Author Archives: News Sources

Rupert Murdoch pressured me over Europe, says former British PM

The Guardian reports: Sir John Major has claimed Rupert Murdoch demanded his government change its policy on Europe or his papers would oppose him at the 1997 general election.

The former Conservative prime minister told the Leveson inquiry on Tuesday that Murdoch delivered the ultimatum at a private meeting with the News Corporation founder on 2 February 1997, three months before the election in which the Tories lost heavily to New Labour.

Major’s claim appears to contradict Murdoch’s own evidence to the inquiry. Murdoch told Leveson on 25 April that “I have never asked a prime minister for anything.”

In his witness statement to the inquiry Major said he assumed Murdoch meant that “he has never asked for anything that would benefit him personally or his company”. “In my very limited contact with Mr Murdoch his statement is on a strict interpretation literally true,” he added.

“Certainly he never asked for anything directly from me but he was not averse to pressing for policy changes. In the runup to the 1997 general election in my third and last meeting with him on 2 February 1997 he made it clear that he disliked my European policies which he wished me to change.

“If not, his papers could not and would not support the Conservative government. So far as I recall he made no mention of editorial independence but referred to all his papers as ‘we’.

“Both Mr Murdoch and I kept our word. I made no change in policy and Mr Murdoch’s titles did indeed oppose the Conservative party. It came as no surprise to me when soon after our meeting the Sun newspaper announced its support for Labour.”

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The case for sanctions against Israel

Ilan Pappé writes: I have been a political activist for most of my adult life. In all these years, I have believed deeply that the unbearable and unacceptable reality of Israel and Palestine could only be changed from within. This is why I have been ceaselessly devoted to persuading Jewish society—to which I belong and into which I was born—that its basic policy in the land was wrong and disastrous.

As for so many others, the options for me were clear: I could either join politics from above, or counter it from below. I began by joining the Labor Party in the 1980s, and then the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash), when I declined an offer to join the Knesset.

At the same time, I focused my energies on working alongside others within educational and peace NGOs, even chairing two such institutions: the left-Zionist Institute for Peace Studies in Givat Haviva, and the non-Zionist Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies. In both circles, veteran and younger colleagues alike sought to create constructive dialogue with our compatriots, in the hope of influencing present policy for future reconciliation. It was mainly a campaign of information about crimes and atrocities committed by Israel since 1948, and a plea for a future based on equal human and civil rights.

For an activist, the realization that change from within is unattainable not only grows from an intellectual or political process, but is more than anything else an admission of defeat. And it was this fear of defeatism that prevented me from adopting a more resolute position for a very long time.
After almost thirty years of activism and historical research, I became convinced that the balance of power in Palestine and Israel pre-empted any possibility for a transformation within Jewish Israeli society in the foreseeable future. Though rather late in the game, I came to realize that the problem was not a particular policy or a specific government, but one more deeply rooted in the ideological infrastructure informing Israeli decisions on Palestine and the Palestinians ever since 1948. [Continue reading…]

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The state of Gaza: Five years after Hamas took power in the city, how has life changed for its citizens?

Donald MacIntyre writes: The front office of Kamal Ashour’s small family clothing factory in Gaza City opens on to Izzedine al-Qassam Street, named, like Hamas’s military wing, in honour of the Islamist mujahid who led the anti-Zionist, anti-Mandate, Black Hand gang and was shot dead by British police in 1935.

Which makes it serendipitous to see the mannequins on one of its shelves triumphantly displaying four samples of the 2,000 acrylic cardigans and polo sweaters Ashour has just shipped off to the UK firm of JD Williams in the first clothing exports to leave Gaza for five years. And a lot more so to be talking on Ashour’s landline to a Jewish-Israeli clothier in Tel Aviv about how fast, if he had half a chance, he would revert to buying his goods from here, as he once did.

Having made the call, Ashour, a short, spry septuagenarian who used to export at least 80 per cent of his clothing to Israel, has thrust the phone into my hand to demonstrate just how highly his most favoured customer values his business. Sure enough, the Israeli trader explains that, since the blockade imposed in Gaza by his own government in 2007, he has been forced to find a Chinese supplier instead of Ashour; that, yes, the sweaters may be slightly –though “not much”– cheaper, but that he would still prefer Ashour every time. “Look, I’ve been working with Gaza for 30 years and with this guy for 11 or 12. The overall quality is high, better than China. He’s very, very good to work with. I trust him completely. If he says he will do something, he does it. He never changes his mind.”

