Monthly Archives: March 2010

Hamas rule in Gaza: three years on

Prof. Yezid Sayigh writes:

More than a year after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against Gaza, and with the crippling siege well into its fourth year, the rule of the Islamic Resistance Movement/Hamas over the narrow strip of territory looks set to endure. Fortuitous circumstances and the mistakes of others, rather than the coherence of its own policies, played a major role in the early consolidation of the “de facto” government headed by Hamas prime minister Ismail Hanieh; but a stable system is emerging nonetheless: one that often proceeds through trial and error, but which also shows considerable adaptability and a marked learning curve. Much of the government’s success in building a functioning public administration is due to its close, in some respects seamless relationship with Hamas, but that relationship also brings unexpected dilemmas and challenges in its wake. Above all, Hamas fears repeating the mistakes of its rival, the long-dominant Fatah, with respect to its symbiotic relationship with the Palestinian Authority: Fatah, it believes, was drawn by the mundane needs of governing daily life and the desire to preserve power into compromising on national goals—and Hamas sees Fatah and the PA as so closely bound together that the fate of the one determines the fortunes of the
other.

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Listen to the Arabs

Parag Khanna writes:

If Arabs are supposed to be lining up with the United States and Israel to contain the hegemonic ambitions of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then why did Syria host a “war council” of Iran and Hezbollah in Damascus last month? And why is Qatar exploring gas fields jointly with Iran?

The fact is that most Arabs prefer a modus vivendi with Iran — just as many tacitly collaborate with Israel on matters of mutual interest.

Rather than seeing themselves as trapped between Israel and Iran, the most common Arab objective seems to be to limit excessive American influence in their region.

Americans widely believe that the Arab world was elated by the election of President Obama over a year ago. That is so, but not because the Arabs want strong American leadership in their region; they’d prefer to run their own affairs with minimal American interference. From engaging Hamas to negotiating with Iran, Arab states are taking matters into their own hands. And that’s good.

In the run-up to the Arab League summit this weekend, the organization signaled to the Palestinian leadership that it backs direct talks with Israel on final status issues, and is moving toward creating an Arab peacekeeping force to stabilize Gaza and re-integrate Hamas into the Palestinian government.

Dealing with the Palestinians’ internal divisions in this way achieves America’s objective of subduing Hamas in a far better way than any American efforts to date.

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What planet do these people live on?

A letter signed by 300 members of Congress and sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declares:

A strong Israel is an asset to the national security of the United States and brings stability to the Middle East.

What an accomplishment! That so many fallacies could be packed into a single sentence!

But the lunacy isn’t confined to Congress. Right in the middle of what is being described as the worst rift in US-Israeli relations in decades, when it comes to the business of business it’s business as usual:

Even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received the full wrath of the Obama administration, the Defense Ministry and Pentagon were concluding yet another huge deal.

Israel will buy three new Hercules-J transport aircraft, built by Lockheed Martin, at a cost of $250 million. The planes will be manufactured according to Israeli specifications and include many systems produced by Israeli military suppliers.

The deal goes to show that a continuing diplomatic crisis between Israel and the United States has still to make itself felt as far as defense relations are concerned.

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Iraq’s election result declared

The New York Times reports:

When the votes were all finally counted, Iraq’s election left almost everything unresolved, from who would finally rule the country to whether American combat troops would be able to leave on schedule by August.

The former interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, a secular Shiite once derided as an American puppet, galvanized the votes of Sunnis who sat out Iraq’s first national elections and clawed his way back from political obscurity. But his wafer-thin edge of 91 to 89 over his nearest rival, the incumbent prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, falls far short of the majority of 163 of the 325 seats in parliament that he needs to form a government.

A jubilant Mr. Allawi said he would work with any group that was willing to join him in forming a government. “We will not exclude anyone,” he said. “Our coalition is open to all.”

But even with the best of intentions, assembling that coalition will take at least until July, possibly even longer, Iraqi political experts said, and Mr. Allawi will have to overcome deep-seated enmity from the other two biggest vote-getting blocs: the Kurds, with 43 seats; and the Iraqi National Alliance, a Shiite party that gained 70 seats and is led in part by the anti-American cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, who emerged as a possible king maker.

In that case, Mr. Maliki would remain as a caretaker prime minister, and Iraq would enter a protracted period of uncertainty that could prove particularly dangerous as American troops draw down. President Barack Obama has promised that all combat troops will withdraw from Iraq by August, leaving 50,000 trainers and support troops until the end of 2011.

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Being there

After a recent piece by Tom Engelhardt was republished in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes — his op-ed was on opposition to the scheduled US withdrawal from Iraq — a reader from the military sent Tom an email posing this pointed question: “When was the last time you visited Iraq?” The obvious implication being: if you ain’t been there, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

It’s a reasonable charge and one that can be thrown at most of those of us who are presumptuous enough to write about what’s happening on the other side of the world. For instance, I live in North Carolina and I’m not Jewish, yet I spend a great deal of time writing about Israel, a country I’ve never visited. Shouldn’t I be keeping my nose out of their business?

