Category Archives: Editor’s comments

Jewish lobbying fails to stop EU support for Goldstone report

On Tuesday, a headline for Haaretz declared:

Jewish lobbying sways EU against support of Goldstone Gaza report

The article said:

Members of the European Parliament have backtracked from their plan to pass a resolution demanding implementation of the Goldstone report, in response to pressure from European Jewish leaders, Haaretz has learned.

After leaders of all the major EP parties had agreed on the wording of a draft demanding implementation of the controversial document – which accused Israel of war crimes in Gaza last year and proposed prosecuting Israeli officials in the International Criminal Court – the European Union’s legislative body was scheduled to vote on the measure Wednesday.

But Tuesday, leaders of the parties backed away from the draft, after the president of the European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor, warned them that adopting it would seriously harm EU-Israel ties.

“It appears inconceivable that while the United Nations itself hasn’t yet officially adopted this report, the European Parliament, in this motion for a resolution, calls for and demands its implementation,” he wrote in a letter sent to the heads of major EP parties.

The joint motion for the resolution was removed from the plenary session’s agenda after the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) blocked it.

“The European Jewish Congress played an important role in blocking the legitimization of the Goldstone report,” an official from the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.

That was Tuesday, but this is what actually happened on Wednesday:

Despite an intensive lobbying effort on the part of European Jewish groups, the European Parliament has endorsed the Goldstone report, the UN’s official investigation into the bombardment of the Gaza Strip in January 2009, a report that accuses Israel of war crimes and calls for the prosecution of Israeli officials in The Hague.

In a 335-to-287 vote splitting the house between left and right, MEPs backed a joint resolution from the centre left, far left, Greens and Liberals calling on the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and the bloc’s member states to “publicly demand the implementation of [the report’s] recommendations and accountability for all violations of international law, including alleged war crimes.”

The report also said:

On Tuesday afternoon, the level of lobbying had reached such an extent that Irish socialist MEP Proinsias de Rossa, the chair of the chamber’s Palestinian Legislative Council liaison delegation, sent around his own email encouraging deputies not to buckle under the pressure.

“You are being bombarded with mails at present seeking to undermine your support for the the Goldstone Report in the vote tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow’s vote is a test of the credibility of this parliament’s commitment to human rights irrespective of political considerations,” he continued. “The joint resolution is a fair and balanced position negotiated by all the main political groups. I appeal to you to support it.”

Imagine a similar turn of events in the US Congress. Just imagine…

(I guess it’s about as easy as imagining Congress including any socialist representatives or a Palestinian liaison group.)

Biden late for dinner

The Associated Press reports that after the Israeli government humiliated the US Vice President Joe Biden, the minister responsible says he’s sorry:

Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai, whose office announced the latest construction plans in east Jerusalem, apologized Wednesday for disrupting Biden’s visit. But he said the problem was merely about timing, not substance.

“We had no intention, no desire, to offend or taunt an important man like the vice president during his visit,” Yishai told Israel Radio. “I am very sorry for the embarrassment … Next time we need to take timing into account.”

Ministry spokeswoman Efrat Orbach said the ministry routinely issues announcements of planning decisions immediately after they are taken. But this is not the first time that such announcements have dovetailed with visits by top U.S. officials. Plans for hundreds of settlement apartments were announced during the peace mission of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Israeli announcement drew an unusually harsh condemnation from Biden late Tuesday. And in an apparent snub Tuesday night, Biden pointedly arrived 90 minutes late to his scheduled dinner with Netanyahu

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Biden, who had come to try to smooth relations with a longtime ally and promote new peace talks, denounced Israel’s plans to build 1,600 housing units in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem as a threat to the search for peace.

“I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem,” Biden said, calling it “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”

“We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them,” Biden said.

The sharp turn of events abruptly changed the tenor of the trip in its second day, coming just hours after the vice president proclaimed his love for Israel and declared enduring U.S. support. Biden’s visit followed a year of tension brought on by Israel’s defiance of the Obama administration’s admonitions on precisely the same issue: housing settlements in disputed areas.

Obama administration cheerleaders like J Street might get a kick out of hearing Biden being harshly critical of the Israeli government, but what’s a denunciation like this really worth?

The administration either needs to threaten to apply real pressure on the Israeli government, or, if it wants to confine itself to diplomatic gestures then it should do so under the tutelage of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

In response to Israel’s latest contemptuous behavior, Biden could — he really could — have turned around and said adiós. He does after all belong to an administration that less than a year ago was advising Netanyahu to complete his “homework” on freezing settlements before it would be worth arranging a meeting.

What the Dubai assassination reveals

Robert Baer considers some of the wider implications of the assassination of the Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai in January:

If Mossad was indeed responsible, it means that blame for Mabhouh’s assassination can be put at the doorstep of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s Prime Minister has historically approved hits staged in countries with which Israel is not at war. Such details are unlikely to be made public any time soon, but it does make you wonder what the deliberations might have been leading up to Mabhouh’s assassination.

