Jonathan Freedland on Iran

This letter to the Guardian was sent yesterday. Didn't get published.

**********************

Understanding the perceptions of the protagonists in a dispute is crucial to any progressive approach to security issues. To explain an actor's behaviour is not to excuse it but to gain the insights we need in order to be able to prevent the worst outcomes.

Sadly, in his article on the threat of an Israeli attack on Iran, Jonathan Freedland did not take this approach ("The West Has to Tackle Iran", Guardian, 25 June 2008). Freedland should have reviewed both the Iranian and the Israeli perspectives, and critically analysed both against the known facts. Instead, he took an indulgent view of Israel's perspective and ignored the Iranian view entirely.

The threats perceived by Iran are real enough. It is bordered by two nations recently laid waste by US regime-change. It is surrounded by US bases, forces and allies. Three of its close neighbours (Pakistan, India and Israel) have US-indulged nuclear weapons capabilities outside of international jurisdiction. And US backing for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war is very much within living memory. Moreover, the US rejected without consideration Iran's 2003 offer of a grand bargain for peace including removal of support for Hezbollah and Hamas and support for the Arab peace plan (i.e. the two-state solution accepted by the entire world bar the US and Israel).

These are several reasons for Iran to think itself in need of nuclear weapons to deter a grave and apparently implacable threat. They are reasons that have nothing to do with Islamist extremism or the wretched Ahmedinejad's denial of the holocaust. Yet this crucial context is omitted from Freedland's article. Instead, even the most preposterous of Israeli fears are taken at face value. For example, Freedland apparently takes quite seriously the idea that an Iranian regime pragmatic enough to collaborate with the US over Afghanistan and with Israel itself over Iran-Contra is also irrational enough to commit collective suicide by attacking Israel for no reason.

Is the view of Iran as a "suicide nation" not best left to maniacs like Alan Dershowitz, rather than the Guardian's leading op-ed writers?

Freedland also makes some important omissions and employs occasionally alarming forms of logic. For example, he says that the intelligence consensus that Iran has no nuclear weapons programme will be viewed with suspicion in Israel because the Yom Kippur war came as a result of Israel underestimating the Arab threat. This sounds rather like Dick Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine", which says that if there is a one percent chance that a threat exists then the US should act as though it definitely does exist. Thus evidence and rationality are dispensed with, and replaced by fantasy and innuendo. Not the best way to make judgements that could lead to the incineration of innocent Iranian men, women children. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that Egypt attacked Israel in 1973 after several diplomatic offers of peace on the basis of Israel returning stolen Egyptian territory were summarily ignored, just like Iran's peace offer to the US and Israel in 2003 was rejected without consideration.

But perhaps the most serious omission was the very idea that Israeli "fears" may be less than are claimed. It is only 5 years since the US launched a war of aggression aimed at securing strategic advantage in the Middle East under the cloak of a manufactured "threat". By now, it should be no more than routine in any serious analysis of a US-alleged "threat" for that "threat" to be examined for the possibility that it has been inflated or manufactured for political ends. Less sane elements within the Israeli and US governments have every reason to create a pretext for knocking-out a strategic rival in the region. Indeed, this is where Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine" comes in, with its obviation of the need for proof when making allegations that excuse aggressive war.

It is extraordinary that such questions can be ignored only five years after the WMD fiasco in which, lest we forget, uncritical writing in Western newspapers played a central part. Not least since, unlike the notion of Iran committing suicide, these threats exist in the real world.

Freedland's focus is all on what the West can do about the threat others pose to us. With one in five Iraqis a refugee and one in twenty-five a corpse, perhaps a more relevant question is the threat that we pose to others. A more balanced view would have been more informative for your readers and more productive in terms of promoting peace.

Yours sincerely

David Wearing
London

Israel defends itself

The Jewish Democratic State

The American political scientist Norman Finkelstein, author of this superb book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has been deported from Israel during a visit there and banned from re-entering for ten years.

Israel does not appear to be making any attempt to justify this, other than some half-heartedly mumbled insinuation that Finkelstein has links with Hezbollah ...er ...or Al-Qaeda ... or something. The fact that those two groups actively hate each other shows how little effort Israel is making to formulate a cover story. And incidentally, Finkelstein is scornful of those few Western lefties who, from a comfortable position thousands of miles away, profess some meaningless "support for the resistance" (you can watch him express that scorn about halfway through this video). All this strongly indicates that Finkelstein was summarily declared persona non grata because of his political views, not an invented allegience with terrorists*. Let us then recall what those views are.

Finkelstein's dangerously radical position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is this: that Israel should comply with international law, giving back the land it has illegally expropriated from the Palestinians and withdrawing to its legal 1967 borders. In other words, his position is identical to that expressed in 2004 by the International Court of Justice (who perhaps are also terrorist-sympathisers, in Israeli eyes). Clearly such extremisim is beyond the pale in "the Middle East's only democracy".

So, a Jewish, democratic state....except for Jews who disagree too strongly with the state.

How fitting that Israel the outlaw state should ban someone - a Jewish son of holocaust survivors, no less! - from entering the country .... because he urges the government to comply with the law. For the Israeli state, criminality is the law, and standing up for the law is a crime. A crime punishable by banishment.

