Category Archives: Issues

Mossad chief: Palestinian conflict top threat to Israel’s security, not Iran

Haaretz reports: The biggest threat to Israel’s security is the conflict with the Palestinians and not Iran’s nuclear program, Mossad chief Tamir Pardo said Thursday at a meeting at a private home attended by 30 businesspeople.

According to a person present during the 90-minute talk, Pardo dealt largely with the organizational changes he had made at the Mossad, as well as management policies at the spy agency. But during the question-and-answer period, participants asked him to assess the greatest threats facing Israel.

Pardo said, according to the source, that the major threat to Israel is the conflict with the Palestinians. When some of the participants asked him to repeat what he said, he answered: “Yes, the biggest threat is the Palestinian issue.”

Someone asked whether the Iranian nuclear threat was the second largest threat. Pardo surprised his audience by saying Iran might produce or purchase a nuclear weapon in the future, but he wouldn’t “recommend rushing to obtain a foreign passport.”

One person noted that Pardo’s words suggested he did not share the urgency in speeches by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tehran’s nuclear program. It was clear that Pardo did not consider this issue a significant threat, let alone an existential one.

Pardo listed the threats facing Israel, including a takeover of parts of Iraq by the Islamic State organization and its threats to neighboring Jordan under King Abdullah.

“This is a worrisome problem for Israel,” Pardo said. “This organization is here to stay. They embrace the public like [Israeli ultra-Orthodox party] Shas does, with a welfare and education system. They espouse murder for its own sake. Hamas is a lightweight organization by comparison.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Could Chalabi replace Maliki?

Patrick Cockburn writes: The ablest candidate to be prime minister is Ahmed Chalabi on the grounds that he is intelligent, energetic, an excellent organiser and has a good understanding of what has gone wrong. Several times in the past couple of years he told me with complete accuracy that the Iraqi security services were so rotted by corruption that they would speedily disintegrate if they had to fight a real war.

The very fact that Chalabi would be good as prime minister of Iraq does not mean that he will get the job. Listening to conversations among politically active Iraqis about the next prime minister, I notice that they all focus on how many players each candidate gets on with – the different power centres in the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities and foreign states such as the US, Iran and the Sunni neighbours – and not whether a new PM could reorganise the army before the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) attacks Baghdad.

Commending Chalabi and his abilities invariably causes dismay in the West – though not in Iraq these days – because he has acquired an impressive array of enemies. At different moments Chalabi has been high up on the most-hated lists of the US State Department, the CIA, Saddam Hussein, the British Foreign Office, Democrats and all those, mostly but by no means exclusively on the left and centre, who opposed the invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain in 2003.

The Guardian reports: The son of an establishment Baghdad family, Chalabi left Iraq as a child in 1956, spending much of his time between the US and the UK, along with stints in academia in Lebanon and finance in Jordan from the early 1970s. Along the way, he received a doctorate in mathematics and founded Petra Bank in Amman, which failed more than a decade later.

“In all of Iraq, nobody knows how to punch above their weight or play the convoluted game of Iraqi politics better than Ahmad Chalabi,” said Ramzy Mardini, a Jordan-based political analyst for thinktank The Atlantic Council. “His enduring survival is beyond our comprehension. Unlike Ayad Allawi [another former exile], Ahmad Chalabi is close to Iran. This is the key relationship that makes Chalabi’s candidacy something of a realistic prospect should Maliki be ousted. If Iran has a redline against a candidate, [he doesn’t] have a shot in making it in the end.

“If Iraqi politics were Game of Thrones, Chalabi would play Lord Baelish, a consummate puppet master behind the scenes, constantly plotting his path to power. For him, chaos isn’t a pit, but a ladder and Chalabi knows the ways and means of exploiting a crisis to suit his interests and elevation in Iraq’s political circles. He apparently has good relations with everyone, except Maliki.”

The next month will determine how willing Chalabi’s patrons are to throw in their lot with him. Maliki, apparently emboldened after a private talk with the office of Iraq Shia Islam’s highest authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said on Friday that he was not going anywhere.

Facebooktwittermail

A Shiite family fleeing Tal Afar — among Iraq’s 1.2 million internally displaced citizens

McClatchy reports: The mortars rained down for 12 hours, an eternity for members of the Hassan family who huddled together in a single room, the children screaming and the adults praying to die in the shelling rather than be slaughtered by the Islamic State militants who rampaged into the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar two weeks ago.

