The creative destruction of Iran

Lara Friedman writes: Discussion of military action against Iran is again taking center stage. It takes me back to a late September 2002 meeting, when I brought a former senior Israeli official to see the late Congressman Tom Lantos, then the ranking minority member of the House International Relations Committee. Our meeting focused on Iraq, with Lantos arguing passionately for pre-emptive U.S. military action against Saddam Hussein, who he compared to Hitler. Lantos dismissed out of hand our Israeli visitor’s suggestion that a war might be destabilizing to the region and to Israel, telling us (and this is close to a direct quote):

The Middle East is like a kaleidoscope. If you pick up a kaleidoscope and look through it, you don’t see anything special. But if you shake the kaleidoscope and look through it again, you see something more beautiful than was there before.

We were taken aback. One of the most powerful members of Congress — a Holocaust survivor with unchallenged moral authority — was saying, in effect, that the U.S. should wage war not to achieve a specific goal, but to shake things up, in the hopes that out of the chaos would emerge more attractive options.

Advocates of military action against Iran today are relying on a similar “shake the kaleidoscope” approach. Their arguments are predicated on the belief that all other presently available options are unacceptable. They believe that Iran is immune to pressure; that Iran will abuse diplomacy to run out the clock and go nuclear before the world can stop it; and that containment — learning to live with a nuclear or even a “nuclear-capable” Iran — is a non-starter.

Most war advocates concede that military action will at best delay — not stop — Iran’s nuclear program. Most admit that it will probably kill many innocent Iranian civilians — the same civilians whose human rights many of them also claim to defend (AIPAC’s simultaneous campaign for human rights in Iran, and its campaign for an ever-harder line on Iran, culminating in the current effort to get the Senate to adopt a pro-war resolution, is a prominent example of this phenomenon). And most acknowledge that an attack on Iran could be profoundly destabilizing to the region and could threaten U.S. interests around the world.

Yet their conclusion is that military action is nonetheless both desirable and inevitable. [Continue reading…]

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Nuclear alarmism over Iran is backing us into a corner

Shashank Joshi warns that nuclear alarmism on both sides of the Atlantic “could drag us into an unwinnable and unnecessary war.”

A nuclear Iran is profoundly undesirable – but it’s also eminently containable.

The … argument, that Iran is too crazy to be deterred, is historically untenable. Stalin’s Soviet Union was viewed in exactly the same terms. NSC-68, one of the most famous American intelligence assessments of the cold war, judged Moscow to be “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own”, aimed at “domination of the Eurasian landmass”. That was the year after the Soviets’ first nuclear test. Mao Zedong, who was to acquire a bomb shortly thereafter, welcomed a nuclear war in which “imperialism would be razed to the ground, and the whole world would become socialist”.

Senator Joseph Lieberman last week fumed that “containment might have been viable for the Soviet Union during the cold war, but it’s not going to work with the current fanatical Islamist regime in Tehran”. Well, fanaticism has pedigree. Stalin and Mao might have been bloodthirsty fanatics, but they were not suicidal. Nor is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Last week, two of America’s top intelligence officials told a senate hearing two important things. First, any Iranian decision to build a nuclear weapon would be based “on a cost-benefit analysis”. Even fanatical theocracies are governed by reason. Second, “Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict”. If Iran is deemed to be unlikely to start a conventional war, it’s not going to start a nuclear war.

And there’s a simple reason for this. The area around Tehran contains a fifth of Iran’s population, and half of the country’s industry. A single Israeli thermonuclear bomb would wipe this out in the blink of an eye. Iran’s abhorrent calls to wipe Israel off the map are gestures as empty as Mao’s nuclear posturing.

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U.S. hints at possibility of arming Syrian rebels

Reuters reports: The United States on Tuesday appeared to open the door to eventually arming the Syrian opposition, saying if a political solution to the crisis were impossible it might have to consider other options.

The comments, made by officials at both the White House and the State Department, marked a shift in emphasis by Washington, which thus far has stressed its policy of not arming the opposition and has said little about alternatives.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet with representatives of some 70 countries in Tunis on Friday for the first “Friends of Syria” meeting to coordinate the international community’s next steps to respond the nearly year-long uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“We still believe that a political solution is what’s needed in Syria,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

“We don’t want to take actions that would contribute to the further militarization of Syria, because that could take the country down a dangerous path. But we don’t rule out additional measures.”