Such is his nervousness about discussing a politically sensitive topic that, unlike Mr Ashour, his Israeli client, whose name we know, begs us not to use it. For this is a conversation across enemy lines. Gaza is still officially classified by the Israeli Cabinet as a “hostile entity” and since the turbulent events that unfolded in June 2007 the exports to Israel and the West Bank on which its economy depended have been prohibited.

Five years ago this week, Gaza was in chaos. The BBC correspondent Alan Johnston was being held as a hostage by the criminal jihadists who had kidnapped him in March. The Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, seized by militants on the Gaza border, had already been in captivity for a year. But in the streets outside, a brief but bloody civil war was raging between militants in the two biggest Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah.

Two years earlier, Ariel Sharon had pulled Israeli troops and the 8,000 settlers they had been protecting out of Gaza. Then, in January 2006, Hamas unexpectedly beat Fatah in notably clean parliamentary elections held throughout the occupied territories. The victory was not primarily because of ideology. (Fatah was committed to a two-state solution with Palestine, consisting of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem living side by side with Israel, while Hamas had always refused to recognise Israel.) Rather, it was because Palestinians were fed up with Fatah’s corruption, the failure of negotiations to bring any results, and perhaps because some, at least in Gaza, initially bought into Hamas’s extravagant boasts that its militants had “liberated” the territory from Israel.

Finding itself leading the new Palestinian Authority in uneasy co-habitation with a Fatah president in Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas was faced with a boycott by a US-led international community which effectively refused to recognise the results of the election it had sanctioned in the first place. The outcome was a coalition with Fatah; but it was a shotgun marriage that quickly degenerated into civil conflict.

Hamas, despite partially covert American help for the Fatah forces, was victorious. When the bloodshed ended on 14 June 2007 Hamas was left in charge of Gaza, Fatah of the West Bank. And Israel responded with its blockade of Gaza – central elements of which are still in force today – which the senior UN official Filippo Grandi said 12 days ago had “completely obliterated” the territory’s economy, and which leaves a deeply puzzling question: why is Israel still maintaining an export ban which, in Grandi’s words, has “penalised” the “common people” and the “business community” of Gaza but has left its Hamas rulers intact and unscathed? [Continue reading…]

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The Syrian opposition is fighting the enemy within the mind of every citizen

Nadim Shehadi writes: The appointment of Abdulbaset Sieda to head the Syrian National Council (SNC) opposition comes at a time when the SNC is undergoing what was euphemistically called a restructuring and opening up to other opposition groups.

This is an immense challenge and is part of a major re-evaluation and overhaul of the experience of the opposition in the past year, during which so much change has occurred on all fronts. This comes also after Burhan Ghalioun, the previous president of the SNC, declared that they had failed the Syrian people.

The appointment comes after two important meetings, one of the SNC in Rome which decided on the restructuring and another in Bulgaria where the SNC met with several other opposition groups and managed to come up with a joint statement.

The Bulgaria meeting also discussed a roadmap to create a common vision and a plan for co-ordination between what is now recognised as a diverse collection of opposition groups with the aim of developing a mechanism to work together under the umbrella of the SNC while maintaining their autonomy. Another aim is to prepare for the transition after the fall of the regime.

What makes these plans more difficult is that the opposition is at the same time fighting a battle of ideas against the regime’s dominant Ba’athist ideology. These ideas are deeply ingrained in the minds of Syrians, including those of the opposition, and benefit from a headstart of 48 years where Ba’ath party ideology was hammered in through the media, the educational system and other government institutions. [Continue reading…]

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The heart of the people of Europe beats in Greece

“The heart of the people of Europe beats in Greece” — a discussion held in Athens on June 3 in which Slavoj Žižek spoke alongside Alexis Tsipras whose victory in the June 17 elections will — if it happens — send shockwaves around the world.

The Guardian reports: In his fresh linen suit and crisp white shirt Alexis Tsipras cuts a dashing figure. Standing at the podium, just a week before Greeks cast their ballots in the most crucial election since their country emerged from the ashes of civil war, the young leftist leader was on vintage form, fists punching the air as the crowd cheered on the man many have come to see as Greece’s salvation in its greatest hour of need.

On Sunday it was Chios. On Monday, Heraklion, the capital of Crete. On Tuesday, Athens. But as Tsipras criss-crosses the country, the message is always the same: “We speak the language of hope,” he says, “where others speak the language of fear.”

