Category Archives: Opinion

The unfolding Ukraine crisis signals a new world order

Tony Brenton, former British ambassador to Russia, writes: A way out of the Ukraine crisis may now be faintly discernible. The round-table negotiations promoted by the Germans has the support of all the key governments. It is intended to produce a ceasefire, discussion of future Ukrainian constitutional arrangements, and the election of a new Ukrainian president on 25 May. There are still all sorts of ways it could go wrong: the east Ukrainian dissidents are not yet involved and will need to be; and polarisation continues, with both sides gradually losing control of their thuggish surrogates. But things now look marginally more hopeful than they have since the ill-fated Geneva agreement of a month ago.

The west has had to learn some hard lessons to get to where we are now.

It is generally accepted that the EU (in a mode splendidly described by one commentator as of “impotent megalomania”) precipitated matters by blundering into the most sensitive part of Russia’s backyard without seriously asking itself how it might react. This was not an isolated error but the culmination of 20 years of the west simply not taking Russia seriously, most notably with the Kosovo war and the expansion of Nato. When Russia did react in the (legally indefensible, but historically understandable) form of annexing Crimea and destabilising east Ukraine, the western view then swung 180 degrees to focusing on the need to “contain” a revanchist Russia intent on rebuilding the Soviet Union.

In the absence of any willingness among western publics to fight for the independence of Simferopol, the only weapon available was sanctions. These allowed western leaders to claim they were “doing something”, but in fact cruelly exposed their unwillingness to take real economic pain on Ukraine’s behalf. They have also become something of a badge of patriotic pride for those Russians targeted by them – of the six uses of sanctions by the west against the USSR/Russia since the second world war none have worked.

Happily, we now seem to be waking up to the reality that we are dealing not with a revanchist Russia, but with a coldly calculating one – a Russia that is neither patsy nor praying mantis. They don’t want to fight a war or take on the economic burden of rebuilding eastern Ukraine, but they do have a minimal list of requirements – Ukrainian neutrality, more autonomy for Russian speakers – which have to be met before they will back off. [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered troops deployed near Ukraine to return to their home bases and praised the launch of a dialogue between the Ukrainian government and its opponents even as fighting continued in the eastern parts of the country.

Facebooktwittermail

The slippery slope of secrecy

A New York Times editorial says: “If you want to keep a secret,” George Orwell advised in “1984,” “you must also hide it from yourself.” So the latest stricture seems to demand from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the federal uber-agency of all things secret. The office, which oversees 16 government intelligence agencies, issued a new policy in April that will seriously constrain the existing practice by which officials comment informally to the press and public when obvious issues are stirred by leaked information and unauthorized disclosures.

We consider this process an unavoidable but decidedly healthy way of life in Washington. But the updated policy sternly requires that an informed official who’s been regulating his own give-and-take in this important area now submit for advance approval an outline of the topics expected to arise in “unstructured or free-form discussions.” Otherwise, the policy memo states with a certain alarm, an official’s utterances could be construed as a validation of leaked information and “cause further harm to national security.”

The new prepublication review policy provides that the office’s current and former employees and contractors may not cite news reports based on leaks in their speeches, opinion articles, books, term papers or other unofficial writing, according to a report by Charlie Savage of The Times. Semaphore seems to have been overlooked as a medium, but we get the point.

The reassuring fact is that all manner of officials, from the president on down, occasionally speak authoritatively about an issue that might be informed by some bit of leaked information. It’s the mother’s milk of capital conversation. But don’t tell that to the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., whose passion for keeping secrets at any cost — even his own reputation for honesty — has become legendary. It was Mr. Clapper who was asked at a Senate hearing last year whether the National Security Agency collects “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”

“No, sir,” responded Mr. Clapper, adding, “Not wittingly.” Soon came the disclosures — leaks by the torrent — about the N.S.A.’s vast data-mining program.

The new crackdown policy caused enough confusion and derision that the national security office subsequently denied there was anything new about it; just a reminder of past policy. But anyone could see this wasn’t so — once the new policy memo was leaked, of course.

Facebooktwittermail

Anti-Semitism should not be waved around like a propaganda tool

Donna Nevel and Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark write: This week the Anti-Defamation League – an organization with a long history of trying to silence and intimidate those who don’t share their unwavering support for Israel and its policies – published a survey ringing the alarm about anti-Semitism. Rather than advance our understanding of this serious issue, the survey seems predictably designed to stir up fear that Jew-hatred is a growing global phenomenon that puts the world’s Jews universally at risk, and that the biggest culprits are Muslims and Arabs, particularly Palestinians.