I was lucky enough to spend a few hours one afternoon earlier this year in a seminar on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which was largely led by Norman Finkelstein. Even in the face the current, disgusting treatment of the inhabitants of Gaza, he expressed optimism for the future. He said that the argument against Israeli colonianlism and in favour of Palestinian rights was being won, and that apolgists for the Israeli state were becoming increasingly desperate. I can't help but think that his shabby treatment by the Israelis supports that view very strongly.

In the long run, Israel's rulers will suffer for this far more than Finkelstein. I doubt that the majority of the world's Jews, who currently choose to live outside of Israel, will be remotely impressed by this crude display of authoritarianism. And what of the young Israelis who are emigrating in ever increasing numbers? When they see a fellow Jew expelled for taking a position that is shared by practically the entire international community bar the US and Israeli governments, do they see the sort of thriving liberal democracy that they'd want to return to live in?

"Aliyah" probably doesn't look like such a mystical, beatific experience when some Jews aren't even allowed to visit the land God promised them because they have the wrong political opinions. How does Israel sustain its mythology on that basis? How does the banishment of Finkelstein fit into the Zionist narrative? Some Jews are more Jewish than others?

*Update 1: According to the Jerusalem Post, "Officials said that the decision to deport Finkelstein was connected to his anti-Zionist opinions and fierce public criticism of Israel around the world". It seems plain that, nonsense about "security" aside, the real reason for the deportation was let slip here.

Update 2: In response to these letters, published in the Guardian yesterday, which were basically attempts to defame Finkelstein, I had a letter published in the paper today, along with others. My letter was edited. The full version read as follows:

"Lorna Fitzsimons (Letters, 29 May) says that Israel did not deport Norman Finkelstein, and ban him from returning for ten years, because of his criticism of its government, but on "legitimate security grounds", because he has met members of Hizbullah. However, according to the Jerusalem Post on 25 May, "[o]fficials said that the decision to deport Finkelstein was connected to his anti-Zionist opinions and fierce public criticism of Israel around the world."

Does Fitzsimons realise how ridiculous she sounds when she tries to portray a 54 year old political scientist as a threat to Israel's security? Perhaps her time might be better spent reflecting on the nature of a purportedly "Jewish and democratic state" that banishes the son of holocaust survivors because it dislikes his political opinions."

There's also a very good editorial on this in the Israeli paper Haaretz.

What's 'appeasement'?

Last week George Bush equated US politicians who are prepared to talk to Iran or Hamas with the politicians of the 1930s who appeased Nazi Germany.

Apparently, to be a neo-conservative/liberal interventionist is to see Hitler re-incarnated every second day of the week (which has got to fray the nerves after a while, surely?). Perhaps a few of the middle-aged, post WWII generation lust for the glory of fighting a "Good War" like the one their parents' generation fought. Perhaps they feel they missed out, which is why they never miss potential opportunities to start a new war. Maybe they fell asleep in the bit of history class which pointed out that war brings hell, not glory. But then again, its never the likes of tough-talking, testosterone-junkies like George W. Bush that do the fighting and the dying anyway.

But put aside the amateur psychology, and the playground fantasy that second tier nations like Iran, and ragtag guerrilla outfits like Hamas, which can be vaporised by the US at the push of a button, bear some comparison with the Nazi superpower that came within inches of dominating the Earth in the early 1940s. What do we actually mean by 'appeasement'?

As you can see in this clip, a lot of the people who throw the term around in politics haven't the first idea of what the appeasement analogy refers to. This right wing radio talk show host is asked repeatedly what it was that Neville Chamberlain did in the 1930s that was wrong: ie. what is this 'appeasement' that he comdemns people for engaging in? He hasn't a clue.



Chris Matthews puts it succinctly. Appeasement wasn't talking to Hitler; it was giving him half of Czechoslovakia. The problem was not negotiations, but the positions taken, and the outcome. Appeasement in the 1930s was a misguided policy because the calculation that Hitler could be bought off was made in error.

"Appeasement" is the attempt to mollify an aggressive and expansionist power by letting it have some of what it wants (even if that is unjust), in the hope that it might then forget about or modify its greater demands. After 9/11 Tony Blair felt that an aggressive US foreign policy was a new reality that the world was simply going to have to live with. Various insider accounts appear to indicate that he felt he was the man to curb Washington's worst excesses in this regard. Well, if you want an example of appeasement, that would be it. But to be honest, I think this gives too much credit to Blair, who was not the cautionary conscience of Bush-Cheney expansionism but its booster and enabler.

Going back to Chamberlain, it is too easily forgotten that only twenty years before the infamous Munich conference, Europe lay in ruins at the end of World War I. Britain and France lost around one in forty of their populations in the "war to end all wars". The fact that the bulk of the casualties came from men of military age meant that a large part of a crucial section of the population was simply lost to both countries. This catastrophe set the scene for another; the mismanaged attempt to re-order the world economy that led to the global depression of the late twenties and early thirties, which in turn facilitated the rise of fascism. It was an age of disaster-upon-disaster, the like of which had never been seen and probably could not even have been imagined when Chamberlain entered politics at the start of the 20th century.