In the countdown to a poll, the outcome of which could be as pivotal for Europe as for debt-stricken Athens — with many seeing it as a referendum on Greece’s place in the euro — the politician is on a roll.

The language of hope is what Tsipras is good at. More than two years into an economic crisis that is increasingly being compared to a war, Tsipras’ fiery, feel-good, anti-austerity rhetoric has gone down a treat. So, too, have his fierce denunciations of the corrupt political elite, crooked bankers and barbaric measures that have led to Greece’s “undignified” descent into penury and misery.

Like every war, says the telegenic politician, the first casualty is truth. The Greeks — the eurozone’s poorest nation despite living standards having improved dramatically since joining the single currency — have been duped into thinking that there is only one way out of their economic mess: “through the cruel austerity Madame Merkel and the IMF have inflicted upon us”.

The truth, he argues, lies elsewhere: in the ability to think outside the box; in solutions that are “just and dignified”. The “memorandum of understanding” outlining the onerous conditions Greece must meet to acquire EU-IMF loans to keep its insolvent economy afloat has to be “radically renegotiated” if not “torn up”.

It is heady stuff. Six weeks ago, Tsipras was barely known beyond the borders of his homeland. Today, his Coalition of the Radical Left, Syriza, is one of the frontrunners in the battle to govern Greece after the indecisive election on 6 May.

Since emerging as that poll’s surprise runner-up, Syriza – an eclectic alliance of ex-communists, former Stalinists, greens and champagne socialists – has gone from strength to strength. Surveys show it running neck and neck with the “pro-European”, centre-right New Democracy, although no party is expected to win an outright majority. In Athens, where nearly half of Greece’s 11 million-strong population lives and which has been worst hit by the belt-tightening, Syriza has stolen the show.

As Tsipras storms from town to village, addressing peoples assemblies and pre-electoral rallies, his is a presence that suddenly nobody can ignore: from Washington to the capitals of Europe and Asia, too, Syriza’s meteoric rise from fringe party to possible kingmaker in the next Greek parliament is now being watched closely.

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The School of the Americas, the CIA and the U.S.-condoned cancer of torture continue to spread in Latin America, including Mexico

Mark Karlin reports: By academic pedigree and personal background, Jennifer Harbury should be among the ruling elite in the US. She is a graduate of Cornell and Harvard Law School, in fact receiving her law degree from Harvard just a few years before Barack Obama. Instead of following the path of most of her classmates to money and power, she became a legal aid attorney in Texas.

As part of her interest in human rights, she traveled to Guatemala in the early ’90s to write a book, “Bridge to Courage: Life Stories of Guatemalan Compañeros & Compañeras.” It was at that time she met, fell in love with and married Everardo (Efraín Bámaca Velásquez), who was a commandante in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity Front. He was fighting against the US-backed military and government, which was committing genocide against the indigenous population and the poor (ending in more than 200,000 dead – and countless more tortured, but released).

In 1992, Everardo was captured by the Guatemalan military. Harbury demanded to know the whereabouts of her husband and held a hunger strike in front of the Clinton White House, which was covered by the media and made into a national story by “60 Minutes.” Harbury’s request was simple: she wanted the State Department or CIA to tell her what had happened to her husband. But both agencies didn’t acknowledge they knew of his whereabouts.

In an interview with Truthout, Harbury recounted:

After a year of trying to find out what had really happened to him, a young prisoner escaped from the army torture program and reported that Everardo was alive and being severely tortured. After my third hunger strike to save his life, in March 1995, then New Jersey Senator Toricelli disclosed that official US documents indicated that he had been killed by Guatemalan officers on the CIA payroll.

After receiving many files at last through the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act], it became clear that the State Department and the CIA had known where Everardo was and that he was in the hands of our own CIA liaisons or assets, since the week of his capture. They also knew approximately 300 other secret prisoners of war were suffering the same fate. The files show that all these prisoners were tortured to death, thrown down wells, out of helicopters, etc., yet the truth was only revealed to us in 1995. By then all were dead. We could have saved them.