While some responses to the survey may well be of legitimate concern, many of its questions are pointedly designed to skew the results because they have little to do with revealing actual anti-Semitism, as defined, for example, by the US Holocaust Museum. For example, one question asked whether Jews think more highly of themselves than of other groups, and answering yes tallies points in the anti-Semitic column. But common sense suggests that almost anyone in the world would likely answer affirmatively about any other ethnic or religious community.

The most striking example of a leading question undergirds the ADL’s claim that the highest percentage of anti-Semitism is among Palestinians who live in the occupied territories. The ADL asked a group of people for whom the movement of goods, money and labor is controlled by Israel, “Do Jews have too much power in the business world?”. Were they really to be expected to answer anything but “yes”? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Ukraine is all for dialogue, but not under the barrel of a Russian gun

Andrii Deshchytsia, Ukraine’s acting minister of foreign affairs, writes: Last week Russia’s President Putin said he believed referendums should not take place in the eastern regions of Ukraine on 11 May. Remarkably, the change of Putin’s rhetoric has inspired some hope in many European capitals.

Putin distanced himself publicly from pro-Russia armed separatists in the east, pretending Russia had no influence over them. Unfortunately, his posturings are nothing more than a diplomatic trick and are indicative of the long-term game the Kremlin is playing.

As many European diplomats have observed, Putin’s acts regarding Ukraine belie his words. Despite his claims to withdraw troops from Ukraine’s border, he did not – according to all the independent intelligence reports of Ukraine, Nato and the Pentagon. A few hours after his “goodwill” commitment, an armoured Russian “Tiger” (wheeled troop transporter) crossed Ukraine’s border by force to join armed militants in the Luhansk region. This is just one of a multitude of examples of Russia’s direct involvement in the unrest in Ukraine’s east. However, this fact is often lost in the western media because of the Kremlin’s highly coordinated information campaign on Ukraine. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

Trevor Timm writes: If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here’s what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” – in other words, that the ACLU couldn’t prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn’t challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden’s historic whistleblowing to prove it. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Putin’s Nixon strategy is just beginning and it’s going to get uglier

Mark Ames writes: It goes without saying that Putin didn’t plan this crisis to happen — he already had his man in power in Kyiv. But Putin did exploit the situation, turning a major humiliating defeat in February into a massive political victory within Russia by doing what the Silent Majority would’ve wanted Putin to do: Redress grievances, air out resentments nonstop against the West and against west Ukraine fascists, and screw whatever the West thinks.

There’s not much comfort here for any side in the West when you frame Putin’s actions through local politics. Here, in our proxy war way of framing Ukraine, either Putin’s a crazy evil empire-r looking to reestablish his empire, meaning we better stop him now; or Putin’s merely reacting defensively to our aggression (or, according to the faulty thinking of a lot of people sick of American interventionism, Putin is heroically defying the US Empire, acting as a counterweight).

What he’s doing is shoring up his new political base while tightening the screws on whatever remained of liberal freedom in Russia, taking control of the Internet, seizing control of the handful of opposition online media sites, and ramping up the culture war against liberals, gays, the decadent West… The fact that we, the US and EU and a few billionaires, funded violent regime change groups in bed with west Ukraine fascists and Russophobes has only made Putin’s domestic job easier. You can see it in the aftermath of the Odessa fire massacre that killed over 40 pro-Russian separatists: It shut up even Navalny.

The liberal-yuppie elites’ momentum is over. Putin’s popularity among the rest of the country has never been higher.

So if Putin is neither the defiant counterweight hero or the neo-Stalinist imperialist, but rather playing a Russian version of vicious Nixon politics, what should the West do?

That’s easy: Stay the Hell out of Russia’s way for awhile, its version of Nixon politics is just beginning, and it’s going to get uglier. Russia has a history of turning inward in ways that will strike us as feral and alien, something the abandoned Silent Majority will welcome, but no one else will. (Our sanctions only helped speed up that process of inward isolationism.)