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, asked if the United States was shifting its stance on arming the rebels, said Washington did not want to see the violence increase and was concentrating on political efforts to halt the bloodshed.

“That said … if we can’t get Assad to yield to the pressure that we are all bringing to bear, we may have to consider additional measures.”

She declined to elaborate on what those measures might be.

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Khader Adnan ends hunger strike after deal is struck

The Los Angeles Times reports: Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan, who had refused to eat for 66 days to protest his detention without charge or trial, agreed Tuesday to end his hunger strike in return for his release April 17, according to Adnan’s lawyer Jawad Boulus.

Boulus took Adnan’s case to the Israeli Supreme Court last week seeking to secure his release after reports from Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, who had visited him at Ziv Hospital in northern Israel, expressing concern about his health condition. However, after reaching a deal with the state prosecutor, the petition was withdrawn.

Adnan, 33, an alleged member of the Islamic Jihad organization, was arrested Dec. 17 and placed in administrative detention, which allowed Israeli authorities to hold him for a period that could be extended indefinitely without charge or trial. There are currently more than 300 Palestinians held in administrative detention.

A military court sentenced Adnan on Jan. 8 to four months of administrative detention, which means he would not have been released before May 8.

An Israeli Justice Ministry statement said Adnan will be released April 17 and that it will not ask for an extension of his administrative detention.

“As long as no new significant and substantive material is added regarding the appellant, there is no intention to extend the administrative detention,” the ministry said.

This comes shortly after Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev was insisting that Adnan is a “cold-blooded killer” who must be kept in detention for the safety of the public:

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Fear mounts in Israel of Iranian counterattack

The Associated Press reports: Despite its confident saber-rattling, Israel’s concern is growing that the country is vulnerable to a devastating counterstrike if it attacks Iran’s nuclear program.

An announcement this week that a mobile rocket-defense system will soon be built just outside Tel Aviv, where Israel’s sprawling military headquarters sits smack in the middle of office towers, museums, night spots and hotels, caused some jitters. Israeli officials cite intelligence reports that Tel Aviv would be a main target of any attack.

Increasingly, the debate in Israel is turning to whether a strike can do enough damage to the Iranian program to be worth the risks. Experts believe that any attack would at best set back, but not cripple, the Iranians.

Skepticism about Israel’s ability to defend itself runs deep here. Israelis still remember Iraqi Scuds landing in the center of the country 20 years ago. In 2006, the Lebanese Hezbollah militia seemed able to rain rockets at will during a monthlong conflict with the Jewish state. A scathing government report issued months ago suggested the nation is still woefully unprepared.

In a questionably timed move, the Cabinet minister in charge of civil defense in recent days resigned to become the ambassador to faraway China.

The Iron Dome missile defense shield has frequently been touted as a vital element in Israel’s multilayered missile defense program, yet surprisingly a week ago it was reported that new batteries will not be deployed even though so far only three have been deployed while 14 are estimated to be needed to cover te whole country.

Hebrew daily “Yediot Ahronot” reports that the Ministry of Defense will stop procurements of the Iron Dome anti-missile system, due to cuts in the defense budget.

Ministry of Defense director general Udi Shani notified Iron Dome’s manufacturer, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. that it will not procure another Iron Dome battery. The IDF currently operates three batteries, and the Ministry of Defense had planned to procure two more.

Shani notified his US counterparts of the decision, saying that it was due to budget constraints. A defense official said that US aid did not meet all the requirements, and that the Ministry of Defense will have to make up one third of the expenditure from its shekel budget.

An IDF source said, “The current budget sends the Army back to 2003, when the IDF trained less than in any year.” Last week, “Yediot Ahronot” reported that the IDF cancelled a division-level exercise and five brigade-level exercises.

Ministry of Defense said in response, “In the economic reality, the budget is insufficient to complete procurement of the batteries. This issue will be submitted to the cabinet shortly.”

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Future will be shaped by the rise of the angry young man

Afshin Molavi writes: Last October, amid the din of the Arab uprisings, the euro-zone crisis, the lingering effects of the Japan earthquake, and the US gearing up for a election season, a quiet milestone was passed: the world population hit the seven billion mark.

This is, on one level, very good news. It means that advances in medicine, nutrition, and education over the past six decades have dramatically raised life expectancies, reduced infant mortality rates, and eradicated previously fatal diseases. Over the past 60 years, we have become healthier and wealthier than at any time in human history – and yet, still, we stand on a precipice.