In fact, Everardo, Harbury discovered, was kept in a body cast to keep him constrained while he was tortured for more than two years before being executed, all the time with the full knowledge and likely operational involvement of the CIA. [Continue reading…]

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The Iran we don’t see: A tour of the country where people love Americans

Christopher Thornton writes: Except for one day each year — the November 4 anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. embassy — the former American diplomatic compound on Taleqani Street is a lonely place. Now serving as offices of the Sepah militia, another branch of Iran’s security forces, the building is still surrounded by the same brick wall that irate students clambered over to seize the building and take its inhabitants hostage for what would become a 444-day standoff. Anti-American slogans and murals are painted on the brick — a Stars and Stripes silhouette of a handgun, the Statue of Liberty with its head replaced by a skull — and the freshness of the paint suggests that government tenders spruce them up from time to time, especially for the largely scripted, anti-American stage show held each year. But the pedestrians strolling by do not give them much notice, just as they dismiss the state-controlled media outlets. For most Iranians, the most reliable sources of information remain not Iranian but Western, and often American: Radio Farda, the Farsi-language service of Radio Liberty, funded by the U.S. congress and supervised by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors; the BBC, with its new Farsi service; the Voice of America; and CNN, whenever the transmission can pierce the government filtering technology.

Probably no country in the world is more mischaracterized in Western eyes than Iran. Most Americans’ perceptions of Iran are limited to images of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad delivering anti-American speeches and crowds chanting “Death to America!” with the blessing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini. Yet a 2009 World Public Opinion poll found that 51 percent of Iranians hold a favorable opinion of Americans, a number consistent with other polls, meaning that Americans are more widely liked in Iran than anywhere else in the Middle East. The U.S. favorability rating isn’t even that high in U.S. allies India or Turkey, and is two and half times as high as in Egypt. The same survey found that almost two-thirds of Iranians support restoring diplomatic ties with the U.S. (Iranians’ view of U.S. leadership is much worse, at 8 percent as of early this year.) But even these figures are likely on the low end of actual sentiment, as many Iranians might fear expressing such views to a strange pollster, out of fear of drawing the suspicion of the authorities, who sometimes monitor e-mails, phone conversations, and other forms of communication.

The appeal of the United States to ordinary Iranians goes almost entirely unnoticed, and therefore unexplained. Many Iranians regard the American ideal, at least as they perceive it, as a symbol of all they want their own society to be — free, prosperous, “great” — but isn’t. Iranians I’ve encountered from all strata of society express an eagerness to exalt the country they have been conditioned to view as the “Great Satan.” And yet, thousands of miles away, the vast majority of Americans are totally unaware of their Iranian admirers. [Continue reading…]

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In the occupied territories, Israel always wins

Geoffrey Aronson writes: Many years ago I visited the West Bank settlement of Ofra, just east of Ramallah. Ofra, established in 1976 as a “work camp” by Shimon Peres, then minister of defense, is the jewel in the crown of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) settlement movement.

Soon after taking office in 1977, newly elected Likud prime minister Menachem Begin recognized the outpost for what it was always meant to be — a new, permanent settlement.

The entry of settlers into this region proved to be the vanguard of a settlement blitzkrieg that opened up the West Bank heartland to two generations of tens of thousands of settlers. Their successes set the stage for Ariel Sharon’s 1996 exhortation to “grab the hilltops,” in and around Ofra and throughout the West Bank as a whole, inaugurating the creation of about a hundred new settlement “outposts.”

My host that day was Israel Harel, a founder of Ofra and key player in Gush Emunim. His son Etai is one of the founders of Migron, the oldest and best-established outpost sparked into existence by Sharon, sited on a hilltop a few kilometers south of Ofra adjacent to the new road built to connect the new settlements established along the central mountain spine of the West Bank.

Harel and I climbed the gently ascending route next to his house to a nearby hilltop where the settlement of Amona sits, commanding a glorious view east into Jordan. The hilltop abuts the village of Silwad and has been the site of contentious settlement efforts since Amona’s dwellings were put in place in 1997. After Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled that the nine permanent houses there had been illegally constructed on private Palestinian land, Ehud Olmert’s government demolished the permanent dwellings in 2006, but the caravans and the settlers remained. Khaled Mishal, the Hamas leader and native son of the village, once told me that he used to do his physics homework atop the then-pristine summit.

On another occasion, during the second intifada, Harel invited me to a Sabbath prayer service at an impromptu site overlooking Road 60, a short walk through the newly fenced off lands belonging to the village of Ein Yabrud, where Benjamin Kahane, son of Meir Kahane, and his wife had been shot and killed in 2000 by Palestinian gunmen. A military watchtower and a prayer tent had been erected at the site, a practical expression of the symbiotic relationship between settlers and the army. The prime agricultural land was now off limits to villagers. Today, a new neighborhood of red-tiled houses, inhabited in defiance of a court order, has been constructed on it.

