A new generation of political Islamists steps forward

Olivier Roy writes: Everywhere, the Muslim Brotherhood is benefiting from a democratization it did not trigger. There is a political vacuum because the liberal vanguard that initiated the Arab Spring did not try, and did not want, to take power. This was a revolution without revolutionaries. Yet the Muslim Brothers are the only organized political force. They are rooted in society, and decades of opposition against authoritarian regimes gave them experience, legitimacy and respect. Their conservative agenda fits a conservative society, which may welcome democracy but did not turn liberal.

Under these circumstances, the ghost of a totalitarian Islamic state is raised, with the specter of imposing sharia and closing the short democratic parenthesis. But such an outcome is unlikely.

The Islamists have, in fact, changed: They are more middle-class “bourgeois,” and they benefited from the liberalization of local economies during the last decades of the 20th century, especially in countries with no oil rent. The Islamists have also drawn lessons from the failure of ideological regimes and from the success of Turkey’s AKP party. They are no longer advocating jihad and understand geostrategic constraints, such as the need to maintain peace, even a cold one, with Israel. Realism is the starting point of political wisdom.

The Islamists have been elected with a clear agenda: stability, good governance and a better economy. If they have been able to reach a larger constituency than the hard-core supporters of sharia, it is precisely because they can combine such a reformist agenda while talking about religion, values, identity and tradition. The Nahda party won the majority of the votes cast at the Tunisian consulate of San Francisco, although Tunisian expatriates in Silicon Valley are not known for their Islamic fundamentalism.

This mix of technocratic modernism and conservative values is their brand, and to turn their back on multipartism and legalism would alienate a large portion of their constituency, at a time when they have no means to confiscate power. They have neither military forces nor oil wealth to bypass the people: They have to negotiate and deliver. Their electorate wants stability and peace, not revolution.

They are stepping into a new political landscape: a democracy, although a fledgling and fragile one. The only way to maintain their legitimacy is through elections. Even if their pristine political culture is not democratic, they are formatted by the democratic landscape, much as the Roman Catholic Church ended up accepting democratic institutions. But it will take time.

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Muslim Brotherhood win just short of a majority in Egyptian parliamentary election

McClatchy reports: Islamists won a combined 70 percent of parliamentary seats in the first election after Egypt’s revolution, according to official results Saturday that cemented the victory of rival religious parties belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and the more fundamentalist Salafists.

More than 10 million Egyptians cast votes for the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, handing it 47 percent of the parliament. But the lack of an outright majority means the FJP must build alliances, most likely with established liberal parties, to keep the focus on issues such as economic initiatives and the transfer of power from Egypt’s interim military rulers.

The goal, politicians involved in negotiations said, would be to isolate the upstart Salafist Nour Party, which won a surprising 25 percent of seats. It advocates the immediate application of strict Islamic law. The Salafists’ literal interpretation of Islam is anathema to the Brotherhood and liberal parties alike, not to mention alarming to Egypt’s Western allies and foreign investors.

“The fears and concerns over Islamists are legitimate, not only because they are Islamists, but more importantly because we have not tried them before,” said Khalil al Anani, a United Kingdom-based scholar of Islamist movements. “However, overestimating these fears can blow the whole transition process.”

Liberal Egyptians said fear naturally accompanies the rise of the Salafists, a group whose clerics have espoused bans on alcohol and bikinis, and tacitly support self-appointed morality squads that harass unveiled women or unmarried couples. The Nour Party has hedged its stand toward such puritanical stances, but makes no secret of its goal for the application of Sharia law.

A group of Egyptian artists – including some of the country’s top painters, novelists and playwrights – are unconvinced that the Brotherhood can rein in the Salafists, so they’ve formed a coalition to defend intellectuals from what they fear will be inevitable attacks on freedom of expression.

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Hamas political chief to step down

The Guardian reports: Khaled Meshaal, the political head of Hamas, is to step down from his position when elections for the leadership of the Palestinian Islamist organisation take place in the next few months.

A statement from Meshaal’s office said the Damascus-based leader would not seek re-nomination after 16 years at the helm, but would continue to serve the movement. It followed reports of the move earlier this week.

Meshaal has indicated in recent weeks that Hamas should make a strategic departure from armed struggle to popular non-violent resistance in the wake of the Arab spring revolutions and the success of Islamist parties in elections.

The new approach caused a rift with the internal Gaza leadership, which said there would be no change in Hamas policy. “There has been no change concerning our mode of thinking towards the conflict,” Mahmoud Zahar, the most senior Hamas figure inside Gaza, told the Guardian in an interview this month.

Meshaal’s decision to step down may indicate that the Hamas leadership within Gaza has won a power struggle.

Meshaal had also been pushing for Palestinian reconciliation and the formation of a national unity government ahead of elections. However, he was reported to be frustrated with the slow and uncertain progress, and few observers believe elections will take place this year.

The Hamas leader was also looking for a new base for the organisation amid the ongoing revolt in Syria. Hamas had refused to back the regime of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, infuriating the Iranian government, which had sponsored both it and the Syrian leadership.

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The uphill battle against Citizens United

Steven Rosenfeld writes: The movement to overturn the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United ruling and confront the doctrine of corporate personhood stands at a perilous crossroads.

Across the country, two distinct strategies are converging on Congress. More than a million people have signed online petitions. State legislators, city and township governments, Democratic Party groups and unions have sponsored and passed measures in 23 states demanding that Congress pass a constitutional amendment to reassert and elevate the political speech of ordinary citizens and roll back the growing political speech and legal privileges of corporations.

The two approaches can be seen in the protest signs and sound bites proclaiming, “Money is Not Speech” and “Overturn Corporate Personhood.” But these slogans are not calling for the same remedy, especially when transformed into legal language in 10 proposals that have been introduced in the current Congress.

The first would address campaign finance setbacks in a 35-year line of Supreme Court rulings, including the Citizens United ruling in 2010, which deregulated campaign spending by corporations and unions. The second would go further and seek to revoke the status of corporations as persons under the Constitution, rolling back more than a century of Supreme Court rulings under various amendments — not just those concerning political speech.

These two approaches expose an emerging split among progressives with deeper problems that go beyond the steep if not improbable political climb required to adopt any constitutional amendment: passage by two-thirds of Congress followed by ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures.

With a few exceptions, the growing movement to overturn Citizens United and revoke corporate personhood is not being taken seriously beyond America’s liberal communities. The guardians of American capitalism — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican National Committee — do not even feel a need to attack it, unlike recent barbs aimed at the National Popular Vote campaign to reform the Electoral College.

Corporate America’s assessment that this activity is not yet a serious threat to their power is also shared by another key sector of the progressive spectrum. Many of the country’s top liberal constitutional scholars have been silent, as this bandwagon has gathered momentum. They sympathize with its goals but think its champions are not only overpromising to grassroots supporters but have not thought out what they want Congress to do. Nor do they think the frontline voices have done a good job explaining what is at stake beyond hurling bumpersticker slogans. In other words, they reach the same conclusion as America’s corporate titans: this clamor is not yet poised to upend the law behind America’s political system. [Continue reading…]

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Protesters storm grounds of Libya’s interim government’s headquarters in Benghazi

The Associated Press reports: Hundreds of angry Libyans on Saturday stormed the transitional government’s headquarters in the eastern city of Benghazi, carting off computers, chairs, and desks while the country’s interim leader was still holed up in the building.

Libyans have grown increasingly frustrated with the pace and direction of reforms in the country more than three months after the end of the civil war that ousted longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Those concerns spurred residents in Benghazi, where the uprising against longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi broke out in February, to begin protests nearly two weeks ago to demand transparency and justice from the country’s new leaders.

The melee at the National Transitional Council’s headquarters began after protesters broke through the gates using hand grenades and streamed into the grounds of the headquarters. They banged on the building’s doors and demanded officials meet with them.

In a bid to calm tensions, NTC chief Mustafa Abdul-Jalil tried to address the crowd from a second-floor window, but protesters began throwing bottles at him.

Protesters then torched Abdul-Jalil’s armored Land Cruiser and broke into the headquarters itself, smashing windows to get inside and cart off furniture and electronics.

A security official in the building said a team of some 50 guards dressed as civilians were trying to calm the protesters.

The official, who served as a revolutionary commander during the civil war, said Abdul-Jalil was still in the building and was refusing to leave. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Some of the protesters pitched tents weeks ago outside the NTC’s headquarters to protest a set of election laws they say were drafted by the interim leaders without consulting the public.

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Iraq: Under worse management

Bloomberg Businessweek reports: Seif Abdel Sadeh’s eyes lolled as his brother tipped a cup of orange juice to his swollen lips. As he lifted his arm to push his brother’s hand away, he grimaced, agitating the charred skin on his face, causing still more pain. The day before, Seif, 18, was walking to his Sadr City high school when a bomb strapped to a motorcycle exploded. It shattered his left leg and sent so much shrapnel into his right leg that it had to be removed. The bomb that hit Seif that morning, and another that went off minutes later, killed a dozen Iraqis, mostly day laborers waiting to pick up work at a busy intersection on the road that connects Sadr City, a suburb of Baghdad, to the downtown expressway.

Seif’s family huddled around his hospital bed. “We lived in fear of this happening to one of our kids,” Seif’s father, Abdel Sadeh, said, fingering a set of worry beads. His eyes welled up. “Who benefits from attacking innocent people?” He saw the blasts as bad omens: “These attacks are proof that the political parties are going to start tearing this country apart now.”

By some statistical measures, Iraq today is safer and more stable than it has been in nearly a decade. In 2011, fewer than 1,500 Iraqi civilians were killed by bombs, sniper ambushes, and other “enemy attacks,” according to the Brookings Institute Iraq index, the lowest figure since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Business owners say they’re freer than ever to travel, borrow from international creditors, and transfer money abroad. A visitor to Baghdad can take heart in the signs of postwar normalcy: the shouts of young men watching soccer in the cafés, the laughter of children tromping off to school.

Iraq, however, is far from stable. The wave of violence that has rocked the country since the last U.S. troops rolled back across the border into Kuwait on Dec. 18 began with a dozen coordinated attacks in Baghdad on Dec. 22 that killed upwards of 60 people; then there were the Jan. 5 bombings in Kadhimiya and Sadr City and another attack on a bus full of Shiite pilgrims the same day, near the holy city of Karbala. All 30 passengers died. Fifty-three more pilgrims were killed near Basra on Jan. 14, and 10 died in attacks on a police station in Ramadi the next day. Add the victims of drive-by shootings and bombings at military and police checkpoints from Fallujah to Mosul, and the total number of dead in the month since the withdrawal tops 250.

The end of the U.S. military’s long, bloody adventure in Iraq signals the start of a new, highly uncertain chapter in the country’s development. In the scenario conjured by optimistic U.S. and Iraqi officials, an Iraq free of tyranny, terrorism, and foreign occupation will transform itself into a modern and open economy in the heart of the Arab world. That vision recedes a bit more every day as sectarian tensions reemerge, corruption hinders development, and the country’s political leadership moves against its opponents and flirts with autocracy. Iraqis are reluctant to ask aloud if the most recent attacks represent the deadly half-life of war, or, as Abdel Sadeh and many others I spoke to during four weeks in December and January say they fear, another meltdown.

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Why Obama’s ‘targeted killing’ is worse than Bush’s torture

Mary Ellen O’Connell writes: By June 2004, it was confirmed that the US was using torture at secret detention sites and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was in that month that piles of “torture memos” were released to the public. Torture did not officially end until President Obama took office in January 2009.

A similar story is emerging with respect to targeted killing. The Obama administration has produced its own infamous memo; like many of the torture memos, it was written by lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. It concerns something that many consider worse than torture: the memo apparently seeks to justify “targeted killing“.

Calls have gone out for the release of the memo, but there really is no need. We did need to see the torture memos, but not because anyone with legal expertise on the subject would be enlightened by the analysis – torture is absolutely prohibited. The legal analysis could only be specious. Rather, prior to mid 2004, the use of torture, rendition and secret detention were only rumored. The fact of the memos gave credence to speculation.

In the case of targeted killing, the world can see what is happening. The memo need not be published to confirm the fact. And, as with torture, the memo will not contain a persuasive legal argument respecting the fundamental human rights and humanitarian law at issue.

“Targeted killing” is the killing of certain individuals away from battle zones using military means, including missiles, bombs and commando raids. The missiles and bombs are often delivered by drone aircraft. Given the munitions, it is the rare attack that spares the lives of bystanders – over 2,200 persons are estimated to have been killed in the three years of the Obama administration in Pakistan alone. We have no estimates for deaths in Yemen or Somalia, the other scenes of relentless attacks.

“Targeted killing” has become the euphemism du jour. Remember “harsh interrogation”? The conduct discussed in the killing memo was once simply referred to as assassination.

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Atlanta Jewish newspaper publisher suggests Mossad should assassinate Obama

Andrew B Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, suggested in a column published a week ago that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should consider ordering U.S.-based Mossad agents to assassinate President Obama.

Netanyahu should then “forcefully dictate” to then-President Biden that the United States must help Israel “obliterate its enemies.”

Adler, concerned that some of his readers might find the scenario he was portraying implausible, wrote: “Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”

John Cook at Gawker called Adler to inquire about his column:

A nervous Adler told me over the phone that he wasn’t advocating Obama’s assassination by Mossad agents. “Of course not,” he said.

But do you think Israel should consider it an option? “No.”

But do you believe that Israel is in fact considering the option in its most inner circles? “No. Actually, no. I was hoping to make clear that it’s unspeakable—god forbid this would ever happen. I take it you’re quoting me?”

Yes. “Oh, boy.”

When I asked Adler why, if he didn’t advocate assassination and didn’t believe Israel was actually considering it, he wrote a column saying he believed that the option was “on the table,” he asked for a minute to compose himself and call me back. He did a few moments later, and said, “I wrote it to see what kind of reaction I was going to get from readers.”

And what was the reaction? “We’ve gotten a lot of calls and emails.”

A Secret Service spokesman, George Ogilvie, told Fox News that the agency is aware of the incident and is “conducting the appropriate investigative steps.”

Predictably, American Jewish community leaders have been quick to condemn Adler, but as Chemi Shalev notes in Haaretz, it is a mistake to dismiss Adler’s ideas as simply the ranting of a crazed individual.

There is something eerily familiar in all this, of course, for anyone who was present 16 years ago at Tel Aviv’s Kikar Malchei Yisrael, as it was then known, on the night that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. One can already envisage how Adler will be disowned, described as a “wild weed,” depicted as a lone wolf who does not represent anyone in his or in anyone else’s community and used as a springboard for a righteously indignant, preemptive counteroffensive that will show how his solitary case is being exploited to score points against anyone who legitimately criticizes Obama.

And while we might all stipulate that there is no Jew anywhere in the world who is currently contemplating any act of violence against President Obama, I know, and most of you know, that Adler’s crazy and criminal suggestions are not the ranting of some loony-tune individual and were not taken out of thin air – but are the inevitable result of the inordinate volume of repugnant venom that some of Obama’s political rivals, Jews and non-Jews included, have been spewing for the last three years.

Anyone who has spent any time talking to some of the more vociferous detractors of Obama, Jewish or otherwise, has inevitably encountered those nasty nutters, and they are many, who still believe he is a Muslim, who are utterly convinced that he wants to destroy Israel, and who seriously debate whether he is more like Ahmadinejad than Arafat or – and I heard this one with my own ears – more like Hitler than Haman.

Anyone who reads some of the opinion articles and blogs posted on the Internet by the more extreme Obama-hating writers and pundits – again, many of them Jews – cannot deny the wanton and inflammatory nature of much of their anti-Obama invective.

And anyone who lived through the Israeli right-wing’s days of rage against Rabin and the Oslo Accords can never forget that this deluge of deadly toxins need trigger just one homicidal chemical reaction in just one fanatic brain for history to be changed forever.

Adler has now made a verbal apology, but suppose his links had been to Iran rather than Israel. Would the Secret Service now be conducting a low-key investigation or would the director of the FBI be holding a major news conference to announce Adler’s arrest?

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Obama’s only way out of Afghanistan is to talk

Tariq Ali writes: This week Afghan guerrillas carried out yet another raid on the Kandahar airbase. General John Allen, the American commander of the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), issued an odd statement: “Mullah Omar has lost all control over Taliban insurgents, otherwise he would immediately denounce these attacks and order his ‘forces’ to stop attacking innocent Afghan civilians.”

The same Mullah Omar who has been on the most wanted list since 9/11? Remarkable only if one wasn’t aware that the Omar faction of the Taliban has been conducting on-and-off negotiations with the US for several years. None have so far resulted in an agreement.

The Kandahar attack may have been carried out by another faction, one that is hostile to the very idea of talking to the occupier, but it could just as easily be another shot across the bows of a tired empire, just to hurry things along. All the media-hyped advances in Afghanistan were illusory. Hence the need to negotiate with the insurgents and further isolate the Karzai regime.

Different factions of the neo-Taliban have been preparing to take power for the last two years. Their assaults on security installations, intelligence outposts and helicopters carrying Nato intelligence top brass indicate the extent to which they have infiltrated Isaf’s “loyal Afghan” networks. The form of guerrilla warfare, if not the ideology of its proponents, is not dissimilar to resistance movements in the Second World War and the Vietnamese, Chinese and Cuban experiences, codified by Giap, Mao and Che Guevara.