Up until 9/11 I certainly was minding my own business — but then everything changed. On that day a neoconservative cabal grasped the opportunity to set in motion a process that has shaped the last decade: the Israelification of the world.

In a shockwave that ripped across the planet this was as evident in California (where I lived at that time) as anywhere else. An ideological framework that had been used to deny the legitimacy of Palestinian rights and to justify forms of warfare and collective punishment that contravened international law, was suddenly and seamlessly transposed from the local theater of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the global theater of a war on terrorism.

On September 11, we all became Israelis whether we liked it or not. Among those of us who saw what we were being co-opted into as a twisted view of the world, George Bush’s bullhorn had the opposite of its intended effect: it was a call of resistance.

Still, the question, when was the last time you visited Iraq? is a legitimate question.

To have ventured outside one’s neighborhood but only along trails of text, tracing electronic rivulets to their source and soaking in pixelated landscapes, does without question provide a narrowly filtered view of the world.

I am lucky enough to have lived on three continents; to have seen the Buddhas of Bamyan before Osama bin Laden ever dreamed their destruction could light a fuse igniting a clash of civilizations; to have slept in caves and under the stars and to have drunk warm buffalo milk and rancid butter tea. I might not have been to Iraq but I do at least have the privilege of having seen the world from many vantage points.

There is though a sense in which wherever we go, we take our own world with us. Our experience is mediated through our own history. Nevertheless, when we get there — wherever that might be — the extent to which we bridge the gap between going there and being there can have as much to do with how we are seen as it has with what we see. Thus the self-limiting view of the world afforded to so many of America’s soldiers, journalists, missionaries, tourists, and business people who do not meet the world as much as they experience the world meeting America.

It is, as Tom Engelhardt notes, all to easy to go to Iraq (or Afghanistan or anywhere else on the globe) without really being there. Here’s part of Tom’s thoughtful response to his Stars and Stripes reader:

Sometimes being far away, not just from Iraq, but from Washington and all the cloistered thinking that goes with it, from the visibly claustrophobic world of American global policymaking, has its advantages. Sometimes, being out of it, experientially speaking, allows you to open your eyes and take in the larger shape of things, which is often only the obvious (even if little noted).

I can’t help thinking about a friend of mine whose up-close and personal comment on U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan was that they were trapped in an American-made box, incapable of seeing beyond its boundaries — of, that is, seeing Afghanistan. Let me be clear: I have no doubt that being there is generally something to be desired. But if you take your personal blinders with you, it often hardly matters where you are. Thinking about my Stars and Stripes reader’s question, the conclusion I’ve provisionally come to is this: It’s not just where you go, it’s also how you see what’s there, and no less important who you see, that matters — which means that sometimes you can actually see more by going nowhere at all.

When American officials, civilian or military, open their eyes and check out the local landscape, no matter where they’ve landed, all evidence indicates that the first thing they tend to see is themselves; that is, they see the world as an American stage and those native actors in countries we’ve invaded and occupied or where (as in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen) we conduct what might be called semi-war as so many bit players in an American drama.

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No peace without equality

(h/t to Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.)

When Israel defines itself as a “Jewish State,” it not only sees itself as the state of Jews worldwide. It also sees Arab identity in this homeland as a threat to that definition. That’s why the state sees discrimination against Arabs as part of its “job description.” — Hassan Jabareen, Founder and General Director of Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

One of the most insidious deceptions embedded in the concept of a two-state solution is the implication that once a peaceful Palestinian state comes into existence alongside a secure Israel, then the Jewish state will finally have established its international legitimacy. Israel will no longer be a state that disregards the political rights and aspirations of the Palestinian population. It will be vindicated in its claim to be a Jewish democracy.

The deception in that picture is that it glosses over the fact that even if against all expectations a Palestinian state was established in two years, those Palestinians who are also Israeli citizens and who make up a quarter of Israel’s population would remain as they are today: second class citizens. Indeed, in the event that a Palestinian state is created, it seems quite likely that the Palestinian citizens of Israel would come under pressure to leave Israel for the Jews and to move to “their own state”. In such an event, the two-state solution far from being the panacea that it is portrayed to be could well be the forerunner of another catastrophe.

If Israeli Jews cannot embrace the idea that non-Jews deserve equal rights, then there is no formula — two-state or otherwise — that will lead to a just resolution of the Middle East conflict.

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Netanyahu — disgraced, isolated and weaker

The headline for Aluf Benn’s article in Haaretz says it all: “Netanyahu leaves U.S. disgraced, isolated and weaker.”