Unlike many of their neighbors, the Hassans survived, all 19 of them, and the next day they fled their hometown on the same road they’d used in two previous displacements — once when U.S. forces battled Sunni Muslim extremists in 2004, and again in 2005 during sectarian pogroms. But after a harrowing, five-day journey to this southern Shiite holy city, the family has given up on Tal Afar.

Qassim Hassan, 53, the patriarch of this clan of Shiite Muslim Turkmen, a minority that dates back to the 7th Century, said there hasn’t been a peaceful year since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. This third narrow escape will be their last, he declared, ending more than 200 years of his family’s presence in Tal Afar, which once was considered a showpiece of U.S. counterinsurgency successes.

“We’re desperate now,” Hassan said. “We can no longer live there because we are the targets every time, and the government cannot protect us. We’re starting from zero here. We’re building a new life.”

The sectarian cleansing of Tal Afar is now complete, according to accounts from the city that say not a single Shiite family remains. The Islamic State, an al Qaida splinter group that’s captured roughly a third of Iraq, views Shiites as heretics deserving of death.

Not that the Sunnis who stayed behind fared much better — witnesses reached by phone say the extremists demanded two women from each remaining tribe. Leaders refused and at least eight people were killed in a single night of clashes last week, creating another wave of fleeing families. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are

The Washington Post reports: Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Palestinian Mohammad Abu Khdair ‘was burned alive’

BBC News reports: A Palestinian teenager killed in Jerusalem was burned alive, first post mortem examination findings quoted by the Palestinian attorney-general say.

“The direct cause of death was burns as a result of fire,” Mohammed al-A’wewy was quoted as saying.

Israeli authorities say the circumstances surrounding the death of Mohammad Abu Khdair, 16, are unclear.

His death followed the abduction and murder of three young Israelis, with violent clashes spreading overnight.

The post mortem examination on Mohammad Abu Khdair was carried out by Israeli doctors, with Saber al-Aloul, the director of the Palestinian forensic institute, in attendance.

The Palestinian official news agency Wafa quoted the attorney-general as saying that Mr Aloul had reported fire dust in the respiratory canal, meaning the victim had “inhaled this material while he was burnt alive”.

Mohammad Abu Khdair, who had also suffered a head injury, had burns to 90% of the body, it was reported.

Facebooktwittermail

Syria: War’s toll on women

Human Rights Watch: Women in Syria have been arbitrarily arrested and detained, physically abused, harassed, and tortured during Syria’s conflict by government forces, pro-government militias, and armed groups opposed to the government, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW Committee) will conduct a review of the situation for Syrian women on July 4, 2014, in Geneva.

The 47-page report, “We Are Still Here: Women on the Front Line of Syria’s Conflict,” profiles 17 Syrian women who are now refugees in Turkey. Through written and photographic portraits, the report documents ways in which the conflict impacts women in particular. Women profiled in the report experienced violations by government and pro-government forces as well as by armed groups opposed to the government such as Liwa’al-Islam and extremist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS). Some female activists and humanitarian aid providers said they had been threatened, arbitrarily arrested and detained, and tortured by government or armed opposition forces. All six former detainees profiled in the report experienced physical abuse or torture in detention; one woman was sexually assaulted multiple times. Other women said they had been victims of discriminatory restrictions on their dress and movement. Several women were injured or lost family members in indiscriminate attacks on civilians by government forces.

“Women have not been spared any aspect of the brutality of the Syrian conflict, but they are not merely passive victims,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Women are taking on increasing responsibilities – whether by choice or due to circumstance – and they should not have to pay with intimidation, arrest, abuse, or even torture.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syria refugees set to exceed a third of Lebanon’s population

Reuters reports: Lebanon faces the threat of political and economic collapse as the number of refugees pouring in from Syria is set to exceed a third of the population, Social Affairs Minister Rashid Derbas said on Thursday.

Derbas said the total was expected to hit 1.5 million by the end of the year, an excessive burden for a country of just 4 million people.

He said the influx of refugees fleeing Syria’s civil war will have cost Lebanon’s already fragile economy around $7.5 billion between 2012 and 2014. Border communities hosting Syrian refugees were under particular pressure because of the increase in people willing to work for low wages.

“Unemployment doubled, especially among unspecialized or unskilled labor in those mostly poor areas,” he said, warning that the refugee crisis “threatens to take us to an economic, political and even security collapse.”

