This week, a former President and now citizen activist came to Gaza to witness and speak about the ongoing, deliberate destruction of Gaza. On June 16, former President Jimmy Carter spoke in unflinchingly blunt terms of devastating damage caused by the 22-day Israeli military assault on the small strip of land and the failure of the international community to help Gazan citizens rebuild their homes, government offices and industries.
Upon seeing the destruction of the American International School (one of seven schools completely destroyed in Gaza and 87 other schools severely damaged), Carter said, "I have to hold back tears when I see the deliberate destruction that has been wreaked against your people," adding that he felt partly responsible because the school had been "deliberately destroyed by bombs from F-16s made in my country."
In the same speech to graduates of a human rights curriculum sponsored by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, President Carter referred to this month's CODEPINK delegation that had tried to enter Gaza with playground equipment through the Israeli Erez border crossing but were turned back.
Carter said, "Last week, a group of Israelis and Americans tried to cross into Gaza through Erez, bringing toys and children's playground equipment - slides, swings, kites, and magic castles for your children. They were stopped at the gate and prevented from coming. I understand even paper and crayons are treated as 'security hazards' and not permitted to enter Gaza. I sought an explanation for this policy in Israel, but did not receive a satisfactory answer - because there is none...."
Before that delegation, in late May, CODEPINK sent a 66-member delegation of people from 10 into Gaza through the Rafah, Egypt crossing. It was successful in breaking the blockade and brought three sets of playground equipment and toys and a variety of educational materials to the kids of Gaza.
I was part of two of those delegations, on my third trip to Gaza in three months. Three additional groups totaling 73 persons led by delegates from CODEPINK's March, 2009 International Women's Day 60-person delegation also entered Gaza in late May through the Rafah, Egypt crossing. CODEPINK also took 45 persons in early June from three nations to Israel, in an unsuccessful attempt to cross into Gaza via the Erez, Israel border crossing.
In the three past three months, we have witnessed the destruction of much of Gaza and the silence of the international community to the pleas for assistance in the reconstruction of the homes of over 50,000 persons made homeless by the 22 day Israeli military attack on Gaza.
We have also witnessed the effects of the two year siege/blockade/quarantine by the international community on Gaza, collective punishment for the election of Hamas in 2006 as the government of Gaza.
For three months we have met the same residents of the Jabalyia area each day sitting in the wreckage that was their homes--waiting for help--and none has come, despite the pledges from many countries.
During his one day visit to Gaza, President Carter spoke strongly about the international blockade on Gaza and about arbitrary prohibitions by the Israeli government that have made travel into and out of Gaza by Palestinians virtually impossible, banned the import of all but basic goods and prevented reconstruction since Israel's three-week attack on Gaza ended in January, two days before President Obama's inauguration.
Carter said, "Tragically, the international community largely ignores the cries for help, while the citizens of Gaza are treated more like animals than human beings." He added, "Never before in history has a large community been savaged by bombs and missiles and then deprived of the means to repair itself. The responsibility for this terrible human rights crime lies in Jerusalem, Cairo, Washington, and throughout the international community," Carter said.
1.5 million people live in the tiny area (25 miles long and 5miles wide) of Gaza, making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
Carter said, "This abuse must cease. The crimes must be investigated. The wall must be brought down, and the basic right of freedom must come to you."
Carter, as a private citizen not as a government envoy, met with senior members of Hamas, the political, economic and militant group that won sufficient Parliamentary seats in 2006 elections to gain control of the Palestinian Parliamentary Council. Hamas is labeled a terrorist group for having fired thousands of unguided rockets into Israel over the past 5 years.
According to research done by Israeli human rights group B'Tselem from in the 5 and one-half years from June 2004 to the end of Operation Cast Lead, on 17 January 2009, 19 Israelis, including four minors and two soldiers, were killed in Israel by rockets and mortars fired by Palestinians. According to UN figures, in 2005, 1,194 rockets were fired at Israel (an average of 100 a month), in 2006 the rocket fire increased to 1,786 (an average of 149 a month), and in 2007, 1,331 were fired (an average of 111 a month). According to Israel Security Agency figures, in 2008, 2,048 rockets and more than 1,672 mortar shells were fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel (not including the period of Operation Cast Lead, which began on 27 December, during which the rocket and mortar fire increased significantly)
B'Tselem also reports that in the eight years from October 29, 2000 to December 26, 2008, the day before the Israeli attack on Gaza, 3000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza and 1791 killed in the Occupied Territories (total 4791) by Israeli security forces.
During the same 8 year period, 237 Israeli civilians and 245 Israeli security forces (total of 482) had been killed by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
During the December, 2008-January 2009, 22 day attacks on Gaza, 1440 Palestinians were killed by Israeli military and over 5,000 were wounded.
13 Israelis were killed during the 22 days, including 3 civilians and ten Israeli military, five of whom were killed by their own Israeli military forces.
Former President Carter gave Hamas leaders in Gaza a letter from the family of Corporal Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was seized and taken into Gaza in June, 2006. Mr. Carter asked that the letter be passed on to the soldier, who is presumed to be alive. Senior Hamas official Ismail Haniya, who risked Israeli assassination in by making a public appearance with Carter, said Hamas was hoping to negotiate an "honorable deal" for Shalit's return to Israel in the form of a prisoner exchange. In contrast to the one Israeli held in Gaza, over 11,700 Palestinians (including 400 women and children) are imprisoned in Israel.
American and international activists continue to work to educate government officials and citizens about Gaza. On June 4, prior to President Obama speaking at Cairo University, a CODEPINK delegation delivered to the US Embassy in Cairo a copy of a letter from senior Hamas officials signed by deputy Foreign Minister Ahmed Yousef inviting Obama to visit Gaza to see the destruction for himself. The delegation also delivered to the US Embassy a petition signed by over 10,000 persons asking President Obama to visit Gaza.
Additionally, activists with the International Movement to Open the Rafah Border who are in their third week of camping at the Rafah, Egypt border have begun a hunger strike to pressure the Egyptian government to let Palestinians join their families in Gaza.
On June 25, 2009, the Free Gaza Movement boat fleet will attempt to break the naval blockade on Gaza. On July 4, 2009, an American delegation will leave the U.S. for Gaza as a part of the Viva Palestina convoy (). Also, in August, a group of Canadian Members of Parliament will visit Gaza.
While many members of the U.S. Congress visit Israel, only seven have visited Gaza, and several of those have been targeted by the American Israeli Public Affairs committee (AIPAC) because of their statements of concern for Gaza. On the same day, February 22, 2009, Senator John Kerry and Congressmen Keith Ellison and Brian Beard, were the first members of Congress to enter Gaza in 5 years. They said they entered Gaza as private citizens, not government employees.
The U.S. State Department still bans travel for US government employees citing the kidnapping of 17 foreigners in Gaza from 2005-2007 and the deaths of three US government security contractors in 2003 who were killed while providing security to U.S. diplomatic personnel who were visiting Gaza to identify potential Palestinian candidates for Fulbright Scholarships. The State Department allows persons on government contracts to go into Gaza.
Citizen activists have been traveling to Gaza and upon their return, trying their best to educate government officials on Gaza. It is high time for the Obama administration to send US government officials, including Special Envoy George Mitchell, to Gaza to figure out the mechanisms for getting the $300 million the US has allocated for reconstruction in Gaza to the people of Gaza.
Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December, 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book "Dissent: Voices of Conscience." (www.voicesofconscience.com).
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Limiting a Palestinian state
By Lamis Andoni, Al Jazeera's Middle East analyst
It was billed as a peace speech, but Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, echoed the words of a colonialist conqueror when he delivered his much-anticipated policy speech at Bar Illan University.
Without ambiguity, he told the Palestinians that their existence and future hinges on their acquiescence - the relinquishing of their own history, rights and aspirations.
In effect, Netanyahu called on the Palestinians to accept total surrender.
It was a speech reminding the vanquished that they have no rights beyond accepting the terms of their defeat.
In the tradition of victorious colonialists, Netanyahu's vision for the future emanates from a self-entitlement to rewrite history and to determine the fate of his defeated subjects.
Netanyahu's speech is a blow to a justice-based solution to the conflict, not merely because it offers no more than a powerless entity subject to de facto Israeli control, but more significantly because the Israeli leader's vision is based on an extremist Zionist narrative that promotes the view that the historic land of Palestine – recognised as Israel and the West Bank — is the homeland of the Jewish people.
Revisionist history
Such an account categorically denies Palestinian history and Arab roots in Palestine and therefore does not acknowledge the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948, or the 1967 occupation of West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Instead they are the "undisputed lands of Israel".
"The state of Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish people and will remain so," Netanyahu told his audience.
"The connection of the Jewish people to the land has been in existence for more than 3,500 years.
"Judea and Samaria - the places where our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked, our forefathers David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah.
"This is not a foreign land, this is the land of our forefathers," he said emphatically to loud applause.
Throughout his speech Netanyahu never even remotely referred to an occupation, or an end to occupation.
Instead, he referred to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 war as "when the soldiers entered Judea and Samaria".
The presence of the Palestinians "in the land of Israel", as Netanyahu framed it, is a problem that Israel has had to deal with to ensure its security, rather that of an occupation and dispossession of an indigenous people.
"But, friends, we must state the whole truth here. The truth is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians," Netanyahu said.
In other words, the presence of Palestinians in their lands is portrayed as an accident of history – thus annulling in one speech their history and stripping them of their legal, let alone their national, rights.
'Jewish homeland'
It is only in the context of denying Palestinian history and identity that Netanyahu's proposed demands should be understood and evaluated.
Netanyahu's two preconditions for peace are a logical consequence of his blatant and distorted revisionist history.
Asking the Arabs and the Palestinians to recognise that Israel is the historic "Jewish homeland" is paramount to demanding that the Arab, Muslim and Palestinians themselves recant their own history, roots and identity.
Thus by denying their own rights, Palestinians are reduced to a foreign community that accidentally found itself in another people's land and must accept the terms of its "hosts".
Communities as such do not exercise the right to self-determination or national rights.
Therefore, it is only natural, following Netanyahu's line of thinking, that a Palestinian state is only accepted if it is devoid of real sovereignty or independence.
Palestinian state
It is misleading to interpret Netanyahu's conditions as that of accepting a two-state solution.
The vision that Netanyahu laid out stripped the Palestinians of their right to self-determination and replaced it with Israel's "right" to continue its domination of Palestinian lands and lives.
Netanyahu's proposal would leave a Palestinian state undefended [EPA]
He wants occupation without the burden and the responsibility of spearheading one.
He laid out a vision for an isolated and besieged Palestinian entity that would have no control over the land beneath it, nor the skies above it.
"The territory in Palestinian hands must be demilitarised - in other words, without an army, without control of airspace and with effective security safeguards," he said.
His demand for a "demilitarised state" is thus a logical demand, for how else can Netanyahu and Israel and its future leaders ensure the total subordination of future Palestinian generations who will be borne into a perpetual prison in the guise of statehood?
Seen in this light, from a Palestinian viewpoint, Netanyahu is not only trying to deprive Palestinians of their present aspirations for independence, but to deny future generations the right to dream of freedom.
Breakdown of spirit
Total subordination of the vanquished, in the logic of conquerors, is only possible if the defeated are denied the right and the ability to resist.
Disarming an imprisoned population to ensure its control in the name of statehood is a prerequisite to ensure that future generations will not rebel against Israeli control.
But it is not the most dangerous aspect of Netanyahu's terms for Palestinian surrender.
Netanyahu is after a moral and psychological breakdown of the Palestinian spirit.
Breaking the spirit of a nation is not achieved solely through depriving Palestinians of the right to resist or of their right to self-defence, but by forcing the Palestinians to relinquish their memory.
Memory is the key element here.
It is astonishing that Washington and Western governments rushed to embrace Netanyahu's call for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which is paramount to a blatant call to erase Palestinian history.
In his speech, Netanyahu rewrote the history of the conflict by erasing any mention of Palestinians' right to their historic land, denying Palestinian identity and the saga of Israeli-imposed dispossession of the Palestinian people and occupation of Palestinian land.
'Simple truth'
Netanyahu's narrative, long propagated by the Israeli right wing and extremist Zionists, is that the establishment of Israel was an exercise of the right of the Jewish people to their natural homeland - Israel bears no responsibility for the Palestinian refugees and finally there was never a problem of dispossession and occupation.
"The simple truth is that the root of the conflict has been and remains - the refusal to recognise the right of the Jewish people to their own state in their historical homeland," Netanyahu said.
In Cairo, Obama offered a new beginning based on 'mutual understanding' [Reuters]
Netanyahu's rhetoric is consistent with his long-standing politics and reflects the prevailing ideology of the Israeli establishment.
What is more disturbing is Washington's welcome of the speech as a positive step towards peace.
In his Cairo speech, Barack Obama, the US president, offered a new beginning with the Arab and Muslims worlds based "on mutual understanding and respect".
By hailing Netanyahu's racist policy speech, Obama is squandering whatever momentum he sought to build as he perpetuates America's endorsement of Israeli superiority.
Bill Clinton, the former US president, made the same mistake when he unconditionally supported the similar "generous offer" of Ehud Barrak, then Israeli prime minister, who proposed establishing a fragmented, powerless entity in parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under the guise of Palestinian statehood.
Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, rejected the offer, and disillusioned Palestinians erupted in an uprising against Israel - the second Intifada.
Neither the Israeli nor American leaders seem to learn from history.
No Palestinian leader, moderate or extremist, will accept such subordination.
For the Palestinians it is a betrayal of their history, as well as a betrayal of future generations.
By Lamis Andoni, Al Jazeera's Middle East analyst
It was billed as a peace speech, but Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, echoed the words of a colonialist conqueror when he delivered his much-anticipated policy speech at Bar Illan University.
Without ambiguity, he told the Palestinians that their existence and future hinges on their acquiescence - the relinquishing of their own history, rights and aspirations.
In effect, Netanyahu called on the Palestinians to accept total surrender.
It was a speech reminding the vanquished that they have no rights beyond accepting the terms of their defeat.
In the tradition of victorious colonialists, Netanyahu's vision for the future emanates from a self-entitlement to rewrite history and to determine the fate of his defeated subjects.
Netanyahu's speech is a blow to a justice-based solution to the conflict, not merely because it offers no more than a powerless entity subject to de facto Israeli control, but more significantly because the Israeli leader's vision is based on an extremist Zionist narrative that promotes the view that the historic land of Palestine – recognised as Israel and the West Bank — is the homeland of the Jewish people.
Revisionist history
Such an account categorically denies Palestinian history and Arab roots in Palestine and therefore does not acknowledge the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948, or the 1967 occupation of West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Instead they are the "undisputed lands of Israel".
"The state of Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish people and will remain so," Netanyahu told his audience.
"The connection of the Jewish people to the land has been in existence for more than 3,500 years.
"Judea and Samaria - the places where our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked, our forefathers David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah.
"This is not a foreign land, this is the land of our forefathers," he said emphatically to loud applause.
Throughout his speech Netanyahu never even remotely referred to an occupation, or an end to occupation.
Instead, he referred to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 war as "when the soldiers entered Judea and Samaria".
The presence of the Palestinians "in the land of Israel", as Netanyahu framed it, is a problem that Israel has had to deal with to ensure its security, rather that of an occupation and dispossession of an indigenous people.
"But, friends, we must state the whole truth here. The truth is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians," Netanyahu said.
In other words, the presence of Palestinians in their lands is portrayed as an accident of history – thus annulling in one speech their history and stripping them of their legal, let alone their national, rights.
'Jewish homeland'
It is only in the context of denying Palestinian history and identity that Netanyahu's proposed demands should be understood and evaluated.
Netanyahu's two preconditions for peace are a logical consequence of his blatant and distorted revisionist history.
Asking the Arabs and the Palestinians to recognise that Israel is the historic "Jewish homeland" is paramount to demanding that the Arab, Muslim and Palestinians themselves recant their own history, roots and identity.
Thus by denying their own rights, Palestinians are reduced to a foreign community that accidentally found itself in another people's land and must accept the terms of its "hosts".
Communities as such do not exercise the right to self-determination or national rights.
Therefore, it is only natural, following Netanyahu's line of thinking, that a Palestinian state is only accepted if it is devoid of real sovereignty or independence.
Palestinian state
It is misleading to interpret Netanyahu's conditions as that of accepting a two-state solution.
The vision that Netanyahu laid out stripped the Palestinians of their right to self-determination and replaced it with Israel's "right" to continue its domination of Palestinian lands and lives.
Netanyahu's proposal would leave a Palestinian state undefended [EPA]
He wants occupation without the burden and the responsibility of spearheading one.
He laid out a vision for an isolated and besieged Palestinian entity that would have no control over the land beneath it, nor the skies above it.
"The territory in Palestinian hands must be demilitarised - in other words, without an army, without control of airspace and with effective security safeguards," he said.
His demand for a "demilitarised state" is thus a logical demand, for how else can Netanyahu and Israel and its future leaders ensure the total subordination of future Palestinian generations who will be borne into a perpetual prison in the guise of statehood?
Seen in this light, from a Palestinian viewpoint, Netanyahu is not only trying to deprive Palestinians of their present aspirations for independence, but to deny future generations the right to dream of freedom.
Breakdown of spirit
Total subordination of the vanquished, in the logic of conquerors, is only possible if the defeated are denied the right and the ability to resist.
Disarming an imprisoned population to ensure its control in the name of statehood is a prerequisite to ensure that future generations will not rebel against Israeli control.
But it is not the most dangerous aspect of Netanyahu's terms for Palestinian surrender.
Netanyahu is after a moral and psychological breakdown of the Palestinian spirit.
Breaking the spirit of a nation is not achieved solely through depriving Palestinians of the right to resist or of their right to self-defence, but by forcing the Palestinians to relinquish their memory.
Memory is the key element here.
It is astonishing that Washington and Western governments rushed to embrace Netanyahu's call for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which is paramount to a blatant call to erase Palestinian history.
In his speech, Netanyahu rewrote the history of the conflict by erasing any mention of Palestinians' right to their historic land, denying Palestinian identity and the saga of Israeli-imposed dispossession of the Palestinian people and occupation of Palestinian land.
'Simple truth'
Netanyahu's narrative, long propagated by the Israeli right wing and extremist Zionists, is that the establishment of Israel was an exercise of the right of the Jewish people to their natural homeland - Israel bears no responsibility for the Palestinian refugees and finally there was never a problem of dispossession and occupation.
"The simple truth is that the root of the conflict has been and remains - the refusal to recognise the right of the Jewish people to their own state in their historical homeland," Netanyahu said.
In Cairo, Obama offered a new beginning based on 'mutual understanding' [Reuters]
Netanyahu's rhetoric is consistent with his long-standing politics and reflects the prevailing ideology of the Israeli establishment.
What is more disturbing is Washington's welcome of the speech as a positive step towards peace.
In his Cairo speech, Barack Obama, the US president, offered a new beginning with the Arab and Muslims worlds based "on mutual understanding and respect".
By hailing Netanyahu's racist policy speech, Obama is squandering whatever momentum he sought to build as he perpetuates America's endorsement of Israeli superiority.
Bill Clinton, the former US president, made the same mistake when he unconditionally supported the similar "generous offer" of Ehud Barrak, then Israeli prime minister, who proposed establishing a fragmented, powerless entity in parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under the guise of Palestinian statehood.
Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, rejected the offer, and disillusioned Palestinians erupted in an uprising against Israel - the second Intifada.
Neither the Israeli nor American leaders seem to learn from history.
No Palestinian leader, moderate or extremist, will accept such subordination.
For the Palestinians it is a betrayal of their history, as well as a betrayal of future generations.
Time for Jews to Abandon the Old Foundation Myth of Israel?
By Ira Chernus
June 17, 2009
Beneath the violence and the inability to find peace in Israel/Palestine, lie a series of narratives and myths that American and Israeli Jews employ to understand the situation. One such narrative has shifted toward hope recently, but does it go deep enough?
Pundit Stanley Greenberg got it right when he said that in politics “a narrative is the key to everything.” But some issues, like the Israel-Palestine conflict, seem to resist change as they form a thicket of many narratives, tangled up so badly that progress toward a solution seems all but impossible.
Now Barack Obama has waded into that thicket, giving the world an implicit pledge that he will somehow make real progress toward a peace settlement. And he’s already made a down payment toward fulfilling that pledge, provoking Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to work toward “two free peoples living side by side,” marking a real change in the narrative structure of the situation. We no longer have to deal with two competing narratives, one about Israel holding on to the Occupied Territories and the other about Israel ending the occupation; the story of the two-state solution has triumphed. So there is no longer an overarching super-narrative about two stories fighting for political dominance in Israel and in the American Jewish community.
This reminds us that in such tangled situations the many narratives swirling through it are arranged in a (usually implicit) hierarchy. Some are small tales, dealing with only a part of the situation. Some are larger and claim to take in the whole reality. Even among those larger ones, though, some are more basic than others; the upper-story stories (as we might call them) are not convincing, perhaps have no meaning at all, unless one first accepts the more basic lower-story stories. And if one digs deep enough, down to the foundation, there is a foundational narrative holding up the whole structure and all its component stories. That deepest level narrative is the one we can rightly call the prevailing myth.
Postmodernists may call it the master narrative and say it must be abolished or ignored. But ordinary people, who have not read Lyotard or Jameson, don’t give up their myths so easily. Nor can even the heaviest barrage of empirical facts tear the myths from people’s minds. A myth is not necessarily a lie or a fiction. It may contain some measure of empirical truth. But that’s irrelevant to its power as myth. For those who hold fast to it, the myth determines what can count as truth and what must be rejected as falsehood. It determines what empirical evidence they can see and what they can’t see. And it determines what higher level narratives they will accept or reject.
You are contemptible, because you have no real self-esteem and no national self-respect
For the Jewish community, the narratives of accepting and rejecting a two-state solution were rather all-encompassing, and the story of the battle between those two narratives was even more basic. But these still did not get down to the foundational level of myth.
Netanyahu made that clear in the speech that offered his pro forma commitment to a two-state solution. What many took as a sea change in Jewish political life was actually only a small part of the speech. Look at the whole rhetorical entity, and the message was quite different: Upper-story stories, even seemingly fundamental ones, can come and go, but the foundational myth endures.
After some preliminary praises of peace, Netanyahu got to the heart of his speech, asking the rhetorical question: “Why is peace still so far from us, even though our [Israeli] hands are extended for peace?” The predictable answer reaffirmed what may be the most basic Israeli myth of all, the myth of innocence and existential threat. Every problem, it turned out, was the fault of others (mainly Arabs) who “refused any Jewish state whatsoever.” The speaker offered a long tour of history, all “proving” the truth of his myth—tautologically, of course, since the facts were only those that the myth permitted.
Even when he turned to “the need for us to recognize their [Palestinian] rights,” Netanyahu still projected the whole picture through the eyes of the myth of innocence and existential threat: “We do not want to rule over them. We do not want to run their lives.” “We cannot be expected to agree to a Palestinian state without ensuring that it is demilitarized. This is crucial to the existence of Israel. … Without this, sooner or later, we will have another Hamastan.”
Then there was the insistence on the seemingly innocent right of “natural growth” in the settlements, an appeal for the return of Gilad Shalit, and the closing plea that “if our neighbors [will] only work for peace, we can achieve peace.” The root of every problem, and thus the source of every solution, was still placed outside the Jewish community, among the gentiles, the “goyim.”
This myth is as old as Zionism itself. In the essay that set the movement in motion, “Self-Emancipation” (1881), Leo Pinsker told the Jews that they would always be mistreated by the “goyim” because everyone fears, and thus persecutes, homeless people. Later Zionist theorists set forth other explanations of anti-Jewish prejudice. But most agreed that the Jews would be victimized, through no fault of their own, as long as they lived among the “goyim.”
Pinsker said more, though: His own people were to blame, because they would not acknowledge the permanent enmity and inhumanity of the “goyim.” “You are contemptible, because you have no real self-esteem and no national self-respect,” he wrote. Pinsker’s chastising voice has echoed loudly through 130 years of Zionist thinking, casting self-doubt and sometimes even a sense of shame.
It must have echoed loudly in Netanyahu’s mind as he pondered his response to the Obama administration’s new pressures upon him. He has built his career as a symbol of the self-esteem Israeli Jews gained by showing their strength. If he simply knuckled under to the Americans, he might easily trigger enough doubt and shame in his followers to bring his political downfall.
To still the doubts and fend off the shame, he had to offer the full Israeli myth, with its three interlocking, mutually reinforcing themes: Our enemies threaten our very existence; we are wholly innocent, having done nothing at all to evoke such enmity; we will maintain our self-esteem and self-respect by inflicting enough defeats on our enemies to prove to them—and ourselves—our indomitable strength.
So the Palestinians get no part of Jerusalem, no hint of a right of return, no freeze on settlements, and a vaguely defined state at some vague future date, but with no army, no control of their air space, no right to sign treaties unless Israel approves, and (it would seem) other unspecified limitations to be dictated by Israel as negotiations proceed. Of course Netanyahu knows full well that Israel can show its vaunted strength only as long as the U.S. pays the bill. He could not simply bite the hand that feeds him $2.775 billion a year in military aid. So he committed himself to a “vision” of “two free peoples living side by side,” hedged in by all the limitations that the foundational myth requires. While the question of whether to pursue a two-state solution is apparently settled, the larger questions remain: Will Jews in Israel, and those around the world who care about Israel, continue to build Jewish life on the same old foundational myth? Or will the changes in policy open up room for a discussion of deeper changes in the myth itself?
In Israel, the widespread approval of Netanyahu’s speech suggests that myth remains healthy (though there is still, as there has always been, a significant minority who challenge it). It’s here in the U.S.—where Jewish community support is vital to keep all those dollars flowing to Israel—that the myth is increasingly called into question.
Meet the new myth, not the same as the old myth
Diane Balzer is president of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, the largest and among the most moderate of American Jewry’s several pro-Israel, pro-peace groups. She gave Netanyahu qualified praise, welcoming his two-state approach but noting that his “statements on continued settlement expansion, the status of refugees and Jerusalem, and the future Palestinian state’s control over its own borders complicate efforts to renew substantive negotiations by attempting to prejudge their outcome.”
Behind those measured words hides a potentially explosive message: It is time for Jews to abandon the old foundation myth in favor of a new one. That’s clear just by considering what it means to enter “substantive” negotiations without attempting to prejudge their outcome. The goal must be an actual settlement of the conflict, one that improves the situation for one’s own side—in this case, for Israel, which is exactly what Brit Tzedek and all the other Jewish peace groups want.
But the settlement has to be mutually beneficial; the opponents won’t agree to it unless it improves the situation for their side too. So there are at least three necessary conditions if you want “substantive” negotiations:
You cannot assume that your opponents are out to destroy your very existence, simply because they are trying to drive a hard bargain;
You cannot assume that all the fault and blame for the problem lies with your opponents;
You cannot let your self-esteem rest on showing your strength by being intransigent, prejudging outcomes, and inflicting defeats on your opponent.
Breaking any of these rules, and certainly all three of them, dooms the negotiation to be fruitless from the outset.
Thus, the call for “substantive” negotiations sows the seed of a new Jewish myth, whose basic elements are just the opposite of the old one:
Jews and gentiles have to live together; they are inextricably woven together in a single web of relationship, what Martin Luther King, Jr. called a single garment of destiny.
Within that web, there will inevitably be both conflict and cooperation; cooperation is perfectly possible, so it pays to make serious efforts to promote it, which means being responsive to the changing concerns of everyone else in the web.
There are rights and wrongs done on every side; it makes no sense to measure how much blame accrues to any one side, because finger-pointing blocks the way to cooperation.
Self-esteem comes from promoting cooperation; if self-esteem must depend on showing one’s strength (an open question), the way to show strength is to show understanding of others, respond to their concerns, and find paths of mutual benefit.
Many Jewish peace advocates are not yet aware of the new myth they are implicitly telling, nor of the magnitude of change in Jewish life it can create. But new myths rarely arise by conscious effort. They simply grow organically, as people pursue the goals they value most and talk to others about their efforts.
Then one day someone wearing the mantle of authority—perhaps even a future prime minister of Israel—looks back and says of the new myth just what people once said about the old one: “This is what we’ve always believed. These are our eternal values.”
How long that will take, no one can predict. But considering the suffering the old myth has produced for Israelis and—much more so—for Palestinians, even one more day is too long.
By Ira Chernus
June 17, 2009
Beneath the violence and the inability to find peace in Israel/Palestine, lie a series of narratives and myths that American and Israeli Jews employ to understand the situation. One such narrative has shifted toward hope recently, but does it go deep enough?
Pundit Stanley Greenberg got it right when he said that in politics “a narrative is the key to everything.” But some issues, like the Israel-Palestine conflict, seem to resist change as they form a thicket of many narratives, tangled up so badly that progress toward a solution seems all but impossible.
Now Barack Obama has waded into that thicket, giving the world an implicit pledge that he will somehow make real progress toward a peace settlement. And he’s already made a down payment toward fulfilling that pledge, provoking Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to work toward “two free peoples living side by side,” marking a real change in the narrative structure of the situation. We no longer have to deal with two competing narratives, one about Israel holding on to the Occupied Territories and the other about Israel ending the occupation; the story of the two-state solution has triumphed. So there is no longer an overarching super-narrative about two stories fighting for political dominance in Israel and in the American Jewish community.
This reminds us that in such tangled situations the many narratives swirling through it are arranged in a (usually implicit) hierarchy. Some are small tales, dealing with only a part of the situation. Some are larger and claim to take in the whole reality. Even among those larger ones, though, some are more basic than others; the upper-story stories (as we might call them) are not convincing, perhaps have no meaning at all, unless one first accepts the more basic lower-story stories. And if one digs deep enough, down to the foundation, there is a foundational narrative holding up the whole structure and all its component stories. That deepest level narrative is the one we can rightly call the prevailing myth.
Postmodernists may call it the master narrative and say it must be abolished or ignored. But ordinary people, who have not read Lyotard or Jameson, don’t give up their myths so easily. Nor can even the heaviest barrage of empirical facts tear the myths from people’s minds. A myth is not necessarily a lie or a fiction. It may contain some measure of empirical truth. But that’s irrelevant to its power as myth. For those who hold fast to it, the myth determines what can count as truth and what must be rejected as falsehood. It determines what empirical evidence they can see and what they can’t see. And it determines what higher level narratives they will accept or reject.
You are contemptible, because you have no real self-esteem and no national self-respect
For the Jewish community, the narratives of accepting and rejecting a two-state solution were rather all-encompassing, and the story of the battle between those two narratives was even more basic. But these still did not get down to the foundational level of myth.
Netanyahu made that clear in the speech that offered his pro forma commitment to a two-state solution. What many took as a sea change in Jewish political life was actually only a small part of the speech. Look at the whole rhetorical entity, and the message was quite different: Upper-story stories, even seemingly fundamental ones, can come and go, but the foundational myth endures.
After some preliminary praises of peace, Netanyahu got to the heart of his speech, asking the rhetorical question: “Why is peace still so far from us, even though our [Israeli] hands are extended for peace?” The predictable answer reaffirmed what may be the most basic Israeli myth of all, the myth of innocence and existential threat. Every problem, it turned out, was the fault of others (mainly Arabs) who “refused any Jewish state whatsoever.” The speaker offered a long tour of history, all “proving” the truth of his myth—tautologically, of course, since the facts were only those that the myth permitted.
Even when he turned to “the need for us to recognize their [Palestinian] rights,” Netanyahu still projected the whole picture through the eyes of the myth of innocence and existential threat: “We do not want to rule over them. We do not want to run their lives.” “We cannot be expected to agree to a Palestinian state without ensuring that it is demilitarized. This is crucial to the existence of Israel. … Without this, sooner or later, we will have another Hamastan.”
Then there was the insistence on the seemingly innocent right of “natural growth” in the settlements, an appeal for the return of Gilad Shalit, and the closing plea that “if our neighbors [will] only work for peace, we can achieve peace.” The root of every problem, and thus the source of every solution, was still placed outside the Jewish community, among the gentiles, the “goyim.”
This myth is as old as Zionism itself. In the essay that set the movement in motion, “Self-Emancipation” (1881), Leo Pinsker told the Jews that they would always be mistreated by the “goyim” because everyone fears, and thus persecutes, homeless people. Later Zionist theorists set forth other explanations of anti-Jewish prejudice. But most agreed that the Jews would be victimized, through no fault of their own, as long as they lived among the “goyim.”
Pinsker said more, though: His own people were to blame, because they would not acknowledge the permanent enmity and inhumanity of the “goyim.” “You are contemptible, because you have no real self-esteem and no national self-respect,” he wrote. Pinsker’s chastising voice has echoed loudly through 130 years of Zionist thinking, casting self-doubt and sometimes even a sense of shame.
It must have echoed loudly in Netanyahu’s mind as he pondered his response to the Obama administration’s new pressures upon him. He has built his career as a symbol of the self-esteem Israeli Jews gained by showing their strength. If he simply knuckled under to the Americans, he might easily trigger enough doubt and shame in his followers to bring his political downfall.
To still the doubts and fend off the shame, he had to offer the full Israeli myth, with its three interlocking, mutually reinforcing themes: Our enemies threaten our very existence; we are wholly innocent, having done nothing at all to evoke such enmity; we will maintain our self-esteem and self-respect by inflicting enough defeats on our enemies to prove to them—and ourselves—our indomitable strength.
So the Palestinians get no part of Jerusalem, no hint of a right of return, no freeze on settlements, and a vaguely defined state at some vague future date, but with no army, no control of their air space, no right to sign treaties unless Israel approves, and (it would seem) other unspecified limitations to be dictated by Israel as negotiations proceed. Of course Netanyahu knows full well that Israel can show its vaunted strength only as long as the U.S. pays the bill. He could not simply bite the hand that feeds him $2.775 billion a year in military aid. So he committed himself to a “vision” of “two free peoples living side by side,” hedged in by all the limitations that the foundational myth requires. While the question of whether to pursue a two-state solution is apparently settled, the larger questions remain: Will Jews in Israel, and those around the world who care about Israel, continue to build Jewish life on the same old foundational myth? Or will the changes in policy open up room for a discussion of deeper changes in the myth itself?
In Israel, the widespread approval of Netanyahu’s speech suggests that myth remains healthy (though there is still, as there has always been, a significant minority who challenge it). It’s here in the U.S.—where Jewish community support is vital to keep all those dollars flowing to Israel—that the myth is increasingly called into question.
Meet the new myth, not the same as the old myth
Diane Balzer is president of Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, the largest and among the most moderate of American Jewry’s several pro-Israel, pro-peace groups. She gave Netanyahu qualified praise, welcoming his two-state approach but noting that his “statements on continued settlement expansion, the status of refugees and Jerusalem, and the future Palestinian state’s control over its own borders complicate efforts to renew substantive negotiations by attempting to prejudge their outcome.”
Behind those measured words hides a potentially explosive message: It is time for Jews to abandon the old foundation myth in favor of a new one. That’s clear just by considering what it means to enter “substantive” negotiations without attempting to prejudge their outcome. The goal must be an actual settlement of the conflict, one that improves the situation for one’s own side—in this case, for Israel, which is exactly what Brit Tzedek and all the other Jewish peace groups want.
But the settlement has to be mutually beneficial; the opponents won’t agree to it unless it improves the situation for their side too. So there are at least three necessary conditions if you want “substantive” negotiations:
You cannot assume that your opponents are out to destroy your very existence, simply because they are trying to drive a hard bargain;
You cannot assume that all the fault and blame for the problem lies with your opponents;
You cannot let your self-esteem rest on showing your strength by being intransigent, prejudging outcomes, and inflicting defeats on your opponent.
Breaking any of these rules, and certainly all three of them, dooms the negotiation to be fruitless from the outset.
Thus, the call for “substantive” negotiations sows the seed of a new Jewish myth, whose basic elements are just the opposite of the old one:
Jews and gentiles have to live together; they are inextricably woven together in a single web of relationship, what Martin Luther King, Jr. called a single garment of destiny.
Within that web, there will inevitably be both conflict and cooperation; cooperation is perfectly possible, so it pays to make serious efforts to promote it, which means being responsive to the changing concerns of everyone else in the web.
There are rights and wrongs done on every side; it makes no sense to measure how much blame accrues to any one side, because finger-pointing blocks the way to cooperation.
Self-esteem comes from promoting cooperation; if self-esteem must depend on showing one’s strength (an open question), the way to show strength is to show understanding of others, respond to their concerns, and find paths of mutual benefit.
Many Jewish peace advocates are not yet aware of the new myth they are implicitly telling, nor of the magnitude of change in Jewish life it can create. But new myths rarely arise by conscious effort. They simply grow organically, as people pursue the goals they value most and talk to others about their efforts.
Then one day someone wearing the mantle of authority—perhaps even a future prime minister of Israel—looks back and says of the new myth just what people once said about the old one: “This is what we’ve always believed. These are our eternal values.”
How long that will take, no one can predict. But considering the suffering the old myth has produced for Israelis and—much more so—for Palestinians, even one more day is too long.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Netanyahu's "brilliant" peace plan
Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 17 June 2009
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a peace plan so ingenious it is a wonder that for six decades of bloodshed no one thought of it. Some people might have missed the true brilliance of his ideas presented in a speech at Bar Ilan University on 14 June, so we are pleased to offer this analysis.
First, Netanyahu wants Palestinians to become committed Zionists. They can prove this by declaring, "We recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in this land." As he pointed out, it is only the failure of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular to commit themselves to the Zionist dream that has caused conflict, but once "they say those words to our people and to their people, then a path will be opened to resolving all the problems between our peoples." It is of course perfectly natural that Netanyahu would be "yearning for that moment."
Mere heartfelt commitment to Zionism will not be enough, however. For the Palestinians' conversion to have "practical meaning," Netanyahu explained, "there must also be a clear understanding that the Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders." In other words, Palestinians must agree to help Israel complete the ethnic cleansing it began in 1947-48, by abandoning the right of return. This is indeed logical because as Zionists, Palestinians would share the Zionist ambition that Palestine be emptied of Palestinians to the greatest extent possible.
Netanyahu is smart enough to recognize that even the self-ethnic-cleansing of refugees may not be sufficient to secure "peace": there will still remain millions of Palestinians living inconveniently in their native land, or in the heart of what Netanyahu insisted was the "historic homeland" of the Jews.
For these Palestinians, the peace plan involves what Netanyahu calls "demilitarization," but what should be properly understood as unconditional surrender followed by disarmament. Disarmament, though necessary, cannot be immediate, however. Some recalcitrant Palestinians may not wish to become Zionists. Therefore, the newly pledged Zionist Palestinians would have to launch a civil war to defeat those who foolishly insist on resisting Zionism. Or as Netanyahu put it, the "Palestinian Authority will have to establish the rule of law in Gaza and overcome Hamas." (In fact, this civil war has already been underway for several years as the American and Israeli-backed Palestinian "security forces," led by US Lt. General Keith Dayton, have escalated their attacks on Hamas).
Once anti-Zionist Palestinians are crushed, the remaining Palestinians -- whose number equals that of Jews in historic Palestine -- will be able to get on with life as good Zionists, according to Netanyahu's vision. They will not mind being squeezed into ever smaller ghettos and enclaves in order to allow for the continued expansion of Jewish colonies, whose inhabitants Netanyahu described as "an integral part of our people, a principled, pioneering and Zionist public." And, in line with their heartfelt Zionism, Palestinians will naturally agree that "Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel."
These are only the Palestinian-Israeli aspects of the Netanyahu plan. The regional elements include full, Arab endorsement of Palestinian Zionism and normalization of ties with Israel and even Arab Gulf money to pay for it all. Why not? If everyone becomes a Zionist then all conflict disappears.
It would be nice if we could really dismiss Netanyahu's speech as a joke. But it is an important indicator of a hard reality. Contrary to some naive and optimistic hopes, Netanyahu does not represent only an extremist fringe in Israel. Today, the Israeli Jewish public presents (with a handful of exceptions) a united front in favor of a racist, violent ultra-nationalism fueled by religious fanaticism. Palestinians are viewed at best as inferiors to be tolerated until circumstances arise in which they can be expelled, or caged and starved like the 1.5 million inmates of the Gaza prison.
Israel is a society where virulent anti-Arab racism and Nakba denial are the norm although none of the European and American leaders who constantly lecture about Holocaust denial will dare to admonish Netanyahu for his bald lies and omissions about Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Netanyahu's "vision" offered absolutely no advance on the 1976 Allon Plan for annexation of most of the occupied West Bank, or Menachem Begin's Camp David "autonomy" proposals. The goal remains the same: to control maximum land with minimum Palestinians.
Netanyahu's speech should put to rest newly revived illusions -- fed in particular by US President Barack Obama's Cairo speech -- that such an Israel can be brought voluntarily to any sort of just settlement. Some in this region who have placed all their hopes in Obama -- as they did previously in Bush -- believe that US pressure can bring Israel to heel. They point to Obama's strong statements calling for a complete halt to Israeli settlement construction -- a demand Netanyahu defied in his speech. It now remains to be seen whether Obama will follow his tough words with actions.
Yet, even if Obama is ready to put unprecedented pressure on Israel, he would likely have to exhaust much of his political capital just to get Israel to agree to a settlement freeze, let alone to move on any of dozens of other much more substantial issues.
And despite the common perception of an escalating clash between the Obama administration and the Israeli government (which may come over minor tactical issues), when it comes to substantive questions they agree on much more than they disagree. Obama has already stated that "any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state," and he affirmed that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided." As for Palestinian refugees, he has said, "The right of return [to Israel] is something that is not an option in a literal sense."
For all the fuss about settlements, Obama has addressed only their expansion, not their continued existence. Until the Obama administration publicly dissociates itself from the positions of the Clinton and Bush administrations, we must assume it agrees with them and with Israel that the large settlement blocks encircling Jerusalem and dividing the West Bank into ghettos would remain permanently in any two-state solution. Neither Obama nor Netanyahu have mentioned Israel's illegal West Bank wall suggesting that there is no controversy over either its route or existence. And now, both agree that whatever shreds are left can be called a "Palestinian state." No wonder the Obama administration welcomed Netanyahu's speech as "a big step forward."
What is particularly dismaying about the position stated by Obama in Cairo -- and since repeated constantly by his Middle East envoy George Mitchell -- is that the United States is committed to the "legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own." This formula is designed to sound meaningful, but these vague, campaign-style buzzwords are devoid of any reference to inalienable Palestinian rights. They were chosen by American speechwriters and public relations experts, not by Palestinians. The Obama formula implies that any other Palestinian aspirations are inherently illegitimate.
Where in international law, or UN resolutions can Palestinians find definitions of "dignity" and "opportunity?" Such infinitely malleable terms incorrectly reduce all of Palestinian history to a demand for vague sentiments and a "state" instead of a struggle for liberation, justice, equality, return and the restoration of usurped rights. It is, after all, easy enough to conceive of a state that keeps Palestinians forever dispossessed, dispersed, defenseless and under threat of more expulsion and massacres by a racist, expansionist Israel.
Through history it was never leaders who defined rights, but the people who struggled for them. It is no small achievement that for a century Palestinians have resisted and survived Zionist efforts to destroy their communities physically and wipe them from the pages of history. As long as Palestinians continue to resist in every arena and by all legitimate means, building on true international solidarity, their rights can never be extinguished. It is from such a basis of independent and indigenous strength, not from the elusive promises of a great power or the favors of a usurping occupier, that justice and peace can be achieved.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
A version of this article first appeared in The Jordan Times and is reprinted with the authors' permission.
Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 17 June 2009
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a peace plan so ingenious it is a wonder that for six decades of bloodshed no one thought of it. Some people might have missed the true brilliance of his ideas presented in a speech at Bar Ilan University on 14 June, so we are pleased to offer this analysis.
First, Netanyahu wants Palestinians to become committed Zionists. They can prove this by declaring, "We recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in this land." As he pointed out, it is only the failure of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular to commit themselves to the Zionist dream that has caused conflict, but once "they say those words to our people and to their people, then a path will be opened to resolving all the problems between our peoples." It is of course perfectly natural that Netanyahu would be "yearning for that moment."
Mere heartfelt commitment to Zionism will not be enough, however. For the Palestinians' conversion to have "practical meaning," Netanyahu explained, "there must also be a clear understanding that the Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders." In other words, Palestinians must agree to help Israel complete the ethnic cleansing it began in 1947-48, by abandoning the right of return. This is indeed logical because as Zionists, Palestinians would share the Zionist ambition that Palestine be emptied of Palestinians to the greatest extent possible.
Netanyahu is smart enough to recognize that even the self-ethnic-cleansing of refugees may not be sufficient to secure "peace": there will still remain millions of Palestinians living inconveniently in their native land, or in the heart of what Netanyahu insisted was the "historic homeland" of the Jews.
For these Palestinians, the peace plan involves what Netanyahu calls "demilitarization," but what should be properly understood as unconditional surrender followed by disarmament. Disarmament, though necessary, cannot be immediate, however. Some recalcitrant Palestinians may not wish to become Zionists. Therefore, the newly pledged Zionist Palestinians would have to launch a civil war to defeat those who foolishly insist on resisting Zionism. Or as Netanyahu put it, the "Palestinian Authority will have to establish the rule of law in Gaza and overcome Hamas." (In fact, this civil war has already been underway for several years as the American and Israeli-backed Palestinian "security forces," led by US Lt. General Keith Dayton, have escalated their attacks on Hamas).
Once anti-Zionist Palestinians are crushed, the remaining Palestinians -- whose number equals that of Jews in historic Palestine -- will be able to get on with life as good Zionists, according to Netanyahu's vision. They will not mind being squeezed into ever smaller ghettos and enclaves in order to allow for the continued expansion of Jewish colonies, whose inhabitants Netanyahu described as "an integral part of our people, a principled, pioneering and Zionist public." And, in line with their heartfelt Zionism, Palestinians will naturally agree that "Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel."
These are only the Palestinian-Israeli aspects of the Netanyahu plan. The regional elements include full, Arab endorsement of Palestinian Zionism and normalization of ties with Israel and even Arab Gulf money to pay for it all. Why not? If everyone becomes a Zionist then all conflict disappears.
It would be nice if we could really dismiss Netanyahu's speech as a joke. But it is an important indicator of a hard reality. Contrary to some naive and optimistic hopes, Netanyahu does not represent only an extremist fringe in Israel. Today, the Israeli Jewish public presents (with a handful of exceptions) a united front in favor of a racist, violent ultra-nationalism fueled by religious fanaticism. Palestinians are viewed at best as inferiors to be tolerated until circumstances arise in which they can be expelled, or caged and starved like the 1.5 million inmates of the Gaza prison.
Israel is a society where virulent anti-Arab racism and Nakba denial are the norm although none of the European and American leaders who constantly lecture about Holocaust denial will dare to admonish Netanyahu for his bald lies and omissions about Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Netanyahu's "vision" offered absolutely no advance on the 1976 Allon Plan for annexation of most of the occupied West Bank, or Menachem Begin's Camp David "autonomy" proposals. The goal remains the same: to control maximum land with minimum Palestinians.
Netanyahu's speech should put to rest newly revived illusions -- fed in particular by US President Barack Obama's Cairo speech -- that such an Israel can be brought voluntarily to any sort of just settlement. Some in this region who have placed all their hopes in Obama -- as they did previously in Bush -- believe that US pressure can bring Israel to heel. They point to Obama's strong statements calling for a complete halt to Israeli settlement construction -- a demand Netanyahu defied in his speech. It now remains to be seen whether Obama will follow his tough words with actions.
Yet, even if Obama is ready to put unprecedented pressure on Israel, he would likely have to exhaust much of his political capital just to get Israel to agree to a settlement freeze, let alone to move on any of dozens of other much more substantial issues.
And despite the common perception of an escalating clash between the Obama administration and the Israeli government (which may come over minor tactical issues), when it comes to substantive questions they agree on much more than they disagree. Obama has already stated that "any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state," and he affirmed that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided." As for Palestinian refugees, he has said, "The right of return [to Israel] is something that is not an option in a literal sense."
For all the fuss about settlements, Obama has addressed only their expansion, not their continued existence. Until the Obama administration publicly dissociates itself from the positions of the Clinton and Bush administrations, we must assume it agrees with them and with Israel that the large settlement blocks encircling Jerusalem and dividing the West Bank into ghettos would remain permanently in any two-state solution. Neither Obama nor Netanyahu have mentioned Israel's illegal West Bank wall suggesting that there is no controversy over either its route or existence. And now, both agree that whatever shreds are left can be called a "Palestinian state." No wonder the Obama administration welcomed Netanyahu's speech as "a big step forward."
What is particularly dismaying about the position stated by Obama in Cairo -- and since repeated constantly by his Middle East envoy George Mitchell -- is that the United States is committed to the "legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own." This formula is designed to sound meaningful, but these vague, campaign-style buzzwords are devoid of any reference to inalienable Palestinian rights. They were chosen by American speechwriters and public relations experts, not by Palestinians. The Obama formula implies that any other Palestinian aspirations are inherently illegitimate.
Where in international law, or UN resolutions can Palestinians find definitions of "dignity" and "opportunity?" Such infinitely malleable terms incorrectly reduce all of Palestinian history to a demand for vague sentiments and a "state" instead of a struggle for liberation, justice, equality, return and the restoration of usurped rights. It is, after all, easy enough to conceive of a state that keeps Palestinians forever dispossessed, dispersed, defenseless and under threat of more expulsion and massacres by a racist, expansionist Israel.
Through history it was never leaders who defined rights, but the people who struggled for them. It is no small achievement that for a century Palestinians have resisted and survived Zionist efforts to destroy their communities physically and wipe them from the pages of history. As long as Palestinians continue to resist in every arena and by all legitimate means, building on true international solidarity, their rights can never be extinguished. It is from such a basis of independent and indigenous strength, not from the elusive promises of a great power or the favors of a usurping occupier, that justice and peace can be achieved.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
A version of this article first appeared in The Jordan Times and is reprinted with the authors' permission.
Obama's Jimmy Carter problem?
Tue, 06/16/2009 - 5:56pm
When Fox News reported today from Gaza that former President Jimmy Carter plans to urge President Barack Obama to take the Palestinian militant group Hamas off the U.S. terrorist list in meetings later this week, Washington Democrats and the Obama administration collectively cringed.
"The president has addressed Hamas questions, including in the Egypt speech," an administraton official said. "[We] won't have more to say about this."
"Just like with President Clinton, Carter is becoming a huge problem and a growing concern for Obama," a Washington Middle East hand said. "They are very pissed with him."
After observing Lebanon's elections, Carter visited Damascus last week and met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, as well as exiled Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal. This week, he met with Israeli settlers in the West Bank and toured Gaza with top Hamas leader Ismail Haniya as his guide. His trip to Damascus came a day ahead of that of Obama Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell.
Carter's objectives in Gaza, a Washington Middle East expert familiar with the matter told The Cable, are "to open up Gaza, and to see what he can do to pave the way to some [sort of] engagement between Hamas and the U.S.," the expert said, on condition of anonymity, cautioning that he didn't think any such engagement would happen anytime soon. "And to see whether Hamas can shift its position, and the U.S. can shift its position. ... I think he is smart enough to realize they aren't going to come off the terror list."
"Don't forget people in Gaza were spreading rumors last week that Carter was bringing Hamas a letter from Obama," the expert added. "It's absurd, but it made the rounds for a day."
Don't overreact to an unconfirmed news report, agreed veteran U.S. Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller. "This is Jimmy Carter being Jimmy Carter," Miller said by email. "I didn't see any confirmation that Carter intends to ask the administration to remove Hamas from the terrorism list; more likely he'll urge Obama at the right time to consider opening up a dialogue with Hamas."
"But that's a key to an empty room right now given everything that Obama is trying to do with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ] Netanyahu and [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas," Miller continued. "In fact, the way to lose both of them and much of Congress to boot would be to do precisely what the former president recommends."
Seeking to deflect a potential firestorm from the unconfirmed report, the National Jewish Democratic Council's Ira Forman suggested that instead of taking Hamas off the terrorism list, people should put Carter on a list of people one shouldn't pay attention to. "When someone is saying something so outrageous, even if they're a Democrat, we can't take them seriously."
Mitchell didn't directly address Carter's mission at his first State Department news conference Tuesday. But asked about recent statements from Hamas officials urging that the United States to talk to them without preconditions, and asserting that they seek a Palestinian state in land confined to that seized by Israel during the 1967 war, Mitchell said Hamas is welcome to join talks if it agrees to what he called a "democratic dialogue," which he later specified to be the so-called Quartet conditions. "We made our position clear," Mitchell said. "We welcome the participation of any party that meets the requirements of a democratic dialogue."
Like Mitchell, White House officials and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have repeatedly said Hamas members could join a Palestinian unity government if they agree to renounce terror, recognize Israel and abide by past agreements, the conditions set out by the so-called Middle East Quartet made up of the United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union. Hamas's 1988 charter calls explicitly for the destruction of Israel.
Carter himself has reiterated that message to Hamas, according to reports. "I called on Hamas leaders that I met with in Damascus and I told Hamas leaders in Gaza today to accept these conditions," the former president reportedly said after his meeting with Haniya. "They made several statements, and showed readiness to join the peace [process] and move towards establishing a just and independent Palestinian state."
Behind the scenes, there have been some debates in mostly left-leaning Washington and European Middle East circles about whether there should be a softening of conditions to facilitate Hamas members joining a Palestinian unity government. Those who advocate it are concerned that with Fatah only representing the West Bank, and Gaza controlling Hamas, there is not a sufficiently representative Palestinian entity that the United States can push Israel to negotiate with for a two-state solution. One option being floated in the region by independent Palestinians would be to relax conditions in order to achieve a Palestinian technocratic unity government that would mainly prepare for Palestinian elections scheduled for early next year, and then dissolve.
But there's no sign that such ideas have any traction inside the Obama administration.
Indeed, administration officials have indicated that Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian intelligence chief and the lead negotiator on Palestinian unity government talks, has explicitly urged them in meetings not to soften the conditions for Hamas to join a Palestinian unity government. (Some veteran Middle East hands say that neither Egypt, concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is an affiliate, nor Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is enthusiastic about including Hamas in a Palestinian power-sharing government and may be happier if one doesn't materialize.)
Mitchell told journalists today that he would plow ahead with comprehensive Middle East peace talks with the parties that show up in the room, and meet the conditions that have been established.
For its part, Hamas has welcomed Carter's attention. "Someone as high-profile as Carter, coming to the region to meet with Hamas and the government of Ismail Haniya but also [Palestinian Authority] President [Mahmoud] Abbas, is very positive," the Christian Science Monitor quoted Hamas advisor Ahmed Yousef. "He can convey messages to President Obama about the situation in Gaza and in the West Bank and the consequences this blockade has had on our lives. Carter is the messenger that we trust - and that the world community trusts."
What's prompting the recent stream of Hamas interviews and requests for dialogue with Washington? "I think they are intrigued by Obama," the Washington Middle East expert familiar with the matter said. "They saw his [Cairo] speech that had both things that they couldn't swallow and things they are extremely intrigued by. For the first time they are a bit curious, even very curious. And in some ways, they don't know how to deal with him and don't know what to do."
But perhaps not yet quite curious enough or convinced they're going to get left behind to find a way to agree to Obama's conditions for dialogue.
Tue, 06/16/2009 - 5:56pm
When Fox News reported today from Gaza that former President Jimmy Carter plans to urge President Barack Obama to take the Palestinian militant group Hamas off the U.S. terrorist list in meetings later this week, Washington Democrats and the Obama administration collectively cringed.
"The president has addressed Hamas questions, including in the Egypt speech," an administraton official said. "[We] won't have more to say about this."
"Just like with President Clinton, Carter is becoming a huge problem and a growing concern for Obama," a Washington Middle East hand said. "They are very pissed with him."
After observing Lebanon's elections, Carter visited Damascus last week and met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, as well as exiled Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal. This week, he met with Israeli settlers in the West Bank and toured Gaza with top Hamas leader Ismail Haniya as his guide. His trip to Damascus came a day ahead of that of Obama Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell.
Carter's objectives in Gaza, a Washington Middle East expert familiar with the matter told The Cable, are "to open up Gaza, and to see what he can do to pave the way to some [sort of] engagement between Hamas and the U.S.," the expert said, on condition of anonymity, cautioning that he didn't think any such engagement would happen anytime soon. "And to see whether Hamas can shift its position, and the U.S. can shift its position. ... I think he is smart enough to realize they aren't going to come off the terror list."
"Don't forget people in Gaza were spreading rumors last week that Carter was bringing Hamas a letter from Obama," the expert added. "It's absurd, but it made the rounds for a day."
Don't overreact to an unconfirmed news report, agreed veteran U.S. Middle East peace negotiator Aaron David Miller. "This is Jimmy Carter being Jimmy Carter," Miller said by email. "I didn't see any confirmation that Carter intends to ask the administration to remove Hamas from the terrorism list; more likely he'll urge Obama at the right time to consider opening up a dialogue with Hamas."
"But that's a key to an empty room right now given everything that Obama is trying to do with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ] Netanyahu and [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas," Miller continued. "In fact, the way to lose both of them and much of Congress to boot would be to do precisely what the former president recommends."
Seeking to deflect a potential firestorm from the unconfirmed report, the National Jewish Democratic Council's Ira Forman suggested that instead of taking Hamas off the terrorism list, people should put Carter on a list of people one shouldn't pay attention to. "When someone is saying something so outrageous, even if they're a Democrat, we can't take them seriously."
Mitchell didn't directly address Carter's mission at his first State Department news conference Tuesday. But asked about recent statements from Hamas officials urging that the United States to talk to them without preconditions, and asserting that they seek a Palestinian state in land confined to that seized by Israel during the 1967 war, Mitchell said Hamas is welcome to join talks if it agrees to what he called a "democratic dialogue," which he later specified to be the so-called Quartet conditions. "We made our position clear," Mitchell said. "We welcome the participation of any party that meets the requirements of a democratic dialogue."
Like Mitchell, White House officials and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have repeatedly said Hamas members could join a Palestinian unity government if they agree to renounce terror, recognize Israel and abide by past agreements, the conditions set out by the so-called Middle East Quartet made up of the United States, Russia, the United Nations, and the European Union. Hamas's 1988 charter calls explicitly for the destruction of Israel.
Carter himself has reiterated that message to Hamas, according to reports. "I called on Hamas leaders that I met with in Damascus and I told Hamas leaders in Gaza today to accept these conditions," the former president reportedly said after his meeting with Haniya. "They made several statements, and showed readiness to join the peace [process] and move towards establishing a just and independent Palestinian state."
Behind the scenes, there have been some debates in mostly left-leaning Washington and European Middle East circles about whether there should be a softening of conditions to facilitate Hamas members joining a Palestinian unity government. Those who advocate it are concerned that with Fatah only representing the West Bank, and Gaza controlling Hamas, there is not a sufficiently representative Palestinian entity that the United States can push Israel to negotiate with for a two-state solution. One option being floated in the region by independent Palestinians would be to relax conditions in order to achieve a Palestinian technocratic unity government that would mainly prepare for Palestinian elections scheduled for early next year, and then dissolve.
But there's no sign that such ideas have any traction inside the Obama administration.
Indeed, administration officials have indicated that Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian intelligence chief and the lead negotiator on Palestinian unity government talks, has explicitly urged them in meetings not to soften the conditions for Hamas to join a Palestinian unity government. (Some veteran Middle East hands say that neither Egypt, concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is an affiliate, nor Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is enthusiastic about including Hamas in a Palestinian power-sharing government and may be happier if one doesn't materialize.)
Mitchell told journalists today that he would plow ahead with comprehensive Middle East peace talks with the parties that show up in the room, and meet the conditions that have been established.
For its part, Hamas has welcomed Carter's attention. "Someone as high-profile as Carter, coming to the region to meet with Hamas and the government of Ismail Haniya but also [Palestinian Authority] President [Mahmoud] Abbas, is very positive," the Christian Science Monitor quoted Hamas advisor Ahmed Yousef. "He can convey messages to President Obama about the situation in Gaza and in the West Bank and the consequences this blockade has had on our lives. Carter is the messenger that we trust - and that the world community trusts."
What's prompting the recent stream of Hamas interviews and requests for dialogue with Washington? "I think they are intrigued by Obama," the Washington Middle East expert familiar with the matter said. "They saw his [Cairo] speech that had both things that they couldn't swallow and things they are extremely intrigued by. For the first time they are a bit curious, even very curious. And in some ways, they don't know how to deal with him and don't know what to do."
But perhaps not yet quite curious enough or convinced they're going to get left behind to find a way to agree to Obama's conditions for dialogue.
Israel's Crimes, America's Silence By John Dugard
June 17, 2009
Obama's recent speech to the Muslim World failed to address allegations that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. Palestinians and people throughout the region were shocked at the firepower Israel brought to bear against Gaza's civilians and do not want Palestinians' ongoing misery to be further ignored. Many were surely waiting to hear from President Obama that the way to peace does not lie through the devastation of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza.
Israel's Crimes, America's Silence Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
John Dugard: There is now sufficient evidence to charge Israel with war crimes and crimes against Israel for its actions in Gaza. Why is Obama silent on this?
To date, too little mention has been made of investigations that show there is sufficient evidence to bring charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against Israel's political and military leadership for their actions in Gaza. Recently, two comprehensive independent reports have been published on Gaza, and earlier this month a mission mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, and chaired by South African Richard Goldstone, visited Gaza to conduct a further investigation into Israel's offensive.
On May 4 the United Nations published the findings of an investigation into attacks carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on UN premises in Gaza. Led by Ian Martin, formerly head of Amnesty International, this investigation found Israel responsible for wrongfully killing and injuring Palestinians on UN premises and destroying property amounting to over $10 million in value. Although this investigation did not address the question of individual criminal responsibility, it is clear that the identified wrongful acts by Israel constituted serious war crimes.
On May 7 the Arab League published the 254-page report of an Independent Fact Finding Committee (IFFC) it had established to examine the legal implications of Israel's Gaza offensive. This committee, comprising six experts in international law, criminal law and forensic medicine from non-Arab countries, visited Gaza in February. We concluded that the IDF had committed serious war crimes and crimes against humanity.
As the committee's chairman, I spent five days in Gaza along with the other experts. Our views were deeply influenced by interviews we conducted with victims and by the evidence of destruction of property. We were particularly disturbed by the accounts of cold-blooded killings of civilians committed by some members of the IDF and the Israeli military's use of white phosphorus in densely populated areas. The devastation was appalling and raised profound doubts in my mind as to the veracity of Israeli officials who claimed this was not a war against the Palestinian people.
The IFFC found that the IDF, in killing some 1,400 Palestinians (at least 850 of whom were civilians), wounding over 5,000 and destroying over 3,000 homes and other buildings, had failed to discriminate between civilian and military targets, terrorized civilians, destroyed property in a wanton manner not justified by military necessity and attacked hospitals and ambulances. It also found that the systematic and widespread killing, injuring and terrorizing of the civilian population of Gaza constituted a crime against humanity.
The IFFC investigated the question whether the IDF was responsible for committing the 'crime of crimes'-- genocide. Here we concluded that although the evidence pointed in this direction, Israel lacked the intention to destroy the people of Gaza, which must be proved for the crime of genocide. Instead, the IFFC found that the purpose of the offensive was collective punishment aimed at reducing the population to a state of submission. However, the IFFC did not discount the possibility that individual soldiers had acted with the required genocidal intent.
Israel's argument that it acted in self-defense was rejected, inter alia, on the basis of evidence that Israel's action was premeditated and not an immediate response to rockets fired by militants and was, moreover, disproportionate. The IFFC found that the IDF's own internal investigation into allegations of irregularities, which exonerated the IDF, was unconvincing because it was not conducted by an independent body and failed to consider Palestinian evidence.
The IFFC also examined the actions of Palestinian militants who fired rockets indiscriminately into southern Israel. We concluded that these actions constituted war crimes and that those responsible committed the war crimes of indiscriminate attacks on civilians and the killing, wounding and terrorization of civilians.
The past twenty years have brought important developments in international law in respect to accountability for international crimes. Yet Israel has possibly secured impunity for itself by failing to become a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Nevertheless, its actions may still be judged by the court of public opinion.
A bold Obama speech on Gaza would have ensured that the public is on notice that it's not business as usual in Washington. Even American allies, such as Israel, should have to answer evidence of serious international crimes. In this way, some measure of accountability may be achieved. With an active American push, a new view of the United States may begin to take shape after eight years of disregard for international and domestic law.
June 17, 2009
Obama's recent speech to the Muslim World failed to address allegations that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. Palestinians and people throughout the region were shocked at the firepower Israel brought to bear against Gaza's civilians and do not want Palestinians' ongoing misery to be further ignored. Many were surely waiting to hear from President Obama that the way to peace does not lie through the devastation of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza.
Israel's Crimes, America's Silence Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
John Dugard: There is now sufficient evidence to charge Israel with war crimes and crimes against Israel for its actions in Gaza. Why is Obama silent on this?
To date, too little mention has been made of investigations that show there is sufficient evidence to bring charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against Israel's political and military leadership for their actions in Gaza. Recently, two comprehensive independent reports have been published on Gaza, and earlier this month a mission mandated by the UN Human Rights Council, and chaired by South African Richard Goldstone, visited Gaza to conduct a further investigation into Israel's offensive.
On May 4 the United Nations published the findings of an investigation into attacks carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on UN premises in Gaza. Led by Ian Martin, formerly head of Amnesty International, this investigation found Israel responsible for wrongfully killing and injuring Palestinians on UN premises and destroying property amounting to over $10 million in value. Although this investigation did not address the question of individual criminal responsibility, it is clear that the identified wrongful acts by Israel constituted serious war crimes.
On May 7 the Arab League published the 254-page report of an Independent Fact Finding Committee (IFFC) it had established to examine the legal implications of Israel's Gaza offensive. This committee, comprising six experts in international law, criminal law and forensic medicine from non-Arab countries, visited Gaza in February. We concluded that the IDF had committed serious war crimes and crimes against humanity.
As the committee's chairman, I spent five days in Gaza along with the other experts. Our views were deeply influenced by interviews we conducted with victims and by the evidence of destruction of property. We were particularly disturbed by the accounts of cold-blooded killings of civilians committed by some members of the IDF and the Israeli military's use of white phosphorus in densely populated areas. The devastation was appalling and raised profound doubts in my mind as to the veracity of Israeli officials who claimed this was not a war against the Palestinian people.
The IFFC found that the IDF, in killing some 1,400 Palestinians (at least 850 of whom were civilians), wounding over 5,000 and destroying over 3,000 homes and other buildings, had failed to discriminate between civilian and military targets, terrorized civilians, destroyed property in a wanton manner not justified by military necessity and attacked hospitals and ambulances. It also found that the systematic and widespread killing, injuring and terrorizing of the civilian population of Gaza constituted a crime against humanity.
The IFFC investigated the question whether the IDF was responsible for committing the 'crime of crimes'-- genocide. Here we concluded that although the evidence pointed in this direction, Israel lacked the intention to destroy the people of Gaza, which must be proved for the crime of genocide. Instead, the IFFC found that the purpose of the offensive was collective punishment aimed at reducing the population to a state of submission. However, the IFFC did not discount the possibility that individual soldiers had acted with the required genocidal intent.
Israel's argument that it acted in self-defense was rejected, inter alia, on the basis of evidence that Israel's action was premeditated and not an immediate response to rockets fired by militants and was, moreover, disproportionate. The IFFC found that the IDF's own internal investigation into allegations of irregularities, which exonerated the IDF, was unconvincing because it was not conducted by an independent body and failed to consider Palestinian evidence.
The IFFC also examined the actions of Palestinian militants who fired rockets indiscriminately into southern Israel. We concluded that these actions constituted war crimes and that those responsible committed the war crimes of indiscriminate attacks on civilians and the killing, wounding and terrorization of civilians.
The past twenty years have brought important developments in international law in respect to accountability for international crimes. Yet Israel has possibly secured impunity for itself by failing to become a party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Nevertheless, its actions may still be judged by the court of public opinion.
A bold Obama speech on Gaza would have ensured that the public is on notice that it's not business as usual in Washington. Even American allies, such as Israel, should have to answer evidence of serious international crimes. In this way, some measure of accountability may be achieved. With an active American push, a new view of the United States may begin to take shape after eight years of disregard for international and domestic law.
Bernard-Henri Lévy
French philosopher and writer
Posted: June 12, 2009
I met Barack Obama exactly five years ago.
It was the evening of the official nomination of his predecessor, John Kerry, at the Democratic National Convention.
All of the party heavyweights had spoken.
The party loyalists were audience to fiery speeches by both Clintons, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Tom Daschle, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
And at 11 o'clock on the dot, as the large auditorium of the Fleet Center in Boston started to empty, while the remaining delegates expected nothing else special from a drawn out evening -- an evening so long that no one bothered any longer to pace things in synch with the commercial breaks on CNN -- a young unknown, light on his feet, and with an unpronounceable name, bounded on stage and electrified the remaining party loyalists.
I see him again the next day.
I spend the morning in a hotel dining room, interrogating him about his beautiful "Brown American" story, the son of a Kenyan and a white mother from Kansas.
And I am so impressed by this meeting, so struck both by what he says to me and the tone, at once consensual and forthright, soothing and unflinching, which we now know would be from that point on his signature -- I am so profoundly seduced by his message as much as his rhetoric that I write a profile of him called "A Black Kennedy" -- that is, before the editors of the American magazine I am writing for tell me gently but firmly: you can make all the predictions you want; you are free to make a fool of yourself in proclaiming a perfect stranger the future president of the United States; but please, do not sully the icon; hands off the sainted patronymic of Kennedy. And because of this, I indeed change my title from "A Black Kennedy" to "A Black Clinton." I have never completely forgiven myself for it...
Because from that day forth, in my opinion, everything was already settled.
This man had the makings not only of a president, but of a reformer of the highest degree.
This thoroughly brilliant intellectual belonged to a tradition which, in the great debate that has always divided America -- whether it had invented a new, sui generis civilization, or whether it remains fundamentally and spiritually European, pleading the case for Europe, an anchoring in the European tradition, the loyalty of the new world to the old world and its values.
That day, this son of a Muslim father told me how the image of the Israeli people returning to its land after centuries of exile and suffering is what, in his childhood, and particularly under the influence of an exceptionally charismatic camp counselor, had forged his character, his soul, and his ideology as a young emulator of Martin Luther King. He was the only one of all the American leaders that I met who was capable of meeting the unsolvable problem posed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict head on and then of crafting an equitable solution.
And if there was indeed finally someone who, because he belonged to one of the minority groups that as a whole make up the majority of the American people, was capable of addressing a message of fraternity and hope to the planet, it was always Obama -- all the more so because being neither the son nor the descendant of slaves, being the first black or mixed-race leader who was not the living incarnation of the memory of slavery and, thus, of the irremediable guilt of the country, he was able to do that without reigniting even in the United States itself the racial and culture wars.
This was the existential and political equation of the one who became, in the meantime, the 44th president of the United States.
Given that anti-Americanism is the sacramental utterance of the religion of modern times from one end of the earth to the other, I saw only him, Obama, as able to lead the way for the counterattack.
Five years later, we are indeed at that point.
I am not talking about the closing of Guantanamo, a promise kept -- and which, with the disclosure of the CIA's classified files on torture, is one of the forceful messages the world was waiting for.
I am not talking about the colossal error that was the Iraq War, which he and very few others condemned from the very beginning, and which he has without delay started to scale down. Will it take 16 or 19 months to bring home all the troops? And will all of them, without exception, be brought home -- down to the very last one? The symbol is there, in any case; and, for this president-symbol, for this man who speaks in symbols like he speaks in other signs, concepts, and images, that is, of course, the essential.
I am not even talking about the Pakistani question. He questioned me extensively about it that morning five years ago (I had just published my investigation into the death of Daniel Pearl). We agreed that it was the most pressing of the issues that would confront the next American administration (I find in my notes, a joke that this very young Obama made about the "Pakistani" reversal of the famous Leninist saying -- no longer "the Soviets plus electricity" but "the jihad plus nuclear weapons"): he immediately took this question into account -- accurately gathering the unrelenting hate of all constitutive branches of Al Qaeda.
Most impressive was the way that, in a matter of months, and in just a few words, he put an end, that Saturday in front of the 9,387 small white crosses of the American cemetery in Colleville sur Mer, to the misunderstanding that had poisoned America's relations with Europe, and in particular with France, for the past eight years.
The most spectacular event was the 55-minute speech he gave on June 4, in the highly symbolic confines of the University of Cairo, which put an end to the contempt toward Islam proffered, whatever one says, at least since September 11th, with what he called -- a monumental, stupefying first in the mouth of a Western head of state -- the "Holy Koran."
And then finally there was Buchenwald where, under the watchful eye of Elie Wiesel, he said the words that we had been waiting for the day after this first speech of praise to the Muslim world: for balance? No, of course not; not for balance in the banal and banally political sense of the word; because if there really was a willingness that struck me right away at our first encounter, it is the willingness to break with this idiocy, this nastiness, this leprosy of hearts and souls that is the competition among victims and thus the balancing of memories, and therefore, in the best case scenario, the obligation that we impose on ourselves to give to this one an equal -- exactly equal -- dose of compassion that we gave to that one. Nothing of the sort with Obama; nothing like that in his speech at Buchenwald; nothing that resembles this apothecary concern to measure out, weigh, and equally distribute the quantity of compassion and tears that we are supposed to shed. The truth; only the truth; and, on his way out, the invitation extended to Ahmadinejad, the world's guru of Holocaust deniers, to make the trip to Buchenwald -- it was the closing line and it was perfect.
We can, of course, debate this or that point.
We can -- and it's true for me -- not only discuss but regret what was said in Cairo about women wearing the veil in the western world: Obama, in refusing to allow a democratic government "dictate the clothing" (sic) that a woman "must wear," stands in opposition to the laws and principles of French laïcité. He disappoints women who, beyond France's borders, and at the peril of their lives, fight for equal opportunities and rights; and it is a pity that he is retreating on his position on Sheikh Mohamed Sayyed Tantaoui, imam of the Al Azhar mosque and high if not spiritual, at least moral authority of Sunni Islam.
But there are three reasons we can and must be happy about this diplomatic tour.
The restoration of the transatlantic axis and, ultimately, of the Franco-American bond that had been greatly undermined by both sides during the Bush and Chirac years: he did it in true Obama style -- a cool, truly cool style, simultaneously elegant and relaxed, without smugness but without grandiloquence either -- a cold reconciliation, without lyricism, without sentimentality, avoiding the addition of pathos in the psychology and dramatization of personal relations between leaders. What a relief!
Burying the hatchet on what Samuel Huntington called the clash of civilizations: there is only one clash, Obama substantively said, and it is the clash within Islam that opposes Islam to itself -- the Islam of murderers, dictators and fanatics on one hand; and on the other hand, the Islam of all who fight for human rights, democracy, enlightenment and fight for it within the Islamic world in the same fashion, relatively speaking, as the dissidents of communism. Finally!
And then the fact that this man who never compromised and who, in my opinion, will not compromise the imperatives of Israel's security, but also will not ease his efforts in aiding in the creation of a second State, a Palestinian one, for which we have waited 60 years, and which many of us think is the only true guarantee of long-term security for the Jewish State. Strictly speaking, he is not saying anything new on the subject; if we stick just to the words, they are not fundamentally different from those spoken by his predecessors -- except that the tone is new, and the enthusiasm of his good will, and the feeling that he will not wait, like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before him, until the last year of his second term to remember his good intentions.
Barack Obama set forth, in four days, the parameters of a peace that has never seemed so close and yet so far.
And for the peoples, all the peoples of the region, there is good news, a source of hope, and perhaps the beginning of a new era.
I weigh my words.
I am, more than anyone, in support of the cause of Israel and, also more than anyone, worried about its solitude, not to say its vulnerability -- so much so that, yes, I weigh my words and do not write them, these very words, without a slight tremble in my hand.
And yet.
I profoundly believe that the two State solution is, for both peoples, the lesser of two evils.
And what I know about Obama, what I know about his personal biography and his track record on the question, what I know or can guess about those who surround him, what I know about David Axelrod who wore an Obama button, written in Hebrew, during the campaign, what I know, finally, of the promises made June 4, 2008, before the representatives of the powerful AIPAC, the great American support organization for Israel--all of that to say I have confidence in the good will and honesty of the president.
Perhaps the day will come when the historical alliance of the United States and Israel will be weakened or questioned.
Perhaps the moment will come where the anti-Zionist faction, which, contrary to rumor, is just as strong in the United States as in Europe, will drown out both the Jewish and non-Jewish defenders of the fragile Israeli democracy.
But we aren't at that point yet.
We are far, very far, from that point.
And that day, if it ever comes, will not happen on Obama's watch.
French philosopher and writer
Posted: June 12, 2009
I met Barack Obama exactly five years ago.
It was the evening of the official nomination of his predecessor, John Kerry, at the Democratic National Convention.
All of the party heavyweights had spoken.
The party loyalists were audience to fiery speeches by both Clintons, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Tom Daschle, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
And at 11 o'clock on the dot, as the large auditorium of the Fleet Center in Boston started to empty, while the remaining delegates expected nothing else special from a drawn out evening -- an evening so long that no one bothered any longer to pace things in synch with the commercial breaks on CNN -- a young unknown, light on his feet, and with an unpronounceable name, bounded on stage and electrified the remaining party loyalists.
I see him again the next day.
I spend the morning in a hotel dining room, interrogating him about his beautiful "Brown American" story, the son of a Kenyan and a white mother from Kansas.
And I am so impressed by this meeting, so struck both by what he says to me and the tone, at once consensual and forthright, soothing and unflinching, which we now know would be from that point on his signature -- I am so profoundly seduced by his message as much as his rhetoric that I write a profile of him called "A Black Kennedy" -- that is, before the editors of the American magazine I am writing for tell me gently but firmly: you can make all the predictions you want; you are free to make a fool of yourself in proclaiming a perfect stranger the future president of the United States; but please, do not sully the icon; hands off the sainted patronymic of Kennedy. And because of this, I indeed change my title from "A Black Kennedy" to "A Black Clinton." I have never completely forgiven myself for it...
Because from that day forth, in my opinion, everything was already settled.
This man had the makings not only of a president, but of a reformer of the highest degree.
This thoroughly brilliant intellectual belonged to a tradition which, in the great debate that has always divided America -- whether it had invented a new, sui generis civilization, or whether it remains fundamentally and spiritually European, pleading the case for Europe, an anchoring in the European tradition, the loyalty of the new world to the old world and its values.
That day, this son of a Muslim father told me how the image of the Israeli people returning to its land after centuries of exile and suffering is what, in his childhood, and particularly under the influence of an exceptionally charismatic camp counselor, had forged his character, his soul, and his ideology as a young emulator of Martin Luther King. He was the only one of all the American leaders that I met who was capable of meeting the unsolvable problem posed by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict head on and then of crafting an equitable solution.
And if there was indeed finally someone who, because he belonged to one of the minority groups that as a whole make up the majority of the American people, was capable of addressing a message of fraternity and hope to the planet, it was always Obama -- all the more so because being neither the son nor the descendant of slaves, being the first black or mixed-race leader who was not the living incarnation of the memory of slavery and, thus, of the irremediable guilt of the country, he was able to do that without reigniting even in the United States itself the racial and culture wars.
This was the existential and political equation of the one who became, in the meantime, the 44th president of the United States.
Given that anti-Americanism is the sacramental utterance of the religion of modern times from one end of the earth to the other, I saw only him, Obama, as able to lead the way for the counterattack.
Five years later, we are indeed at that point.
I am not talking about the closing of Guantanamo, a promise kept -- and which, with the disclosure of the CIA's classified files on torture, is one of the forceful messages the world was waiting for.
I am not talking about the colossal error that was the Iraq War, which he and very few others condemned from the very beginning, and which he has without delay started to scale down. Will it take 16 or 19 months to bring home all the troops? And will all of them, without exception, be brought home -- down to the very last one? The symbol is there, in any case; and, for this president-symbol, for this man who speaks in symbols like he speaks in other signs, concepts, and images, that is, of course, the essential.
I am not even talking about the Pakistani question. He questioned me extensively about it that morning five years ago (I had just published my investigation into the death of Daniel Pearl). We agreed that it was the most pressing of the issues that would confront the next American administration (I find in my notes, a joke that this very young Obama made about the "Pakistani" reversal of the famous Leninist saying -- no longer "the Soviets plus electricity" but "the jihad plus nuclear weapons"): he immediately took this question into account -- accurately gathering the unrelenting hate of all constitutive branches of Al Qaeda.
Most impressive was the way that, in a matter of months, and in just a few words, he put an end, that Saturday in front of the 9,387 small white crosses of the American cemetery in Colleville sur Mer, to the misunderstanding that had poisoned America's relations with Europe, and in particular with France, for the past eight years.
The most spectacular event was the 55-minute speech he gave on June 4, in the highly symbolic confines of the University of Cairo, which put an end to the contempt toward Islam proffered, whatever one says, at least since September 11th, with what he called -- a monumental, stupefying first in the mouth of a Western head of state -- the "Holy Koran."
And then finally there was Buchenwald where, under the watchful eye of Elie Wiesel, he said the words that we had been waiting for the day after this first speech of praise to the Muslim world: for balance? No, of course not; not for balance in the banal and banally political sense of the word; because if there really was a willingness that struck me right away at our first encounter, it is the willingness to break with this idiocy, this nastiness, this leprosy of hearts and souls that is the competition among victims and thus the balancing of memories, and therefore, in the best case scenario, the obligation that we impose on ourselves to give to this one an equal -- exactly equal -- dose of compassion that we gave to that one. Nothing of the sort with Obama; nothing like that in his speech at Buchenwald; nothing that resembles this apothecary concern to measure out, weigh, and equally distribute the quantity of compassion and tears that we are supposed to shed. The truth; only the truth; and, on his way out, the invitation extended to Ahmadinejad, the world's guru of Holocaust deniers, to make the trip to Buchenwald -- it was the closing line and it was perfect.
We can, of course, debate this or that point.
We can -- and it's true for me -- not only discuss but regret what was said in Cairo about women wearing the veil in the western world: Obama, in refusing to allow a democratic government "dictate the clothing" (sic) that a woman "must wear," stands in opposition to the laws and principles of French laïcité. He disappoints women who, beyond France's borders, and at the peril of their lives, fight for equal opportunities and rights; and it is a pity that he is retreating on his position on Sheikh Mohamed Sayyed Tantaoui, imam of the Al Azhar mosque and high if not spiritual, at least moral authority of Sunni Islam.
But there are three reasons we can and must be happy about this diplomatic tour.
The restoration of the transatlantic axis and, ultimately, of the Franco-American bond that had been greatly undermined by both sides during the Bush and Chirac years: he did it in true Obama style -- a cool, truly cool style, simultaneously elegant and relaxed, without smugness but without grandiloquence either -- a cold reconciliation, without lyricism, without sentimentality, avoiding the addition of pathos in the psychology and dramatization of personal relations between leaders. What a relief!
Burying the hatchet on what Samuel Huntington called the clash of civilizations: there is only one clash, Obama substantively said, and it is the clash within Islam that opposes Islam to itself -- the Islam of murderers, dictators and fanatics on one hand; and on the other hand, the Islam of all who fight for human rights, democracy, enlightenment and fight for it within the Islamic world in the same fashion, relatively speaking, as the dissidents of communism. Finally!
And then the fact that this man who never compromised and who, in my opinion, will not compromise the imperatives of Israel's security, but also will not ease his efforts in aiding in the creation of a second State, a Palestinian one, for which we have waited 60 years, and which many of us think is the only true guarantee of long-term security for the Jewish State. Strictly speaking, he is not saying anything new on the subject; if we stick just to the words, they are not fundamentally different from those spoken by his predecessors -- except that the tone is new, and the enthusiasm of his good will, and the feeling that he will not wait, like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton before him, until the last year of his second term to remember his good intentions.
Barack Obama set forth, in four days, the parameters of a peace that has never seemed so close and yet so far.
And for the peoples, all the peoples of the region, there is good news, a source of hope, and perhaps the beginning of a new era.
I weigh my words.
I am, more than anyone, in support of the cause of Israel and, also more than anyone, worried about its solitude, not to say its vulnerability -- so much so that, yes, I weigh my words and do not write them, these very words, without a slight tremble in my hand.
And yet.
I profoundly believe that the two State solution is, for both peoples, the lesser of two evils.
And what I know about Obama, what I know about his personal biography and his track record on the question, what I know or can guess about those who surround him, what I know about David Axelrod who wore an Obama button, written in Hebrew, during the campaign, what I know, finally, of the promises made June 4, 2008, before the representatives of the powerful AIPAC, the great American support organization for Israel--all of that to say I have confidence in the good will and honesty of the president.
Perhaps the day will come when the historical alliance of the United States and Israel will be weakened or questioned.
Perhaps the moment will come where the anti-Zionist faction, which, contrary to rumor, is just as strong in the United States as in Europe, will drown out both the Jewish and non-Jewish defenders of the fragile Israeli democracy.
But we aren't at that point yet.
We are far, very far, from that point.
And that day, if it ever comes, will not happen on Obama's watch.
Taking Exception
The Settlements Facts
By Daniel Kurtzer
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Faulty analysis of the Israeli settlement issue is being passed off as fact. Charles Krauthammer's June 5 column, "The Settlements Myth," is one example.
Here are the facts: In 2003, the Israeli government accepted, with some reservations, the "road map" for peace, which imposed two requirements on Israel regarding settlements: "GOI [Government of Israel] immediately dismantles settlement outposts erected since March 2001. Consistent with the Mitchell Report, GOI freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)."
Today, Israel maintains that three events -- namely, draft understandings discussed in 2003 between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley; President George W. Bush's April 14, 2004, letter to Sharon; and an April 14 letter from Sharon adviser Dov Weissglas to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- constitute a formal understanding in which the United States accepted continuing Israeli building within the "construction line" of settlements. The problem is that there was no such understanding.
The first event the Israelis cite is the 2003 discussions on a four-part draft that included the notion that construction within settlements might be permitted if confined to the already built-up areas of the settlements. The idea was to draw a line around the outer perimeter of built-up areas in settlements and to allow building only inside that line. This draft was never codified, and no effort was made then to define the line around the built-up areas of settlements. Nonetheless, Israel began to act largely in accordance with its own reading of these provisions, probably believing that U.S. silence conferred assent.
Second, President Bush's 2004 letter conveyed U.S. support of an agreed outcome of negotiations in which Israel would retain "existing major Israeli population centers" in the West Bank "on the basis of mutually agreed changes . . . ." One of the key provisions of this letter was that U.S. support for Israel's retaining some settlements was predicated on there being an "agreed outcome" of negotiations. Despite Israel's contention that this letter allowed it to continue building in the large settlement blocs of Ariel, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, the letter did not convey any U.S. support for or understanding of Israeli settlement activities in these or other areas in the run-up to a peace agreement.
In his 2004 letter to Rice, Weissglas addressed the issue of the "construction line," saying that "within the agreed principles of settlement activities, an effort will be made in the next few days to have a better definition of the construction line of settlements in Judea & Samaria." However, there never were any "agreed principles of settlement activities." Moreover, the effort to define the "construction line" was never consummated: Israel and the United States discussed briefly but did not reach agreement on the definition of the construction line of settlements. Weissglas's letter also promised "continuous action" to remove all the unauthorized outposts, but Israel removed almost none of them.
Throughout this period, the Bush administration did not regularly protest Israel's continuing settlement activity. But this is very different from arguing that the United States agreed with it. In recent days, former senior Bush administration officials have told journalists on background that no understandings existed with Israel regarding continued settlement activity.
Commentators also focus on the Obama administration's reiteration that a freeze must include the "natural growth" of settlements. Krauthammer says that this "means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line . . . It means no increase in population. Which means no babies." This is nonsense. No one suggests that Israelis stop having babies. Rather, the blessing of a new baby does not translate into a right to build more apartments or houses in settlements. The two issues have nothing to do with each other. Israelis, like Americans, move all the time when life circumstances -- children, jobs, housing availability -- change.
The pattern of population growth in the territories actually undercuts the natural-growth argument. Since 1993, when Israel signed the Oslo Accords, Israel's West Bank settler population has grown from 116,300 to 289,600. The numbers in East Jerusalem increased from 152,800 to more than 186,000. This goes far beyond the natural increase of families already living in the settlements. Inserting the provision of "natural growth" in official documents started with the 2001 Mitchell Report and the 2003 "road map," reflecting recognition that the concept was being abused as a justification for expanding settlements. The Obama administration is pursuing policies that every administration since 1967 has articulated -- that settlements jeopardize the possibility of achieving peace and thus settlement activity should stop. This does not diminish the Palestinians' responsibilities, especially their commitment to stop violence and terrorism and uproot terrorist infrastructure. President Obama emphasized this in his Cairo speech. But Palestinian failures in no way justify Israeli failure to implement their road map commitments with respect to settlements and outposts. It is time for Israel to freeze all settlement activity and dismantle the unauthorized outposts.
The writer, U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005, is a visiting professor of Middle East policy studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
The Settlements Facts
By Daniel Kurtzer
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Faulty analysis of the Israeli settlement issue is being passed off as fact. Charles Krauthammer's June 5 column, "The Settlements Myth," is one example.
Here are the facts: In 2003, the Israeli government accepted, with some reservations, the "road map" for peace, which imposed two requirements on Israel regarding settlements: "GOI [Government of Israel] immediately dismantles settlement outposts erected since March 2001. Consistent with the Mitchell Report, GOI freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)."
Today, Israel maintains that three events -- namely, draft understandings discussed in 2003 between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley; President George W. Bush's April 14, 2004, letter to Sharon; and an April 14 letter from Sharon adviser Dov Weissglas to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- constitute a formal understanding in which the United States accepted continuing Israeli building within the "construction line" of settlements. The problem is that there was no such understanding.
The first event the Israelis cite is the 2003 discussions on a four-part draft that included the notion that construction within settlements might be permitted if confined to the already built-up areas of the settlements. The idea was to draw a line around the outer perimeter of built-up areas in settlements and to allow building only inside that line. This draft was never codified, and no effort was made then to define the line around the built-up areas of settlements. Nonetheless, Israel began to act largely in accordance with its own reading of these provisions, probably believing that U.S. silence conferred assent.
Second, President Bush's 2004 letter conveyed U.S. support of an agreed outcome of negotiations in which Israel would retain "existing major Israeli population centers" in the West Bank "on the basis of mutually agreed changes . . . ." One of the key provisions of this letter was that U.S. support for Israel's retaining some settlements was predicated on there being an "agreed outcome" of negotiations. Despite Israel's contention that this letter allowed it to continue building in the large settlement blocs of Ariel, Maale Adumim and Gush Etzion, the letter did not convey any U.S. support for or understanding of Israeli settlement activities in these or other areas in the run-up to a peace agreement.
In his 2004 letter to Rice, Weissglas addressed the issue of the "construction line," saying that "within the agreed principles of settlement activities, an effort will be made in the next few days to have a better definition of the construction line of settlements in Judea & Samaria." However, there never were any "agreed principles of settlement activities." Moreover, the effort to define the "construction line" was never consummated: Israel and the United States discussed briefly but did not reach agreement on the definition of the construction line of settlements. Weissglas's letter also promised "continuous action" to remove all the unauthorized outposts, but Israel removed almost none of them.
Throughout this period, the Bush administration did not regularly protest Israel's continuing settlement activity. But this is very different from arguing that the United States agreed with it. In recent days, former senior Bush administration officials have told journalists on background that no understandings existed with Israel regarding continued settlement activity.
Commentators also focus on the Obama administration's reiteration that a freeze must include the "natural growth" of settlements. Krauthammer says that this "means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line . . . It means no increase in population. Which means no babies." This is nonsense. No one suggests that Israelis stop having babies. Rather, the blessing of a new baby does not translate into a right to build more apartments or houses in settlements. The two issues have nothing to do with each other. Israelis, like Americans, move all the time when life circumstances -- children, jobs, housing availability -- change.
The pattern of population growth in the territories actually undercuts the natural-growth argument. Since 1993, when Israel signed the Oslo Accords, Israel's West Bank settler population has grown from 116,300 to 289,600. The numbers in East Jerusalem increased from 152,800 to more than 186,000. This goes far beyond the natural increase of families already living in the settlements. Inserting the provision of "natural growth" in official documents started with the 2001 Mitchell Report and the 2003 "road map," reflecting recognition that the concept was being abused as a justification for expanding settlements. The Obama administration is pursuing policies that every administration since 1967 has articulated -- that settlements jeopardize the possibility of achieving peace and thus settlement activity should stop. This does not diminish the Palestinians' responsibilities, especially their commitment to stop violence and terrorism and uproot terrorist infrastructure. President Obama emphasized this in his Cairo speech. But Palestinian failures in no way justify Israeli failure to implement their road map commitments with respect to settlements and outposts. It is time for Israel to freeze all settlement activity and dismantle the unauthorized outposts.
The writer, U.S. ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005, is a visiting professor of Middle East policy studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Once you strip away the mujamalat -- the courtesies exchanged between guest and host -- the substance of President Obama's speech in Cairo indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy. It is not necessary to divine Obama's intentions -- he may be utterly sincere and I believe he is. It is his analysis and prescriptions that in most regards maintain flawed American policies intact.
Though he pledged to "speak the truth as best I can," there was much the president left out. He spoke of tension between "America and Islam" -- the former a concrete specific place, the latter a vague construct subsuming peoples, practices, histories and countries more varied than similar.
Labeling America's "other" as a nebulous and all-encompassing "Islam" (even while professing rapprochement and respect) is a way to avoid acknowledging what does in fact unite and mobilize people across many Muslim-majority countries: overwhelming popular opposition to increasingly intrusive and violent American military, political and economic interventions in many of those countries. This opposition -- and the resistance it generates -- has now become for supporters of those interventions, synonymous with "Islam."
It was disappointing that Obama recycled his predecessor's notion that "violent extremism" exists in a vacuum, unrelated to America's (and its proxies') exponentially greater use of violence before and after 11 September 2001. He dwelled on the "enormous trauma" done to the US when almost 3,000 people were killed that day, but spoke not one word about the hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows left in Iraq -- those whom Muntazer al-Zaidi's flying shoe forced Americans to remember only for a few seconds last year. He ignored the dozens of civilians who die each week in the "necessary" war in Afghanistan, or the millions of refugees fleeing the US-invoked escalation in Pakistan.
As President George W. Bush often did, Obama affirmed that it is only a violent minority that besmirches the name of a vast and "peaceful" Muslim majority. But he seemed once again to implicate all Muslims as suspect when he warned, "The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer."
Nowhere were these blindspots more apparent than his statements about Palestine/Israel. He gave his audience a detailed lesson on the Holocaust and explicitly used it as a justification for the creation of Israel. "It is also undeniable," the president said, "that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation."
Suffered in pursuit of a homeland? The pain of dislocation? They already had a homeland. They suffered from being ethnically cleansed and dispossessed of it and prevented from returning on the grounds that they are from the wrong ethno-national group. Why is that still so hard to say?
He lectured Palestinians that "resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed." He warned them that "It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered."
Fair enough, but did Obama really imagine that such words would impress an Arab public that watched in horror as Israel slaughtered 1,400 people in Gaza last winter, including hundreds of sleeping, fleeing or terrified children, with American-supplied weapons? Did he think his listeners would not remember that the number of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians targeted and killed by Israel has always far exceeded by orders of magnitude the number of Israelis killed by Arabs precisely because of the American arms he has pledged to continue giving Israel with no accountability? Amnesty International recently confirmed what Palestinians long knew: Israel broke the negotiated ceasefire when it attacked Gaza last 4 November, prompting retaliatory rockets that killed no Israelis until after Israel launched its much bigger attack on Gaza. That he continues to remain silent about what happened in Gaza, and refuses to hold Israel accountable demonstrates anything but a commitment to full truth-telling.
Some people are prepared to give Obama a pass for all this because he is at last talking tough on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. In Cairo, he said: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."
These carefully chosen words focus only on continued construction, not on the existence of the settlements themselves; they are entirely compatible with the peace process industry consensus that existing settlements will remain where they are for ever. This raises the question of where Obama thinks he is going. He summarized Palestinians' "legitimate aspirations" as being the establishment of a "state." This has become a convenient slogan that is supposed to replace for Palestinians their pursuit of rights and justice that the proposed state actually denies. Obama is already on record opposing Palestinian refugees' right to return home, and has never supported the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to live free from racist and religious incitement, persecution and practices fanned by Israel's highest office holders and written into its laws.
He may have more determination than his predecessor but he remains committed to an unworkable two-state "vision" aimed not at restoring Palestinian rights, but preserving Israel as an enclave of Israeli Jewish privilege. It is a dead end.
There was one sentence in his speech I cheered for and which he should heed: "Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail."
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
Though he pledged to "speak the truth as best I can," there was much the president left out. He spoke of tension between "America and Islam" -- the former a concrete specific place, the latter a vague construct subsuming peoples, practices, histories and countries more varied than similar.
Labeling America's "other" as a nebulous and all-encompassing "Islam" (even while professing rapprochement and respect) is a way to avoid acknowledging what does in fact unite and mobilize people across many Muslim-majority countries: overwhelming popular opposition to increasingly intrusive and violent American military, political and economic interventions in many of those countries. This opposition -- and the resistance it generates -- has now become for supporters of those interventions, synonymous with "Islam."
It was disappointing that Obama recycled his predecessor's notion that "violent extremism" exists in a vacuum, unrelated to America's (and its proxies') exponentially greater use of violence before and after 11 September 2001. He dwelled on the "enormous trauma" done to the US when almost 3,000 people were killed that day, but spoke not one word about the hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows left in Iraq -- those whom Muntazer al-Zaidi's flying shoe forced Americans to remember only for a few seconds last year. He ignored the dozens of civilians who die each week in the "necessary" war in Afghanistan, or the millions of refugees fleeing the US-invoked escalation in Pakistan.
As President George W. Bush often did, Obama affirmed that it is only a violent minority that besmirches the name of a vast and "peaceful" Muslim majority. But he seemed once again to implicate all Muslims as suspect when he warned, "The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer."
Nowhere were these blindspots more apparent than his statements about Palestine/Israel. He gave his audience a detailed lesson on the Holocaust and explicitly used it as a justification for the creation of Israel. "It is also undeniable," the president said, "that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation."
Suffered in pursuit of a homeland? The pain of dislocation? They already had a homeland. They suffered from being ethnically cleansed and dispossessed of it and prevented from returning on the grounds that they are from the wrong ethno-national group. Why is that still so hard to say?
He lectured Palestinians that "resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed." He warned them that "It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered."
Fair enough, but did Obama really imagine that such words would impress an Arab public that watched in horror as Israel slaughtered 1,400 people in Gaza last winter, including hundreds of sleeping, fleeing or terrified children, with American-supplied weapons? Did he think his listeners would not remember that the number of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians targeted and killed by Israel has always far exceeded by orders of magnitude the number of Israelis killed by Arabs precisely because of the American arms he has pledged to continue giving Israel with no accountability? Amnesty International recently confirmed what Palestinians long knew: Israel broke the negotiated ceasefire when it attacked Gaza last 4 November, prompting retaliatory rockets that killed no Israelis until after Israel launched its much bigger attack on Gaza. That he continues to remain silent about what happened in Gaza, and refuses to hold Israel accountable demonstrates anything but a commitment to full truth-telling.
Some people are prepared to give Obama a pass for all this because he is at last talking tough on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. In Cairo, he said: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."
These carefully chosen words focus only on continued construction, not on the existence of the settlements themselves; they are entirely compatible with the peace process industry consensus that existing settlements will remain where they are for ever. This raises the question of where Obama thinks he is going. He summarized Palestinians' "legitimate aspirations" as being the establishment of a "state." This has become a convenient slogan that is supposed to replace for Palestinians their pursuit of rights and justice that the proposed state actually denies. Obama is already on record opposing Palestinian refugees' right to return home, and has never supported the right of Palestinian citizens of Israel to live free from racist and religious incitement, persecution and practices fanned by Israel's highest office holders and written into its laws.
He may have more determination than his predecessor but he remains committed to an unworkable two-state "vision" aimed not at restoring Palestinian rights, but preserving Israel as an enclave of Israeli Jewish privilege. It is a dead end.
There was one sentence in his speech I cheered for and which he should heed: "Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail."
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
After watching Pres. Obama's speech in Cairo, I was pleased to see he addressed some of the points I hoped he would. He began with the traditional greeting of the Arab and Muslim worlds, as-salam alaykum (peace be upon you). He then talked about the importance of Al-Azhar University, the problem of settlements, Sunni-Shi'ah conflict, interfaith history, the history of Muslims in America, and rule of tyrany under the guise of democracy. Of course, he touched on much more and in much more depth. It is worth looking at the content of his speech in more detail. Although he speaks as a politician, but by choosing the construction of addressing Muslim communities, rather than Egyptians or Arabs, he must turn to a religious language. There are resonances that exist in the speech for both Islamic history and American history, and understanding both makes his speech that much richer.
For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning; and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement. And together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress.
This combination of past and present also implies the long engagement amongst civilizations. Al-Azhar is considered one of the earliest models of a university, which the Europeans adopt. In Europe, the institution is reworked and the modern university is created. This modern creation is then exported back to Egypt in the form of Cairo University. There is a cyclical nature of trade and the flow of ideas that Pres. Obama hints at. This time of crisis cannot define all past and all future interactions.
The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.
It is important to note that there is a recent history of domination, directly through colonization, and indirectly through Cold War proxies. However, Pres. Obama avoids the trap of saying that all ills of the Muslim world are the fault of non-Muslims. He recognizes that in an interconnected world, no people operate in a vacuum. Although he does mention the challenge of modernity, the mistake in that phrase is that he conceives of only one modernity. The fact of the matter is that amongst Muslims there is not a universal rejection of modernity, but there are different conceptions of what the modern is. These differing conceptions of the modern are an important part of misunderstandings. The privileged language of only one modernity is presumptuous and alienating.
As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth." [33:70]
This particular verse comes after a long section chastising those who disbelieved in Moses and his message. It ties nicely to the idea of Holocaust denial Pres. Obama brings up later in his speech. He then emphasizes the connections amongst civilizations again, some of which echo sentiments made earlier here. After talking about the contribution of Muslims to America, oddly ignoring the large number of Muslim slaves, he points to Muslims saying that we have a responsibility as well. He is right. A dialogue requires two parties. Stereotypes exist on all sides and we must address them.
For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning; and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement. And together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress.
This combination of past and present also implies the long engagement amongst civilizations. Al-Azhar is considered one of the earliest models of a university, which the Europeans adopt. In Europe, the institution is reworked and the modern university is created. This modern creation is then exported back to Egypt in the form of Cairo University. There is a cyclical nature of trade and the flow of ideas that Pres. Obama hints at. This time of crisis cannot define all past and all future interactions.
The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.
It is important to note that there is a recent history of domination, directly through colonization, and indirectly through Cold War proxies. However, Pres. Obama avoids the trap of saying that all ills of the Muslim world are the fault of non-Muslims. He recognizes that in an interconnected world, no people operate in a vacuum. Although he does mention the challenge of modernity, the mistake in that phrase is that he conceives of only one modernity. The fact of the matter is that amongst Muslims there is not a universal rejection of modernity, but there are different conceptions of what the modern is. These differing conceptions of the modern are an important part of misunderstandings. The privileged language of only one modernity is presumptuous and alienating.
As the Holy Koran tells us, "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth." [33:70]
This particular verse comes after a long section chastising those who disbelieved in Moses and his message. It ties nicely to the idea of Holocaust denial Pres. Obama brings up later in his speech. He then emphasizes the connections amongst civilizations again, some of which echo sentiments made earlier here. After talking about the contribution of Muslims to America, oddly ignoring the large number of Muslim slaves, he points to Muslims saying that we have a responsibility as well. He is right. A dialogue requires two parties. Stereotypes exist on all sides and we must address them.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Gideon Levy / Future of Mideast is a domestic American issue
By Gideon Levy
Tags: Israel news, Gideon Levy
Benjamin Netanyahu can keep pretending it's just rain and Interior Minister Eli Yishai can continue berating the Obama administration for its "unacceptable" policies. National Union MK Michael Ben-Ari can keep shouting hysterically about our soldiers, and the settlers can keep putting us all in danger. But the issue has been settled in Washington.
Peace lies with them - U.S. decision-makers, led by Barack Obama. In other words, the future of the Middle East is a domestic American issue. Since Henry Kissinger determined that foreign policy is merely an extension of domestic policy, his maxim has never had such tremendous potential impact.
Washington will decide the fate of the West Bank settlements, and we can only hope it insists on their evacuation. Obama standing firm beside the revolutionary Mideast policy he has begun will light the torch of hope here, too. The battle of the titans, Netanyahu and Obama, is little more than a farce - let us recall the fable of the elephant and the bee, or the frog and the ox. Not all creatures can become as great as they think.
Let's also be realistic: An Israeli prime minister has no option of saying no to America once Washington has dug in its heels. Netanyahu knows this better than anyone, and the time has come to explain as much to his "patriotic" coalition allies.
Israel's only real existential danger is losing U.S. support. Yes, there is no Israel without America - not only the $30 billion annual defense aid (without which the IDF would be a shadow of itself), or the market for one-third of Israeli exports, but also international support. Israel, which has become a leper in many circles, is lost without Washington's sponsorship. There is no alternative superpower - having Micronesia alone on our side at the UN will not get us very far.
A green light from America on changing the regional status quo will also encourage a bumbling Europe to begin taking practical steps. Never have so many eyes looked to one man, who will today lay out the principles of his Middle East doctrine in Cairo.
The American president has the power to end the Israeli occupation within months. The conquest of the "Third Kingdom of Israel" following the 1956 Sinai Campaign collapsed within weeks. We could return to that situation, despite the stumbling blocks of the settlements, with a clear timetable for evacuation, severe sanctions for noncompliance and generous assistance for those staying the course. The tailwinds Obama is enjoying have already changed the prevailing tone toward Israel, even among its traditional "supporters" - those who so blindly and irresponsibly endorsed its occupation and wars.
The tools in Obama's kit are varied: A congressional delegation visiting here recently entertained the idea, in private conversations at least, that the U.S. prohibit Israel from using American weapons in the West Bank; someone suggested levying strict limitations on Israelis entering America. But perhaps it would be enough to simply retract the automatic U.S. veto at the UN - and this is without mentioning stopping the flow of aid.
Any of these punitive measures would be efficient and just, in the interest of saving Israel from itself. But Obama's initial steps are not enough - they are likely, perhaps, to topple Netanyahu, but peace will not necessarily follow. Israel must be demanded to now make a series of practical steps, like evacuating the Maoz Esther outpost, which could pave the way for ending the occupation.
As the odds of Israeli society coming to its senses and fighting for its destiny have become infinitesimal, the arena for ending the occupation and pursuing peace has moved stateside, and Jewish America is itself beginning to undergo a revolution. One line of thinking goes like this: If Obama succeeds in dealing with GM, he will also win public support in dealing with Yitzhar and other settlements like it. If he can convince American supporters of Israel that relations with the Jewish state have become dishonest, the sky's the limit. Americans must understand that without changing relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds, the world itself will become a more dangerous place, and that improving relations with those people need not be at Israel's expense, but to its benefit. Time is short but the keys are in the ignition, President Obama. Drive on to peace.
By Gideon Levy
Tags: Israel news, Gideon Levy
Benjamin Netanyahu can keep pretending it's just rain and Interior Minister Eli Yishai can continue berating the Obama administration for its "unacceptable" policies. National Union MK Michael Ben-Ari can keep shouting hysterically about our soldiers, and the settlers can keep putting us all in danger. But the issue has been settled in Washington.
Peace lies with them - U.S. decision-makers, led by Barack Obama. In other words, the future of the Middle East is a domestic American issue. Since Henry Kissinger determined that foreign policy is merely an extension of domestic policy, his maxim has never had such tremendous potential impact.
Washington will decide the fate of the West Bank settlements, and we can only hope it insists on their evacuation. Obama standing firm beside the revolutionary Mideast policy he has begun will light the torch of hope here, too. The battle of the titans, Netanyahu and Obama, is little more than a farce - let us recall the fable of the elephant and the bee, or the frog and the ox. Not all creatures can become as great as they think.
Let's also be realistic: An Israeli prime minister has no option of saying no to America once Washington has dug in its heels. Netanyahu knows this better than anyone, and the time has come to explain as much to his "patriotic" coalition allies.
Israel's only real existential danger is losing U.S. support. Yes, there is no Israel without America - not only the $30 billion annual defense aid (without which the IDF would be a shadow of itself), or the market for one-third of Israeli exports, but also international support. Israel, which has become a leper in many circles, is lost without Washington's sponsorship. There is no alternative superpower - having Micronesia alone on our side at the UN will not get us very far.
A green light from America on changing the regional status quo will also encourage a bumbling Europe to begin taking practical steps. Never have so many eyes looked to one man, who will today lay out the principles of his Middle East doctrine in Cairo.
The American president has the power to end the Israeli occupation within months. The conquest of the "Third Kingdom of Israel" following the 1956 Sinai Campaign collapsed within weeks. We could return to that situation, despite the stumbling blocks of the settlements, with a clear timetable for evacuation, severe sanctions for noncompliance and generous assistance for those staying the course. The tailwinds Obama is enjoying have already changed the prevailing tone toward Israel, even among its traditional "supporters" - those who so blindly and irresponsibly endorsed its occupation and wars.
The tools in Obama's kit are varied: A congressional delegation visiting here recently entertained the idea, in private conversations at least, that the U.S. prohibit Israel from using American weapons in the West Bank; someone suggested levying strict limitations on Israelis entering America. But perhaps it would be enough to simply retract the automatic U.S. veto at the UN - and this is without mentioning stopping the flow of aid.
Any of these punitive measures would be efficient and just, in the interest of saving Israel from itself. But Obama's initial steps are not enough - they are likely, perhaps, to topple Netanyahu, but peace will not necessarily follow. Israel must be demanded to now make a series of practical steps, like evacuating the Maoz Esther outpost, which could pave the way for ending the occupation.
As the odds of Israeli society coming to its senses and fighting for its destiny have become infinitesimal, the arena for ending the occupation and pursuing peace has moved stateside, and Jewish America is itself beginning to undergo a revolution. One line of thinking goes like this: If Obama succeeds in dealing with GM, he will also win public support in dealing with Yitzhar and other settlements like it. If he can convince American supporters of Israel that relations with the Jewish state have become dishonest, the sky's the limit. Americans must understand that without changing relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds, the world itself will become a more dangerous place, and that improving relations with those people need not be at Israel's expense, but to its benefit. Time is short but the keys are in the ignition, President Obama. Drive on to peace.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Obama's Cairo mission: Don't be Bush
Five disastrous Middle East policies that the president must show he's rejected.
By Gary Kamiya
June 4, 2009 | These are momentous days in the Middle East. As President Barack Obama arrives in Cairo to deliver a long-awaited speech addressing relations between America and the Arab/Muslim world, no fewer than four significant events loom on the regional horizon. On June 7, Lebanon will hold elections that could give the militant group Hezbollah unprecedented political power. Iran will hold its elections five days later, with the political fate of hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hanging in the balance. U.S. combat forces are scheduled to leave all Iraqi cities by the end of June, the first tangible step toward ending the American military presence there. And Obama has just handed right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a July deadline to form a new peace policy.
Under George W. Bush, America's Arab/Muslim report card was an F-minus. U.S. standing in the Middle East and among the world's Muslims sank to an all-time low, terrorist attacks greatly increased, violent extremists gained power, moderate and pro-U.S. regimes were weakened, the crucial Israeli-Palestinian conflict grew ever more intractable, Iraq sank into a hell from which it has only now begun to emerge, and the Taliban surged back in Afghanistan and threatened Pakistan. Bush's policies were directly responsible for many of these calamitous outcomes, and exacerbated others. In his Cairo speech, Obama's most pressing need is thus to make it unequivocally clear to the world's 1.5 billion Muslims and 325 million Arabs that the U.S. has decisively rejected Bush's failed ideology and policies, and intends to chart a completely new path. We can expect Obama to invoke his own background, reject the idea of a "clash of civilizations" and make an inspiring appeal to shared values. Those oratorical flourishes will count for something, but unless he supports them with tough, realistic language and actual policy changes, they will just go down as pretty words.
What follows is a list of Bush's five cardinal Middle East errors, and what Obama can do in his speech and in his subsequent actions to correct them.
Sin 1: His egregiously pro-Israel tilt. Abandoning even the pretense of being an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bush told his Cabinet at the very beginning of his administration that he intended to opt out and unleash Ariel Sharon on the Palestinians -- and then he did. Like it or not, the Palestinian cause is the unifying one for the world's Arabs and Muslims, and the West's abject failure to act justly toward the Palestinians has done more damage to its image in the Arab/Muslim world than anything else. Bush took that phenomenon to new depths. The justified perception that Washington was completely in Tel Aviv's pocket poisoned everything the U.S. tried to do in the region, from promoting democracy to fighting in Iraq to winning hearts and minds. Blind U.S. support for Israel enrages ordinary Arabs and Muslims, gives militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas a raison d'être, and undercuts U.S. allies like Egypt whose oppressed people see their sclerotic leaders as paid-off water carriers for America.
Obama's antidote: He has made a good start by making it clear to the far-right Netanyahu government that the U.S. will no longer tolerate Israel's usual tricks of stalling and equivocating on freezing the settlements. The settlements are not the key issue in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but stopping their growth is essential if peace is to be realized because they are a prima facie sign of Israeli bad faith. Neither the Palestinians nor any Arab country will begin negotiations with Israel until the settlements, which have relentlessly grown during the entire so-called peace process initiated by Oslo in 1993, are frozen. Obama should make it clear in his speech that he has told the Israeli government that it must freeze the settlements and that he expects them to comply, thus publicly locking himself into a position from which he cannot back down and increasing pressure on the Netanyahu government to take action.
Obama should also not fall into the pointless trap of demanding that Arab states make goodwill gestures toward Israel before Netanyahu has even said that he is committed to a viable two-state solution. The Arab Peace Plan, in which every Arab state agreed to establish full relations with Israel if it ended its illegal occupation of the territories it captured in the 1967 war, has been on the table for seven years, and Israel has not acted on it. The Arab states have made it clear that the next move is Israel's, and if Obama insists that the Arabs must act first, he will squander all of his credibility with his audience.
But the really important moves here will come in the weeks and months after the speech. If Obama does not put real pressure on Netanyahu to freeze settlements and begin working toward a two-state solution -- which could lead the Israeli leader's coalition partners to bolt, bringing down his government in record time -- his worldwide audience will regard his speech as just more meaningless words. After all, even George W. Bush repeatedly called for the creation of a Palestinian state. The time is long past when mere rhetoric will convince Arabs and Muslims that the U.S. is serious about brokering a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Bonus point: If Obama surprises the world by announcing that he intends to visit Gaza. Obama has never dared to criticize Israel's onslaught against the tiny, impoverished strip. But a visit would speak volumes about the new direction his administration intends to take.
Bush Sin 2: His grandiose declaration of a "war on terror," accompanied by ignorant, self-defeating rhetoric about fighting "Islamofascism." One of the reasons Bush invaded Iraq was to teach the backward, violent Arab-Muslim world a lesson in the wake of 9/11. This was insulting enough, but the Bush neocons' insistence that the invasion was also going to be good for the benighted region was intolerable, a combination of brutality and "idealistic" condescension. Bush's crusader-like zeal in pursuing a "clash of civilizations" only strengthened the appeal for Arabs and Muslims of mirroring messianic groups like al-Qaida, and gave democracy itself a bad name.
Obama's antidote: First, he should declare the "war on terror" over. He should explain that the U.S. is not fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat "terrorism," but because we want to help the people of those countries defeat enemies that threaten the lives of their citizens. He should clearly say that we are not attempting to impose American ideas or values on anyone, only helping them to live lives of minimal human decency.
It is too late to undo the Iraq war, but Obama can make it clear that the US will honor its commitment to wind down its military presence there and is committed to working with the Iraqi government to ensure the best possible outcome for the long-suffering Iraqi people. He should again repeat that the U.S. has no designs on Iraq's oil or any of its other assets.
Bush Sin 3: Bush lumped all "extremist" groups together and declared all of them America's enemies. Violent extremism is indeed a regional problem, but Bush's failure to distinguish between nationalist resistance movements like Hamas and Hezbollah and anomic Islamist groups like al-Qaida was counterproductive and only strengthened the extremists.
Obama's antidote: The U.S. does indeed need to bolster moderates, but the way to do that is to stop the moralistic blustering and get smart. Simply demonizing militant groups that have deep roots in their societies, like Hezbollah and Hamas, is a ticket for failure. With the exception of fanatical Islamist groups like al-Qaida, "extremism" is often wholly or partially a symptom, a reaction to an underlying situation, not an eternal state of anti-Western hatred. It would be premature for Obama to announce that the U.S. will open full diplomatic channels with Hamas and Hezbollah, but he needs to make clear that he is prepared to address the underlying causes that have allowed them to flourish, and signal that he is prepared to work with them. As Robert Malley and Hussein Agha point out in a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, the U.S. embrace of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas actually weakened him, turning him into an Uncle Tom in the eyes of many Palestinians. In similar fashion, Vice President Joe Biden's recent foolish intervention into Lebanese politics -- a rare Obama Middle East misstep -- may have actually strengthened Hezbollah. These groups are not going away, they are not merely proxies for Iran, and Obama needs to recognize that he is going to have to deal with them.
Bush Sin 4: Demonizing Iran and Syria. Bush did this both out of ideological conviction, to punish them for their hard line against Israel, and as a way of lining up a "moderate" Arab coalition against them. Like all of Bush's Middle East policies, this one backfired. Iran is stronger than ever, and the much-vaunted moderate Sunni coalition against Iran was undercut by their publics' anger over the Palestinian issue. As long as Iran and Syria can pose as the defenders of the Palestinians against Israel, the moderate Sunni states will have their hands tied in trying to weaken them.
Obama's antidote: Obama must make it clear that he has a larger vision of regional stability than Bush's bogus let's-all-hate-Iran-together scheme. He should reaffirm his diplomatic outreach to Iran and signal that he does not intend to bludgeon it into submission. (This will also weaken the demagogic appeal of the repellent and incompetent Ahmadinejad in the coming elections.) He should also signal that he intends to return the U.S. ambassador to Syria and bring Damascus into the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, with resolving the Golan Heights issue paramount. As the veteran Mideast commentator Helena Cobban has noted, the U.S.-abetted rift between Hamas and Fatah has made it very difficult to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis without Syria being involved. Syria actually offers a major potential opening for U.S. diplomacy.
Bush Sin 5: His well-meaning but condescending, hypocritical and self-defeating support for reform and democracy. This is the trickiest part of Obama's mission, and the most equivocal part of Bush's legacy. Bush's goals in supporting democracy and reform in the Arab world were justifiable, but those goals foundered on realpolitik. When Bush realized that he needed the support of autocratic regimes like Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's, his interest in supporting reformers suddenly waned. Bush's support for democracy was also deeply hypocritical: He made a big show of supporting the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, but he refused to deal with Hamas when it was elected in free and fair elections in Gaza.
Obama's antidote: Obama needs to avoid both paternalism and hypocrisy. He must be realistic in assessing the limits of U.S. influence in this area, while at the same time clearly signaling to Arab reformers that the U.S. does not intend to return to the bad old realism in which it tacitly accepted pro-U.S. autocrats who delivered stability. He must signal that he will deal with all democratically elected governments, not just those the U.S. likes. He can thus salvage what was good in Bush's pro-democracy outreach while avoiding its fatal flaws.
This will be a long and difficult process. Perhaps the best thing Obama could do to encourage democracy and reform in the region would be to display a little salutary humility. If he were to acknowledge that the U.S. has not always lived up to its own ideals, that it has made grave errors in the region -- such as toppling Iran's legitimately elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 -- such an admission would probably go further than anything else in signaling to Obama's audience that he "gets it." A leader who is big enough to admit his country's historic mistakes, and apologize for them, would make a far stronger case for American-style freedom and democracy than one who lectures the rest of the world from a self-righteous pulpit.
Obama has a very deep Mideast hole to dig America out of. But if he says what he needs to say on Thursday, and then follows up on his words, he can make a good start.
Five disastrous Middle East policies that the president must show he's rejected.
By Gary Kamiya
June 4, 2009 | These are momentous days in the Middle East. As President Barack Obama arrives in Cairo to deliver a long-awaited speech addressing relations between America and the Arab/Muslim world, no fewer than four significant events loom on the regional horizon. On June 7, Lebanon will hold elections that could give the militant group Hezbollah unprecedented political power. Iran will hold its elections five days later, with the political fate of hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hanging in the balance. U.S. combat forces are scheduled to leave all Iraqi cities by the end of June, the first tangible step toward ending the American military presence there. And Obama has just handed right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a July deadline to form a new peace policy.
Under George W. Bush, America's Arab/Muslim report card was an F-minus. U.S. standing in the Middle East and among the world's Muslims sank to an all-time low, terrorist attacks greatly increased, violent extremists gained power, moderate and pro-U.S. regimes were weakened, the crucial Israeli-Palestinian conflict grew ever more intractable, Iraq sank into a hell from which it has only now begun to emerge, and the Taliban surged back in Afghanistan and threatened Pakistan. Bush's policies were directly responsible for many of these calamitous outcomes, and exacerbated others. In his Cairo speech, Obama's most pressing need is thus to make it unequivocally clear to the world's 1.5 billion Muslims and 325 million Arabs that the U.S. has decisively rejected Bush's failed ideology and policies, and intends to chart a completely new path. We can expect Obama to invoke his own background, reject the idea of a "clash of civilizations" and make an inspiring appeal to shared values. Those oratorical flourishes will count for something, but unless he supports them with tough, realistic language and actual policy changes, they will just go down as pretty words.
What follows is a list of Bush's five cardinal Middle East errors, and what Obama can do in his speech and in his subsequent actions to correct them.
Sin 1: His egregiously pro-Israel tilt. Abandoning even the pretense of being an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bush told his Cabinet at the very beginning of his administration that he intended to opt out and unleash Ariel Sharon on the Palestinians -- and then he did. Like it or not, the Palestinian cause is the unifying one for the world's Arabs and Muslims, and the West's abject failure to act justly toward the Palestinians has done more damage to its image in the Arab/Muslim world than anything else. Bush took that phenomenon to new depths. The justified perception that Washington was completely in Tel Aviv's pocket poisoned everything the U.S. tried to do in the region, from promoting democracy to fighting in Iraq to winning hearts and minds. Blind U.S. support for Israel enrages ordinary Arabs and Muslims, gives militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas a raison d'être, and undercuts U.S. allies like Egypt whose oppressed people see their sclerotic leaders as paid-off water carriers for America.
Obama's antidote: He has made a good start by making it clear to the far-right Netanyahu government that the U.S. will no longer tolerate Israel's usual tricks of stalling and equivocating on freezing the settlements. The settlements are not the key issue in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but stopping their growth is essential if peace is to be realized because they are a prima facie sign of Israeli bad faith. Neither the Palestinians nor any Arab country will begin negotiations with Israel until the settlements, which have relentlessly grown during the entire so-called peace process initiated by Oslo in 1993, are frozen. Obama should make it clear in his speech that he has told the Israeli government that it must freeze the settlements and that he expects them to comply, thus publicly locking himself into a position from which he cannot back down and increasing pressure on the Netanyahu government to take action.
Obama should also not fall into the pointless trap of demanding that Arab states make goodwill gestures toward Israel before Netanyahu has even said that he is committed to a viable two-state solution. The Arab Peace Plan, in which every Arab state agreed to establish full relations with Israel if it ended its illegal occupation of the territories it captured in the 1967 war, has been on the table for seven years, and Israel has not acted on it. The Arab states have made it clear that the next move is Israel's, and if Obama insists that the Arabs must act first, he will squander all of his credibility with his audience.
But the really important moves here will come in the weeks and months after the speech. If Obama does not put real pressure on Netanyahu to freeze settlements and begin working toward a two-state solution -- which could lead the Israeli leader's coalition partners to bolt, bringing down his government in record time -- his worldwide audience will regard his speech as just more meaningless words. After all, even George W. Bush repeatedly called for the creation of a Palestinian state. The time is long past when mere rhetoric will convince Arabs and Muslims that the U.S. is serious about brokering a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Bonus point: If Obama surprises the world by announcing that he intends to visit Gaza. Obama has never dared to criticize Israel's onslaught against the tiny, impoverished strip. But a visit would speak volumes about the new direction his administration intends to take.
Bush Sin 2: His grandiose declaration of a "war on terror," accompanied by ignorant, self-defeating rhetoric about fighting "Islamofascism." One of the reasons Bush invaded Iraq was to teach the backward, violent Arab-Muslim world a lesson in the wake of 9/11. This was insulting enough, but the Bush neocons' insistence that the invasion was also going to be good for the benighted region was intolerable, a combination of brutality and "idealistic" condescension. Bush's crusader-like zeal in pursuing a "clash of civilizations" only strengthened the appeal for Arabs and Muslims of mirroring messianic groups like al-Qaida, and gave democracy itself a bad name.
Obama's antidote: First, he should declare the "war on terror" over. He should explain that the U.S. is not fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat "terrorism," but because we want to help the people of those countries defeat enemies that threaten the lives of their citizens. He should clearly say that we are not attempting to impose American ideas or values on anyone, only helping them to live lives of minimal human decency.
It is too late to undo the Iraq war, but Obama can make it clear that the US will honor its commitment to wind down its military presence there and is committed to working with the Iraqi government to ensure the best possible outcome for the long-suffering Iraqi people. He should again repeat that the U.S. has no designs on Iraq's oil or any of its other assets.
Bush Sin 3: Bush lumped all "extremist" groups together and declared all of them America's enemies. Violent extremism is indeed a regional problem, but Bush's failure to distinguish between nationalist resistance movements like Hamas and Hezbollah and anomic Islamist groups like al-Qaida was counterproductive and only strengthened the extremists.
Obama's antidote: The U.S. does indeed need to bolster moderates, but the way to do that is to stop the moralistic blustering and get smart. Simply demonizing militant groups that have deep roots in their societies, like Hezbollah and Hamas, is a ticket for failure. With the exception of fanatical Islamist groups like al-Qaida, "extremism" is often wholly or partially a symptom, a reaction to an underlying situation, not an eternal state of anti-Western hatred. It would be premature for Obama to announce that the U.S. will open full diplomatic channels with Hamas and Hezbollah, but he needs to make clear that he is prepared to address the underlying causes that have allowed them to flourish, and signal that he is prepared to work with them. As Robert Malley and Hussein Agha point out in a recent piece in the New York Review of Books, the U.S. embrace of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas actually weakened him, turning him into an Uncle Tom in the eyes of many Palestinians. In similar fashion, Vice President Joe Biden's recent foolish intervention into Lebanese politics -- a rare Obama Middle East misstep -- may have actually strengthened Hezbollah. These groups are not going away, they are not merely proxies for Iran, and Obama needs to recognize that he is going to have to deal with them.
Bush Sin 4: Demonizing Iran and Syria. Bush did this both out of ideological conviction, to punish them for their hard line against Israel, and as a way of lining up a "moderate" Arab coalition against them. Like all of Bush's Middle East policies, this one backfired. Iran is stronger than ever, and the much-vaunted moderate Sunni coalition against Iran was undercut by their publics' anger over the Palestinian issue. As long as Iran and Syria can pose as the defenders of the Palestinians against Israel, the moderate Sunni states will have their hands tied in trying to weaken them.
Obama's antidote: Obama must make it clear that he has a larger vision of regional stability than Bush's bogus let's-all-hate-Iran-together scheme. He should reaffirm his diplomatic outreach to Iran and signal that he does not intend to bludgeon it into submission. (This will also weaken the demagogic appeal of the repellent and incompetent Ahmadinejad in the coming elections.) He should also signal that he intends to return the U.S. ambassador to Syria and bring Damascus into the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, with resolving the Golan Heights issue paramount. As the veteran Mideast commentator Helena Cobban has noted, the U.S.-abetted rift between Hamas and Fatah has made it very difficult to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis without Syria being involved. Syria actually offers a major potential opening for U.S. diplomacy.
Bush Sin 5: His well-meaning but condescending, hypocritical and self-defeating support for reform and democracy. This is the trickiest part of Obama's mission, and the most equivocal part of Bush's legacy. Bush's goals in supporting democracy and reform in the Arab world were justifiable, but those goals foundered on realpolitik. When Bush realized that he needed the support of autocratic regimes like Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's, his interest in supporting reformers suddenly waned. Bush's support for democracy was also deeply hypocritical: He made a big show of supporting the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, but he refused to deal with Hamas when it was elected in free and fair elections in Gaza.
Obama's antidote: Obama needs to avoid both paternalism and hypocrisy. He must be realistic in assessing the limits of U.S. influence in this area, while at the same time clearly signaling to Arab reformers that the U.S. does not intend to return to the bad old realism in which it tacitly accepted pro-U.S. autocrats who delivered stability. He must signal that he will deal with all democratically elected governments, not just those the U.S. likes. He can thus salvage what was good in Bush's pro-democracy outreach while avoiding its fatal flaws.
This will be a long and difficult process. Perhaps the best thing Obama could do to encourage democracy and reform in the region would be to display a little salutary humility. If he were to acknowledge that the U.S. has not always lived up to its own ideals, that it has made grave errors in the region -- such as toppling Iran's legitimately elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 -- such an admission would probably go further than anything else in signaling to Obama's audience that he "gets it." A leader who is big enough to admit his country's historic mistakes, and apologize for them, would make a far stronger case for American-style freedom and democracy than one who lectures the rest of the world from a self-righteous pulpit.
Obama has a very deep Mideast hole to dig America out of. But if he says what he needs to say on Thursday, and then follows up on his words, he can make a good start.
Monday, June 1, 2009
If the Oval Office guest list is an indicator, US President Barack Obama is making good on his commitment to try to revive the long-dead Arab-Israeli peace process. On 18 May President Obama received Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; on 28 May he met with Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.
As this process gets under way, the United States -- Israel's main arms supplier, financier and international apologist -- faces huge hurdles. It is deeply mistrusted by Palestinians and Arabs generally, and the new administration has not done much to rebuild trust. Obama has, like former US President George W. Bush, expressed support for Palestinian statehood, but he has made no criticisms of Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip -- which killed more than 1,400 people last winter, mostly civilians -- despite evidence from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN investigators of egregious Israeli war crimes. Nor has he pressured Israel to lift the blockade of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are refugees, are effectively imprisoned and deprived of basic necessities.
Obama has told Netanyahu firmly that Israel must stop building settlements on expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank, but such words have been uttered by the president's predecessors. Unless these statements are followed by decisive action -- perhaps to limit American subsidies to Israel -- there's no reason to believe the lip service that failed in the past will suddenly be more effective.
On the Palestinian side, Obama is talking to the wrong man: more than half of residents in the Occupied Palestinian Territories do not consider Abbas the "legitimate" president of the Palestinians, according to a March survey by Fafo, a Norwegian research organization. Eighty-seven percent want the Fatah faction, which Abbas heads, to have new leaders.
Hamas, by contrast, emerged from Israel's attack on Gaza with enhanced legitimacy and popularity. That attack was only the latest of numerous efforts to topple the movement following its decisive victory in the 2006 legislative elections. In addition to the Israeli siege, these efforts have included a failed insurgency by Contra-style anti-Hamas militias nominally loyal to Abbas and funded and trained by the United States under the supervision of Lieut. Gen. Keith Dayton. If Obama were serious about making real progress, one of the first things he would do is ditch the Bush-era policy of backing Palestinian puppets and lift the American veto on reconciliation efforts aimed at creating a unified, representative and credible Palestinian leadership.
None of these problems is entirely new, though the challenges, having festered for years, may be tougher to deal with now. Netanyahu did add one obstacle, however, when he came to Washington. In accord with his anticipated strategy of delay, he insisted that Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist as a "Jewish state" as a condition of any peace agreement. Obama seemingly endorsed this demand when he said, "It is in US national security interests to assure that Israel's security as an independent Jewish state is maintained."
Israel has pressed this demand with increasing fervor because Palestinians are on the verge of becoming the majority population in the territory it controls. Israel wants to ensure that any two-state solution -- something that looks increasingly doubtful even to proponents -- retains a Jewish majority. This explains the state's longstanding opposition, in defiance of international humanitarian law, to the return of Palestinian refugees who were expelled or fled from homes in what is now Israel.
But can Israel's demand be justified? A useful lens to examine its claim is the fundamental legal principle that there is no right without a remedy. If Israel has a "right to exist as a Jewish state," then what can it legitimately do if Palestinians living under its control "violate" this right by having "too many" non-Jewish babies? Can Israel expel non-Jews, fine them, strip them of citizenship or limit the number of children they can have? It is impossible to think of a "remedy" that does not do outrageous violence to universal human rights principles.
What if we apply Israel's claim to the United States? Because of the rapid growth of the Latino population in the past decade, Texas and California no longer have white majorities. Could either state declare that it has "a right to exist as a white-majority state" and take steps to limit the rights of non-whites? Could the United States declare itself officially a Christian nation and force Jews, Muslims or Hindus to pledge allegiance to a flag that bears a cross? While such measures may appeal to a tiny number of extremists, they would be unthinkable to anyone upholding twenty-first-century constitutional principles.
But Israeli leaders propose precisely such odious measures.
Already, Israel bans its citizens who marry non-citizen Palestinians from living in the country -- a measure human rights activists have compared with the anti-miscegenation laws that once existed in Virginia and other states. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has long advocated that the nearly 1.5 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel be "transferred" from the country in order to maintain its Jewish majority.
Recently, Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party has sponsored or supported several bills aimed at further curtailing the rights of non-Jews. One requires all citizens, including Palestinian Muslims and Christians, to swear allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state. Another proposes to punish anyone who commemorates the Nakba (the name Palestinians give to their forced dispossession in the months before and after the state of Israel was established) with up to three years in prison. Ironically, Lieberman is an immigrant who moved to Israel from Moldova three decades ago, while the people he seeks to expel and silence have lived on the land since long before May 1948.
And as Obama continues to remind us of America's "shared values" with Israel, another proposed bill passed its first reading in the Knesset this week. According to the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, the law would prescribe "one year in prison for anyone speaking against Israel's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state" -- making it a thought crime to advocate that Israel should be a democratic, nonracial state of all its citizens.
It would be sad indeed if the first African-American president of the United States were to defend in Israel exactly the kind of institutionalized bigotry the civil rights movement defeated in this country, a victory that made his election possible.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). This article was originally published by The Nation and is republished with permission.
As this process gets under way, the United States -- Israel's main arms supplier, financier and international apologist -- faces huge hurdles. It is deeply mistrusted by Palestinians and Arabs generally, and the new administration has not done much to rebuild trust. Obama has, like former US President George W. Bush, expressed support for Palestinian statehood, but he has made no criticisms of Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip -- which killed more than 1,400 people last winter, mostly civilians -- despite evidence from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN investigators of egregious Israeli war crimes. Nor has he pressured Israel to lift the blockade of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are refugees, are effectively imprisoned and deprived of basic necessities.
Obama has told Netanyahu firmly that Israel must stop building settlements on expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank, but such words have been uttered by the president's predecessors. Unless these statements are followed by decisive action -- perhaps to limit American subsidies to Israel -- there's no reason to believe the lip service that failed in the past will suddenly be more effective.
On the Palestinian side, Obama is talking to the wrong man: more than half of residents in the Occupied Palestinian Territories do not consider Abbas the "legitimate" president of the Palestinians, according to a March survey by Fafo, a Norwegian research organization. Eighty-seven percent want the Fatah faction, which Abbas heads, to have new leaders.
Hamas, by contrast, emerged from Israel's attack on Gaza with enhanced legitimacy and popularity. That attack was only the latest of numerous efforts to topple the movement following its decisive victory in the 2006 legislative elections. In addition to the Israeli siege, these efforts have included a failed insurgency by Contra-style anti-Hamas militias nominally loyal to Abbas and funded and trained by the United States under the supervision of Lieut. Gen. Keith Dayton. If Obama were serious about making real progress, one of the first things he would do is ditch the Bush-era policy of backing Palestinian puppets and lift the American veto on reconciliation efforts aimed at creating a unified, representative and credible Palestinian leadership.
None of these problems is entirely new, though the challenges, having festered for years, may be tougher to deal with now. Netanyahu did add one obstacle, however, when he came to Washington. In accord with his anticipated strategy of delay, he insisted that Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist as a "Jewish state" as a condition of any peace agreement. Obama seemingly endorsed this demand when he said, "It is in US national security interests to assure that Israel's security as an independent Jewish state is maintained."
Israel has pressed this demand with increasing fervor because Palestinians are on the verge of becoming the majority population in the territory it controls. Israel wants to ensure that any two-state solution -- something that looks increasingly doubtful even to proponents -- retains a Jewish majority. This explains the state's longstanding opposition, in defiance of international humanitarian law, to the return of Palestinian refugees who were expelled or fled from homes in what is now Israel.
But can Israel's demand be justified? A useful lens to examine its claim is the fundamental legal principle that there is no right without a remedy. If Israel has a "right to exist as a Jewish state," then what can it legitimately do if Palestinians living under its control "violate" this right by having "too many" non-Jewish babies? Can Israel expel non-Jews, fine them, strip them of citizenship or limit the number of children they can have? It is impossible to think of a "remedy" that does not do outrageous violence to universal human rights principles.
What if we apply Israel's claim to the United States? Because of the rapid growth of the Latino population in the past decade, Texas and California no longer have white majorities. Could either state declare that it has "a right to exist as a white-majority state" and take steps to limit the rights of non-whites? Could the United States declare itself officially a Christian nation and force Jews, Muslims or Hindus to pledge allegiance to a flag that bears a cross? While such measures may appeal to a tiny number of extremists, they would be unthinkable to anyone upholding twenty-first-century constitutional principles.
But Israeli leaders propose precisely such odious measures.
Already, Israel bans its citizens who marry non-citizen Palestinians from living in the country -- a measure human rights activists have compared with the anti-miscegenation laws that once existed in Virginia and other states. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has long advocated that the nearly 1.5 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel be "transferred" from the country in order to maintain its Jewish majority.
Recently, Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu party has sponsored or supported several bills aimed at further curtailing the rights of non-Jews. One requires all citizens, including Palestinian Muslims and Christians, to swear allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state. Another proposes to punish anyone who commemorates the Nakba (the name Palestinians give to their forced dispossession in the months before and after the state of Israel was established) with up to three years in prison. Ironically, Lieberman is an immigrant who moved to Israel from Moldova three decades ago, while the people he seeks to expel and silence have lived on the land since long before May 1948.
And as Obama continues to remind us of America's "shared values" with Israel, another proposed bill passed its first reading in the Knesset this week. According to the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, the law would prescribe "one year in prison for anyone speaking against Israel's right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state" -- making it a thought crime to advocate that Israel should be a democratic, nonracial state of all its citizens.
It would be sad indeed if the first African-American president of the United States were to defend in Israel exactly the kind of institutionalized bigotry the civil rights movement defeated in this country, a victory that made his election possible.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). This article was originally published by The Nation and is republished with permission.
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