Benn’s full account appears below but some of the comments elsewhere in the Israeli press reveal how deeply a racist outlook on the world is embedded within the Israeli perspective. As the Daily Telegraph reported:

Sending a clear message of his displeasure, Mr Obama treated his guest to a series of slights. Photographs of the meeting were forbidden and an Israeli request to issue a joint-statement once it was over were turned down.

“There is no humiliation exercise that the Americans did not try on the prime minister and his entourage,” Israel’s Maariv newspaper reported. “Bibi received in the White House the treatment reserved for the president of Equatorial Guinea.”

Why, the editors of Maariv might care to explain, would the president of Equatorial Guinea not be afforded respect during a visit to the White House?

The Telegraph says that upon his arrival to meet with President Obama, Netanyahu was presented with a set of 13 demands, key among those that Israel halt all new settlement construction in East Jerusalem:

When the Israeli prime minister stalled, Mr Obama rose from his seat declaring: “I’m going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls.”

As he left, Mr Netanyahu was told to consider the error of his ways. “I’m still around,” Mr Obama is quoted by Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper as having said. “Let me know if there is anything new.”

When the two men met briefly an hour later, a short meeting failed to break the impasse.

Aluf Benn writes:

The visit – touted as a fence-mending effort, a bid to strengthen the tenuous ties between Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama – only highlighted the deep rift between the American and Israeli administrations.

The prime minister leaves America disgraced, isolated, and altogether weaker than when he came.

Instead of setting the diplomatic agenda, Netanyahu surrendered control over it. Instead of leaving the Palestinian issue aside and focusing on Iran, as he would like, Netanyahu now finds himself fighting for the legitimacy of Israeli control over East Jerusalem.

The most sensitive and insoluble core issues – those which when raised a decade ago led to the dissolution of the peace process and explosion of the second intifada – are now being served as a mere appetizer.

At the start of his visit, Netanyahu was tempted to bask in the warm welcome he received at the AIPAC conference, at which he gave his emotional address on Jerusalem.

Taking a page from Menachem Begin, he spoke not on behalf of the State of Israel, but in the name of the Jewish people itself and its millennia of history.

His speech was not radical rightist rhetoric. Reading between the lines, one could spot a certain willingness to relinquish West Bank settlements as long as Israel maintains a security buffer in the Jordan Valley.

But at the White House, the prime minister’s speech to thousands of pro-Israel activists and hundreds of cheering congressmen looked like an obvious attempt to raise political capital against the American president.

Knowing Netanyahu would be reenergized by his speech at the lobby, Obama and his staff set him a honey trap. Over the weekend they sought to quell the row that flared up during U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s trip here two weeks ago, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described Netanyahu’s response to the ultimatums Washington presented to him as “useful.”

Special envoy George Mitchell made a televised visit to the prime minister’s bureau Sunday to invite Netanyahu to the White House. Washington, it seemed, was trying to make nice.

Far from it. Just when Netanyahu thought he had resolved the crisis by apologizing to Biden, Clinton called him up for a dressing down.

This time as well, Netanyahu almost believed the crisis had passed, that he had survived by offering partial, noncommittal answers to the Americans’ questions. Shortly before meeting with Obama, Netanyahu even warned the Palestinians that should they continue to demand a freeze on construction, he would postpone peace talks by a year.

His arrogant tone underscored the fact that Netanyahu believed that on the strength of his AIPAC speech, he could call the next few steps of the diplomatic dance.

But then calamity struck. At their White House meeting, Obama made clear to his guest that the letter Netanyahu had sent was insufficient and returned it for further corrections. Instead of a reception as a guest of honor, Netanyahu was treated as a problem child, an army private ordered to do laps around the base for slipping up at roll call.

The revolution in the Americans’ behavior is clear to all. On Sunday morning Obama was still anxiously looking ahead to the House of Representatives vote on health care – the last thing he wanted was a last-minute disagreement with congressmen over ties with Israel.

The moment the bill was passed, however, a victorious Obama was free to deal with his unruly guest.

The Americans made every effort to downplay the visit. As during his last visit in November, Netanyahu was invited to the White House at a late hour, without media coverage or a press conference. If that were not enough, the White House spokesman challenged Netanyahu’s observation at AIPAC that “Jerusalem is not a settlement.”

The Americans didn’t even wait for him to leave Washington to make their disagreement known. It was not the behavior Washington shows an ally, but the kind it shows an annoyance.

The approval of construction at the Shepherd Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah, announced before his meeting with Obama, again caught Netanyahu unawares. Apparently the special panel appointed after the Ramat Shlomo debacle to prevent such surprises failed its first test.

Netanyahu is having his most difficult week since returning to office, beginning with the unfortunate decision to relocate the planned emergency room at Ashkelon’s Barzilai Medical Center and lasting through his humiliating jaunt through Washington.