America’s Silent Majority was crazy enough in the Nixon years: the Silent Majority cheered Nixon on when college students were gunned down on campuses; 80% of Americans sided with Lt. William Calley, the officer in charge of the My Lai massacre. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Have cosmologists lost their minds in the multiverse?

Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis write: The recent BICEP2 observations – of swirls in the polarisation of the cosmic microwave background – have been proclaimed as many things, from evidence of the Big Bang and gravitational waves to something strange called the multiverse.

The multiverse theory is that our universe is but one of a vast, variegated ensemble of other universes. We don’t know how many pieces there are to the multiverse but estimates suggest there many be squillions of them.

But (if they exist) there has not been enough time since our cosmic beginning for light from these other universes to reach us. They are beyond our cosmic horizon and thus in principle unobservable.

How, then, can cosmologists say they have seen evidence of them?

Unobservable entities aren’t necessarily out-of-bounds for science. For example, protons and neutrons are made of subatomic particles called quarks. While they cannot be observed directly, their existence and properties are inferred from the way particles behave when smashed together.

But there is no such luxury with the multiverse. No signals from from other universes have or will ever bother our telescopes.

While there is some debate about what actually makes a scientific theory, we should at least ask if the multiverse theory is testable? Does it make predictions that we can test in a laboratory or with our telescopes? [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How to strike a win-win deal with Iran

Reza Marashi and Trita Parsi write: The United States and its allies are now preparing for the home stretch in their nuclear negotiations with Iran. And, as they approach the finish line, it will be critical for insightful voices to help the Obama administration parse through difficult issues that remain on the negotiating table.

Kenneth Pollack – a top Clinton administration official and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution – recently took to the pages of the New York Times to do exactly that. He correctly notes in his op-ed that a comprehensive deal verifiably ensuring the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program will be enormously beneficial.

Ken is our friend and one of the sharpest minds working in Washington today. That’s why we hope to use his New York Times op-ed as a launching pad for a broader dialogue about what the details of a comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran should look like.

He rightly points out three critical issues that will make or break our negotiations with Iran: inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities; creating mechanisms to ensure Iran doesn’t cheat; and the duration of a final deal. However, we believe the contours recommended in his op-ed would risk creating such an imbalance in the deal that it would incentivize the Iranians to cheat, and by that turn a diplomatic win into an embarrassing fiasco.

On the issue of intrusive inspections, we agree: For a mutually-agreed upon time period, any final nuclear deal with Iran will have to include one of the most comprehensive inspections regime in history.

But pushing for the type of inspections we had in Iraq – a constant, indefinite and undefined International Atomic Energy Agency presence – doesn’t pass the feasibility litmus test and contradicts what has already been agreed upon in November: Once the final deal expires and Iran has successfully alleviated the international community’s concerns about its program, Tehran will become a normal Non-proliferation Treaty state, meaning there will be no limitations imposed on its nuclear program beyond what all other NPT states have to accept. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syria’s dirty secret is that Assad could win in a fair election

Faisal Al Yafai writes: There is a presidential election in Syria and Bashar Al Assad is going to win. The only question is by how much.

As a presidential candidate, Mr Al Assad has done quite well. He has overseen a truce that has seen one of the country’s largest cities return to government control. He has maintained his relationships with his allies in Iran and Hizbollah. He still cuts a man of the people stance, in marked contrast to the extremists who seek to run the country.

He is, above all, a known quantity, a man who has led the country through difficult times, promises stability and is backed by an army that can deliver it. All in all, Mr Al Assad looks like a credible candidate.

Though only, of course, if you overlook the fact that he caused the civil war that rages today.

But there is a serious reason to understand why Mr Al Assad is seen by many within and without Syria as a credible candidate. Because many will vote for him.

Certainly, that is because there is no real alternative, because the only places in which voting will take place are under government control, because 40 years of propaganda have removed any alternative – and because the Assad regime has spent three years demonstrating what it means by the slogan “Assad or we burn the country”.