The turmoil next door has not only hurt Lebanon’s economy, but has aggravated sectarian tensions and fueled violence. It currently hosts around 1.1 million registered Syrian refugees. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The enemy of your enemy isn’t your friend, but you can have an affair with him

Maziar Bahari and Reza HaghighatNejad write: Every few days a crowd gathers at the Leadership Complex in central Tehran, chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Hypocrites.” The group varies in size: sometimes there are hundreds of people, and other times only a handful. Supporters range from prominent government officials to farmers from remote villages. But everyone who attends these ritual gatherings is rewarded in some way. It might be extra food rations or a higher government position. People at risk of losing their jobs might be told their positions are now secure. What’s important to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is to have his supporters there with him, lending further legitimacy to his words. Whatever they may be.

Last week, during a ceremony attended by Iranian judges and prosecutors, Khamenei expressed his doubts on Iran’s potential cooperation with the U.S. in Iraq. He accused the American government of exploiting the advances made by extremist Sunnis in Iraq to gain control over the country. As his audience sat before him, many of them crossing their hands over their crutches or their chests — a very Iranian sign of submission — Khamenei said that the current crisis had nothing to do with the sectarian divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims. The crowd chanted on cue. The Ayatollah added, “Americans are trying to undermine the stability and the territorial integrity of Iraq, in which the last remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime are used as proxies and those formerly outside this network of power are treated as pawns.”

Khamenei’s words were echoed by his supporters, who see the rise of the extremist Sunni group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, as an important threat to Iran’s dominance in Shia-majority Iraq. “After the victory of the Shias in Iraq, Arab countries, America and Israel started causing trouble because they were not happy with a Shia democratic government in Iraq,” said Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, former Chief Justice of Iran. “The people of Iraq should remain united,” he said. “Only the U.S. would benefit from a split.” Shahroudi’s comments are particularly important because he was born and raised in Iraq, and was among the leaders of the opposition against Saddam Hussein. He is also widely regarded as Khamenei’s mentor.

Khamenei’s supporters call him “The Leader of All Muslims around the World.” The gist of their conspiracy theories is that the whole world is united to undermine Khamenei’s leadership. The U.S. presence in Iraq and the region is regarded as the main challenge to dominance in Iraq, but they also include ISIS in an American scheme against Iran. “Command centers for the ISIS fighters were in the White House and Saudi Arabia,” said a revolutionary guards commander, and a Khamenei appointee. “The ISIS conflict is an American and Zionist conspiracy to reverse Islamic awakening in the Middle East,” added another appointed commander. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iraqi Shiite militias enter battle against ISIS

AFP reports: Iraq’s government once battled entrenched Shiite militiamen but is now making common cause with them against a jihadist-led onslaught that Baghdad’s forces are struggling to contain on their own.

Shiite militiamen are fighting alongside Iraq’s flagging forces, bringing experience, morale and increased numbers to the government side, which has lost large areas of five provinces to the Sunni Arab militant offensive.

But even if it pushes back the offensive, the government may have traded that immediate threat for another it cannot control.

“The last time the militias became strong and Baghdad had to contend with them, it led to operation Charge of the Knights,” said John Drake, a security analyst with AKE Group, referring to a 2008 operation against Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia that only succeeded with American support.

“This involved heavy fighting in the south of the country,” said Drake. “The difference now is that the government won’t have the same US military support.”

The Shiite militia resurgence also risks further alienating the Sunni Arab minority, which populates most areas overrun in the offensive and was targeted by death squads during a Sunni-Shiite sectarian war, which peaked in 2006-2007 and killed thousands.

“The reinvigoration of Shiite militia groups will, at the very least, be of concern for the Sunni community, given that such groups were involved in widespread sectarian killing,” Drake said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

German student under NSA scrutiny, reports say

The New York Times reports: A 27-year-old informatics student in southern Germany was identified in news reports on Thursday as the first German citizen known to be under surveillance by the National Security Agency since it was revealed last year that the agency had once tapped the cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The news came on the same day that two former American security officials testified to a parliamentary inquiry about reports of sweeping digital surveillance and monitoring in Germany by American intelligence, which touched off a major controversy and put strains on German-American relations.

