Helena Cobban Explains Fatah

Posted on August 2, 2009 by Tony

Helena Cobban has spent decades reporting on Palestinian politics and the wider MIddle East, and her expertise offers an indispensable understanding of the dynamics at work as Fatah prepares to hold its first party conference in decades. The Israelis and their closest supporters in Washington are unlikely to enjoy the outcome.

Posted in Hear! Hear! | 10 Comments

More Dennis Ross Dissembling

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Tony

Once again, the boundless dissembling of Dennis Ross… The anecdote in Roger Cohen’s piece about his meeting with the Saudi King ought to give pause to those who’d have us believe Ross is some kind of strategic genius — plainly, the guy is out of his depth. But more nefarious is Ross’s attempt to convince that Israel may just do something rash like bomb Iran. This, because “Israeli officials have argued that they don’t believe Iran would ever be crazy enough to nuke them but do believe the change in the balance of power with a nuclear or near-nuclear Iran could be so decisive that Jews would begin to leave Israel.” This, too, is misleading. First off, Ross in his book makes clear that an essential part of his strategy for squeezing Iran is to make the Europeans believe that if they don’t implement an economic blockade, Israel will attack Iran — in order to turn the screws on Iran. It needn’t be true, of course.

But this idea that Jews would “begin” to leave Israel should Iran tilt the regional balance of power in its favor also ignores the fact the Jews have been leaving Israel in droves for years, now — about as many as 1 million Israeli Jews now live abroad, which is close to one fifth of Israel’s Jewish population. The economic downturn has prompted some to return from the U.S. and Europe, but last year’s figure was just 11,000 — lower than the annual rate of emigration in recent years.

The reason is nothing to do with Iranian nukes; it’s just a combination of the corrosive impact of the conflict with the Palestinians, the decline of anti Semitism in a world more comfortable than it has ever been for Jews to live wherever they choose, and the cultural globalization that extends the horizons of Israeli kids.

It should be noted, of course, that the question of where Jews choose to live may be of some import to Ross, who recently headed up a Jerusalem-based outfit that claimed for itself the title of “The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute” (as if such a thing were possible!). It was founded in 2002 by the Jewish Agency, the arm of the Israeli government responsible for promoting Jewish immigration to Israel.

Among the Agency’s more notable interventions in recent years was to “aggressively lobby” Germany to pass a new law restricting Jewish immigration from former Soviet territories. The Agency had long complained that German policies welcoming Jewish immigrants had seen Germany surpass Israel as the destination of choice by Jews leaving former Soviet territories, and that this repesented a “threat” to Israel.

Posted in If I Was a Blogger... | 7 Comments

Obama, Foxman and Israel’s Purpose

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Tony


Obama at Yad Vashem, the diplomatic ‘gateway’ to Israel whose function is to root Israel — in the mind of every visiting dignitary — squarely in the Holocaust

Abe Foxman, President of the Anti-Defamation League and a stalwart cheerleader for Israel in Washington, has been worried about President Barack Obama ever since the new Administration took office. When Obama named Senator George Mitchell as his Mideast envoy, Foxman actually complained that the problem with Mitchell was “meticulously fair and even handed,” which he insisted was not a desirable approach for the U.S. to take to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ever since Obama’s Cairo speech, Foxman’s concerns have become more pronounced. It’s not that the Anti Defamation League president didn’t take heart from Obama’s insistence that Israel’s security is sacrosanct; or that “he made strong statements against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.” No, his concern — among others — was that Obama should have “made clear that Israel’s right to statehood is not a result of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.”

He’s not the only one who argues this, of course; many on the Zionist right have long insisted that the movement claimed sovereignty in Palestine not on the basis of the Holocauast, but claiming to represent the continuity of the Hebrews of Judea thousands of years ago.

The same theme was echoed today in Haaretz by Israeli liberal Aluf Benn.

Commenting on Obama choosing to follow his Cairo speech with a visit to Buchenwald, Benn said this decision to balance an outreach to the Muslim world with a gesture recognizing the horrors of anti-Semitism may have been welcomed by American Jews, “but in Israel it was taken as an affront. The Israeli narrative attributes the state’s creation to a historical bond from biblical times, to the Zionist struggle and to the victory in the War of Independence. Obama’s message in Cairo – that Israel was established as compensation for the Holocaust – was perceived in Israel as an adoption of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Zionist stance.”

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear… Where on Earth did Barack Obama get this idea that Israel’s foundation was intimately tied to the Holocaust? Maybe it’s the fact that the first place Israel takes every visiting dignitary is to Yad Vashem, which as Avrum Burg has so eloquently argued, a visit designed effect what he calls the “emotional blackmail” that sears into the minds of the guest that Israel is the answer to the Holocaust, and that any criticism of the Jewish State must be muted for that reason.

Or maybe it’s the fact that Israel’s leaders are always rabbiting on about every new challenger in the region being a reincarnation of Hitler. Begin said it about Arafat; Netanyahu says it about Ahmadinejad. For years, Israel’s leaders have spoken about the 1967 borders as “Auschwitz borders.” I could go on and on. The Zionist narrative as I was fed it growing up portrayed the creation of the State of Israel as a triumphant redemption from the horrors of the camps. And the same narrative became the organizing principle of Israeli education starting in the 1960s with the Eichmann trial, when as Tom Segev and others have shown, the Israeli state makes a conscious decision to emphasize the Holocaust as the basis of its national identity to keep people from leaving. Jewish schoolkids, many of whose families had never set foot in Europe, now make an annual pilgrimage to the death camps of Poland. Israeli air force planes fly over Auschwitz in symbolic claiming of the mantle of the survivors.

