Osama: A Preemptive Obit

Posted on October 6, 2006 by Tony

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The revolution is just a T-shirt away…

Before leaving for a vacation in South Africa in December of 2001, my editors asked me to prepare an obituary for Osama bin Laden on the assumption that he might well be killed in Afghanistan while I was on the beach in Cape Town. Five years later, I dug it up out of curiosity. It was never quite finished, but it really isn’t too bad: I particularly like the analogy to the Comintern…

We can say with relative certainty that Osama bin Laden is not right now enjoying the attentions of 70 virgins in paradise. But with the same certainty we can predict that he will live on, years and even decades from now, on the T-shirts, key-chains and calendars of the Muslim world’s malcontents. Indeed, in the rarefied climes of rebel icons, Bin Laden has become the Islamist Che Guevara.

It was long before September 11 that Osama bin Laden first chose to die. Authoring the most dramatic terror attack in history had simply compressed the timeframe of the inevitable ‘martyrdom’ he first envisaged two decades earlier in the same mountains of southeastern Afghanistan where a simple TKTKTK ended his life on TKTK. The video spectacle of bin Laden cackling ghoulishly over the number of innocents his human bombs had killed in the World Trade Center will underscore the grim satisfaction in the West and among its allies in the east, near and far, at the Saudi terrorist’s ignominious end. But the story of Bin Laden’s rise is a cautionary tale of perils that persist despite the elimination of a man who had, of late, come to personify them.

Bin Laden’s decision to sacrifice his life in service of an implacable pan-Islamic nationalism would likely have been taken two decades earlier, when the pious young Saudi multimillionaire first ventured into Afghanistan.
Back then, of course, he was an American ally, selflessly putting his fortune, his career and even his body on the line to rally Islamic firebrands from all over the world to help wage jihad against the Soviet infidels who had invaded Muslim lands. That effort, covertly backed and orchestrated by the U.S. as well as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, saw an improbable triumph, as lightly-armed guerrilla forces put to flight the world’s largest conventional army. But it had other, unintended consequences. The Afghan jihad had drawn together Muslim radicals from all over the world, and trained and organized them into an International Brigade of Islamist fighters, feeding off each other’s extremism, their victory feeding fevered dreams of reviving the long-lost Islamic empire of old – or at least of being able to roll back contemporary foes in conflicts around the globe. (Had the Republican cause prevailed in Spain in the 1930, the Communist International would have found itself with a similar cadre of battle-hardened veterans ready for deployment in the world’s sharpest class wars.)

The somewhat naïve but highly motivated bin Laden found himself in the orbit of hardened Islamist zealots from all over the world, his own views growing increasingly hard-line as he found himself assiduously courted particularly by the Egyptian radicals who saw his potential as a global terrorist leader in his wealth, his connections with Arab elites and his charisma.

For bin Laden and those around him, the message of the Soviet retreat was simple: armed with unshakable faith that they are soldiers of god and a willingness to die fighting, jihadists could prevail over ‘infidels.’ The “Afghan Arabs” were not men who could easily return their own countries — Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other pro-Western Arab regimes had used the Afghan jihad as an opportunity to “export” their domestic Islamist nuisances, and weren’t about to allow them back as combat-hardened warriors to renew their seditious efforts. Bin Laden shared their predicament. Afghanistan had hardened his opposition to the Saudi royal family, which failed to measure up to his measure of Islamic legitimacy. And when the king invited U.S. troops onto Saudi soil to defend the kingdom against any threat from Iraq, Bin Laden was outraged — a new set of infidels were being invited onto the sacred ground of Islam’s birthplace. Bin Laden was now on a collision course with the House of Saud, and despite his family’s deep-rooted ties to the royal family, he found himself expelled.

For Bin Laden, that was simply confirmation of the analysis he’d developed in Afghanistan: The undemocratic, un-Islamic regimes of the Arab world were but servants of the United States, whose presence and influence in the Arab and Muslim world was the prime obstacle to his dream of a pan-Islamic political revival. At bases in Afghanistan, and in the Sudan where an Islamist regime made room for him after his expulsion by the Saudis, bin Laden kept his Afghan Arabs together in his al-Qaeda organization. They were sent to fight in Chechnya, Bosnia and other places Muslims were under fire or waging separatist battles, spreading their example of selfless sacrifice to spread the tentacles of a global network whose ultimate confrontation would pit it against its supreme ‘infidel’ enemy, the United States.

Bin Laden believed America could be beaten. His objective, after all, was not to conquer the U.S. but rather to end its presence and pervasive influence in the lands of Islam. Exhibit A was the U.S. withdrawal from Beirut in 1985, after Hizbollah blew up a Marine barracks there killing more than 200 U.S. troops. The bloody carnage of Mogadishu in 1993, in which 17 U.S. soldiers were killed in an abortive raid on a local warlord, also led to a hasty retreat [EM] today U.S. officials believe operatives linked with bin Laden helped train the Somali gunmen who ambushed the Americans. And in his propaganda, bin Laden certainly claimed the incident as further proof of his basic thesis — that the U.S. would withdraw from Muslim countries if the cost of staying was rendered too high.

Bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad leaders at the helm of his movement had global ambitions quite unlike any terrorist organization that had gone before them. Previous terrorist luminaries such as the Palestinian Abu Nidal had generally led organizations drawn from a single country, and had been entirely dependent on state sponsors for sanctuary and survival — states such as Libya, Syria and Iran had all used such groups to send bloody political messages to their foes. Al Qaeda was different: its members were drawn from all over the Muslim world, their core cemented during the Afghan jihad; and they operated entirely independently of any state sponsorship. Indeed, far from such authoritarian precincts as Tripoli, Tehran and Damascus, al Qaeda preferred to establish its bases in locales where state authority had all but collapsed — Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan.

And rather than slowly grow their organization from the ground up, bin Laden and his henchmen saw mergers-and-acquisitions as the way to go. The model, unconsciously, may have been the Communist International — Lenin in 1921 had managed to reproduce his Bolshevik party on a global scale by simply absorbing preexisting, ideologically compatible leftist parties from almost every country into a global umbrella organization.