The student, Sebastian Hahn of Erlangen in Bavaria, said he had been active for six years in the Tor network, a group that works to encrypt digital communications, and that he had rented space on a computer in Nuremburg that he said was one of several around the world that direct other computers involved in Tor. Two German state broadcasting channels reported that there was evidence that the N.S.A. was tracking the Nuremberg computer as part of an operation called “XKeyscore.” A server at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is used by Roger Dingledine, a well-known web activist, was also tracked in the operation, the German broadcasters reported. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why this isn’t a ‘new’ intifada

Samer Badawi writes: In a pre-interview with a television news producer yesterday, I found myself stammering over a familiar question: as a Palestinian, do you have any hope for the future?

Steeped in the day-to-day of our “conflict” with Israel, I find it difficult to respond to such banalities – not least because I’m in no position to represent all Palestinians.

So after attempting something articulate with the producer, I decided to get in touch with my friend, Emad Burnat, the Oscar-nominated director of 5 Broken Cameras and as good a gauge as any of the situation in the West Bank.

If you’ve seen his film, you’ll know why. In it, Emad documents his West Bank village’s nonviolent struggle against Israeli land grabs. Produced from more than 700 hours of footage, the documentary features intimate portraits of Bil’in’s leading nonviolent activists, who maintain a remarkable sense of hope amidst the violence and tragedy that surround them. But here’s the thing: the earliest of the film’s footage dates back to 2005, when common wisdom had it that the Second Intifada was over.

So when I asked Emad today if a third intifada was coming, his response wasn’t surprising. Instead, it reminded me of something he published just before his appearance at the 2012 Oscars:

“I come from Palestine. I have lived my entire life under military occupation, and I have no memory of a time without struggle.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Why the U.S. stuck with Maliki — and lost Iraq

“The crisis now gripping Iraq and the Middle East was not only predictable but predicted — and preventable. By looking the other way and unconditionally supporting and arming Maliki, President Obama has only lengthened and expanded the conflict that President Bush unwisely initiated.”

This is the damning assessment of Ali Khedery who by 2009 had become the longest continuously serving American official in Iraq. He writes:

[I]n August 2010, I was shocked that much of the surge’s success had been squandered by Maliki and other Iraqi leaders. Kurds asked how they could justify remaining part of a dysfunctional Iraq that had killed hundreds of thousands of their people since the 1980s. Sunni Arabs — who had overcome internal divisions to form the secular Iraqiya coalition with like-minded Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and Christians — were outraged at being asked to abdicate the premiership after pummeling al-Qaeda and winning the elections. Even Shiite Islamist leaders privately expressed discomfort with Iraq’s trajectory under Maliki, with Sadr openly calling him a “tyrant.” Worst of all, perhaps, the United States was no longer seen as an honest broker.

After helping to bring him to power in 2006, I argued in 2010 that Maliki had to go. I felt guilty lobbying against my friend Abu Isra [Maliki], but this was not personal. Vital U.S. interests were on the line. Thousands of American and Iraqi lives had been lost and trillions of dollars had been spent to help advance our national security, not the ambitions of one man or one party. The constitutional process had to be safeguarded, and we needed a sophisticated, unifying, economics-minded leader to rebuild the country after the security-focused Maliki crushed the militias and al-Qaeda.

In conversations with visiting White House senior staff members, the ambassador, the generals and other colleagues, I suggested Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi as a successor. A former Baathist, moderate Shiite Islamist and French-educated economist who had served as finance minister, Abdul Mahdi maintained excellent relations with Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds as well as with Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

On Sept. 1, 2010, Vice President Biden was in Baghdad for the change-of-command ceremony that would see the departure of Gen. Ray Odierno and the arrival of Gen. Lloyd Austin as commander of U.S. forces. That night, at a dinner at the ambassador’s residence that included Biden, his staff, the generals and senior embassy officials, I made a brief but impassioned argument against Maliki and for the need to respect the constitutional process. But the vice president said Maliki was the only option. Indeed, the following month he would tell top U.S. officials, “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend the SOFA,” referring to the status-of-forces agreement that would allow U.S. troops to remain in Iraq past 2011.

I was not the only official who made a case against Abu Isra. Even before my return to Baghdad, officials including Deputy U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford, Odierno, British Ambassador Sir John Jenkins and Turkish Ambassador Murat Özçelik each lobbied strenuously against Maliki, locking horns with the White House, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill and Maliki’s most ardent supporter, future deputy assistant secretary of state Brett McGurk. Now, with Austin in the Maliki camp as well, we remained at an impasse, principally because the Iraqi leaders were divided, unable to agree on Maliki or, maddeningly, on an alternative.