More than a few Middle East hands shrugged their shoulders at the question: Netanyahu wouldn’t have cared whether Israel was fingered for the assassination of Mabhouh or not. The whole point, they argue, was to send a reminder to Israel’s enemies that it will eliminate them anywhere it can find them. When Mossad went after the Palestinian Black September movement in retaliation for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, it didn’t give a damn about the diplomatic blowback. It was a case of an eye for an eye, and the belief that the best deterrence is to strike fear into your enemies.

But the evidence that the assassins tried to make it look as if Mabhouh died in his sleep belies the deterrence explanation. And it doesn’t answer the question why Mossad would risk exposing 26 operatives. A small intelligence service, Mossad cannot afford to take this many people out of circulation by having their pictures beamed around the world. It also doesn’t explain why the alleged assassins stole the identities of Israeli citizens. Israelis may be proud that their secret service can reach its enemies anywhere, but it serves no national or political interests to expose their own people to retribution.

If Netanyahu authorized the hit, though, the real question is whether he really considered the strategic implications. Look at the map. If Israel goes ahead and bombs Iran’s nuclear facilities, it will need over-flight clearances from the Gulf Arabs. Antagonizing the U.A.E. in this way, leaving almost no doubt Israel was behind Mabhouh’s assassination, does not seem the best way to facilitate such clearances.

Baer makes a good point. If everything had gone as planned not only would there have been no news about the killing, but Hamas’ leaders themselves would have had little reason to doubt that Mabhouh had died of natural causes.

As for Netanyahu’s strategic thinking, there are at least two ways of interpreting his action. Either it was purely opportunistic and a decision made without clearly thinking through the implications. Or, it can be taken as further evidence that despite the Israeli leader’s bellicose posture he does in fact have no intention of asking Arab states for over-flight clearances because — and this would be Israel’s most closely guarded secret — Netanyahu has in truth no intention of attacking Iran and that his thinly veiled threats are hollow.

The Marjah mirage

Gareth Porter writes:

For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a “city of 80,000 people” as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marjah was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centers in Helmand.

It turns out, however, that the picture of Marjah presented by military officials and obediently reported by major news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war, apparently aimed at hyping the offensive as a historic turning point in the conflict.

Marjah is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers’ homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

“It’s not urban at all,” an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marjah a “rural community.”

Not surprisingly, it’s hard to find photographs of Marjah’s “city center”. Even so, it’s reasonable to infer that the flag-raising ceremony that took place on February 25 when the Afghan central government reclaimed control of Marjah would have taken place at some sort of center, near some sort of prominent civic building.

This is the occasion:

Two days earlier, while US Marines were conducting counterinsurgency operations “through a residential area of the city” one soldier found time to pet goats:

Israel’s game of bluff

Didi Remez has translated parts of a column by Nahum Barnea that appeared in Hebrew in Yediot‘s Friday political supplement. Barnea considers the assessments by Dr. Moshe Vered who published a study last year on possible scenarios that would result from an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Barnea goes on to say:

The game is now approaching the critical stage, the “money time.” Netanyahu and Barak are waving the military card. “All the options are on the table,” they say, accompanying the sentence with a meaningful look. There are Israelis, in uniform and civilian clothes, who take them seriously. The Obama administration is troubled. It is no accident that US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen was sent here, to make it clear that the US was vetoing a military strike. It is no accident that Barak was invited to Washington and Vice President Biden will be coming here on Monday. He is not only coming to visit Yad Vashem.

I find it difficult to believe that Netanyahu will undertake such a weighty and dangerous decision. It is more reasonable to assume that he and Barak are playing “hold me back.” On the day they will be called upon to explain why Iran attained nuclear weapons, they will say, each on his own, what do you want from me, I prepared a daring, deadly, amazing operation, but they—the US administration, the top IDF brass, the forum of three, the forum of seven, the forum of ten—tripped me up. They are to blame.

Netanyahu and Barak know: there is no military operation more successful, more perfect, than an operation that did not take place.

Netanyahu has upgraded Ahmadinejad to the dimensions of a Hitler. Against Hitler, one fights to the last bunker. This is what Churchill did, and Netanyahu wants so badly to be like Churchill. His credibility—a sensitive issue—is on the table. If he retreats, the voters will turn their back on him. Where will he go? In his distress, he may run forward.

The fascinating side of this story is that very few Israelis would appear to believe their prime minister. If they believed him, they would not run in a frenzy to buy apartments in the towers sprouting like mushrooms around the Kirya. In the event that Iran should be bombed, the residents of the towers would be the first to get it. If they believed [Netanyahu], the real estate prices in Tel Aviv would drop to a quarter of their current value, and long lines of people applying for passports would extend outside the foreign embassies.

Given that, as Barnea notes, Israelis can tell Netanyahu is bluffing, there seems little reason to doubt that the Israeli prime minister’s bluff is equally transparent to both Washington and Tehran.