Returning to Israel today, Netanyahu will need to work hard to rehabilitate his image, knowing full well that Obama will not relent, but instead demand that he stop zigzagging and decide, once and for all, whether he stands with America or with the settlers.

The satisfaction that Washington gains from putting Netanyahu in his place may be short-lived. As Seth Freedman notes in The Guardian: “External pressure on Israel from the likes of the United States and European Union serves only to provoke a siege-mentality response from Israelis and plays into the hands of the paranoiacs on the Israeli right.”

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The two-state illusion

Mya Guarnieri writes:

A drive east of the Green Line suggests the two-state solution is moot. Jewish-only roads slice through the hills. The separation barrier winds through the West Bank, choking Palestinian villages. Settlements are lodged in the land’s throat.

Dr. Neve Gordon, author of the book Israel’s Occupation comments, “The one-state solution is already on the ground, in the sense that close to half a million Israeli Jews currently live in the area occupied by the [Israeli] army. They’re enmeshed within the Palestinian population.”

While the body of one state is here, the spirit isn’t. The current system, according to Dr. Gordon, is a democracy for Jews and an apartheid regime for Palestinians–different from that of South Africa, but functioning in a similar way.

“The question is whether there can be a separation,” Dr. Gordon says, pointing to the argument made by former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, who called the West Bank an egg that can’t be unscrambled.

And even if Israel could undo some of the mess, the proverbial finger Netanyahu recently gave the Americans suggests that the government has another agenda.

“I think what’s clear is that there is no intention on the part of the Israeli government to support a two-state solution,” Dr. Gordon says. “The borders, the airspace, all remain under Israeli control. What Netanyahu means when he says two states is not a state–it’s a municipality [for Palestinians] to collect their own garbage… What Netanyahu is supporting is a deepening of [settlements and the occupation] while talking about two states.”

To continue to advocate for a two-state solution, Dr. Gordon explains, is to support Netanyahu and his map for an unacknowledged, de facto single state that oppresses Palestinian residents.

Meanwhile, The Media Line reports:

Palestinian support for a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel is declining, a joint Palestinian-Israeli study has found.

The latest public opinion survey conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that the while the majority of Palestinians and Israelis support a two-state solution to the conflict, Palestinian support for such a resolution has declined in recent months.

“The results show a decline in the Palestinians support for the two-state solution,” Waleed Ladadweh, a researcher with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research told The Media Line. “From 64 percent in December 2009 to 57 percent in this poll.”

Dr Nabil Kukali, Director of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, agreed that Palestinian public opinion is trending towards a bi-national state.

“On the whole Palestinians support the peace process, but there are some changes in attitudes towards the two-state solution,” he told The Media Line. “The Palestinians feel hopeless and they don’t think the Israelis will give the Palestinians one meter of their land.”

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Israel escalates its repression, stoking the fires of division

Jesse Rosenfeld reports:

A week of Palestinian frustration with Israeli settler expansion in East Jerusalem and state provocations at Palestinian national and religious sites culminated last weekend with four young men from the Nablus region killed in suspicious circumstances. The grief and outrage at Sunday’s funeral in the village of Iraq Burin over the fatal shootings of 16-year-olds Muhammad and Useid Qadus was made more severe as news of two more deaths in the nearby village of Awarta spread through the procession.

The Qadus cousins were shot with live ammunition in the chest and head during a riot the previous day, instigated by soldiers sealing residents in their homes in an attempt to secure the main village road for use by settlers in the West Bank. Despite evidence of live rounds being fired, including X-rays showing an M16 round lodged in Useid’s brain, the army has claimed that they fired tear gas and rubber bullets.

“The two boys lived with the settlers attacking their land and family,” said Majida al Masri, a politician in Nablus and politburo member for the leftist, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, told me.

No sooner had the bodies been put in the ground than a line of funeral attendees headed back toward the Nablus hospital, this time to get information on the shooting of two farm boys by the army while they worked near the Itamar settlement.

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Insurgent faction presents Afghan peace plan

The New York Times reports:

Representatives of a major insurgent faction have presented a formal 15-point peace plan to the Afghan government, the first concrete proposal to end hostilities since President Hamid Karzai said he would make reconciliation a priority after his re-election last year.

The delegation represents fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, 60, one of the most brutal of Afghanistan’s former resistance fighters who leads a part of the insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan forces in the north and northeast of the country.

His representatives met Monday with President Karzai and other Afghan officials in the first formal contact between a major insurgent group and the Afghan government after almost two years of backchannel communications, which diplomats say the United States has supported.

Though the insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, or Islamic Party, operates under a separate command from the Taliban, it has links to the Taliban leadership and Al Qaeda and has fought on a common front against foreign forces in Afghanistan.