The tragedy is that the efforts of the "appeasers'" to avoid another bloodbath only ended up precipitating the greatest one of all (so far). But it seems to me that to focus on their failed tactics while ignoring their motives is to ignore the relevant history, that the opprobrium flung in their direction by historical illiterates is perhaps not entirely deserved, and that it will take a bigger man than George W Bush to qualify as a credible critic of men who, however misguided, were working desperately to avert a cataclysm. Those who weild the appeasement analogy, believing that it gives them some claim to the moral high ground, should remember that trying to stop wars is a good deal more honourable a pursuit than trying to start them.

Here's Juan Cole on the "Crock of Appeasement".

Sixty years of dispossession

Today, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of its founding, and I can think of no-one better to mark the occassion than the late, great Edward Said; speaking here ten years ago, on the 50th anniversary.

An excerpt:

"In the United States, celebrations of Israel's fifty years as a state have tried to project an image of the country that went out of fashion since the Palestinian Intifada (1987-92): a pioneering state, full of hope and promise for the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, a haven of enlightened liberalism in a sea of Arab fanaticism and reaction. On 15 April, for instance, CBS broadcast a two hour prime-time program from Hollywood hosted by Michael Douglas and Kevin Costner, featuring movie stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kathy Bates (who recited passages from Golda Meir minus, of course, her most celebrated remark that there were no Palestinians) and Winona Ryder. None of these luminaries are particularly known for their Middle Eastern expertise or enthusiasm, although all of them in one way or another praised Israel's greatness and enduring achievements. There was even time for a cameo appearance by President Bill Clinton, who provided perhaps the least edifying, most atavistic note of the evening by complimenting Israel, "a small oasis," for "making a once barren desert bloom," and for " building a thriving democracy in hostile terrain.""

Ironically enough, no such encomia were intoned on Israeli television, which has been broadcasting a 22-part series, Tkuma, on the country's history. This series has a decidedly more complicated content. Episodes on the l948 War, for instance, made use of archival sources unearthed by the new historians (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Schlaim, Tom Segev, et al) to demonstrate that the indigenous Palestinians were forcibly expelled, their villages destroyed, their land taken, their society eradicated. It was as if Israeli audiences had no need of all the palliatives provided for diasporic and international viewers, who still needed to be told that Israel was a cause for uncomplicated rejoicing and not, as it has been for Palestinians, the cause of a protracted, and still continuing dispossession of the country's indigenous people.

That the American celebration simply omitted any mention of the Palestinians indicated also how remorselessly an ideological mind-set can hold on, despite the facts, despite years of news and headlines, despite an extraordinary, if ultimately unsuccessful, effort to keep effacing Palestinians from the picture of Israel's untroubled sublimity. If they're not mentioned, therefore they don't exist. Even after fifty years of living the Palestinian exile I still find myself astonished at the lengths to which official Israel and its supporters will go to suppress the fact that a half century has gone by without Israeli restitution, recognition, or acknowledgment of Palestinian human rights and without, as the facts undoubtedly show, connecting that suspension of rights to Israel's official policies. Even when there is a vague buried awareness of the facts, as is the case with a front page New York Times story on April 23 by one Ethan Bronner, the Palestinian Nakba is characterized as a semi-fictional event (dutiful inverted commas around the word "catastrophe" for instance) caused by no one in particular. When Bronner quotes an uprooted Palestinian who describes his miseries, the man's testimony is qualified by "for most Israelis, the idea of Mr Shikaki staking claim to victimhood is chilling," a reaction made plausible as Bronner blithely leapfrogs over the man's uprooting and systematic deprivations and immediately tells us how his "rage" (for years the approved word for dealing with Palestinian history) has impelled his sons into joining Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Ergo, Palestinians are violent terrorists, whereas Israel can go on being a "vibrant and democratic regional superpower established on the ashes of Nazi genocide." But not on the ashes of Palestine, an obliteration that lingers on in measures taken by Israel to block Palestinian rights, domestically as well as in territories occupied in l967.

Take land and citizenship for instance. Approximately 750,000 Palestinians were expelled in 1948: they are now more than 4 million. Left behind were 120,000 (now one million) who subsequently became Israelis, a minority constituting about 18 per cent of the state's population, but not fully-fledged citizens in anything more than name. In addition there are now some 2.5 million Palestinians without sovereignty on the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is the only state in the world which is not the state of its actual citizens, but of the whole Jewish people who consequently have rights that non-Jews do not. Without a constitution, Israel is governed by Basic Laws of which one in particular, the Law of Return, makes it possible for any Jew anywhere to emigrate to Israel and become a citizen, at the same time that native-born Palestinians do not have the same right. 93 per cent of the land of the state is characterised as Jewish land, meaning that no non-Jew is allowed to lease, sell or buy it. Before 1948, the Jewish community in Palestine owned a little over 6 per cent of the land. A recent case in which a Palestinian Israeli, Adel Kaadan, wished to buy land but was refused because he was a non-Jew has become something of a cause célèbre in Israel, and has even made it to the Supreme Court which is supposed to but would prefer not to rule on it. Kaadan's lawyer has said that "as a Jew in Israel, I think that if a Jew somewhere else in the world was prohibited from buying state land, public land, owned by the federal government, because they're Jews, I believe there would have been an outcry in Israel." (New York Times, 1 March, l998). This anomaly about Israeli democracy, not well known and rarely cited, is compounded by the fact that, as I said above Israel's land in the first place was owned by Palestinians expelled in l948; since their forced exodus their property was legally turned into Jewish land by The Absentees' Property Law, the Law of the State's Property, and the Land Ordinance (the Acquisition of Land for Public Purposes). Now only Jewish citizens have access to that land, a fact that does not corroborate The Economist's extraordinarily sweeping statement on "Israel at 50" (25 April-1 May l998) that since the state's founding Palestinians "have enjoyed full political rights. ""

Read the rest here.