Of those seven billion humans on our planet, nearly half are under the age of 24.

In many of the poorest and developing countries, those numbers are even more stark, with 60 to 70 per cent of the population falling into that age group, particularly in poor and developing countries unable to cope with the demands of young populations. For example, three out of four Nigerians are under 35. In Yemen, the numbers are even more stark. Three out of four are 25 or under. Across the Middle East and North Africa region, two out of three people are 29 or younger.

We are currently living amid the largest cohort of youth in human history. Young populations can be a demographic gift or a demographic bomb. A gift when governments effectively employ them, deriving sustainable productive value from their labour while the young people derive meaningful work experience, raise their incomes, marry, have children, invest, and continue the cycle of life.

The next decade, however, will likely see some demographic bombs blowing up across the world as youth bulges push against weak or underperforming economies and unemployment and underemployment plague societies from Nigeria to Pakistan, from Egypt to large parts of India and sub-Saharan Africa, and in many European countries.

While this environment will inflict damage on men and women alike, the effect on young men will prove to be more destabilising.

The world over the next decade will be defined by the Angry Young Man, born amid this historic baby boom, and now entering the netherworld between youth and adulthood, unable to find a job, angry at his government, hyper-aware of the inequalities around him, frustrated by corruption, and connected to the outside world through social networking sites and satellite television. From Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis to Tahrir Square in Cairo, from Athens and Tehran to Delhi and Karachi, the angry young man, fist pumping the air, has become a feature of our world. [Continue reading…]

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Khader Adnan and now-normalized Western justice

Glenn Greenwald writes: Each year, the U.S. State Department, as required by law, issues a “Human Rights Report” which details abuses by other countries. To call it an exercise in hypocrisy is to understate the case: it is almost impossible to find any tyrannical power denounced by the State Department which the U.S. Government (and its closest allies) do not regularly exercise itself. Indeed, it’s often impossible to imagine how the authors of these reports can refrain from cackling mischievously over the glaring ironies of what they are denouncing (my all-time favorite example is discussed in the update here).

In 2010, the State Department included a long section on the oppressive detention practices of China. The “principal human rights problems” of the tyrannical Chinese government include “a lack of due process in judicial proceedings” and “the use of administrative detention.” Indeed, “arbitrary arrest and detention remained serious problems. The law grants police broad administrative detention powers and the ability to detain individuals for extended periods without formal arrest or criminal charges.” Can one even find the words to condemn these Chinese monsters?

Time‘s Tony Karon today writes about the case of Khader Adnan, a 33-year-old Palestinian baker currently imprisoned without charges by the Israeli government on accusations that he is a spokesman for Islamic Jihad. To protest his due-process-free imprisonment and that of thousands of other Palestinians, Adnan has been on a sustained hunger strike and is now close to death. Karon writes:

Israel has not charged Adnan with any crime . . . Israel deals with such cases using a legal framework based on emergency laws left over from British colonial rule to detain any suspect for six months at a time without needing to provide evidence or lay charges against them. When a detainee’s six-month spell has expired, the detention can simply be renewed.

Writing today about the Adnan case in The National, Joseph Dana explains that Israel imprisons Adnan and so many like him pursuant to “a framework of laws and statutes to govern all aspects of life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” and “many, if not most, of the laws governing movement of Palestinians, freedom of speech and association are draconian in nature; none is more alarming than the administrative detention order. The order enables Israel to hold prisoners indefinitely without charging them or allowing them to stand trial.” [Continue reading…]

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The small overnight strike that’s so easy it hasn’t happened

Among the supporters of a strike on Iran the only two things that can reliably be said are that none believe in Murphy’s Law or the law of unintended consequences.

The New York Times reports:

The possible outlines of an Israeli attack have become a source of debate in Washington, where some analysts question whether Israel even has the military capacity to carry it off. One fear is that the United States would be sucked into finishing the job — a task that even with America’s far larger arsenal of aircraft and munitions could still take many weeks, defense analysts said. Another fear is of Iranian retaliation.

“I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll say, ‘Here’s how it’s going to be done — handful of planes, over an evening, in and out,’ ” said Andrew R. Hoehn, a former Pentagon official who is now director of the Rand Corporation’s Project Air Force, which does extensive research for the United States Air Force.

Enter, Edward Luttwak, champion of the “small, overnight strike.” He argues this is the only option worth considering and were it not for alarmists in the Pentagon, this is the option Obama could employ. Obama and Bush have been hamstrung by planners who only offer an air war rather than an air strike.

[T]his war planning denied to the president and American strategy the option of interrupting Iran’s nuclear efforts by a stealthy overnight attack against the handful of buildings that contain the least replaceable components of Iran’s uranium hexafluoride and centrifuge enrichment cycle — and which would rely on electronic countermeasures to protect aircraft instead of the massive bombardment of Iran’s air defenses.

That option was flatly ruled out as science fiction, while the claim that Iran’s rulers might be too embarrassed to react at all — they keep telling their people that Iran’s enemies are terrified by its immense might — was dismissed as political fiction.

Yet this kind of attack was carried out in September 2007, when the Israeli air force invisibly and inaudibly attacked the nuclear reactor that Syria’s Assad regime had imported from North Korea, wholly destroying it with no known casualties. To be sure, an equivalent attack on Iran’s critical nuclear nodes would have to be several times larger. But it could still be inaudible and invisible, start and end in one night, and kill very few on the ground.

The resulting humiliation of the regime might be worthwhile in itself — the real fantasy is a blindly nationalist reaction from a thoroughly disenchanted population. In fact, given the probability that an attack could only delay Iran’s nuclear efforts by several years, the only one worth considering at all is the small, overnight strike.

What’s curious about Luttwak’s argument is that he hangs short of advocating that Israel should overcome America’s trepidation. When he says that the overnight strike he envisions would need to be several times larger than Israel’s 2007 strike on Syria, he declines to specify whether this puts such an operation inside or outside Israel’s capacity. The implication seems to be that what Israel might choose to do it will only be forced to do because the U.S. failed to take on the responsibility.

Perhaps the most revealing element in Luttwak’s argument is his throwaway remark towards the end: that an attack on Iran’s key nuclear installations might be worth conducting if for no other reason than to humiliate the regime by showing that such an attack could not be prevented. Luttwak might not be an Israeli, but he thinks like an Israeli. This has less to do with protecting Israel from an existential threat and much more to do with asserting dominance.

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USA Today founder says Iran’s nuclear plans are no big deal

Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today and former head of Gannett, says there’s no justification for so much alarm around Iran’s nuclear ambitions. (For the umpteenth time it should be noted that no one outside Iran actually knows for sure what those ambitions are. For that matter, the Iranians themselves may still remain undecided about their goals.) Neuharth says:

It’s so simple: Countries that have nuclear weapons and know when or how to use them — or more likely not use them — will be the survivors and leaders.

Those who misuse them will die as other countries with nuclear weapons retaliate.

It appears USA Today took some heat from those who think it’s the duty of every mainstream U.S. publication to join in the hysteria being fomented by Israel’s leaders and so Neuharth’s op-ed is now “balanced” by some feedback from one of Washington’s chief fear-mongers, Dennis Ross:

Iran with nukes means a nuclear war in the Middle East becomes far more likely. With no one able to strike second, everyone will be on a hair trigger in a region with lots of triggers for conflict.

There is a host of assumptions loaded into those two sentences.

Firstly, the catalyst for nuclear proliferation across the region would be the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran. Why so? Why wouldn’t the most obvious such catalyst be the first country to have introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East, namely, Israel? Conversely, wouldn’t the most effective way of preventing a regional nuclear arms race be for the sole nuclear power to disarm before anyone else acquired nuclear weapons?

Secondly, even if as Ross implicitly predicts, Iran risks promoting a Middle East nuclear arms race, is it really true that within a densely clustered group of nuclear armed states, each state has a greater incentive to initiate a preemptive strike because no one will have a realistic second strike capability?

It seems like the opposite argument carries as much if not more weight. That is to say, the closer the proximity between nuclear adversaries, the less the risk that they will attack each other. Why? Fallout.

The only country in the Middle East that suffers less risk that radiation released by its own weapons might drift back towards its own territory is Israel. Moreover, Israel is surrounded and interlaced by a unique human shield: five million Palestinians.

A nuclear strike on Israel would put at risk the lives of every member of a population whose interests every political leader across the region has long declared as dear to their hearts. (This is not to deny that these pro-Palestinian sentiments have often been utterly cynical, but that cynicism notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine how an Iranian leader or anyone else could justify the harm to Palestinians that would be caused by a nuclear strike on Israel.)

Does the fact that there are 25,000 Jews living in Tehran offer Iran a similar form of protection from an Israeli nuclear attack? I don’t think so.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said he believes the Iranian government is a “rational actor.”

The same should be said of Israel.

However passionately its leaders might express their fear of an “existential threat” posed by Iran, the Islamic republic’s acquisition of a few nuclear weapons would not threaten Israel’s existence while it maintains an arsenal of as many as 200 nuclear weapons. What it would do would not merely threaten but irrevocably alter the regional balance of power.

A Middle East in which Israel was no longer the sole nuclear power, would be a region in which Israel could no longer enjoy the same level of political impunity. The Jewish state would lose its swagger. The pressure for it to make peace with its neighbors and to recognize the political rights of the Palestinians would be stronger than ever. Iran, cast in its current role as a putatively genocidal arch-enemy, is merely a device used to forestall this political day of reckoning.

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You can’t get there from here: How to get beyond the two-state trap

Jeff Halper writes: Even as I write this, the bulldozers have been busy throughout that one indivisible country known by the bifurcated term Israel/Palestine. Palestinian homes, community centers, livestock pens and other “structures” (as the Israel authorities dispassionately call them) have been demolished in the Old City, Silwan and various parts of “Area C” in the West Bank, as well among the Bedouin — Israeli citizens — in the Negev/Nakab. This is merely mopping up, herding the last of the Arabs into their prison cells where, forever, they will cease to be heard or heard from, a non-issue in Israel and, eventually, in the wider world distracted from bigger, more pressing matters.

An as-yet confidential report submitted by the European consuls in Jerusalem and Ramallah raises urgent concerns over the “forced expulsion” of Palestinians — a particularly strong term for European diplomats to use — from Area C of the West Bank (the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control but which today contains less than 5% of the Palestinian population). Focusing particularly on the rise in house demolitions by the Israeli authorities and the growing economic distress of the Palestinians living in Area C, the report mentions the fertile and strategic Jordan Valley (where the Palestinian population has declined from 250,000 to 50,000 since the start of the Occupation), plans to relocate 3000 Jahalin Bedouins to a barren hilltop above the Jerusalem garbage dump and the ongoing but accelerated demolition of Palestinian homes (500 in 2011).

At the same time the “judaization” of Jerusalem continues apace, a “greater” Israeli Jerusalem steadily isolating the Palestinian parts of the city from the rest of Palestinian society while ghettoizing their inhabitants, more than 100,000 of which now live beyond the Wall. Some 120 homes were demolished in East Jerusalem in 2011; over the same period the Israeli government announced the construction of close to 7000 housing units for Jews in East and “Greater” Jerusalem. “If current trends are not stopped and reversed,” said a previous EU report, “the establishment of a viable Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders seems more remote than ever. The window for a two-state solution is rapidly closing….”

In fact, it closed long ago. In terms of settlers and Palestinians, the Israeli government treats the whole country as one. Last year it demolished three times more homes of Israeli citizens (Arabs, of course) than it did in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The demolition of Bedouin homes in the Negev/Nakab is part of a plan approved by the government to remove 30,000 citizens from their homes and confine them to townships.

None of this concerns “typical” Israelis even if they have heard of it (little appears in the news). For them, the Israeli-Arab conflict was won and forgotten years ago, somewhere around 2004 when Bush informed Sharon that the US does not expect Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders, thus effectively ending the “two-state solution,” and Arafat “mysteriously” died.

Since then, despite occasional protests from Europe, the “situation” has been normalized. Israelis enjoy peace and quiet, personal security and a booming economy (with the usual neoliberal problems of fair allocation). The unshakable, bi-partisan support of the American government and Congress effectively shields it from any kind of international sanctions. Above all, Israeli Jews have faith that those pesky Arabs living somewhere “over there” beyond the Walls and barbed-wire barriers have been pacified and brought under control by the IDF. A recent poll found that “security,” the term Israelis use instead of “occupation” or “peace,” was ranked eleventh among the concerns of the Israeli public, trailing well behind employment, crime, corruption, religious-secular differences, housing and other more pressing issues. [Continue reading…]

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Does AIPAC want war?

Robert Naiman writes: For all it has done to promote confrontation between the United States and Iran, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has worked to avoid the public perception that AIPAC is openly promoting war. In AIPAC’s public documents, the emphasis has always been on tougher sanctions. (If you make sanctions “tough” enough – an effective embargo – that is an act of war, but it is still at one remove from saying that the US should start bombing.)

But a new Senate effort to move the goalposts of US policy to declare it “unacceptable” for Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capability – not a nuclear weapon, but the technical capacity to create one – gives AIPAC the opportunity to make a choice which all can observe. If the Lieberman resolution becomes an ask for AIPAC lobbyists at the March AIPAC policy conference, then the world will know: AIPAC is lobbying Congress for war with Iran.

Sponsors of the Lieberman resolution deny that it is an “authorisation for military force”, and in a legal, technical sense, they are absolutely correct: it is not a legal authorisation for military force. But it is an attempt to enact a political authorisation for military force. It is an attempt to pressure the administration politically to move forward the tripwire for war, to a place indistinguishable from the status quo that exists today. If successful, this political move would make it impossible for the administration to pursue meaningful diplomatic engagement with Iran, shutting down the most plausible alternative to war.

The first “resolved” paragraph of the Lieberman resolution affirms that it is a “vital national interest” of the United States to prevent Iran from acquiring a “nuclear weapons capability“.

The phrase “vital national interest” is a “term of art”. It means something that the US should be willing to go to war for. Recall the debate over whether the US military intervention in Libya was a “vital national interest” of the United States (which Defence Secretary Robert Gates said it wasn’t.) It was a debate over whether the bar was met to justify the United States going to war.

The resolution seeks to establish it as US policy that a nuclear weapons capability – not acquisition of a nuclear weapon, but the technical capacity to create one – is a “red line” for the United States. If the US were to announce to Iran that achieving “nuclear weapons capability” is a red line for the US, the US would be saying that it is ready to attack Iran with military force in order to try to prevent Iran from crossing this “line” to achieve “nuclear weapons capability”.

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Another day in apartheid Israel

Mya Guarnieri reports: Last week, Tel Aviv City Councilman Binyamin Babayoff (Shas) sent a letter to Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, Minister of Transportation Israel Katz, and Dr. Moshe Tiomkin, a Tel Aviv councilman and the head of the city’s Transportation, Traffic and Parking Authority. In an excerpt published by Mynet (local online Hebrew news affiliated with Ynet), Babayoff wrote that “illegal foreign workers fill the buses…” leaving no room for Jewish Israeli residents of South Tel Aviv. He added that “foreign workers… give off a bad smell and they might, God forbid, cause all kinds of diseases.”

Reminding of Jim Crow laws, Babayoff proposes that the state introduce separate buses for migrant workers and refugees or limit their access to buses during peak hours of heavy traffic, thus giving preference to Jewish Israeli residents.

Speaking to Mynet, Babayoff claimed that his proposal was not racist. He said that Jewish Israelis in South Tel Aviv “live a life of hell” because of the foreigners in the neighborhood. He added that his letter was a response to the appeals of “scared” residents.

In a comment to Mynet, the Tel Aviv Municipality condemned Babayoff’s proposal and called it “racist,” adding that it is committed to “caring for immigrant workers and their basic health needs, education, and welfare…”

(Though they’re not migrant workers, homeless African refugees might beg to differ with the city’s statement).

After Babayoff embarked on a campaign against migrant workers and refugees in the summer of 2010 — calling on South Tel Aviv landlords not to rent to these “infiltrators” and claiming that doing so violates Jewish religious law — 25 area rabbis signed an “Edict Forbidding the Rental of Apartments to Infiltrators.” Shortly thereafter, 10 South Tel Aviv real estate agents signed a petition stating they would not rent to illegal residents.

Later that year, hundreds of Israeli rabbis across the country signed a religious edict forbidding the rental or sale of property to Palestinian citizens of the state.

Last year, David Sheen, an Israeli journalist with Haaretz, filmed some of the Jewish nationalists in South Tel Aviv who want “foreign infiltrators” expelled from Israel.

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What would happen if Iran had the bomb?

Christian Science Monitor reports: Analysts say Iran is not an irrational, suicidal actor that can’t be deterred. Nor do they believe it is determined to destroy Israel at all costs. A recent Israeli think tank simulation of “the day after” an Iranian nuclear test came to the same conclusion: that nuclear annihilation will not automatically result.

Yet a nuclearized Iran would precipitate some profound changes across a chronically unstable region. Military balances would shift. Political relations among antagonists – and allies – would become more complicated. Israel would lose its nuclear hegemony in the Middle East.

Underlying it all loom major questions. Would Iran, implacable foe of the US and Israel, suddenly become beyond attack, like North Korea? Would Iran and Israel settle into a decades-long regional cold war, like that between India and Pakistan? Would Iran’s jittery Persian Gulf neighbors rush to become nuclear powers themselves, setting off a dangerous and irreversible new arms race?

The questions swirled as Iran signaled on Feb. 16 that it was ready with “new initiatives” to resume long-stalled talks over its nuclear program with the US and other big powers. But the Iranians were nebulous about any possible concessions to previous Western demands – demands that diplomats say have only risen higher in a US election year. Renewed chances of talks came during a week when Tehran also proclaimed new advances in nuclear technology. As a result of all this, the possibility of any political breakthrough is far from certain.

It is not a fait accompli, of course, that Iran will build a bomb, even though it sometimes seems as if it is – and many Americans believe the country already has. As recently as 2010, for instance, a CNN poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed Iran has a nuclear arsenal.

Yet American intelligence agencies agree that Tehran hasn’t yet decided to go for a nuclear bomb – and that even if it chose to, it would take years to create one and the means to deliver it. Israeli intelligence is also reported to have reached the same conclusion.

In testimony before Congress in late January, the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said Iran is “keeping open the option” to develop nuclear weapons. But, he added, “we do not know” if it will. The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in its latest report last November, detailed alleged weapons-related work for the first time, but said “systematic” work was halted in 2003.

Tehran has long claimed it wants only to make nuclear power peacefully, and in Iran, embracing “nuclear rights” enjoys wide, popular support because it blends national pride and scientific prowess. Publicly, Iranian rulers profess to reject atomic weapons, and at the highest levels they evoke Islamic religious reasons to oppose all weapons of mass destruction.

Yet analysts and diplomats note that Iran does have many reasons to develop at least a “breakout” capability – the ability to assemble a bomb quickly should it want to. Tehran has watched modern history unfold around it and no doubt has drawn its own conclusions. Acquiring nuclear weapons helped preserve regimes in North Korea and Pakistan, for instance. But in Iraq and Libya, two nonnuclear countries, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi were deposed. The Iranian media, in fact, tut-tutted last year that Mr. Qaddafi’s fatal error was relinquishing his secret nuclear weapons program in 2004.

“If I was an Iranian national security planner, I would want nuclear weapons,” Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA now at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said in January.

“Look at the neighborhood that I live in: Everyone else has nuclear weapons who matters; and those who don’t, don’t matter, and get invaded by the United States of America,” Mr. Riedel said on a panel hosted by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank.

In other words, the reason Tehran might pursue a bomb is the same one that has propelled every nuclear state in history: self-protection. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The United States and the European Union signaled on Friday that negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program could soon resume for the first time in more than a year, even as a telecommunications network vital to the global banking industry prepared to expel Iranian banks.

While senior American and European officials stopped short of declaring a diplomatic breakthrough, Iran dropped previously unacceptable preconditions for talks in a letter this week from its senior nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, who declared his country’s “readiness for dialogue” at “the earliest possibility.”

After weeks of official bluster, ominous threats of military action in the Persian Gulf, and assassination attempts on Israelis in India, Thailand and Georgia that Iranian agents have been blamed for, the offer appeared to be a genuine concession by Iran, the officials said, though one made under the duress of tightening economic sanctions against the country.

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Frustrated protesters fill streets in Damascus

The New York Times reports: Hundreds and hundreds of antigovernment protesters braved scattered gunfire from Syrian soldiers to march through a middle-class neighborhood in Damascus on Saturday, the biggest demonstration witnessed close to the heart of the capital since the country’s uprising started 11 months ago.

The neighborhood, Mezze, skirts the hill on which the sprawling white presidential palace sits, and as row upon row of demonstrators walked along, wrapped tightly in heavy coats amid a snowstorm, more than a few expressed the wish that President Bashar al-Assad could hear them.

“I hope President Assad opens the window of his office and sees how Damascenes are shouting against him and his regime,” said Usama, 22, a university student from the neighborhood, giving only his first name out of fear of retribution. “The regime thought we were asleep, but it doesn’t know that when we wake up his regime will be gone.”

The relative calm of Damascus, as well as Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, throughout the uprising has been cited repeatedly by the Assad government to buttress its argument that it enjoys wide support in Syria. Officials maintain that the demonstrations and unrest in rebellious cities like Homs, Hama and Dara’a, all sites of brutal government crackdowns, are the work of foreign infiltrators.

That argument will be much harder to sustain if mainstream, middle-class districts of the capital like Mezze begin rising up to demonstrate, as it did on Saturday. The march was prompted by the deaths of three men at a smaller protest a day earlier. Several marchers said it was one thing to deploy tanks in provincial cities to fight antigovernment protesters, but it would be impossible to say that foreign armed gangs had penetrated an area close to the presidential palace.

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Khader Adnan: The West Bank’s Bobby Sands

The Independent reports: It was only after talking with lucidity and animation for an hour about her husband’s 61-day hunger strike that Randa Jihad Adnan’s eyes, visible though the opening of her nekab, filled with tears. Until then, this articulate 31-year-old graduate in sharia law from Al Najar University in Nablus, the pregnant mother of two young daughters aged four and one and half, had described with almost disconcerting poise the two months following the arrest of her husband, Khader Adnan, on 17 December.

He was seized at 3.30am by some of the scores of Israeli military and security personnel who surrounded the family home in a West Bank village south of Jenin, and is now being held in the Israeli Rebecca Ziv hospital in Safed. On Wednesday she was allowed to visit him with the children and her father-in-law.

There they found him, weak and extremely thin, his beard unkempt and his fingernails long. He was shackled by two legs and one arm to his bed, and was connected to a heart monitor. Though mentally alert, he could speak only with difficulty. “I was shocked,” she said yesterday. “I couldn’t speak for about three minutes, and it was the same for my daughters.”

Mrs Adnan is convinced that the Israeli authorities only allowed the visit because they wanted the family to put pressure on her husband to end his hunger strike. He had started this on 18 December in protest at his arrest, his treatment and the subsequent detention order served on him.

“My father-in-law said to him: ‘We want you to stay alive. You cannot defeat this state on your own.’ He told him he wanted him to end the strike. I told him I wished he would drink a cup of milk. But he said: ‘I did not expect this from you. I know you are with me all the time. Please stop it.” Mrs Adnan said yesterday: “I know my husband. He will not change his mind. I expect him to die.”

The day before the visit, a Red Cross delegation had gone to her home to warn her that her husband’s heart could fail “at any minute”. They told her that he was suffering from muscular atrophy, which was affecting his heart and stomach, that his pulse was weak, and that his life was now in extreme danger.

Richard Falk writes: The world watches as tragedy unfolds beneath its gaze. Khader Adnan is entering his 61st day as a hunger striker in an Israeli prison, being held under an administrative detention order without trial, charges, or any indication of the evidence against him.

From the outset of his brutal arrest in the middle of the night – in the presence of his wife and young daughters – he has been subject to the sort of inhumane and degrading treatment that is totally unlawful and morally inexcusable. Its only justification is to intimidate, if not terrify, Palestinians who have lived for 45 years under the yoke of an oppressive occupation. This occupation continuously whittles away at Palestinians’ rights under international humanitarian law – especially their right to self-determination, which is encroached upon every time a new housing unit is added to the colonising settlements that dot the hilltops surrounding Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The case of Khader Adnan is a revealing microcosm of the unbearable cruelty of prolonged occupation. It draws a contrast in the West between the dignity of an Israeli prisoner and the steadfast refusal to heed the abuse of thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails through court sentence or administrative order.

Mr Adnan’s father poignantly highlighted this contrast a few days ago by referring to Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas in captivity for several years and recently released in good health: “Where are the mother and father of Gilad Shalit? Do they not feel for me in this humanitarian case? Where are they?” He went further in drawing this comparison: “My son was arrested from his house, from among his wife and children, was taken prisoner. He was not carrying any weapon. Whereas Shalit was fighting against the people of Gaza, and destroying their homes, and firing upon, and Shalit was released.”

It is true that foreign authority figures, from the UN Secretary General on down, showed their empathy for the agony experienced by Israelis concerned for the wellbeing of Shalit, but these same personalities are notably silent in the much more compelling ordeal being experienced before our eyes in the form of Mr Adnan’s captivity, seemingly unto death. It should not be surprising that surviving family members of IRA hunger strikers should step forward expressing solidarity with Mr Adnan and compare the Irish experience of resistance to that of the Palesinians.

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