A spokesman for the delegation, Mohammad Daoud Abedi, said the Taliban, which makes up the bulk of the insurgency, would be willing to go along with the plan if a date was set for the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country. Publicly, a Taliban spokesman denied that.

The plan, titled the National Rescue Agreement, a copy of which was given to The New York Times, sets that date as July 2010, with the withdrawal to be completed within six months.

Earlier, Tim McGirk reported:

Pakistan’s arrest of a dozen top Taliban leaders — military commanders, strategic planners and a financier — over the past six weeks is viewed by Afghan and NATO officials with a mixture of relief and suspicion. On one hand, the arrests have disrupted the insurgents’ chain of command, making it tougher for the Taliban’s war council to relay funds and battle plans to their commanders fighting NATO troops. But according to Afghan officials and diplomats in Kabul, the roll-up of Taliban leaders has dealt a blow to secret, preliminary talks under way during the past six months between President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban, as well as those conducted through a separate channel between the Taliban and U.N. envoys.

Sources consulted by TIME in Peshawar, Kabul and Kandahar all characterize those Taliban commanders picked up by Pakistani intelligence agencies as being more malleable to peace talks with Karzai than a core of hard-liners within the Taliban’s ruling shura, or council, who are thought to be hiding in the Pakistani cities of Quetta or Karachi. One foreign diplomat in Kabul says he looked at the list of 14 Taliban arrested by the Pakistanis and thought, “I knew eight of them personally, and they were all in favor of a peace process.” This was confirmed by Kai Eide, the U.N.’s former Special Representative in Afghanistan, who told the BBC on March 18 that Pakistan’s arrests had cut short “talks about talks” between the U.N. and the Taliban in Dubai.

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Time to shut down the CIA

Former CIA operative Robert Baer writes:

On January 10, 2010, CIA director Leon Panetta wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which he disputed that poor tradecraft was a factor in the Khost tragedy [after a Jordanian doctor named Humam Khalil Abu-Malal al-Balawi blew himself up, in one of the deadliest attacks in the CIA’s history]. Panetta is wrong.

An old operative I used to work with in Beirut said he would have picked up Balawi himself and debriefed him in his car, arguing that any agent worth his salt would never expose the identity of a valued asset to a foreigner like the Afghan driver. I pointed out that if he’d been there and done it that way, he’d probably be dead now. “It’s better than what happened,” he said.

One thing that should have raised doubts about Balawi was that he had yet to deliver any truly damaging intelligence on Al Qaeda, such as the location of Zawahiri or the plans for the Northwest bomb plot. Balawi provided just enough information to keep us on the hook, but never enough to really hurt his true comrades. And how was it that Balawi got Al Qaeda members to pose for pictures? This should have been another sign. These guys don’t like their pictures taken. So there were a few clear reasons not to trust Balawi, or at least to deal with him with extreme caution.

But the most inexplicable error was to have met Balawi by committee. Informants should always be met one-on-one. Always.

The fact is that Kathy [the Khost CIA base chief], no matter how courageous and determined, was in over her head. This does not mean she was responsible for what happened. She was set up to fail. The battlefield was tilted in Al Qaeda’s favor long ago—by John Deutch and his reforms, by the directors who followed him, by the decision to drop the paramilitary course from the mandatory curriculum (which would have made Kathy a lot more wary of explosives), and by two endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have worn the CIA down to a nub. Had Kathy spent more time in the field, more time running informants, maybe even been stung by one or two bad doubles, the meeting in Khost probably would have been handled differently—and at the very least there would have been one dead rather than eight.

If we take Khost as a metaphor for what has happened to the CIA, the deprofessionalization of spying, it’s tempting to consider that the agency’s time has passed. “Khost was an indictment of an utterly failed system,” a former senior CIA officer told me. “It’s time to close Langley.”

Baer isn’t prepared to go that far — he still hankers for the “professionalism” of a bigone era. What he fails to note is that at the core of that lost world of espionage was a contest between spies and that on neither side did those past masters of their tradecraft have any desire to die for their cause.

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Anglophobia on the rise in Israel

After the British government expelled an Israeli diplomat understood to be the London Mossad chief, the Daily Telegraph reports:

…members of the Israeli parliament likened the British government to “anti-Semitic dogs” and demanded the expulsion of Britain’s military attaché in Tel Aviv.

“The British are being hypocritical, and I do not wish to insult dogs here, since some dogs show true loyalty, [but] who gave the British the right to judge us on the war on terror?” said Arieh Eldad, a Right-wing member of the Knesset.

Another member, Michael Ben-Ari, said: “Dogs are usually loyal, the British may be dogs, but they are not loyal to us. They seem to be loyal to the anti-Semitic establishment.”

In an editorial, the Jerusalem Post says:

…the British government, it would appear, has its good guys and bad guys confused. Intelligence activities designed to protect citizens’ lives, even if they cross certain diplomatic frameworks, merit a sensible public response founded in moral support.