Bin Laden set out the ideological basis for his Islamist International in his February 1998 statement declaring a “World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews.” It cited three key issues of universal concern to Muslims — the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, the ongoing U.S. campaign against Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian situation — and used these as a basis to call for a global war of terror against America and its allies. “To kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque (in Mecca) from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”

Back then, of course, bin Laden was a relative nobody in the Islamic world, and the only co-signatories of his jihad declaration were his Egyptian Islamic Jihad sidekick and/or mentor Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and representatives of three even smaller groups from Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Russian Revolution had communists from all over the planet rushing to join Lenin’s international; bin Laden had yet to convince the world’s radical Islamists of his own leadership credentials. That changed six months later, when bin Laden operatives blew up two U.S. embassies in East Africa. And the factor that made bin Laden the undisputed champion of the world’s radical lslamists was less the fact of the carnage he’d wrought simultaneously in Kenya and Tanzania, than the U.S. response. By firing off a slew of cruise missiles onto two continents in a vain bid to kill bin Laden and destroy his assets, the Clinton administration succeeded only in creating a fireworks display that heralded bin Laden’s ordination as America’s nemesis. For many Islamists skeptical of bin Laden’s preposterous sounding claim to be leading a global jihad against America, Washington’s response gave pause for thought [EM] a man that hated and feared by the U.S. had unrivaled claim to lead the Islamists.

It was not Bin Laden’s own actions, but the U.S. response to them, that had put him on the map, back in 1998. And that process was to be amplified in the years to come.

Postscript: That’s as far as I got back then. But I’ll add the following: Just as the Comintern proved an unworkable model for global revolution, so has al-Qaeda expended itself. Today, the mantle of Islamist “nationalism” (for it is that sense of redeeming a people or “nation” humiliated by Western powers, rather than any specific confessional impulse, that drives al-Qaeda and other Islamist movements) is carried, principally, by nationally-based movements who are confronting a specific enemy around a clear set of grievances and goals that are at least conceivably attainable. Hamas or Hezbollah are not much interested in restoring a Caliphate to rule from Spain to Indonesia; their goals are far more specific and localized. And in the end, while Bin Laden’s movement could blow things up, it failed to ignite any sustainable forms of struggle – like Che Guevara (also remembered more as a T-shirt icon of rebellion than for his rather unfortunate ideas of how it should be pursued), Bin Laden found that simply taking spectacular military action against even a hated foe would not necessarily rally the masses to join him in struggle or confront their own local tyrants. (Indeed, as much as they hated the U.S., many Arabs seemed unable to “own” 9/11, instead blaming it on the CIA or the Mossad, insisting that “Arabs could not have done this.”) The only chapter waging an ongoing battle with an achievable goal may be the Al-Qaeda in Iraq hybrid. And that, of course, did not exist until the U.S. invaded and sent Sunni Arabs looking for a channel of resistance. But the ability of that chapter of al-Qaeda to survive and grow has nothing to do with the fate of bin Laden and his inner circle; it will thrive as long as the U.S. remains in Iraq. Bin Laden’s greatest asset has always been the foolhardiness of his enemies.

Posted in From Tony's Archive | 8 Comments

Dosunmu’s African Game

Posted on September 28, 2006 by Tony

My friend Andrew Dosunmu has done an extraordinary book of photographs of African football, capturing the almost subversive joy and exuberance it brings to the global game, and its place in the urban African social fabric. “For me, it was about photographing what soccer does to people—it’s more of a celebration. Soccer is a center that brings people together,” he says. “It was a great opportunity to show life in Africa, not the way it’s reduced in the world media.”

Touting the aesthetics of urban Africa has long been Andrew’s auterial signature, whether in his work as a fashion-stylist, photographer, videographer and filmmaker. Even before I met him in 1994, his work had jumped off the page at me out of magazines like Paper and Vibe, where he styled clothes in a rugged dancehall reggae setting that spoke of the appropriation of Armani and Hugo Boss in urban African shanty towns rather than on fashion runways. (Check out his portfolio here)

He was way ahead of the curve in introducing that aesthetic to style magazines and music videos, and he’s just kept going.

Hot Irons, his extraordinary slice-of-life documentary on the contestants in Detroit’s Annual “Hair Wars” hairdresser throwdown explored the deeper issues of hair and personal style in African Diaspora culture, in the most understated, visual way, consistent with his commercial styling work and his art.

It also got him a Sundance Fellowship.


Andrew at Sundance makes a point to his host

There are, I know, more movies to come. Andrew has a magic touch that captures the cut-and-paste reordering of symbols of urban Africa better than anyone I know. Go and see whatever he does, believe me, you won’t be disappointed.

Posted in Shameless Cronyism | 46 Comments

A Whiff of Sulfur…

Posted on September 20, 2006 by Tony

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Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez may be an authoritarian-populist demagogue (Winnie rather than Nelson Mandela) who embarrasses more serious Latin American leftists, but he clearly has had the foresight to hire a comedy writer. That much was apparent in his UN General Assembly address, Wednesday, when he repeatedly referred to President Bush as “the Devil,” comically crossing himself after reminding delegates that “El Diablo” had been in this very room, at that same podium, just the night before. And then came the killer punchline: “It still smells of sulfur in here…”

Posted in 99c Blogging | 11 Comments

Children of a Lesser God?

Posted on September 10, 2006 by Tony


Birth pangs of a New Middle East?

Imagine, on September 12 2001, Condoleezza Rice had jetted in to town to tell New Yorkers that the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and the two thousand lives lost there represented the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”… Yet that’s exactly what she told the people of Lebanon as they dug dead children out of the rubble left by American bombs dropped from American planes flown by Israelis. When American innocents are killed, we’re told the event changed the world; when Arab innocents are killed they’re just the “collateral damage” of the turning of history’s gears.

Perhaps it was the grotesque spectacle of Rice telling the Lebanese people that calling for a cease-fire would have to wait, because as tragic as their losses were, they were the necessary price of the greater Bush administration’s efforts to create a “new” Middle East — an enterprise that has seen at least 46,000 Iraqi civilians killed, and counting — that provoked Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fuad Siniora to dispense with diplomatic niceties. Siniora, whose leadership had previously been trumpeted by Washington as a showcase for its new Middle East, bluntly challenged the plain racism inherent in Washington’s position: “Is the value of human rights in Lebanon less than that of citizens elsewhere?” Siniora asked. “Are we children of a lesser god? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”

Israel’s answer to that question has always been an unapologetic yes. The Zionist movement initially claimed a state in Palestine on the basis that it was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” When it turned out that, in fact, Palestine was full of people that had little interest in handing over their land, Zionist thinking shifted — those who later became the Likud advocated crushing Arab resistance behind an “Iron Wall,” believing that only military humiliation would make them accept Israel’s existence. The leaders of the mainstream Labor Zionist movement instead advocated ethnic cleansing, the “transfer” of the Arab population of Palestine, like some alien vegetation, to places like Iraq. The 1948 war did, indeed, see hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs forced out by Israeli military units, and the new Israeli legislature completed the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by summarily seizing their property and passing laws preventing their return. Then, after 1967, when many of those same refugees found themselves living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, many found themselves again summarily stripped of their homes and land in order to make way for Israeli settlements. Throughout its history, Israel has treated Arab life as cheap, expendable, contemptible even — certainly, in no sense, the equal of Jewish or American life.