Our debates mattered little, however, because the most powerful man in Iraq and the Middle East, Gen. Qassim Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, was about to resolve the crisis for us. Within days of Biden’s visit to Baghdad, Soleimani summoned Iraq’s leaders to Tehran. Beholden to him after decades of receiving Iran’s cash and support, the Iraqis recognized that U.S. influence in Iraq was waning as Iranian influence was surging. The Americans will leave you one day, but we will always remain your neighbors, Soleimani said, according to a former Iraqi official briefed on the meeting.

After admonishing the feuding Iraqis to work together, Soleimani dictated the outcome on behalf of Iran’s supreme leader: Maliki would remain premier; Jalal Talabani, a legendary Kurdish guerilla with decades-long ties to Iran, would remain president; and, most important, the American military would be made to leave at the end of 2011. Those Iraqi leaders who cooperated, Soleimani said, would continue to benefit from Iran’s political cover and cash payments, but those who defied the will of the Islamic Republic would suffer the most dire of consequences.

I was determined not to let an Iranian general who had murdered countless American troops dictate the endgame for the United States in Iraq. By October, I was pleading with Ambassador Jeffrey to take steps to avert this outcome. I said that Iran was intent on forcing the United States out of Iraq in humiliation and that a divisive, sectarian government in Baghdad headed by Maliki would almost certainly lead to another civil war and then an all-out regional conflict. This might be averted if we rebuffed Iran by forming a unity government around a nationalist alternative such as Abdul Mahdi. It would be extremely difficult, I acknowledged, but with 50,000 troops still on the ground, the United States remained a powerful player. The alternative was strategic defeat in Iraq and the Middle East writ large. To my surprise, the ambassador shared my concerns with the White House senior staff, asking that they be relayed to the president and vice president, as well as the administration’s top national security officials.

Desperate to avert calamity, I used every bit of my political capital to arrange a meeting for Jeffrey and Antony Blinken, Biden’s national security adviser and senior Iraq aide, with one of Iraq’s top grand ayatollahs. Using uncharacteristically blunt language, the Shiite cleric said he believed that Ayad Allawi, who had served as an interim prime minister in 2004-05, and Abdul Mahdi were the only Shiite leaders capable of uniting Iraq. Maliki, he said, was the prime minister of the Dawa party, not of Iraq, and would drive the country to ruin.

But all the lobbying was for naught. By November, the White House had settled on its disastrous Iraq strategy. The Iraqi constitutional process and election results would be ignored, and America would throw its full support behind Maliki. Washington would try to move Talabani aside and install Allawi as a consolation prize to the Iraqiya coalition.

The next day, I appealed again to Blinken, Jeffrey, Austin, my embassy colleagues and my bosses at Central Command, Gen. Jim Mattis and Gen. John Allen, and warned that we were making a mistake of historic proportions. I argued that Maliki would continue to consolidate power with political purges against his rivals; Talabani would never step aside after fighting Hussein for decades and taking his chair; and the Sunnis would revolt again if they saw that we betrayed our promises to stand by them after the Awakening’s defeat of al-Qaeda. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iraqi Kurd officials lobbying for independence in Washington

The Wall Street Journal reports: Senior officials from the semiautonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan are in Washington laying the groundwork for a formal bid for independence, despite opposition from the Obama administration.

Key aides to Kurdish President Massoud Barzani have met staff from the State Department, White House and Congress over the past two days, describing what the Kurds say is the “new reality” in Iraq. Numerous territories in the west of the country have fallen in recent weeks to the militant group Islamic State, which recently changed its name from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS.

Mr. Barzani is moving to hold a referendum among Iraq’s Kurdish population, after which the government in the Kurdish capital of Erbil could seek to formally secede, his top aides told a gathering of reporters Thursday.

“If we can’t live together, we will go for divorce,” said Fuad Hussein, Mr. Barzani’s chief of staff, who met Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday. “It is now about a new reality.”

A move toward Kurdish independence would represent a repudiation of Obama administration policy, which seeks to maintain a united Iraq. U.S. officials worry that Kurdish independence could fuel secessionist bids by Kurdish territories in other parts of the Middle East, particularly Turkey and Syria. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Egypt: Catastrophic decline in human rights one year after ousting of Morsi

Amnesty International: A surge in arbitrary arrests, detentions and harrowing incidents of torture and deaths in police custody recorded by Amnesty International provide strong evidence of the sharp deterioration in human rights in Egypt in the year since President Mohamed Morsi was ousted.

