So It Goes

Meanwhile, at the Gaza-Israel Border...

THERE'S A LOT OF BIG NEWS around the world right now, more than global media outlets and even their audiences might have a chance to digest. Amidst it all, two tweets today, posted within a half hour of one another on the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman's Twitter feed:

Today, 312 truckloads of food, goods + gas entered the Gaza Strip via the Kerem Shalom Crossing

130+ mortars, Qassams & Grad missiles fired from Gaza & landed in Israel since beginning of yr-56 of which fired this wk

So, even as missile attacks from Gaza continue to rain down on it, Israel allows essential aid to go through -- according to this report. That explodes -- sorry -- challenges what many might know or assume about Israel's stance on Gaza: that Israel's trying to choke off Gaza residents and that Gaza is no longer a threat to Israel.

Let's put a bookmark on these and keep them in mind when the focus shifts back, as it inevitably will, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jeff

 

Settlements: Only a Side Show

THERE'S A LOT OF CHATTER RIGHT NOW ABOUT A COLLISION between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu about their disparate views on settlements of Israelis in the West Bank.

True, they disagree (at least according to their public statements), and true, that has put some pressure on Netanyahu. Israeli politics make it difficult for him to freeze expansion of settlements, let alone cut back on existing ones -- even if the Prime Minister does, in his heart, agree with Obama's position; and those same domestic pressures insist that every Israeli leader keep the American President on his side.

Obama is caught between two pressure points, too. Even before his speech in Cairo last week, addressed to the Muslim world, the President surely knew he needed to show the Palestinians and their supporters throughout the world that he would do more than talk about peace and reconciliation. He knew he had to put some visible pressure on Israel so as not to seem like anything less than a fair broker in the peace process.

On the other side, though, President Obama cannot beat up on Israel too much. That's because, first of all, he would upset an important constituency in his own party and in the U.S. And I don't mean only the Jewish community, but, I believe, most Americans who have consistently shown support for Israel (see, for example, this study by the Pew Research Center showing that Americans are more than four to one more likely to sympathize with Israel than with the Palestinians in their longstanding conflict: ) And, second of all, while I don't know Obama personally, he has given every indication that he, too, cares about the security of the State of Israel.

Indeed, I think Obama believes -- as I do -- that, as much as it may signal a rift between the U.S. and Israel, his posture on the settlements will help Israel. So, too, his insistence on a two-state solution, which, by the way, was George W. Bush's position, so I don't see what the conflict is there.

Some American Jews freak out, to put it nicely, whenever there is any daylight between the positions of the American and Israeli leaders. Many have continued to harbor suspicions they so irrationally held last year about Obama that he will endanger Israel. The fact is they probably represent a minority of American Jewish opinion on the settlements; I'm saying this without empirical evidence, but I think it's the case that most American Jews (myself included) have never understood how Israel could say it is ready for a peaceful reconciliation with Palestinians as it allowed an expansion of the settlements and created, as Ariel Sharon once referred to them, "facts on the ground."

But here's where I agree with some in the Jewish community who worry about the fixation on the settlements issue. Even as I think Israel needs to do something about pulling back (and that's a very vague term, I realize) on the settlements in the West Bank, it is a necessary, but not sufficient ingredient to progress. I don't think we should boil the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to settlements, as some critics and even friends of Israel often do.

If the settlements issue goes away next week -- that is, no expansion activity, or even, more extensively but untenably, Jews leave the West Bank altogether (along the lines of the so-named 2002 "Saudi Plan," or Arab Peace Initiative, which also call for the division of Jerusalem and the right of return of Palestinians to pre-1948 homes in Israel proper) -- can anyone out there say that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would cease?

Does anyone truly believe that Israel's fiercest enemies, some of whom live in Gaza and the West Bank and have hurled virulent invective, missiles and other deadly attacks upon Israelis would say, "Okay, then, Israel has a right to exist. We will live side by side in peace with our good friends the Israelis?" Need I recite the vile and rejectionist language -- let alone violent actions -- from groups like Hamas and, just outside Israel, Hezbollah? Everything they say and do suggests they will see it not as an end to the conflict but as a new, opportune moment to continue the fight. I hope I'm wrong about that, but, c'mon, does anyone honestly disagree with that assessment? I believe there are many among the Palestinians and in the Arab and Muslim worlds who are ready reconcile under the right conditions. But these more extreme forces still have the upper hand. 

So, yes, Obama needs to place proper pressure on Israel to show the Arab world he means business, but he must not forget to do the same with the Palestinians. The American Jewish right is properly reminding him of this, but must also have the patience to let him do what he needs to do.The American Jewish left must resist the temptation to make the conflict all about the settlements and what Israel alone must do to contribute to the progress toward peace.

Obama has shown a willingness to press the Palestinian side, and, everything he has said and done suggests he will. (The rifts within the Palestinian community make it hard for them to deliver, unfortunately.) But, for some reason, what gets the ink and the air time is his supposedly tough talk with Netanyahu around the settlements issue, which is, to my mind, only a side show.

Jeff

The image above of President Barack Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the Oval Office on, May 18, 2009, is an Official White House Photo taken by Pete Souza.

The Drama of Durban II

THERE WAS SOME EXTRAORDINARY and, for me, heartening drama today at the U.N. Durban Review Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, the follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

That last confab, which took place in Durban, South Africa, was so shot through with anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that the U.S. and Israeli delegations ceremoniously and under a barrage of intense criticism walked out. It was one of the very few actions by the George W. Bush Administration that I thoroughly applauded. But much of the attention that should have been directed at this surreal event in Durban was obscured when the attacks of September 11 occurred less than a week later. Except for many of the activist groups that focused their energies (for either good or bad) on Durban I, few others even knew it took place.

A number of countries -- including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Poland, Italy, and Israel -- are boycotting the Durban II conference, which began today, and, as you'll see below,  a number of other European countries walked out today when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad took the conference dais to speak.

Yes, that's right, Ahmedinejad, who has called the Holocaust a lie and has spouted reams of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist invective during his tenure over the last several years and whose government is hardly the model of human rights practices. He was the lead-off hitter at a conference against racism. And he was fresh off of a meeting last night with Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz, a gesture that prompted Israel to ask its Ambassador to Switzerland to go back to Israel for consultations (not a formal recall, but a rebuke nonetheless). Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak put it just right when he said today, "It's an upside-down world, when the president of Iran can be a guest of honor at an anti-racism conference."

Critics of the boycotting countries are pointing to the fact that all of the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel language in the conference's official pronouncements have been expunged. But, as National Security Council aide Samantha Power reportedly said in a conference call last week with Jewish leaders, Durban II is still on track to "reaffirm, in toto, Durban I," as if to say, everything we said then goes for us double now. "We want to show good faith to our allies and the people who are working hard to improve the text." Power said. "...But we are also not interested in being involved or associated with fool's errands."

In the words of one those who attended Durban I, "The World Conference against Racism triggered intimidation and harassment against Jews, just a few hours before the September 11 attacks on the United States. The brutality unleashed in Durban, the collective anger against Israel, the United States, and the West in general resonated as a warning of what was to come.... In Durban, the international NGO community was complicit in the attempt to criminalize the Jews. At a lightning pace, a minority of delegates managed to manipulate thousands of participants and impose their resentful ideology. In only a few days, a collective moral code was constructed. It called upon civil society to distinguish the 'good' from the 'evil.'"

What also scared and saddened me after Durban I were the number of human rights and anti-racism groups (including many prominent and otherwise respectable ones I've known and even worked with in the United States) that looked the other way on this. So invested were they in a conference that would shine a spotlight on certain kinds of human indignities that they were willing to throw the Jews and Israel over the side to get what they wanted. They pilloried Jewish community, Israel and the U.S. government as opponents to racial harmony and tolerance, even as pronouncements about "Israeli apartheid" and "Zionism = racism" and even worse stuff than that floated around them in Durban. It didn't matter that, on so many occasions and for decades, Jewish activists had been there with them to fight racism. When it came to bigotry against Jews and Israel, however, our friends did not reciprocate. (I'm pleased to see that at least one of the groups that took this stand in 2001 has urged the U.S. to address the problems at Durban II. I'm not mentioning any names, sorry.)

I was pissed and hurt by this. For a period of maybe 50 or 60 years since the Holocaust, the world was finally aware of the danger of anti-Semitism, and, at least in respectable company, it was viewed as radioactive. But, by Durban I (and, arguably well before) that taboo had worn off to the point that a U.N.-sponsored forum on racism became a legitimate platform for taking shots at the Jews and Israel. And, since 2001, that taboo seems to have all but disappeared in some geographies and communities. It is getting scary.

But back to what happened in Geneva today. As Zvika Krieger, a correspondent for The New Republic recounts in a live, play-by-play blogging account, President Ahmedinejad was the first of several heads of state to open the conference with short introductory speeches:

"Ahmedinejad just walked in.

"There seems to be some confusion. He is walking to the seat of the Iranian delegation, not the stage. The chair of the conference seems confused. Ok, now he is finally being escorted to the podium. He begins speaking, thanking Allah.

"Some activists are interrupting his speech. They are wearing clown wigs and red noses, and yelling 'Racist! Racist.' There seem to be three of them, in different parts of the hall. They've been escorted out by security guards. There is a loud applause, though it is unclear whether they are clapping for the activists or the guards.

"He continues speaking through the whole fiasco. He is taking a lot of time to thank Allah and his prophets.

"Now we're getting a lecture on the history of war, ending with WWII. He transitions into an indictment of the Security Council, questioning the motives of superpowers giving themselves veto powers. Enough of the subtlety -- he condemns their role in the creation of the state of Israel, and starts ripping into Zionism.

"The EU is walking out! The entire France, Bulgarian, and Hungarian delegation just walked out. I think others walked out too -- can't see their placards. The press box is going crazy. The entire hall has erupted in applause -- some applauding the delegate who walked out, some applauding Ahemdinejad for continuing his anti-Israel tirade.

"Ahmediniejad continues, condemning 'the most racist regime,' a litany of generic Israel canards. A group of Israeli students start yelling 'Racist! Racist!' from the viewing gallery. No one seems to be stopping them. Two Iranian women in hijabs start waving their fists at them. After a few minutes, security finally arrives and escorts out one of the Israel students. Now another one has started yelling 'Facist! Facist!'

"Ahmediniejad is now ripping into America for invading Iraq. The usual stuff about arrogance and racism.

"Now he's blaming the global economic crisis on the US. He's condeming US's selfishness and lack of transparency. He's even condemning the bank bailout plan!

"Now he's veered into banal pronouncements about ignorance and history and racism and the creation of the universe and worshipping god.

"Oops, he's back to Israel! 'A kind of racism that has tarnished the image of humanity ... The word Zionism personifies racism that falsely resorts to religion and abuses religious sentiments to hide their hatred and ugly faces." And Jews control the media! And the major world powers! "Cultural endeavors are not enough. Efforts must be made to put an end to efforts made by Zionists and their supporters. ... Governments must be encouraged in their efforts and their fights to eradicate this barbaric racism.'

"Another protestor starts shouting from the plenary floor. He is quickly apprehended and silenced.

"Now A-jad is talking about a changing of the global order, and the upending of traditional power structures. "Western liberalism and capitalism, like communism, has reached to its end since it has failed to perceive the truth of the world and humanity as it is.

"Another protestor starts yelling 'Racist!' and is quickly escorted out. Two hijab-clad women start waving and blowing kisses to A-jad.

"Now he is back to the Security Council, calling for the elimination of the 'discriminatory veto right.' Some generic language about love and happiness and cooperation and overhauling the global monetary system. And finally, 'Let us all join hands in amity ... in fulfillment of a decent new world.' Amen.

"UPDATE: The foreign minister of Norway is up next, and he is calling out A-jad, whose speech he says 'threatens the very focus of the conference.' The declaration of this conference included 'the need to protect against incitement to hatred. I heard the messages inside the president's speech. I heard incitement and hatred. This is not a finger-pointing exercise. The president has made Iran the odd man out, and Norway will not accept the odd man out hijacking the efforts of the many. ... We cannot surrender the floor of the United Nations to extremism.' Huge applause erupts in the hall."

I'm not always a fan of street theater, but it seems to fit in this circumstance given the absurdity of the scene. And let's hope it raises some real awareness about the toxicity of racism and bigotry, in this case against the Jews.

Jeff

Fighting to Give Peace a Chance

IN1987, AT THE START OF what was to become the first intifada, or Palestinian uprising against Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, I heard a senior Israeli diplomat tell an American audience, "This is not a beauty contest!"

Translation: 'We, Israel, will do what we have to do to respond to the violence and keep order. We can't worry about how it looks or what the rest of the world thinks.'

The trouble with those two sentences is that, in practice, they don't coexist well. It was a beauty contest, whether Israel liked it or not. The rest of the world was scrutinizing and mostly criticizing Israel's every action, which, within the limits of the cameras' frames, appeared to be responding too harshly to a bunch of rock-throwing boys. The fact was -- and still is -- that Israel's image and international political standing suffered badly because it did what it had to do, regardless of how justified it may have been and how it looked to the outside.

As I've written here several times before (see this, this, this, or this), that's the unfortunate position Israel has long faced as it has tried to respond to Palestinian violence -- which, over the years, only seems to have gotten worse and more bent on Israel's destruction. Israel has long been caught between two bad options. On the one hand, Israel cannot sit idly by and ignore threats to the safety of its own people -- such as thousands of missile salvos shot for years by Hamas on Israeli population centers. Nor can it, on the other hand, ever try to defend against such threats without prompting the ire of the international community.

That's especially true today, as Israel heads into three weeks of air and ground action action in Gaza to eliminate -- or at least subdue -- Hamas's deadly missile attacks. As has too often been the case when Israel acts, many innocent (along with the not-so-innocent) people -- women and children among them -- have lost their lives or been badly injured. Life in Gaza is a nightmare for those who have been spared. No no matter where one may stand on the conflict, no one can deny it is a terrible and sickening situation for those innocent people in Gaza.

And few, even those who have little sympathy for Israel, can deny that hitting innocents this time was nearly unavoidable, if Israel were to respond at all. Hamas has located legitimate military targets close to homes, schools, refugee camps and other places where civilians are concentrated. It's difficult for Israel to refrain from going after those targets, from defending itself.

It followed that option of restraint for years. During that time, Israeli towns were under a harrowing and constant threat of missile attacks. (This video tells the story well.) During that time, few voices from the international community raged against the perpetrators, engaged in feverish shuttle diplomacy or hastily convened the U.N. Security Council to pass emergency cease-fire resolutions.

So we have now a familiar dynamic. The latest operation has forged a widespread consensus in Israel, where consensus is rare (you know, three Jews, five opinions...) that Israel's current actions just and necessary. Polls have shown that more than 80 percent approve of the current course, and I suspect that large numbers of Jews in the diaspora feel the same, though probably not as high a proportion as we see among Israelis.

"This is a just war and we don’t feel guilty when civilians we don’t intend to hurt get hurt, because we feel Hamas uses these civilians as human shields," Elliot Jager, editorial page editor of The Jerusalem Post, told The New York Times this week. "We do feel bad about it, but we don’t feel guilty."

In addition to the hostility aimed at Israelis and its supporters around the world as a results, what's most vexing and discouraging is the familiar feeling of isolation. Again from the Times article above: "'It is very frustrating for us not to be understood,' remarked Yoel Esteron, editor of a daily business newspaper called Calcalist. 'Almost 100 percent of Israelis feel that the world is hypocritical. Where was the world when our cities were rocketed for eight years and our soldier was kidnapped? Why should we care about the world’s view now?'" So it is a beauty contest.

It also hurts that so many around the world views Israelis as genocidal maniacs. I know, the terrible plight of Gaza's innocent Palestinians and Israel's determination to keep on attacking until Hamas is neutralized leads people to that conclusion.

The truth is that Israel wishes these innocents had remained safe (thus the showering of warning leaflets and phone calls to Gaza residents urging them to take cover prior to attacks). The truth is that, more than anything, Israelis and their supporters want peace, not what they have now. I hear it all the time from every Israeli who has ever said anything on the subject. They want peace more than anything. They hate seeing people killed or hurt, on either side of the conflict. Hate it!

Can anyone seriously say that about Hamas or Hezbollah? Seriously. Their hate and desire for more casualties, especially Jews, is at the heart of this conflict. Absent that, most analysts say there are a sufficient number of Israelis and Arabs who could come to terms and make a real go of co-existence.

Unfortunately, the choices, again, are rotten. To the Israelis, the only clear path to peace is, ironically, through military action. As Sallai Meridor, Israel's Ambassador to the United States, said at a pro-Israel rally I attended last week in Washington, "We are fighting terror to give peace a chance." Again, the endgame for Israel is peace, not conflict, hard as that may be for some people to imagine.

It seems very sad really, to fight for peace. And it will not win any beauty contests. But can anyone offer a better alternative?

Jeff

Fighting for What's Right

I SAW THE DOCUMENTARY "REFUSENIK" ABOUT TEN DAYS AGO, and it provoked a lot of thoughts about what happens when people fight for what's right.

 The film chronicles the plight of Jews who tried to free themselves from the persecution of the Soviet Union and of the people -- mostly in the United States -- who tried to help them. It shows how what ultimately became a celebrated global movement for human rights started with only a few rather passionate and determined people inside and outside the U.S.S.R.

The movement was powered by a relatively small  (as compared to the vast numbers in the U.S.S.R. overall) group of Jews, who took enormous personal risks by daring to apply for exit visas from their country. The subsequent refusal (thus the moniker "refusenik") by the Soviet authorities ensured these applicants and their families would lose their jobs, be monitored and harassed constantly by the KGB, committed to psychiatric hospitals and/or exiled to remote, inhospitable locales such as Siberia.

Starting in the early 1960s, small groups of vocal activist students began to publicize the cause of Soviet Jews, later capturing more widespread attention first from what the film repeatedly refers to as the "establishment" of the Jewish community and then leaders and grassroots from many non-Jewish backgrounds.

With the benefit of some rather remarkable film footage from the time and of more recent interviews (with many of the most famous refuseniks such as Natan and Avital Sharansky, Vitali Rubin, Vladimir and Maria Slepak, and Ephraim Kholmyansky, as well as with figures such as Eli Wiesel, Mikhail Gorbachev, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz), we hear the captives and their supporters in the West talk about some of the brazen efforts to outwit the KGB and to inflict pain on the Soviet government. Like survivors and rescuers during the Holocaust, the refuseniks leave you wondering whether you could ever endure what they did if you had faced the same harsh choices.

For so many years, their efforts appeared rather like a flea stepping on the toe of an elephant. Little by little, as the movement for Soviet Jewry grew around the world and the heroic refuseniks themselves loomed larger as symbols of Soviet oppression, the Soviets started to relent. The elephant yielded. In the 1970s, the Soviets allowed the incremental release of a few small groups of Jews and some higher-profile refuseniks, whose celebrity embarrassed the regime. Eventually, as the Soviet system began to crumble, hundreds of thousands eventually left for refuge elsewhere.

Second to the extraordinary and inspiring heroics of the refuseniks themselves, what moved me also was the Soviet Jewry movement itself, which was committed not to let the refuseniks' struggles be forgotten. The movement drew on people far beyond the Jewish community -- civil rights leaders, such as Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, leading Christian clergy, sympathetic public commentators and the political leadership of many nations, especially my own. They created a juggernaut that put the refuseniks' plight high on the list of U.S. foreign policy priorities and on the agendas of summits between American and Soviet Presidents.

Learning about this (again, as I had some involvement with it in the '80s), I was struck that nearly no one, certainly no one thoughtful and influential in American political life, questioned this massive mobilization by the American Jewish community in the way many do the efforts today of pro-Israel activists.

Why is that? I know this might sound willfully ignorant to those who have criticized Israel's actions against Palestinians, but tell me, please, how Israel's struggle to defend itself from terrorism and possibly all-out destruction is any less just a cause than that of Jews trying to throw off the yoke of repression in the U.S.S.R.?

How is it that a well-organized, passionate community of pro-Israel activists is accused -- even by otherwise respected political analysts -- of subverting the U.S. foreign interests, when there was no similar opposition to the Soviet Jewry movement some 20 or 30 years ago (at least not as much as I think there was)?

Part of the answer, of course, is that the cause of Soviet Jewry served the cause of anti-Communism, which enjoyed broad-based support in the U.S. And the Rooskies were the villains and the poor suffering Jews were the victims; it was a simple frame.

To most, the Arab-Israeli conflict looks far more complicated -- and in many ways it is, not least because the Israelis are well armed, and, notwithstanding horrific acts of terror against Israelis, they don't always appear to be the victims. And to some, the very notion of Zionism -- of Jews having their own state -- is illegitimate.

What's most disturbing about all that is a willful ignorance to see that the cause of peace and prosperity for Israel -- and, yes, for non-Israelis, too -- is as just as the cause for Soviet Jewry, or for any oppressed group around the world. No people should be forced to endure a 60-year siege, to be subjected to murderous attacks on its streets and to be constantly targeted for extinction, as Mssrs. Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Meshal and others like them would have it.

Still there are those who question pro-Israel activism. They almost invariably assume that the goal of U.S. support for Israel is the result of some immoral deal that lawmakers cut for political expedience. Did it ever occur to them that political leaders believe in U.S. support for Israel because they see it as a just cause?

I'm not defining "U.S. support for Israel" as unconditional support for any Israeli policy, no matter how misguided. Israel, like any grown-up, modern state is not perfect. And, as I have argued here several times before, it is faced with two bad choices -- on the one hand, the insecurity that comes with a policy of restraint, and the opprobrium that comes with taking firm, decisive action to defend itself.

Still, tell me what is unjust about sticking by a nation that shares what we believe are enlightened values, that is an agent of intellectual, human and cultural progress in the world and that is the object of so much irrational and vitriolic hatred. Is it that some are uncomfortable with the prospect of Jewish power -- either in the form of a well-organized community of advocates or in the form of a state capable of protecting itself?

What's this really all about?

Jeff

Another View on Misguided Diplomacy

BEYOND MANY OF THE EDITORIAL PAGES OF MAJOR WESTERN NEWSPAPERS, most of the public criticism of former President Jimmy Carter's meetings this past week with Hamas leadership came from largely from Israelis and most of Israel's Jewish supporters around the world. That's not to say that the criticism was any less valid. But I worry that, when Israelis and the Jews are once again fighting a battle like this on their own, many others around the world tend to discount their views as the same old intransigence.

So rather than rehearse many of the same arguments that other Jewish supporters for Israel are making about President Carter's misguided diplomacy, I thought it would be refreshing to look at a different source and see what his views are on the subject. In this case, I've chosen someone who has been in a good position to evaluate the role of violent extremism among Arab groups in the Middle East, someone who is not motivated necessarily by his embrace of Israel.

I'm referring to Farid Ghadry, a Syrian-born businessman who now lives in the United States and who founded and currently heads a group called the Reform Party of Syria.

RPS describes itself as a "Syrian opposition party to the Assad regime that has emerged as a result of September 11.  The party is governed by secular, peace committed American-Syrians, Euro-Syrians, and native Syrians who are determined to see that a 'New Syria' is reborn that embraces real democratic and economic reforms." And, with his frequent and vigorous speeches, testimonies in Congress, regular blog entries and various other public utterances, Ghadry provides anyone who will listen regular reminders to pay attention to the misdeeds of the Assad regime and to the courageous efforts of those who oppose it.

With that in mind and knowing of his longtime criticism of extremists (particularly those with strong ties to Assad), it's not entirely surprising that Ghadry would be critical of President Carter's meetings with Hamas. But, as with Jewish and Israeli responses to President Carter's meeting, Ghadry's  perspective still gives his arguments as much power as any.

In a blog posting yesterday, Ghadry wrote:

The direct and indirect effect of President Jimmy Carter's visit to Gaza, Egypt, and Damascus to meet with members of Hamas sends chills down the spine of every Arab and Muslim working for reforms in the Middle East because it legitimizes terror and violence and dilutes all the efforts that peaceful Arab reformers have committed themselves to. One such reformer told me: "Why are we working so hard for peace if the Americans prefer to deal with terror?.'" I could not utter but words of encouragement knowing deep inside that he is right.

He goes on:

Under the auspices of “seeking peace”, President Carter is reversing years of hard work by many Palestinians and Israelis who see the road to co-existence paved by true peaceful acts. For President Carter to meet with individuals with blood on their hands not only legitimizes terror but it also encourages it in two ways: It sends the signal to Hamas that its violence pays off but also inspires those who vacillate between violence and peace to surrender to violence.

Ghadry's most valuable message, then, is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, despite that terminology, not strictly between Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, it is between the forces of moderation and the forces of extremism on both sides of the conflict. My belief (and more knowledgeable people than I would probably agree) is that there are a large number of Israelis and Arabs, who if they had their way, could pretty quickly come close to resolving many of the issues that have divided them for so many years. The main obstacle, however, are those who see any such co-existence and cooperation between the two peoples as a threat and who will do anything to derail peace.

Ghadry is not saying (nor am I) that the forces of good should do nothing at all to deal with groups like Hamas and extremist regimes like Iran and Syria. As he writes:

Part of the blame for Carter’s trip falls on this administration as well. The policy of “no policy” towards Syria and Iran has fostered this sense of mid-air suspension that inevitably encourages people like president Carter to apply the laws of physics. Had the US foreign policy been more forceful than simply attempt to isolate Hamas and Syria, the US may had seen faster pace to peace than what the molasses isolationist policy can deliver.

I'm not completely sure what Ghadry means when he says "more forceful." I hope he means it in the diplomatic sense and not through military action against these groups. That's my preference, and one only needs to look at the mess in Iraq to understand why.

But we need diplomacy that's more careful and evenhanded than what President Carter, who has vilely compared Israel to the South African Apartheid governments of years past, has to offer. Ghadry's right that someone with the stature of Jimmy Carter -- a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and tireless advocate for peace and human rights -- frustrates the careful (and probably not-so-careful) efforts of those on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide who are trying to solve this problem of extremism. It allows the good guys to look like the obstructionists to peace and the bad guys look like great statesmen willing to compromise without really having to compromise.

If you have any doubt that Hamas really doesn't want to compromise, by the way, just read what Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas's "foreign minister," wrote in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post three days ago:

A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

This is not compromise, especially when you know that Hamas has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. Rather, it is like one boxer telling another to tie his hands behind his back so the first boxer can finish the other off -- with knives and bullets.

And these are the guys to whom President Carter decides to lend his prestige? Does President Carter have any prestige left to give?

Jeff

"What is the Matter With You People?"

Yesterday's Sunday comics section included a Doonesbury strip that I think says a lot about the relationship between the Islamic world and the West.

The strip (which is a "Flashback," meaning it ran once before, I think in 2007) shows two soldiers -- one of them American, the other Iraqi -- in an armored vehicle patrolling through a tough neighborhood in Iraq. Their dialogue begins:

American soldier: "Ready to do this, partner?"
Iraqi soldier: "ZZZ."
AS: "Great!... Okay, that's the safe house -- the big white building at the end of the street."
IS: "I know this house. The owner is Sunni scum."
AS: "Oh, yeah?... Well, intel wants us to capture the guy alive."
IS: "This will not be possible. I am sworn to vengeance!"
AS: "Why? What'd he ever do to you?"
IS: "A member of his family killed a member of mine."
AS: "What? When did this happen?"
IS: "1387"
AS: "What is the matter with you people?"

Whether or not this exchange reflects reality, Garry Trudeau is saying, within only a few frames and with only few words, that cultural differences between the Islamic world and the West are immense. Trudeau reflects not a "clash of civilizations," as so many of us want to believe exists, but rather the first-time encounter of two people who don't really know or understand one another.

The American in the strip views Muslims as one big, backward and dysfunctional family that is trapped in the past and unprepared for the present. He finds the Iraqi's talk of sectarian revenge -- based, no less, on something that happened more than 600 years ago -- incomprehensible. The Iraqi does not understand the cultural vocabulary of the American or fully grasp the reality of the moment. He sleeps through his patrol and is willing to ignore what sounds like a reasonable command, possible triggering a dangerous showdown.

For his part, the Iraqi embraces history as something truly meaningful and relevant today, even if it means ignoring the realities of the present. Americans tend not to look back too much on the past, or to understand why it stands for so much to other cultures.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to say how fair these characterizations are generally of people on both sides Muslim/Western divide. But I'm glad that Trudeau gets us thinking at least about what we all don't know. That's precisely what Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University, does, though he can fill in the gaps for us. Ahmed (about whom I have written before and for whom I have done some p.r. work) is foremost a translator between people who do not know each other and who literally and cultural speak completely different languages.

In other words, he occupies a critical role at a time when Islam and the West needs people like him the most. Through his many books, documentaries, lectures, diplomacy (he was Pakistan's High Commissioner to the U.K.) and plays, he has been a prime interpreter of Islam to the West, helping us get past the misguided shorthands we have about Muslims. At the same time, he interprets the West to the Islamic world, which swirls with myths and downright bizarre assumptions about Westerners.

If there is one message that Westerners would do well to take from Ahmed, it is that Islam is more complex than we truly comprehend. In his recent book, "Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization," which was the product of anthropological visits to eight or nine Islamic countries in the Arab Middle East, South Asia and East Asia, Ahmed leaves no doubt that Islam expresses itself in countless ways, often within a single country or region and even within a single family.

Moreover, he argues that the very encounter with the West -- lately through the fast-moving, border-busting phenomenon of "globalization" -- has brought about many different challenges and responses in many parts of the Islamic world that were previously mostly insulated from the outside.

Islamic reactions to that encounter with the outside world are mixed, Ahmed shows, describing them using three broad typologies. "Islam's response to the forces of globalization... takes at least least three distinct forms: mystics reach out to other faiths, traditionalists want to preserve the purity of Islam, and modernists attempt to synthesize society with other non-Muslim systems" he writes in "Journey Into Islam." "Because most people in the West do not understand the complexity of Muslim society through models such as [these], they reduce understanding of U.S. relations with the Muslim world to good versus evil, and divide Muslims crudely into moderate versus extreme."

These three models "have been in play for the last two centuries," Ahmed  told an audience at the Brookings Institution last June when discussing his book. "This is an ongoing dynamic, an ongoing dialectic within Muslim society. Since the first impact with Western colonization in the middle of the 19th Century, and you are seeing, in a sense, the drama being played out right now. 9/11 was a catalyst. It escalates the drama, but it does not create the drama."

America's and the West's failure to understand the complexities of the Islamic world, Ahmed writes in the book, has led to much of the miscalculation and disaster that is the Iraq war. The U.S., he says, "needs to quickly appreciate the nuances of these societies. Muslims widely complain of the lack of justice, widespread corruption and collapse of law and order. Too frequently, the United States backs strong military intervention, unaware of how this support encourages turmoil and how negatively this support is seen within a country."

At the Brookings event about "Journey Into Islam," scholar Stephen P. Cohen seconded Ahmed's analysis by pointing out that a "wonderful euphemism that is circulating around Washington is kinetic solution, that is, beating up somebody or shooting them. Kinetic solutions don’t work. If you have to use a kinetic solution, that is, shoot them, you have already lost the war especially the war of ideas."

"America’s great strength," Cohen continued, "its practical approach to problem-solving, has really become a weakness of ours. We don’t take the time to listen, to understand, if not to respect, at least to understand other cultures and civilizations. The policy implications here are really get out and talk, meet with people, reestablish the libraries around the world. We used to be culture centers for many countries. I know in Pakistan when I first went there I think there were eight different American centers. There are zero now. In Pakistan and other countries, the American center, the American library was often the cultural and intellectual center point of local and national dialogue about their states as well as relations with the U.S. These kinds of institutions have disappeared around the world. They are still relevant. They are still powerful. We really need to rebuild them to be able to compete in the world."

Ahmed's criticisms of the Muslim world are the mirror image of those he has of the West.

• "Muslims need to recognize that the most effective 'weapons' for addressing their grievances are knowledge and reason, rather than brute force...."
• "Muslim leaders must [also] strive to live up to their own vision of the ideal society. Too many Arab rulers use the crutch of Israel directly or indirectly to avoid working toward democracy until that 'problem' is solved."
• If Muslims had reacted to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq with restraint rather than violence, it "would have impressed people in the West and created sympathy for Muslim causes. As it happened, the beheadings, the suicide bombings, and the hyperbolic rtheroric of violence... confirmed already existing steteotypes of Muslims. Very soon, people in the West began to equate violence and terrorism with Islam itself... and see all Muslims as inherently bloodthirsty...."

So, to paraphrase the American soldier's question in the Doonesbury strip: What is the matter with all these people? "Ignorance of other cultures leads to serious policy mistakes, whether conducting warfare of peace negotiations," Ahmed answers.

The real task, then, is to accelerate the pace with which we eliminate that ignorance among as many people on both sides of the divide as possible.

Jeff

Dealing with Iran

I'M GUESSING IT WAS MOSTLY COINCIDENCE that David Ignatius and Charles Krauthammer’s columns addressing how the U.S. and the West should deal with the ominous threat of Iran appeared on the same Washington Op-Ed page on Friday, September 15. They presented a shorthand of the two primary arguments in a debate about a difficult issue. My own preference –- and hope –- is for the way outlined in Ignatius’s column.

Ignatius, who has reported extensively across the Middle East, including Iran, from which he had just returned from a long visit, based his column on an interview earlier in the week with President Bush. The interview showed that, even when pressed, the President eschewed a military resolution to the Iranian nuclear threat, though he endorsed some of the carrot-and-stick solutions (such as processing plutonium outside Iran) that have been recommended to keep Iran from using nuclear technology to threaten others.

“I came away with a sense that Bush is serious about finding a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis, and that he is looking hard for ways to make connections between America and Iran,” Ignatius wrote.

Ignatius also asked Bush why he approved the controversial 12-day tour to the United States by former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

“The Khatami visit ‘said that the United States is willing to listen to voices,’ Bush explained. ‘And I hope that sends a message to the Iranian people that we're an open society, and that we respect the people of Iran.’ Clearly, the White House wants to reach out to segments of Iranian opinion beyond the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“I asked Bush what next steps he would favor in opening dialogue with Iran. ‘I would like to see more cultural exchanges,’ he said. ‘I would like to see university exchanges. I would like to see more people-to-people exchanges.’"

Compared to the inflexible, get-tough tone we heard in the run up to the military attack on Iraq in March 2003, it’s an understatement to say this signals a conversion for this administration. As I wrote in an earlier posting, what a difference a war makes. And it’s a welcome change, as far as I’m concerned, not to lead with the tip of a sword. But that’s not to say a military option would never be necessary. It just seems to be an unimaginable option to exercise, especially given what it has wrought on Iran’s Western border. 

Indeed, in his column, Krauthammer doesn’t dismiss that the costs of military strike to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat would be pretty horrendous. Iran’s military proxies (terrorists) will be deployed to do their dirty business all over the world against Western targets. Oil prices, he says, could go up to $150 a barrel. If the U.S. were to carry out the strike, it will take an enormous diplomatic hit even from its allies in the West and certainly from the Muslim world.

“These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing…. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini's ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map…. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble? These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away.”

I’ll leave it up to the arms and Iran experts to argue with Krauthammer about the whether the threat is “no more than a year away,” but I will not discount that it is serious.

But I think Krauthammer presents a false choice. Choosing not to bomb the Iran – even if you could figure where is the most effective place to bomb (he can’t be talking about a ground invasion, can he?) isn’t “doing nothing.” I’m not sure our current administration has the diplomatic capital right now to build the kind of trust and good will that President Bush seems to be referring to in his interview with Ignatius. But isn’t that – combined with some other incentives and penalties through the international community – doing something?

Yes, if intelligence tells us that the clock is ticking, that missiles are about to be launched, then the calculus may be different. (Or if, as was the case this summer with Hezbollah, an actual provocation occurs, some action should be taken.)

I realize that ‘building bridges of understanding’ can sound soft and mushy, and to those who just want to kill the rest of us, that sort of stuff means nothing. But we’ve learned that we can’t eliminate that small group of extremists without building alliances with the great majority of the rest who would like, just like us, to put the extremists out of business. I know, I know, we’ve been talking for years about working with the moderates in Iran and in other places, and look what it’s gotten us.

We should be ready with a military option but it should be only remotely deployed. Something tells me that dropping a few bombs to erase the threat, even if it could hit the right targets (a big if), could actually make the threat lot bigger and more terrifying than it is now.

Jeff

"I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here.”

NOW THAT I’VE GONE OFF ON the inflexibility of liberal ideologues, it’s only fair that I devote equal time to conservative ideologues, who do the same from the opposite end of the spectrum (though this won’t be the first time in my blog musings).

And who better to use as Exhibit A than Vice President Richard Cheney, who appeared this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press?” It is he, more than any, who has turned the current administration (and the Congress that has rubber-stamped virtually everything it asks for) into an echo chamber of extremist conservative ideology. And don’t just take my word for it. There are others within the conservative establishment who have said that same thing.

This morning, under the punishing questioning of Tim Russert, the Vice President showed one of the central tenets of an ideologue: don’t let the facts get in the way of your point of view. The other is that rest of us are idiots, and we should just leave it up to Cheney and his people, who know what they’re doing (and the V.P. lets his arrogance slip for a second when he says below “Tim… I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here.”). Let’s go to the videotape:

MR. RUSSERT: All right. Now the president has been asked, “What did Iraq have to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?” and he said “nothing.” Do you agree with that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I do. So it’s not...
MR. RUSSERT: So it’s case, case closed.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’ve never been able to confirm any connection between Iraq and 9/11.
….MR. RUSSERT: Then why, in the lead-up to the war, was there the constant linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s a different issue. Now, there’s a question of whether or not al-Qaeda, or whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11. There’s a separate—apart from that’s the issue of whether or not there was a historic relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet’s testimony before the Senate Intel Commission, an open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern of relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
MR. RUSSERT: But the president said they were working in concert, giving the strong suggestion to the American people that they were involved in September 11th.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. There are, there are two totally different propositions here, and people have consistently tried to confuse them. And it’s important, I think—there’s a third proposition, as well, too, and that is Iraq’s traditional position as a strong sponsor of terror.
So you’ve got Iraq and 9/11, no evidence that there’s a connection. You’ve got Iraq and al-Qaeda, testimony from the director of CIA that there was indeed a relationship, Zarqawi in Baghdad, etc. Then the third...
MR. RUSSERT: The committee said that there was no relationship. In fact...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I haven’t seen the report; I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the fact is...
MR. RUSSERT: But Mr. Vice President, the bottom line is...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We know, we know that Zarqawi, running a terrorist camp in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, after we went in to 9/11, then fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of ‘02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: The bottom line is, the rationale given the American people was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he could give those weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda and we could have another September 11. And now we read that there is no evidence, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, of that relationship. You’ve said there’s no involvement. The president says there’s no involvement.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, Tim, no involvement in what respect?
MR. RUSSERT: In September 11, OK. The CIA said, leading up to the war, that the possibility of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction was “low.” It appears that there was a deliberate attempt made by the administration to link al-Qaeda in Iraq in the minds of the American people and use it as a rationale to go into Iraq.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tim, I guess—I don’t—I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here. In September—or in 1990, the State Department designated Iraq as a state sponsor of terror. Abu Nidal, famous terrorist, had sanctuary in, in Baghdad for years. Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went into Iraq. You had the facility up at Kermal, poisons facility, ran by Ansar Islam, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. You had the fact that Saddam Hussein, for example, provided payments to the families of suicide bombers of $25,000 on a regular basis. This was a state sponsor of terror.  He had a relationship with terror groups. No question about it. Nobody denies that.
….Now this was the place where, probably, there was a greater prospect of a connection between terrorists on the one hand and a terrorist-sponsoring state and weapons of mass destruction than any place else. You talk about Iran, North Korea, they’re problems, too, but they hadn’t been through 12 years of sanctions and resolutions by the U.N. Security Council and ignored them with impunity.”

Now, I’m no expert on this, but I seem to understand that Iran had been one of the most egregious sponsors of terrorist groups, especially Hezbollah. North Korea had long been a scourge because of it had exported missile technology to other states for years. But seemed not big rush to invade either Iran or North Korea, which is a relief.

I’m not saying that Iraq was the Great Humanitarian of the bunch. But from everything we’ve heard about even the pre-9/11 rumblings within the Bush Administration, there was a curious and disproportionate fixation on Iraq that, again, no facts were going to dislodge.

Also, there seemed to be a sense that military intervention was the only way to challenge the growing threat of Iraq. Now, let us stipulate that we should never rule out military options when trying to deal with rogue nations (like, say, Israel’s recent attempts to eliminate Hezbollah’s missile capabilities in Lebanon), though I would hope they would be rare acts. And let us also agree that economic sanctions are, as they say, “blunt instruments” that often do not have the effects we intend.

But I need not rehearse for the world that the Bush administration seemed to have little patience for anything but a military option –- also a blunt and bloody instrument that can (indeed, has) backfire. It is an extreme option, and it says something about the character of a government that used it (in Iraq) almost as a first resort. 

There could have been many other ways of protecting the U.S., as Russert suggests. Back to the videotape:

MR. RUSSERT: Three hundred billion dollars spent so far. The Congressional Budget Office says if we stay in Iraq through the end of 2009, it’ll be a half trillion dollars. In all candor, could that $300 billion we’ve spent so far in Iraq not have been better spent securing Afghanistan, improving airline security, having technology for gels and liquids so people can get on without being nervous? Our cargo in our ports. Could that $300 billion have not been better spent securing our nation against terrorists rather than in Iraq?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, Tim, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of securing the nation against terrorists. You know, we’re here on the fifth anniversary, and there has not been another attack on the United States. And that’s not an accident, because we’ve done a hell of a job here at home, in terms of homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance program we’ve put in place, in terms of the financial tracking program we put in place, and because of our detainee policy, where we, in fact, were able to interrogate captured terrorists to get the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to disrupt...
MR. RUSSERT: But could it have been better spent?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I’m not sure that it could have been. I don’t know how much better you can do than no, no attacks for the last five years.
MR. RUSSERT: But the Commission on 9/11 says that we get D’s and F’s.
People with...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well...
MR. RUSSERT: People with radios in police departments can’t—in D.C. cannot talk to Alexandria. Four-fifths of the mayors say they can’t communicate with their localities. People can’t carry toothpaste and shampoo on planes. The administration cut $6 million—or tried to—out of funding to screen those kind of things...

The prepondence of death, destruction and failure, as well as the sagging poll numbers, seem to have rendered the Vice President a bit more demur than we've seen him in the past. But he's still not about to admit that if he had to do it over, knowing what he knows now, he would do it any differently. He says he won't, of course. That's just the usual political bravado, which we can expect from either party. But it's also the sort of ideological stubbornness that has gotten this country, and many others, into a terrible mess.

And now, in retrospect, Mr. Cheney's only options are to rationalize all the bad decisions he made in the past and say that everything's just fine. That's another attribute of an ideologue: self-delusion.

Jeff

The Moral Equation In Killing

THE WASHINGTON POST RAN A REMARKABLE AND FASCINATING ARTICLE the other day giving an inside account of the decision making that goes on within the Israeli military, intelligence and political community when it comes to targeted killings. That's Israel's practice of pinpoint killings of terrorist leaders.

It was remarkable not only for the level of detail the reporter, Laura Blumenfeld was able to gather and describe (she has, over the years, filed many great stories like this one on a pretty wide range of topics). It was notable also because it showed the exquisite dilemmas the Israelis go through before they decide to pull the trigger, as it were, to eliminate their supreme enemies.

The article illustrates vividly what I have noted on this blog several times in the past: Israel is constantly offered two equally bad choices: attacking its adversaries, which sometimes involves killing innocents and, even when it doesn’t, usually brings about the opprobrium of the international community; or backing off and exposing its citizens to harm.

According to the article, Israel arrived at this practice as a way of getting at the hardest of the most hardened leaders of the terrorists who plan deadly attacks against Israelis. They reason that it might be a deterrent to get the guys who don't really kill themselves in these operations and get their own hands dirty, to speak. And they go after them only when all other means of capturing them are exhausted.

But it's not so easy, especially when you consider that doing so could mean hurting or killing innocents. 

Blumenfeld portrays Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, one of the Israel's top military commanders as the proponent of some restraint, as the one more driven by the moral considerations than by the cold military needs. And, in the other corner, she puts Avi Dichter, who at the time of the events described in the piece was the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency.

As far as Dichter is concerned, Israel's approach to counter-terrorism is, "It's not an eye for an eye. "It's having him for lunch before he has you for dinner." He adds elsewhere: "And if the terrorists walk out [of a targeted attack] alive, and tomorrow another bus explodes, how do we explain it to our people?"

That is the toll Dichter is trying to prevent, and Yaalon is on the same team. But he is also trying to prevent a more insidious toll. "How can we look in the eyes of our pilots if they kill innocent people?"

And, just as we saw in Lebanon and as the Israelis have seen in other battles (such as the 2002 battle in Jenin), there is always a danger that targeted killings will kill innocents. And, as was the case in the operation Blumenfeld describes, that can scuttle a whole mission.

In fact, the Israelis are so concerned about the possibility of killing innocents that they consult with ethicists and have actually taken what sounds like an absurd step of engaging a mathematician to calculate how many civilian casualties in such an operation would morally acceptable. (Maybe not so absurd, a colleague of mine explained. Isn't that what the Environmental Protection Agency does when it calculates many illnesses are acceptable versus the benefits of allowing a certain agent to be released into the environment? And doesn't the FDA do the same with drugs? I dunno, it's just hard to fathom quantifying a moral idea. And, by the way, according to Blumenfeld, "the mathematician whom the military had enlisted had failed to produce a formula.")

What's more the fail safes Israel puts in place to insure it is targeting the right person are formidable, and, as the article points out, they can scrub an operation at the last minute.

I see no evidence that Israel’s adversaries have taken any steps to fight in anything in the neighborhood of a just manner. Indeed, instead of trying to avoid innocents, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have deliberately targeted them.

This is not to say that killing is ever a purely morally just practice, even if all the ethicists in the world can argue that there are times it is. I'm glad it is not my job to carry out this practice of targeted killing, and it leaves all of us, even those of us who root on a government that practices it, a little sullied.

Still, I don’t see that Israel has much better options considering what it is up against, and I’m glad to see (and not surprised) that it doesn’t take its responsibility to wage war lightly.

Jeff

A Letter to an American Christian Leader on the Current Arab-Israeli Conflict: Part II

BECAUSE I WROTE EARLIER ABOUT THE “Pastoral Letter to Palestinian Friends and Partners,” by Rev. John H. Thomas, General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ (USA), I thought it would be worth sharing also a Religion News Service column on the same subject by Rabbi A. James Rudin.

Copyright restrictions don't allow me to share the entire column here, but Rabbi Rudin has some tough criticisms and concludes that the Pastoral letter "removes Thomas from playing any constructive role in achieving Middle East peace."

Jeff

"The status quo is untenable."

JOHN WATERBURY, the president of American University of Beirut, argues on today's Washington Post Op-Ed page that Israel's "distinct preference for the status quo, founded on conventional military superiority over all its neighbors and some strategic depth through its retaining the occupied territories" is the essential source of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It all began, he says, "at the end of formal combat in 1967, [when] Moshe Dayan declared 'mission accomplished.'"

By Waterbury's lights, I guess, the "mission" was the subjugation and colonization of poor Arab peoples by Israel.

Never mind that on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War the armies of those Arab peoples had massed on Israel's borders and were calling for the extinction of the Jewish state.

Never mind that the doctrine of pushing the Jews into the sea remains clear and present even today among Islamic militant groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and many others, not to mention wonderful guys like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, who has been unambiguous about this.

Never mind that, as far as Israel is concerned, the "mission" has never been about asserting its hegemony across the Middle East but about survival, which is what Moshe Dayan and his Army accomplished in 1967. It has always been about being left alone to thrive on its own small patch of earth. Good relations between Arabs and Jews would be nice, but even the most idealistic doves in Israel would settle for disengagement and peace.

I find it ironic that Waterbury would invoke the term "status quo" because for years I have heard Israelis from the left to the right of the spectrum repeat this mantra: "The status quo is untenable." That's to say, 'Israel's occupation of Gaza and all of the West Bank will undermine Israel's own future well being.' Now, it's fair to say that both the left and the right in Israel (and their supporters in the diaspora) had very different views about how to break away from the status quo, and I personally believe that the right wing was at times disingenuous about their willingness to do so.

I also find it startling that someone so close to the scene as Waterbury can conclude the conflict is all the fault of the Israelis. Even the unilateral withdrawal by Israel from Gaza and Southern Lebanon is, to Waterbury, a suspicious act!

It is yet more startling that Waterbury would tacitly say, by omission, that voraciously ambitious and morally corrupt terror groups, which deliberately put at risk the very people they claim to be fighting for, bear no responsibility at all. Not even the Saudis would agree with him.

What is Waterbury thinking?

Jeff

How Not to Wage a War?

ISRAELI MILITARY HISTORIAN Michael Oren, writing in The New Republic, declared today that "for three weeks now, Israel has presented a textbook case of how not to wage a war." Oren argues that the aerial war has left "Hezbollah largely intact militarily and with its political prestige greatly enhanced. Syrian and Iranian influence will be immeasurably strengthened. A disaster of regional and perhaps global dimensions appears imminent -- unless Israel seizes its last opportunity to regain the initiative and deliver a decisive blow to Islamic extremism."

That opportunity, Oren says, "is a massive ground campaign to gain control of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. By clearing the terrorists from the area adjacent to its northern border and by eliminating Hezbollah's most strategic strongholds, Israel will have won a concrete achievement. And though long-range rockets will continue to be launched at Israel from central Lebanon."

Just such a ground campaign appears to be underway right now. But while Oren may be right that the aerial bombardment has not eliminated Hezbollah and may have emboldened it, was there any other way to go? Could they have dispensed with the aerial campaign, which might have exposed more of the ground troops -- not to mention civilians in Northern Israel -- to even more harm? Again, was Israel faced with two equally bad choices as they were in Jenin in 2002?

To support Oren's case, just yesterday I heard Fawaz Gerges, a Sarah Lawrence College and native of Lebanon who had been there on vacation with his family when the bombing began, say, as he does from quote in the New York Sun:

"Hezbollah has become now a symbol of resistance and defiance, not just for Lebanese, but I think for many Arabs and Muslims. And the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, I think has become one of the most undisputed Arab heroes for Arabs and Muslims.
  

"Mr. Gerges added,"Just this week… a very prestigious Beirut research Institute, along with the Lebanese-American University, did a survey of thousands of Lebanese.And the findings, they show almost 87% of all Lebanese, Shiites, Sunnis, and Christians support Hezbollah.… This tells you that there has been a swell of support for Hezbollah inside Lebanon.… The longer the war continues, the stronger Hezbollah would become, and, in fact, the weaker the democratically elected Lebanese government would be."

Gerges, who had no kind words to say about Hezbollah and called Hezbollah's kidnapping of the Israeli soliders an monumental mistake, said that prior to the conflict there was a strong and growing antipathy for Hezbollah in Lebanon and maybe even a lack of antipathy (if not a fondness for) Israel there. That is a major casualty of this war.

No doubt that much of what Israel has done over the last three weeks has contributed to this overnight change and that it could take longer to repair this than it will take to rebuild the physical infrastructure of the country. But, not to play the finger pointing game, but how can we not say that siting missile batteries in residential areas is not a trap to make Israel look bad and that the bait is the people of Lebanon?

But, again, the Catch-22 for Israel: should it have just not retaliated? Indeed, I have to believe that one of the reasons Israel absorbed rocket attacks from southern Lebanon over the last several years is that Israel saw that the Lebanese were rallying away from Hezbollah and wanted to give that movement time to gel. But this latest step was too much.

And as for proportion, I, too, have struggled with this question, and I think reasonable minds can disagree. But would a measured tit for tat have done the job? Would Israel have been respected by its enemies and liked by its allies? Hard to believe, but we don't know, and this war isn't over yet.

Jeff

Playing Games with Body Counts

IT NOW TURNS OUT THAT THE BODY COUNT at the collapsed building in Qana in Lebanon is 28, not twice that number, as was originally reported on Sunday.

That is, of course, no comfort at all to those families who suffered losses there. It certainly doesn't make me feel good, and I want to be careful not to appear to be playing games about proportionalism when every life is sacred and the conditions for the people of Southern Lebanon must surely be miserable. 

But who's playing the games?

We saw a similar phenomenon when in 2002 the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) invaded the Jenin Jenin Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank to root out the reputed masterminds of suicide bombing attacks on Israelis. The initial reports were that "hundreds" of innocent residents of the camp had been killed in the fighting, and people were calling for hauling Israel into the international war crimes tribunal. But when the dust cleared, a U.N. investigative team counted 52 dead Palestinians, still a lot of people in what was described as a hideous scene. But it was not hundreds.

The problem then was the same as it is today: how to extricate these bad boys from a densely populated area without hurting innocents they were using as shields? Three choices: 1) don't go in, which will ensure that the suicide bombings continue; 2) level the town with bombs, as Hafez al-Assad did in the Syrian town of Hama when it didn't like the political movement arising there. Or 3) Conduct a ground campaign, eliminating the enemy block by block, which will subject IDF soldiers to a lot of peril.

They went with Option Three, and, indeed, 23 IDF soldiers died, a huge toll for Israel, and many others were wounded. My cousin, who lives in Israel, knew a kid who fought in Jenin and was wounded (not seriously). During the whole few days the battle raged, the soliders on the ground who were were calling to the guys outside, called, "Bring in the daisy cutters," 15,000-pound bombs that obliterate everything in sight, as President Assad would have done. Even as IDF soldiers died, the superiors would not pull exercise that option. They knew that the retribution in the world community would be too great.

There is also some chatter, coming only from the Israelis, of course, that Israeli bombs may not have been responsible for the fateful strike that collapsed the building on the 28 people (many of them children) in Qana. The building collapsed, Israel says, at least seven or eight hours after the air strikes. The implication is that the Hezbollah folks must have bombed the building themselves to make it look like the Israelis did it.

Whoa. These Hezbollah guys are cold blooded, but that's ice cold. I'd like to believe it's not true, but buildings don't just fall on their own, though it's certainly possible that the air strikes could have seriously destabilized them.

The truth is we don't yet know the truth about this. But we do know that Hezbollah and has made a perverse practice of locating its missile batteries in populated areas for the purpose of either keeping Israeli bombers away or embarrassing Israel when it goes ahead and bombs anyway. The Israelis have clear video evidence that Hezbollah launched rockets from Qana, and the IDF simply could not let this stand.

In that sense, Hezbollah is reckless and uncaring of the people it purports to protect, and it bears responsibility in the deaths of these poor people (many of them children) in Qana. It was the same bad scenario as in Jenin and the many other hornets' nests Israel has had to stick its hands into.

Jeff

Update on August 2: So as not to be playing games with body counts myself, I should say that Human Rights Watch has announced that at least 13 people from the wreckage in Qana are not accounted for. That could mean many of those missing died, so the total number of dead could be higher. In any case, it's too high now.