“The Arabs only understand force, and if you don’t hit them hard, they won’t respect you.” Even when they try to render such racist poison profound via the likes of Bernard Lewis, I find such sentiments not only sickening, but also an abomination of Jewish ethics. Having grown up in apartheid South Africa, I have a natural suspicion of anything I’m told by the people in power about why the “other” who they have caged up can’t be granted the basic rights that “civilized” people reserve for one another. I don’t think there’s a coincidence in the fact that those telling us that “the only language the Arabs understand is force” happen to be the same people who communicate with Arabs largely in the vernacular of violence. And when one considers Israel’s doctrine of “disproportionate deterrence,” which requires the killing of scores, even hundreds of Palestinians for every Israeli killed — more than 200 have been killed in Gaza over the past six weeks as Israel rampages through the territory hoping that bludgeoning its occupied population, most of them also refugees from earlier expulsions, will yield the return of the captive soldier Gilad Shalit — then yes, for Israel’s there’s no doubt that an Arab life is worth little in comparison to an Israeli life.

By extension — as well as in the course of its own adventures in the region — the U.S. has adopted the same attitude. It has not even bothered to keep count of the civilian death toll in Iraq. Keeping count would make clear that the death toll suffered by the U.S. on 9/11 is racked up every two months in Baghdad alone. In New York City they’re spending billions on memorials; in Baghdad they’re building two new morgues.

The ever-excellent Alistair Crooke spies a new “Orientalism” at work, in which the West rationalizes its own violence on the basis of denying the humanity of the Arab “other”:

The global “war on terror” has allowed western leaders to cast “our” struggle as one for civilization itself–“we” have values, they have none, we want to spread democracy, they hate our freedoms. The West is now defined by its opposition to terrorism and as a defender of civilization. The war on terrorism has transformed orientalism, from a European-based vision of modernity that could be used to “domesticate” non-Europeans, into a program that establishes a frontier between “Civilization” and “the new Barbarism”.

The new “Orientalism” offers us new political tools. Since the “new barbarians” live outside of civilization, civilized rules no longer apply to them: if “they” win elections they can still not be part of “us”–office holders and parliamentarians can be abducted and interned without a murmur; members of “barbarian” movements can be arrested and taken away for imprisonment and torture in other countries, and barbarian leaders, whether or not legitimately elected, can be assassinated at the pleasure of western leaders. They “abduct” us, we “arrest” them.

The underpinning of our worldview is based on our idea of what constitutes the legitimate use of power–and, therefore, on the use of violence. It is the bedrock of the Enlightenment. Violence practiced by the nation state is legitimate; violence used by non-state actors is a threat to civilization and the existing world order. The barbarians do not have resistance movements, they are not for liberation, and they are not fighting oppression. To admit so is to admit that we are oppressors, and that cannot be. They are not fighting for their homes: they are “unauthorized armed groups”.

***

Rami Khouri: Rootless Cosmopolitan’s
Person of the Year

The most important and moving piece of commentary I read during the Lebanon war came from Rami Khouri — who would without hesitation be named Rootless Cosmopolitan’s “Person of the Year” if we indulged in that sort of thing. The Palestinian-Jordanian editor-at-large of Beirut’s Daily Star is hands-down the most perceptive commentator writing of the dynamic in the region day in and day out. We’ll return to some of his more important insights in later posts, and you can keep up with Rami’s prolific, almost daily output, by clicking here — and I highly recommend that you do. But my specific purpose here is engaging the themes he raises in the Lebanon commentary cited above: He is asked by the editors of the Guardian/Observer what he would write say to Israeli journalists right now; his answer is to invite them to take a more Jewish approach to their work!

(I’m quoting it at length because I find it such an eloquent exposition of the basic humanist view this site takes on the conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere — and of my own sense of the basic definition of Jewishness, derived from Hillel: “That which is hateful unto yourself, do not do unto others; all the rest is commentary”…)

So here’s what I would say to journalists in Israel: read Deuteronomy and act on its moral and political principles.

Deuteronomy, a pivotal book of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), is supremely relevant here because it blends the three issues that I believe Israeli, Arab and international journalists must affirm in order to honour their professional dictates along with their own humanity. These are: good governance anchored in the rule of law; a moral foundation for human relations anchored in the dictate to treat others as you want others to treat you; and the towering divine commands to ‘choose life’ and ‘pursue justice’.

Deuteronomy is an appropriate balm because it emphasises – in both human society and the divine plan – the central value of justice that is anchored in a system of codified laws that are administered fairly by compassionate and competent judges. The most beautiful and powerful part of Deuteronomy is verses 18-20, ending with: ‘Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue.’

How is this relevant to the Israeli-Lebanese war today and issues beyond this round of fighting? I believe it is crucial, because the single biggest reason that Israel has found itself locked in ever more vicious wars with assorted Arab neighbours is its refusal to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians and other Arabs on the basis of the rule of law, and to resolve disputes on the basis of both parties enjoying equal rights….

The common Israeli view – one that Bush and Blair have swallowed in its entirety – sees the Arabs and Iran as pits of Islamic terror and anti-Semitic savagery that want only to kill Jews and annihilate Israel. They are free to live in this imaginary world if they wish to, but the consequences are grim, as we see today. Subjugated and savaged Arabs will fight back, generation after generation, just as the Jews did historically, inspired as they were by the moral force of the ‘Deuteronomistic’ way. If the world does not offer you justice, you fight for your rights.

The missing element in Israeli behaviour is to ask if Israel’s own policies have had any impact on reciprocal Arab behaviour. If this is a war between two sides – which I believe it is – then both need to examine their policies, and make concessions to resolve their disputes. Peace-making and conflict resolution must be anchored in law that dispenses justice equally to all protagonists. The law we have to deal with here comprises UN resolutions and bodies of international conventions and legal precedents.

We cannot pick one UN resolution we want implemented – say, 1559 – and forget the others, such as, say, 242 and 338. This is what has happened since 1967 and even before. The rights of Israel have been given priority over the rights of Arabs, and this skewed perception has been backed by US might.

I wish Israeli journalists would apply to their writing and analysis the moral dictates and divine exhortations that their Jewish forefathers passed down from generation to generation: obey the law, treat others equally, pursue justice, choose life. Journalists should identify the legitimate rights, grievances and needs of both sides by providing facts rather than propaganda.

Israel and the US have ploughed ahead for decades with a predatory Israeli policy that savages Arab rights, land and dignity. In return, public opinion in the Arab world has become violently anti-Israeli, and resistance movements have emerged in Palestine and Lebanon. If current policies continue, similar movements will emerge elsewhere, just as Hamas and Hizbollah were born in the early 1980s in response to the Israeli occupation of their lands.

Moses had it right, perhaps because he accumulated much wisdom during his 120 years of life. Meet the legitimate demands of both parties to a dispute, he said, and a fair, lasting resolution will emerge. Ignore the centrality of justice and equal rights for both parties, and you will be smitten by divine fire – or fated to fight your adversaries forever, as Israel seems to have opted to do.

*****

Which brings us to the most important book you may ever read on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Dalia Eshkenazi, like me and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish kids around the world, grew up believing that the Palestinians had simply fled their homes in 1948, miraculously making way for a Jewish State — either out of ignorance and fear; mostly in response to radio broadcasts urging them to leave so that Arab armies could wipe out Israel. That’s when the Palestinians were discussed at all. Israel preferred (and still prefers) not to think too much about the fact that much of the “Jewish State” is built on the ruins of homes, lands and villages seized at gunpoint from others, before laws were passed legalizing what was, in a moral sense, essentially theft, and then simply flattening and building over them. Dalia, whose family had emigrated from Bulgaria in 1948 when she was an infant, often wondered about the previous inhabitants of the beautiful old stone house in which she’d grown up in Ramla.

Then, one day in 1967, one of them showed up and knocked on her door. Bashir Khairi, whose family — like most others in the town — had been loaded onto buses at gunpoint and driven out of town and then forced to walk miles to Ramallah, had taken advantage of Israel’s conquest of the West Bank to travel to Jerusalem, and then to his old home. Dalia allowed him in, and immediately understood his connection with the house. Thus began a fraught and complex friendship that allowed for a dialogue quite unique between an Israeli and a Palestinian. There’s no happy ending or simple outcome. But her engagement with Bashir allows to Dalia to adopt what I would consider a more Jewish attitude to her country’s predicament: She is a committed Zionist, but is nonetheless forced to dispense with the web of self-serving myths propagated by the Zionist movement over Israel’s creation, and instead confront the reality that it occurred at the cost of a crime perpetrated against another people. For Dalia, the dilemma is to find a solution that avoids turning her own people into refugees. For Bashir, it’s a simple case of the “right of return” and the belief that Israelis and Palestinians can live together in a single democratic polity — a position for which, by the end of the book, he’s spent about a third of his life in prison, as a leader of the PFLP.

I don’t want to get into the nuances — you need to read this book. Go to Amazon and buy this book right now, or for more, click here to hear him discuss the book on NPR’s Fresh Air — or get a glimpse of his accompanying radio documentary from this NPR transcript. And also, this piece of his published by my friend Tom Engelhardt. Believe me, I don’t know Sandy Tolan from a bar of soap; this is quite simply the most important book I’ve read for ages.

The pair find no easy answers, of course. But they are able to conduct an honest dialogue based on a recognition of their common humanity — a dialogue made possible by the fact that Dalia is able to acknowledge what really happened in 1948, and accept Israel’s responsibility. She doesn’t only take Bashir’s word for it; she begins to investigate and finds Israelis who were actually involved in some of the relevant military operations who tell her how the Arabs of Ramla and many other towns and villages were driven out in what, today, would be called a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

I had the same experience myself in 1979, on Yom Kippur, when I read Uri Avnery’s “Israel Without Zionism,” written by an Israeli who was there, who fought in that war, and who bluntly revealed that the massacre at Deir Yassin (as recounted at this link from a liberal Zionist perspective) was not an isolated incident. (I knew of this massacre, even in my teenage Zionist Habonim days, but because the perpetrators were the Irgun, we could simply blame it on the Likudniks, whom even as fellow Zionists we disdained as fascist thugs, and maintain the illusion of the Haganah’s “purity of arms” — now, an Israeli-Jewish voice was telling me that what the Palestinians had said all along was substantially true: that they had been deliberately and in some cases systematically driven from their homes and lands by Israeli violence and the fear of Israeli violence. The Likudniks, BTW, never disagreed: They’d mock our bleeding heart concerns, and say “How else do you think we’d have gotten a Jewish State?” Perhaps they were right — after all, even on the basis of the UN partition plan of 1947, Palestinian Arabs constituted some 40 percent of the population in the territory allocated for a Jewish state, and they owned more than 80 percent of the land. It’s not hard to see why mass ethnic-cleansing would appeal to Ben Gurion as a precondition for realizing his dream of a Jewish majority state.)

The suppression of the history of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 within the Zionist movement — and its substitution by the frankly preposterous myth that had us believe that 700,000 people had turned themselves into refugees with nothing but the clothes on their backs in response to radio broadcasts telling them to do so — is premised on the idea that to admit and acknowledge what Israel had done to the Palestinians in 1948 would undermine the moral legitimacy of the State of Israel. But you have to wonder what moral legitimacy is established on the basis of falsehoods. Israelis know very well where the Palestinian refugee problem came from, and they also understand its significance in fueling the conflict. Why else, when asked what he would have done had he been born Palestinian, did Ehud Barak answer (during his 1999 election campaign), “join a fighting organization”? Barak, a bit of a weasel, really (he tried to suggest, in the wake of the Camp David debacle, that his sole purpose in negotiating with the Palestinians was to “unmask” the duplicity of Yasser Arafat), almost personifies Israel’s struggle with its bad conscience: Despite acknowledging the reason why Palestinian fight, he later insisted that Israel could never accept responsibility for having created the Palestinian refugee problem.

Yet, as the relationship between Dalia Eshkenazi and Bashir Khairi shows, such acknowledgment is the only basis for an honest dialogue between the two sides: How they proceed from that acknowledgment is a major point of negotiation, but it can’t be avoided. In one scene in “The Lemon Tree,” Dalia’s husband shocks his Palestinian guests by telling them that Israel is not afraid of Syria or Hizballah or any other neighbors, but it is deeply afraid of the Palestinians. They’re shocked and ask why. He answers: “Because you’re the only ones with a legitimate claim against us.”

A Palestinian friend told me years later that Avnery was a good friend of his. Early in their relationship, Avnery suddenly realized that my friend was one of the Palestinian villagers that Avnery’s unit had forced onto trucks at gunpoint and driven out of their village near Jerusalem, forcing his family into West Bank exile. My friend poured him another drink and their friendship deepened. 1948 is known to the Palestinians simply as the “Nakbah” — the catastrophe. But for Israeli Jews, too, it was a catastrophe of a different type; a moral “nakbah.” Dalia Eshkanazi is rare — although hardly alone — among Israelis, Zionists even, in recognizing that fact. (Even though, in the U.S., recognition of such a simple truth would probably have her branded an “anti-Semite.”)

I’m not sure how this conflict will be solved, and while I can recognize the fundamental flaws of a two-state solution, I’m also skeptical of the simplicities advocated in support of a single state solution. But I do know that, like the relationship between Dalia Eshkenazi and Bashir Khairi, it will have to proceed on an honest acknowledgement of the humanity of all the protagonists, and an honest accounting of the history of Palestinian dispossession. Whatever the solution, it will have to involve justice and fairness.

And it’s on that front that the U.S. and others have stumbled over the rise of Hamas. To simply demand that Hamas recognize the State of Israel is pointless. Fatah recognized the State of Israel, but only because it had become clear to them that Israel was an intractable strategic reality — not because they recognized the moral basis claimed by Israel for its own existence, but simply because they recognized the futility of trying to fight on to reverse the fact of its existence against overwhelming military odds. Ask Abu Mazen or any other Palestinian leader, for that matter, in an honest moment, would he rather Israel had not come into being in 1948, and I have no doubt of what the honest answer would be. This book may help the objective observer, and indeed, Israelis themselves, better undertand why.

History can’t be reversed, but nor can it be denied. It’s time more Americans became better acquainted with the Palestinians, and, indeed, with the Israelis — and with the big picture of the brutally tragic history they share. Understanding that history is the key to changing its tragic course. And for that reason, Sandy Tolan has exemplified Rami Khouri’s Deuteronomistic journalistic ethic. You might even say he has done a Mitzvah.

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Situation Report | 66 Comments

Memo to Madonna: It’s a Buyer’s Market

Posted on August 16, 2006 by Tony

A couple of months ago, it was credibly reported that Madonna was looking for a house in Rosh Pina, a northern Israeli town overlooking the Sea of Galilee where, so we were told, she believes the Messiah will arrive. He’ll walk from Safed to Tiberias, in probably the most gorgeous part of the Holy Land, where he may be tempted to cool his heels in one of those quaint bed and breakfasts — that’s according to the script from which she and other Hollywood Kabbalists are reading. And Rosh Pina offers a gorgeous little front row seat on that divine moment, of course — drinks on the patio and watch the show.

Rosh Pin also happened to be well within range of Hizballah’s Katyusha rockets, and took a bit of a beating these last four weeks. Assuming the messiah can survive any future Hizballah fusillade, the good news for the artist also known (in Kabbalah circles) as Esther, is that Hizballah has managed to bring down property prices in northern Israel. Presumably, there are moneyed Kabbalists everywhere waiting to make a killing.

Posted in 99c Blogging | 15 Comments

Fidel +10

Posted on August 14, 2006 by Tony

Looks like another marketing triumph by Adidas over Nike: The first photographs of the ailing commandante supremo aimed at showing that he’s on the mend showed that Fidel Castrol has lost none of his inimitable sense of style. That certainly ain’t no hammer and sickle perched boldly on his warmup suit as he mugs with a copy of Granma (a paper in which I was once rebuked for falling prey to imperialist schemes). And while they’re unlikely to follow in the idiom of their brilliant World Cup ads by making the Fidel +10 spot — although I’d happily write the script (young Fidel and Raul square off in a childhood garden, picking legendary fighters for their armies in an imaginary war-game… Fidel: “Jose Marti!” Raul: “Lenin!” Fidel: “Bolivar!” Raul: “Zapata!” Fidel: “Sandino!” Raul: “Trotsky!” Fidel: “Trotsky?!! [Laughs mockingly.] Mao!” etc.) — even while Adidas may not know it, the Fidel ad is a huge banding boom, blessing the street fashion marriage of the German sportswear icon with Che kitsch. And think about, which hip kids would possibly want to dress like Fidel’s enemies, the Miami Cubans and their man in the White House?

Talking of Fidel, BTW, great article in today’s Guardian by Duncan Campbell stressing why even after Fidel is out of the picture, Cubans themselves will decide their own history, and their choices are unlikely to be those demanded by Washington and the Miami crew, who are regarded with fear and suspicion by most Cubans. Campbell offers up a great opener:

“It may be as the pages of history are turned, brighter futures and better times will come to Cuba,” wrote Winston Churchill in 1895. “It may be that future years will see the island as it would be now, had England never lost it – a Cuba free and prosperous under just laws and patriotic administration, throwing open her ports to the commerce of the world, sending her ponies to Hurlingham and her cricketers to Lords.”


Not cricket: Fidel watches Che putt home in headier days

Cute conclusion, too (and I’ll have more to say on Fidel and his legacy later):

If the Bush administration is really interested in more than score-settling and vote-catching, it should lift the embargo immediately so that Cuba can, as Churchill imagined, throw open its ports to the commerce of the world and allow US citizens to visit the island and see for themselves whether it is heaven, hell or something else entirely. The “battle of ideas” that Castro has recently been urging Cubans to engage in should continue in earnest, with a place for every voice and every idea. Imperial powers past or present should keep their hands off. Pity about the cricket, though.

Posted in Annals of Globalization | 12 Comments

Why Lebanon Should Make You Fear a President Hillary

Posted on August 6, 2006 by Tony

Ethan Bronner in the New York Times asks the question “what would Ariel Sharon have done?” in response to Hizballah’s raid that captured two soldiers. And his answer seems to be, very little: A few air strikes, and then a prisoner exchange. So why did Ehud Olmert launch what is increasingly becoming a disastrous war for Israel in response to what was, essentially, a tactical escalation of the ongoing border skirmishing?

“Sharon never had to prove he was Sharon,” [a senior Israeli official who has know Sharon for 30 years] said. “To be prime minister of Israel, the Jews must trust you and the Arabs need to fear you. Sharon had those qualities. Olmert still needs to prove that he is Sharon.”

The result, he and others argue, is that Mr. Olmert has responded with a ferocity in Lebanon that Mr. Sharon would not have chosen. At the same time, Mr. Sharon’s neglect of Hezbollah’s arsenal left Mr. Olmert far more vulnerable.

Leaders of Hezbollah and its sponsors said they did not expect Israel’s harsh counteroffensive. However ferociously he had fought Yasir Arafat and Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza, Mr. Sharon never reacted that way in Lebanon while prime minister. In 2004, he exchanged 430 prisoners and the bodies of 59 Lebanese for an Israeli citizen taken by Hezbollah and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers held by the militia. Hezbollah calculated that his more moderate successor, Mr. Olmert, would be open to similar negotiations.

For Mr. Olmert, the calculation was different. Since the attack from Lebanon came on the heels of a similar one from Gaza — leaving three Israel soldiers in enemy hands — and his entire policy is based on more withdrawals from occupied territory, he felt he was being tested. He needed to show friend and foe that he could be a Sharon.

Now, imagine those skittish Democrats, who voted for the war even though they knew it was probably a bad idea but didn’t want to uh, look weak, and who have ever since engaged in the most bizarre game of Twister in an effort to show that the war could have gone very differently if they’d been in charge (you know, Kerry saying he’d have brought in more allies — yeah, right, name any ally who’d have followed you into Iraq but not Bush…). Imagine, if you can, a President Hillary Clinton tested by some provocation by those looking to sink the U.S. into more quagmires. Or Hillary simply facing the smorgasbord of security crises bequeathed by the Bush administration, many of them of its own making…

I’m afraid Hillary Clinton has been proving ever since she first started running for the Senate that she, too, is Sharon. Maybe someone could persuade Papa Bush to come out of retirement. At least he knows he’s not Sharon…

Posted in 99c Blogging | 4 Comments

Israel Disappoints the Neo-cons in Lebanon Proxy War

Posted on August 4, 2006 by Tony

Hear, Oh Israel! Charles Krauthammer is disappointed. Very disapppointed. And he clearly speaks for the rest of the neo-conservative fraternity that has worked so hard to destroy any distinction between U.S. interests and Israeli interests. That’s because, as we pointed out a couple of days ago, the Bush administration sees Israel’s war in Lebanon as its own war, by proxy, against Iran. And Israel is quite simply failing to deliver the knockout blow against Hizballah that Washington is demanding — it can’t be done, of course, but reality has never restrained the neocons from pursuing their fantasies, at the expense of thousands of lives. Krauthammer offers candid confirmation of what many, including Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah, have suspected all along:

Israel’s leaders do not seem to understand how ruinous a military failure in Lebanon would be to its relationship with America, Israel’s most vital lifeline… America’s green light for Israel to defend itself is seen as a favor to Israel. But that is a tendentious, misleadingly partial analysis. The green light — indeed, the encouragement — is also an act of clear self-interest. America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat.

He explains, as we’ve done, that the U.S. sees Hizballah as nothing more than a cat’s paw for Iran, which it sees as its major strategic competitor in the Middle East. It therefore saw the Hizballah provocation as a golden opportunity to strike a blow, by proxy, at an organization deemed an important part of Iran’s own deterrent capability. It is also mindful of the power of the challenge offered by Hizballah to further destabilize the decrepit autocracies in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia on which its influence in the Arab world rests.

Hence Israel’s rare opportunity to demonstrate what it can do for its great American patron. The defeat of Hezbollah would be a huge loss for Iran, both psychologically and strategically. Iran would lose its foothold in Lebanon. It would lose its major means to destabilize and inject itself into the heart of the Middle East. It would be shown to have vastly overreached in trying to establish itself as the regional superpower.

The United States has gone far out on a limb to allow Israel to win and for all this to happen. It has counted on Israel’s ability to do the job. It has been disappointed… (Olmert’s) search for victory on the cheap has jeopardized not just the Lebanon operation but America’s confidence in Israel as well. That confidence — and the relationship it reinforces — is as important to Israel’s survival as its own army.

From the horse’s mouth.

Much of the debate over the influence of the Israel lobby in the U.S. focuses on the question of whether the relationship advances or compromises U.S. interests. My own thinking has long been that it doesn’t help to try and examine this question viewing either Israel or the U.S. in monolithic terms. In fact, what Krauthammer’s comments reveal is the fact that there’s an extremist ideological element at work both in Washington and in Israeli political circles (although there it is concentrated in the more hardline Likud minority of Bibi Netanyahu), whose common purpose is a (misguided) revolutionary drive to forcefully remake the whole Middle East on terms more favorable to the U.S. and Israel — essentially, to crush all challengers to either.

Their enemies were not simply the realist custodians in Washington of a policy to pursue U.S. interests by balancing those of Israel and its Arab neighbors — most importantly by pressing Israel to conclude a peace with its neighbors based on UN Resolution 242 — but also the Israeli peace camp. Today, Sharon’s propagandists may have convinced much of the U.S. media that the reason there was no peace was that Arafat wouldn’t make a deal, but it’s conveniently forgotten that Sharon himself opposed the deal offered by Barak at Camp David far more vehemently than Arafat ever did. More importantly, it’s also ignored that the neocons who have guided so much of the Bush Administration’s Middle East policy — Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrahams, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle (and even others who are not neocons, just ignorant ultra-nationalists like Dick Cheney) — were as vehemently opposed to the Oslo Peace process. And just as they set out to overturn the U.S. involvement in pressing Israel to conclude a two-state peace based on the 1967 borders, they also set out to overturn the Israeli electorate’s preference for governments committed to the same principle.

Perle, in fact, led a study group that included Feith and which compiled a strategic guideline for the incoming Netanyahu government in 1996, titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which amounted to a manifesto to reverse the prevailing “Land for Peace” logic and instead pursue tough action to remak the Middle East, including Iraq — which they (as if to illustrate the almost psychedelic giddiness of their fantasies) envisaged turning into another kingdom under the rule of the Jordanian royal house.

Thoughtful Israeli voices are beginning to count the cost of the “friendship” from the U.S. to Israel orchestrated by this crowd. Daniel Levy writes in Haaretz, that in the case of Lebanon, “Israel was actually in need of an early exit strategy, had its diplomatic options narrowed by American weakness and marginalization in the region, and found itself ratcheting up aerial and ground operations in ways that largely worked to Hezbollah’s advantage.” This, says Levy, is symptomatic of a deeper problem, which is the hegemony in Washington’s Middle East decision making of the neo-cons’ fabulist narrative:

The key neocon protagonists, their think tanks and publications may be unfamiliar to many Israelis, but they are redefining the region we live in. This tight-knit group of “defense intellectuals” – centered around Bill Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Elliott Abrams, Perle, Feith and others – were considered somewhat off-beat until they teamed up with hawkish well-connected Republicans like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Newt Gingrich, and with the emerging powerhouse of the Christian right. Their agenda was an aggressive unilateralist U.S. global supremacy, a radical vision of transformative regime-change democratization, with a fixation on the Middle East, an obsession with Iraq and an affinity to “old Likud” politics in Israel. Their extended moment in the sun arrived after 9/11.

Finding themselves somewhat bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire, the neoconservatives are reveling in the latest crisis, displaying their customary hubris in re-seizing the initiative. The U.S. press and blogosphere is awash with neocon-inspired calls for indefinite shooting, no talking and extension of hostilities to Syria and Iran, with Gingrich calling this a third world war to “defend civilization.”

Disentangling Israeli interests from the rubble of neocon “creative destruction” in the Middle East has become an urgent challenge for Israeli policy-makers. An America that seeks to reshape the region through an unsophisticated mixture of bombs and ballots, devoid of local contextual understanding, alliance-building or redressing of grievances, ultimately undermines both itself and Israel. The sight this week of Secretary of State Rice homeward bound, unable to touch down in any Arab capital, should have a sobering effect in Washington and Jerusalem.

Elsewhere, Sidney Blumenthal provides fascinating insights into the neocons’ operations within the administration, suggesting that Rice is actually marginalized by the neo-cons, which accounts for the skittishness that has characterized her interventions throughout the crisis — and that the U.S. is extending Israel’s target range by supplying NSA intelligence supposedly showing the movement of weapons from Syria and Iran to Hizballah, creating conditions and pretexts for an expansion of the conflict. Blumenthal adds:

Having failed in the Middle East, the administration is attempting to salvage its credibility by equating Israel’s predicament with the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for their part, see the latest risk to Israel’s national security as a chance to scuttle U.S. negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to realize the fantasies of “A Clean Break.”

By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences — from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot. ”

This is far more serious than lunatic but influential televangelists lobbying for an attack on Iran to hasten Armageddon and “rapture”, this is a case of geopolitical berserkers with all the sobriety of a bunch of teenage Maoists on crack — but who are taken far too seriously for our collective good in Washington and in the U.S. national media — trying to start a war, with Israel at its epicenter.

The U.S.-Israel relationship under the current administration, then, is a blank check only to the extent that Israel is willing to go to war to realize a neo-con Likudnik fantasy.

Israelis have typically unleashed the dogs of war while expecting the U.S. to apply the brakes and walk it away from the precipice. Instead, they have found this administration baying for more. Tom Segev, my favorite of all Israel’s historian-journalists, puts it eloquently:

Over time, we have grown accustomed to the Americans saving us, not only from the Arabs, but from ourselves too. Not in this war. It is still unclear whether this war was coordinated with the United States; only the release of government records of the past three weeks will shed light on this. Whatever the case may be, the impression is that the Americans are linking the events in Lebanon to their failing adventure in Iraq…

…If Europe had some say in the region, Israel may have started negotiations with Hezbollah on the release of the soldiers it abducted – and hopefully, it still will do so – instead of getting mixed up in war. For some years now, more Middle East-related wisdom emanates from Europe than from the United States. It wasn’t Europe but the United States that invented the diplomatic fable called the road map; it wasn’t Europe but the United States that encouraged unilateral disengagement and is allowing Israel to continue oppressing the population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The United States is not engaged with Syria; Europe is. Syria is relevant not only for settling the situation in Lebanon, but also in managing relations with the Palestinians. This is the real problem. Because, even if the United States conquers Tehran, we will still have to live with the Palestinians. In Europe, they already understand this.


Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 62 Comments

Letter from San Quentin

Posted on August 1, 2006 by Tony

Some months ago, I posted a piece titled “Are Jews White” that used the case of Stephen Liebb, a Jewish convict in San Quentin who is seeking to have himself racially reclassified from “White” to “Other,” to explore the question of Jews and whiteness – and observe that while terms such as “White” and “Black” are anthropoligically meaningless, they mark political boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. My conclusion: “Let’s just say when Jews try too hard to be ‘white’ they often end up in political spaces where no Jew should feel comfortable.”

Mr. Liebb has no access to the Internet, but a friend of his forwarded him the piece, and he sent me this letter in response:

May 29, 2006
Dear Mr. Karon

I recently received a copy of your article Are Jews White? which referred to my litigation to be reclassified from White to Other. Your article was very insightful. Racial classification is not an exact science. Recent DNA studies show that Jews and Palestinians share a common DNA which confirms our common ancestry as Semites, and makes us susceptible to certain illnesses, like Parkinson’s Disease.

Your article, though, demonstrates that perhaps more significant than any genetic history is our religious and cultural history, which includes a commandment: “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt. (Exodus :22:21) Whether in prison or in South Africa, I believe a Jew has an obligation to align himself with those who are mistreated and oppressed. It is unfortunate that Jews who feel they have “arrived” feel no empathy with those who have not.

I don’t have access to the Internet, but would like to read about you and read any comments about the article “Are Jews White?” My case is scheduled for trial in Federal court in December.

Thank you for your time and consideration
Sincerely
(signed)
Stephen Liebb
C-60825 4N 69L
San Quentin, CA 94970

Posted in A Wondering Jew | 14 Comments

Is Israel Fighting a Proxy War for Washington?

Posted on July 29, 2006 by Tony

Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said a curious thing Saturday: Israel has recognized reality and is ready for a cease-fire in Lebanon, Nasrallah claimed, but it is the U.S. that insists that it fight on. And if you read the analysis of Ze’ev Schiff, the dean of Israeli military correspondents and an enthusiastic advocate of the military campaign against Hizballah, there’s a remarkable confirmation of Nasrullah’s analysis. Schiff writes:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is the figure leading the strategy of changing the situation in Lebanon, not Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Defense Minister Amir Peretz. She has so far managed to withstand international pressure in favor of a cease-fire, even though this will allow Hezbollah to retain its status as a militia armed by Iran and Syria.

As such, she needs military cards, and unfortunately Israel has not succeeded to date in providing her with any. Besides bringing Hezbollah and Lebanon under fire, all of Israel’s military cards at this stage are in the form of two Lebanese villages near the border that have been captured by the IDF.

If the military cards Israel is holding do not improve with the continuation of the fighting, it will result in a diplomatic solution that will leave the Hezbollah rocket arsenal in southern Lebanon in its place. The diplomatic solution will necessarily be a reflection of the military realities on the ground.

Listening the millenarian rubbish pouring out of the mouths of Bush and Blair last Friday about this being a fight led by the U.S. and its allies for a “new Middle East” of freedom from tyranny blah blah there was also a sense that this skirmish had been appropriated by the U.S. for its wider global war, and Iran, of course, is its prime target right now — with Hizballah being identified as an Iranian asset that could be destroyed. (Never mind that Bush’s rhetoric is oblivious to the reality that every time Arab electorates have been given the option to vote in a democratic election, they have returned governments profoundly at odds with U.S. and Israeli policy, and the U.S. has ended up ignoring them, or trying to overthrow them… repudiating Bush’s increasingly brittle and shrill rationalizations is not my purpose here — and Blair, quite frankly, knows better, which is why the court of history will judge him even more harshly).

I’ve always maintained that the “pro-Israel” position of the Bush administration, formulated and influenced by hardline American Likudniks (whom, it must be said, are hardly representative of mainstream Israeli thinking) is actually fundamentally bad for Israel. Its infantile, aggressive maximalism precludes Israel from doing what it will take to live at peace with its surroundings, instead demanding a confrontational approach in keeping with Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” in which Israel’s survival depends on crush and humiliating the Arabs. Bush may talk the language of “Arab liberation,” but his contempt for Arab democracy is plain — just look at his response to the Hamas election victory. His administration appears to be dedicated to a remaking of the Middle East on America’s terms through violent social engineering. The depth of their failure in Iraq appears not to have deterred them from another adventure in Lebanon, this time using Israel as their agent of “change.” And if hundreds of Lebanese children are killed in Israeli air strikes, they’re just victims of the “birth pangs of a New Middle East.”

Plainly, the region has no interest in being remade in the manner in which Bush envisages. I strongly recommend the coverage of Rami Khouri, the excellent Jordanian analyst of Arab affairs at Beirut’s Daily Star, who makes clear that the region’s politics have indeed been remade, with the pro-U.S. autocracies having discredited themselves beyond repair, and the new motive force of Arab politics is the Islamist movement representing resistance to Israel and the U.S. and responsive, clean government in comparison to the autocracies.

Mark Perry and Alistair Crooke have argued thoughtfully that the most credible and viable policy for the U.S. to follow in these circumstances is to promote democracy and acknowledge that it will bring Islamists to power, and seeking to engage with that reality rather than continuing the vain path of seeking to violently suppress an increasingly popular movement.

Yet the Administration appears to have clung to its old instincts in the case of Lebanon. Indeed, they appear to have framed their response to the crisis as an opportunity to wage proxy war against Iran by seeking to militarily eliminate what they see as nothing more than an Iranian proxy. So when Israel launched its retaliation, probably expecting the Bush administration to set the limits and demand restraint, instead it found Washington saying “Don’t hold back on our account, in fact, make sure you finish them off…”

And seeking Hizballah’s defeat on the battlefield remains their objective. But with the zealous delusion that has characterized so much of what this Administration has done in the Middle East, it simply failed to reckon with reality and consequence. It’s premises were faulty, as we’ve discussed in a previous post — Hizballah can’t be beaten on the battlefield, it seems, and Israel very quickly began looking to a NATO force to pull its chestnuts out of hte fire (As I noted in my TIME.com piece after the Rome meeting, this gives the Europeanns far more leverage than washington would like over the shape of a cease-fire — they’re not about to go and fight Hizballah on behalf of Israel or the U.S. so they’re demanding a cease-fire as a precondition for going in. A cease-fire that would have to be agreed by Hizballah, in other words, that fact alone giving Hizballah a remarkable victory over the U.S. and Israel.)

After its air campaign failed to even slow the rate of Hizballah rocket fire into Israel, it sent in ground troops. They managed to capture Maroun al-Ras, but after days of fierce fighting in which they took heavy casualties, the Israelis actually pulled out of the battle for Bint Jbail. And Israeli officers had freely admitted there are at least 170 such towns controlled by Hizballah in southern Lebanon. And Israel has no appetite for reestablishing roots in the quagmire of southern Lebanon. That’s why it suddenly finds itself needing the international force more than anyone.

So, not only is Hizballah going to emerge stronger, having survived the onslaught and therefore have a substantial hand in shaping the cease-fire that will follow — and politically, while the Administration may have been hoping the Israeli campaign would turn Lebanese against Hizballah, the opposite has occurred: A poll last week found that a solid 70 percent of Lebanese, across the board, supported Hizballah’s capture of the two Israeli soldiers that started the current confrontation: That breaks down as around 95 percent of Shiites, 70 percent of Sunnis, around 40 percent of Druze and 54 percent of Christians, far from turning on Hizballah as a result of its provocation, instead backed it to the hilt after two weeks of bombing. (Bombing will do that, I suspect — two dramatic terror hijack-bombings on 9/11, and the U.S. population was ready to follow Bush into an entirely unrelated military adventure in Iraq, remember?)

Not surprising, also, 86 percent of Lebanese in the same survey don’t believe the U.S. is an honest broker. And frankly, the Lebanon debacle will have sealed America’s fate in Arab eyes for a generation: When the next al-Qaeda attacks come on U.S. soil, I don’t expect there’ll be much hand-wringing or denial in the Arab world, blaming the Mossad for something they didn’t want to believe Arabs were capable of and so forth. And media outlets wanting to run “Why do they Hate Us?” specials can probably start writing them already.

I also noted in a different Time.com piece how the Lebanon crisis has further weakened the U.S. position in Iraq, particularly its ability to influence the Shiite-led government (whose leaders, after all, are ideological fellow travelers of Hizballah).

There will be other regional implications, such as gains for Syria. And I want to return to the issue of the cease-fire and prospects for Hizballah — it wouldn’t surprise me to see new proposals from the Lebanese government under which Hizballah’s armed forces would be incorporated into those of the Lebanese army. Probably not exactly what Condi had in mind.

But it also seems clear that Israel’s own position is weakened. It has once again aroused the hatred of the Arab world, and the disdain of much of the international community for its plainly excessive response, all in pursuit of reestablishing its “deterrent” capacity — but if Hizballah is left standing, and indications are that it will be, that deterrent capacity itself will have been undermined. And Israel will have to pay a diplomatic price too, being forced back into internationally supervised peace discussions with a view to settling the conflict on the basis of the 1967 borders, as Brent Scowcroft, of the grownup Bush administration so forcefully argues.

I can’t help thinking that for all of the enthusiasm of the neocon Likudniks, the Bush administration’s “New Middle East” policy is not only bad for the Arabs; it’s bad for Israel, too.

Posted in 99c Blogging, Situation Report | 6 Comments