Settlers like Harel, his son, and their supporters have always insisted that private Palestinian land has never been taken for settlement unless duly paid for. A long and sordid trail of forged bills of sale and powers of attorney suggests otherwise. When I asked Harel if he could accept the theft of private Palestinian property, he said he could not.

The example of Ofra has been repeated throughout the West Bank during what will soon be a half century of settlement beyond Israel’s June 1967 border. According to some objective measures, the settlement enterprise has been extraordinarily successful: Israel has transferred in defiance of unanimous international sentiment more than half a million of its citizens, almost 7 per cent of the state’s total population, to almost 300 distinct locations outside its borders — a feat unmatched in recent history. [Continue reading…]

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White racism makes Black Israeli Jews scared to live in their own country

JTA reports: When violent riots against African migrant workers erupted in south Tel Aviv recently, a mob attacked Hanania Wanda, a Jew of Ethiopian origin, mistaking him for a Sudanese migrant worker.

“Wanda is my friend,” says Elias Inbram, a social activist in the Ethiopian community and a former member of the Israeli diplomatic corps who served as spokesman for the embassy in South Africa. “I knew I had to react somehow.”

He suddenly realized, says Inbram, 38, “that since to white people, all blacks look the same — I, an Israeli Jew who is black, or anyone in my family, or anyone in my community, could be attacked, too.”

That moved him to stencil “CAUTION: I am not an infiltrator from Africa” onto a bright yellow T-shirt. He then drew in by hand, in the upper left corner, the unmistakable yellow “Jude” patch from the Nazi era.

Last week, he posted a picture of himself wearing the shirt — the only one he has printed — on Facebook. It already has gained thousands of “likes.”

“I want to force people here to think of the racism and hatred in Israeli society,” Inbram, who holds a master’s degree in law and is interning before applying for the bar, told JTA.

The wave of violence in Israel against African migrant workers and asylum seekers, in which nearly a dozen Jews of Ethiopian origin also have been attacked in the past few weeks, has forced many Ethiopian Jews to deal with race in a way they have until now mostly avoided. Some said it has forced upon them a new consciousness and political awareness.

“I have a law degree and a master’s degree. I served in the army,” Inbram said. “Another friend of mine who was beaten up is a Ph.D. candidate. We’re Israeli citizens. But none of that matters. Ever since we came, the state has treated us as if we should say thank you for anything we receive, as if we have no rights as Jews and Israelis. But now we are afraid because in the eyes of whites, we are first of all blacks.”

Aliza, 23, a sociology student at Hebrew University who would give only her first name, told JTA, “At the beginning, when white friends would ask me how I feel about the migrants from Africa, I would get pretty angry. Why should I feel anything special? Just because we’re both black? I thought it was racist and patronizing. I’m Jewish and Israeli. Jewish history is much more relevant to me than African history. I relate more to Jews from Eastern Europe than to African Muslims or Christians. I was a baby when I came here.”

But the violence — and in particular, she said, the torching of an apartment where Eritrean migrants were living in Jerusalem early this week — have changed her mind.

“Now I’m scared to live in my own country — because I’m black,” she said.

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Syrian forces shell cities as opposition picks leader

The New York Times reports: Syrian government forces shelled rebel strongholds across the country on Sunday, opponents of the government said, while the main opposition group in exile, the Syrian National Council, chose a new leader.

The shelling struck at targets in and around Homs in central Syria and near al-Heffa, just east of the port of Latakia, as well as other locations, opposition groups said. The violence continues despite a United Nations-brokered cease-fire, which has so far had little effect on the conflict, and the presence of international monitors.

The new leader of the council, announced on Sunday in Istanbul, is Abdelbaset Sieda, a Kurdish professor of Arabic and philosophy who promised the organization would be overhauled.

“We will expand and extend the base of the council,” he told reporters at a news conference, “so it will take on its role as an umbrella under which all the opposition will seek shade.”

The Syrian National Council, formed last fall, has been plagued by infighting and has been criticized as ineffective, amounting to little more than a front for the long-exiled Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood with little influence inside the country. Its top post was supposed to rotate every three months, but Bourhan Ghalioun, another exiled academic, held on to it until an outcry over his most recent re-election in May, especially from inside Syria, prompted him to step down.

Council members involved in the process hailed Mr. Sieda’s election as proof that the Syrian opposition was committed to upholding democratic principles and the idea of a “leaderless revolution.” He ran unopposed.

“The ideal leadership of the council is not through one person — because no one is elected and has actual legitimacy,” said Bassma Kodmani, a member of the executive committee. Until such time as there are free elections in Syria, she said, the choice of the president of the council should be made by consensus.

“The revolution does not want to see a big leader, or one individual who leads everything,” Ms. Kodmani said. “Personalization leads to polarization.”

An editorial in Lebanon’s Daily Star says: Choosing a Kurd to replace Burhan Ghalioun is a very healthy choice, confirming that the opposition is a nationalistic platform, not confined to protecting one group’s priorities over another, and one which is concerned with the rights of every minority. Sida was elected on merit only, not on the basis of his sect, his religion or his background.

However he faces many severe challenges. Acknowledging Sunday that his first task is to reform and restructure the council is important. But he must urgently seek to draw all opposition factions under one cohesive umbrella: Their disunity and differences have, until now, been the stumbling block in their progress in deposing the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

This fragmentation has served as a key justification for those – whether in the West or in the Arab world – who have claimed that they would otherwise provide greater support, material or otherwise, to the rebels.

The election of Sida comes at a critical time, when violence appears to be intensifying at an alarming rate. Civil war is now in full swing, despite the tendency for commentators, politicians and journalists to define it otherwise.

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Obama is letting the U.S. get sucked into war on the Arabian penninsula

Gregory Johnsen writes: In Yemen, Obama appears to be headed down exactly the road he has been trying to avoid for the past two-and-a-half years: getting sucked into a war from which there is no easy exit.

Miller’s article in today’s Washington Post gives us some insight to the thought process that is making this drift possible.

“But officials said the campaign is now also aimed at wiping out a layer of lower-ranking operatives through strikes that can be justified because of threats they pose to the mix of U.S. Embassy workers, military trainers, intelligence operatives and contractors scattered across Yemen.”

In other words, the US has inserted, trainers, operatives and contractors into Yemen in an effort to erode the threat presented by AQAP, but those trainers, operatives and contractors attract attacks from Yemenis who are upset with a foreign military presence (no matter how small) on their land. And then when these trainers, operatives and contractors come under attack as they have recently in Aden and Hudaydah the US feels the need to respond and so it widens the target list even further – which then drives even more people into the arms of AQAP.

This is not going to end well. At this point, how does it end[?] The US has tried 2.5 years of drone and missile strikes in Yemen — and despite the individuals it has killed — AQAP continues to grow and appears just as eager and able to strike at the US. So, what happens, if a “missile surge” doesn’t work in Yemen?

What then does the US do?

I have argued for several years now that the US needs to draw as narrow of a circle as possible when it comes to targeting AQAP in Yemen. I worried then as I do now, that any expansion of targeting in Yemen would find the US in a war that it could never kill its way out of. And indeed that, I fear, is what is taking place right now. In an effort to destroy the threat coming out of Yemen, the US is getting sucked further into the quicksand of a conflict it doesn’t understand and one in which its very presence tilts the tables against the US.

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Can U.S.-Pakistan relationship be salvaged?

The Associated Press reports: You know a friendship has gone sour when you start making mean jokes about your friend in front of his most bitter nemesis.

So it was a bad sign this week when the U.S. defense secretary joshed in front of an audience of Indians about how Washington kept Pakistan in the dark about the raid that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden a year ago.

“They didn’t know about our operation. That was the whole idea,” Leon Panetta said with a chuckle at a Q&A session after a speech in New Delhi, raising laughs from the audience. The Bin Laden raid by U.S. commandos in a Pakistani town infuriated Islamabad because it had no advance notice, and it was seen by Pakistan’s powerful military as a humiliation.

The U.S. and Pakistan are starting to look more like enemies than allies, threatening the U.S. fight against Taliban and al-Qaida militants based in the country and efforts to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan before American troops withdraw.

Long plagued by frustration and mistrust, the relationship has plunged to its lowest level since the 9/11 attacks forced the countries into a tight but awkward embrace over a decade ago. The U.S. has lost its patience with Pakistan and taken the gloves off to make its anger clear.