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The roots of Bain Capital in El Salvador’s civil war

Justin Elliot reports: A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country’s bloody civil war in the 1980s

Bain, the source of Romney’s fabulous personal wealth, has been the subject of recent attacks in the Republican primary over allegations that Romney and the firm behaved like, in Rick Perry’s words, “vulture capitalists.”One TV spot denounced Romney for relying on “foreign seed money from Latin America” but did not say where the money came from. In fact, Romney recruited as investors wealthy Central Americans who were seeking a safe haven for their capital during a tumultuous and violent period in the region.

Like so much about Bain, which is known for secrecy and has been dubbed a “black box,” all the names of the investors who put up the money for the initial fund in 1984 are not known. Much of what we do know was first reported by the Boston Globe in 1994 when Romney ran for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy.

In 1984, Romney had been tapped by his boss at Bain & Co, a consulting firm, to create a spin-off venture capital fund, Bain Capital.

A Costa Rica-born Bain official named Harry Strachan invited friends and former clients in Central America to a presentation about the fund with Romney in Miami. The group was impressed and “signed up for 20% of the fund,” according to Strachan’s memoir. That was about $6.5 million, according to the Globe. Bain partners themselves were putting up half the money, according to Strachan. Thus the Central American investors had contributed 40 percent of the outside capital.

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Throw out the playbook for Libya’s elections

Sean Kane writes: After over 40 years of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Jamahiriya — a by design stateless society of purported direct rule by the popular masses — Libya’s political transition was always going to be sui generis. Other Arab autocrats may have subverted elections and ignored their constitutions, but in most cases at least the motions of representative democracy existed. This was not the case in Libya, where the law organizing the country’s first elections is scheduled for publication this weekend. As Othman El-Mugirhy, the chair of the committee that drafted the law eloquently put it, “Libya has no institutions, it is a state of ashes.”

One legacy of the almost perpetual administrative flux that Qaddafi’s unique governing model engendered is that individuals rather than political parties will likely contest Libya’s forthcoming elections. This has all sorts of unusual consequences, not least of which is potentially turning on its head the widespread belief in the region that early elections favor the Muslim Brotherhood.

Political parties come in for a particularly hard time in Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Green Book, which lays out his Third Universal Theory (the Brother Leader’s proposed alternative to capitalism and communism). Describing political parties as the abortion of democracy and their members as traitors, the Green Book makes the case that parties split society by ensuring “the rule of the part over the whole” and are the “contemporary model of dictatorship” intended to rob people of their right to govern themselves directly.

The decades of demonization of political parties by Qaddafi have left a lasting impact on the Libyan political scene. Many of the nascent political entities in the new Libya seem to prefer to call themselves “movements” or “alliances” rather than use the word party, which still frequently draws a visceral negative reaction.

Countrywide focus group research conducted in Libya by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in November 2011 tends to confirm this anecdotal impression. NDI found participants’ reactions to the idea of political parties “range from ignorance to skepticism to outright hostility.” Many were concerned that political parties are potentially divisive and could cause conflict among Libyans at a time when the country needs to be united. One participant repeated word for word a Green Book bromide that the larger the number of parties, the greater the divisions and struggle within society.

It is perhaps unsurprising then that the electoral law prepared by Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) is widely expected to propose a system in which voters would choose from individual candidates rather than party lists in selecting representatives for the country’s constitutional assembly. The closest international analogue to this type of electoral system is that used in Afghanistan, where its application has contributed to a parliament of individuals rather than parties.

In Libya, such a system makes it likely that candidates in June’s elections for the country’s constitutional assembly will rely on social institutions other than parties to attract votes. In other words, tribal, regional, and family networks are likely to trump political and ideological visions in the coming polls.

This has real implications for the prospects of Libya’s best-organized political party and the only one that scored name recognition in the NDI focus groups — the Muslim Brotherhood. Simply put, being the only political party that ordinary people can name might not be such a good thing among a population that has been acculturated to view parties as synonymous with hidden agendas and narrow interests.

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The struggle against Sopa and Pipa is not over

Dan Gillmor writes: Has Sopa, the draconian copyright legislation under consideration by the American Congress, been firmly put to rest? You might imagine that, while the dust settles from a series of mini-explosions this week in the copyright arena, as a bill that once seemed certain to be enacted has stalled.

But you would be mistaken to think it’s dead. The powerful interests backing Sopa (Stop Online Piracy Act), which proponents say is aimed to stop the worst of the worst infringers, are unhappy with this week’s events, but they have not remotely given up. And they still have time and money on their side.

For the moment, however, it’s plain that the internet community made a huge impact on Congress with a mass online protest that led to a flooding of lawmakers’ email accounts and phone/fax lines. Dozens of lawmakers either backed away from earlier support or announced that they’d gone from neutral to against.

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New poll: Americans aren’t ready for another war

Emily Ekins writes: For those tuning into the myriad Republican presidential debates over the past few months, they may have been surprised to learn that many GOP candidates believe a military intervention in Iran could be likely.

Yet despite the cheers the candidates received for taking hawkish foreign policy stances with Iran, a recent Rasmussen poll finds that only 35 percent of Americans favor using military force if sanctions fail to prevent Iran from developing their nuclear capabilities.

This finding is especially interesting given that 81 percent of Americans think it is either somewhat or very likely that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon in the near future, and that 63 percent of Americans do not believe it is very or at all likely that stiff economic sanctions will effectively force Iran to disband its nuclear program.

Although 76 percent of Americans believe that Iran is a serious national security threat to the United States, only 35 percent are ready to favor military intervention. This means that even though most Americans believe it’s quite likely Iran will develop a nuclear weapon and that economic sanctions will fail to work, they aren’t willing for Americans to engage in another military intervention. This suggests that Americans may recognize there are other means to promote peace, prosperity, and American defense,
besides intervening militarily.

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Israel’s immigration plan for ‘ethnically pure’ bunker state

Jonathan Cook writes: The wheel is turning full circle. Last week the Israeli parliament updated a 59-year-old law originally intended to prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from returning to the land from which they had been expelled as Israel was established.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalised these new refugees – in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.

Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world – according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous Texas.

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Interdependence is not a slogan but an increasingly insistent reality

Zbigniew Brzezinski writes: If we wish to reflect on the common challenge inherent in the ongoing transformation of global politics, we would be wise to start by recognizing what I believe to be the three fundamental facts of the present era. First, global peace is threatened not by utopian fanaticism, as was the case during the 20th century, but by the turbulent complexity inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening. Second, comprehensive social progress is more enduringly attained by democratic participation than by authoritarian mobilization. Third, in our time global stability can be promoted only by larger-scale cooperation, not through the imperial domination prevalent in earlier historical epochs.

The 20th century was dominated by fanatical ideological efforts to recreate societies by brutal totalitarian methods on the basis of utopian blueprints. Europe knows best the human costs of such simplistic and arrogant ideological fanaticism. Fortunately, with the exception of some highly isolated cases such as North Korea, it is unlikely that new attempts at large-scale utopian social engineering will arise. That is largely so because in the 21st century, for the first time in human history, the entire world is now politically awakened. The peoples of the world are restless, they are interconnected, they are resentful of their relative social deprivations, and they increasingly reject authoritarian political mobilization.

It follows that democratic participation is in the longer-run the best guarantee both of social progress and political stability. In the global arena, however, rising populist aspirations and the difficulties inherent in shaping common global responses to political and economic crises combine to threaten international disorder to which no single country, no matter how powerful, wealthy or strategically located, can effectively respond. Indeed, potential global turmoil—coincidental with the appearance of novel threats to universal well-being and even to human survival—can be effectively addressed only within a larger cooperative framework based on more widely shared democratic values.

The basic fact, therefore, is that interdependence is not a slogan but a description of an increasingly insistent reality. America realizes that it needs Europe as a global ally; that its cooperation with Russia is of mutual and expanding benefit; that its economic and financial interdependence with a rapidly rising China has a special political sensitivity; and that its ties with Japan are important not only mutually but to the well-being of the Pacific region. Germany is committed to a more united Europe within the European Union and to close links across the Atlantic with America, and in that context it can more safely nurture mutually beneficial economic and political cooperation with Russia. Turkey, which almost a century ago launched its social and national modernization with Europe largely as its model, is assuming a greater regional role as an economically dynamic and politically democratic state, as well as a member of the Atlantic alliance and Russia’s good neighbor. And Russia, recognizing that its modernization and democratization are mutually reinforcing and vital to its important world role, also aspires to a broader collaboration with Europe, with America and, quite naturally, with its dynamic neighbor to the east, China.

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