There is however one “diplomatic framework” that Israel sees fit to observe: it doesn’t steal the identities of American-Israeli dual nationals.

As for what sinister motives might lurk behind the rebuke to Israel dished out by the British, Dominic Waghorn says:

Right of centre free-daily newspaper Israel Hayom expresses the suspicion shared with me by a senior Israeli diplomat yesterday. “Some three million Muslims live in Britain, and Gordon Brown needs their votes in the upcoming elections.”

“We’ve recently had the feeling that Miliband thinks the route to leading Labour and the government goes through slighting and hurting Israel,” a diplomatic source tells Maariv.

What’s interesting about this notion that the Labour government could be pandering to Muslim voters is that those making the accusation would I am sure — even while AIPAC is in the middle of a conference graced by the attendance of virtually every member of Congress — see no parallel between a British government attentive to the views of Muslim voters and American politicians attentive to the views of Jewish voters.

Perhaps most telling is the fact that this senior Israeli diplomat refers to Muslims who “live in Britain” — as though he can’t quite accept the fact that the Muslims who live in Britain and who will have an impact on the upcoming election are actually British Muslims and British citizens.

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What’s worse than an insult?

The Shepherd Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem

[Updated below.] For Israel to announce new settlement construction in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem right when Joe Biden was visiting, was, Hillary Clinton said, “insulting” to the United States.

Now Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting Washington and what happens right before he goes to the White House to meet President Obama? Another announcement from Jerusalem, but this time it’s even more inflammatory than the last one:

The Jerusalem municipality has given final approval to a group of settlers construct 20 apartments in a controversial hotel in east Jerusalem, Haaretz learned on Tuesday.

The announcement comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in Washington smoothing over ties with the United States over the latest settlement-related tensions, and hours before the premier was to meet with President Barack Obama in Washington.

The Shepherd Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was purchased by American Jewish tycoon Irving Moskowitz in 1985 for $1 million.

Moskowitz, an influential supporter of Ateret Cohanim and heightened Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, plans to tear down the hotel and build housing units for Jewish Israelis in its place.

The local planning council initially approved the plan in July, a move which angered Britain and the United States and prompted them to call on Israel to cancel the plans. The council issued its final approval for the project last Thursday, which now enables the settlers to begin their construction at once.

An existing structure in the area will be town down to make room for the housing units, while the historic Shepherd Hotel will remain intact. A three-story parking structure and an access road will also be constructed on site.

Jake Tapper adds:

Moskowitz is a supporter of Ateret Cohanim (“Crown of the Priests”), a religious movement that seeks to populate East Jerusalem with Jewish settlers. As the Yeshiva puts it: “The Yeshiva is the spiritual epicenter of a community of almost 1000 residents in the heart of the Old City in the so-called ‘Moslem’ Quarter. This area was in fact, prior to the Arab riots, largely inhabited by Jews. It is on this historical basis that we refer to it now as the Renewed Jewish Quarter.”

No word yet on reaction from the White House.

Ynet reports:

Hatem Abdel Kader, holder of the Jerusalem portfolio in Fatah, told Ynet that the decision was tantamount to “Netanyahu slapping Obama in the face in his own house.”

Abdel Kader added that “Netanyahu feels that AIPAC is on his side, that he owns the US and that no action, no pressure by the Americans can prevent him from going ahead with the construction.”

The Fatah official added that the construction’s approval proved that the reports of Washington’s acquiescence in the face of Israel’s plans to build in east Jerusalem were true.

“The new plans for the Shepherd Hotel prove that the dispute between the Administration and Israel was not real and pertained to the way the plans were presented, rather than to the construction itself. What the Americans are actually saying to the Israelis is ‘keep building – but I don’t want to know about it,'” he said.

Update: After Netanyahu and Obama’s closed-door White House meeting, Politico says: “any impression that Netanyahu’s trip would mark a renewal of the troubled relationship between U.S. and Israeli leaders had faded by the time the men met.” The meeting was “shrouded in unusual secrecy” and marked a transition in the administration’s dealings with the Israeli prime minister that has shifted from the “red hot anger” of last week to “an icier suspicion” yesterday, reflected in the fact that no official statements followed the awkward encounter.

Still, the fact is, Obama didn’t turn Netanyahu away. The news that the Shepherd Hotel development had been approved prompted this: “This is exactly what we expect Prime Minister Netanyahu to get control of,” a senior U.S. official told POLTICO Tuesday evening. “The current drip-drip-drip of projects in East Jerusalem impedes progress.”

The transition from the Bush administration to the current administration has been in which the last secretary of state said the Israelis were being “unhelpful” whereas they are now described as “insulting” — either way, the status quo remains the same: Israel can do what it pleases whatever words of displeasure it might provoke.