Suffer little children

In the week that Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary, spare a thought for some people with rather less cause for celebration: the children terrorised and starved by its government.

"Every once in a while Ibrahim Hawash, 42, calls his wife Noha from his nightshift job to make sure that she has followed the treatment course prescribed by their family doctor for the involuntary urination of their four children, who are in primary school. The doctor says that the four children lost their ability to control urination due to the fear they underwent when Israeli army jets bombed a home near theirs in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip during the "Warm Winter" military campaign three weeks ago. The four children still remember the terrifying night when they woke frightened up to the sound of a thundering explosion in the area and found that the glass of their home's windows had fallen onto their bed. Hawash, who works in one of the Palestinian security agencies, says that his children refuse to sleep alone, insisting on sleeping in the same room as their parents because they are scared of the night. He adds that he exerted great efforts to convince two of his children to go back to school, for they were afraid that they would be killed in an Israeli bombing operation on their way there, or while at school. Thousands of Palestinian children have experienced what Hawash's four children are undergoing."

"Aish Samour, director of the Psychiatric Hospital in Gaza, says that 30 per cent of Palestinian children under 10 years of age suffer from involuntary urination due to deep-seated fear, and mentions other nervous problems such as nail- biting, nightmares, bodily pains of unknown cause, crying and introversion."

"According to a study conducted by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, each Palestinian child has been exposed to more than nine shocking events. The study says that 95.6 per cent of children have seen images of the wounded and killed, .... a total of 60 per cent of children have undergone moderate psychological shock..., and 33.3 per cent have undergone major psychological shock. The study notes that 15.6 per cent suffer from minor post-traumatic syndrome disorder, while 62.2 per cent suffer moderately and 20 per cent severely."

"Eyad Al-Sarraj, director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, says that Palestinian children have lost the two most important pillars in their lives: a sense of security that has been lost due to raids, bombings and destruction, and a sense of joy and happiness that is a staple of childhood. He says that when a child sees his father, "impotent and incapable of providing security", the child feels immediately "estranged". He adds that according to data gathered in a study his institution undertook, 45 per cent of children studied said that they had seen occupation soldiers beat their fathers and insult them before their eyes."

"Al-Sarraj points out that matters are made more complicated by the fact that due to the Gaza siege, Palestinian children suffer from a chronic state of malnutrition that affects their intellect. This is reflected in the fact that 15 per cent of Gaza's children suffer from impairments in their intellectual abilities due to malnutrition. He adds that repression and violence accumulated within the lives of Palestinian children affect their creative capacities and push them to resort to extreme acts that reflect the pain and frustration they feel."

Read the whole report, "Gaza's suffering children" by Saleh Al-Naami, here, at Al-Ahram Weekly.

The terrorism its ok to like

The Israeli government and its supporters often tell us that the difference between Israel and the Palestinian groups is Israel doesn't attack civilians. It takes some talent to say this with a straight face. The fact is that the targeting of ordinary Palestinians - the innocent and the defenceless - is an explicit Israeli policy.

The blockade of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, instituted as collective punishment when the people there voted the wrong way in a free election, and stepped up against the inhabitants of Gaza when Hamas had the temerity to fight off a US-backed coup attempt against the elected government, constitutes, by definition, the deliberate targeting of innocent people.

As Dov Weisglass, an senior Israeli government adviser, described the policy aim at the outset, "the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet". That's his way of saying - in a jokey, off-hand sort of a way - that the idea is to force Palestinian children into a state of malnutrition.

These news reports show some of the other effects of the I-plan "diet": raw sewage flowing in the streets because there's no electricity to work the treatment plants, cancer patients dying because routine treatments are being denied to them; violence to all intents and purposes, and as targeted at defenceless people as any suicide bombing.






It takes deep intellectual discipline - an assumption of the West's intrinisc benevolence completely impervious to the facts - to pretend that there is any qualitative difference between the Israeli blockade and outright terrorism.

Recall that the major Palestinian factions have offered Israel peace on the legitimate international borders; those it crossed in the 1967 war when it began the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories. In the more immediate term, it has also been offered a mutual ceasefire to put an end to the current violence. Israel has rejected all of this, so we need not detain ourselves with the nonsense that it acts only in self-defence. What Israel and its British and American suppoters want is not peace but victory, and if Palestinian kids have to stay on their "diet" until victory is achieved, then so be it.

How grown-ups do politics

For the benefit of Messers Olmert, Bush, Cheney, Dr Rice, and many others, here's how the grown-ups do diplomacy.




Jimmy Carter, doing what 64 per cent of Israelis want to see done, but what their government and the oh-so "pro-Israeli" US government refuses to do: talking to Hamas.

For the uninitiated, talking to people is how armed conflicts are brought to a conclusion. The alternatives are trying to (a) obliterate your enemy, or (b) demand their total surrender and keep the killing going until they accept.