Thousands of people have been detained, with figures varying. According to official estimates published by the Associated Press in March, at least 16,000 people have been detained over the past year as part of a sweeping crackdown against Mohamed Morsi’s supporters and other groups and activists that have expressed dissent.

According to WikiThawra, an initiative run by the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social rights, at least 80 people died in custody over the past year and more than 40,000 people were detained or indicted between July 2013 and mid-May 2014.

Reports of torture and enforced disappearances in police and military detention facilities are also widespread. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

A post–peace process security crisis on the West Bank?

Tony Karon writes: “We have to fight terror as if there were no peace talks,” former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin famously said in the early ’90s, “and we have to pursue peace as if there were no terror.” That statement may have defined the relationship between Israel and the then-nascent Palestinian Authority, established in 1994 as an interim administrative arrangement to prepare the way for Palestinian statehood. But events of the past few weeks have served up a morbid reminder that 20 years after the Oslo Accord, the peace process remains in long-term paralysis while a new wave of violence threatens to spiral out of control. Moreover, Rabin’s premise that Israeli and Palestinian leaders share the same goal has become difficult for either side to sustain.

Israeli outrage over the killing of three teenage settlers abducted near Hebron has translated into a wave of citizen attacks on Palestinians on the back of a widespread Israeli crackdown, and the discovery of the body of a Palestinian teenager said to have been abducted in Jerusalem on Tuesday prompted fresh clashes as Palestinian protesters blamed Israeli settlers for the death.

Today, of course, there are no peace talks, nor is their absence temporary: Israel and the Palestinian leadership failed to agree on terms for a political solution to their conflict at the Camp David talks in 2000, and since then — periodic attempts to revive the conversation notwithstanding — if anything, the gulf between them has widened. Israel’s political median has moved steadily to the right since Rabin signed the Oslo Accord, while the political standing of PLO chairman and PA President Mahmoud Abbas has steadily diminished in the face of challenges from Hamas and from the fact that settlements have continued to grow despite his peace efforts. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

In Israel echoes of Nazi Germany

Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev writes: On March 9, 1933, brown-shirted Sturmabteilung went on a rampage. “In several parts of Berlin a large number of people, most of whom appeared to be Jews, were openly attacked in the streets and knocked down. Some of them were seriously wounded. The police could do no more than pick up the injured and take them off to hospital,” the Guardian reported. “Jews were beaten by the brown shirts until blood ran down their heads and faces” the Manchester Guardian noted. “Before my eyes, storm troopers, drooling like hysterical beasts, chase a man in broad daylight while whipping him,” Walter Gyssling wrote in his diary.

I know: you were outraged before you even finished the paragraph above. “How dare he compare isolated incidents here and there to Nazi Germany,” you are thinking to yourself. “This is an outrageous trivialization of the Holocaust.”

You are right, of course. My intention is not to draw any parallel whatsoever. Both my parents lost their families during World War II, and I need no convincing that the Holocaust is a crime so unique in its evil totality that it stands by itself even in the annals of other premeditated genocides.

But I am a Jew, and there are scenes of the Holocaust that are indelibly etched in my mind, even though I was not alive at the time. And when I saw the videos and pictures of gangs of right-wing Jewish racists running through the streets of Jerusalem, chanting “Death to the Arabs,” hunting for random Arabs, picking them out by their appearance or by their accents, chasing them in broad daylight, “drooling like hysterical beasts” and then beating them up before the police could arrive – the historical association was automatic. It was the first thing that jumped into my mind. It should have been, I think, the first thing that jumped into any Jew’s mind.

Israel in 2014, it goes without saying, is not “The Garden of Beasts” that Erik Larson wrote about in his book on 1933 Germany. The Israeli government does not condone vigilantism or thuggery, as the Nazis did for a while, before Germans started complaining about the disorder on their streets and the damage to Berlin’s international reputation. I have no doubt that the police will also do their utmost to apprehend the murderers of the Palestinian boy whose burnt body was found in a Jerusalem forest. I am even praying that they find that the killing wasn’t a hate crime at all.

