Light years apart
MEI 18th Feb
From Ian Williams
It’s Easier to Reach Heaven than the End of the Street: A Jerusalem Memoir, Emma Williams
Olive Branch Press, an imprint of Interlink Publishing Group, Inc.
ISBN: 9781566567893, $16
Newly updated for the American edition, Emma Williams’ account of her six years in Jerusalem is, in many ways, far more telling than many of the more overtly partisan and ideological accounts of the Middle East conflict. She was conducting medical research in the Occupied Territories while her husband, Andrew Gilmour, was in Jerusalem with the United Nations, trying to put truth in the increasingly far-fetched rumours of a peace process.
She does not belabour the symbolism of the timing and location of the birth of her son – just before Christmas in a hospital in Bethlehem – but it surely enhances her authority. The statue of the Virgin Mary on the roof hospital had been raked with machine-gun fire from an Israeli tank the night before, but, unlike many Palestinian women, she made it to the hospital and was not held up to die at an IDF checkpoint.
Shortly after the author’s arrival in Jerusalem in 2000, Ariel Sharon took his deliberately provocative walk through the Haram al-Sharif, triggering the Second Intifada, followed after 9/11 by his assault on the Palestinian Authority. She records the puzzlement of her international colleagues in the bars of Jerusalem about the mentality of someone who could order the destruction of dental records, examination records and even driving licence records in the government buildings.
Williams’ family lived in an Arab part of Jerusalem, but with Jewish as well as Arab neighbours. Their social and professional lives crossed the divide between communities while also exposing them to the foreigners, who brought their own intellectual baggage with them. From her anecdotes, the experience is not so much one of apartheid as of switching frequently between parallel universes. “You live on the wrong side of reality,” a friend tells her about their home “on the seam”, in an Arab village in “no man’s land” in Jerusalem.
On one side, life goes on normally, except she vividly paints the perpetual fear of suicide bombings, the randomness of which magnifies their effect on morale, where every explosion has friends and family checking on the whereabouts of their children and spouses. One exploded outside the French School that her children attended. She, her three children and the unborn she was carrying, all missed it only by minutes.
Anyone who has dealings in or about the Middle East has confronted the absolute assumption of moral correctness. On the one side are those Israelis who have no conception of the brutality and humiliation of the occupation, and on the other are some Palestinians who make the “traditional” justification for the bombings as “the weapon of the weak.”
The author’s quantum leaps between the universes provide telling contrasts. The metaphysical membrane of belief is so strong that an Israeli acquaintance asserts to the wife of a French journalist shot by an Israeli paratrooper: “Our security forces don’t do that sort of thing.” The paratrooper had been captured on film taking careful, unprovoked and deliberate aim. Only the journalist’s flak jacket and the angle he was standing at stopped the bullet from going though his heart. The armour of moral certainty is hard enough to stop mere reality penetrating.
Williams is archetypically British in her politeness, which makes her a much better reporter than a more easily riled observer. When Israeli officials and, indeed, ordinary people say blinkered things, she does not take them to task and so can record the smooth flow of their prejudices.
However, she goes further to show how the suicide bombing campaign alienated even the best-intentioned Israelis, such as veteran peace campaigner Israel Shahak. Yaser Arafat’s half-hearted condemnations enhanced the rapid shrinkage of the Israeli peace camp and allowed him to be easily typecast as the terrorist leader rather than the opportunist would-be beneficiary.
What terrorises about suicide bombs is their unpredictability. But as a frequent visitor across the lines to the West Bank, she records how randomness is subsumed in the caprice of the occupying forces. The wall, the checkpoints, the peremptory behaviour of the troops are perennial, even for relatively privileged foreigners. At the same time, Williams illustrates how much worse it is for the Palestinians – especially the casualties, direct and indirect, that as a doctor and medical researcher, she saw in the Occupied Territories.
Her direct experience of both worlds (one checkpoint, but light years away from each other) allows her to ask questions that would seem offensive from others. After a bomb at the Hebrew University, she asks: “Why is the killing of so many students worse than the killing of women and children or old people – or anyone?” She compares suicide bombing to “the other forms of killing: those from further away, or from so great a distance that the victims are unseen.”
This eminently readable book not only recounts dispassionately the background to the problem, but, perhaps most usefully, gives the reader a vivid and touching depiction of the human clay, on both sides, from which any peaceful solution has to be built.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Laid Back Hacks in ME
'Straight journalism'
Passionate Detachment, Middle East International, February 18 2010
From Ian Williams in New York
Following a back injury, I write this from a horizontal position. There is only one other group of professionals that can earn a living lying flat on its back, and, frankly, I often suspect the other has more honesty and integrity. Which leads in naturally to the debate about whether the supposed objectivity of Ethan Bronner, The New York Times’ (NYT) Jerusalem bureau chief, is compromised because his son has enlisted in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the paper, praised Bronner’s work and claimed that it was, indeed, balanced – but that like Caesar’s wife, NYT staff should be above suspicion and Bronner should be reassigned. Executive Editor Bill Keller disagreed. Neither mentioned that Bronner was also married to an Israeli.
The American media are often over-punctilious about the minutiae of conflicts of interest. They will insist on paying full fares and accommodation for a junket arranged by a foreign government or a company, and then write grovelling and obsequious copy about it. A British journalist riding with them on a totally paid-for gravy train might well reward his benefactors by being rude about them. Some American journalists even refuse to join political parties or vote because they imagine it would compromise their position.
In reality, of course, the real issue is not whether Bronner is Jewish, has an Israeli wife or a son serving in the forces occupying the other side’s territory. Indeed The New York Times would be well served to have Jewish and Israeli journalists covering the issue for them if they had the integrity of the likes of Amira Hass, Akiva Eldar or Gideon Levy from Haaretz.
The real test here is to reverse the terms in the equation. Would the NYT appoint a Muslim to the position, and even if they did, would they keep him in it if his son went native and joined the forces of the Palestinian Authority, let alone Hamas? The answer is clear.
It could be argued that Bronner’s son had no option because of Israeli conscription – but his son is also an American citizen with an easy exit, so there is more than an element of voluntarism about this. Indeed, that compounds it: he has either volunteered for a short term under the programme for foreigners, or he has been conscripted as an Israeli – and faces a lifetime of reserve duty.
However, is also true that both Bronner and the NYT have been evasive about his son’s action, with the bureau chief initially denying it then referring questions on the issue to his superiors back in Manhattan – who compounded suspicions with a wriggly response that could have been crafted by a scriptwriter for Yes Minister. They clearly think that this is, indeed, an issue.
The Times, even more than most American media, takes itself far more seriously than its actual performance merits. The box-ticking approach to ‘objectivity’ tends to obscure the question posed by a previous visitor to Jerusalem –‘what is truth’? The newspaper’s connivance in the drumbeat of frenzy leading up to the Iraq War and its tolerance for Judith Miller’s attempts to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her WMD reporting demonstrate that.
In a recent talk, Bronner claimed to work in shades of grey as opposed to the black and white he characterised in others. In fact, if you look at his work, it tends to be in shades of blue. His bedrock assumptions identify with Israel as a polity, and even when he is critical of policies, he is less so than many Israeli colleagues, although, to be fair, more so than many of the less sophisticated ‘Israel-firsters’ in the American press.
Reporters have to work in a context of editors and proprietors and meet their requirements for source cultivation. In the hierarchy of sources, an undisclosed White House or State Department source normally trumps a named foreign envoy or politician. But Israeli leaders are accorded honorary Washington insider status. Ariel Sharon could come with his hands dripping with blood, Binyamin Netanyahu can promise a settlement freeze and then plant trees in Ariel, and they will still be treated with the deference due to a senior senator in Washington.
Bonner, like the NYT, brings with him the deference to authority that is characteristic of the American media. Einstein’s second theory of relativity applies: “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.” The American social environment, especially in the media, is overwhelmingly pro-Israeli and, with a few exceptions, contrarian journalists do not have successful career paths if they differ.
Jeremy Paxman, a pugnacious TV journalist and presenter in Britain, succinctly expressed a proper journalistic attitude when talking to those in authority: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” His career prospects in American media characterised by deference to authority would be as dim as Robert Fisk’s.
In which context, it is worth quoting Bronner’s 2006 review of Fisk’s book, in which he charged that The Independent’s Middle East correspondent “has become something of a caricature of himself, railing against Israel and the United States, dismissing the work of most of his colleagues as cowering and dishonest, and seeking to expose the West’s self-satisfied hypocrisy nearly to the exclusion of the pursuit of straight journalism… Mr Fisk is most passionate and least informed about Israel.” In this context, we can assume that “straight” journalism means: don’t ask, and don’t mention inconvenient facts that stray too far from Israel’s self-image.
Mark Twain, H L Mencken, I L Stone and other greats of American journalism were not afraid to take sides against the forces of darkness – as they saw them. We remember them because, even if occasionally they got the facts wrong, they pointed to the truth on the great issues of the day, without deference to authority. They would not be a Times bureau chief anywhere.
Passionate Detachment, Middle East International, February 18 2010
From Ian Williams in New York
Following a back injury, I write this from a horizontal position. There is only one other group of professionals that can earn a living lying flat on its back, and, frankly, I often suspect the other has more honesty and integrity. Which leads in naturally to the debate about whether the supposed objectivity of Ethan Bronner, The New York Times’ (NYT) Jerusalem bureau chief, is compromised because his son has enlisted in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
Clark Hoyt, the public editor of the paper, praised Bronner’s work and claimed that it was, indeed, balanced – but that like Caesar’s wife, NYT staff should be above suspicion and Bronner should be reassigned. Executive Editor Bill Keller disagreed. Neither mentioned that Bronner was also married to an Israeli.
The American media are often over-punctilious about the minutiae of conflicts of interest. They will insist on paying full fares and accommodation for a junket arranged by a foreign government or a company, and then write grovelling and obsequious copy about it. A British journalist riding with them on a totally paid-for gravy train might well reward his benefactors by being rude about them. Some American journalists even refuse to join political parties or vote because they imagine it would compromise their position.
In reality, of course, the real issue is not whether Bronner is Jewish, has an Israeli wife or a son serving in the forces occupying the other side’s territory. Indeed The New York Times would be well served to have Jewish and Israeli journalists covering the issue for them if they had the integrity of the likes of Amira Hass, Akiva Eldar or Gideon Levy from Haaretz.
The real test here is to reverse the terms in the equation. Would the NYT appoint a Muslim to the position, and even if they did, would they keep him in it if his son went native and joined the forces of the Palestinian Authority, let alone Hamas? The answer is clear.
It could be argued that Bronner’s son had no option because of Israeli conscription – but his son is also an American citizen with an easy exit, so there is more than an element of voluntarism about this. Indeed, that compounds it: he has either volunteered for a short term under the programme for foreigners, or he has been conscripted as an Israeli – and faces a lifetime of reserve duty.
However, is also true that both Bronner and the NYT have been evasive about his son’s action, with the bureau chief initially denying it then referring questions on the issue to his superiors back in Manhattan – who compounded suspicions with a wriggly response that could have been crafted by a scriptwriter for Yes Minister. They clearly think that this is, indeed, an issue.
The Times, even more than most American media, takes itself far more seriously than its actual performance merits. The box-ticking approach to ‘objectivity’ tends to obscure the question posed by a previous visitor to Jerusalem –‘what is truth’? The newspaper’s connivance in the drumbeat of frenzy leading up to the Iraq War and its tolerance for Judith Miller’s attempts to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her WMD reporting demonstrate that.
In a recent talk, Bronner claimed to work in shades of grey as opposed to the black and white he characterised in others. In fact, if you look at his work, it tends to be in shades of blue. His bedrock assumptions identify with Israel as a polity, and even when he is critical of policies, he is less so than many Israeli colleagues, although, to be fair, more so than many of the less sophisticated ‘Israel-firsters’ in the American press.
Reporters have to work in a context of editors and proprietors and meet their requirements for source cultivation. In the hierarchy of sources, an undisclosed White House or State Department source normally trumps a named foreign envoy or politician. But Israeli leaders are accorded honorary Washington insider status. Ariel Sharon could come with his hands dripping with blood, Binyamin Netanyahu can promise a settlement freeze and then plant trees in Ariel, and they will still be treated with the deference due to a senior senator in Washington.
Bonner, like the NYT, brings with him the deference to authority that is characteristic of the American media. Einstein’s second theory of relativity applies: “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.” The American social environment, especially in the media, is overwhelmingly pro-Israeli and, with a few exceptions, contrarian journalists do not have successful career paths if they differ.
Jeremy Paxman, a pugnacious TV journalist and presenter in Britain, succinctly expressed a proper journalistic attitude when talking to those in authority: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” His career prospects in American media characterised by deference to authority would be as dim as Robert Fisk’s.