Washington feels obliged to play along in order to make the Israeli threat seem credible. Tehran in turn needs to show that it will not bow to foreign pressure and thus the likely effect of Israel’s threats is to make the Iranian nuclear program advance more quickly than it would have minus the pressure.

How can this possibly serve Israel’s interests? In terms of thwarting Iran’s nuclear program it doesn’t, but this is not the Jewish state’s primary goal. What it wants more than anything else is to promote division across the region and thereby undermine the power of the opponents of Zionism.

Come the day that “the Iranian threat” turns out to have been overstated, a new threat will emerge. Israel cannot survive without its beloved enemies.

Does Obama have a vision?

At Time, Mark Halperin writes:

Who would have thought that one of Barack Obama’s biggest missteps as president would be repeating some of the bad habits of George W. Bush? No single factor was more instrumental in Obama’s 2008 victory than his pledge to completely reverse the nation’s course once in the White House. Instead, over the past year, Obama has mimicked some of Bush’s most egregious blunders, leading to much of the political predicament in which the present decider finds himself today.

This is not to say that Obama has maintained Bush’s policies, although his administration’s continuity on issues ranging from Afghanistan to Wall Street has alienated the left. And he certainly hasn’t done himself any favors by failing to inspire the general public to rally around his agenda. But Obama’s stumbles atop the high-wire of running the federal government has created perhaps the greatest danger to his presidency, and they are oddly reminiscent of the misguided practices which tripped up his predecessor.

Reuters reports:

President Barack Obama will outline his administration’s vision for space agency NASA and an eventual trip to Mars during a conference in Florida in April, the White House said on Sunday.

Obama has had to defend his commitment to the space agency in the politically important U.S. state after submitting a budget to Congress that would cancel a program to return U.S. astronauts to the moon.

Obama wants to refocus NASA efforts on technologies to prepare for human missions to other destinations in the solar system.

In Mark Halperin’s analysis of the failings of the Obama administration the key word is “missteps”.

Journalists these days love judgement-free terms like this. Another favorite is “recalibrate”. These words evoke an image of political conduct that suggests Washington is a machine (usually poorly oiled) and the president is the master mechanic. He will do swimmingly well if he can just figure out exactly where to apply the lubricants. Up steps an old hand like Halperin, happy to advise which are the squeaky wheels that need fixing.

No doubt Obama is lacking in executive experience but unfortunately his problems seem to run much deeper than that. If he is unencumbered by Bush’s ideological rigidity, this appears to have less to do with being his being more intellectually nimble than with his being more shamelessly cynical.

The latest example of Obama’s cynicism is that he isn’t willing to ditch the scientifically unjustifiable objective of a human mission to Mars. One can only assume that this decision is driven by his fear that to abandon such a project would make him appear less adventurous, less visionary than his predecessor — even though when Bush announced that objective it was decried by scientists unwilling to indulge in the former president’s comic-book fantasies.

If Obama’s problem is less mechanical and more attitudinal, what’s he going to do? Tell us he realizes that in his first year he approached his job with too much cynicism but he’s recently had some good discussions with Axelrod and once again he’s rediscovered his inspirational core?

Of course cynicism isn’t a misstep and it can’t really be fixed — only exposed and condemned.

Tzipi Livni won’t be visiting the UK any time soon

To hear it from the Israeli press you’d think that the British government can now make changes to the law simply by having the prime minister write an op-ed.

Last December an arrest warrant was issued for former Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, when she was expected to arrive in Britain. According to Haaretz she no longer needs to fear getting hand-cuffed for alleged war crimes — at least not on trips to the UK:

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced on Thursday plans to stop politically-motivated campaign groups from securing arrest warrants for visiting foreign officials. In a March 3 editorial in the Daily Telegraph, Brown wrote, “Britain will continue to take action to prosecute or extradite suspected war criminals – regardless of their status or power… But the process by which we take action must guarantee the best results. The only question for me is whether our purpose is best served by a process where an arrest warrant for the gravest crimes can be issued on the slightest of evidence.”

Under the current system, British magistrates are obliged to consider an arrest warrant case presented by any individual. Gordon Brown said he will instead propose that only one government department, the Crown Prosecution Service, evaluate the merits of any case brought under international law.

This move follows an uproar last December when Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni canceled a trip to London because a pro-Palestinian group secured an arrest warrant for alleged crimes committed in Gaza. A statement from Livni’s office praised the new changes proposed by Brown and said that “the British legal system has been abused by cynical elements in the United Kingdom.”

From London The Times presents a very different story:

Britain risks a showdown with Israel today when the Government signals it is in no hurry to ease the threat of arrest for visiting politicians and generals.

Ministers will announce a consultation on the principle of universal jurisdiction, under which private citizens can secure arrest warrants for offences such as war crimes committed abroad.

The Government had promised swift action when the Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni cancelled a trip to London last year after a magistrate issued a warrant for her arrest for alleged war crimes in Gaza when she was Foreign Minister.

The issue caused embarrassment for the Government, which promised to remedy the matter quickly. Today’s announcement, however, means that the issue will not be resolved until well after the election, expected in May. When The Times reported last month that a Cabinet split could delay the issue could be delayed for months, Ms Livni threatened to travel to Britain and “take the bullet” as the only way of shaming the Government into action.

After the disclosure that agents suspected of acting for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, used fake British passports to enter Dubai and kill a Hamas commander, however, the balance of diplomatic power has shifted.

The delay is a victory for Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, who has argued that the legal point at stake is too important to rush.

Since the British government just voted in support of a UN General Assembly resolution calling on Israel to fully investigate allegations of war crimes committed during its war on Gaza, maybe they should quietly tell the Israelis that the proposed changes on universal jurisdiction aren’t going to happen if Israel keeps running away from the Goldstone report.

The National reports:

Two unrelated diplomatic upsets have underlined growing impatience with the behaviour of the Israeli government among western countries that are traditionally supportive.

Backing from the European Union and Australia in the United Nations to sustain the issue of Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza more than a year ago has coincided with controversy over Israel’s apparent use of western passports in the assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhouh, a Hamas official, in Dubai.

Support for an Arab resolution last Friday at the UN – most EU countries voted in favour while others and Australia abstained – gave Israel and the Palestinians five more months to report back on progress in their respective investigations of war crimes alleged in a report by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge.

The impossibility of a two-state solution and the reality of the Israeli apartheid state

Just over a year ago, Bob Simon at CBS’s 60 Minutes did a piece that implicitly challenged the credibility of President Obama’s early push to revive the Middle East peace process. Simon noted the swiftness with which the new president had taken up the issue, but then went on to show the stark realities of segregated life in the occupied West Bank.

For anyone paying attention to the issues, there were no revelations in the 60 Minutes segment, yet the fact that it aired on prime-time network television and right at the moment the Obama administration was being viewed by so many with such a giddy sense of hope, showed Simon’s seriousness as a journalist. Nothing that has happened in the intervening months has cast an iota of doubt on the perspective he presented.

Haaretz reports:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Israel would never agree to withdraw from the Jordan Valley under any peace agreement signed with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the Jordan Valley’s strategic importance along the eastern border of the West Bank made it impossible for Israel to withdraw, according to a meeting participant.

Salman Masalha points out that Israel’s apartheid nature is not confined to the physical separation it has created between Jewish settlers and Palestinians but is also intrinsic to the structure, operation and identity of the Jewish state:

The alienation between Arabs and Jews can be seen everywhere. It has not arisen solely in the context of the national conflict, but is rather a result of an establishment policy which has expropriated Arabs’ lands to build communities “for Jews only” and has pushed the Arab inhabitants into localities under an “ethno-Zionist siege” on all sides.

The Israel Police, which is responsible for maintaining public law and order, provides the most blatant evidence that the Israeli regime behaves as if it is a foreign regime. It abandons the Arab localities to the rule of criminal gangs, intervening only when concern arises that the crime might spill over into Jewish locales. The Arab alienation from the police – a symbol of the regime – is apparent, among other things, in the absence of Arabic writing on police vehicles. How does an Arab citizen feel about a police force that appears in his community, but does not include any writing in his language? Does this not symbolize, more than anything else, that the police represent an occupation regime, a foreign regime? How would the inhabitant of some Jewish locale feel if there were no writing in Hebrew on police vehicles, but only a foreign language?

The alienation is also evident with regard to the central government. This is the only democratic country in the world where one-fifth of the citizens – who are declared to have equal rights, at least on paper – have no representation in the government or in “provisional and permanent institutions.” And this is the case even before we start talking about budgetary allocations, master plans, the building of cities and communities, education, culture, industrialization and more.

Chas Freeman writes:

Impolitic as it is to mention this, in rejecting the analogy with apartheid in South Africa, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen is not only denying realities on the ground in Palestine but also the principal and most awkward difference between the two cases. South Africa’s whites did not have a dedicated cadre of coreligionists or ethnic kin abroad who labored to protect them from the consequences of their deviance from the norms of humane behavior as defined by Western civilization at large. Nor, despite open sympathy for South African whites in the American South and among ardent anti-Communists, did apartheid enjoy international ideological support outside the neo-Nazi fringe. Israel’s policies are supported morally, politically, and financially by large Jewish communities and a vocal minority of Christians abroad, especially in North America, which is where global power remains concentrated. Without that support and those subsidies, Israel manifestly could not act as it does. The dependence of South Africa on external factors was far less direct or clear.

These differences between South Africa and Israel seem to me to be crucial both morally and politically. Cohen is clearly in denial not only about the realities of the Israel-Palestine situation but more importantly about the moral question raised by his support and that of so many other Jews who identify with Israel not just for the existence of Israel but for whatever it does: is Israeli pseudo-apartheid entitled to and does it enjoy the approval and support of world Jewry regardless of how inhumane it is to others? If the answer to either question is yes, it follows that the Jewish Diaspora and its Christian camp followers are as responsible as Israel itself for the Jewish state’s increasingly blatant racist outrages against Palestinians and other Arabs.

Jesse Rosenfeld writes:

I grew up in an anti-apartheid household in Toronto. My parents met while my father was touring southern Africa as part of a Canadian anti-apartheid organisation, building links with postcolonial African socialist states and the South African liberation movement. On long car journeys, our family would mix Nelson Mandela’s autobiography with Just William children’s story tapes, and my parents would occasionally hire a babysitter so they could attend organising meetings for the international boycott campaign against South Africa.

As much as I was taught about apartheid, the violence of segregation, and the brutality of a state designed only to serve a settler population, I didn’t experience it first-hand until I moved to Ramallah in 2007.

Going to Jerusalem through the Qalandia terminal checkpoint and watching the soldiers harass and degrade Palestinians with Jerusalem IDs – while most of my Ramallah friends were barred from travelling there altogether – was the first I saw of state-run segregation. Walking through the Balata refugee camp on the edge of Nablus was the first township-style ghetto I set foot in. Seeing the Palestinian Authority beat anti-Bush demonstrators in the street during the former president’s visit in 2008 was my first real taste of the bitterness of Inkatha-style divide-and-rule.

Mossad returns to its ‘glory days’

The Times reports:

Would you be prepared to cross-dress? And kill a guest in an adjacent hotel room? If the answer to these questions is a resounding “yes”, and you can also act, enjoy luxury international travel with a twist and can carry off a convincing Irish or Australian accent, then the job could be yours.

The Israeli spy agency Mossad may be the target of international reproach since it allegedly killed the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel this month, but at home emerging details of the operation have generated Mossad mania.

It has never been more popular in Israel, with stores selling out of Mossad memorabilia and its official website reporting a soaring number of visitors interested in applying to become agents. “Mossad has been restored to its glory days,” said Ilan Mizrahi, a former deputy director of the agency, which is located in the affluent beach town of Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv.

One of the signature elements of cult psychology is that the more a group is vilified, the more self-righteous it becomes. The outsiders’ opprobrium, far from provoking shame or doubt, has the opposite effect: it is treated as a vindication of the cult’s sense of superiority.

Is Israel really prepared to go it alone?

Reuters reports:

Israel’s perspective on Iran’s nuclear program differs from that of the United States, and the two may part ways on what action to take, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Friday.

Washington’s clout over its Middle East ally is under scrutiny after Israel’s veiled threats to attack Iran preemptively if international diplomacy fails to rein in Tehran’s uranium enrichment, a process with bomb-making potential.

The United States this week said it did not want to hurt the Iranian people with “crippling” sanctions against Iran’s energy sector, measures Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as the only viable diplomatic solution.

“There is of course a certain difference in perspective and a difference in judgment and a difference in the internal clock, a difference in capabilities,” Barak told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think-tank, when asked about Israeli-U.S. discussions about Iran.

“I don’t think that there is a need to coordinate in this regard. There should be understanding on the exchange of views, but we do not need to coordinate everything,” said Barak, who was in Washington for strategic talks.

Yet again, we are supposed to believe that Israel is prepared to go it alone and take on Iran.

Israel can destroy a nuclear reactor in Iraq; it can destroy one under construction in Syria; it wipe out a weapons convoy in Sudan; it can kill a Hezbollah commander with a bomb in Damascus; it can smother a Hamas commander with a pillow in Dubai; and it can flatten Southern Lebanon and Gaza.

Therefore, Israel’s ready to go to war with Iran… or, it loves to show off its power when it perceives the risk of doing so is minimal. If that was the case with Iran, we wouldn’t be weighing the chances of an Israeli attack — we’d be looking at the results of such an action.

Are we living in the post-moral age?

Rafi Eitan, an Israeli elder statesman and former intelligence officer is perhaps best known for having led the Mossad operation that captured Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, and brought him back to face trial and execution in Israel in 1962.

In an interview with Haaretz this week, Eitan summed up the Zeitgeist in which we live — the Israelification of the Western world which unfolded after 9/11:

… when there is a war on terror you conduct it without principles. You simply fight it.

President Bush, with his Manichaean view of the world, wanted to paint his war on terror in quasi-moral terms. President Obama has distilled it to its unprincipled essence.

The arc that has led from twisted morality to a rarefied amorality reached its completion point this week when the Obama administration made its determination that the authors of the former administration’s torture policies had done no more than make an error of judgment.

Newsweek reports:

The chief author of the Bush administration’s “torture memo” told Justice Department investigators that the president’s war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be “massacred,” according to a report by released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility.

The views of former Justice lawyer John Yoo were deemed to be so extreme and out of step with legal precedents that they prompted the Justice Department’s internal watchdog office to conclude last year that he committed “intentional professional misconduct” when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects.

The report by OPR concludes that Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and his boss at the time, Jay Bybee, now a federal judge, should be referred to their state bar associations for possible disciplinary proceedings. But, as first reported by NEWSWEEK, another senior department lawyer, David Margolis, reviewed the report and last month overruled its findings on the grounds that there was no clear and “unambiguous” standard by which OPR was judging the lawyers. Instead, Margolis, who was the final decision-maker in the inquiry, found that they were guilty of only “poor judgment.”

The report, more than four years in the making, is filled with new details into how a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department, the CIA, and the White House crafted the legal arguments that gave the green light to some of the most controversial tactics in the Bush administration’s war on terror. They also describe how Bush administration officials were so worried about the prospect that CIA officers might be criminally prosecuted for torture that one senior official—Attorney General John Ashcroft—even suggested that President Bush issue “advance pardons” for those engaging in waterboarding, a proposal that he was quickly told was not possible.

At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, that the president’s wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:

“What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally—”

“Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.”

“To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?” the OPR investigator asked again.

“Sure,” said Yoo.

Yoo is depicted as the driving force behind an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department memo that narrowly defined torture and then added sections concluding that, in the end, it essentially didn’t matter what the fine print of the congressionally passed law said: The president’s authority superseded the law and CIA officers who might later be accused of torture could also argue that were acting in “self defense” in order to save American lives.

Where does Obama stand?

“I’m a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there.”

Terrorism — even if this administration thinks the term is passé — remains the only reality. Obama’s cynical mastery rests in his ability to sustain the terror zeitgeist without using the word.

Principles? They’re a distraction — a preoccupation and an indulgence for those of us little folks who do not daily wrestle with the moral ambiguity of governance.

Obama’s take-no-prisoners approach

A year ago, when President Obama signed his executive order to close Guantanamo he said: “the message we are sending around the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism, and we are going to do so vigilantly; we are going to do so effectively; and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.”

It is now plain that Obama’s solution to the dilemma of how to interrogate and incarcerate suspected terrorists is chillingly simple: kill them.

The Obama administration’s kill-first policy relies first and foremost on this fact: the United States can act with impunity. Indeed, a president who was welcomed by the world largely because he was seen as the antithesis of his predecessor, appears in fact to believe that under the protection of a cool and sophisticated persona he has latitude to go further than Bush — as though the former president’s greatest failing was his style.

The Washington Post reports:

When a window of opportunity opened to strike the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa last September, U.S. Special Operations forces prepared several options. They could obliterate his vehicle with an airstrike as he drove through southern Somalia. Or they could fire from helicopters that could land at the scene to confirm the kill. Or they could try to take him alive.

The White House authorized the second option. On the morning of Sept. 14, helicopters flying from a U.S. ship off the Somali coast blew up a car carrying Saleh Ali Nabhan. While several hovered overhead, one set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of the remains for DNA verification. Moments later, the helicopters were headed back to the ship.

The strike was considered a major success, according to senior administration and military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the classified operation and other sensitive matters. But the opportunity to interrogate one of the most wanted U.S. terrorism targets was gone forever.

The Nabhan decision was one of a number of similar choices the administration has faced over the past year as President Obama has escalated U.S. attacks on the leadership of al-Qaeda and its allies around the globe. The result has been dozens of targeted killings and no reports of high-value detentions.

Keep chewing that qat Mr Friedman — but spare us the visions

Tom Friedman, refreshed and inspired by his recent jaunt to Yemen, writes:

I believe the only way the forces of 1979 can be rolled back would be with another equally big bang — a new popular movement that is truly reformist, democratizing, open to the world, yet anchored in Muslim culture, not disconnected. Our best hopes are the fragile democratizing trends in Iraq, the tentative green revolution in Iran, plus the young reformers now coming of age in every Arab country. But it will not be easy.

The young reformers today “do not have a compelling story to tell,” remarked Lahcen Haddad, a political scientist at Rabat University in Morocco. “And they face a meta-narrative” — first developed by Nasser and later adopted by the Islamists — “that mobilizes millions and millions. That narrative says: ‘The Arabs and Muslims are victims of an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy aided by reactionary regimes in the Arab world. It has as its goal keeping the Arabs and Muslims backward in order to exploit their oil riches and prevent them from becoming as strong as they used to be in the Middle Ages — because that is dangerous for Israel and Western interests.’ ”

Today that meta-narrative is embraced across the Arab-Muslim political spectrum, from the secular left to the Islamic right. Deconstructing that story, and rebuilding a post-1979 alternative story based on responsibility, modernization, Islamic reformation and cross-cultural dialogue, is this generation’s challenge. I think it can happen, but it will require the success of the democratizing self-government movements in Iran and Iraq. That would spawn a whole new story.

I know it’s a long shot, but I’ll continue to hope for it. I’ve been chewing a lot of qat lately, and it makes me dreamy.

The problem with viewing the Middle East in terms of competing narratives is that it leads to exactly what Friedman does: present the region’s problems in terms of defective story telling. It discounts the possibility that the most obvious explanation for the iron grip of the so-called meta-narrative is that it provides a fairly good approximation of the truth.