But make no mistake: the gangs of Jewish ruffians man-hunting for Arabs are no aberration. Theirs was not a one-time outpouring of uncontrollable rage following the discovery of the bodies of the three kidnapped students. Their inflamed hatred does not exist in a vacuum: it is an ongoing presence, growing by the day, encompassing ever larger segments of Israeli society, nurtured in a public environment of resentment, insularity and victimhood, fostered and fed by politicians and pundits – some cynical, some sincere – who have grown weary of democracy and its foibles and who long for an Israel, not to put too fine a point on it, of one state, one nation and, somewhere down the line, one leader.

In the past 24 hours alone, a Facebook Page calling for “revenge” for the killings of the three kidnapped teens has received tens of thousands of “likes,” replete with hundreds of explicit calls to kill Arabs, wherever they are. The one demanding the execution of “extreme leftists” reached almost ten thousand likes within two days. These, and countless other articles on the web and on social media are inundated, today as in most other days, with readers comments spewing out the worst kind of racist bile and calling for death, destruction and genocide.

These calls have been echoed in recent days, albeit in slightly more veiled terms, by members of the Knesset, who cite Torah verses on the God of Revenge and his command on the fate of the Amalekites. David Rubin, who describes himself as a former mayor of Shiloh, was more explicit: in an article published in Israel National News he wrote “An enemy is an enemy and the only way to win this war is to destroy the enemy, without excessive regard for who is a soldier and who is a civilian. We Jews will always aim our bombs primarily at military targets, but there is absolutely no need to feel guilty about ‘disrupting the lives of, and killing or wounding enemy civilians who are almost entirely Hamas and Fatah supporters.”

And hovering above all of this are Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, who persist in portraying our conflict with the Palestinians in stark terms of black and white, good versus evil; who describe Israel’s adversaries as incorrigible and irredeemable; who have never shown the slightest sign of empathy or understanding for the plight of the people who have lived under Israeli occupation for nearly half a century; whose pronouncements serve to dehumanize the Palestinians in the eyes of the Israeli public; who perpetuate the public’s sense of isolation and injustice; and who thus can be said to be paving the way for the waves of homicidal hatred that are now coming to light.

Some people will draw a parallel between the ugly right wing violence that swept Israel after the Oslo Accords and today’s rising tide of dangerous racism, implicating Netanyahu in both: from his fiery anti-government speeches in Zion Square to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and from his harsh anti-Palestinian rhetoric to the outburst of horrid racism today. But that is an easy out. It is not Netanyahu who is to blame, it is the rest of us, Jews in Israel as well as those in the Diaspora, those who turn a blind eye and those who choose to look the other way, those who portray the Palestinians as inhuman monsters and those who view any self-criticism as an act of Jewish betrayal.

This comparison is surely valid: Edmund Burke’s maxim ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing’ was true in Berlin in the early 1930s and it will hold true in Israel as well. If nothing is done to reverse the tide, evil will surely triumph, and it won’t take too long.

Facebooktwittermail

An ex-Trader Joe’s exec’s plan to reduce food waste and feed the hungry

The Atlantic: America’s growing income inequality has dominated the national conversation in recent months, accompanied by an avalanche of data: economists tell us the richest 1 percent of American households earn 20 percent of all income and own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. But how do these figures translate into everyday life? For a glimpse into what has gone wrong, consider America’s food paradox: Grocery stores catering to wealthy shoppers discard billions of pounds of wholesome food because of minor cosmetic flaws while, in low-income neighborhoods across the country, 48 million Americans lack reliable access to affordable, nutritious food.

Doug Rauch, the former president of the Trader Joe’s Company, has first-hand knowledge about America’s food waste. He tells me that he has seen shocking quantities of food discarded because customers expect perfect fruit and vegetables on their supermarket shelves. “Grocery stores routinely trash produce for being the wrong shape or containing minor blemishes,” he tells me. After three decades in the grocery business, Rauch retired four years ago to devote himself to investigating and addressing the problem. The USDA estimates that 31 percent of food produced in America goes uneaten every year, amounting to a loss of $161.6 billion. “Here we are in the richest nation in the history of the world in terms of food production, yet one in six Americans is going hungry,” he says.

Rauch wants to take a stab at tackling this inefficiency in America’s food system. The solution seems obvious to him: Couldn’t we take the excesses of the wealthy and give them to the poor? This is precisely the concept behind Daily Table, a grocery store he is launching this fall in Roxbury, a low-income Boston suburb. Rauch plans to salvage food discarded by supermarkets and sell it at very low cost to consumers who would not otherwise have the means to adequately feed themselves. If this experiment works, he plans to open stores like it around the country. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail