It’s the Formation, Stupid…

Posted on March 9, 2008 by Tony


Stevie and El Nino having fun at last

Finally, Liverpool fans have reason to believe again, even if our beloved football club is currently the object of a bizarre game of chicken between rival billionaire investors. On the pitch, we’re finally producing the goods, in a sometimes poetic, sometimes tidily efficient manner that suggests the players have finally found the confidence to prevail and kill games off. It’s too late now, to actually win the thing, but there are glimmers, finally, of a side that plays like champions.

One reason, of course, is the fact that Fernando Torres is such a ruthlessly efficient finisher that even when he showed up for work sick, last Wednesday against West Ham, he completed a hatrick because of the half-chances that came his way. With a striker like that in the ranks, you can always pull a victory out of the hat in the dying seconds. He has, in every sense, made all the difference this season — without his goals we’d not be in with a shout even for Champion’s League qualification. Rotation be damned, Torres needs to play whenever he’s fit. And, of course, his performance has revealed two other uncomfortable truths: None of the rest of our strikers, Peter Crouch, Dirk Kuyt and Andrei Voronin, is fit to lead the line. Kuyt remains very useful as a support striker, his tireless running and ability to create chances for his more illustrious partner invaluable — particularly in our new formation. (See more below, because I think the formation is the key.) Crouch is valuable only as a kind of novelty act, an impact substitute who can change the game when introduced late on and cause havoc in a settled defense by the Route 1 options he offers. But much as I love the lad, Crouchinho doesn’t have the pace to unsettle top-drawer defenses. He’ll have to get used to the bench if he wants a future at Anfield, because in the new system, he doesn’t have much to offer in a first-choice lineup.

Other individuals have stepped up their game late in the season: Stevie G is finally enjoying himself, having established the kind of magic intuitive partnership with Torres that he once had with Michael Owen, and that will produce bucketloads of goals. Xabi Alonso is back, and, I would argue, indispensable to the new system — I know there’s going to be a strong move from Real Madrid to tempt him away, but he really is essential to our new system and must be kept at all costs.

And, of course, Javier Mascherano has been immense all season — Torres would get the nod for the greatest bag of goals for the club since Robbie Fowler, and deservedly so — but I can’t help thinking that El Jefecito should be a contender for our player of the season.

Of the wide players, Ryan Babel has made the difference in recent matches, proving that Harry Kewell should be sent to the knacker’s yard as he presents a real threat on the left that can beat men for pace and guile, and score goals (albeit only when he transfers the ball onto his right foot, which smarter full backs are going to figure out quickly and force him outside). Yossi Benayoun is a mixed back, although also a useful impact sub. Jermaine Pennant, not yet convincing, although a lot better now than a year ago.

We’ve suffered badly without Danny Agger, the sort of mobile central defender who can bring the ball out of defense and pass like Alonso rather than like Carra. (Agger, like Alan Hansen, is the sort of center half who would be more likely to score with his feet than with his head.) Sami Hyppia has been a marvelous servant to the club, and has not failed us, but his lack of pace at 34 has forced us to defend very deep, to our cost… Not surprising that the quick adaptation of Martin Skrtel to the English game has seen us look more convincing when he’s alongside Carra than when Sami is. Steve Finnan and John Arne Riise look to have become squad players rather than first-teamers, now, having to make way for Alvaro Arbeloa and Fabio Aurelio.

The real difference in recent weeks, though, has been that Rafa has finally settled on a formation that gets the most out of his best available players — a 4-2-3-1. Having Masch and Xabi patrol at the base of the midfield not only screens the defense, it allows Xabi to do what he does best and orchestrate our game, setting its pace and rhythm with his passing. It also resolves the problem of how to play him, Masch and Stevie in the same side without forcing Stevie on to the right — by giving Stevie the free role behind the strikers, a role he is clearly relishing. The attacking trident allows the winger on the dead side of play to drift in to support Torres, along with Stevie. And we’ve seen plenty of games now in which Arbeloa and Kuyt, and Aurelio and Babel, have combined outstandingly going forward. When we’re on the attack, this formation quickly gets five men in and around the opposition box — Torres, the wide men (Kuyt and Babel), Stevie and one of the full backs, with Xabi and Masch securing the perimeter. Besides the return to form of some of the players, that system — versions of which have been used by Chelsea in their best Mourinho times, Man United, sometimes Arsenal — as well as by France in the last World Cup — has made all the difference in recent weeks. It also makes a lot more sense of rotation, because there’s a more clearly defined system into which the players can be slotted (as when Lucas replaced Masch last weekend).

At the end of the storm, there’s a golden sky… and we’ll get there with Masch, Xabi, Stevie and Torres (not to mention Carra and Agger) as the spine our our 4-2-3-1…

Posted in Glancing Headers | 9 Comments

Is Israel-Iran Enmity Irreversible?

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Tony

Two of my favorite commentators on the Middle East, my friends Trita Parsi and Daniel Levy recently appeared together on a panel discussing Iran-Israel relations, and revealed some of the critically important insights that make them such indispensable reads. Watch higlights below:

You can download a full video of the event here.

And don’t forget to pay regular attention to the web sites of both Daniel and Trita; these are young pundits well worth reading!

Posted in Shameless Cronyism | 3 Comments

How Chavez Eats and Keeps His Cake

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Tony

The Times is a new daily news venture edited by Ray Hartley, who consistently provides some of the best commentary on where South Africa is headed. They asked me to do a three-part series on the changing global power balance and its implications. This is part three, in which I explain why regimes that are militantly at odds with the U.S. — think Chavez in Venezuela, or even the Islamic Republic of Iran — are able to routinely defy Washington because they have something to offer that Washington needs. (Oil, in the case of Venezuela, and in Tehran’s case, the prospect of stability in Iraq). And what that tells us is that for a host of more powerful and less ideologically committed regimes in the developing world — from Turkey to Brazil, Indonesia to South Africa — there is an unprecedented opportunity to advance their own interest by refraining from aligning themselves with any single bloc, but instead cutting deals with various power centers.

It seems rather odd, by today’s standards, that the United States once cared enough to (at least covertly) seek to shape political outcomes in Australia or East Timor. Even more bizarre, and horrific, the idea that it would sacrifice 50,000 of its own fighting men and kill more than a million Vietnamese in a war whose strategic rationale was based around such strategic objectives as preventing the Soviet Union from having access a deep-water port in the Pacific. The Soviets got Cam Ranh Bay, and it didn’t make any difference to the global strategic equation. And the Vietnamese Communist Party regime is today counted
by Washington as a friend and a good trade and investment opportunity. The Cold War, however, had cast the world in binary terms. “Non-alignment,” as far as Washington was concerned (and Moscow, too) was simply a euphemism for siding with the Soviet camp, and no corner of the planet was exempt from the superpower contest.