But the dirty secret in Syria today is that, if the presidential election were free and fair, Bashar Al Assad would still win. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Fascism returns to Ukraine

Timothy Snyder writes: We easily forget how fascism works: as a bright and shining alternative to the mundane duties of everyday life, as a celebration of the obviously and totally irrational against good sense and experience. Fascism features armed forces that do not look like armed forces, indifference to the laws of war in theirapplication to people deemed inferior, the celebration of “empire” after counterproductive land grabs. Fascism means the celebration of the nude male form, the obsession with homosexuality, simultaneously criminalized and imitated. Fascism rejects liberalism and democracy as sham forms of individualism, insists on the collective will over the individual choice, and fetishizes the glorious deed. Because the deed is everything and the word is nothing, words are only there to make deeds possible, and then to make myths of them. Truth cannot exist, and so history is nothing more than a political resource. Hitler could speak of St. Paul as his enemy,Mussolini could summon the Roman emperors. Seventy years after the end of World War II, we forgot how appealing all this once was to Europeans, and indeed that only defeat in war discredited it. Today these ideas are on the rise in Russia, a country that organizes its historical politics around the Soviet victory in that war, and the Russian siren song has a strange appeal in Germany, the defeated country that was supposed to have learned from it.

The pluralist revolution in Ukraine came as a shocking defeat to Moscow, and Moscow has delivered in return an assault on European history. Even as Europeans follow with alarm or fascination the spread of Russian special forces from Crimea through Donetsk and Luhansk, Vladimir Putin’s propagandists seek to draw Europeans into an alternative reality, an account of history rather different from what most Ukrainians think, or indeed what the evidence can bear. Ukraine has never existed in history, goes the claim, or if it has, only as part of a Russian empire. Ukrainians do not exist as a people; at most they are Little Russians. But if Ukraine and Ukrainians do not exist, then neither does Europe or Europeans. If Ukraine disappears from history, then so does the site of the greatest crimes of both the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. If Ukraine has no past, then Hitler never tried to make an empire, and Stalin never exercised terror by hunger.

Ukraine does of course have a history. The territory of today’s Ukraine can very easily be placed within every major epoch of the European past. Kiev’s history of east Slavic statehood begins in Kiev a millennium ago. Its encounter with Moscow came after centuries of rule from places like Vilnius and Warsaw, and the incorporation of Ukrainian lands into the Soviet Union came only after military and political struggles convinced the Bolsheviks themselves that Ukraine had to be treated as a distinct political unit. After Kiev was occupied a dozen times, the Red Army was victorious, and a Soviet Ukraine was established as part of the new Soviet Union in 1922. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Whenever a new great power has emerged and faced an existing power, military conflict has ensued

Nouriel Roubini writes: The biggest geopolitical risk of our times is not a conflict between Israel and Iran over nuclear proliferation. Nor is it the risk of chronic disorder in an arc of instability that now runs from the Maghreb all the way to the Hindu Kush. It is not even the risk of Cold War II between Russia and the West over Ukraine.

All of these are serious risks, of course; but none is as serious as the challenge of sustaining the peaceful character of China’s rise. That is why it is particularly disturbing to hear Japanese and Chinese officials and analysts compare the countries’ bilateral relationship to that between Britain and Germany on the eve of World War I.

The disputes between China and several of its neighbors over disputed islands and maritime claims (starting with the conflict with Japan) are just the tip of the iceberg. As China becomes an even greater economic power, it will become increasingly dependent on shipping routes for its imports of energy, other inputs, and goods. This implies the need to develop a blue-water navy to ensure that China’s economy cannot be strangled by a maritime blockade.

But what China considers a defensive imperative could be perceived as aggressive and expansionist by its neighbors and the United States. And what looks like a defensive imperative to the US and its Asian allies – building further military capacity in the region to manage China’s rise – could be perceived by China as an aggressive attempt to contain it.

Historically, whenever a new great power has emerged and faced an existing power, military conflict has ensued. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Indian election and the lessons the West can take from Narendra Modi’s popularity

In anticipation of Narendra Modi’s election as India’s next prime minister, Jason Bruke writes: Modi has many critics and when the final results are released on Friday we will probably learn that, even in the event of victory, under a third of voters in India will have actually voted for him. Though he has been cleared by judicial inquiries of having allowed, or even encouraged, sectarian violence in 2002 in the state he runs, suspicions of deep-rooted prejudice remain. Others fear authoritarianism. Concerns about his accession to high office may prove unfounded, but are legitimate.

His supporters, however, see someone else. For if this new urban-rural lower middle-class – also, incidentally, the key constituency for political Islamists and, historically, European revolutionary organisations of every type – are still optimistic, they are also very frustrated. In Modi, they see a strong leader with a proven record of administration who will bring jobs and security, internal and external. They see someone who will restore “Indian pride”, a little battered in recent years. And above all, they see someone like them. It is their concerns, they believe, he articulates. “I understand you because I am from among you,” Modi told a rally in Gujarat, with some justification.

If much of Modi’s support is based in the hope that he can bring order to the chaos of modern India, some is also rooted in an inchoate resentment directed primarily at the local political elite. Unfortunately, this simmering anger results in outbursts that are often poorly aimed, with the west becoming collateral damage.

This is in part our fault. Our interaction with countries like India is complex. But our policymakers and official representatives are guilty of extraordinarily narrow vision which has helped open up space for people like Modi across much of a continent. This aids the sense among huge numbers of people that globalisation is a conversation from which, metaphorically and practically, they are excluded. That conversation takes place in English and it is worth noting that Modi will be the first leader of such prominence and power in India who, like the vast majority of his compatriots, is uncomfortable in what has become the world’s language. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Journalists are meant to cause trouble

Jason Mojica writes: This may surprise you, but Mohammed Fahmy, the imprisoned Al Jazeera English journalist who on Friday was awarded the World Press Freedom Award, is actually kind of a dick.

And I’m sure he feels the same way about me.

A couple of years before he and his colleagues Peter Greste and Beher Mohamed were arrested in Cairo and accused of running a terrorist cell from their rooms at the Marriott, I worked with Fahmy on a story I produced for VICE News. It was July 2011 and the toppling of President Hosni Mubarak earlier in the year hadn’t brought the sea change that Egyptians were hoping for. Protesters were expected to return to Tahrir Square in what was being dubbed, “Egypt’s Second Revolution.” The very short version of this story is that we were having trouble getting all of the elements of the story we were after when we met Fahmy who offered his services as a fixer. Now, we already had a fixer in Cairo, but I was willing to try anything at that point, so I hired Fahmy for a day to see what he could do. He delivered, but he didn’t gel with me and my crew. At the end of a very long day of shooting, we were happy to part ways.

The next morning, working again with our original fixer, we traveled to Port Said on the Suez Canal, where we heard rumors that the Egyptian Army was violently cracking down on protesters. We were there all of a half-hour before being accused by the locals of being “spies.” Luckily the Army got to us before the angry mob did. Our crew was detained, interrogated, interrogated again, driven back to Cairo, interrogated together, interrogated separately, and at around one or two in the morning, released into the custody of the U.S. State Department. When I got my phone back, I saw a BBM from Fahmy asking if it was true that we had been arrested.

“Just a little,” I replied.

He said he wanted to write a story about it, and asked for quotes from us. I declined, saying that I didn’t think there was much of a story — getting detained for long, boring periods of time followed by being unceremoniously released is quite commonplace in our line of work. I asked him as a favor to please not make a big deal about it, and if he did feel that he had to write something, to please just leave our names out of it.

He ran the story, names and all, which pissed me off. We traded shitty BBMs back and forth, and I came away thinking of him as a pushy, bull-headed bastard who cared more about getting a story out than for the people who that story was about.

In other words, a damn good journalist.

Journalists are people whose jobs it is to find out things that people don’t necessarily want them to find out. That often requires a type of aggression and self-righteous determination that rubs people the wrong way. And that’s one of the reasons we need to change the way we talk about press freedom. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Putin as a fascist leader bears total responsibility for crisis in Ukraine, commentator says

Paul Goble writes: Had Vladimir Putin accepted the Maidan’s ouster of discredited Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and agreed to accept the results of the upcoming elections, nothing that has occurred in Ukraine since that time would have happened, according to a Ukrainian commentator.

“Thousands of people would not have suddenly discovered in themselves an unconquerable desire for federalism,” Dmitry Litvin says. “Thousands would not have learned the meaning of ‘legitimacy,’ a term they had not been acquainted with. [And they] would not have suddenly decided they could not live … without state status for the Russian language and constitutional reforms”.

“If in short one man by the name of Putin had not decided that Ukrainian affairs are his affairs, then we now would not have to be catching terrorists and burying dozens of victims of resistance.” But that reflects an even deeper problem, one with which Russians, Ukrainians, and the world must deal.

That one man could do this is the clearest illustration of the Fuherprinzip, “the principle of the vozhd [great leader],” Litvin says. That principle, he continues, is “the central element of the state system under fascism.” Whatever the leader does or thinks must be what the entire society does and thinks.