Since Carter has secured Hamas' consent to any future agreement between Israel and the PLO that resulted in a Palestinian state on the legitimate international borders, and that was ratified by the Palestinian public in a referendum, I think we can deduce that Carter's way works.

Of course, the comparison is a little unfair. Carter wants peace. The US and Israeli government want victory, and apparently don't much care how many people die before they get it (and they definitely don't want a return to the legitimate borders- they want to keep what they stole). But Carter's efforts have now exposed those governments' belligerence for all to see. They pretended they didn't have a "partner for peace" and their bluff has now been called.

See also Carter being interviewed by the BBC's Jeremy Paxman here. Paxman is not afraid to put the boot in when unimpressed with an interviewee. Carter's opponents have tried to paint him as beyond the pale for his peace efforts this past week. The gentle ride he gets from this branch of the Western establishment suggests that the need to talk to Hamas is becoming a mainstream position. US-Israeli rejectionism is becoming less and less tenable.

Renouncing Violence

"So we got hold of just some [10 year old] Palestinian kid nearby, we knew that he knew who it had been [a 15-year-old throwing stones]. Let's say we beat him a little, to put it mildly, until he told us. You know, the way it goes when your mind's already screwed up, and you have no more patience for Hebron and Arabs and Jews there.

"The kid was really scared, realising we were on to him. We had a commander with us who was a bit of a fanatic. We gave the boy over to this commander, and he really beat the shit out of him ... He showed him all kinds of holes in the ground along the way, asking him: 'Is it here you want to die? Or here?' The kid goes, 'No, no!'

"Anyway, the kid was stood up, and couldn't stay standing on his own two feet. He was already crying ... And the commander continues, 'Don't pretend' and kicks him some more. And then [name withheld], who always had a hard time with such things, went in, caught the squad commander and said, 'Don't touch him any more, that's it.' The commander goes, 'You've become a leftie, what?' And he answers, 'No, I just don't want to see such things.'

"We were right next to this, but did nothing. We were indifferent, you know. OK. Only after the fact you start thinking. Not right away. We were doing such things every day ... It had become a habit... "

And the parents saw it. The commander ordered [the mother], 'Don't get any closer.' He cocked his weapon, already had a bullet inside. She was frightened. He put his weapon literally inside the kid's mouth. 'Anyone gets close, I kill him. Don't bug me. I kill. I have no mercy.' So the father ... got hold of the mother and said, 'Calm down, let them be, so they'll leave him alone.'"

Former Israeli soldier, speaking anonymously to The Independent (many similar tesimonies can be found here).


"It seems to me that what Hamas needs to do is pretty clear. Renounc[ing] violence would be a good step towards showing you actually want peace"
US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

The Israeli military receives around $3billion a year in state aid from Dr Rice's government.

Its pro-Israel to talk to Hamas

Oh yes it is.

Paul Woodward at War in Context makes an excellent point. Since the majority of Israeli citizens support the idea of talking to Hamas, how can it be 'anti-Israel' to do so? Is it not the US and Israeli governments, and any others (like the UK) supporting the vicious and brain-dead policy of isolating and ignoring the Palestinians' elected representatives, who are being 'anti-Israel'? When you oppose the will of the Israeli majority (let alone their interests) which Israel are you supporting?

Ex US President Jimmy Carter has made the impeccably 'pro-Israel' decision to meet with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal next week. Its a move that's to be applauded. Only dialogue is going to end the conflict. Israel and its supporters should know by now that the Palestinians can not be beaten with violence, starvation or any other blunt instrument. 60 years after the Deir Yassin massacre - the defining moment of the campaign of ethinic cleansing that brought Israel into existence - the Palestinians are still there, stubbornly insisting on their humanity in the face of all attempts to erase them. If not for the sake of basic morality then at least for the sake of cold-blooded imperial pragmatism, its time for the US and its client to face reality, talk to the Palestinians' respresentatives, and bring this squalid episode of history to a sensible conclusion.

See also on this, Tony Karon's "Jimmy Carter and the Art of Growing Up".

Obama on race and foreign policy

Further to my post of yesterday, you can watch Obama's whole speech on the comments of his former pastor here.

The Israel line is almost a throwaway one. The speech focuses on the issue of race domestically in the US. Obama had been called upon to condemn his former pastor, who had said "God Damn America" for the way it had treated, and continues to treat, its black citizens. Obama spent a few minutes doing so, but spent the bulk of the speech putting Rev.Wright's comments in the context of the grave, historic injustices of the African-American experience.And then he went further, identifying the problems that face America's white working class, and noting that the political solutions for all those who are not getting their fair share of America's prosperity - black and white - lie in recognising their common interests and utilising their collective strength.

So on race, and Wright's comments on race, Obama had it both ways. And I don't necessarily mean that as a criticism. While condemning Wright's specific words, Obama made it clear that those words were rooted in a clearly understandable source of anger. Personally, I think words of condemnation for Wright would have stuck in my throat. His anger at the situation of Black Americans was perfectly justified. But perhaps Obama sees this as a battle one can afford to lose, in the interests of winning the wider conceptual war.

However, that was all in respect of Wright's comments on domestic policy. In respect of his comments on foreign policy, which is what yesterday's post was about, Obama's condemnation goes entirely unqualified. If he had given as gentle and as eloquent a contextualisation of what Wright had said about US crimes overseas as he had on the subject of race politics in the US, my criticism here would have been muted. But in a 40 minute speech, Obama offered a swift condemnation, and no explanation whatever, of why Wright would view 9/11 as a consequence (albeit a disgusting and inexcusable one) of decades of US aggression abroad.

One of the deepest roots of the imperialist "war on terror" - whether as a mistake from a US point of view or as a crime from an objectively moral point of view - is the failure, or even the refusal, to understand the malignant role the US has played in the lives of so many people across the world. Hence the idea that "they" could only possibly "hate us" because "they hate our freedoms". Hence the idea that our new set of military adventures abroad could only be a good thing for all concerned, save for "the bad guys". Failure to so much as acknowledge that America has done wrong after catastrophic wrong to others, continuing to indulge in jingoistic conceits about the greatest country on Earth, as Obama does with something approaching a casual abandon, is akin to being an 'enabler' to an alcoholic, when what he needs is not just one more drink for the road, but a long, hard look in the mirror.

There is a danger when liberals draw lines in the sand, demarcating what one can and can not say politically; as Obama did when he declared Wright's comments to be utterly beyond the pale. The danger is that things which urgently need to be said are rendered unsayable, and more importantly, unthinkable, on the grounds of political expediency. Obama's was about the most progressive speech I've heard from a major US politician in my lifetime. So much so that many mainstream commentators have described it as positively daring; courageous in its candour and frankness. If, even in a speech like that, the merest honest reflection on the unambiguously evil things that we know the US has done abroad is absolutely out of the question, then the US is a long, long way from a foreign policy that reaches so much as the lowest threshold of decency. If even Barak Obama can't tell the truth about America's role in the world, in a speech which was quite marvellous in parts, then who will? And if American politicians, even the most progressive of them, can't so much as acknowledge Americas past crimes, then what kind of "hope" do they really offer to the traditional victims, in Palestine, Iraq, Africa and elsewhere?

I'll say this much: if Obama can make a speech on foreign policy as (relatively) enlightened, honest, humane and forward thinking as this one was on race, then we may just be onto something with him. If he can't, or won't, then we should be even more reserved about his candidature than we ought to be already.

[Here's a useful assessment of Obama's evolving position on the Middle East, by Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco]

Obama and Wright: Beyond the Pale

Barak Obama yesterday described the "view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam" as "profoundly distorted".

Yet that "profoundly distorted" view is precisely the view of United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, John Dugard, as I noted here earlier this month. And as I've noted elsewhere, the view that Islamist terrorism is either exascerbated or caused by Western foreign policy is simply the consensus view of security agencies and experts across the board.

It says something rather frightening about how far to the right US political culture has gone, that views held by people as straightforwardly mainstream and liberal as John Dugard (not only a UN Special Rapporteur, but also a professor of international law who has served as a judge on the International Court of Justice) must be denounced and consigned to the fringes of debate, even by the most progressive Presidential candidate the US has produced in some time. But its a sad fact that, in relation to much of the rest of the world, American political debate simply occurs on another planet altogether.

I'd still prefer Obama to win the nomination, and the Presidency. But I have to say its very much a case of beggers can't be choosers. Perhaps a victory for him will bring us a little closer to the day where simple truths are not decried as obscenities in US political culture. But this latest from him, whether he really believes it or not, is very far from encouraging.

Supporting the two-state settlement

The below is an email sent to the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland. I'll post up any substantive reply I get from him.

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Dear Jonathan

Hope you're well. I was a little puzzled by a couple of things you said in your article this morning about the two state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (a settlement which I'm very much in favour of, btw).

You appear to characterise Israel and the US as accepting the two-state settlement, and Hamas rejecting it.

But here you can watch Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas hardliner, repeatedly and explicitly favouring a Palestinian state on the 67 borders, and reaffirming Hamas' agreement with the position of Fatah and with the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.

This is by no means the first time a Hamas figure has said this. Perhaps they're lying about their true intentions. But surely we can't simply ignore them or proceed as though they haven't said what they've said.

By contrast, here, you can see what Israel and the US's vision of the two-state settlement looks like.

Note that the "Security Wall" and major settlement blocks, which Israel has repeatedly said it will keep in any final settlement, sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank, effectively decapitating any Palestinian state and leaving it stillborn. Note also that, unlike the Palestinian position, this is a clear and explicit rejection of international law.

In fact, its effectively a rejection of the two-state settlement. What it is is one-state-plus-bantustans.

I'm familiar with your writing over many years, so I know that you are concerned for the victims of this conflict, that you are keen to see justice prevail, and that, like me, you see international law as the basis for a workable settlement. However, there's a dissonance between the facts and your view of the situation which I don't think helps us to get to our agreed destination.

I'm reminded of Sharon's withdrawal of colonists from Gaza in 2005, and your characterisation of that move at the time as an olive branch that could be the beginnings of a peace deal, even as Sharon's chief adviser explicitly stated that the object of the exercise was to destroy the peace process, "prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and ... prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem".

If we're going to proceed to the settlement we both want to see, I think its important to be as clear-sighted as possible about the real positions of the various actors. Especially when these aren't matters of subjective interpretation so much as known and stated facts.

One more thing. In your article, you appeared to advocate Israel making peace with Syria as a way to help cut Hamas out of the equation. Do I have that right? Its just that Hamas is an elected representative of the Palestinians. Isn't there a moral barrier to excluding the Palestinians' elected representatives from decisions about their fate? And in practical terms, wouldn't that increase the chances of the final settlement being further from the 67 borders and international law, and closer to the one-state-plus-bantustans that the US and the Israelis advocate?

I write to you not to confront but to exchange views, so I'd be very interested in any response you might have the time to provide.

Best wishes
David Wearing

Its the occupation, stupid

Yesterday's sickening massacre of teenage boys at a religious school in Jerusalem is now being claimed by Hamas.*

This is particularly depressing, coming after Hamas' suicide attack on Dimona last month, because it represents a defeat for moderates within the group who were agitating for a shift of accent away from military operations and toward political solutions. These moves have been rejected at every turn by Israel and the West - for example, by starving the people of Gaza as punishment for voting for Hamas in an election, or by plotting a coup against the elected Palestinian government. It now appears that the small opportunity to take a step closer to peace that was offered by possible Hamas moderation is beginning to fade.

Of course, Hamas is far more of a threat to Israeli state power (not the Israeli population) as a political group that refuses to relinquish its people's rights than it is as a group of terrorist killers of innocent people. Hamas' reversion to these attacks, after a several months long unilateral ceasefire which held up reasonably well, is the predictable consequence of Israel and its allies slamming the door shut on Hamas moderation. Blood flows as a consequence.

Over the next few days, weeks and months, we can expect yesterday's massacre to be ruthlessly exploited for every ounce of propaganda value by the Israeli government and its apologists. A huge effort will be made to cast this attack as what Israeli spokesman Mark Regev called "a defining moment", placing it at the centre of the conflict and indeed portraying it, and acts of terrorism like it, as the reason for the conflict.

Terrorism is not the reason for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The reason is the occupation, of which terrorism is an ugly and entirely predictable symptom.

Let me quote at length from January's report by UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard (the whole report is absolutely required reading for anyone with a serious interest in this issue). Remember, the following is not drawn from a radical Islamist source or from some obscure left-wing publication. It is the considered opinion of a 71 year old South African professor of international law, who has served as a judge on the International Court of Justice and who has written extensively on South African apartheid.

In his capacity as United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Dugard reported as follows:

"Terrorism is a scourge, a serious violation of human rights and international humanitarian law. No attempt is made in the reports [presented to the UN by Dugard] to minimize the pain and suffering it causes to victims, their families and the broader community. Palestinians are guilty of terrorizing innocent Israeli civilians by means of suicide bombs and Qassam rockets. Likewise the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are guilty of terrorizing innocent Palestinian civilians by military incursions, targeted killings and sonic booms that fail to distinguish between military targets and civilians. All these acts must be condemned and have been condemned. Common sense, however, dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by Al Qaeda, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation. While such acts cannot be justified, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation. History is replete with examples of military occupation that have been resisted by violence - acts of terror. The German occupation was resisted by many European countries in the Second World War; the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) resisted South Africa's occupation of Namibia; and Jewish groups resisted British occupation of Palestine - inter alia, by the blowing up of the King David Hotel in 1946 with heavy loss of life, by a group masterminded by Menachim Begin, who later became Prime Minister of Israel. Acts of terror against military occupation must be seen in their historical context. This is why every effort should be made to bring the occupation to a speedy end. Until this is done peace cannot be expected, and violence will continue. In other situations, for example Namibia, peace has been achieved by the ending of occupation, without setting the end of resistence as a precondition. Israel cannot expect perfect peace and the end of violence as a precondition for the ending of the occupation."

"A further comment on terrorism is called for. In the present international climate it is easy for a State to justify its repressive measures as a response to terrorism - and to expect a sympathetic hearing. Israel exploits the present international fear of terrorism to the full. But this will not solve the Palestinian problem. Israel must address the occupation and the violation of human rights and international humanitarian law it engenders, and not invoke the justification of terrorism as a distraction, as a pretext for failure to confront the root causes of Palestinian violence - the occupation."

What follows inescapably from this is that anyone with a genuine desire to ensure that atrocities like that committed yesterday never happen again will be redoubling their efforts to campaign for the end of the illegal occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip - "the root cause of Palestinian violence". Some, like the Israeli government, will use yesterday's atrocity as "a pretext for failure" to end that occupation. They will hasten their continuing colonisation of stolen land, and blame the consequences of their crimes for their failure to end those crimes - a wonderfully absurd and self-serving piece of propagandist non-logic. We can only conclude from this that the Israeli government has little more respect for Israeli life than it does for Palestinian life. It accepts Israeli deaths from Palestinian terrorism, the "inevitable consequence" of its policies, as a price worth paying in exchange for the prime real estate it is stealing from the Palestinians, in flagrant breach of international law.

Israel-Palestine is not complicated. Its "root cause" is the theft, occupation and systematic crushing of an innocent civilian population by the Israeli state (a catastrophe described in heart-rending detail here by a group of leading aid agencies) in epic and serial breaches of international law and common morality. The solution is well known - the immediate and total end of the occupation, and a Palestinian state with fully equal rights to the Israeli state being established on the whole of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip - i.e. Israel's immediate adherence with international law.

And there is a single and straightforward test of a person's seriousness when they talk about an end to this conflict. Are they focusing their efforts on effecting the solution just described? Or are they finding reasons to shift the focus elsewhere? Judge the verbal and policy responses to yesterdays events, from politicians and commentators, on that basis.

*[update - there's some confusion in the press this afternoon about whether this claim of responsibility was genuine, as it was originally reported].

Gaza: crushing the ants

"The more vulgar apologists for U.S. and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the U.S. and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity (hence water, sewage disposal, and other such basics of civilized life).

The same line of defense is common with regard to some of Washington's past peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to kill them, hence not a crime on the order of intentional killing -- so we are instructed by moralists who consistently suppress the response that had already been given to these vulgar efforts at self-justification.

To repeat once again, we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S. atrocities typically fall into the third category. Thus, when Israel destroys Gaza's power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this, providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African country that could not replenish them.

Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by 'Araboushim' in areas inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather differently. "

Noam Chomsky - The Most Wanted List: International Terrorism - 26 February 2008

Meanwhile in Ramallah...

Focus on Gaza, ruled by Western bête noire Hamas, has in recent months drawn attention away from the siuation in the West Bank, where our 'good Palestinians', Fatah, hold sway.

Now that the two Palestinian territories have split into Hamas-governed and Fatah-governed enclaves, the Western strategy is to show the Palestinians the rewards of obeying the master and the costs of disobediance. So, the public in Gaza are denied food and medicine (with Fatah's collaboration) until they learn to have a government more to our liking. And the West Bank is given the rewards that flow to those who kneel before Washington.

Or so the plan goes. In fact, as Arthur Nelson reports from Ramallah in the West Bank, the demonstration model is not looking quite as attractive is its supposed to.

"More typical events in the last week have included a mysterious explosion, continued Israeli army raids, and a major downtown gunfight between PA ’security’ forces in balaclavas and youths from the city’s Amari refugee camp. The violence, unheard outside Ramallah, is at once cause, effect and byproduct of a pervasive gloom that has settled over ‘Fatahland’ like smog."

"In private, moderate former cabinet ministers now compare the government of PA president Mahmoud Abbas to France’s Vichy regime under German occupation. In public, meanwhile, West Bank trades unions affiliated with Fatah are battening down the hatches in an increasingly bitter dispute with the PA that has already sparked a two-day national strike this month."

"Without western aid, the PA would surely collapse, and that might be a bad thing. But the funnelling of donor dollars here is socially engineering an alternative Palestinian capital, cut off from the rest of the West Bank, and the world. The strings attached to the aid economy – market liberalisation and a crushing of the Intifada’s resistance dynamics – only reinforce the sense that Palestine has become a truncated, failed police state before it is even sovereign"

"Opposition to this trend is far from easy. The activists of Hamas, still the majority party in the elected Palestinian Legislature, are in hiding, or in jail. Police violence is endemic. Protests, such as those against Annapolis and Bush’s visit, are routinely suppressed with force. Fatah functionaries stand guard in Hamas mosques to ensure that free religious assembly does not turn into anything more civic-minded."

While the focus remains on the Palestinians writhing under our boot in Gaza, who may or may not be living up to the high moral standards we demand of them, the crimes of our allies in the West Bank go unreported, unlamented and ignored. But when, as seems increasingly likely, Fatah splits into collaborationist and nationalist camps, and bloodshed ensues, it will be no less calamitous for the Palestinian people or for the cause of peace than the Hamas-Fatah violence of 2006-07. The West's strategy of pummelling the Palestinians into submission, imagining that a point will come when they surrender their fundamental rights, is of course doomed to fail. The question is how much damage will be done to the Palestinian society, and how much blood will flow, before our governments recognise the futility (if not the abject immorality) of this course of action.

Uri Avnery on the blockade of Gaza

Once again, Uri Avnery nails it:

"It is impossible not to feel exhilaration when masses of oppressed and hungry people break down the wall that is shutting them in, their eyes radiant, embracing everybody they meet - to feel so even when it is your own government that erected the wall in the first place."

"The Gaza Strip is the largest prison on earth. The breaking of the Rafah wall was an act of liberation. It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair."

And on the "defence" of Sderot:

"WHAT to do? After all, it is impossible to tolerate the suffering of the inhabitants of Sderot, who are under constant fire.

What is being hidden from the embittered public is that the launching of the Qassams could be stopped tomorrow morning.

Several months ago Hamas proposed a cease-fire. It repeated the offer this week.

A cease-fire means, in the view of Hamas: the Palestinians will stop shooting Qassams and mortar shells, the Israelis will stop the incursions into Gaza, the "targeted" assassinations and the blockade.

Why doesn't our government jump at this proposal?

Simple: in order to make such a deal, we must speak with Hamas, directly or indirectly. And this is precisely what the government refuses to do.

Why? Simple again: Sderot is only a pretext - much like the two captured soldiers were a pretext for something else altogether. The real purpose of the whole exercise is to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank.

In simple and blunt words: the government sacrifices the fate of the Sderot population on the altar of a hopeless principle. It is more important for the government to boycott Hamas - because it is now the spearhead of Palestinian resistance - than to put an end to the suffering of Sderot. All the media cooperate with this pretence."

Read the rest here. And see also Tony Karon's "Hamas Blows a Hole in Bush's Plans"