Despite its ideological patina, the contest between Washington and Moscow set little store by the domestic political arrangements of potential allies. India, the world’s largest democracy, was closer to the Soviet Union, while generations of Pakistani military dictators have been coddled by Washington. Henry Kissinger forged an anti-Soviet alliance against Moscow with communist China, and in the Reagan years the U.S. even supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia because the government that ousted it — and put an end to the killing fields — had been installed by Soviet-aligned Vietnam. Vicious thugs and
kleptocrats all over the world were sustained by their alliance with either Washington or Moscow.

Even the apartheid regime in South Africa could count on the support of the Reagan Administration, because Pretoria was a reliable ally against the Soviets — even willing to commit its own forces in support of U.S. covert action to prevent the Soviet-aligned MPLA from taking power in Angola. The ANC, in Washington’s view, was little more than a cat’s paw for Moscow.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall changed everything, of course; that much quickly became clear in South Africa. The apartheid regime got the message that it could no longer count on U.S. support, and the regime began negotiating with the ANC, suddenly deemed kosher by Washington. The ANC took power in a post-Cold War moment, where abiding by the “Washington Consensus” on free markets and social spending was the only game in
town for a government needing to attract foreign investment to fuel an economic development program.

But the very spread of unbridled capitalism, so vigorously promoted by Washington and enabled by the end of the Cold War, has also brought on a decline in U.S. strategic influence. China’s breakneck-speed growth, for example, has breathed new vigor into commodity markets that had seemed to be dying a slow death at the end of the 1980s.
Industrialization requires energy, metals, timber, fibers, minerals, new food supplies to growing cities, and more. Suddenly commodity exporters found their struggling
export economies of Africa and Latin America, buoyed by new customers with boundless appetites. Had oil remained at around $20 a barrel, Russia would be the same basket
case it was during the Yeltsin era; Venezuela would be nothing like the regional power player in Latin America, while Iran’s regime would collapse at home; and U.S. banks would not be helped through their credit crisis by massive injection of investment from the sovereign funds of the Gulf states.

The principle factor pushing up oil prices up over the past five years has been the demand generated by expanding industrialization, and growth in industrial output has both fueled not only by the spendthrift habits of American consumers, but also by the growing consumer demand generated by economic growth in those industrializing countries where the middle class is rapidly expanding. As global stock markets have teetered in recent weeks, the buzzword in financial capitals has been “decoupling” — the idea that the worst consequences of the U.S. recession, which would traditionally have taken the whole
capitalist world down with it, may be offset by the growing strength of domestic markets in China, India and other “emerging” countries.

The reordering of the global economic picture over the past decade has opened opportunities for countries of the south, both economic and political, which simply didn’t exist previously.

Today, editorialists in the U.S. sniff that African governments are being given too many opportunities to buck Western tutelage on good governance (and on limiting social spending) because China is offering massive loans and investments without the conditions typically attached by Western lenders.

This expanding sense of economic possibility — as well as the declining ability of the West to impose its writ through the application of military force that has been so visible in Iraq,
Afghanistan and Lebanon — has also changed the geopolitical game. When the U.S. demanded support for its position on Iraq at the United Nations Security Council, it made clear to Chile, for example, that a coveted trade deal was at stake if the Chileans refused to back Washington. Same thing with Mexico’s coveted immigration law changes in the U.S. To no avail. Longtime allies defied the U.S. and got away with it, signaling the onset of a geopolitical era in which the nations of the south face unprecedented economic and political choice. It’s no longer a case of choosing between the U.S. or some rival power
bloc. Why not both?

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez may dedicate himself to challenging Washington’s influence everywhere he finds it in Latin America, but he also sells the U.S. almost two thirds of the oil he exports to finance his revolution. Today, the smart mid-level emerging country has growing relations not only with the U.S. but also with China, Russia, the European Union and some of the oil states of the Middle East, as well as with Brazil, India,
Turkey and a host of similarly placed nations. Open for business with all, beholden to none.

There was a moment at the end of the Cold War when it seemed that unbridled U.S. hegemony would define the next era. But that moment has passed. “Non-alignment,” or rather multiple alignments, have become the norm in a world without superpower blocs.

Posted in Situation Report | 7 Comments

‘Lost’ Entries on Rootless Cosmopolitan

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Tony

A number of readers have drawn my attention to the fact that a number of previously published posts on this site are no longer available. That’s because they missed the boat in our migration to a new server. Don’t worry, they still exist, and we’re working on securing them safe passage. But if you have any favorites you’re looking for and are getting a “not available” message, please post a note below, to help me build an inventory of what needs to be retrieved.
Cheers
Tony

Posted in Housekeeping | Leave a comment

A Stateless Dinner

Posted on March 4, 2008 by Tony


For dinner tonight, I made the following:

A kind of brown-rice pilaf that involved sauteeing onion, garlic and lacinato kale (chopped), removing from the pan and then sauteeing a mix of shitake, oyster and cremini mushrooms with a squeeze of lemon juice and some thyme; when those are soft and yummy add cubes of tofu (always press your tofu dry between two plates, with a weight on top, pouring off the water; it creates an airiness inside that allows them to far better absorb the flavors you attach) that have been marinated in a mix of soy sauce, fish sauce, mirin, lemon, garlic and olive oil for a half hour or so. When these have cooked for five minutes or so, add the kale/onion mix, two handfuls of pignoli nuts, and about the same amount of cooked brown rice as the size of the kale-mushroom-tofu mix in the pan — and stir all the ingredients together. I served it with butternut roasted with a sprinkle of cinammon and Sahadi’s Yemeni spice mix.

It was delicious, but it had no name — or nationality. It was something that evolved from considering the available ingredients in my fridge, and the influences of the myriad cuisines that one samples all the time in New York.

What got me thinking about this was this week’s Newsweek piece on Chinese food, based on Jennifer 8. Lee’s book that shows that what passes for “Chinese” in the U.S. wouldn’t really be recognizable in China. There are some interesting notes in there about the impact of immigration policy on the pattern of Chinese restaurant formation, and also some pretty silly observations — “In the 1950s,” she says, “if you ate Chinese food, China itself seemed a lot less threatening.” Uh…. Never mind. (Just picture Nixon and Kissinger in the White House pigging out on General Tso before launching the opening to China…)

But the basic point she’s making is hardly unique to Chinese food; it applies to most “Diaspora” cuisines. There’s no such thing as “Italian” in Italy, only regional cuisines to which the traditional American-Italian menu would look a little bizarre. I know the same is true for the Russian restaurants of New York, my friend Yuri cracks up laughing when he finds Ukrainian borscht, Polish stuffed cabbage and Uzbek-Jewish plov on the same menu. Don’t get me started on Jewish food, there really is no such thing — we simply took what we liked from the cultures in which we lived, according to our means (which is why the well-to-do Sephardim dine at the sumptuous spice table of the Levant, while us Ostjuden found comfort in such bland and stodgy favorites as gefilte fish, and traditional Baltic fare such as stuffed cabbage etc.)

And then there’s “Indian,” which in the West typically means a polyglot of Bengali and Punjabi delicacies, often bowdlerized and adapted to the West — and some exclusively Western imposters such as mulligatawny soup (invented in the kitchens of the P&O shipping line) and chicken tikka masala which was invented in Birmingham and exported to India for the first time in 1994.

Cuisines have always evolved through patterns of trade and migration, and while Ms. Lee is certainly correct that there’s nothing really “Chinese” about Chinese in the U.S., what she may want to consider is how exclusively Chinese is Chinese (if there is such a thing) in China.

Now go try my recipe, or better still, adapt it and let me know what you discover.

Posted in Cuisine | 13 Comments

U.S. Pours Gasoline on Gaza Fires

Posted on March 4, 2008 by Tony


Once upon a time, Israelis and Palestinians looked to the U.S. to intervene at moments of heightened confrontation to mediate between the two sides and contain the damage. The Bush Administration, however, has proved entirely incapable of playing this role, because its own diplomatic efforts are hidebound by the requirements of its own war on Hamas.

Condi Rice is sticking doggedly to that script, even though all the other players are making clear that the game is up. The New York Times tells us, for example, that U.S. officials are worried that efforts to broker a cease-fire to end the carnage in Gaza might undermine Washington’s priority, which is not to restore peace, but to isolate and eliminate Hamas: “Ms. Rice wants to avoid the word ‘cease-fire’ because administration officials believe that a negotiated cease-fire between Israel and Hamas — which the United States and Israel view as a terrorist organization — would legitimize Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinian people,” the Times reports. “The fear, administration officials said, is that a negotiated cease-fire would likely undermine Mr. Abbas and make it look like Hamas is the entity with which Israel and the West should be negotiating, and not Mr. Abbas.”

Ah. Cease-fire talks would “legitimize” Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinian people. Right. That would be the Palestinian people who, in a democratic election voted Hamas candidates into 56% of the seats in the Palestinian legislature. Their legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinian people is well-established. (And just look how much talking to the Americans has done for the legitimacy of Mahmoud Abbas!) A cease-fire would “make it look” like Hamas is the entity with which Israel and the West should be negotiating? What planet are these U.S. officials on? What’s the point of peace talks if they don’t involve the party that, on the Palestinian side, is doing most of the fighting? Mahmoud Abbas commands no forces currently fighting Israel, so, simple logic would dictate that the Palestinian entity with whom a truce will have to be negotiated will have to be Hamas. You know, like, duh!

The naivete that Rice displays in support of a policy that has plainly failed because of its fundamentally flawed premise, can be breathtaking: “We need to continue to work to make sure that everyone understands that Hamas is doing what we expected,” she told the Times. “Using attacks on Israel to try to arrest a peace process in which they have nothing to gain.” Diplomacy .101 would teach you that a “peace process” in which one of the key protagonists has “nothing to gain” is irretrievably doomed. Peace processes only work when it can be demonstrated to each side that it has more to gain from ending hostilities than it could gain by fighting on. The fact that Rice is saying it is in Hamas’s best interest to keep lobbing rockets at Israel is a tacit admission that the peace process envisaged by the Bush Administration is a delusion.

And the fact that Rice and her Administration have nothing to offer in the Gaza crisis is confirmed by former Clinton Administration ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, who endorses the notion that talking to Hamas undermines Abbas, and therefore cannot be countenanced. (Uh, chaps, you may want to consider the fact that Abbas has been fatally undermined not by any conversations anyone has had with Hamas, but by the fact that he has nothing — zero, nada, zip — to show for his years of diplomatic engagement with Israel under the ministrations of the Bush Administration.) No, Indyk tells the New York Times, “Excluding (Hamas) doesn’t work, and including them doesn’t work, either. So what do you do? This is a situation that does not lend itself to a sensible policy.”

No, sir, that’s not true, and throwing up your hands because you won’t talk to Hamas until they formally recognize Israel (which, BTW, Abbas’s PLO did only five years after the Oslo Accords were negotiated, and even then not to the satisfactio of many Israelis) and “renounce” violence, is reprehensible abrogation of responsibility. There is a sensible policy, but it begins by renouncing the flawed premise of the current one, i.e. that Hamas cannot be engaged and must be isolated and eliminated.

It’s not as if Hamas hasn’t declared itself ready for a truce, and made moves to pursue a cease-fire with Israel. And many Israeli officials are pressing Israel to take up the offer. Far-sighted Israelis, of course, don’t allow themselves the luxury of adopting the Bush Administration’s militant outlook on Hamas: A recent opinion poll actually found that two thirds of Israelis actually support negotiating a truce with Hamas. But for Rice and the Bush Administration, such a pragmatic course of action would require acknowledging that Hamas is an intractable reality despite Washington’s best efforts of the Bush Administration to destroy it. And admitting defeat is not something that comes easily to the current White House.

Nor is the current standoff in Gaza a crisis that simply crept up on the Bush Administration; it was a situation created by the failed coup attempt authored by the U.S. last June in the hope of reversing the decision of the Palestinian electorate.

Last May, already, alerted by materials that were surfacing in the blogosphere and the Middle Eastern press, I wrote a post (linked here to a copy from another site, because it got stuck in my migration from one server to another — recovery efforts are underway!) about the coup plan that would have U.S.-backed strongman Mohammed Dahlan topple the elected government. I followed up last June, once the coup had failed, with a piece that concluded:

Now, Hamas has made clear that it is an intractable reality, although the fighting has likely greatly increased the balance within the organization in favor of the more confrontational element. And Dahlan turned out to be a Paper Pinochet.

Still, given their spectacular inability to comprehend the reasons for their defeats in the Palestinian territory, I don’t expect the U.S. to begin engaging pragmatically with the reality of Hamas as an indispensable component of the Palestinian leadership. Instead, given the endless capacity for self-delusion of the people running U.S. Middle East policy, I fully expect to see the U.S. rush resources to Egypt where Dahlan can be reunited with his scattered forces in preparation for his next historic role — at the head of a “Bay of Pigs” type invasion of Gaza.

The nuts and bolts of that disastrous coup attempt, authored by Condi Rice and Elliot Abrams, is now the subject of an outstanding investigative piece in Vanity Fair. David Rose’s piece, based on confidential documents and U.S. and Palestinian sources provides a gripping account of the U.S. effort to reverse the result of an election it had demanded. (My favorite part is how Condi issues orders to Abbas, instructing him to dissolve the elected government, and giving him two weeks in which to do it, settling for four when he asks for more time; then sending an emissary to scold him when he hasn’t met her deadline… And they think talking to Hamas is going to erode this man’s legitimacy! The man has lost most of his legitimacy even within the ranks of Fatah precisely because of the nature of his relationship with the Americans, which Rose reveals in great detail.)

Rose’s account of the botched coup attempt demonstrates exactly why the Bush Administration today has had about as much relevance to the search for a credible Israeli-Palestinian peace process as Spongebob Squarepants has to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
As former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, who believes Israel should negotiate with Hamas, puts it, “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the only one in which the U.S. is still maintaining an ideological approach.” And therein lies the tragedy.

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 43 Comments

South Africa’s Racist Present

Posted on March 2, 2008 by Tony

Guest Column: Sean Jacobs. When I read the reports a couple of days ago about a bunch of racist white students at a university in South Africa torturing black service staff members and then posting a video of their exploits on the internet as a warning against integrating the residences, and you wonder why Jacob Zuma fans still sing old songs about machine guns. After all the abuse that black people have had to swallow from white racists in South Africa, and then have to find it in their hearts to forgive and move on, and then to still be confronted with this savagery from a bunch of white thugs who seem to have been so confident of their impunity that they posted the evidence themselves… it’s pretty sickening. What would Gandhi do? I don’t know. But I was glad that Rootless Cosmopolitan occasional guest columnist Sean Jacobs had something to say on the matter. (He first published this in the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog.)

South Africa’s Ugly Present
By Sean Jacobs

It will be interesting to see over the next few days how western (and
South African) media (including South Africa’s racially skewed
blogosphere) will report on the racist incident on a university campus
in South Africa’s Free State (sic) province.

If you have not seen or heard about it yet, a group of white students
forced black staff to eat food that had been urinated on.

If the BBC’s tone is anything to go by, get ready for some apologetic
reporting.

The BBC used scare quotes to describe the incident. As a friend
reminded me, why, in reporting an appalling recent incidence of abuse
of blacks by whites in South Africa, did the BBC opt to use quotes? The
headline reads “Outcry in SA over ‘racist’ video”. So which is it – is
it racist? Or is it merely “racist”?

I hope I am proven wrong, but I doubt we will see a serious discussion
and reportage about how racial apartheid lives on in South Africa’s
rural provinces, its small city campuses (like the University of the
Free State) and schools, as well as its small towns and farming
districts where things have not changed much.

Last June, I visited the district in Small Karoo (Klein Karoo in
Afrikaans) where my mother was born. She’s the daughter of farm workers
who moved to Cape Town as a young woman in the 1960s to do domestic
work for whites. We witnessed the still-feudal labour and living
conditions that still exist there, and are very similar, she reminded
me, to when she was a child.

I am also reminded of a trip I took with three other friends (two black
and one white American) to the Oppikoppi music festival in the North
West Province a few years back (this was after 2000). We were settling
in at the camp ground when a car with the flag of the 19th century
white Afrikaner republic drove past our camping spot and the occupants,
looking in our direction, gestured: “Wat maak die kaffers hier?”
(Literally translated: “What are the niggers doing here?”)

We also now learn that the racist students at the Free State University
were not just a few bad apples. The case highlights a greater,
institutional culture at the university that tolerated this kind of
behaviour. That black people had been complaining for a while about
racist incidents. These included “… an advert on the university
intranet system requesting a roommate who ‘should not be black and
should be Christian’, dehumanising initiation practices and lecturers
making fun of a student with an albinism condition.”

Watch over the next few days as the victims get blamed. For being the
“collateral damage” of “racial tensions” on the campus, or the result
of too much integration of the university’s residences by “pushy” black
students. And the protests already under way will be scrutinised; the
behaviour of protesters and protest leaders will be judged in terms of
how “responsible” they are in keeping black “anger” in check. There
will be calls for the situation to calm down so we can get things back
to normal.

Some will also hope, like the “liberal” South African Institute for
Race Relations has already done, that this mess will go away, as it
bedevils “race relations” and South Africa’s “reputation”.

What they mean is that the current set-up, by which South Africa is the
most unequal country in the world along racial lines, will be
threatened. As if the current set-up is the best thing South Africa can
afford. My wife has a phrase to describe white liberal sensibilities in
South Africa: “Freedom is [the] freedom to get in line behind us.”

Already in some quarters (the “racial tensions” framers like the leader
of the “opposition” Democratic Alliance) there are attempts to give
equal weight to the University of the Free State incident and the
recent murder of four black people by a young white man in the
country’s northwest on the one hand, and on the other the frivolous
charge by white journalists that they were denied entrance to a meeting
by the private Forum of Black Journalists. (On the latter issue, there
is nothing wrong in principle with a black journalists’ forum, given
the history of that profession in South Africa. That is not the same as
having an opinion about the people currently running it.)

The larger context is, of course, that it has become an article of
faith inside and outside South Africa (and in some quarters within the
country, especially among white liberals), as well as among those with
an interest in developments there (including foreign journalists),
that:

• Overt racism is a thing of the past.

• That the changes from white minority control to a more equitable
society are moving too fast.

• That blacks expect too much.

• That the changes since 1994 are all “reverse racism”.

• That the current state of affairs should be laid at the door of the
“black” government.

Yes, it is true that every day in South Africa, black people are not
forced to eat food laced with urine by whites, dragged behind trucks,
fed to lions or murdered for no other reason than they are not white.

It is also true that not all whites act like this.

And it is certainly the case that since 1994 South Africa has been
governed by a democratic government. The faces of the national
government, and the majority of provincial and city governments today,
are black faces, be they Thabo Mbeki at national level, Beatrice
Marshoff at provincial level in the Free State or Gertrude Mothupi,
mayor of Bloemfontein, the city where the University of the Free State
is situated.

Since 1994 the size and relative wealth of Africans, and blacks in
general, as a class have grown considerably, whether personified by the
success of communications magnate Cyril Ramaphosa or mining
entrepreneur Patrice Motsepe. As the Guardian reported in 2004:

“A decade later, according to the department of trade and industry,
black people have moved from zero to 10% of company ownership and
occupy 15% of skilled positions. The richest black people’s incomes
have risen 30% and you see them spending it in air-conditioned shopping
malls and pricey restaurants.”

This is encouraging, but note, however, that blacks comprise about
80-85% of the population.

So while it is true that blacks and whites at the top are integrated
(and the Forum for Black Journalists “dispute” reflects the kind of
politics of this “new” non-racial elite), outside of this small
stratum, the worlds of whites and black South Africans are, to a great
extent, still separate ones.