“It has taken on attributes and characteristics now of a near adversarial relationship, even though neither side wants it to be that way,” said Maleeha Lodhi, who was serving as Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks and was key in hurriedly putting together the two countries’ alliance.

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The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements

Arun Gupta and Steve Horn write: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker did not win the June 5 recall vote because a parade of Daddy Warbucks stuffed his suit full of six-figure checks. The Democratic challenger Tom Barrett did not lose because he raised a scant $4 million to Walker’s $30 million war chest.

Walker won because he had a vision, however brutish, and he forged a rich-poor alliance that supports it. Barrett lost because he stood for nothing, because the Democrat Party shuns organized labor, because labor retreats from street politics even when they have the upper hand and because progressives confuse elections with movements.

In short, Walker’s cakewalk is a microcosm of why American politics tilts further and further right year after year, and why the Democrats, progressives and unions have an endless capacity for self-inflicted wounds. As much as liberals whine “big money thwarts people power” and the Obama campaign dismisses the loss as due to local conditions, the election portends deep trouble for a president and party facing an energized right in November’s election.

The recall is also a study in the paths not taken for the Wisconsin Uprising and why the Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements. There was an expression among activists in Wisconsin that went, “One year longer, one year stronger” a year after the beginning of the “Uprising.” But the reality is that, one year longer, the left as an organizing force is, in actuality, “one year weaker.” [Continue reading…]

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‘There will be no Palestinian state’

Max Blumenthal interviews former PLO legal advisor, Ziyad Clot, the whistleblower who handed the “Palestine Papers” to Al Jazeera last year.

MB: Explain the title of your book. What caused you to conclude that there will never be a sovereign Palestinian state?

ZC: The big question today is whether after 45 years of occupation why there has been no sovereign state. The only advice I’d give to someone interested in this is to look at a map and ignore what will be the hypothetical borders of a future Palestinian state and recognize the fact that the two populations are intermingled in Israel and West Bank. Because of the colonization and the fact that no one has been able to stop it since 1967 we now reach a situation where in the West Bank there is not a single hill without a settlement or an outpost. How do you create a viable Palestinian state in that situation, and where this is not enough land or water to create that state? You can’t. Therefore all the attributes of the state aren’t there anymore. Jerusalem has become a de facto unified capital of Israel and what really struck me when I was there was the extraordinary gap between the facts on the ground and what is still being negotiated in this parallel world which has totally lost touch with reality.

MB: The Palestine Papers provide a portrait of a Palestinian Authority that was out of touch to say the least. Not only were they willing to negotiate away most of East Jerusalem, they seemed psychologically disjointed from the entire refugee situation. How can you account for the disconnect?

ZC: They [PA officials] live and negotiate under a situation of occupation. It’s easy for us to say they’re giving up and are ready for any compromise and that all the red lines have been crossed — and this is my personal belief — but they have to cope with so many constraints and obstacles that along the years that they lost touch with the exiles, then the refugees, then Gaza, and now East Jerusalem because of the wall, so they are left in this small enclave that they try to administer without full sovereignty. So along the years they have internalized these constraints and became accustomed to the discourse that is acceptable to the West. Because of the PA’s structure and how it is financed they are more accountable to the international donors than the Palestinian people. So this explains why the bridges between Palestinians don’t exist anymore. If there is one area where Palestinians should focus it’s on the issue of representation. Because the peace process has become irrelevant the question of who represents the Palestinians and how they are represented is most important at this point. [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s settlement policy could trigger a third intifada, experts warn Netanyahu

Haaretz reports: Mideast experts warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week that construction policies in the settlements or the burning of a major mosque by extremists could help trigger a violent uprising in the West Bank.

The meeting with Netanyahu, which lasted about 90 minutes, took place Tuesday evening.

The burning of a major mosque by Jewish extremists was the greatest risk, the experts said. Violence could also be sparked, they said, if Netanyahu’s plan goes through to build 850 new housing units in the West Bank, especially if the diplomatic stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians continues.

The implementation of construction plans without diplomatic progress could undermine the Palestinian people’s support of President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the experts said. It could also weaken the Palestinian security forces that are keeping a lid on violence.

The experts included professors Shimon Shamir, Emmanuel Sivan, Meir Litvak, Eyal Zisser and Anat Lapidot. Also present was Brig. Gen. (res. ) Shalom Harari – a former Arab affairs adviser to IDF Central Command, the Defense Ministry and the Israeli delegation to the Madrid and Oslo peace talks.

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