In which context, it is worth quoting Bronner’s 2006 review of Fisk’s book, in which he charged that The Independent’s Middle East correspondent “has become something of a caricature of himself, railing against Israel and the United States, dismissing the work of most of his colleagues as cowering and dishonest, and seeking to expose the West’s self-satisfied hypocrisy nearly to the exclusion of the pursuit of straight journalism… Mr Fisk is most passionate and least informed about Israel.” In this context, we can assume that “straight” journalism means: don’t ask, and don’t mention inconvenient facts that stray too far from Israel’s self-image.
Mark Twain, H L Mencken, I L Stone and other greats of American journalism were not afraid to take sides against the forces of darkness – as they saw them. We remember them because, even if occasionally they got the facts wrong, they pointed to the truth on the great issues of the day, without deference to authority. They would not be a Times bureau chief anywhere.
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Palin into omnipotence
COMMENT
Asia Times February 10, 2010
By Ian Williams
WASHINGTON - "We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron," declaimed American journalist H L Mencken (1880-1956) many years ago: former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's speech to the National Tea Party movement in Tennessee last weekend calls the famous curmudgeon's lofty aspiration to mind.
Certainly, the "plain folks" assembled there fitted Mencken's bill, and they enthusiastically assume that Palin is one of them. The convention included "birthers" who think that President Barack Obama is a Muslim alien, many who think the United Nations is a sinister internationalist plot, and platform speakers who think that
the president is not just a socialist, but an "international socialist", which does not betoken an esoteric appreciation of the detritus of the fourth international, but is simply two conservative swear words compounding each other.
Palin might on occasion be an ignoramus, but she is no moron, and what is more, she is making money hand over fist, which is more than they are. In fact, they paid over their hard-earned dollars to attend the convention, which a for-profit company arranged, and which paid Palin a US$100,000 speaker's fee.
Her rhetoric avoids endorsement of the wilder excesses of her supporters, yet her folksy delivery and anarchic syntax is close enough in spirit for them to identify with her. If she did articulate her policies in a clear and intellectually compelling way, she would lose their support, as in fact former presidential candidate John McCain has done with occasional, albeit infrequent, public displays of cerebral activity. Horrified at his temerity in letting reality intrude on the smooth flow of their venomous prejudices, some in the Tea Party are against him in the next primary.
Insofar as is there is a movement, it is fueled by a rage that depends for its strength and cohesion on its inarticulacy. Yes, there is also a deep racist undercurrent - in fact often quite explicit. There are a lot of whites who still can't cope with a black president - which is why some of them can't believe he is a citizen. It is progress of sorts that they don't come out and say clearly why he cannot be president, but it is noticeable that the conventions and demonstrations are whiter than a supermarket sliced loaf.
However, there are more rational premises for their anger, even if the conclusions they draw from them are far-fetched, indeed far-stretched. Working-class (or in US parlance middle-class) incomes have been stagnant for decades, since president Ronald Reagan in fact, while health and higher education costs have soared.
It is a year since Obama picked up the poisoned chalice from George W Bush and was left to pick up the ruins of the neo-liberal enterprise. There is little doubt that his efforts have stopped it being even worse, but after a year in which he has, in effect, pandered to the perpetrators in the name of bipartisanship, it almost presents his back with a large target.
But Obama has not shown the leadership he should have done, whether on oversight of banks or reform of healthcare, and his main fault is that he has left it to the congressional Democrats, many of whom have been as subservient to the business lobbyists as their Republican opponents.
Palin's flip comment on Obama strikes memorably home at his failure, which is no less a real political failure, even though neither she nor the Republicans have any alternative plans at all, "So, how's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?"
Obama has gone technocratic on his erstwhile supporters, and backpedaled on charismatic clear leadership while not putting a clear enough line between him and his predecessor. Certainly, the direction and tone of government has changed, immeasurably for the better under Obama, although you would never guess that from listening to the leftist mirror images of the teabaggers who accuse the president of betraying principles that he never espoused. But even if he did not promise the revolutionary changes that some of them imagined, he did, both explicitly and implicitly, promise change in how business would be conducted in Washington.
One lesson that some have drawn from the surprise Republican victory in Massachusetts is that the teabaggers rule and that conservative rage is triumphant. But polls show that no less than 82% of those who deserted Obama and voted for the Republican candidate wanted a public option in the healthcare bill. Similarly, large majorities of voters in all parties disagree strongly with the Supreme Court decision that now allows corporations unlimited spending in elections.
We cynics, looking at how much influence business already has in Washington, are not sure that it could get any worse. But the entirely rational fear of big business and big government is the basis of disaffection from left to right. The genius of Palin and the Republican right is to tie these in a package with "Big Labor" and present it as creeping socialism, along with undercover anti-minority and anti-black sentiment, in a way that attracts such dedicated and vociferous support. It has been done before. Think of the brownshirts, until they had served their purpose.
On the one hand, the teabaggers might make the Republicans unelectable nationally - soon, for example, the minorities will be a majority! And the electorate as a whole still shows signs of awareness of the real world. But Obama and the Democrats need some more therapeutic and constructive anger to retain traditional supporters and win new ones.
Ironically, the Supreme Court decision, even if does not inaugurate the cataclysmic consequences that some fear, could be the fulcrum for a major campaign to change how Washington does business, to question what most countries see as a system of overt corruption and bribery. But the president has to be indignant with his own side as well: he cannot allow the congressional leaders of his party to frame legislation, whether on health, financial oversight or Pentagon procurement, shaped by the campaign donations the most self-interested corporations and industries have given them.
Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and
Asia Times February 10, 2010
By Ian Williams
WASHINGTON - "We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron," declaimed American journalist H L Mencken (1880-1956) many years ago: former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's speech to the National Tea Party movement in Tennessee last weekend calls the famous curmudgeon's lofty aspiration to mind.
Certainly, the "plain folks" assembled there fitted Mencken's bill, and they enthusiastically assume that Palin is one of them. The convention included "birthers" who think that President Barack Obama is a Muslim alien, many who think the United Nations is a sinister internationalist plot, and platform speakers who think that
the president is not just a socialist, but an "international socialist", which does not betoken an esoteric appreciation of the detritus of the fourth international, but is simply two conservative swear words compounding each other.
Palin might on occasion be an ignoramus, but she is no moron, and what is more, she is making money hand over fist, which is more than they are. In fact, they paid over their hard-earned dollars to attend the convention, which a for-profit company arranged, and which paid Palin a US$100,000 speaker's fee.
Her rhetoric avoids endorsement of the wilder excesses of her supporters, yet her folksy delivery and anarchic syntax is close enough in spirit for them to identify with her. If she did articulate her policies in a clear and intellectually compelling way, she would lose their support, as in fact former presidential candidate John McCain has done with occasional, albeit infrequent, public displays of cerebral activity. Horrified at his temerity in letting reality intrude on the smooth flow of their venomous prejudices, some in the Tea Party are against him in the next primary.
Insofar as is there is a movement, it is fueled by a rage that depends for its strength and cohesion on its inarticulacy. Yes, there is also a deep racist undercurrent - in fact often quite explicit. There are a lot of whites who still can't cope with a black president - which is why some of them can't believe he is a citizen. It is progress of sorts that they don't come out and say clearly why he cannot be president, but it is noticeable that the conventions and demonstrations are whiter than a supermarket sliced loaf.
However, there are more rational premises for their anger, even if the conclusions they draw from them are far-fetched, indeed far-stretched. Working-class (or in US parlance middle-class) incomes have been stagnant for decades, since president Ronald Reagan in fact, while health and higher education costs have soared.
It is a year since Obama picked up the poisoned chalice from George W Bush and was left to pick up the ruins of the neo-liberal enterprise. There is little doubt that his efforts have stopped it being even worse, but after a year in which he has, in effect, pandered to the perpetrators in the name of bipartisanship, it almost presents his back with a large target.
But Obama has not shown the leadership he should have done, whether on oversight of banks or reform of healthcare, and his main fault is that he has left it to the congressional Democrats, many of whom have been as subservient to the business lobbyists as their Republican opponents.
Palin's flip comment on Obama strikes memorably home at his failure, which is no less a real political failure, even though neither she nor the Republicans have any alternative plans at all, "So, how's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?"
Obama has gone technocratic on his erstwhile supporters, and backpedaled on charismatic clear leadership while not putting a clear enough line between him and his predecessor. Certainly, the direction and tone of government has changed, immeasurably for the better under Obama, although you would never guess that from listening to the leftist mirror images of the teabaggers who accuse the president of betraying principles that he never espoused. But even if he did not promise the revolutionary changes that some of them imagined, he did, both explicitly and implicitly, promise change in how business would be conducted in Washington.
One lesson that some have drawn from the surprise Republican victory in Massachusetts is that the teabaggers rule and that conservative rage is triumphant. But polls show that no less than 82% of those who deserted Obama and voted for the Republican candidate wanted a public option in the healthcare bill. Similarly, large majorities of voters in all parties disagree strongly with the Supreme Court decision that now allows corporations unlimited spending in elections.
We cynics, looking at how much influence business already has in Washington, are not sure that it could get any worse. But the entirely rational fear of big business and big government is the basis of disaffection from left to right. The genius of Palin and the Republican right is to tie these in a package with "Big Labor" and present it as creeping socialism, along with undercover anti-minority and anti-black sentiment, in a way that attracts such dedicated and vociferous support. It has been done before. Think of the brownshirts, until they had served their purpose.
On the one hand, the teabaggers might make the Republicans unelectable nationally - soon, for example, the minorities will be a majority! And the electorate as a whole still shows signs of awareness of the real world. But Obama and the Democrats need some more therapeutic and constructive anger to retain traditional supporters and win new ones.
Ironically, the Supreme Court decision, even if does not inaugurate the cataclysmic consequences that some fear, could be the fulcrum for a major campaign to change how Washington does business, to question what most countries see as a system of overt corruption and bribery. But the president has to be indignant with his own side as well: he cannot allow the congressional leaders of his party to frame legislation, whether on health, financial oversight or Pentagon procurement, shaped by the campaign donations the most self-interested corporations and industries have given them.
Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and
Friday, February 05, 2010
Oh Canada
Canada's pandering to Israel
Middle East International 4 Feb 2010
Passionate Detachment
From Ian Williams
In January, Canada stopped contributing to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It is the latest in a series of decisions that have seen Ottawa ‘out-Israeling’ Washington. It had previously stopped funding KAIROS (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives), an NGO that had been supporting human rights groups in Israel and the Occupied Territories. In each case, the government of Stephen Harper seemed to be responding to, or rather pandering to, rabidly pro-Israeli Jewish groups in Canada. Israel itself has certainly never encouraged an end to the funding of UNRWA, an institution that for decades has, in effect, been paying some of the bills for the occupation.
Although camouflaged internationally by a similar drift in British and Australian policy, Ottawa has moved far from its own earlier positions, and possibly farther than either London or Canberra. Indeed, the Obama administration’s muted criticisms of Israeli policy sound relatively ferocious compared with Canada’s gestures towards the administration of Binyamin Netanyahu.
Once upon a time, Canada was a paragon of international virtue: supportive of the UN and happily putting distance between itself and its southern neighbour on the Middle East. Then came Stephen Harper. Ottawa did not join the Iraq war, but that was more a function of strong Canadian public opinion and Harper’s parlous electoral position than any considered choice.
Canada led the walk-out at the Durban conference on racism and was the first to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority when Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. It applauded Israel’s right to “defend itself” against Hizbullah (a “measured response”, according to Harper), and against Hamas in Operation Cast Lead.
The move in the Conservative Party has also pulled the Liberal Party a significant distance from the principles of Pierre Trudeau, leaving only the New Democrats and the Bloc Québécois to uphold international law. Indeed, the first turns in policy came under the previous Liberal government, ironically with human rights stalwarts in its ranks like Irwin Cotler and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who, in 2006, suggested correctly that Israel’s shelling of the UN post at Qana in southern Lebanon (in which a Canadian officer was killed) was a war crime.
Ignatieff was criticised so strongly for his remark that he ended up apologising for it, and last May he commented on the Conservative bid for Jewish votes: “It is beyond reckless for political leaders to try to score points by branding one another as ‘anti-Israel’ — to try to win votes by claiming a monopoly on supporting Israel. My party will never claim to be the only genuine defenders of Israel in Canadian politics because I don’t want my party to be alone in the defence of Israel. I want all parties to be genuine defenders of Israel.”
Yet why would anyone want to defend another country so uncritically, let alone one that had killed a Canadian soldier? How did these sincere defenders of human rights allow themselves an Israeli exception?
It is not just the multilateralism and commitment to the UN that have been a cornerstone of Canadian policy since 1945, it is also the particular application of that policy to the Middle East. To look at the official Canadian Foreign Affairs website, a Likudnik might think it had been drafted by the PLO’s legal department. Canada does not recognise the annexation of East Jerusalem, considers the territories to be occupied and the settlements to be contrary to the Geneva Conventions. It calls the West Bank barrier illegal and supports the Arab peace initiative, which is, of course, based on the 1967 boundaries.
Which leads to the basic paradox: why is Ottawa so fervent in support of an Israeli government that flaunts its denial of all these positions, whose prime minister only a week ago was declaring that the settlement in which he was planting a tree would always be part of Israel, and whose administration is evicting Palestinians from East Jerusalem and building that illegal barrier?
If you delve into the official US State Department positions you will find a similar, if somewhat less explicit, exposition of and support for the accepted international legal position on the issues. But the gap between Canada’s legal position and its diplomatic gestures is amazingly wide.
On one level, it is a cynical electoral ploy. Canada’s Jewish vote is small but concentrated in areas that include key marginal ridings (constituencies). By pandering to Israel, Harper hopes to dislodge enough votes to swing the balance. Some Canadian observers also suggest it appeals to the evangelical element in the Western prairie states that provides much of the Conservative vote.
On the face of it, the strategy could backfire since there are approximately three times as many Canadian Muslims as Jews. Indeed, in the absence of adequate polling, it is possible that ‘official’ Jewish leaders, like many of their colleagues in the US, exaggerate the degree of support for Netanyahu’s Israel in their traditionally Liberal and liberal community.
It is also possible that they have gone too far with defunding UNRWA. Penalising refugees to pander to groups of fanatics with dubious political support seems to have provoked a backlash from many Canadians, who want to know who made this decision, when and why.
Middle East International 4 Feb 2010
Passionate Detachment
From Ian Williams
In January, Canada stopped contributing to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It is the latest in a series of decisions that have seen Ottawa ‘out-Israeling’ Washington. It had previously stopped funding KAIROS (Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives), an NGO that had been supporting human rights groups in Israel and the Occupied Territories. In each case, the government of Stephen Harper seemed to be responding to, or rather pandering to, rabidly pro-Israeli Jewish groups in Canada. Israel itself has certainly never encouraged an end to the funding of UNRWA, an institution that for decades has, in effect, been paying some of the bills for the occupation.
Although camouflaged internationally by a similar drift in British and Australian policy, Ottawa has moved far from its own earlier positions, and possibly farther than either London or Canberra. Indeed, the Obama administration’s muted criticisms of Israeli policy sound relatively ferocious compared with Canada’s gestures towards the administration of Binyamin Netanyahu.
Once upon a time, Canada was a paragon of international virtue: supportive of the UN and happily putting distance between itself and its southern neighbour on the Middle East. Then came Stephen Harper. Ottawa did not join the Iraq war, but that was more a function of strong Canadian public opinion and Harper’s parlous electoral position than any considered choice.
Canada led the walk-out at the Durban conference on racism and was the first to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority when Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. It applauded Israel’s right to “defend itself” against Hizbullah (a “measured response”, according to Harper), and against Hamas in Operation Cast Lead.
The move in the Conservative Party has also pulled the Liberal Party a significant distance from the principles of Pierre Trudeau, leaving only the New Democrats and the Bloc Québécois to uphold international law. Indeed, the first turns in policy came under the previous Liberal government, ironically with human rights stalwarts in its ranks like Irwin Cotler and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, who, in 2006, suggested correctly that Israel’s shelling of the UN post at Qana in southern Lebanon (in which a Canadian officer was killed) was a war crime.
Ignatieff was criticised so strongly for his remark that he ended up apologising for it, and last May he commented on the Conservative bid for Jewish votes: “It is beyond reckless for political leaders to try to score points by branding one another as ‘anti-Israel’ — to try to win votes by claiming a monopoly on supporting Israel. My party will never claim to be the only genuine defenders of Israel in Canadian politics because I don’t want my party to be alone in the defence of Israel. I want all parties to be genuine defenders of Israel.”
Yet why would anyone want to defend another country so uncritically, let alone one that had killed a Canadian soldier? How did these sincere defenders of human rights allow themselves an Israeli exception?
It is not just the multilateralism and commitment to the UN that have been a cornerstone of Canadian policy since 1945, it is also the particular application of that policy to the Middle East. To look at the official Canadian Foreign Affairs website, a Likudnik might think it had been drafted by the PLO’s legal department. Canada does not recognise the annexation of East Jerusalem, considers the territories to be occupied and the settlements to be contrary to the Geneva Conventions. It calls the West Bank barrier illegal and supports the Arab peace initiative, which is, of course, based on the 1967 boundaries.
Which leads to the basic paradox: why is Ottawa so fervent in support of an Israeli government that flaunts its denial of all these positions, whose prime minister only a week ago was declaring that the settlement in which he was planting a tree would always be part of Israel, and whose administration is evicting Palestinians from East Jerusalem and building that illegal barrier?
If you delve into the official US State Department positions you will find a similar, if somewhat less explicit, exposition of and support for the accepted international legal position on the issues. But the gap between Canada’s legal position and its diplomatic gestures is amazingly wide.
On one level, it is a cynical electoral ploy. Canada’s Jewish vote is small but concentrated in areas that include key marginal ridings (constituencies). By pandering to Israel, Harper hopes to dislodge enough votes to swing the balance. Some Canadian observers also suggest it appeals to the evangelical element in the Western prairie states that provides much of the Conservative vote.
On the face of it, the strategy could backfire since there are approximately three times as many Canadian Muslims as Jews. Indeed, in the absence of adequate polling, it is possible that ‘official’ Jewish leaders, like many of their colleagues in the US, exaggerate the degree of support for Netanyahu’s Israel in their traditionally Liberal and liberal community.
It is also possible that they have gone too far with defunding UNRWA. Penalising refugees to pander to groups of fanatics with dubious political support seems to have provoked a backlash from many Canadians, who want to know who made this decision, when and why.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Obama end of year report: B -
Multilateralism: B-
IPS, Fpif,
January 27, 2010 · By Ian Williams
The Obama administration is UN-friendly. So why hasn't it made more of a push to bring the United States into compliance with international conventions?
obamaUnderstandably preoccupied the economic crisis and health care reform, the Obama administration has failed to deliver on the multilateral front. Still awaiting signatures and ratification are the Law of the Sea (wanted by the Pentagon), the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty (crucial to the administration's nonproliferation policy), the Conventions on Land Mines and Child Soldiers (both popular with Obama's base), and, of course, the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The Law of the Sea is crucial for American claims in the rapidly defrosting Arctic and is such low-hanging fruit that only an exclusive concern with local politics can explain the failure to ratify it. In the case of the ICC, the administration did send a delegation to the recent meeting of states party. That is progress of a sort. But this approach simply returns the United States to the Clintonesque position of non-inhalation, going with the flow but not taking any actual risks. The muted reaction from the blogosphere suggests that those who could once have been whipped into patriotic indignation about U.S. accession to the ICC are too busy teabagging.
At the same time, the Obama administration has aligned the United States publically with the United Nations and its surrounding multilateral structures. In one of the few concrete steps it's taken, Congress honored the White House request to pay U.S. arrears to the UN for the first time in 30 years. Admittedly, Washington still pays nine months in arrears, and there are huge debts for peacekeeping contributions. But the payments are a big step forward from when any dyspeptic legislator with a grudge against the world could use the UN as a whipping boy.
Congress might try again to starve and beat the UN into submission, but the Obama administration shows few signs of doing so. Indeed, freed from a perennial anxiety about the budget and the once-vindictive attention Washington formerly paid to the UN secretariat, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has become more forthright and principled.
Now Ban Ki-Moon has a real opportunity. Whether we like it or not, a UN without the active support of the world's superpower, albeit a declining one, is simply not effective. And insofar as declining superpowers have more need of multilateral support, the United States has a rational self-interest in supporting the organization. Obama's public commitment to multilateral principles allows the secretary-general to restate them more forcefully.
However, the pinch will come, just as it did during the Reagan years, on the Middle East. It was not gratifying to see Obama appointees eating — even if they did not entirely swallow — their previous words on international justice when it came to the Goldstone Report. Obama has not used previous UN resolutions on the Middle East, nor the possibility of future Security Council decisions, to prod the maverick Netanyahu back onto the trail laid down by the road map for peace. On the other hand, his administration hasn't "punished" Ban Ki-Moon for his increasingly forthright statements about Gaza — perhaps because U.S officials have been saying similar things, albeit less strenuously.
The Obama administration has endorsed the Arab League plan and its references to the UN-sanctioned borders from 1967, but it's hardly been assiduous in pressuring Israel to accept them, let alone the road map. Until it does, the world's jury will remain out on whether the United States has truly re-subscribed to the principles of the organization that it played such a large role in founding. But Obama can still deal with those outstanding international conventions, notably the Law of the Sea, while he still has a Senate majority, thereby reassuring to the world that progress is being maintained. Even if the Massachusetts election result gives him an excuse for failure, it's no excuse for not trying.
Ian Williams
Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit
IPS, Fpif,
January 27, 2010 · By Ian Williams
The Obama administration is UN-friendly. So why hasn't it made more of a push to bring the United States into compliance with international conventions?
obamaUnderstandably preoccupied the economic crisis and health care reform, the Obama administration has failed to deliver on the multilateral front. Still awaiting signatures and ratification are the Law of the Sea (wanted by the Pentagon), the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty (crucial to the administration's nonproliferation policy), the Conventions on Land Mines and Child Soldiers (both popular with Obama's base), and, of course, the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The Law of the Sea is crucial for American claims in the rapidly defrosting Arctic and is such low-hanging fruit that only an exclusive concern with local politics can explain the failure to ratify it. In the case of the ICC, the administration did send a delegation to the recent meeting of states party. That is progress of a sort. But this approach simply returns the United States to the Clintonesque position of non-inhalation, going with the flow but not taking any actual risks. The muted reaction from the blogosphere suggests that those who could once have been whipped into patriotic indignation about U.S. accession to the ICC are too busy teabagging.
At the same time, the Obama administration has aligned the United States publically with the United Nations and its surrounding multilateral structures. In one of the few concrete steps it's taken, Congress honored the White House request to pay U.S. arrears to the UN for the first time in 30 years. Admittedly, Washington still pays nine months in arrears, and there are huge debts for peacekeeping contributions. But the payments are a big step forward from when any dyspeptic legislator with a grudge against the world could use the UN as a whipping boy.
Congress might try again to starve and beat the UN into submission, but the Obama administration shows few signs of doing so. Indeed, freed from a perennial anxiety about the budget and the once-vindictive attention Washington formerly paid to the UN secretariat, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has become more forthright and principled.
Now Ban Ki-Moon has a real opportunity. Whether we like it or not, a UN without the active support of the world's superpower, albeit a declining one, is simply not effective. And insofar as declining superpowers have more need of multilateral support, the United States has a rational self-interest in supporting the organization. Obama's public commitment to multilateral principles allows the secretary-general to restate them more forcefully.
However, the pinch will come, just as it did during the Reagan years, on the Middle East. It was not gratifying to see Obama appointees eating — even if they did not entirely swallow — their previous words on international justice when it came to the Goldstone Report. Obama has not used previous UN resolutions on the Middle East, nor the possibility of future Security Council decisions, to prod the maverick Netanyahu back onto the trail laid down by the road map for peace. On the other hand, his administration hasn't "punished" Ban Ki-Moon for his increasingly forthright statements about Gaza — perhaps because U.S officials have been saying similar things, albeit less strenuously.
The Obama administration has endorsed the Arab League plan and its references to the UN-sanctioned borders from 1967, but it's hardly been assiduous in pressuring Israel to accept them, let alone the road map. Until it does, the world's jury will remain out on whether the United States has truly re-subscribed to the principles of the organization that it played such a large role in founding. But Obama can still deal with those outstanding international conventions, notably the Law of the Sea, while he still has a Senate majority, thereby reassuring to the world that progress is being maintained. Even if the Massachusetts election result gives him an excuse for failure, it's no excuse for not trying.
Ian Williams
Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit
Friday, January 22, 2010
Faster than the USS Liberty compensation
'Reimbursement', not justice
From Ian Williams
Middle East International 22 January 2010
Israel has confirmed to the United Nations that it is agreeing to pay $10.5 million for the 15 January 2009 destruction of UN premises in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. Most of the payment goes to UNRWA, with a few hundred thousand dollars for the office of the UN Special Coordinator for the peace process, whose facilities were also trashed in an act redolent with symbolism.
At Israeli insistence, the payment is scrupulously described as ‘reimbursement’ for the ruined supplies and facilities. Since UNRWA is a voluntarily funded agency, not paid for from the UN general assessment, the ‘reimbursement’ is as much a gesture to the donor countries who have shown increasing restiveness at seeing their aid to the Palestinians regularly destroyed by the IDF, as it is to the UN – although relations between Ehud Barak and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are perhaps more important.
Specifically excluded from the payment (carefully not labelled ‘compensation’, let alone ‘reparation’) is any money for human victims of the tragedy. Some Israelis now admit that ‘mistakes’ were made, but the Board of Inquiry, set up by Ban Ki-moon and headed by Ian Martin, a respected human rights figure, concluded that the action was part of a pattern of attacks on UN premises, schools, hospitals and warehouses.
The ‘reimbursement’ also excludes any admission of guilt by Israel: it is not to set a precedent. Indeed, it is unprecedented. It took 14 years for Israel to pay $6 million to compensate the US Navy for damage to the USS Liberty in 1967. Furthermore, Israel has not, as far as we know, compensated the Overseas Private Investment Corp, a US government-backed fund, for the $48 million owed to the Connecticut-based Morganti Group for its share of the Gaza power plant bombed by the Israelis in 2006. Nor has it compensated the European Union, whose members have been uncommonly vociferous about the costs of regular IDF flattening of their expensive aid projects.
Last January, Ban Ki-moon came, saw and was disgusted with the results of the Israeli attack and has persevered when previous UN chiefs have, in effect, let the IDF get away with successive horrors – just think of the recidivist shelling of UNIFIL’s outpost at Qana in 1996. His persistence, and relationship with Barak, the good cop of current Israeli foreign affairs compared with the Lieberman/Ayalon team officially holding the foreign portfolio, delivered the deal.
Special relationship
Barak immediately apologised to Ban for the destruction, which involved phosphorus shells. The secretary-general reported at the time: “The defence minister said to me it was a grave mistake and he took it very seriously. He assured me that extra attention will be paid to UN facilities and staff, and this will not be repeated.” Ban’s indignation was compounded because he was actually in Israel trying to secure a ceasefire when the UN premises were attacked. He could have been forgiven for thinking that someone in the IDF was trying to send him a message, not least when, as he soon complained, Israeli forces went ahead and carried out more such actions.
Barak and his ilk seem to have pushed the ‘reimbursement’ deal through. They are concerned at the erosion of the new special relationship between Israel and this UN administration. At one time, Israeli governments could rely on Washington to do the heavy lifting to bludgeon the international organisation into taciturn acquiescence. But the Obama administration, with its own issues with Netanyahu, cannot be relied upon to the same extent, so Israel has to do its own bilateral stroking.
But the greatest leverage for the UN was the detailed 184-page report of the Board of Inquiry led by Ian Martin, former special representative in East Timor. Reporting back to Ban last May, he concluded “that IDF actions involved varying degrees of negligence or recklessness with regard to United Nations premises and to the safety of United Nations staff and other civilians within those premises, with consequent deaths, injuries, and extensive physical damage and loss of property.” The report also called for compensation for damage to property, which was promptly endorsed by Ban.
Only a 27-page summary was published and the full report has been kept confidential. It is likely to be buried even more deeply as part of the deal. Almost certainly, Israel’s fear is that the details in there would add to the growing prospects of international criminal charges against Israeli personnel. The book was closed on using the Martin report as the basis for any further action.
The report is not being greeted as a triumph by local UN staff, who look with an understandably jaundiced eye at the damage Israel has done in Gaza. Ban may have achieved more than anyone else before in getting compensation, but many local employees, ruefully contemplating the death of colleagues and the people whose welfare they are charged to maintain, complain that it is at the cost of justice.
From Ian Williams
Middle East International 22 January 2010
Israel has confirmed to the United Nations that it is agreeing to pay $10.5 million for the 15 January 2009 destruction of UN premises in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. Most of the payment goes to UNRWA, with a few hundred thousand dollars for the office of the UN Special Coordinator for the peace process, whose facilities were also trashed in an act redolent with symbolism.
At Israeli insistence, the payment is scrupulously described as ‘reimbursement’ for the ruined supplies and facilities. Since UNRWA is a voluntarily funded agency, not paid for from the UN general assessment, the ‘reimbursement’ is as much a gesture to the donor countries who have shown increasing restiveness at seeing their aid to the Palestinians regularly destroyed by the IDF, as it is to the UN – although relations between Ehud Barak and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are perhaps more important.
Specifically excluded from the payment (carefully not labelled ‘compensation’, let alone ‘reparation’) is any money for human victims of the tragedy. Some Israelis now admit that ‘mistakes’ were made, but the Board of Inquiry, set up by Ban Ki-moon and headed by Ian Martin, a respected human rights figure, concluded that the action was part of a pattern of attacks on UN premises, schools, hospitals and warehouses.
The ‘reimbursement’ also excludes any admission of guilt by Israel: it is not to set a precedent. Indeed, it is unprecedented. It took 14 years for Israel to pay $6 million to compensate the US Navy for damage to the USS Liberty in 1967. Furthermore, Israel has not, as far as we know, compensated the Overseas Private Investment Corp, a US government-backed fund, for the $48 million owed to the Connecticut-based Morganti Group for its share of the Gaza power plant bombed by the Israelis in 2006. Nor has it compensated the European Union, whose members have been uncommonly vociferous about the costs of regular IDF flattening of their expensive aid projects.
Last January, Ban Ki-moon came, saw and was disgusted with the results of the Israeli attack and has persevered when previous UN chiefs have, in effect, let the IDF get away with successive horrors – just think of the recidivist shelling of UNIFIL’s outpost at Qana in 1996. His persistence, and relationship with Barak, the good cop of current Israeli foreign affairs compared with the Lieberman/Ayalon team officially holding the foreign portfolio, delivered the deal.
Special relationship
Barak immediately apologised to Ban for the destruction, which involved phosphorus shells. The secretary-general reported at the time: “The defence minister said to me it was a grave mistake and he took it very seriously. He assured me that extra attention will be paid to UN facilities and staff, and this will not be repeated.” Ban’s indignation was compounded because he was actually in Israel trying to secure a ceasefire when the UN premises were attacked. He could have been forgiven for thinking that someone in the IDF was trying to send him a message, not least when, as he soon complained, Israeli forces went ahead and carried out more such actions.
Barak and his ilk seem to have pushed the ‘reimbursement’ deal through. They are concerned at the erosion of the new special relationship between Israel and this UN administration. At one time, Israeli governments could rely on Washington to do the heavy lifting to bludgeon the international organisation into taciturn acquiescence. But the Obama administration, with its own issues with Netanyahu, cannot be relied upon to the same extent, so Israel has to do its own bilateral stroking.
But the greatest leverage for the UN was the detailed 184-page report of the Board of Inquiry led by Ian Martin, former special representative in East Timor. Reporting back to Ban last May, he concluded “that IDF actions involved varying degrees of negligence or recklessness with regard to United Nations premises and to the safety of United Nations staff and other civilians within those premises, with consequent deaths, injuries, and extensive physical damage and loss of property.” The report also called for compensation for damage to property, which was promptly endorsed by Ban.
Only a 27-page summary was published and the full report has been kept confidential. It is likely to be buried even more deeply as part of the deal. Almost certainly, Israel’s fear is that the details in there would add to the growing prospects of international criminal charges against Israeli personnel. The book was closed on using the Martin report as the basis for any further action.
The report is not being greeted as a triumph by local UN staff, who look with an understandably jaundiced eye at the damage Israel has done in Gaza. Ban may have achieved more than anyone else before in getting compensation, but many local employees, ruefully contemplating the death of colleagues and the people whose welfare they are charged to maintain, complain that it is at the cost of justice.
A Dog and Tail Tale
Washington lobbies' Israel-Turkey reality check
From Ian Williams
Passionate Detachment column Middle East International 22 January 2010
It might not be a change of the tide, but the ham-fisted Israeli foreign ministerial team has certainly revealed the shift in the currents of regional and international politics.
The petty triumph of calling in Ambassador Oğuz Çelikkol for a reprimand, as if he or the Turkish government controlled programming on Turkish TV, might have played well for the right in Israel, but the affair also said much about Ankara’s changing relationship with both Israel and the United States.
The brusque Turkish demand for an Israeli apology, following Ankara’s refusal to assist in the US invasion of Iraq or to countenance operations through its airspace to Iran, is the latest indication of a coming of age for Turkey and a new climate in global relations. The government in Ankara can base policies on popular support without worrying too much about uppity allies like the US, let alone Israel – or for that matter those parts of its own military with too much invested in those alliances.
For many years, Turkey needed Washington: as a military backstop against the Soviets, and indeed the Syrians and Iraqis, with whom there were old border issues. The US connection also helped to restrain the Greeks, for whom politics was, all too often, about how to annoy their eastern neighbour. A military relationship with Israel was strategically useful for Turkey when Syria or Iraq were a threat, but possibly more useful was the prospect of using the leverage of the Israel lobby in Washington.
In the peculiar Washington waltz of lobbies, Israel’s efforts on behalf of Turkey were countered by the Armenian expatriate lobby, the Greek lobby and a range of human rights organisations who generally took a dim view of Ankara’s policies. That was apparent when AIPAC had a clutch of Senators ‘unsign’ Bob Dole’s resolution on the 75th anniversary of the ‘Armenian Genocide’.
That was an earlier and possibly slightly more sophisticated version of Israel getting above itself than the current situation. It was because of this overreach that Dole became a firm and dedicated supporter of Bush and Baker’s campaign to stop Israel getting the $10 billion loan guarantees that Shamir wanted to resettle Russian immigrants – such as Lieberman and Ayalon.
On this occasion, who needs whom more? Turkey is a growing regional power, military and economic. It is on friendly terms with its neighbours and has gone some way to smooth over some of its more intractable problems – like teaming up with Russia to sign a peace treaty with Armenia. It has tried to broker peace between Syria and Israel – and finds the latter more at fault for the failure.
Turkey’s relationship with the EU is growing more important economically and politically than its ties to the US, whose shrinking superpower status has become more visible than ever. Neo-con overreach has made obvious the limitations of American military power, while the economic crisis has reduced US financial clout to its lowest ebb since 1945. Israel had some significance in its own right, but not nearly as much as it had as a means of influence in Washington. If Turkey does not have as much need of the US as before, it follows that there are fewer advantages to courting Israel than before.
Lieberman and Ayalon should be congratulated for their part in bursting the bubble. Not only is the US less important to Turkey and the Israel lobby less important than it was, but the two clowns have given a clear indication of why, with diehard exceptions like Joseph Lieberman, Israel supporters in Washington will no longer take their line verbatim from the Israeli government.
In real terms, the US has more to gain from a relationship with a regional power such as Turkey than with an Israel, for which support comes at such a heavy financial and diplomatic price across the world. Obama won’t rush to do an Erdoğan just yet, but even Washington lobbies can’t keep reality at bay forever.
From Ian Williams
Passionate Detachment column Middle East International 22 January 2010
It might not be a change of the tide, but the ham-fisted Israeli foreign ministerial team has certainly revealed the shift in the currents of regional and international politics.
The petty triumph of calling in Ambassador Oğuz Çelikkol for a reprimand, as if he or the Turkish government controlled programming on Turkish TV, might have played well for the right in Israel, but the affair also said much about Ankara’s changing relationship with both Israel and the United States.
The brusque Turkish demand for an Israeli apology, following Ankara’s refusal to assist in the US invasion of Iraq or to countenance operations through its airspace to Iran, is the latest indication of a coming of age for Turkey and a new climate in global relations. The government in Ankara can base policies on popular support without worrying too much about uppity allies like the US, let alone Israel – or for that matter those parts of its own military with too much invested in those alliances.
For many years, Turkey needed Washington: as a military backstop against the Soviets, and indeed the Syrians and Iraqis, with whom there were old border issues. The US connection also helped to restrain the Greeks, for whom politics was, all too often, about how to annoy their eastern neighbour. A military relationship with Israel was strategically useful for Turkey when Syria or Iraq were a threat, but possibly more useful was the prospect of using the leverage of the Israel lobby in Washington.
In the peculiar Washington waltz of lobbies, Israel’s efforts on behalf of Turkey were countered by the Armenian expatriate lobby, the Greek lobby and a range of human rights organisations who generally took a dim view of Ankara’s policies. That was apparent when AIPAC had a clutch of Senators ‘unsign’ Bob Dole’s resolution on the 75th anniversary of the ‘Armenian Genocide’.
That was an earlier and possibly slightly more sophisticated version of Israel getting above itself than the current situation. It was because of this overreach that Dole became a firm and dedicated supporter of Bush and Baker’s campaign to stop Israel getting the $10 billion loan guarantees that Shamir wanted to resettle Russian immigrants – such as Lieberman and Ayalon.
On this occasion, who needs whom more? Turkey is a growing regional power, military and economic. It is on friendly terms with its neighbours and has gone some way to smooth over some of its more intractable problems – like teaming up with Russia to sign a peace treaty with Armenia. It has tried to broker peace between Syria and Israel – and finds the latter more at fault for the failure.
Turkey’s relationship with the EU is growing more important economically and politically than its ties to the US, whose shrinking superpower status has become more visible than ever. Neo-con overreach has made obvious the limitations of American military power, while the economic crisis has reduced US financial clout to its lowest ebb since 1945. Israel had some significance in its own right, but not nearly as much as it had as a means of influence in Washington. If Turkey does not have as much need of the US as before, it follows that there are fewer advantages to courting Israel than before.
Lieberman and Ayalon should be congratulated for their part in bursting the bubble. Not only is the US less important to Turkey and the Israel lobby less important than it was, but the two clowns have given a clear indication of why, with diehard exceptions like Joseph Lieberman, Israel supporters in Washington will no longer take their line verbatim from the Israeli government.
In real terms, the US has more to gain from a relationship with a regional power such as Turkey than with an Israel, for which support comes at such a heavy financial and diplomatic price across the world. Obama won’t rush to do an Erdoğan just yet, but even Washington lobbies can’t keep reality at bay forever.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Downsizing Intelligence
Ian Williams: Ignorant intelligence and self-fulfilling prophecies
January 15, 2010 Tribune
Since Christmas Day, everyone in the United States knows that the cricket-box bomber visited Yemen. Luckily for Gordon Brown, the suspicion directed towards Yemen has not touched on Britain, even though the would-be auto-castrato, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, spent more time in London than there.
The US reaction began as typically reflexive, with little in the way of reflection. “Stop the release of Yemeni prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.” “It’s all Barack Obama’s fault.” The Pentagon chipped in with vague and unsourced reports that a fifth of released internees have “rejoined the militant activity” – as unspecified as the names or countries. In the fevered Islamophobic imagination that the Pentagon has displayed over the decade, regular attendance at a mosque and refusal to eat eggs and bacon for breakfast could count as militant activity.
I cannot be the only person who suspects that kidnapping, incarcerating, torturing and humiliating people for years without trial might leave them with a monstrous grudge against their tormentors, eager to get payback for those wasted years.
However, there is little sense of that in the American media and even less awareness that US support for Israel gives the bulk of the ideological leverage for the preachers who incite the likes of Abdulmutallab to deeds that go so squarely against basic human impulses.
For the media, Yemen was the problem. And it presented a tempting target for a vindictive response, helped along because the government in Sana’a had been playing up alleged Iranian and al Qaida connections to the numerous dissident groups in the country. It says a lot about US ignorance that, after all these years, so many politicians and commentators have still not noticed that the Wahhabi al Qaida actually hates Shi’a Iran – or even that, without tacit Iranian co-operation, Western forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan would be even harder pressed.
In the same vein, adding Cubans, Syrians, Iranians, Nigerians and Yemenis to the list of those who need extra scrutiny and greater humiliation at airports shows more than a hint of going after the “usual suspects”, regardless of what would be more rational. The Cubans have indeed been involved in aircraft bombings – it’s just that it was a Cuban flight blown up by an exile the US refused to extradite.
When ignorant intelligence goes to war hand in hand with such galloping prejudices, the consequences of a massive American incursion into a complex and variegated society such as Yemen would be unimaginable – if it were not that we have actually seen the results in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Nothing could be more calculated to turn Hillary Clinton’s words about Yemen becoming a regional and global threat into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If they but knew it, Yemen is an American conservative dream. It’s a shame they aren’t evangelical Christians or the Republican Party would be holding it up as a model state. It has very little government, while weaponry is everywhere.
I have a treasured photograph of me on a visit to Yemen in a shooting competition with a provincial governor, which could either get me the National Rifle Association vote if I ran in an American election or hauled off as a terrorist suspect, depending on the volatile popular mood.
On the same trip, I could not help noticing that the neo-liberal consensus on downsizing government was over-fulfilling the plan in Sana’a. Not a minister I was introduced to was over five feet tall. The Gulliver-like feeling was reinforced by the tiny doorways on the magnificent old buildings that left me with near-concussion every time I forgot to duck.
In the other sense also, Yemeni government was very small. Not far from the capital, villagers paraded with AK47s on their shoulders and jambiyahs – the phallic knives – jutted from the centre of their belts.
The provincial governor, who took us out to see them, had his own guard, but the demonstration was peaceful. It was the boys and girls of the vicinity lined up with their school books held in front of them. The villagers wanted more funds for the school.
At that time, President Ali Abdullah Saleh was allowing reasonably open elections – and such constitutional methods worked. Since then, he has consolidated his hold on power and money has tended to stick in his vicinity.
Gordon Brown seems to be working on the right lines in seeing economic and institutional development as one of the keys for helping Yemen constitute a stronger and more cohesive society – not to mention a police rather than a military solution to terrorism.
He even seems to have influenced the Americans to hold off on the bombers – although that could be because they can’t find a pharmaceutical factory to destroy, as Bill Clinton did in Sudan – and the demands on the overstretched US military constrain any attempt to send in the marines.
There will always be fanatical religious figures – evangelical ministers, die-hard rabbis and bloodthirsty imams – but as long as the West condones and in effect supports Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank and apartheid-like behaviour towards the Palestinians, then the latter will continue to recruit dupes to die for them.
Brown’s conference on Yemen is important, but it is a sideshow to George Mitchell’s mission to Israel. And unless Obama stops the cheques and votes going to Benjamin Netanyahu, Mitchell will fail and the bombers will succeed.
Friday, January 08, 2010
Richard Goldstone Interview
The NS Interview: Richard Goldstone
Ian Williams
Published 30 December 2009 New Statesman
“I’m certainly a friend of Israel – I don’t mind being called a Zionist”
You served as a judge under apartheid in South Africa. How difficult was it to fulfil that role?
I wouldn't have accepted an appointment if human rights lawyers hadn't already begun to use the courts to establish rights for black South Africans. People like John Didcott, a leading anti-apartheid campaigner who went on the bench in the Natal region and blazed a trail there, encouraged me. There were already decisions knocking holes in the oppressive system.
Did those campaigners invoke international law or rely on domestic law?
International law was relevant, but Roman-Dutch common law was very egalitarian, and the apartheid legislation overlaid it, so there were gaps where the common law came through. Apartheid legislators liked to use benign words in their statutes, hoping the judges would know how to interpret them, so there were large areas where one could interpret the law in a way that was less oppressive. Later I chaired the Commission of Inquiry Regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, which exposed illegal behaviour even under apartheid.
South Africa is still your home. Do you feel the government has lived up to early expectations?
South Africa, for all its problems, has been a tremendous success. But expectations were unrealistically high. It will take decades, generations, to overcome the heritage of 350 years of racial oppression. It's going in a good direction.
You were prosecutor at the Yugoslav Tribunal. Was it an example of victors' justice?
Nuremberg was victors' justice, but The Hague certainly wasn't. It was anything but. It was an international court, and none of the judges involved had an interest.
There were accusations that a quota from each side was prosecuted to prove impartiality.
There was definitely pressure in that direction, but I did not succumb to it. In my book, being even-handed means treating similar crimes
similarly. So if - on a scale of one to ten, with ten the most serious - we were prosecuting crimes by the Serbs rated ten, it was not appropriate to go after ones or twos committed by Bosniaks.
How important was the tribunal?
It was hugely significant: the first truly international, as opposed to multinational, court. It was part of a very welcome development in international law, which has been progressively removing impunity from war criminals.
Were the Yugoslav and the Rwanda tribunals a flash in the pan?
Not at all. They gave rise to the International Criminal Court, supported by 110 nations - admittedly not some of the most powerful, such as Russia and the US, but that will change. The movement is in one direction. Just recently, for the first time in eight years, the US was an observer at the meetings of states party to the ICC.
There are still furious debates about the Kosovo intervention. What's your assessment?
I chaired the International Commission on Kosovo. We came to a unanimous conclusion -
I suppose an oxymoron - that the Nato intervention was illegal but legitimate. Russia tried to get the Security Council to condemn the Kosovo intervention but lost by 12 votes to three. It was an after-the-fact acceptance of what happened. That led to the Canadian inquiry, which developed into the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, which has in turn become soft law.
Some who criticised your support for Nato now cheer the Gaza report. What about accusations that it was biased against Israel?
The original mandate was biased, but the president of the Human Rights Council agreed with me to change it. As with Rwanda and Yugoslavia, we investigated all sides.
Were you apprehensive taking it on?
Of course! The Middle East is not the easiest part of the world, but I assumed, perhaps naively, that because of the even-handed mandate, Israel would co-operate. Obviously I was really saddened when they refused.
You've been described as a friend of Israel, a Zionist. Is that accurate?
I'm certainly a friend of Israel. I don't mind being called a Zionist; it depends on the definition.
Perhaps that's why you weren't criticised to begin with. Then the floodgates opened . . .
There has definitely been a consistent effort to attack the messenger rather than read the report. Clearly, personal attacks have been unpleasant for me, and unpleasant for my family.
Where do you see the Gaza debate going now?
I hate prophesying. I really do not know how it will go, but the report seems to have gained its own momentum.
How has the new era of accountability for war crimes changed the landscape?
Impunity, generally speaking, has come to an end - I don't think there's any person today accused of committing international crimes who can feel happy travelling. That in itself, if not a complete success, must act as a deterrent.
Ian Williams
Published 30 December 2009 New Statesman
“I’m certainly a friend of Israel – I don’t mind being called a Zionist”
You served as a judge under apartheid in South Africa. How difficult was it to fulfil that role?
I wouldn't have accepted an appointment if human rights lawyers hadn't already begun to use the courts to establish rights for black South Africans. People like John Didcott, a leading anti-apartheid campaigner who went on the bench in the Natal region and blazed a trail there, encouraged me. There were already decisions knocking holes in the oppressive system.
Did those campaigners invoke international law or rely on domestic law?
International law was relevant, but Roman-Dutch common law was very egalitarian, and the apartheid legislation overlaid it, so there were gaps where the common law came through. Apartheid legislators liked to use benign words in their statutes, hoping the judges would know how to interpret them, so there were large areas where one could interpret the law in a way that was less oppressive. Later I chaired the Commission of Inquiry Regarding Public Violence and Intimidation, which exposed illegal behaviour even under apartheid.
South Africa is still your home. Do you feel the government has lived up to early expectations?
South Africa, for all its problems, has been a tremendous success. But expectations were unrealistically high. It will take decades, generations, to overcome the heritage of 350 years of racial oppression. It's going in a good direction.
You were prosecutor at the Yugoslav Tribunal. Was it an example of victors' justice?
Nuremberg was victors' justice, but The Hague certainly wasn't. It was anything but. It was an international court, and none of the judges involved had an interest.
There were accusations that a quota from each side was prosecuted to prove impartiality.
There was definitely pressure in that direction, but I did not succumb to it. In my book, being even-handed means treating similar crimes
similarly. So if - on a scale of one to ten, with ten the most serious - we were prosecuting crimes by the Serbs rated ten, it was not appropriate to go after ones or twos committed by Bosniaks.
How important was the tribunal?
It was hugely significant: the first truly international, as opposed to multinational, court. It was part of a very welcome development in international law, which has been progressively removing impunity from war criminals.
Were the Yugoslav and the Rwanda tribunals a flash in the pan?
Not at all. They gave rise to the International Criminal Court, supported by 110 nations - admittedly not some of the most powerful, such as Russia and the US, but that will change. The movement is in one direction. Just recently, for the first time in eight years, the US was an observer at the meetings of states party to the ICC.
There are still furious debates about the Kosovo intervention. What's your assessment?
I chaired the International Commission on Kosovo. We came to a unanimous conclusion -
I suppose an oxymoron - that the Nato intervention was illegal but legitimate. Russia tried to get the Security Council to condemn the Kosovo intervention but lost by 12 votes to three. It was an after-the-fact acceptance of what happened. That led to the Canadian inquiry, which developed into the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, which has in turn become soft law.
Some who criticised your support for Nato now cheer the Gaza report. What about accusations that it was biased against Israel?
The original mandate was biased, but the president of the Human Rights Council agreed with me to change it. As with Rwanda and Yugoslavia, we investigated all sides.
Were you apprehensive taking it on?
Of course! The Middle East is not the easiest part of the world, but I assumed, perhaps naively, that because of the even-handed mandate, Israel would co-operate. Obviously I was really saddened when they refused.
You've been described as a friend of Israel, a Zionist. Is that accurate?
I'm certainly a friend of Israel. I don't mind being called a Zionist; it depends on the definition.
Perhaps that's why you weren't criticised to begin with. Then the floodgates opened . . .
There has definitely been a consistent effort to attack the messenger rather than read the report. Clearly, personal attacks have been unpleasant for me, and unpleasant for my family.
Where do you see the Gaza debate going now?
I hate prophesying. I really do not know how it will go, but the report seems to have gained its own momentum.
How has the new era of accountability for war crimes changed the landscape?
Impunity, generally speaking, has come to an end - I don't think there's any person today accused of committing international crimes who can feel happy travelling. That in itself, if not a complete success, must act as a deterrent.
Underpants, Yemen and Obama
Yemen crisis set to test Obama's acumen
From Ian Williams
Middle East International 8th January
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his sponsors, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, may have failed to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day with their novelty exploding underwear, but they certainly put truth in all the usual clichés: the sound of empty stable doors slamming shut being drowned out by the chatter of chickens coming home to roost.
The device, with its triggering syringe, was sewn into Abdulmutallab’s underpants, which bespeaks an indoctrination grim enough to over-ride one of the most basic male instincts. It also implies that future airline passengers are going to be subject to even more humiliating and intrusive searches than before, and as the US announced on 4 January, passengers from 14 selected countries (including Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen) will be singled out for even more of that treatment than other travellers.
In fact, that random selection of 14 targeted countries is ominously suggestive that this particular self-appointed franchise of al-Qa’ida has a firm grasp of the main principle: to provoke a Western response that will substantiate their feverish tales of Western Islamophobia. The Obama reaction to Yemen, where Abdulmutallab received some of his training and preparations, will indicate just how successful they have been.
Usual suspects
Hillary Clinton declared that instability in Yemen is not just a regional but also a global threat. Sadly it is a small, far-away country of which most Americans know nothing. On 4 January The Wall St Journal inadvertently epitomised that. It carried a picture of Yemeni troops checking a passing car. It did not notice their bulging cheeks, which were stuffed like hamster’s jowls with qat. One does not need to be too censorious to wonder whether a qat habit is truly conducive to alertness. But then the idea that US intelligence is at work there fixing targets is almost as worrying. Small, faraway countries are expendable in wars against abstractions, be they drugs or terror.
For example, putting Nigeria on the list of 14 countries whose citizens are singled out for heightened scrutiny suggests a panic response. It might have been Abdulmuttallab’s birthplace, but his father also lives there – and he had alerted the CIA about his son’s suspicious activities. The CIA in turn failed to tell the FBI and other agencies. It seems highly probable that the failed suicide bomber had picked up his bad habits in London where he studies, as, of course did Richard Reid, the British ‘shoe-bomber’. Britain is, needless to say, not on the hastily rushed-out list of suspicious countries, but Cuba and Iran are, both of which are more sinned against than sinning in the matter of blowing airliners out of the sky. And while putting Usama Bin-Laden’s Saudi Arabia on the list seems appropriate, hoisting up the thobs on thousands of Saudi princes at airports could lead to some interesting social and political repercussions.
The US reaction is straight out of Casablanca. In response to a Republican outcry, the administration issues an order to round up the usual suspects. In furtherance of the partisan attacks on Obama, the opposition treated the attempted bombing as a consequence of liberal invertebracy. The genuine intelligence failures were certainly less disastrous than those under the Bush administration that led to 9/11, but the Republicans have always benefited from a very short attention span in the American media – and from a failure by Democrats to challenge their preposterous presumptions.
Possible military action?
As a result, the Obama administration is teetering on the brink of breaking the first rule of surgical intervention: first, do no harm. It is also on the verge of breaking a rule so obvious that Hippocrates never had to state it: don’t use a hatchet instead of a scalpel. How long can the White House resist the pressure to ‘do something’, from bombing a misidentified factory (as in Sudan) at one end of the scale, to invading a country (as in Iraq) at the other?
At least the Obama administration appears to be holding firm on closing Guantanamo, but it faces its own nominal ally in Joseph Lieberman demanding that because a Nigerian tried to blow up a plane, no interned Yemenis be released, whether or not they have any evidence against them. Despite his threatened treachery on Obama’s healthcare bill, the senator is still the Chair of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee and, as one of AIPAC’s most cherished assets, epitomises the rush to let lobbies and prejudices shape responses to foreign affairs.
So far, the US has not unleashed the full and counterproductive armoury of hi-tech weaponry on Yemen, although it has begun to move in that direction. It had the excuse that, before the bombing, Sana’a showed every sign of trying to enlist US support to bolster its weak internal standing. The Yemeni government had been trying for some time to make unlikely associations between Iran and the Houthis in the north, and between the secessionists and al-Qa’ida in the south. Needless to say, these linkages could provoke legislative reflexes in Washington, where Yemen is being depicted as a failed state. This is a little unfair, since as a state it has hardly been tried. Sana’a is more a PO box for the dwindling oil revenues and the foreign aid cheques that the government hopes will be boosted by recent events. It is those resources that much of the factionalism is about.
However, a few more drones crashing into ‘guilty’ villages and a heavy US presence on the ground, or even in control, could succeed in uniting Yemen’s fractious tribes and factions like nothing else. The regime in Sana’a seems to be realising that danger, but could face heavy US pressure – unless Obama shows some of the sensitivity and acumen for which he was elected.
From Ian Williams
Middle East International 8th January
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his sponsors, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, may have failed to bring down Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day with their novelty exploding underwear, but they certainly put truth in all the usual clichés: the sound of empty stable doors slamming shut being drowned out by the chatter of chickens coming home to roost.
The device, with its triggering syringe, was sewn into Abdulmutallab’s underpants, which bespeaks an indoctrination grim enough to over-ride one of the most basic male instincts. It also implies that future airline passengers are going to be subject to even more humiliating and intrusive searches than before, and as the US announced on 4 January, passengers from 14 selected countries (including Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen) will be singled out for even more of that treatment than other travellers.
In fact, that random selection of 14 targeted countries is ominously suggestive that this particular self-appointed franchise of al-Qa’ida has a firm grasp of the main principle: to provoke a Western response that will substantiate their feverish tales of Western Islamophobia. The Obama reaction to Yemen, where Abdulmutallab received some of his training and preparations, will indicate just how successful they have been.
Usual suspects
Hillary Clinton declared that instability in Yemen is not just a regional but also a global threat. Sadly it is a small, far-away country of which most Americans know nothing. On 4 January The Wall St Journal inadvertently epitomised that. It carried a picture of Yemeni troops checking a passing car. It did not notice their bulging cheeks, which were stuffed like hamster’s jowls with qat. One does not need to be too censorious to wonder whether a qat habit is truly conducive to alertness. But then the idea that US intelligence is at work there fixing targets is almost as worrying. Small, faraway countries are expendable in wars against abstractions, be they drugs or terror.
For example, putting Nigeria on the list of 14 countries whose citizens are singled out for heightened scrutiny suggests a panic response. It might have been Abdulmuttallab’s birthplace, but his father also lives there – and he had alerted the CIA about his son’s suspicious activities. The CIA in turn failed to tell the FBI and other agencies. It seems highly probable that the failed suicide bomber had picked up his bad habits in London where he studies, as, of course did Richard Reid, the British ‘shoe-bomber’. Britain is, needless to say, not on the hastily rushed-out list of suspicious countries, but Cuba and Iran are, both of which are more sinned against than sinning in the matter of blowing airliners out of the sky. And while putting Usama Bin-Laden’s Saudi Arabia on the list seems appropriate, hoisting up the thobs on thousands of Saudi princes at airports could lead to some interesting social and political repercussions.
The US reaction is straight out of Casablanca. In response to a Republican outcry, the administration issues an order to round up the usual suspects. In furtherance of the partisan attacks on Obama, the opposition treated the attempted bombing as a consequence of liberal invertebracy. The genuine intelligence failures were certainly less disastrous than those under the Bush administration that led to 9/11, but the Republicans have always benefited from a very short attention span in the American media – and from a failure by Democrats to challenge their preposterous presumptions.
Possible military action?
As a result, the Obama administration is teetering on the brink of breaking the first rule of surgical intervention: first, do no harm. It is also on the verge of breaking a rule so obvious that Hippocrates never had to state it: don’t use a hatchet instead of a scalpel. How long can the White House resist the pressure to ‘do something’, from bombing a misidentified factory (as in Sudan) at one end of the scale, to invading a country (as in Iraq) at the other?
At least the Obama administration appears to be holding firm on closing Guantanamo, but it faces its own nominal ally in Joseph Lieberman demanding that because a Nigerian tried to blow up a plane, no interned Yemenis be released, whether or not they have any evidence against them. Despite his threatened treachery on Obama’s healthcare bill, the senator is still the Chair of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee and, as one of AIPAC’s most cherished assets, epitomises the rush to let lobbies and prejudices shape responses to foreign affairs.
So far, the US has not unleashed the full and counterproductive armoury of hi-tech weaponry on Yemen, although it has begun to move in that direction. It had the excuse that, before the bombing, Sana’a showed every sign of trying to enlist US support to bolster its weak internal standing. The Yemeni government had been trying for some time to make unlikely associations between Iran and the Houthis in the north, and between the secessionists and al-Qa’ida in the south. Needless to say, these linkages could provoke legislative reflexes in Washington, where Yemen is being depicted as a failed state. This is a little unfair, since as a state it has hardly been tried. Sana’a is more a PO box for the dwindling oil revenues and the foreign aid cheques that the government hopes will be boosted by recent events. It is those resources that much of the factionalism is about.
However, a few more drones crashing into ‘guilty’ villages and a heavy US presence on the ground, or even in control, could succeed in uniting Yemen’s fractious tribes and factions like nothing else. The regime in Sana’a seems to be realising that danger, but could face heavy US pressure – unless Obama shows some of the sensitivity and acumen for which he was elected.
Yemen: maybe not deja vue all over again...
US hand stayed - for now
By Ian Williams
Asia Times 9 Jan 2010
WASHINGTON - From Mexico to Iraq, we can see the practical consequences of "wars" against abstractions, whether drugs or terror. In Yemen, there are signs that both President Ali Abdallah Saleh's government and the Barack Obama administration are drawing back from repeating the mistakes of Afghanistan, and perhaps even of Somalia.
Indeed, it is worth comparing Somalia with Yemen. In traditional Western terms, Somalia should have been almost the most successful state in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its population was homogenous in religion, language and culture, with a strong sense of identity. But what outsiders did not realize was how much clan diversity there was beneath that seeming unity. What looked like strong central government under Siad Barre, the last
effective national president, looked like a monopolization of resources by one group to all the other clans. Since then, no putative national government has been able to come up with an offer that the various parties cannot easily refuse.
Just across the mouth of the Red Sea, in Yemen, there are even more crosscutting fault lines. There is a Zaidi/Sunni divide, there are the divisions between the north and the former Marxist People's Democratic Republic in the south, which are not so much ideological as based on Saleh's government cutting the former leadership down there from the access to power and wealth that they thought the reunification of 1990 entitled them.
In the north, in Saada province, the Houthi tribe used to provide the emirs for the thousand-year dynasty in what is now the capital, Sana'a, and now feel excluded. Because they are Zaidi, and therefore technically Shi'ite, opportunistic Yemeni officials linked them with Iran, thereby encouraging Saudi and American support for the central government. Yet they are no closer to Iranian Shi'ites than Anglicans in Britain are to American Pentecostalists, even if both are technically Protestants. But since they are Shi'ite, they are anathema to the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and their al-Qaeda offshoot.
In the mountains, the various clans happily ignore the central government, and some of them seem to be tolerating, at least, al-Qaeda, quite likely for a mixture of financial and theological reasons.
The Yemeni government has always been weak and decentralized, dependent on mediating the demands of the clans and localities whose physical isolation is reinforced by the national habit of weapon-bearing. Yemen is the National Rifle Association's paradise on Earth, and most men would consider themselves naked without their jambiyas, the knife stuck in the belt.
Much of the recent internal conflict is about distribution of scarce resources. Yemen is a desperately poor country, whose poverty has not been helped by frequent civil wars and which was enhanced even more when Yemen's envoy voted in the United Nations Security Council against resolutions authorizing the 1990-1991 Desert Storm after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
United States diplomats told the Yemeni envoy at the time that this was the most expensive vote he'd ever cast, and for once, an American prediction came true. Saudi Arabia expelled hundreds of thousands of Yemeni workers whose remittances had kept the economy afloat, and foreign aid shrank even more. Needless to say, Saddam Hussein's gratitude was strictly limited.
Things have improved now. Saudi Arabia and Yemen finally broadly agreed their long-disputed frontier in 2000, even though it did not restore the former privileged position of Yemeni workers in the kingdom.
However, the oil revenue which provided much of the central government's funding has been declining, and foreign aid has not been expanding, even if the post-1991 boycott is no longer in effect. However, the nepotism and corruption of the Saleh government, now in power for three decades, has taken a visibly disproportionate share of what there is left, and has provoked widespread agitation from those left out.
The main industry and commerce is the growth, distribution and mastication of qat, which takes a huge amount of land and water and anything up to a third of personal income. (Qat is a tropical evergreen plant whose leaves are used as a stimulant.)
On its positive side, the cultivation of a cash crop so lucrative that fields have armed guards has also, according to some economists, been a means of transferring wealth to the countryside and absorbing the deported workers from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
At first, when the government faced widespread dissent, it seemed to have seen an opportunity. By characterizing all the dissident groups as Iranian or al-Qaeda-influenced, they effectively rang the right bells in Riyadh and Washington, and hoped for military and financial aid.
Since the abortive Christmas Day bombing of the North West Airlines flight by a Nigerian linked to al-Qaeda and Yemen, both sides seem to have drawn back. The Yemenis who had been canvassing for heavy weaponry that would allow them to defeat all their various rebels seem to have realized that if they wanted to put truth in the rumors about al-Qaeda being behind them, all they had to do was get too close to the US and West - as in fact they had already shown signs of doing with bombing raids.
Any visible intervention by the US could unify Yemen like nothing else - against the invader. The same thought seems to be occurring in Washington, despite the apocalyptic language from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the Yemeni situation being a regional and global threat. Support for police units has already been announced, and the international meeting that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has convened (with American and Saudi support) for the end of the month seems based on the premise that economic, social and political development are crucial to hold the country together and dampen the various conflicts.
It is not so much that Yemen is a failed state, but as Indian pacifist Mahatma Gandhi one said when asked what he thought about Western civilization, a functioning state would be a good idea. There are unlikely to be any quick and easy answers, but it could be that the right questions are being asked this time. If there is to be a war in Yemen against abstractions, it should be against tangible and real abstractions: poverty and one of its causes, corruption.
Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
By Ian Williams
Asia Times 9 Jan 2010
WASHINGTON - From Mexico to Iraq, we can see the practical consequences of "wars" against abstractions, whether drugs or terror. In Yemen, there are signs that both President Ali Abdallah Saleh's government and the Barack Obama administration are drawing back from repeating the mistakes of Afghanistan, and perhaps even of Somalia.
Indeed, it is worth comparing Somalia with Yemen. In traditional Western terms, Somalia should have been almost the most successful state in Sub-Saharan Africa. Its population was homogenous in religion, language and culture, with a strong sense of identity. But what outsiders did not realize was how much clan diversity there was beneath that seeming unity. What looked like strong central government under Siad Barre, the last
effective national president, looked like a monopolization of resources by one group to all the other clans. Since then, no putative national government has been able to come up with an offer that the various parties cannot easily refuse.
Just across the mouth of the Red Sea, in Yemen, there are even more crosscutting fault lines. There is a Zaidi/Sunni divide, there are the divisions between the north and the former Marxist People's Democratic Republic in the south, which are not so much ideological as based on Saleh's government cutting the former leadership down there from the access to power and wealth that they thought the reunification of 1990 entitled them.
In the north, in Saada province, the Houthi tribe used to provide the emirs for the thousand-year dynasty in what is now the capital, Sana'a, and now feel excluded. Because they are Zaidi, and therefore technically Shi'ite, opportunistic Yemeni officials linked them with Iran, thereby encouraging Saudi and American support for the central government. Yet they are no closer to Iranian Shi'ites than Anglicans in Britain are to American Pentecostalists, even if both are technically Protestants. But since they are Shi'ite, they are anathema to the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and their al-Qaeda offshoot.
In the mountains, the various clans happily ignore the central government, and some of them seem to be tolerating, at least, al-Qaeda, quite likely for a mixture of financial and theological reasons.
The Yemeni government has always been weak and decentralized, dependent on mediating the demands of the clans and localities whose physical isolation is reinforced by the national habit of weapon-bearing. Yemen is the National Rifle Association's paradise on Earth, and most men would consider themselves naked without their jambiyas, the knife stuck in the belt.
Much of the recent internal conflict is about distribution of scarce resources. Yemen is a desperately poor country, whose poverty has not been helped by frequent civil wars and which was enhanced even more when Yemen's envoy voted in the United Nations Security Council against resolutions authorizing the 1990-1991 Desert Storm after Iraq invaded Kuwait.
United States diplomats told the Yemeni envoy at the time that this was the most expensive vote he'd ever cast, and for once, an American prediction came true. Saudi Arabia expelled hundreds of thousands of Yemeni workers whose remittances had kept the economy afloat, and foreign aid shrank even more. Needless to say, Saddam Hussein's gratitude was strictly limited.
Things have improved now. Saudi Arabia and Yemen finally broadly agreed their long-disputed frontier in 2000, even though it did not restore the former privileged position of Yemeni workers in the kingdom.
However, the oil revenue which provided much of the central government's funding has been declining, and foreign aid has not been expanding, even if the post-1991 boycott is no longer in effect. However, the nepotism and corruption of the Saleh government, now in power for three decades, has taken a visibly disproportionate share of what there is left, and has provoked widespread agitation from those left out.
The main industry and commerce is the growth, distribution and mastication of qat, which takes a huge amount of land and water and anything up to a third of personal income. (Qat is a tropical evergreen plant whose leaves are used as a stimulant.)
On its positive side, the cultivation of a cash crop so lucrative that fields have armed guards has also, according to some economists, been a means of transferring wealth to the countryside and absorbing the deported workers from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
At first, when the government faced widespread dissent, it seemed to have seen an opportunity. By characterizing all the dissident groups as Iranian or al-Qaeda-influenced, they effectively rang the right bells in Riyadh and Washington, and hoped for military and financial aid.
Since the abortive Christmas Day bombing of the North West Airlines flight by a Nigerian linked to al-Qaeda and Yemen, both sides seem to have drawn back. The Yemenis who had been canvassing for heavy weaponry that would allow them to defeat all their various rebels seem to have realized that if they wanted to put truth in the rumors about al-Qaeda being behind them, all they had to do was get too close to the US and West - as in fact they had already shown signs of doing with bombing raids.
Any visible intervention by the US could unify Yemen like nothing else - against the invader. The same thought seems to be occurring in Washington, despite the apocalyptic language from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the Yemeni situation being a regional and global threat. Support for police units has already been announced, and the international meeting that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has convened (with American and Saudi support) for the end of the month seems based on the premise that economic, social and political development are crucial to hold the country together and dampen the various conflicts.
It is not so much that Yemen is a failed state, but as Indian pacifist Mahatma Gandhi one said when asked what he thought about Western civilization, a functioning state would be a good idea. There are unlikely to be any quick and easy answers, but it could be that the right questions are being asked this time. If there is to be a war in Yemen against abstractions, it should be against tangible and real abstractions: poverty and one of its causes, corruption.
Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
For action by those concerned with media freedoms
Message from Japanese journalist Toshikuni DOI:
Israel began its military attacks on Gaza on the 27th of December 2008.
On its first anniversary, I made up my mind to protest officially
against the restrictions on my reporting imposed by the Israeli
government. The protest is not against media control in general but is
motivated by restrictions on my activities as a journalist. Since last
summer, the Israeli government has refused to issue a press
card to me on two occasions, which has eliminated the chances of my
covering stories in Gaza. This, however, concerns not only myself but
all other journalists who are interested in reporting on Palestine.
If you can agree to the following protest, please write to me at the
following address. I will list your name with your occupation as
someone who endorses it.
doitoshikuni@mail.goo.ne.jp
You may be cited as for example: Toshikuni Doi (journalist)
And please let other people learn about this protest. Please spread the
news to your friends, to someone you know, and particularly to media
people, journalists, and human rights organizations.
I thank you in advance for your support.
Toshikuni Doi
Dec. 29, 2009
Israel began its military attacks on Gaza on the 27th of December 2008.
On its first anniversary, I made up my mind to protest officially
against the restrictions on my reporting imposed by the Israeli
government. The protest is not against media control in general but is
motivated by restrictions on my activities as a journalist. Since last
summer, the Israeli government has refused to issue a press
card to me on two occasions, which has eliminated the chances of my
covering stories in Gaza. This, however, concerns not only myself but
all other journalists who are interested in reporting on Palestine.
If you can agree to the following protest, please write to me at the
following address. I will list your name with your occupation as
someone who endorses it.
doitoshikuni@mail.goo.ne.jp
You may be cited as for example: Toshikuni Doi (journalist)
And please let other people learn about this protest. Please spread the
news to your friends, to someone you know, and particularly to media
people, journalists, and human rights organizations.
I thank you in advance for your support.
Toshikuni Doi
Dec. 29, 2009
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
It's the law
Since this was written, of course Livni has had to cancel her trip to London, despite the shameless grovelling from Brown and Milliband..
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pages 14-15
United Nations Report
Israel’s Obsession With Goldstone Report Reflects Fears of War Crimes Prosecutions
By Ian Williams
It is a tribute to the legal meticulousness of Richard Goldstone and his colleagues on the U.N. Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) fact-finding mission that the Israeli government is so obsessed with their report. It can see prosecutions of IDF and Knesset members just over the horizon. Binyamin Netanyahu and his ministers have raucously complained to Britain and France for not voting against the Council resolution that accepted the report, and to Russia and China for supporting it. And, of course, they keep confusing Obama administration criticism of the mandate the Council gave with criticism of the report itself.
[Judge Richard Goldstone (l), head of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special mission investigating Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay prior to the Council’s Sept. 29, 2009 meeting in Geneva at which Goldstone presented his findings. (AFP photo/Fabrice Coffrini)]
Judge Richard Goldstone (l), head of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special mission investigating Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay prior to the Council’s Sept. 29, 2009 meeting in Geneva at which Goldstone presented his findings. (AFP photo/Fabrice Coffrini)
In fact, Britain, France and the U.S. united in telling Israel to set up an impartial inquiry. Indeed, to their credit, Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy apparently tried to trade a “no” vote for Israeli pledges to hold an inquiry, lift the blockade and stop settlement activity and evictions. In the flood of personal attacks on Goldstone and his mission, neither Washington, nor London, nor Paris has seriously challenged the substance of his report or the integrity of his mission, let alone his own personal integrity.
Israel’s Western allies have been reduced to inanities, lamenting the mission’s failure to hear the case the Israelis refused to make. “Because Israel did not cooperate with the Mission, which we regret, the report lacks an authoritative Israeli perspective on the events in question, so crucial to determining the legality of actions,” declared the British envoy in Geneva, who should have been fully aware that it was precisely with that eventual excuse in mind that Israel refused to cooperate.
With all the outrage of a recidivist criminal asked to stop breaking and entering people’s houses, Netanyahu and his colleagues continue to bluster. A quick summary of their defense is:
“So let’s get this straight. Israel broke no laws of war during Operation Cast Lead, which is why we will not tolerate any impartial inquiry, even one we organize ourselves, into what happened then. Nor will we allow the issue to be judged by an international court, and what is more, just in case, we want the laws changed to allow us to do what we want when we say we are fighting terrorism.
“It is one-sided, partial, biased and anti-Semitic to suggest that our behavior and Hamas’ both bear scrutiny, and everyone knows that the U.N. is hopelessly prejudiced against us, which is proved by their cunning in heading a mission with a Zionist pro-Israeli Jew whose daughter served in the IDF. And since we refused to cooperate, the report did not hear any evidence from us and so is one-sided.
“Oh, and by the way, just because we keep rubbing Obama’s nose in our broken promises over settlements in no way lessens our demand that the White House sacrifice its hard-won global credibility by rescuing us from the consequences of our failure to hold the inquiry that Goldstone, the U.S., France and the UK have all asked us to hold.”
There is, of course, a small germ of truth in Israel’s protestations about the comparative fervor with which the Human Rights Council goes after the Jewish state compared with other malefactors. One would like to think that the states involved were imbued with deep human sympathy for the Palestinian predicament, but it does not take a cynic to doubt it. Egypt could immediately end the blockade on Gaza, for example, but it does not, in a callous exercise of realpolitik.
Equally, their obstinate pseudo-solidarity in the Human Rights Council has been counterproductive. The original inquiry mandate refused to look at the possibility of Palestinian groups committing war crimes, which has given the Obama administration wiggle room to refuse support to the report. Former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson refused the offer to head the inquiry precisely for that reason.
Goldstone, with the support of Navai Pillai, Robinson’s successor, accepted the position only on condition that he had a mandate to look at both sides. It is worth remembering why his credentials enabled him to do that. A veteran legal struggler against apartheid, he was on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that helped keep South Africa together after the fall of the apartheid regime. He became chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, meticulously building cases against the perpetrators of crime—against, one might add, mainly Muslim victims.
He was then drafted onto the Volcker Commission on the United Nations Oil for Food program and was prepared to engage in harsh criticism of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, despite a longstanding personal acquaintance and shared concern for international justice.
Goldstone’s daughter reportedly has said that one reason he took the job was because he wanted to ensure that the report did not engage in unfair criticism of Israel. I suspect that most people in the U.N. and the human rights community had no idea of the depth of his sympathy to Israel. Certainly, if it had been more widely known, it is likely that some members of the Human Rights Council might have protested vociferously at his appointment. They would have been wrong, of course. Goldstone has shown his integrity repeatedly, and his report could only be assailed as biased by people who have not read it, and who ignore the conclusions—which, after all, are most modest: that Israel and Hamas should investigate the allegations of war crimes.
Needless to say, the alleged friends of the Palestinians on the Council did their best to give ammunition to those trying to wiggle out of the report’s otherwise unassailable conclusions by failing to mention Hamas and including many sound, but contextually misplaced, political criticisms of Israel. To be fair, some Russians and Chinese are alleged to have told Israel that they were referring the report to the Security Council but voted for the resolution because of these other points, on the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is a measure of how desperate Israel is that this “reassurance”—that the countries involved fundamentally opposed Israel policy on its eternal capital and occupation but did not want the issue to go to the Security Council and thus the International Criminal Court (ICC)—was so welcome to Israeli politicians. Indeed, Moscow and Beijing oppose the reference to the Court because they see Uighurs, Tibetans and Chechens as potential stand-ins for Palestinians!
So what next? The report will certainly be discussed at the U.N. General Assembly, whose decisions are now considered “non-binding,” despite the partition plan being accepted there and the Korean War run from there. However, it will certainly bring more grief for Israel if it does not hold the inquiry.
Imagine—Heavy Pressure From Israel!
Because the Security Council is the only body with the power to refer to the ICC prosecutions of citizens of states (like Sudan, Israel, the U.S. and China) that have not ratified the convention establishing the Court, there will be heavy pressure from Israel and its supporters on the U.S. and others not to allow the report to go there, and to veto it if it does.
Israel’s government has threatened to stop the peace process if the Report goes to the ICC. Interestingly, Netanyahu told the Knesset after hearing the UNHRC vote, “We will not allow Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak, who sent our sons to war, to arrive at the international court in The Hague.” This was the Likudnik’s reminder to the White House that despite the Israeli prime minister’s vigorous defense of Operation Cast Lead against the report’s findings, it was in fact the “peace” Labor/Kadima coalition that had planned and initiated the assault.
However, the report already has had implications. Increasingly, Israeli leaders and military are having difficulty traveling abroad for fear of arrest and prosecution. The report recommends referral to the ICC if the parties do not conduct credible investigations within six months. But in any case, national courts will be armed with the Goldstone report to take action if any of the perpetrators set foot in their jurisdictions.
Despite the coalition government’s bluster, there is a serious question about whether the peace process is proceeding at all, since Netanyahu is refusing the Obama administration’s demand to honor previous pledges to stop settlement building. But far from being an obstacle to peace, the report offers multiple points of leverage for the White House, if it cares to use them. And it should—unless it wants to reverse the waves of good opinion generated since Obama went to Cairo.
While there is wriggling, there is also a lot of nuanced criticism in the administration’s handling. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff at the Security Council, while implying that the State Department also has not read its 570-plus pages, balanced the Washington’s “serious concerns about the report, its unbalanced focus on Israel, the overly broad scope of its recommendations, and its sweeping conclusions of law” with a firm statement: “Nevertheless, we take the allegations in the report seriously. Israel has the institutions and the ability to carry out serious investigations of these allegations and we encourage it to do so. Hamas is a terrorist organization and has neither the ability nor the willingness to examine its violations of human rights.”
Incidentally, he added, “just as we defend Israel’s right to self-defense, we cannot accept the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The people of Gaza must have hope for a better future and know that the international community hears their concerns. We call for a reopening of the crossings, with an appropriate monitoring regime, to allow for the entry of legitimate goods into Gaza.”
So there we have it. It is a small mercy but a significant one: a break in the doctrine of so many decades that the U.S. cannot criticize Israel.
One hesitates to ask whether even Congress will countenance continuing loan guarantees and grants to a foreign government that defies U.S. policy by expanding settlements, blockading Gaza, and obdurately refusing to conduct its own inquiry into Cast Lead. But even if it does, the administration, not Congress, casts Security Council vetoes. It is time for some hard talking to Israeli politicians about their future travel plans and the danger that their travel agents will need to become qualified as international lawyers.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pages 14-15
United Nations Report
Israel’s Obsession With Goldstone Report Reflects Fears of War Crimes Prosecutions
By Ian Williams
It is a tribute to the legal meticulousness of Richard Goldstone and his colleagues on the U.N. Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) fact-finding mission that the Israeli government is so obsessed with their report. It can see prosecutions of IDF and Knesset members just over the horizon. Binyamin Netanyahu and his ministers have raucously complained to Britain and France for not voting against the Council resolution that accepted the report, and to Russia and China for supporting it. And, of course, they keep confusing Obama administration criticism of the mandate the Council gave with criticism of the report itself.
[Judge Richard Goldstone (l), head of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special mission investigating Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay prior to the Council’s Sept. 29, 2009 meeting in Geneva at which Goldstone presented his findings. (AFP photo/Fabrice Coffrini)]
Judge Richard Goldstone (l), head of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special mission investigating Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay prior to the Council’s Sept. 29, 2009 meeting in Geneva at which Goldstone presented his findings. (AFP photo/Fabrice Coffrini)
In fact, Britain, France and the U.S. united in telling Israel to set up an impartial inquiry. Indeed, to their credit, Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkozy apparently tried to trade a “no” vote for Israeli pledges to hold an inquiry, lift the blockade and stop settlement activity and evictions. In the flood of personal attacks on Goldstone and his mission, neither Washington, nor London, nor Paris has seriously challenged the substance of his report or the integrity of his mission, let alone his own personal integrity.
Israel’s Western allies have been reduced to inanities, lamenting the mission’s failure to hear the case the Israelis refused to make. “Because Israel did not cooperate with the Mission, which we regret, the report lacks an authoritative Israeli perspective on the events in question, so crucial to determining the legality of actions,” declared the British envoy in Geneva, who should have been fully aware that it was precisely with that eventual excuse in mind that Israel refused to cooperate.
With all the outrage of a recidivist criminal asked to stop breaking and entering people’s houses, Netanyahu and his colleagues continue to bluster. A quick summary of their defense is:
“So let’s get this straight. Israel broke no laws of war during Operation Cast Lead, which is why we will not tolerate any impartial inquiry, even one we organize ourselves, into what happened then. Nor will we allow the issue to be judged by an international court, and what is more, just in case, we want the laws changed to allow us to do what we want when we say we are fighting terrorism.
“It is one-sided, partial, biased and anti-Semitic to suggest that our behavior and Hamas’ both bear scrutiny, and everyone knows that the U.N. is hopelessly prejudiced against us, which is proved by their cunning in heading a mission with a Zionist pro-Israeli Jew whose daughter served in the IDF. And since we refused to cooperate, the report did not hear any evidence from us and so is one-sided.
“Oh, and by the way, just because we keep rubbing Obama’s nose in our broken promises over settlements in no way lessens our demand that the White House sacrifice its hard-won global credibility by rescuing us from the consequences of our failure to hold the inquiry that Goldstone, the U.S., France and the UK have all asked us to hold.”
There is, of course, a small germ of truth in Israel’s protestations about the comparative fervor with which the Human Rights Council goes after the Jewish state compared with other malefactors. One would like to think that the states involved were imbued with deep human sympathy for the Palestinian predicament, but it does not take a cynic to doubt it. Egypt could immediately end the blockade on Gaza, for example, but it does not, in a callous exercise of realpolitik.
Equally, their obstinate pseudo-solidarity in the Human Rights Council has been counterproductive. The original inquiry mandate refused to look at the possibility of Palestinian groups committing war crimes, which has given the Obama administration wiggle room to refuse support to the report. Former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson refused the offer to head the inquiry precisely for that reason.
Goldstone, with the support of Navai Pillai, Robinson’s successor, accepted the position only on condition that he had a mandate to look at both sides. It is worth remembering why his credentials enabled him to do that. A veteran legal struggler against apartheid, he was on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that helped keep South Africa together after the fall of the apartheid regime. He became chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, meticulously building cases against the perpetrators of crime—against, one might add, mainly Muslim victims.
He was then drafted onto the Volcker Commission on the United Nations Oil for Food program and was prepared to engage in harsh criticism of former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, despite a longstanding personal acquaintance and shared concern for international justice.
Goldstone’s daughter reportedly has said that one reason he took the job was because he wanted to ensure that the report did not engage in unfair criticism of Israel. I suspect that most people in the U.N. and the human rights community had no idea of the depth of his sympathy to Israel. Certainly, if it had been more widely known, it is likely that some members of the Human Rights Council might have protested vociferously at his appointment. They would have been wrong, of course. Goldstone has shown his integrity repeatedly, and his report could only be assailed as biased by people who have not read it, and who ignore the conclusions—which, after all, are most modest: that Israel and Hamas should investigate the allegations of war crimes.
Needless to say, the alleged friends of the Palestinians on the Council did their best to give ammunition to those trying to wiggle out of the report’s otherwise unassailable conclusions by failing to mention Hamas and including many sound, but contextually misplaced, political criticisms of Israel. To be fair, some Russians and Chinese are alleged to have told Israel that they were referring the report to the Security Council but voted for the resolution because of these other points, on the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is a measure of how desperate Israel is that this “reassurance”—that the countries involved fundamentally opposed Israel policy on its eternal capital and occupation but did not want the issue to go to the Security Council and thus the International Criminal Court (ICC)—was so welcome to Israeli politicians. Indeed, Moscow and Beijing oppose the reference to the Court because they see Uighurs, Tibetans and Chechens as potential stand-ins for Palestinians!
So what next? The report will certainly be discussed at the U.N. General Assembly, whose decisions are now considered “non-binding,” despite the partition plan being accepted there and the Korean War run from there. However, it will certainly bring more grief for Israel if it does not hold the inquiry.
Imagine—Heavy Pressure From Israel!
Because the Security Council is the only body with the power to refer to the ICC prosecutions of citizens of states (like Sudan, Israel, the U.S. and China) that have not ratified the convention establishing the Court, there will be heavy pressure from Israel and its supporters on the U.S. and others not to allow the report to go there, and to veto it if it does.
Israel’s government has threatened to stop the peace process if the Report goes to the ICC. Interestingly, Netanyahu told the Knesset after hearing the UNHRC vote, “We will not allow Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak, who sent our sons to war, to arrive at the international court in The Hague.” This was the Likudnik’s reminder to the White House that despite the Israeli prime minister’s vigorous defense of Operation Cast Lead against the report’s findings, it was in fact the “peace” Labor/Kadima coalition that had planned and initiated the assault.
However, the report already has had implications. Increasingly, Israeli leaders and military are having difficulty traveling abroad for fear of arrest and prosecution. The report recommends referral to the ICC if the parties do not conduct credible investigations within six months. But in any case, national courts will be armed with the Goldstone report to take action if any of the perpetrators set foot in their jurisdictions.
Despite the coalition government’s bluster, there is a serious question about whether the peace process is proceeding at all, since Netanyahu is refusing the Obama administration’s demand to honor previous pledges to stop settlement building. But far from being an obstacle to peace, the report offers multiple points of leverage for the White House, if it cares to use them. And it should—unless it wants to reverse the waves of good opinion generated since Obama went to Cairo.
While there is wriggling, there is also a lot of nuanced criticism in the administration’s handling. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff at the Security Council, while implying that the State Department also has not read its 570-plus pages, balanced the Washington’s “serious concerns about the report, its unbalanced focus on Israel, the overly broad scope of its recommendations, and its sweeping conclusions of law” with a firm statement: “Nevertheless, we take the allegations in the report seriously. Israel has the institutions and the ability to carry out serious investigations of these allegations and we encourage it to do so. Hamas is a terrorist organization and has neither the ability nor the willingness to examine its violations of human rights.”
Incidentally, he added, “just as we defend Israel’s right to self-defense, we cannot accept the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The people of Gaza must have hope for a better future and know that the international community hears their concerns. We call for a reopening of the crossings, with an appropriate monitoring regime, to allow for the entry of legitimate goods into Gaza.”
So there we have it. It is a small mercy but a significant one: a break in the doctrine of so many decades that the U.S. cannot criticize Israel.
One hesitates to ask whether even Congress will countenance continuing loan guarantees and grants to a foreign government that defies U.S. policy by expanding settlements, blockading Gaza, and obdurately refusing to conduct its own inquiry into Cast Lead. But even if it does, the administration, not Congress, casts Security Council vetoes. It is time for some hard talking to Israeli politicians about their future travel plans and the danger that their travel agents will need to become qualified as international lawyers.
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