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Britain kicks out Mossad chief

After a recent warning from US military leaders that Israel is putting at risk the lives of American soldiers in the Middle East, the British government has warned that actions by Israel present “a hazard for the safety of British nationals in the region.”

This latest warning comes after a criminal investigation has concluded that Israel stole the identities of 12 British citizens in order to murder the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January. As a result of that investigation Britain today expelled an Israeli diplomat from London who is understood to be the UK-based Mossad chief.

From London, the Daily Telegraph reports:

An investigation by the Serious and Organised Crime Squad (SOCA) has concluded that there are “compelling reasons” to believe that Israel was responsible for the “misuse” of a dozen British passports.

A senior diplomat at the Israeli Embassy in London – widely believed to be a member of Mossad, the feared Israeli secret service agency – is being expelled from the Untied Kingdom as a result.

As the diplomatic row escalated, Mr Miliband told the House of Commons that he had demanded that the Israeli government give assurances that British citizens will never again be drawn into such an operation.

Describing the passport holders as “wholly innocent victims,” the Foreign Secretary aid that the fact that Israel was a “friend” of the United Kingdom added “insult to injury.

The British government has also taken the unusual step of warning British passport holders not to hand over their passports to Israeli officials unless “absolutely necessary.”

Since it’s impossible to enter any country without handing over your passport, perhaps this advice should be interpreted to mean that British citizens should only travel to Israel when absolutely necessary.

Aryeh Eldad, a National Religious Party member of the Knesset suggested that the British are worse than dogs when told Sky News: “I think [the] British are behaving hypocritically and I don’t want to offend dogs on this issue, since some dogs are utterly loyal, who are they to judge us on the war on terror?”

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Obama finds killing more convenient than trials or detention

Mind-reading is something that political commentators generally avoid. No one can claim to be any good at it. Yet even if we rarely find out what is actually going on inside a politician’s mind, there are moments when it seems impossible to avoid asking — even without the hope of getting an answer — what was he thinking?

One such moment came as soon as President Obama entered the White House when he signed an executive order to close Guantanamo. Symbolically, this appeared to mark the end of George Bush’s war on terrorism.

Obama had a wry expression on his face.

They have no idea.

Is that what he was he thinking, even at that moment when Obama euphoria was at its height?

Indeed, we really did have no idea that the president who had promised to end the mindset that led to war would within months of taking office have authorized even more extrajudicial killings than his predecessor and that a take-no-prisoners killing practice would be followed in order to avoid the legal complications of detention.

“Extrajudicial killing” is an Orwellian expression. In plain language it is murder.

Consider the case of Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan who was killed in a helicopter attack in Somalia last year. Officials debated whether the militant suspected of being linked to al Qaeda should be captured but opted to kill him instead in part because they weren’t sure where he could be detained.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, the administration is still struggling to come up with its own version of Guantanamo, minus the name:

The White House is considering whether to detain international terrorism suspects at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, senior U.S. officials said, an option that would lead to another prison with the same purpose as Guantanamo Bay, which it has promised to close.

The idea, which would require approval by President Obama, already has drawn resistance from within the government. Army Gen. Stanley A. McCrystal, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and other senior officials strongly oppose it, fearing that expansion of the U.S. detention facility at Bagram air base could make the job of stabilizing the country even tougher.

That the option of detaining suspects captured outside Afghanistan at Bagram is being contemplated reflects a recognition by the Obama administration that it has few other places to hold and interrogate foreign prisoners without giving them access to the U.S. court system, the officials said.

Without a location outside the United States for sending prisoners, the administration must resort to turning the suspects over to foreign governments, bringing them to the U.S. or even killing them.

In one case last year, U.S. special operations forces killed an Al Qaeda-linked suspect named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in a helicopter attack in southern Somalia rather than trying to capture him, a U.S. official said. Officials had debated trying to take him alive but decided against doing so in part because of uncertainty over where to hold him, the official added.

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Policing Afghanistan

At TomDispatch, Pratap Chatterjee writes:

The Pentagon faces a tough choice: Should it award a new contract to Xe (formerly Blackwater), a company made infamous when its employees killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007, or to DynCorp, a company made infamous in Bosnia in 1999 when some of its employees were caught trafficking young girls for sex?

This billion-dollar contract will be the linchpin of a training program for the Afghan National Police, who are theoretically to be drilled in counterinsurgency tactics that will help defeat the Taliban and bring security to impoverished, war-torn Afghanistan. The program is also considered a crucial component of the Obama administration’s plan for turning the war around. Ironically, Xe was poised to win the contract until a successful appeal by DynCorp last week threw the field wide open.

Some people in the U.S. government (and many outside it) believe that this task should not be assigned to private contractors in the first place. Meanwhile, many police experts are certain that it hardly matters which company gets the contract. Like so many before it, the latest training program is doomed from the outset, they believe, because its focus will be on defeating the Taliban rather than fostering community-oriented policing.