The rate of intermarriage is negligible; integrated neighbourhoods like
those in soap operas are, with a few urban exceptions, quite literally
a fiction. Working together in an office does not qualify as
integration.

Today, 61% of blacks are considered poor, as compared to 1% of whites.
According to government statistics, about one in ten African adults
suffers from malnourishment and at least one in four African children
suffer from stunted growth. Only 17% of “coloured” households and 10%
of African households earn incomes to put them in into the top income
quintile. By contrast, 65% of white households are in the top quintile.

And while crime is rampant, and does not discriminate on the basis of
race, the majority of victims of crime are black.

The University of the Free State and this state of affairs are the real
racism(s) in South Africa.

Posted in Guest Columns, The Whole World's Africa | 21 Comments

Israel in Deadly Denial

Posted on March 2, 2008 by Tony


Guest Column: Uri Avnery As dozens of Palestinian civilians are killed in Israel’s fierce retaliation for the latest round of rocket fire, the veteran Israeli peace campaigner Uri Avnery discusses the inevitable — it may take the death of hundreds or even thousands more Palestinians, and scores more Israelis, but in the end, Israel will talk to Hamas.

The Bush-Olmert policy, since Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections two years ago, has been a catastrophic failure. Attempts to cajole the Palestinians through collective punishment (economic and military) into overthrowing Hamas have, if anything, strengthened its hand — and the collaboration of the Fatah leadership with many of these efforts has simply accelerated the political eclipse of the preferred Palestinian interlocutors of the U.S. and Israel.

Clearly, it is the duty of the international community through the UN to protect civilians in conflict situations, and that requires restraining Israel’s attacks on Gaza, and brokering a ceasefire with representative leaders of the Gaza Palestinians to prevent further rocket attacks on Israeli population centers. That means tearing up the absurd Bush Administration policy that has been in effect for two years ago, when we warned on this site that it was time for the U.S. to get real on Hamas.

Only a negotiated cease-fire between Israel and Hamas can bring the carnage in Gaza to an end, and the current violence is not a coherent policy, simply an appeasing of the worst instincts of a mob baying for vengeance. Israel’s deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai last week threatened to unleash a “shoah” (the Hebrew word used to refer to the Holocaust) in Gaza in response to Palestinian rocket fire. (When Mahmoud Ahmedinajad says things a lot less explicit that are deemed to threaten Israel’s elimination, he arouses the ire of the international community and is scolded by the U.N. Secretary General; somehow Vilnai’s threat has passed largely without comment.)

Vilnai’s statement, although he scrambled to explain that he used the word simply to connote its literal meaning, “disaster,” seems to answer the question posed last year by former Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, about the increasingly virulent strain of racism that has emerged in mainstream Israeli political discourse. “I hear voices coming out of Sderot …. We will destroy and kill and expel. And there is a transferist discourse in the government …. We have crossed so many red lines in the past few years. And then you ask yourself what the next red lines that we cross will be.”

In the midst of the fury, Uri Avnery’s view is a welcome dose of calm rationality.

Good Morning, Hamas

By Uri Avnery

We Israelis live in a world of ghosts and monsters. We do not conduct a war against living persons and real organizations, but against devils and demons which are out to destroy us. It is a war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, between absolute good and absolute evil. That’s how it looks to us, and that’s how it looks to the other side, too.

Let’s try to bring this war down from virtual spheres to the solid ground of reality. There can be no reasonable policy, nor even rational discussion, if we do not escape from the realm of horrors and nightmares.

After the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, Gush Shalom said that we must speak with them. Here are some of the questions that were showered on me from all sides:

– Do you like Hamas?

Not at all. I have very strong secular convictions. I oppose any ideology that mixes politics with religion – whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, in Israel, the Arab world or America.

That does not prevent me from speaking with Hamas people, as I have spoken with other people with whom I don’t agree. It has not prevented me from being a guest at their homes, to exchange views with them and to try to understand them. Some of them I liked, some I did not.

– It is said that Hamas was created by Israel. Is that true?

Israel did not “create” Hamas, but it certainly helped it along in its initial stages.

During the first 20 years of the occupation, the Israeli leadership saw the PLO as its chief enemy. That’s why it favored Palestinian organizations that, it was thought, could undermine the PLO. One example of this was Ariel Sharon’s ludicrous attempt to set up Arab “village leagues” that would act as agents of the occupation.

The Israeli intelligence community, which in the last 60 years has failed almost every time in forecasting events in the Arab world, also failed this time. They believed that the emergence of an Islamic organization would weaken the secular PLO. While the military administration of the occupied territories was throwing into prison any Palestinian who engaged in political activity – even for peace – it did not touch the religious activists. The mosque was the only place where Palestinians could get together and plan political action.

This policy was, of course, based on a complete misunderstanding of Islam and Palestinian reality.

Hamas was officially founded immediately after the outbreak of the first intifada at the end of 1987. The Israeli Security Service (known as Shabak or Shin Bet) handled it with kid gloves. Only a year later did it arrest the founder, Sheik Ahmad Yassin.

It is ironic that the Israeli leadership is now supporting the PLO in the hope of undermining Hamas. There is no better evidence for the stupidity of our “experts” as far as Arab matters are concerned, stemming from both arrogance and contempt. Hamas is far more dangerous to Israel than the PLO ever was.

– Did the Hamas election victory show that Islam was on the rise among the Palestinian people?
Not necessarily. The Palestinian people did not become more religious overnight.

True, there is a slow process of Islamization throughout the region, from Turkey to Yemen and from Morocco to Iraq. It is the reaction of the young Arab generation to the failure of secular nationalism to solve their national and social problems. But this did not cause the earthquake in Palestinian society.

– If so, why did Hamas win?

There were several reasons. The main one was the growing conviction of the Palestinians that they would never get anything from the Israelis by non-violent means. After the murder of Yassir Arafat, many Palestinians believed that if they elected Mahmoud Abbas as the new president, he would get from Israel and the US the things they would not give Arafat. They found out that the opposite was happening: No real negotiations, while the settlements were getting larger every day.

They told themselves: if peaceful means don’t work, there is no alternative to violent means. And if there be war, there are no braver warriors than Hamas.

Also: the corruption in the higher Fatah echelons had reached such dimensions, that the majority of Palestinians were disgusted. As long as Arafat was alive, the corruption was somehow tolerated, because everybody knew that Arafat himself was honest, and his towering importance for the national struggle overrode the shortcomings of his administration. After Arafat, tolerating the corruption became impossible. Hamas, on the other hand, was considered clean, and its leaders incorrupt. The social and educational Hamas institutions, mainly financed by Saudi Arabia, were widely respected.

The splits within Fatah also helped the Hamas candidates.

Hamas, of course, had not taken part in previous elections, but it was generally assumed – even by Hamas people themselves – that they represented only about 15-25 percent of the electorate.

– Can one reasonably expect the Palestinians to overthrow Hamas themselves?

As long as the occupation goes on, there is no chance of that. An Israeli general said this week that if the Israeli army stopped operating in the West Bank, Hamas would replace Abbas there too.

The administration of Mahmoud Abbas stands on feet of clay – American and Israeli feet. If the Palestinians finally lose what confidence they still have in Abbas, his power would crumble.

– But how can one reach a settlement with an organization that declares that it will never recognize Israel and whose charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state?

All this matter of “recognition” is nonsense, a pretext for avoiding a dialogue. We do not need “recognition” from anybody. When the United States started a dialogue with Vietnam, it did not demand to be recognized as an Anglo-Saxon, Christian and capitalist state.

If A signs an agreement with B, it means that A recognizes B. All the rest is hogwash.

And in the same matter: The fuss over the Hamas charter is reminiscent of the ruckus about the PLO charter, in its time. That was a quite unimportant document, which was used by our representatives for years as an excuse to refuse to talk with the PLO. Heaven and earth were moved to compel the PLO to annul it. Who remembers that today? The acts of today and tomorrow are important, the papers of yesterday are not.

– What should we speak with Hamas about?

First of all, about a cease-fire. When a wound is bleeding, the blood loss must be stemmed before the wound itself can be treated.

Hamas has many times proposed a cease-fire, Tahidiyeh (“Quiet”) in Arabic. This would mean a stop to all hostilities: Qassams and Grad rockets and mortar shells from Hamas and the other organizations, “targeted liquidations”, military incursions and starvation from Israel.

The negotiations should be conducted by the Egyptians, particularly since they would have to open the border between the Gaza Strip and Sinai. Gaza must get back its freedom of communication with the world by land, sea and air,

If Hamas demands the extension of the cease-fire to the West Bank, too, this should also be discussed. That would necessitate a Hamas-Fatah-Israel trialogue.

– Won’t Hamas exploit the cease-fire to arm itself?

Certainly. And so will Israel. Perhaps we shall succeed, at long last, in finding a defense against short-range rockets.

– If the cease-fire holds, what will be the next step?

An armistice, or Hudnah in Arabic.

Hamas would have a problem in signing a formal agreement with Israel, because Palestine is a Waqf – a religious endowment. (That arose, at the time, for political reasons. When Caliph Omar conquered Palestine, he was afraid that his generals would divide the country among themselves, as they had already done in Syria. So he declared it to be the property of Allah. This resembles the attitude of our own religious people, who maintain that it is a sin to give away any part of the country, because God has expressly promised it to us.)

Hudnah is an alternative to peace. It is a concept deeply embedded in the Islamic tradition. The prophet Muhammad himself agreed a Hudnah with the rulers of Mecca, with whom he was at war after his flight from Mecca to Medina. (By the way, before the Hudnah expired, the inhabitants of Mecca adopted Islam and the prophet entered the town peacefully.) Since it has a religious sanction, its violation by Muslim believers is impossible.

A Hudnah can last for dozens of years and be extended without limit. A long Hudnah is in practice peace, if the relations between the two parties create a reality of peace.

– So a formal peace is impossible?

There is a solution for this, too. Hamas has declared in the past that it does not object to Abbas conducting peace negotiations, on condition that the agreement reached is put to a plebiscite. If the Palestinian people confirm it, Hamas declared that it will accept the people’s decision.

– Why would Hamas accept it?

Like every Palestinian political force, Hamas aspires to power in the Palestinian state that will be set up along the 1967 borders. For that it needs to enjoy the confidence of the majority. There is no doubt whatsoever that the vast majority of the Palestinian people want a state of their own and peace. Hamas knows this well. It will do nothing that would push the majority of the people away.

– And what is the place of Abbas in all this?

He should be pressured to come to an agreement with Hamas, along the lines of the earlier agreement concluded in Mecca. We believe that Israel has a clear interest in negotiating with a Palestinian government that includes the two big movements, so that the agreement reached would be accepted by almost all sections of the Palestinian people.

– Is time working for us?

For many years, Gush Shalom was telling the Israeli public: let’s make peace with the secular leadership of Yasser Arafat, because otherwise the national conflict will turn into a religious conflict. Unfortunately, this prophecy, too, has come true.

Those who did not want the PLO, got Hamas. If we don’t come to terms with Hamas, we shall be faced with more extreme Islamic organizations, like the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Posted in Situation Report | 106 Comments

Obama and the ‘Jewish Vote’

Posted on February 27, 2008 by Tony


Rootless Cosmopolitan is not in the habit of endorsing political candidates, but I was reminded of the essence of my own credo in a piece last week in Newsweek by the wonderful ethno-musicologist Robert Farris Thompson, writing of his love of Mambo and other Afro-Caribbean musical styles:

Mambo distills their cross-cultural insights, leading us, for example, to a Puerto Rican man who learned to live among the Anglos, Jews, Italians and Irish. In a wonderful book on his life, “Benjy Lopez: A Picaresque Tale of Emigration and Return,” by Barry B. Levine, he shared this insight: “Imagine if you were twenty years old and didn’t feel inferior to anybody or better than anybody. When you treat everybody the same, people open up to you.” Those are words I have tried to live by.

Those words also capture precisely what seems to inspire many around the globe about Barack Obama. My good friend Michael Weeder — Father Michael Weeder, an Anglican priest and longtime revolutionary in my native Cape Town — sent me an email at about the same time in which he noted the following:

Obama is the child both of Africa, who was robbed of her own, and of those whose aspirations were embodied in the Mayflower. A child of our continent in the White House … this is not just a North American election, no… we should all have that bloodied vote. I see how Americans are stepping up to the plate of human justice and solidarity.
Out of the whore of Babylon comes something new as the sloping Beast pauses, en route to Jerusalem. Perhaps a new day is possible.

The reason people around the world are excited about the possibility of an Obama presidency is that they see in him a person who appears to live by that credo “neither inferior, nor superior, to anyone.” And that’s in marked contrast to the arrogance with which every U.S. president of the past quarter century has addressed the world.

Hillary Clinton is so imprisoned in this haughty arrogance that she mocks Obama for even suggesting that the starting point in dealing with Iran, or Cuba is to talk to the adversary and understand his concerns. Nope, Hillary is very much part of the bark-into-a-megaphone school of international affairs, of which the Bush Administration has simply been the zenith. Clinton’s boundless cynicism has been astonishing — she expects people to vote for her on the basis that she’s taken more hits from the Republicans and is immune to their blows; she mocks Obama for offering people the hope that things could be different. Which, of course, is true, in the sense that if Hillary Clinton is elected president, I’m not sure how profoundly different they would be, quite frankly.

She goes on about how Obama hasn’t been tested, but in truth — on the issues that really matter to the world — both have been tested, and Hillary failed. She voted to authorize the Iraq war, where Obama had the courage to stand up and say no. And she voted to authorize Bush to do his best to provoke another war with Iran. Again, Obama refused to give Bush the mandate he sought. Obama is the least likely of all the contenders to drop bombs on people or starve them in the name of self-righteous anger, ideological arrogance or because Israel demands it.

America is in urgent need of a profound change in the way that it relates to the world, and it’s not going to come from Hillary Clinton. The fact that she believes she can prevail by pouring scorn on the very notion that things could be different is a sign of the decrepitude that has dominated the upper echelons of the Democratic Party since the first Clinton term. (It may not be surprising that in a party that could put up Al Gore and John Kerry, Hillary might believe that she had earned the right to be the candidate, but why shouldn’t Democratic voters expect more?)

Now, as the desperation begins to set in, the Clinton campaign is showing its true colors, trying to stampede voters away from Obama by implying that he’s a trojan horse for Osama, doing their best to alert Jewish voters to the idea that, unlike Hillary he may not be willing to jump through every hoop that the Israel lobby demands.

So, Is Obama “Good for the Jews”?

On a recent visit to Cape Town, I was shown one of those Obama-as-Osama smear emails that have done the rounds of the internet’s Jewish geography, containing those talking points that were once exclusive to the fevered racist imagination of the the Zionist alte-kakkers but have since become mainstream fare for Clinton boosters. His middle name is HUSSEIN. Scary, huh? His father and paternal grandmother were MUSLIMS. He went to a MADRESSA as a toddler. (Actually, I’ve long been amused at how the term madressa has come to connote terrorist training camp in the Western media — all I can tell you is that in my anti-apartheid struggle days in South Africa, we had plenty of our activist meetings in madressas kindly made available by local imams, and I felt right at home in them because they were almost indistinguishable from the Hebrew nursery school I had attended, but never mind…)

I read a few lines and began to giggle. “Oh, so you don’t believe Obama is secretly part of the Muslim war against the West?” the man who showed me the email asked. What Muslim war against the West, I asked. He looked a little offended: “You mean you don’t believe there’s a Muslim war against the West?” No, I don’t. And I don’t believe Obama is a Muslim, anyway, but I do think his heritage may make him more inclined to engage in dialogue with Muslim countries, and that would be an extremely good thing.

Again, quoting from my good friend, the Anglican Father Michael Weeder, whose own roots are not dissimilar from Obama’s, “I relate to his Muslim Indonesian connection because that is where the dominant strand of my genetic lines leads from and then a large proportion of my relatives (the known ones) are Muslim. But that is a minor if not irrelevant matter… Much is being made of Obama’s Muslim ties with Islam, and if Islam has influenced him I say ‘Praise be to Allah’ because his nur is pure, and shines like the morning sun through a winter haze. I believe that grace is at work here.”

It is, of course, precisely the prospect of an American president committed to justice and dialogue that freaks out the Zionists. They cite his willingness to talk to Iran as Exhibit A in the case against him. That’s because the Zionists want an American president who will bomb Iran, having worked themselves into a lather of with their own dark fantasies about Iran as Nazi Germany. And if Obama is prepared to talk to Iran, he may be prepared to talk to Hamas, too. For the Zionists, that’s another reason to plotz at the prospect of an Obama presidency, even though talking to Hamas is exactly what Israel and the U.S. need.

The greatest fear, quite explicitly, cited by the Zionists is that Obama may pursue an even-handed policy on the Middle East. Imagine that…

It disturbs the Zionist establishment that Obama is promising change, because the Zionist establishment is deeply invested in the current disastrous status quo — the status quo that has plunged America into a ruinous war, and the Middle East into a chaos that even sober Zionists ought to recognize is bad for Israel, even if they remain cold to the crimes against Palestinians it has involved. “All the talk about change, but without defining what that change should be is an opening for all kind of mischief,” warned Malcolm Hoenlein, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. “Of course Obama has plenty of Jewish supporters and there are many Jews around him,” Hoenlein said. “But there is a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign.”

The problem with Obama, for the Zionist establishment — and some Israeli politicians have made this clear — is that he may be too even-handed in dealing with Israel and the Palestinians. He may not muster quite the same degree of racist contempt for the Palestinians that can be safely expected from a Hillary Clinton (they’re not entirely sure of John McCain, either, fearful that he might send Republican “realists” of the Scowcroft-Baker variety to the Middle East rather than Irgun fighters like Elliot Abrahams, Bush’s Mideast point-man). As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, “Visiting the region in 2005 as senator for New York, Senator Clinton shunned the Palestinians completely, meeting only Israeli leaders and hearing and expressing only Israeli positions. She particularly galled Palestinians by enthusiastically backing the 700-kilometre complex of walls and fences that Israel is building inside the West Bank.”

When Obama gently but firmly suggested to Ohio Jewish voters that there was a difference between being a friend to Israel and embracing the toxic Likud view of how to approach its neighbors, some Zionist commentators went apoplectic — Haaretz’s manic U.S.-based nationalist watchdog Shmuel Rosner howled that Obama was interfering in Israeli internal affairs! But then Rosner represents the Zionist alte-kakker perspective to a tee, with grading of American political candidates solely on the basis of their level of hostility to Israel’s foes and willingess to give it carte blanche to destroy the Palestinians and itself. Why Haaretz publishes this crank, I have no idea, but it should be embarrassed to run this sort of tribalist drivel which most American Jews find acutely embarrassing.

The reality is that Obama may be just the sort of friend Israel needs; the sort of friend that restrains you from driving home drunk.

I love this line from one of Hillary’s campaign organizers in response to Obama being quoted as saying he wanted “an honest discussion about ways to bridge the gap that grows between Muslims and the West” — Daphna Ziman, a friend of Clinton’s who has organized campaign events for her, responded, “I am horrified at Mr. Obama’s point of view.” Enough said.

Never Mind Obama, are the Zionists “Good for the Jews”?

If I was a Zionist, of course, I’d be less worried by Obama than by the fact that American Jews are voting for him in huge numbers, despite being warned off him by the Zionist establishment. Obama even beat Hillary among Jewish voters in California, a state that Hillary actually won! I have little doubt that he’ll easily carry a majority of young Jewish voters, about 70% of whom, like Obama, opposed the Iraq war at the time that Hillary voted for it. And what this reveals, in fact, is that Zionist hegemony among American Jews is fading.

A 2007 study commissioned for American Jewish organizations found that less than half of American Jews under 35 would consider Israel’s disappearance a “personal tragedy,” and more than half were uncomfortable only 54% were comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state. These figures reveal that young American Jews don’t want to be fenced off in some nationalist ghetto of the mind; they don’t see their fate and their existence as initimately tied to Israel’s, nor do they see Israel as representing them and their Jewishness. It would be safe to assume, in fact, that a large and growing number of American Jews, just like Barack Obama, would like to see a more even-handed U.S. Middle East policy that raises the prospects for peace. A Jew’s place, as I’ve always argued, is in the world, wherever he or she chooses to make it. And the value of Judaism is derived from the way it feeds into a universal humanity — tribal nationalism has no place in my idea of Judaism, and it’s not something I want any part of. And I get the sense that millions of young American Jews feel the same way. Barack Obama is the perfect candidate in this election for those who believe that our Jewish values compel us to be part of a universal movement for justice that joins us together with all who share that goal, across all tribal boundaries. And he’s the perfect candidate to lead America in an age when it will have to learn to treat the rest of the world as something more than its vassals and courtiers. That’s why long before Texas and Ohio cast their votes, the vast majority of humanity that is paying attention has left no doubt that it wants to see Barack Obama in the White House.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 81 Comments

Inside a Failed Palestinian Police State

Posted on February 26, 2008 by Tony


Guest Column: Arthur Neslen. Jewish holiday meals at the homes of relatives or our parents’ friends are the last place that my generation of Jewish dissenters from Zionism expect to encounter kindred spirits. But that’s exactly where I first met Arthur Neslen, an English journalist related by the contours of Jewish geography to the family of a close friend of my father’s, with whom we once spent Rosh Hashanah. Arthur was more than a kindred spirit, of course, he was the first Jewish journalist employed by al-Jazeera and was hard at work on his excellent book Occupied Minds: A Journey Through the Israeli Psyche, which uses hundreds of interviews with a cross section of Israelis to reveal the mindset that drives contemporary Israeli policy. Arthur is currently living in Ramallah, in the West Bank, researching a new book. He filed this postcard for Rootless Cosmopolitan, in which he explains the steady collapse of Fatah, from internal rot as much as from external challenges:

Inside a Failed Palestinian Police State
By Arthur Neslen
The death of Hamas preacher Majed al-Barghouti in a prison cell last week — apparently after being tortured — momentarily shattered the surface calm of news reports from Ramallah. But neither the subsequent rioting nor the fact that the dead man came from one of the most prominent Palestinian families disrupted the ‘democracy versus terror’ agenda that has distorted most news reporting out of the West Bank since last June (when Hamas took control of Gaza).

Martin Luther King once described rioting as ‘the voice of the unheard,’ but despite al-Barghouti’s death, most Ramallans currently seem too depressed to riot. The only events to have lifted spirits in the city lately have been a freak snow storm, and a similarly rare suicide bombing in Dimona — the latter prompting local shopkeepers to cut prices for the morning and, in one case, to waive payment altogether.

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

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

Sources in the Fatah grassroots camp aligned with Marwan Barghouti, the movement’s single most popular leader who remains in prison in Israel, warn of a rage building among their supporters that they will be unable to control. They complain that the failure of Mahmoud Abbas’s strategy to produce anything other than an increased expansion of settlements, mass arrests and assassinations, has cost him his
authority among the Fatah rank and file.

The narrative in much Western news reporting since last year’s Gaza civil war that effectively ended the Second Intifada has emphasized the Annapolis process as the great hope for delivering Palestinian national goals, but you’d be hard-press to find support for it in any quarter of Palestinian society. For now, most Ramallans seem content to soldier on with their private struggles to make ends meet, until stronger political winds again rake up the dust. But feelings of bitterness, defeat and resentment have multiplied.

Supposedly, this gloomy picture is all wrong. Ramallah is enjoying an economic boom with a reported growth rate of 10 percent last year. Residents of cities such as Nablus and Tulkarem are fighting each other for apartments here, while rents and living costs rocket. Billions of dollars and batteries of Western consultants are washing over the streets like icy rain. But the money isn’t trickling down the Fatah food chain.

Supporters of Mohammed Dahlan (the U.S.-backed Fatah strongman driven out of Gaza by Hamas) and Islamic Jihad alike talk about the aid monies as something akin to blood money; the Jihad stalwarts are indignant, Dahlan’s supporters just resigned. Where five years ago, Ramallah was at the heart of the intifada, today there almost seems to be an intifada against its heart.

The pavements of the town’s central roundabout, Al Manarah, were recently fenced off with the same metal security barriers used by the Israeli army at Qallandia, a checkpoint that bars most Ramallans from Jerusalem. When that didn’t stop people from taking their traditional route around the roundabout by foot, armed Fatah soldiers assumed positions on a traffic detail. Such Egyptian-style ‘security’ might impress visiting Western dignitaries but it also lends weight to an increasingly powerful, if whispered, Hamas critique that the Fatah leadership is a corrupt, disorganised and undemocratic syndicate which speaks to, and governs for, a Western audience.

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

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

In a Brechtian twist, when the U.S. president’s arrival brought curfews, street closures and checkpoints back to Ramallah for the first time since Israel’s army pulled out, the city bit its collective lip. Fatah rules, okay – with an iron hand – but is utterly powerless in the face of U.S. and Israeli diktats.

I used to watch the PA’s last symbolic act of defiance from my window at night, a green laser beam that shone from the tip of Yasser Arafat’s mausoleum in the Muqata towards Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque. In the week that Gaza’s wall fell it was switched off, reputedly at the behest of Tel Aviv. Few complained.

The prevailing mood of passive disengagement and cynicism was well captured by two of Abbas’s presidential guards during the ‘celebrations’ at the Muqata after Israel freed 400 prisoners (who were anyway due for imminent release). “This means nothing,” one griped to me. “There is no confidence between the two sides and there will be no peace.” A soldier standing next to him agreed, adding “There will be war here forever.”

In Ramallah’s cafes and bars, morbid conspiracy theories circulate about the influence of groups such as the Adam Smith Institute, which oversees the PA’s Negotiations Support Unit. Meanwhile, in private, the NSU’s workers wheel out the same complaints of cronyism and incompetence that their predecessors rehearsed last year, and their predecessors, the year before that. All the time, Fatah rots from within.

A friend involved with Fatah’s preventive security unit, relayed an apparently widespread belief among his comrades; that Abbas will sign up to a final status deal giving Israel Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel, while losing most of east Jerusalem and the refugees’ right to return. He would, according to the theory, then be assassinated.

This may be why Abbas appears to have no more intention of signing a peace agreement than does Ehud Olmert. Both leaders would have drowned by now without a peace process but neither has the power base, conviction, leadership skills or public goodwill to survive a peace deal.

For Abbas, at the very least, any deal would trigger the much-anticipated Fatah civil war. The question is what there would be left to fight over in Fatah by that point, if it did.

Posted in Guest Columns, Situation Report | 22 Comments