The hold of this story is not a reflection of a weak Arab mind or of limited access to good education but on the contrary the facts that the region is indeed mired by autocratic rule, the West is indeed hugely invested in controlling the region’s carbon resources and the only country in the region towards which the West and especially the United States displays an unswerving loyalty is indeed Israel.

Call that an imperialist-Zionist conspiracy if you like, but the name is really just a distraction — a way for Friedman to say: “no truth here… please move along. Come check out my dream of modernity — it could be your dream too. (If only I could figure why you think the way you do… More qat please.)”

Daylight robbery

Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”

Simon Johnson comments:

Does the president truly not understand that Dimon and Blankfein run banks that are regarded by policymakers and hence by credit markets as “too big to fail”?

This is the antithesis of a free-market system.

True. But there’s a crucial cultural dimension to what Obama is saying.

The love of money and the celebration of the accumulation of personal wealth are core American values. To criticize the wealthy is to take a stance that is widely seen as un-American. Indeed, the widely-held assumption is that the only plausible motive anyone might have for denouncing the rich is envy. And to be tarred with the slur “envious” is to be cast into a social margin occupied by that most pathetic type of American: the loser.

So, if you want to stay on the side of the winners, you say: Mr Blankfein, you just snatched a cool $9 million. Good for you!

Meanwhile, those of us who are not burdened with the vanity of the president or the fear of being called un-American, can name Blankfein’s reward what it is: theft.

And just in case anyone might be in any doubt whether Goldman Sachs is run by crooks, consider the fact that the current debt crisis in Greece — which has sent shock-waves through the global economy — was brought about in large part because Goldman Sachs created a mechanism through which the Greek government has for most of the last decade been able to conceal its debt.

Der Spiegel reports:

Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country’s already bloated deficit.

Greeks aren’t very welcome in the Rue Alphones Weicker in Luxembourg. It’s home to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical office. The number crunchers there are deeply annoyed with Athens. Investigative reports state that important data “cannot be confirmed” or has been requested but “not received.”

Creative accounting took priority when it came to totting up government debt.Since 1999, the Maastricht rules threaten to slap hefty fines on euro member countries that exceed the budget deficit limit of three percent of gross domestic product. Total government debt mustn’t exceed 60 percent.

The Greeks have never managed to stick to the 60 percent debt limit, and they only adhered to the three percent deficit ceiling with the help of blatant balance sheet cosmetics. One time, gigantic military expenditures were left out, and another time billions in hospital debt. After recalculating the figures, the experts at Eurostat consistently came up with the same results: In truth, the deficit each year has been far greater than the three percent limit. In 2009, it exploded to over 12 percent.

Now, though, it looks like the Greek figure jugglers have been even more brazen than was previously thought. “Around 2002 in particular, various investment banks offered complex financial products with which governments could push part of their liabilities into the future,” one insider recalled, adding that Mediterranean countries had snapped up such products.

Greece’s debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.

Real Zionists live in Israel

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to submit a bill in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that would allow Israeli citizens to vote from outside the country. The Media Line reports:

Currently only Israeli envoys and diplomats can vote from overseas. Israel’s Absorption Ministry estimates that around 750,000 Israeli citizens live outside the country, and in a country with just over five million eligible voters such an influx of voters would have a noticeable impact.

The push for the voting rights of Israelis living abroad is one of the clauses in an agreement signed between Netanyahu’s center-right Likud party and now-Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s right Yisrael Beiteinu party upon their post-election formation of a governing coalition last year. The coalition agreement calls for a bill allowing Israelis abroad to vote to be brought before the Knesset within a year of the government’s establishment.

“There are many things in the coalition agreement that we plan to implement,” Lieberman said at a Knesset press conference. “The law allowing Israelis abroad to vote will be voted on… I promise to keep 100% of the promises we made to our voters.”

Opposition leaders immediately slammed the proposal and Israel’s center-left Labor party, ultra orthodox Shas party and centrist Kadima party were all expected to oppose the bill.

“The right to determine Israel’s fate must lie in the hands of those who live in Israel and are willing to bear the brunt of their decisions,” opposition and Kadima leader Tzipi Livni said in a statement. “During his first year in office and also today, Netanyahu has proved that he is prepared to sell the country’s future out to his political partners.”

Livni, said Israelis abroad “should be encouraged to cultivate ties to [Israel] and to return to it.”

If Israel was simply the territorial embodiment of an ideology, then Israeli citizens who choose to live overseas should indeed be entitled to vote. Indeed, why not let any committed Zionist vote in an Israeli election?

In reality, though, Israel is a nation that bears the fundamental characteristics of any other: the people whose lives are most deeply impacted by its political structures are its inhabitants. (Oh, and just in case anyone forgot, 25% of Israeli citizens are not Jewish.)

Anyone who feels passionately about Israel retaining its identity as a Jewish state and who by virtue of being Jewish also has the “right” to live there should either put their Zionism into practice and move to Israel, or have the decency to acknowledge that they are not a Zionist but rather a pro-Zionist.