To that end, the Ukrainian commentator continues, “the information milieu in Russia has been cleansed in such a way that outlets disseminate the worldview of the leader, his relation to people and events –and nothing more, except for entertainment.”

A second element of fascism in Russia requires is the articulation of “an historical mission,” something for which the leader “’was called’ to power” to realize. As defined by Putin, “Russia’s mission today is not distinguished from the mission of other fascist states – the defense of genuine traditional values from the influence of ‘destructive elements.’”

To be sure, Litvin continues, fascism “at the time of its first appearance in Europe” during the interwar period “declared ‘Judaism’ as the source of the destruction of genuine values and harshly rejected all forms of non-classical relations to life, art, labor, and science,” blaming these on the Jews.

Now, in fascism’s “second appearance in Europe,” the source of such destruction is Americanism. The Russian media under Putin’s direction is portraying Americanism as the primary enemy in just the same way Nazi media portrayed Jewishness and demanding that Russians do everything they can to fight against Americanism and its agents. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Israel can never justify the denial of Palestinian freedom

Gershon Baskin writes: John Kerry said the “A word” and was then forced to apologize.

I don’t have to apologize.

I repeat Kerry’s exact words and believe in every single one of them: “A unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens – or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.”

If the two-state solution is dead, as it seems it might be, Israel will become a unitary state with two populations, one with privileges and political rights and the other living in Bantustans, surrounded, isolated from each other, with no real control over their lives, denied their political rights. If Israel does not end its occupation over the Palestinian people, sooner, not later, Israel will become a new form of apartheid.

No, not apartheid like South Africa was, but a new type of political discrimination, forced separation, with separate legal systems, separate roads and more. One society will be the masters and the other the servants. To a large extent this already describes the reality. We already have a unitary state reality, and it has existed for 46 years. With no real hope for political change that will bring about the end of the Israeli occupation over the Palestinian people, this can no longer be thought of as a temporary situation over disputed territories. With annexation or without it, Israel is and has been in full control over the territories for the past 46 years. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Kerry’s ‘apartheid’ gambit a bigger deal in U.S. than in Israel

Gershom Gorenberg writes: On Monday morning, “Apartheid” was the first word in the headline of the editorial at the top of page 2 in Israel’s Ha’aretz daily. The newspaper’s editorial page is an old-fashioned grey mass of type, the print equivalent of the low monotonous growl of an aging foreign policy commentator on public radio. But Ha’aretz wasn’t growling about U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s leaked warning, published late Sunday night, that unless Israel reaches a two-state agreement, it risks becoming “an apartheid state.”

Rather, the editorial was about the planning bodies that allow Israeli settlement construction and block Palestinian building in Area C, the part of the West Bank where Israel rather than the Palestinian Authority runs day-to-day affairs. The paper urged Israel’s Supreme Court to rule against the discrimination.

From this we learn two things: First, intentionally or not, whoever leaked Kerry’s comments to a meeting of the Trilateral Commission on Friday did so with timing that guaranteed a muted coverage in Israel. Saturday night on the American East Coast was Sunday morning in Israel. The day’s ink-on-paper newspapers were already printed and lying on doorsteps. And since Monday was Israel’s’ memorial day for the Holocaust, the up-to-the-second media, online and on the air, were devoted entirely to painful memories and the political uses or misuses of them. On talk radio, talk about Kerry would have to wait.

The second lesson is that “apartheid” is a strong but not shocking word within Israel’s own political conversation. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The U.S. supreme court needs to keep up with our cellphones – and the NSA

Yochai Benkler writes: Tuesday’s US supreme court arguments involved a seemingly basic legal question about the future of the Fourth Amendment: do police officers need a warrant to search the cellphone of a person they arrest? But the two privacy cases pit against each other two very different conceptions of what it means to be a supreme court in the first place – and what it means to do constitutional law in the 21st century.

“With computers, it’s a new world,” several justices reportedly said in the chamber. Are they ready to be the kinds of justices who make sense of it?

Cellphones expose so much of our most personal data that the decision should be a 9-0 no-brainer. The basic problem that makes it a harder call is that lawyers and judges are by training and habit incrementalists, while information and communications technology moves too fast for incrementalism to keep up. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail