In the occupied territories, Israel always wins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Syrian forces shell cities as opposition picks leader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Reconsidering the Houla massacre

(Update below)

A new report in Germany’s leading daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), is gathering attention among those who view with suspicion most other reports on Syria being published in the Western media.

The report claims that the Houla massacre in which 108 people died on May 25 was not committed by members of the pro-Assad Shabiha but was in fact carried out by anti-Assad Sunni militants and that nearly all the victims were members of the Alawi and Shia minorities.

Moon of Alabama writes:

While I do not agree with the FAZ’s general editorial positions, I have followed Rainer Hermann reports for years. In my view he is an very reliable and knowledgeable reporter who would not have written the above if he had doubts or no additional confirmation about what he was told by the opposition members he talked to.

In a translation appearing at National Review, Hermann refers to eyewitness accounts, saying:

Those killed were almost exclusively from families belonging to Houla’s Alawi and Shia minorities. Over 90% of Houla’s population are Sunnis. Several dozen members of a family were slaughtered, which had converted from Sunni to Shia Islam.

Earlier reports, including one from Human Rights Watch which interviewed surviving relatives of the families, said that 62 of the dead belonged to Abdel Razzak family with Reuters reporting that this was a Sunni family. Hermann’s report provides no family names but asserts that almost none of those killed were Sunnis.

In the absence of any additional information, I’m inclined to still believe the original reports.

Who’s running with the Hermann report? Antiwar.com, National Review, Global Research, Moon of Alabama, DEBKA File, American Thinker, and Lew Rockwell — a curious amalgam of the left, right, and libertarian.

Update: Human Rights Watch confirmed to me that the Abdel Razzak family are indeed Sunnis and that after the massacre those members of the family who survived sought the protection of the Free Syrian Army.

Even before the FAZ report appeared, rumors had started circulating that the victims of the massacre were converts to Shiism and thus HRW asked residents of Houla (including survivors from the Abdel Razzak family) about these allegations but they all denied them and said that all those killed from that family were Sunnis. The majority of the victims of the massacre were from the Abdel Razzak family.

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Daniel Klaidman’s love affair with drones

Glenn Greenwald describes the video below as “one of the most flagrant and repellent examples of rank government propaganda masquerading as objective journalism that I have ever seen”.

In his ongoing defense of drone warfare — in tandem with the promotion of his new book — Klaidman writes:

The fact that a CIA or military operator can take out a target from the comfortable confines of their cubicle, far removed from the battlefield, without subjecting themselves to any risk, troubles people. The suggestion is that the ability to kill remotely dulls one’s moral sensibilities. But is that true? It’s hard to know without talking to CIA drone operators themselves. Since the program is covert, that’s not possible. But in reporting my book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency, I was able to get a remarkable, if second hand, glimpse into the mind set of a CIA drone operator.

In the book, I report out a conversation between the State Department’s legal adviser, Harold Koh, and a drone operator at CIA headquarters. Koh, perhaps the most forceful advocate of human rights law in the Obama administration, was preparing a speech in defense of targeted killing, and wanted to do his homework; he wasn’t going to put his reputation in jeopardy without knowing the drone strike program and its protocols inside and out. He spent hours at Langley grilling agency lawyers and operators. The operators were naturally suspicious of Koh—a wariness only fueled by Koh’s blunt demeanor. “I hear you guys have a PlayStation mentality,” he said.

The operators of the unmanned drones were civilians, but most were ex-Air Force pilots who took umbrage at the idea that they were “cubicle warriors” morally detached from killing. The lead operator lit into Koh. “I used to fly my own air missions,” he began defensively. “I dropped bombs, hit my target load, but had no idea who I hit. Here I can look at their faces. I watch them for hours, see these guys playing with their kids and wives. When I get them alone, I have no compunction about blowing them to bits. But I wouldn’t touch them with civilians around. After the strike, I see the bodies being carried out of the house. I see the women weeping and in positions of mourning. That’s not PlayStation; that’s real. My job is to watch after the strike too. I count the bodies and watch the funerals. I don’t let others clean up the mess.”

The conversation must have proved persuasive; Koh gave his speech, defending the legal underpinning of the job the drone operator and his colleagues do.

The expression “take out” has become so widely adopted it might seem that it barely warrants attention these days, but still, I find it a revealing euphemism. Journalists like Klaidman clearly prefer “take out” rather than “kill” even though the expression conjures up images of a gangster ordering the elimination of a rival. To speak of taking out targets is to transparently align oneself with those who exercise the power to order executions.

Klaidman mounts a defense of drone operators and attempts to demonstrate that their remoteness from the battlefield does not shield them from the moral weight of warfare. Indeed, through the words of the operative that he cites, Klaidman implies that a drone operator who spends hours following the movements of his target, acquires through this intimate view a deeper and more moral understanding of what it means to kill. He ignores the possibility that the predator hunting his prey gains just as much insight into premeditated murder.

Both Klaidman and the unnamed drone operator invoke this perverse image of humanitarian concern: that if a child’s father is blown to shreds but the child survives because the assassin didn’t fire his missile until after the child had moved a safe distance from the blast zone, then the drone operator, the CIA or Pentagon, the U.S. government, and by extension the American people, can all regard themselves as merciful. Look, we don’t kill the little children. How tender and caring we all are.

In the comic book categories through which Americans are encouraged to view the world, label someone a “terrorist,” and all other labels, such as “father,” “husband,” “brother,” suddenly fade into irrelevance.

For those not fully convinced by Klaidman’s argument, the apparent clincher is that the only alternative to drone strikes is much more destructive air strikes. A Hellfire missile does less damage than a 500lb bomb and that’s why its use constitutes a “humanitarian advance.” Case closed, Klaidman would have it.

The lie embedded in this line of reasoning is that absent the bomb or the missile we are inviting another 9/11 attack on the United States and thus strikes of one kind or another are a necessity. Klaidman, like all true believers in the war on terrorism, refuses to acknowledge that just as was the case eleven years ago, the ability of terrorists to attack targets in the United States does not hinge on the freedom of movement of a handful of al Qaeda operatives in North Waziristan.

Klaidman’s how-I-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-drone mission seems like a kind of sexual infatuation. During a couple of years research he has concluded that drones are simply irresistible. And since he appears to have confined himself to interviewing advocates of remote warfare it’s not surprising he would reach that conclusion. Presumably the idea of going to Pakistan and talking to survivors of drone attacks is something Klaidman would have viewed as unthinkable — even though had he wanted to balance his research in this way, I have no doubt that The Bureau of Investigative Journalism or Clive Stafford Smith at Reprieve could have facilitated such interviews.

Klaidman makes a feeble appeal for greater transparency around Obama’s drone warfare policy, but secrecy applied to drone attacks is no different from secrecy applied anywhere else: it’s primary function is to impede the political, legal, and media scrutiny that might undermine the operation of the program. As always, secrecy serves as a license for criminality.

The drone operator is really the high tech equivalent of a sniper and as Randall Collins has noted, the sniper, even within the military, is regarded as a different kind of killer.

Snipers tend to be disliked even by their fellow soldiers, or at least regarded with uneasiness. A British sniper officer in World War I noted that infantrymen did not like to mingle with the snipers “for there was something about them that set them apart from ordinary men and made the soldiers uncomfortable”… World War II soldiers sometimes jeered at them. U.S. snipers in Vietnam were met with the comment: “Here comes Murder Incorporated.”

For Klaidman though, the unassailable virtue of drone warfare is precision. “It is precisely the pinpoint accuracy of drones that makes them such a significant humanitarian advance over other kinds of weaponry.”

But as a method of assassination, a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone is actually among the least precise weapons. That’s why Osama bin Laden was assassinated by a more traditional method — a bullet in the forehead — Obama couldn’t risk the uncertainty that would prevail from a drone attack.

And those of us who object to drone warfare are not as Klaidman would have it, afraid of the drones’ supernatural power — we are afraid of a very worldly presidential power which claims the right to execute anyone anywhere.

When a handful of officials can meet in secret, review secret evidence, and apply a secret legal rationale to issue a death sentence and when the revelation of a “kill list” created in this way prompts virtually no public outcry, then we should not only fear our government — we should fear the passivity of those around us who seem blithely indifferent about America’s slide towards totalitarian rule.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What then does the US do?

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

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Can U.S.-Pakistan relationship be salvaged?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements

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

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

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

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

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‘There will be no Palestinian state’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Palestinian prisoners to launch solidarity hunger strike

Ma’an News Agency reports: Palestinian prisoners are planning a one day hunger strike on Monday in solidarity with three prisoners who are still refusing food in protest against Israeli policies, a PA official said Saturday.

Prisoners affairs minister Issa Qaraqe said that all prisoners would return their meals in a gesture of solidarity with Mahmoud al-Sarsak, Akram al-Rekhawi and Samer al-Barq.

Prisoners announced the action in a statement, Qaraqe said, and Israeli prison authorities have also been also notified.