To be a Jewish pro-Zionist is to say: I celebrate the fact that there are millions of Jews who are willing to practice Zionism on my behalf. Maybe some day I’ll join them, but in the meantime I prefer to cheer from afar and visit occasionally.

If more non-Israeli Jews who call themselves Zionists had the humility to acknowledge that they are not real Zionists, perhaps they’d have a less paternalistic relationship with a country they choose not to make their home. (And perhaps Israeli political parties who cannot drum up enough support at home would stop trying to inflate their power by getting support from overseas.)

U.S.: Easing Gaza siege would help counter Goldstone

Think of Gaza as a hospital patient whose lips have been stitched closed. Israeli doctors point to an IV drip and say: “Look. We are taking great care to make sure the patient stays alive.” American consultants suggest that it would really be better to remove a couple of stitches so that a tube can be inserted in the patient’s mouth. It would look much more humane. Right.

Haaretz reports:

The United States has suggested to Israel that easing the Gaza blockade would help counter the fallout from the Goldstone report on alleged war crimes during Operation Cast Lead a year ago.

Friday, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is expected to present a report to the General Assembly on the implementation of the report’s recommendations by Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The U.S. message on the blockade was relayed last week when a Foreign Ministry delegation met in Washington with senior officials from the State Department and the White House. Much of the meeting dealt with steps that Israel could take to help the United States and others block the Goldstone report and prevent it from reaching the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Heading the Israeli delegation was the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director for international organizations, Eviatar Manor. The delegation met with officials including the U.S. assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, Michael Posner, and President Barack Obama’s adviser on human rights, Samantha Power.

What would Erik Prince advise?

The New York Times reports:

An Iraqi militant group said it had abducted an American contractor, a day after the United States military reported that a contractor had been missing since Jan. 23. It would be the first reported kidnapping of an American in a year in Iraq.

The militant group posted a video to back up its claim, although the man in the video does not give his name.

The Department of Defense identified the missing man as Issa T. Salomi, 60, of El Cajon, Calif. In a statement on Friday, the military said he worked as a contractor for American forces and was last seen on Jan. 23 in Baghdad. Search efforts were under way, the statement said.

There was no way to immediately confirm the authenticity of the video or that the man pictured was Mr. Salomi.

The reports of an abduction raise fresh fears that despite an improvement in security in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, foreigners working here are still vulnerable to kidnapping.

In the video, the captured man, wearing what appeared to be an American military uniform, identified the abductors as the League of Righteous, a Shiite Muslim militant group, and said they were treating him “kindly.” He said his kidnappers were demanding the release of other militants from jail and the prosecution of former Blackwater security guards accused in a shooting that left 17 Iraqis dead in 2007.

“The second demand is to bring the proper justice and the proper punishment to those members of Blackwater company that have committed unjustifiable crimes against innocent Iraqi civilians,” the man said in a transcript of the video posted on a Web site used by Iraqi insurgent groups. The man in the video said his captors were demanding “proper compensation to the families that have been involved in great suffering because of this incident.”

If the Obama administration has any interest in really dealing with the Blackwater legacy in a significant way, it’s time that it develops a case for the criminal prosecution of Erik Prince. Otherwise, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, groups like the League of Righteous will continue to have all the political ammunition they need to justify kidnapping Americans.

But the chances are, Prince still doesn’t need to fear arrest. Instead, most likely, another secret deal will be cut resulting in another prisoner exchange.

Can Obama take charge?

Paul Krugman describes the current crisis in Washington and its parallels with the collapse of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century:

…given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

Don’t hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism.

It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis. But by now, we know how the Obama administration deals with those who would destroy it: it goes straight for the capillaries. Sure enough, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, accused Mr. Shelby of “silliness.” Yep, that will really resonate with voters.

After the dissolution of Poland, a Polish officer serving under Napoleon penned a song that eventually — after the country’s post-World War I resurrection — became the country’s national anthem. It begins, “Poland is not yet lost.”

Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.

The problem with locating the root of the problem in what has become a dysfunctional Senate, is that it turns the administration into a victim. Krugman might bemoan the White House’s ineffectual defense mechanisms but he’s essentially sidelining the heart of the problem: a weak president.

War in Context

… with attention to the unseen

Category Archives: Editor’s comments

Jewish lobbying fails to stop EU support for Goldstone report

Biden late for dinner

What the Dubai assassination reveals

The Marjah mirage

Israel’s game of bluff

Does Obama have a vision?

Tzipi Livni won’t be visiting the UK any time soon

The impossibility of a two-state solution and the reality of the Israeli apartheid state

Mossad returns to its ‘glory days’

Is Israel really prepared to go it alone?

Are we living in the post-moral age?

Obama’s take-no-prisoners approach

Keep chewing that qat Mr Friedman — but spare us the visions

Daylight robbery

Real Zionists live in Israel

U.S.: Easing Gaza siege would help counter Goldstone

What would Erik Prince advise?

Can Obama take charge?