Party Minister Isaac Herzog has warned that it is another step towards fascism; legal experts like Mordechai Kremnitzer have pointed out that it doesn’t serve any identifiable purpose except making Arabs feeling even less at home in Israel. Likud Ministers Benny Begin and Dan Meridor have pointed out how harmful the law is for the relation with Israeli Arabs and for Israel’s standing in the world.
Both Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu have already declared that they see this law as just a first step in a general attempt towards ensuring loyalty to the state by legislation. The time has come to ask what really stands behind this rising tide. The obvious answer seems to be that it is directed against both Israel’s Arab citizenry, whom Avigdor Lieberman is alienating and insulting almost every day, and Palestinians who want to gain Israeli citizenship.
But I think that this is not the whole story. Consider this strangest of alliances between Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas; one is a completely secular, ultra-nationalist, the other an ultra-Orthodox party. What do they have in common? Why are they lately so effectively cooperating with each other, together with other extreme-right parties?
I believe that what unites them is less a fear of Israel’s enemies (and Israel does have enemies). It is a visceral hatred for the Western values and the liberal ethos. They all hate freedom; they all hate the idea of critical, open discourse, in which ideas are discussed according to their merit. They keep criticizing what they see as the liberal bias of the media and academia, and they have made sustained attempts to curtail freedom of speech at the universities.
Lieberman’s disdain for these ideas breaks through at every possible moment: lately he has insulted French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos, telling them they should take care of their own problems in Europe before they come to advise Israel. This has been typical of him for a long time: Lieberman thinks that Israel should turn east; that it should no longer define itself as a Western country, and should finally shake off Israel’s original commitment to be part of the Western world.
Shas has made clear for decades that it just plays along with democracy; that it doesn’t believe in the idea of citizens thinking critically: they believe that only their spiritual leader, Ovadia Yossef, must determine what is right and what is wrong. Other ultra-rightists have been feeling for a long time that the commitment to universal values is undermining their program for the greater Israel in which Palestinians should have no political rights.
They cannot stand the idea that a liberal democracy should be based on rational legislation and is open to criticism by all. They are furious that tribal loyalty is not above criticism. Just lately, national religious rabbis have claimed that studying at universities is a danger for young religious people, because they internalize too many enlightenment values.
We are really talking about a right-wing anti-liberal coalition united by an instinctive hatred against the idea that there are universal standards of rationality and of morality. They do not want to hear criticism of their worldviews that relies on ideas that have, for a long time, been common to the free world. What we are seeing is a fight about Israel’s cultural and political identity.
For many liberal Israelis, the proposed new citizenship law represents a red line which once crossed will lead inexorably to the end of Israeli democracy. The foundation of that fear is the conviction that Israel has a democracy to lose.
Point out the contradictions inherent in the idea of a Jewish democracy, which by its nature grants preferential rights to Jews, and the liberal-Zionist shrug is to say, it’s a work in progress. No democracy is perfect.
Still, a real threshold has emerged and it consists above all in matters of perception: Israel is becoming a state which no longer serves and is instead threatening the needs of liberal Jewish identity — an identity in which neither half is meant to subvert the other.
Israel is ceasing to be a Jewish state and turning into a state for some Jews.
One could argue that this has long been the case, since for most Jews Israel is either an imaginary life insurance policy or of no particular relevance to their own lives. Even so, what has sustained Israel is the importance of the idea of a Jewish state in the minds of most Jews, irrespective of where they choose to live.
In this context, the Palestinians are irrelevant. They are peripheral to a conversation that has less to do with contested rights than it has to do with contested Jewish identity.
No wonder the peace process has gone nowhere. The wrong parties have been engaged in negotiations.
There is no Israeli consensus because there is no Jewish consensus. The tribe no longer exists (if it ever did) but rather than confront that fact, it has been hidden behind a veil: the unquestionable need for a Jewish state.
As the need for a Jewish state becomes untethered from Jewish identity, no wonder there is a drive to chain it to the law.
Pamela Geller’s English friends — Islamophobes united
(Update below)
Pamela Geller — “hate monger and anti-mosque queen bee,” as she has been dubbed by Charles Johnson at the conservative blog where she got her start — has “helped bring into the mainstream a concept that after 9/11 percolated mainly on the fringes of American politics: that terrorism by Muslims springs not from perversions of Islam but from the religion itself,” write Anne Barnard and Alan Feuer in a New York Times profile.
Geller’s profile is twice the length of a piece Barnard wrote on Park51’s Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in August. That’s presumably because Geller is now “a media commodity.”
Not until we get close to the end of the Geller profile do we hear mention of her connections to the notorious fascist group, the English Defence League.
Ms. Geller went on to champion as patriotic the English Defense League, which opposes the building of mosques in Britain and whose members have been photographed wearing swastikas. (In the interview, Ms. Geller said the swastika-wearers must have been “infiltrators” trying to discredit the group.)
In March, when the EDL held a rally in support of the visiting Dutch politician and anti-Islam leader, Geert Wilders, Geller wrote:
How I wish I could be there to stand with the English Defense League.
The EDL’s notoriety has no doubt been fueled by its more photogenic members and their drunken behavior, but the movement is not only attracting disaffected white skinheads.
In May, The Guardian (see also the accompanying video) recounted meeting an EDL leader who alluded to the group’s growing links to the US.
On a chilly evening in early March, Alan Lake settles into his seat in a cafe in central London. This smartly dressed man in his mid-40s has emerged as a key figure in the organisation and is quickly into his stride — warning that the UK will have Sharia law in the next 40 years “unless something is done”.
A London-based IT consultant, Lake has spoken at several EDL rallies and sees himself as one of the organisation’s thinkers. “The middle-class intellectuals are coming forward and also American speakers – some of them quite famous, although I can’t give you names yet … they love the fact that we can have people that can go on the streets.”
Addressing a far-right anti-Islam conference in Sweden last year, Lake told delegates it was necessary to build a united “anti-Jihad movement” and spoke of the need for “people that are ready to go out in the street”, boasting that he and his friends had begun to build alliances with “more physical groups like football fans”. Lake says he is opposed to violence or confrontation but regularly returns to the importance of the EDL’s physical presence.
In a post at the 4Freedoms Community website, Lake described his vision of segregation in the UK in the coming decades:
In 20 or 30 years the UK will start to fragment into Islamic enclaves and non-Islamic areas around them. Its time we decided who will be allowed in the non-Islamic areas. These are the people who we will force into the Islamic enclaves (and who we will execute if they sneak out).
By forcing these liberal twits into those enclaves we will be sending them to their death, at worst, and at best they and their families will be subjected to all the depredations, persecution and abuse that non-Muslims worldwide currently ‘enjoy’ in countries like Pakistan, Iran and Egypt. It will be great to see them executed or tortured to death…
Please everyone, start to contribute the names of all those we will send with their wives and children to enjoy the religion of peace. We are taking away the middle ground for sympathisers and appeasers. Sure, they can say they support the gangsters of Islamism if they want, it’s their choice! But we will not let them just stand in the middle and say it, hanging back from actually BEING WITH those Hamas and Hizbullah endorsing gangs. If they like that so much, they can be with them, lock, stock and barrel.
Here’s some names to start off. Please note this is a discussion, we need to work it out before sending them to their sordid end.
1. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury
2. David Cameron [Britain’s prime minister]
3. Nick Clegg [Britain’s deputy prime minister]
After this post caught the attention of Indymedia, Lake made some revisions and wrote: “I said execute the leftists that left the Islamic enclaves — yes that was a bit provocative, but I was trying to be brief.”
In a further indication of the blossoming relationship between America and Britain’s anti-Islam movements, the EDL has announced an upcoming event, welcoming Rabbi Nachum Shifren who is a candidate for California State Senate District 26.
“The English Defence League Event @ Embassy of Israel” has this description on Facebook:
The English Defence League will be holding an event in London on Oct 24th in support of Israel, we have an orthodox Rabbi joining us from Los Angeles who is fighting Sharia in L.A and running for state congressman there, we sympathise with what Israel are going through, it’s the only country in the west that is tackling the issues we highlight, we have seen members of the Islamic community hold anti-Israel marches in England which the country is in disgust over but still no action from the government, our four [sic] fathers fought a Nazi regime and won to protect our god given human rights, we cannot allow such fascist ideologies try to rule our streets once again using the same racist tactics, the English Defence League ignited the flame that has awoke this whole world, we are at the fore front of this movement, we have to support our brothers and sisters worldwide the way they are supporting us.
A spokesman at the embassy told me they have nothing to do with the event and will be issuing a statement shortly.*
Lastly, back on Geller, the New York Times made no reference to her possible connections with organized crime.
In 2007, the New York Post reported on a murder that took place at a Long Island auto dealership where Geller was reported to be a co-owner. A car salesman, Collin Thomas, had been murdered outside the showroom of Universal Auto World. In the course of the investigation, detectives also uncovered evidence of an alleged million dollar scam.
As part of the homicide probe, Nassau County police raided the dealership, owned by auto czar Michael Oshry [Geller’s former husband], and Oshry’s Hewlett Harbor home and seized business records.
Cops found banking records were sent to the house, though the state requires such files be kept at businesses, according to court papers filed in a civil forfeiture action by the Nassau district attorney.
“The dealership knew what was going on,” an investigator said.
Oshry’s lawyer, William Petrillo, said his client “has not engaged in any criminal activity.”
His ex-wife, Pamela Geller, former associate publisher of the New York Observer and a conservative blogger, burst into tears when told her ex is under criminal investigation.
Although listed in business records as a Universal co-owner, she denied it. “I have nothing to do with this,” Geller said.
Thomas’ fiancée, Cindy Heron, 21, said he was popular and successful. “All his customers loved him,” she said.
Universal shut its doors June 22 and liquidated its assets.
The New York Times does mention:
Ms. Geller got nearly $4 million when the couple divorced in 2007, and when Mr. Oshry died in 2008, there was a $5 million life-insurance policy benefiting her four daughters, said Alex Potruch, Mr. Oshry’s lawyer. She also kept some proceeds from the sale of Mr. Oshry’s $1.8 million house in Hewlett Harbor.
*Update: The Israeli embassy in London issued a brief statement today, Tuesday, saying that it “wishes to disassociate itself from next Sunday’s event, and from any attempts to link Israel to the EDL.”
Tea Party teaming up with English fascists
The Observer reports:
The English Defence League, a far-right grouping aimed at combating the “Islamification” of British cities, has developed strong links with the American Tea Party movement.
An Observer investigation has established that the EDL has made contact with anti-jihad groups within the Tea Party organisation and has invited a senior US rabbi and Tea Party activist to London this month. Rabbi Nachum Shifren, a regular speaker at Tea Party conventions, will speak about Sharia law and also discuss funding issues.
The league has also developed links with Pamela Geller, who was influential in the protests against plans to build an Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero. Geller, darling of the Tea Party’s growing anti-Islamic wing, is advocating an alliance with the EDL. The executive director of the Stop Islamisation of America organisation, she recently met EDL leaders in New York and has defended the group’s actions, despite a recent violent march in Bradford.
Geller, who denies being anti-Muslim, said in one of her blogs: “I share the EDL’s goals… We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the west.”
Devin Burghart, vice-president of the Kansas-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, said: “Geller is acting as the bridge between the EDL and the Tea Party. She plays an important role in bringing Islamophobia into the Tea Party. Her stature has increased substantially inside the Tea Party ranks after the Ground Zero mosque controversy. She has gained a lot of credibility with that stuff.”
Details of the EDL’s broadening aspirations came as about 1,000 supporters yesterday gathered to demonstrate in Leicester, which has a significant Muslim population. Home secretary Theresa May banned marches in the city last week but the EDL said its protest would proceed, raising fears of violence. Parts of Leicester were cordoned off to separate a counter-protest from Unite Against Fascism. Officers from 13 forces were on hand to maintain order.
At the end of August, EDL members converged on Bradford (which has a large British Muslim population) for a demonstration they promoted as “The Big One”.
This is their promotional video and beneath it is a video of the actual demonstration. In an apparent effort to fend off accusations that the EDL is a band of fascist, racist thugs, they have adopted as one of their rally symbols the Israeli flag (see 1 min 30 seconds into the second video) — even while they use the Nazi salute.
EDL rally in Bolton, March, 2010:
The Jewish Republic of Israel
Haaretz reports:
Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi was quick Sunday to condemn the Cabinet’s approval of a controversial proposal requiring non-Jews seeking citizenship to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
“The government of Israel has become subservient to Yisrael Beiteinu and its fascist doctrine,” said Tibi. “No other state in the world would force its citizens or those seeking citizenship to pledge allegiance to an ideology.”
“Israel has proven that it is not equal and is a democracy for Jews and not for Arabs,” he added.
The amendment is one of the promises Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made to Yisrael Beitenu in the coalition agreements. Since coming into government Yisrael Beitenu has advanced a long list of “loyalty” laws, which many consider to be discriminatory against Israel’s Arab citizens.
Gideon Levy writes:
Remember this day. It’s the day Israel changes its character. As a result, it can also change its name to the Jewish Republic of Israel, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. Granted, the loyalty oath bill that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to have passed purportedly only deals with new citizens who are not Jewish, but it affects the fate of all of us.
From now on, we will be living in a new, officially approved, ethnocratic, theocratic, nationalistic and racist country. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t affect him is mistaken. There is a silent majority that is accepting this with worrying apathy, as if to say: “I don’t care what country I live in.” Also anyone who thinks the world will continue to relate to Israel as a democracy after this law doesn’t understand what it is about. It’s another step that seriously harms Israel’s image.
Israel’s human shields and live bait
Sharmine Narwani writes:
Logic dictates that the physical presence of half a million Jews in illegal settlements and outposts – connected through a maze of Jewish-only roads – has stealthily destroyed the possibility of a land-for-peace compromise. And Israel’s government has spent $17 billion on settlements since occupation began.
But here’s something we don’t talk about readily. Why would consecutive Israeli governments heavily subsidize and incentivize the relocation of young families – women and children – into hostile environments? Why would Israel – which claims security dangers wherever there are Palestinian populations – deliberately and systematically place its Jewish civilian population in “harm’s way?”
The settlers are Israel’s human shields and live bait.
“Naatzi! Naaaatzi!” This word, amazingly enough, is a settler favorite. “Nazis!” they screech at foreign TV crews, while waving their infants around. “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi,” they chant as they provocatively try to stop Palestinians from harvesting their olive crops. And the IDF soldiers wait and watch – occasionally intervening to push a frustrated and humiliated Palestinian objector away from a taunting, threatening Jewish settler.
Eventually, a half-crazed Palestinian will fight back, even kill some settlers. Israeli authorities immediately step in and claim the “Security Risk” has increased and more Palestinian land has to be confiscated to ensure Israel’s security. More Palestinians are detained, harassed, punished. More Palestinian homes are occupied or demolished. See how that works? Unleash your craziest Jews onto a Palestinian civilian population until someone blows a fuse and hits back. Then use that as the pretext to encroach further into the lives and onto the land of Palestinians.
Jewish settlers. Half a million of them in 121 illegal settlements and 102 illegal outposts. Human shields and live bait for Israel. The Jewish state’s frontline army for depopulating Palestinian land.
International law recognizes the right of a person living under occupation to resist or retaliate against occupying forces – nobody would question a Palestinian lashing out at an Israeli soldier. But kill a Jewish settler, and the lines get blurred fast. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, the “occupier” (Israel) may not settle its populations (Jewish settlers) in occupied areas (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem), but these laws also do not permit the harming of civilians except in the case of self-defence during an act of violence. In other words, although Israel flagrantly violates the former law by incentivizing Israeli citizens to move into occupied Palestinian territory, these same international conventions do not allow Palestinians to willy-nilly defend their lives and property from Jewish settlers – except during actual hostilities, when they are usually at a considerable disadvantage.
But are settlers really “civilians” as intended by the protective language of the Fourth Geneva Convention? This is debatable on at least one score, as the language dealing with “protected persons” is often prefaced with “civilian persons who take no part in hostilities…”
“The Hilltop Youth consist of hundreds of young settler boys and girls who have become protectors of the illegal outposts pitched on Palestinian-owned land throughout the West Bank. Traumatized by Israel’s desettlement of Gaza, they have vowed to resist a similar fate, and heeding only the “law of God” and the religious-nationalist action calls from the likes of Judeo-fascist high-priestesses Daniella Weiss and Nadia Mattar, these kids have unleashed the newest waves of settler vigilantism: “Price-Tagging.”
Every time authorities act against the perceived interests of the settlers, the latter will exact a “price tag” by carrying out reprisals against nearby Palestinians and their property.
Mearsheimer on the undiminished power of the Israel lobby
(H/t Pulse)
How do we know the power of the lobby is undiminished? Each time President Obama pressed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu on the issue of a settlement freeze, Obama was forced into a humiliating retreat. That would not have happened had it not been for the behind-the-scenes machinations of the lobby.
That’s John Mearsheimer’s argument.
Not for a second do I doubt the existence and power of the lobby, but in this instance I think Mearsheimer is actually undermining his and Stephen Walt’s overarching argument about the extent of the lobby’s influence.
To portray Obama as a victim of the lobby is to avoid looking at the effect of two other major factors: Obama’s political skills and political instability in Iran.
Obama went into a fight without carrying weapons. He put pressure on Netanyahu yet neither threatened any consequences if the Israeli leader refused to yield, nor took any kind of punitive actions (beyond petty insults like withholding photo-opportunities) when Netanyahu stood his ground.
Even if the president was constrained in terms of the weapons at his disposal — the lobby as always keeps Congress in its pocket, meaning that legislative pressure is unavailable — he had recourse to more than sternness. He could for instance have derived leverage from Goldstone. In other words, he could have made American support for Israel at the UN conditional on a settlement freeze.
Aside from these types of tactical errors Obama made in terms of how he wielded the power of the presidency, the other factor that seriously undermined his strategy for challenging Netanyahu was the impact of political unrest in Iran resulting from the disputed 2009 presidential elections.
As the Iranian regime set about crushing the Green Movement, Obama became an awkward and passive spectator. For good reasons he believed that there was very little the US could constructively do to support Iran’s embattled democracy movement, yet that created the perception that having been tough on Israel he was now being soft on Iran. In what appeared to be an effort to counter that perception he essentially abandoned his tough love approach to Israel. Thereafter, it became all carrots and no sticks when dealing with Netanyahu.
The lobby no doubt took satisfaction at this turn of events and helped push the claim that Obama must not be tough on Israel while soft on Iran, but this was secondary to the effect of what was playing out on the streets of Tehran.
So, even if I would agree that the lobby’s power is largely undiminished, Obama’s failed Middle East strategy is very much a train wreck of his own making. To say that the lobby tied his hands, simply lets him off the hook.
Would-be spies should approach Israeli consulates with caution
In June 2006, Elliot Doxer, an employee at an internet company in Boston, sent an email to a foreign consulate. “I am a Jewish American who lives in Boston,” he allegedly wrote. “I know you are always looking for information and I am offering the little I may have.” He also wrote that he wanted “to help our homeland and our war against our enemies.”
Let’s take a wild guess: he was referring to the Jewish homeland and communicating with the Israeli consulate. That’s the assumption made by the Jerusalem Post and just about everyone else — even though court documents only refer to “Country X.”
As the victim of an FBI sting operation, Doxer now faces the prospect of 20 years in jail and a $250,000 fine if convicted.
But here’s the interesting bit. In response to Doxer’s approach, the consulate informed US law enforcement officials and then assisted the FBI with its investigation.
So what’s a would-be spy to do?
Don’t trust your local Israeli consulate?
Don’t ask for compensation?
Make sure you have extremely valuable intelligence?
Acquire Israeli citizenship before you do anything else?
The next Jonathan Pollard might now be reconsidering his options.
Obama desperate to please Netanyahu
How much is a two-month extension in the West Bank settlement slowdown really worth?
The Obama administration is pursuing this paltry prize as if it was staving off another economic meltdown — even as hundreds of building projects have already been started.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
The U.S. has been wooing Netanyahu for weeks with offers including a squadron of F-35 fighters, support for a long-term Israeli troop presence in a new Palestinian state, and a pledge to veto any anti-Israel resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council. The U.S. also is offering access to its satellites that could provide early warning of attacks.
To the Palestinians, the White House is pledging support for their position on the exact location of borders for a future state in exchange for a promise to continue negotiating even if Israel refuses to extend the construction moratorium.
Although the Obama administration was expected to eventually give out incentives to keep the negotiations alive, diplomats and other observers say they are surprised that it has offered so much, so early for such a small victory: a commitment by both sides to keep talking.
“From the left to the right, people are saying that the administration is looking desperate,” said Robert Danin, a former U.S. official and an advisor to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, an envoy to the region for the United Nations, U.S., European Union and Russia.
On Thursday by Ehud Shani, director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, signed a contract for 20 F-35 fighter jets.
Making a hint that they will be used to bomb Iran, he described them as being “one of the answers” for dealing with the “problem” of Tehran.
Israel will get the jets at a discount, pay for them with US tax dollars (through recession-proof military aid), while also likely profiting from F-35 production — it has expressed an interest in manufacturing 25% of the wings of the more than 3,000 aircraft Lockheed expects to build.
The jets won’t be delivered until about 2016, but by that point Israel’s war-mongers no doubt feel optimistic that there will be a war-friendly Republican administration in place — though whether GOP control of the White House is necessary to serve Israel’s needs, is highly debatable.
Obama chooses new national security adviser who has ‘no credibility with the military’
Undaunted by the revelations from Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars, President Obama is replacing National Security Adviser Gen James Jones with his deputy, Tom Donilon.
Last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Donilon would be a “disaster” in that position and Jones said Donilon had “no credibility with the military.”
Was it Donilon’s performance as a vice president at Fannie Mae that impressed Obama?
If Obama is to be judged by those he surrounds himself with, it sure looks like he seeks the company of those who make him comfortable rather than those who appear most competent.
As reported by Woodward, the performance evaluation that Jones gave Donilon was pretty scathing:
First, he had never gone to Afghanistan or Iraq, or really left the office for a serious field trip. As a result, he said, you have no direct understanding of these places. “You have no credibility with the military.” You should go overseas. The White House, Situation Room, interagency byplay, as important as they are, are not everything.
Second, Jones continued, you frequently pop off with absolute declarations about places you’ve never been, leaders you’ve never met, or colleagues you work with. Gates had mentioned this to Jones, saying that Donilon’s sound-offs and strong spur-of-the-moment opinions, especially about one general, had offended him so much at an Oval Office meeting that he nearly walked out.
Third, he said, you have too little feel for the people who work day and night on the NSC staff, their salaries, their maternity leaves, their promotions, their family troubles, all the things a manager of people has to be tuned to. “Everything is about personal relations,” Jones said.
Update: Shoot-from-hip posts sometimes need revision. As others have pointed out, the criticisms of Donilon don’t necessarily put him in a negative light. My own snap judgement was largely based on a negative view of Jones and the expectation that his deputy was unlikely to outshine the general.
At Foreign Policy, Josh Rogin writes:
Immediate reaction within the administration to Jones’s resignation was consistent with the long-held view that Jones was never able to be effective as national security advisor because he was outside of Obama’s inner circle and was intellectually and sometimes physically cut out of major foreign policy discussions.
“Jones always carried an ’emeritus’ air about him and appeared removed and distant from the day-to-day operations,” one administration official told The Cable. “In six months, you will be hard pressed to find anyone in the administration who notices that Jones is no longer there.”
Emeritus is a polite way of saying unengaged. This was strikingly evident when he was the keynote speaker at the J Street conference last year.
So what about Donilon? Josh Rogin again:
According to all accounts, Donilon has been the machine running the NSC for some time, chairing the crucial deputies committee meetings and making the trains run on time throughout the NSC. But Donilon is not viewed as a strategic thinker along the lines of someone like former NSA Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski.
“Donilon will represent continuity and I can’t see any major shifts in policy stemming from the changeover,” one administration source said.
On one major issue, Jones and Donilon seemed to agree. Donilon is skeptical about the prospects for success in Afghanistan, for reasons similar to Jones’s. Just after Obama announced the decision to add 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, Donilon said to the NSC’s Gen. Doug Lute, “My god, what have we got this guy into?,” according to Woodward.
And there you have — horribly predictably — the illegitimate offspring of “change”: continuity.
Everything’s being going so stunningly well, who could dream of changing course?
But Obama will need someone who can inspire boldness if he’s going to find a way out of the Afghan labyrinth. I don’t see that a man whose chief virtue is that he knows how to keep operations running smoothly will have such a talent.
The rock upon which our nation no longer rests
In a landmark case, the first trial of a former Guantánamo detainee, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of United States District Court in Manhattan made a ruling that presents a major setback for the Department of Justice. He barred the key witness from testifying because he had been identified and located through torturing the accused, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who was being held in a secret prison by the CIA.
Kaplan explained his decision in this way:
The Court has not reached this conclusion lightly. It is acutely aware of the perilous nature of the world in which we live. But the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests. We must follow it not only when it is convenient, but when fear and danger beckon in a different direction. To do less would diminish us and undermine the foundation upon which we stand.
At face value, this sounds like one of those rare feel-good moments in the post 9/11 era when someone who has sworn to uphold the Constitution took that responsibility very seriously.
“… the Constitution is the rock upon which our nation rests.” I imagine Judge Kaplan took satisfaction in crafting that sentence. It’s good.
But just in case anyone might be alarmed that the innocent-until-proven-guilty Ghailani might end up being acquited, the judge was eager to pacify such fears.
[H]is status as an “enemy combatant” probably would permit his detention as something akin to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end even if he were found not guilty in this case.
So is Ghailani on trial to determine his innocence or guilt, or simply to decide on the location of his prison cell?
Isn’t that the direction in which fear and danger beckon?
A real Afghan exit strategy
Anyone who carefully read the Washington Post‘s report on talks between the Karzai government and the Taliban should have been struck by this detail: “discussions with the Quetta Shura [Taliban leadership] do not include representatives of the Haqqani group.”
The Waziristan-based Haqqani network has for some time been described as the most formidable element in the Afghan insurgency, so how would the war end if the group that is most vigorously fighting it is left out of a reconciliation process?
The Guardian now presents the answer:
Hamid Karzai’s government held direct talks with senior members of the Haqqani clan over the summer, according to well-placed Pakistani and Arab sources. The US contacts have been indirect, through a western intermediary, but have continued for more than a year.
The report said:
The indirect contacts with the Americans have been made through a non-governmental western intermediary, who has met Haqqani representatives in Pakistan several times in the past 18 months, and who has conveyed messages to and fro.
Different diplomatic sources gave different accounts of the Haqqanis’ readiness to take part in a preliminary dialogue.
One said the relentless targeting of the Haqqani network fighters and leaders by US drones had devastated morale. “There is war-weariness on both sides. Not just in the west,” the diplomat said.
Another said the announcement by the US president, Barack Obama, that the troop drawdown would begin next July, had in turn encouraged the Haqqanis to come forward. “That conveyed a message that the Americans would not be there for ever, and they definitely were in the market for talks, and that opened a door,” the source said.
He predicted that talks with both the Haqqanis and the Quetta Shura would begin in earnest in December, after the winter snows cut the passes between Pakistan and Afghanistan and effectively end the fighting season.
In any future talks the critical demand from both Kabul and Washington would be for the Haqqanis to sever their ties to al-Qaida, whose leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are believed to be sheltering in the caves of North Waziristan.
A Pakistani official said yesterday that he believed the group was ready to make that step. “This is the end of the road for al-Qaida in Waziristan,” the official said.
Just over a year ago, the intrepid Ghaith Abdul-Ahad went to meet Haqqani fighters in their stronghold.
“We are Afghans fighting the jihad and defending our country under the leadership of Jalaluddin Haqqani,” the commander said. He spoke in a schoolmasterly tone. As well as being a commander, Mawlawi Jalali is a teacher in Haqqani’s madrasa.
“The Americans toppled the emirate [of the Taliban] and we are fighting to bring it back. When the Taliban were here the jihad was only in Afghanistan. Now, thanks to the Americans, the jihad has spread to many other countries.”
How did he plan to pursue his holy war? “We use different tactics: mining the streets, fighting and direct attacks. Here in this camp we make all the preparations and have all the men we need for these different tactics.”
What about the new American surge, I asked. Did it concern him?
“We attack the towns, like in Wazi Zadran, where there is a strong American and Afghan garrison, and mine the streets every day. We average two or three attacks a day against the Americans and their allies. The more troops they send, the more targets we have, so it’s good.”
In June 2008, the New York Times reported:
One Western military official said there was an unspoken agreement between Pakistani and American officials that United States Predator drones would generally be used in the tribal areas against foreign Qaeda members, rather than Pakistani or Afghan targets, like the Haqqanis.
If such an agreement existed, it clearly doesn’t any more.
Tom Gregg points out that the opportunity to draw the Haqqani network into a peace process will pass as soon as its leader, Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, transfers power to his son.
It is well known that for almost a decade he has suffered from health problems and requires regular medical attention rendering him relatively inactive in the day-to-day workings of the insurgency. Furthermore, as a senior insurgent commander (and former Taliban Minister), Maulavi Haqqani’s profile as a “most wanted” does not permit travel to the Afghan battle space. Consequently, his 36-year-old son Sirajuddin (aka “Khalifa”) has increasingly taken over, with gusto, operational command of his father’s network.
However, these limitations speak nothing of the influence Maulavi Haqqani continues to enjoy as a tribal leader, religious scholar, ISI associate and close ally of Gulf Arab financiers. Indeed, the success of the Haqqani network rests with these social/religious/political connections that Maulavi Haqqani has carefully nurtured over the past 30-plus years; indeed, it was these very factors that also made him so popular with the CIA during the anti-Soviet jihad). It can be assumed that these networks, particularly with Arab financiers and the ISI, have been “inherited” by Sirajuddin. However, the same cannot be said about Maulavi Haqqani’s tribal, religious and mujahideen credentials. Sirajuddin is in his early 30’s, grew up in Miram Shah, Pakistan and, prior to 2001, only occasionally traveled to his native village of Garde Serai, nestled in the rugged mountains of Paktia province. In Miram Shah he was involved in Islamic Studies but, unlike his father, did not graduate from a prestigious madrassah and is too young to have been a well-known fighter during the anti-Soviet jihad.
Hence, the very elements that have contributed to the success of Maulavi Haqqani’s activities in eastern Afghanistan (and that could be used to assist in a peace process) — his personal influence as a tribal leader, mujahideen commander and religious elder — will be lost after he dies or passes control to Siraj.
Did the Taliban clock just start ticking?
“You have the watches, but we have the time,” the Taliban like to say.
But now the Washington Post reports that the Taliban’s top commanders are “very serious” about finding a way to end the war. Their eagerness is driven by fear that their power will be usurped.
The leadership knows “that they are going to be sidelined,” the source said. “They know that more radical elements are being promoted within their rank and file outside their control. . . . All these things are making them absolutely sure that, regardless of [their success in] the war, they are not in a winning position.”
In this narrative, when it comes the issue of negotiating peace, it’s Washington that has been dragging its feet, waiting for an advantageous position.
The United States’ European partners in Afghanistan, with different histories and under far stronger domestic pressure to withdraw their troops, have always been more amenable to a negotiated settlement. “What it really boils down to is the Americans both supporting and in some cases maybe even participating in talking with the enemy,” the first European official said. “If you strip everything away, that’s the deal here. For so long, politically, it’s been a deal breaker in the United States, and with some people it still is.”
Whatever domestic political difficulties the administration may fear would result from a negotiated deal with the Taliban, this official said, would be resolved by ending the war earlier rather than later. “A successful policy solves the political problem,” he said.
U.S. officials depicted a somewhat different progression leading to the same conclusion, insisting that the time for real negotiations has only now arrived. Although last fall’s strategy review concluded that defeat of the Taliban was an unrealistic goal, it was followed this year by “a period of time where we’ve been focused on getting our inputs in place, moving resources into Afghanistan,” a senior administration official said. The Afghan government has also been positioning itself for serious talks, he said, through international conferences in January and July, the convening of a “peace jirga,” or council, in Kabul and last week’s naming of the members of an official government reconciliation team.
“Now, yeah, there’s a sense that we mean what we say” when voicing support for a political process, the official said. “The president’s view is that we have to do these things at the same time. We can’t take the approach that we’re just going to be putting our foot on the gas on the military side of things and will get around to the political,” he said.
Last month, Obama pressed his national security team to be more specific about what it meant by a political solution, and “reinforced” the need to be working simultaneously on the military and political sides of the equation, the official said.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, told reporters last week that high-level Taliban leaders had “sought to reach out” to the top level of the Karzai government. “This is how you end these kinds of insurgencies,” he said.
So, even as NATO convoys are getting blown up in Pakistan, things are moving into alignment in Afghanistan just in time for a favorable policy review in December and the beginning of troop withdrawals in July. What a stroke of luck!
What makes me skeptical that Mullah Omar is ready for retirement in Saudi Arabia?
US undermining government in Pakistan
The editor’s of the Washington Post don’t need to pay any attention to commentary from bloggers in order to realize that their recommendations on Pakistan are way off target. All they have to do is read reports in their own newspaper.
U.S. officials in Pakistan have spent much of the past year toiling to bolster the country’s elected government and perhaps improve the United States’ image along the way. But much of the progress made toward those goals may have been swept away with the firing of two NATO missiles last week, officials and politicians here said.
The helicopter strike, which Pakistan says killed three of its soldiers, is widely seen here as proof that the U.S. alliance with Pakistan is based solely on self-serving security interests. And it may have put the United States in the position of destabilizing the weak government it wants to fortify, by giving President Asif Ali Zardari’s many critics another reason to say he is allowing Pakistan to be an American pawn.
It did not help that the airstrike came at the end of a month in which the CIA targeted Pakistan’s militant-riddled tribal areas with a record number of drone strikes, which are secretly sanctioned by Pakistan but deeply unpopular. It also followed reports, confirmed by Pakistani officials, depicting the powerful army chief and U.S. officials as trying to play puppet master by presenting Zardari with lists of incompetent ministers and aides they think should be dismissed to improve governance.
A joint investigation into the airstrike is underway, with results expected to be released sometime Wednesday. U.S. and Pakistani officials said the incident had strained but not fractured the nations’ relationship. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said the allies are “working energetically” to resolve the issues.
Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell struck an upbeat tone with reporters earlier this week, saying that the relationship between the Pentagon and the Pakistani military is “stronger than it has ever been.”
Privately, though, the Obama administration and U.S. military have appeared exasperated by Pakistan’s response to last week’s missile strike. Senior military officials eschewed the effusive apologies and compensation that normally follow inadvertent coalition killings of civilians, noting that the three killed were not civilians and that the United States is not in the habit of compensating the families of soldiers who fire on U.S. forces. The officials said no substantive move will be taken until the probe is completed.
Farahnaz Ispahani, a spokeswoman for Zardari, said Tuesday that Pakistan is satisfied with the U.S. response. In the public’s eyes, though, she said, the incident “only bolsters the arguments and popularity of the terrorists.” The Taliban has asserted responsibility for a string of retaliatory attacks on NATO supply convoys.
On Wednesday, the US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Peterson, apologized for last week’s attack and said in a statement that a joint investigation has established that U.S. helicopters mistook the Frontier Corps soldiers for insurgents they had been pursuing.
When it comes to respect for sovereignty, America’s double standards are glaringly obvious to Rafia Zakaria writing in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper.
On Oct 1, just days after the Nato incident in Pakistan, US forces engaged in an armed standoff with Mexican forces that had crossed the international bridge in pursuit of a vehicle related to a drugs case. US forces at the Texas border at Progresso shut down the international crossing when the Mexican military was reported to have crossed the border.
While no shots were fired, the US customs and border police refused to admit that the Mexican military had the right to cross into the US while in pursuit of criminals. This despite the fact that drug-related crimes caused nearly 5,500 deaths in Mexico in 2008 and the US supplies 90 per cent of the weapons used by drug cartels in Mexico to carry out these murders. All these would seem good reason to allow the doctrine of hot pursuit to apply when Mexican police or military are engaged in an operation against the deadly cartels and cross into the US.
Of course, such is not the case. Mexico is not permitted to fly drones into US territory, searching for intelligence on the drug trade or to thwart arms deals that cause deaths of their citizens. Similarly, Pakistan has to look the other way when the US chooses to ignore the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in search of terrorists. Crudely stated, the rules of the game in the current case are being dictated not by any existing legal doctrine in international law but rather at the will and whims of the most powerful player.
As Robert Baer notes in Time magazine:
Pakistanis scoff at the argument often heard in Washington that the U.S. needs to remain at war in Afghanistan partly in order to stabilize Pakistan — instead, they see the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the load that it has placed on Islamabad as being the major cause of the instability in their country. In other words, they have a very different idea of what another 10 years of war in Afghanistan or a full-fledged bombing campaign against the tribal areas will do for Pakistan’s security.
“This conflict is the bone in the throat of the world”
Phil Weiss, who’s in Israel right now, sat down to talk with Jeff Halper, the Minnesota-born founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, to hear his thoughts on the conflict.
Halper would be happy living in a democracy with Palestinians. I asked him why so many Israelis don’t feel that way.
“There is a principle inculcated in Israelis and Jews from before 1948, by all politicians, newscasters, teachers, journalists, any official, and that is that the Arabs are our permanent enemies. And that’s it! And if you take that as an unchanging premise, then it doesn’t matter what is being done to Palestinians.They brought it on themselves.
“You can’t trust the Arabs. That makes everything else a non-issue… Yitzhak Shamir said, ‘The Jews are still the Jews, the Arabs are still the Arabs, and the sea is still the sea.’ Which means, it’s just the way it is, it’s nature. Arabs are what they are, and we are what we are, and nothing’s going to change that….”
But are Israelis even aware of the tapestry of suffering that is the occupation, and what this does to Palestinian lives?
“Israelis don’t care. Because they’re living the good life. Polls show that peace is the 8th issue in priority for Israelis. It’s like that cover ot Time magazine, Israel doesn’t want peace. I’ve been saying that for years…. And the Israeli government thinks it’s sustainable, they think they can keep this going for another 40 years. They have no idea that we’re living on borrowed time.
“And Israel is not going to cooperate and is not going to negotiate in good faith. Because of the Congress. The only way to go to some kind of peace is by exerting pressure on Israel, which the U.S. could do easily, but the president can’t do. And Israel feels completely protected. The U.S. can’t do anything to Israel, and it won’t let anyone else do anything to Israel. We start building settlements, and it’s, ‘So what?’”
I said that the status quo will bring on violence. Halper said he doubts it.
“It’s too sewn up. Israel is too much in control. Israeli soldiers are every ten feet in the West Bank… Israel is knocking off Palestinian leaders all the time.” And the natural source of Palestinian leadership is all in Israeli jails, 12,000 Palestinians– “I use the term warehousing”– and Palestinian society is rife with collaborators, from the Palestinian Authority on down.
Where’s the hope?
“I don’t use the word hope, I use the word struggle. There’s a struggle going on…”
The good news is that now it’s globalized: the United States is becoming more and more isolated on this issue.
“I don’t think Americans appreciate how isolated they are internationally. This is now a global conflict, and so you have the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The irresistible force is– the EU can make things hard on Israel economically, and the whole Muslim world can be up in arms, and you have BDS, Turkey, isolating Israel, and the international community saying that this is too costly to accept forever. But then the immovable object is the U.S. Congress.”