Mahmoud al-Sarsak, 25, from Rafah in southern Gaza, has been on hunger strike for 83 days. A soccer player on Palestine’s national team, he has been detained by Israel for nearly three years without charge and is demanding his release.

Al-Rekhawi, 38, has been held at Ramle prison clinic since his arrest in 2004 and suffers chronic illnesses including diabetes and asthma. He has refused food for 59 days.

Samer al-Barq, 38, joined the mass hunger strike on April 17, but ended the strike on May 14 along with around 2,000 other prisoners when Israel agreed to “facilitate” the detainees’ demand to end its policy of detention without charge or trial.

He relaunched his hunger strike after Israel renewed his administrative detention order on May 21.

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Why Obama will free Jonathan Pollard

Grant Smith writes: The US Department of Justice has released new files about convicted spy Jonathan Pollard’s bid for presidential clemency. Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after passing more than a million highly classified documents to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the US Navy. Documents in the Freedom of Information Act response (PDF) reference 32 pages of government agency deliberative communications and 37 pages of new communications between Pardon Attorney Ronald Rogers and Pollard’s legal team — all produced since July of 2011. While the contents have been withheld, their existence signals that the Pollard commutation request may be nearing a conclusion within the Obama administration. June 18 could mark the culmination of a massive lobbying campaign for release. Obama’s dismal record on Israeli accountability suggests Pollard will soon walk free.

Released documents reveal that the Rabbinical Assembly — claiming to represent “1.5 million Jews worldwide” — passed a formal resolution asking Obama to commute Pollard’s sentence. Rabbi David Zwiebel of Agudath Israel of America and Moshe Kantor of the European Jewish Congress also urged Pollard’s release. Letters demanding release also continue to flood in from former and current members of the US Congress. Steve Symms, Matt Salmon, Alan Simpson, Robert Wexler, Barney Frank, and Gary Ackerman joined the ranks of fellow representatives already demanding release. Moshe Kahalon, Israel’s Minister of Communications, gushed to Obama “I have no doubt that your decision to release Jonathan Pollard now as a humanitarian expression of justice and compassion will bring great relief to many, and will remove this impediment to the friendship between our nations.” Former New York City Mayor David Dinkins is also now rooting for Pollard’s release. Upping the ante, Israeli President Shimon Peres has explicitly linked his receipt of a US Presidential Medal of Freedom during a special June 18 White House dinner to Pollard’s freedom gambit — channeling even more intense pressure on Obama to take action in a specific context, place and time.

The linkage to Obama’s reelection bid is obvious. Israel’s Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger brashly stated that releasing Pollard would be good for Obama’s reelection campaign. But what makes Pollard worth expending such formidable lobbying and political capital? Why have Israel and its Western lobbying organizations made Pollard a key issue, almost on the same footing as massive US taxpayer-funded aid packages and confronting Iran? The Israel lobby effort is trying to achieve much more than simply putting Congress and a sitting president through their paces. [Continue reading…]

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Tehran’s views on U.S. politics, nuclear talks

Mehdi Khaliji writes: Iran’s ruling regime pays close attention to American politics in its own calculations about how to negotiate with Washington—and how to game the new diplomatic effort. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his inner circle, for example, believe that President Barack Obama needs to talk to Iran, but they also sense that the U.S. president will be unable to make any concessions because it might endanger his reelection bid.

So Tehran has concluded that Obama needs to prolong the talks and achieve minor goals to demonstrate that talks are making progress.

The regime also believes that reaching an agreement with Washington before the presidential election will be futile, since a new administration could change U.S. discourse and any agreement that is reached before the election.

As a result, the regime has concluded that both sides will benefit in delaying any substantive agreement until after the U.S. elections in November.

In the meantime, Khamenei continues to believe that neither the United States nor Israel is willing to attack Iranian nuclear facilities, at least before the U.S. election. So rather than seek a solution to the standoff, Iran’s short-term goal is to decrease diplomatic pressure, or at least prevent new sanctions before the election.

Historically, the Islamic Republic has viewed Republican presidents more favorably than Democratic ones. In 2008, nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani said publically that Iran would prefer that a Republican win the presidential election because Democrats incessantly pressured Tehran. In trying to game diplomatic talks in its favor, Iran could even employ the nuclear issue to influence the U.S. presidential election—in an attempt to replicate the impact of the 1979-1981 hostage crisis. President Jimmy Carter’s inability to resolve that crisis contributed to Ronald Reagan’s victory. [Continue reading…]

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The bloody Islamic insurgency in Russia’s backyard

Anna Nemtsova writes: The officers nervously cocked their rifles as the crowd began to swell. The Kirovsky police station in the capital city of Russia’s Dagestan region was now under siege. But the angry cohort outside the station walls on May 27 wasn’t composed of the bearded, gun-toting militants one might expect in this insurgency-racked region, but a crowd of enraged women in hijabs and ankle-length dresses. It wasn’t the first angry mob the officers had faced down, but a crowd of only women was unprecedented. Their dry faces wrinkled by sleepless nights, the women stormed the courtyard looking for their husbands and sons, locked in the basement cells, where they were thought to be beaten or, worse, tortured with electricity.

Yelling at the top of their lungs, the women, mostly Salafi Muslims, demanded that police let in their lawyers. Desperate to make sure that one of the women’s sons, a 19-year-old named Abdurakhman Magomedov, detained a few hours earlier, was not hidden in a trunk of a police car, the women blocked the driveway. They yelled that they would blow themselves up if the authorities didn’t answer their demands. After a few phone calls and text messages went out, hundreds of the women’s infuriated male relatives and friends drove up to the police checkpoint. With iPads and cell phones held aloft, they began taking photos of the men in uniform.

The Dagestan insurgency began with the spillover of militant activity following Russia’s harsh crackdown on neighboring Chechnya in the late 1990s. Although the region is traditionally Sufi, militant Salafi imams have been making inroads in the North Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In recent years, the region has been the scene of a vicious cycle of violence and repression: police and special forces have arrested thousands of young Salafists throughout the North Caucasus republics, which in turn has driven more young men — and increasingly women — to various jihadi groups that aim to establish an Islamic state encompassing the entire North Caucasus. With thousands of active fighters, the insurgency in Dagestan is now reportedly the largest in the Caucasus. [Continue reading…]

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America, oil, and war in the Middle East

Toby Craig Jones writes: Middle Eastern oil has enchanted global powers and global capital since the early twentieth century. Its allure has been particularly powerful for the United States. The American romance began in earnest in the 1930s, when geologists working for Standard Oil of California discovered commercial quantities of oil on the eastern shores of Saudi Arabia. In the years that followed, enchantment turned into obsession. Shortly after World War II it became clear that oil was more than merely a coveted industrial commodity. The most visible and celebrated event in that history occurred when Franklin D. Roosevelt hosted ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Saud, the founding monarch of Saudi Arabia, aboard the USS Quincy on Egypt’s Great Bitter Lake in February 1945. The meeting permanently linked Middle Eastern oil with American national security. It also helped forge one of the twentieth century’s most important strategic relationships, in which the Saudis would supply cheap oil to global markets in exchange for American protection. A bargain was made. And so too was a future tinderbox.

Over the course of the twentieth century, preserving the security not just of Saudi Arabia but of the entire Persian Gulf region and the flow of Middle Eastern oil were among the United States’ chief political-economic concerns. The pursuit of American power in the Gulf has been fraught with peril and has proved costly in terms of both blood and treasure. Oil has flowed, although not without difficulty. Since the late 1970s the Gulf has been rocked by revolution and almost permanent war. Security, if measured by the absence of conflict, has been elusive, and safeguarding the Persian Gulf and the region’s oil producers has meant increasingly more direct and dearer forms of U.S. intervention.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the American military occupation there represented only the latest stage of American militarism in the Middle East. While more considerable in scale, duration, and devastation than previous military misadventures in the region, the Iraq War was the outgrowth of several decades of strategic thinking and policy making about oil. It is true, of course, that terrorism and especially the attacks of September 11, 2001, helped accelerate the drive to war in 2003, but to focus too much on 9/11 is to overlook and discount the ways that oil and oil producers have long been militarized, the role oil has played in regional confrontation for almost four decades, and the connections between the most recent confrontation with Iraq and those of the past. Oil and war have become increasingly interconnected in the Middle East. Indeed, that relationship has become a seemingly permanent one. This outcome was not inevitable; the United States has not only been mired in the middle, but its approach to oil has also abetted the outcome.

It is also important to understand the U.S. emphasis on security, and the contradictions of its approach to it, in a broader regional context. While this essay does not dwell on the U.S.-Israeli relationship, U.S. Persian Gulf policy and America’s relationship with the region’s oil producers were often at odds with the alliance between the United States and Israel. The tensions created by American policies in the Gulf have undermined U.S. claims about pursuing regional security more generally. This contradiction played out most spectacularly during the 1973 oil crisis. [Continue reading…]

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