The Obama administration is in a fix: it believes that, if it can’t put at least 100,000 trained police officers on Afghan streets and into the scattered hamlets that make up the bulk of the country, it won’t be able to begin a drawdown of U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan by the middle of next year.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that US forces are facing soaring IED attacks, the Taliban is making a dramatic comeback in the northern province of Kunduz.

The New York Times says that soon after what had been described as a successful offensive in Marja, the Taliban have begun waging a campaign of intimidation “that some local Afghan leaders worry has jeopardized the success of an American-led offensive there meant as an early test of a revised military approach in Afghanistan.”

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Is Pakistan on a path back to military control?

From the New York Times:

In a sign of the mounting power of the army over the civilian government in Pakistan, the head of the military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, will be the dominant Pakistani participant in important meetings in Washington this week.

At home, much has been made of how General Kayani has driven the agenda for the talks. They have been billed as cabinet-level meetings, with the foreign minister as the nominal head of the Pakistani delegation. But it has been the general who has been calling the civilian heads of major government departments, including finance and foreign affairs, to his army headquarters to discuss final details, an unusual move in a democratic system.

Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi has been taking a public role in trying to set the tone, insisting that the United States needs to do more for Pakistan, as “we have already done too much.” And it was at his request that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed this fall to reopen talks between the countries at the ministerial level.

The talks are expected to help define the relationship between the United States and Pakistan as the war against the Taliban reaches its endgame phase in Afghanistan. It is in that context that General Kayani’s role in organizing the agenda has raised alarm here in Pakistan, a country with a long history of military juntas.

The leading financial newspaper, The Business Recorder, suggested in an editorial that the civilian government of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani should act more forcefully and “shun creating an environment conducive to military intervention.”

The editorial added, “The government needs to consolidate civilian rule instead of handing over its responsibilities, like coordination between different departments, to the military.”

“General Kayani is in the driver’s seat,” said Rifaat Hussain, a professor of international relations at Islamabad University. “It is unprecedented that an army chief of staff preside over a meeting of federal secretaries.”

As Gen Kayani rises in power, it’s hard not to wonder whether the United States is falling back into its habitual pattern of preferring to deal with powerful military leaders rather than elected governments. For Washington, international relations always seem so much easier to manage on the basis of personal relations with generals who won’t be held accountable by a troublesome electorate.

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The gulf in the Persian Gulf

From the Los Angeles Times (and don’t be put off by the author!):

For the Saudis, concern about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which Riyadh sees as a longer-term threat, has taken a back seat to its concern about the lack of perceived progress in solving the Israel-Palestinian struggle.

Riyadh’s growing unease about the effect of this protracted conflict on the kingdom and on Iran’s hegemonic ambitions was conveyed to Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in meetings in the region last month with senior Saudi and other Arab officials, according to a senior U.S. military official.

Initially, the kingdom’s concern about the plight of the Palestinians was mostly lip service. While Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil states bankrolled the Palestine Liberation Organization and rhetorically endorsed the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own and a theoretical return to the lands of Palestine, Jerusalem in particular, the lack of a settlement and the perpetuation of the status quo following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war jeopardized neither vital Saudi nor Arab interests.

Today, however, concern about the rise of militant Palestinian Hamas, Palestinian political disarray and the growing political despair of Palestinians under Israeli occupation — if not those in the refugee camps of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon — seems widespread within the kingdom, for practical, self-serving reasons. The Saudi government has come to see the festering wound of Palestine as a primary source of the radicalization of its own population and, hence, of the extremism that threatens the kingdom’s stability and plays directly into Iranian hands.

Because Saudi Arabia is overwhelmingly young — more than 75% of Saudis are under 30 — most of the country’s citizens have no memory of a time when an Arab-Israeli peace seemed not only possible but likely. The 1991 Madrid peace conference, the 1993 Oslo accords, the Arab-Israeli handshakes on the White House lawn — all are now ancient history. Instead, Saudis, and young Saudis in particular, see Israelis not as potential partners in peace but as brutal occupiers.

The Arab media and the exponential growth of the Internet have reinforced among Saudis a sense of humiliation, injustice and outrage over Israel’s incursions into Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Al Jazeera and the thousands of websites that Saudis avidly monitor have brought the once-distant suffering of Palestinians directly into their living rooms, giving their plight an immediacy and resonance it once lacked.

Everyone I talked to on a recent trip to Riyadh — from princes to merchants to bloggers — mentioned the Palestinian cause, rather than Iran, as their top foreign policy concern (an impression supported by recent opinion polls). Saudi royals and government officials know well that Al Qaeda and other “jihadi” groups exploited the Palestinian cause not only to help recruit the Saudi “muscle” for the 9/11 attacks — 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis — but also for subsequent attacks on the kingdom itself.

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