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Sunday, July 27, 2014

Scattered links this week, mostly Israel (but what else can one do?). Information is less forthcoming in the world's other hotspots -- Libya has emerged as one, alongside Syria and Iraq, and Ukraine. One thing I wonder about the latter is how intense the fighting has been as the central government attempts to beat down the seccessionists. It seems likely that Russia provided the latter with the BUK missile believed to have shot down the Malaysian Airlines plane, and that the rocket was fired by someone expecting Ukrainian military planes rather than a neutral airliner. The downed airliner should be a cautionary lesson for both sides, but instead has been up as a political tool, to villify Russia, making matters worse rather than better. I don't doubt that there is some amount of villainy on the Russian side, but the other side (Ukraine? Europe? America?) is hardly innocent either, and restarting the Cold War will only be worse for all. At times like this, one needs statesmen. Instead, all we got is Obama, hounded by spooks like Lindsey Graham.

Let's start with a couple twitter images, reportedly Gaza City's Sheijayia neighborhood before and after Israeli bombing. Not the same views, but you get the idea:

Meanwhile, back to the links:

• Mustafa Akyol: Turkey Can Teach Israel How to End Terror: Turkey had battled Kurdish separatists since 1984, their approach described by one of their generals as "killing all terrorists one by one." A couple years ago Turkey changed its approach, started negotiating with PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, and has largely resolved the problem. (Was it a coincidence that Turkey's change coincided with the ending of their alliance with Israel?)

  The Kurds were not angry at Turkey because they were innately prone to violence. They were angry because Turkey had done something grievously wrong to them. And a peace agreement became possible only when the Turkish public and the state acknowledged this fact.

  If Israel is ever going to achieve peace, Israelis will have to overcome their own self-righteous hawkishness as well -- and abandon the intellectually lazy reflex that explains Palestinian militancy as the natural product of Arab and Islamic culture's supposedly violent nature.

• Uri Avnery: Once and for All!: Of course, it isn't really this symmetric, but the headline talking points could be solved easily:

  In this war, both sides have the same aim: to put an end to the situation that existed before it started.

  Once And For All!

  To put an end to the launching of rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, Once And For All!

  To put an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt, Once And For All!

  So why don't the two sides come together without foreign interference and agree on tit for tat?

  They can't because they don't speak to each other. They can kill each other, but they cannot speak with each other. God forbid.

  This is not a war on terror. The war itself is an act of terror.

  Neither side has a strategy other than terrorizing the civilian population of the other side. [ . . . ]

  Both hopes are, of course, stupid. History has shown time and again that terrorizing a population causes it to unite behind its leaders and hate the enemy even more. That is happening now on both sides.

  Avnery didn't point out the greatest symmetry, which is that compliance with the other side's goals would cost nothing and actually benefit both sides. Despite the claims of Israel's most blinded supporters, there is no reason to think that Gazans take any absolute satisfaction in killing Israelis with rockets. Nor, if the rockets stopped, should Israel gain any succor watching Gazans starve. I'm not sure that any Israelis can articulate the real reason they've persisted in keeping Gaza locked up and down. Twice now, Israel has adopted policies which show that they have no long-term desire to keep Gaza: at the start of Oslo when they handed the whole Strip over to the PA, and in 2004 when they dismantled their last settlements in the Strip. One has to wonder why they didn't Cut Gaza Loose -- hand the Gaza Strip off to the UN to form an independent state, more or less as I proposed a couple weeks ago.

  I tried circulating my post around a bit, but got no interest or feedback whatsoever in it. Pro-Palestinians don't like it because they think that splitting off Gaza will make it that much harder to get any sort of independence for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and they may be right. (Assuming no right of return -- I think that's a totally dead prospect given Israel's strength and racism -- it tilts the demographics to the point where Israel might consider granting citizenship to all extant West Bank and Jerusalem Palestinians, although that's likely a long struggle away.) And pro-Israelis don't like it because most Gazans are Israeli refugees with a still legitimate right of return, so at the very least they fear that a Palestinian state might legitimize the refugees' moral case. (If this sounds kind of fishy, it's because it is, but Israelis are raised to see existential threats everywhere; that is, after all, the bedrock Zionism is founded upon.)

  Avnery only sees one way out of the mutual destruction of war-after-war, and that's to do something very similar to what I proposed. So I count him (and the Israeli peace camp) among the people who might advance such a plan. It should also appeal to liberal Zionists, especially outside Israel. It is, for instance, something that should make sense to Kerry and Blair but they can't currently grasp because of their phobia about Hamas and how they see Gaza and Hamas as one. And if they did embrace it, what rejoinder would Netanyahu have? He can't claim that Israeli control in any way benefits Gaza. Nor can he claim that Israel's past and current security efforts are the only way Israel can ensure its own security. The problem with nearly every scheme to resolve the conflict is that it would impose some unacceptable cost to Israel, but cutting Gaza loose doesn't have any costs: it's a scheme that even an implacable stonewaller like Netanyahu can't resist forever. And it would be a positive step, breaking the blockade/rockets cycle that resulted in Israeli escalation and war in 2006, 2008, 2012, and now 2014.

• Richard Silverstein: Israel's Slaughter, Based on a Lie: Evidently, at least one Israeli "official source" confirms that they realize that Hamas was not responsible for the kidnapping-murder of three Israeli teenagers back on June 12, the event that kicked off a series of events leading to Israel's latest intensive demolition of Gaza. The crime was, instead, the work of a "lone cell" in Hebron. However, Netanyahu sought to use the murders as an excuse to break up the unification deal between Hamas and Fatah. He sent 10,000 IDF troops into the West Bank where they ransacked thousdands of homes, arresting 500 Palestinians (mostly associated with Hamas, many of whom had been in Israeli prisons before being released in last year's prisoner exchange deal), and killing seven. When Hamas protested by shooting off some rockets from Gaza, Israel then began its bombardment and invasion of Gaza, killing well over a thousand more.

  This entire slaughter is based on a lie. And not just a small lie, but a huge, cancerous, evil lie. I do not like to make absolute moral statements if I can avoid it. But there is no doubt in my mind that Bibi Netanyahu is evil. While that doesn't necessarily mean all of Israel is evil, as long as they elect this megalomaniac to office, then all of Israel is culpable in his malevolence. [ . . . ]

  To return to Sheera's tweet, lest anyone question her source, the BBC's Jon Donnison is reporting that Israeli police spokesflack, Mickey Rosenfeld is saying the same thing explicitly.

  On a related matter, several thousand Israelis marched yesterday night in Tel Aviv against the Gaza massacre. It is not easy to do so when 90% of your fellow citizens believe you're being traitorous. I don't know if such protests are enough to exonerate the nation of war crimes. But they are some small solace.

  The lie at the root of the war gives this some resonance with the Bush invasion of Iraq, although lies leading to war are old hat -- the sinking of the Maine in 1898 and the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1964 are two of the more notorious ones in US history. Nor is this anything new for Israel: the false rumors of Syria massing troops on the border in 1967, the assassination of Israel's UK ambassador in 1982 that was used as a pretext for invading Lebanon, and whatever that cockamamie story was in 1956, are just the first examples that jump into mind. Lies and wars go hand-in-hand, first as rationales then to cover up the dirty truth. The only thing remarkable about this war is how fast Israel's lies are being uncovered -- that's partly explained by the prevalence of media but also by how baldfaced the lies are. Sure, Netanyahu is vile, but that's not news either: he was the principal person responsible for destroying the Oslo framework and inciting the second intifada. Since returning to power he's sloughed off the Mitchell and Kerry iniatives and seems well on his way to kicking off a third intifada. But there's no originality in Netanyahu's evil, and little of the personal monstrosity you can find in Ariel Sharon (or Yitzhak Shamir or Menachem Begin or even Yitzhak Rabin, to limit ourselves to Israeli PMs): you can explain everything he's done as the dutiful son of his father, who was Vladimir "Iron Wall" Jabotinsky's secretary in exile in New York. Netanyahu has never enjoyed an original thought in his life. He is, rather, the slave of an old and profoundly wrong idea, which is that the only way Zionism can survive in Israel is by repeatedly beating Palestinians into submission. That idea is what's evil; Netanyahu's is merely its tool.

• More on Israel's latest war:

  • Kate: Six Palestinians are killed in West Bank in protests of Gaza slaughter: The title piece plus dozens of other reports
  • Helena Cobham: Absence of "peace process" might help Gaza ceasefire negotiations: Main point here is that Abbas has agreed with the Hamas ceasefire proposal, which insists that Israel release the prisoners covered in the Shalit deal who were arrested by Israel in their anti-Hamas sweep of the West Bank, and that the blockade of Gaza be ended. Israel supposedly can't negotiate these points with Hamas because Israel cannot talk to Hamas.
  • Annie Robbins: In Photos: Worldwide protest against Israeli attack on Gaza: Photos and videos of demonstrations from around the world. Also see: Martin Gajsek: Report from historic march on Qalandia checkpoint in solidarity with Gaza.
  • Richard Silverstein: Israel Murders IDF Soldier to Prevent His Capture: Explains the "Hannibal Directive," which basically says that if there is a chance that an IDF soldier might be captured and turned into a bargaining chip (like Gilad Shalit was), the IDF should kill that soldier first. As Silverstein reports, there has been at least one example of that during the present hostilities.
  • Rebecca L Stein: How Israel militarized social media: How the IDF put their best face on for Facebook, Twitter, etc.
  • Al-Haq: Why Israel's legal justifications for 'Operation Proective Edge' are wrong: Israel has made a big deal out of their practice of phoning or other warnings, arguing that if they contact you (or at least try) and their attack subsequently injures you, they are not responsible. To say the least, this assumes they have the right to bomb, and hardly shows any concern for the consequences. Moreover, such calls can themselves be a form of terror. Or they could be misdirecting. This piece focuses mostly on international law, which Israel is in gross violation of.
  • Udi Aloni: The swan song of the Israeli left: Includes a link to the film Forgiveness.
  • Jonathan Freedland: Liberal Zionism After Gaza: A postscript following Freedland's review of Ari Shavit's My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel and John B Judis' Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict. In the latter piece I particularly appreciate Norman Finkelstein's quote on Shavit's "insights": "[they] comprise a hardcore of hypocrisy and stupidity overlaid by a tinsel patina of arrogance and pomposity. He's a know-nothing know-it-all who, if ever there were a context for world's biggest schmuck, would come in second." Shavit's the kind of guy who writes movingly about how Israel force-marched entire towns over the border and into permanent exile, then proclaims the atrocity worthwhile because it now lets him live in a fully Jewish state. (As opposed, I suppose, to a guy like Benny Morris, who uncovered numerous IDF atrocities, only to lament that there weren't more.) In this war as in so many others, liberal Zionists "shoot and cry": as Freedland translates, "the Israeli dove gets to win the admiration of the outside world, Jew and non-Jew alike, but the beauty and sensitivity of his conscience even as the behavior of his country, and the army whose uniform he continues to wear, does not change." And the order is essential: shooting first, by lining up for every war, he assures his comrades of his loyalty, even if he returns to humanity later.
  • Lisa Goldman: The Gaza war has done terrible things to Israeli society: For example: "Peaceful, unarmed [anti-war] demonstrators in Israel's two most liberal cities were physically attacked by ultra-nationalists wielding stones and bottles. In Haifa, nationalist thugs assaulted the Arab deputy mayor, slamming the middle-aged man down on the pavement. In Tel Aviv, they chased anti-war protestors into a cafe and smashed a chair over the head of one of them, even as municipal sirens wailed to announce an incoming rocket from Gaza. The police were ineffective in stopping the violence."
  • Melvin A Goodman: Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto: A reminder that Gaza resembles nothing so much as a classic ghetto, an open air prison locked down and patrolled from the outside. The most famous one was the Warsaw Ghetto managed by the Nazis in WWII -- one well known in Israel thanks to the valliant but doomed Jewish revolt there, long touted in Israel as one of the few cases where Jews fought back, like good Israelis do today. It is remembered elsewhere for the utter carnage of the Nazi "final solution": they killed over 300,000 Jews in putting the revolt down, laying waste to the entire ghetto. Israel hasn't approached that level of genocide, at least not yet, but they've killed thousands, destroyed uncounted homes and businesses and public buildings and key infrastructure. What keeps Israel from applying its own "final solution"? A mix of conscience, practicality, and concern for world opinion. All of those are wearing thin, especially conscience -- most obviously, Rabbi Dov Lior's ruling in favor of the "destruction of Gaza so that the south should no longer suffer."

Also, a few links for further study:

• Avi Shlaim: Cursed Victory: Review of Ahron Bregman's new book, Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories (2014, Allen Lane [UK]). The review is itself a good short history lesson, especially on Ehud Barak's ill-fated negotiations with Syria and Arafat. ("Bregman confirms the view I have long held -- that the two principal reasons for the collapse of the summit were Barak's intransigence and Clinton's mismanagement.") I doubt that there's much here we don't already know, although Bregman has a reputation for digging through the documents, which as Avi Raz's recent The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War made clear, show that Israel's opposition to any sort of peace initiative has been a consistent policy all along.

  Bregman describes Israel as "a heavy-handed and brutal occupier." He regards the four decades of occupation chronicled in this book as a black mark on Israeli, and indeed, Jewish history. He finds it depressing that a people that has suffered such unspeakable tragedies of its own can behave so cruelly towards another. The only sign of hope in this otherwise bleak picture is that the occupation may carry within it the seeds of its own demise. By forcing the Palestinians to live in squalor, Bregman concludes, Israel has "hardened those under its power, making them more determined to put an end to the occupation, by violent means if necessary, and live a life of dignity and freedom."

• On the slaughter of innocents: Unsigned (the author seems to have been involved in Human Rights Watch), but a long and impressive meditation that recounts the history of mass slaughter -- examples include the Mongol practice of sacking cities and similar desires by both sides in WWII -- but is written with Gaza in mind. A couple examples:

  The Israeli architect and philosopher Eyal Weizman has analyzed how groups like Human Rights Watch participate, inadvertently and from admirable aspirations, in the science of war: their "collusion . . . with military and political powers." Their methods involve a shift "from a focus on the victims of war to an analysis of the mechanism of the violations of law." Law itself, once broken, is treated as the chief victim; the individuals whose lives were at stake fade away in the descriptions of the offense almost as they did in the choosing of targets. This elision, however unwanted, is built into the methods. "Today's forensic investigators of violence move alongside its perpetrators, morphing into them," according to Weizman. "Humanitarianism, human rights and international humanitarian law," he writes, "have become the crucial means by which the economy of violence is calculated and managed."

  The Weizman book quoted is The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (2012, Verso Books). I'm not familiar with that book, but have scanned through his Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (2007, Verso Books), one of the most deeply revealing looks at exactly how Israel manages its occupation system. The point about how human rights violations can be trivialized as violations of law is evident in all the reports which claim that Gazan rockets constitute a war crime, which in routine course balances off Israel's war crime -- its use of far more deadlier munitions. The real world difference, of course, is proportionality, which in the Israel-Gaza case is crudely visible in death and injury reports and would very likely be even more striking if you could convert the entire war efforts into some common measure of force.

  The focus on civilian casualties generates a strict, technical approach to the question of responsibility. The individual story is subordinated not just to the lawbooks, but to the slide rule. No side can ensure absolutely that it will prevent civilian casualties, as long as it's at war and killing people. So no side is completely devoid of guilt. But since the Geneva Conventions give a certain latitude for trying but failing, even killers can make a claim to innocence as well. The authority to evaluate such shades of inculpation gives enormous power to the human rights investigator and his organization, power over fine mathematical gradations of right and wrong: much greater power than simpler, starker, less technologically advanced modes of assessing morality could endow.

  But this focus buries other questions, broader ones, about responsibility for the conflict as a whole. [ . . . ]

  The aim of Israel's various "operations" in Gaza is not just to take out specific people, but to cow a population. (Even the famous text messages that supposedly warn residents a bomb is about to blast their home have, as Gazans can tell you, at least as much to do with showing off the invisible, terrifying omniscience of a military surveillance system. We know where you are.) Unleashed with that intent behind them, weapons -- however "smart" -- will terrorize, not just target; the very targeting is an aspect of terror, a reminder of superior knowledge as well as superior means, but spillover is equally intrinsic to the effect. The message inevitably exceeds the "purely" military purpose, and the collateral damage itself becomes the point: a sign of exultant excess, the means drowning the end. You can't go on talking about equivalence without acknowledging Israel's military domination, its unmeasurable ability to destroy. And to cap its technological triumph, it is (and has been for forty years) the only state in a thousand-mile radius with nuclear bombs.

  Much more in this piece, such as the line: "The confrontation between popular rebellion and a rapacious settler society isn't just an old, cowboys-and-Indians story that we can look on with disinterest or restrained amusement." (One might note that the US-Indian wars are still taught in the US military academies, and US troops frequently refer to counterinsurgency operations as operating in "Injun territory." Judging from scattered quotes, it would seem that part of Israel's hasbara toolkit is to remind Americans of their struggle to conquer the Indians -- ancient history in the US but a vivid analogy in Israel.)

In local news, sorry to hear that Randy Brown died: a longtime newspaperman, journalism professor, and political dabbler, certainly a positive presence in Wichita. And here's a sampler of his columns. In other Wichita news today, the Eagle published Sen. Jerry Moran's op-ed on why it would be better to let the lesser prairie chicken go extinct than to inconvenience any Kansas oil or gas producers. And in the big money 4th Congressional District primary, the Eagle endorsed vile Mike Pompeo (R-Koch) over evil Todd Tiahrt (R-Boeing). I can't find the candidate questions box, but Tiahrt's professed desire to be a public servant was almost touching, until he added that bit about standing up to special interests. In his sixteen years in the House, no one was a bigger corporate whore. The best you can say for him is that he sold himself cheap, and not a lot of the money stuck to his fingers, so you could buy into his sincerity thing, if only you were part of the public he so dedicated himself to serving. Curiously, Tiahrt's gained in the polls recently by attacking Pompeo's defense of the NSA -- a position he almost certainly wouldn't have thought of had Pompeo not been so rabid on it. If I could ask a debate question it would be about where they stand on the Export-Import Bank: the tea party (and most likely the Kochs) are all agitated against it, but the main beneficiary is Boeing -- and even though Boeing abandoned Wichita, I can't imagine "Tanker Todd" parting with them.

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