And most of those Jews abroad who support the principle of a Jewish State — and the Western nations who do likewise — do so on the basis of the Holocaust. If Israel’s claims were based only on a mythologized history of a Biblical kingdom, frankly it would have aroused no more sympathy in the Jewish world than Bin Laden’s fantasies about resurrecting the Islamic Caliphate have done in the Muslim world. Without the Holocaust, in other words, Zionism would have remained the fringe movement among Jews that it was before World War II.

To suggest that the link between Israel’s claims to legitimacy and the Holocaust were invented by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is absurd. They were present at the founding in the international community’s response to Israel’s creation (does Aluf Benn really think Israel won the UN vote that enabled its creation because of the Biblical claims of the Zionist movement?!), and they have been systematically developed and exploited by Israel itself.

The reason the likes of Foxman, and the Israelis themselves, are suddenly feeling queasy about the Holocaust-as-basic-argument-for-Israel, is that they’re suddenly recognizing the limits of what that buys them.

As I wrote here following the Cairo speech, the likes of Foxman suddenly realized that the Holocaust argument set limits on what Israel could legitimately demand — Obama expressed a rock solid commitment to ensure Israel’s security, but warned that settlements outside its 1967 border had no legitimacy. After all, they were if anything a drain on Israeli security, and Obama made clear that the U.S. recognizes that Israel’s creation came at the expense of another people, rooting the plight of the Palestinians first in the expulsions of 1948, and then in the occupation that began in 1967 — and he insisted, to the chagrin of Foxman and others, that the Palestinian narrative and aspiration had equal status, and could not be ignored by the U.S.

I wrote:

Hence, a solid U.S. bond with Israel to guarantee its survival and security in a hostile environment, but no endorsement of an expansive Zionism that calls on Jews to “redeem” the Biblical Land of Israel by settling on West Bank land. By insisting that Palestinians are born equal to Israelis and that their side of the conflict be understood, and that Israel halt its expansion into Palestinian territory, Obama is forcing Israel to confront a basic question of its own identity — and also to reckon with the fact that its creation, and expansion, have occurred at the expense of another people who are deemed of equal status in the mind of the American president. No wonder, then, that some Israelis and their American supporters are annoyed.

Still, having told the world and the majority of Jews who live in it that Israel was the answer to the Holocaust and the inheritor of the mantle of the survivors (a contestable claim, to be sure, but you only have to look at the fact that Germany paid most of its “reparations” not to the survivors themselves, but to Israel), Foxman et al are going to have a hard time pivoting to the narrative of Biblical redemption. For starters, most of the world’s Jews don’t buy such bubbemeis. And you’re going to have a hard time getting American Jews and most Western countries to accept the idea that the Palestinians’ epic suffering has been inflicted simply in the name of a distortion of Biblical fantasy.

Essentially, the problem they face is that an ideological construct of their own making is no longer serving its purpose of ensuring a blank check for Israel’s endless dispossession of the Palestinians. The bad news, of course, is that justifying that dispossession on the basis of a Biblical narrative is going to get even fewer takers in America, of any persuasion.

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 25 Comments

Netanyahu Sr. Lets the Cat Out of the Bag

Posted on July 11, 2009 by Tony

My latest:

When a top sportsman wants to express opinions that might get him into trouble with his employers, his father often pops up in the media to reveal what his son is really thinking. In the same way, while Benjamin Netanyahu would risk incurring Washington’s wrath if he were to admit the cynicism behind his apparent embrace of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, his father has no such qualms.

On Israeli TV last week, the 100-year-old historian and stalwart of the Israeli right, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, was blunt when asked whether his son now supports the creation of a Palestinian state: “He does not support it. He supports such conditions that they [the Palestinians] will never accept it. That’s what I heard from him. I didn’t propose these conditions, he did. They will never accept these conditions. Not one of them.”

Click here to read the whole thing

Posted in Situation Report | Tagged , , , , | 16 Comments

Obama Slouching Towards an Iran War?

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Tony

“The Obama Administration has given Israel a green light to attack Iran.” That was the takeaway reported by leading U.S. news outlets as well the major papers and broadcasters across the spectrum in the Middle East from Sunday’s comments on ABC by Vice President Joe Biden.

A careful read of the Biden interview transcript, of course, makes clear that while the Vice President kept reiterating that Israel was a sovereign state free to act as it deemed necessary in response to perceived threats, and to which the U.S. could not prescribe, he did also make clear — when asked about whether the U.S. would allow Israeli planes to overfly Iraqi airspace — that the U.S. would act in its own national interest on the Iran question. Given that he noted earlier in the same exchange that an attack on Iran was not in U.S. national interests — or Israel’s, for that matter — the media reporting of the exchange may have distorted his meaning. Indeed, the White House rushed to insist Monday that the U.S. position remained unchanged, and Obama himself underscored on Tuesday that he had NOT given Israel any such “green light”, and had instead told it to allow diplomacy to work. Biden, he said, had simply “stated a fact”, i.e. that Israel is a sovereign country that will make its own security decisions. (And the Israelis helpfully came out with reports suggesting that the Netanyahu government won’t ask permission — a frankly fanciful claim.)

Unfortunately, Obama’s “sovereignty” argument is not good enough. Unless the White House declares loudly and clearly not only that it opposes any attack on Iran by Israel, but also that it will do whatever is in its power to prevent such an attack, the Obama Administration will be read as having made a plausibly-deniable but nonetheless real threat that Iran faces military action. The Great Sage of Statecraft, Dennis Ross (wait, what exactly are his achievements, again?) may think such ambiguity is devilishly clever, but it’s more likely to bring closer a war Obama obviously doesn’t want, helping him bring about through act and omission a strategic catastrophe that would dwarf Bush’s Iraq misadventure.

Even if Biden was, in his signature foot-in-mouth way, trying to affirm U.S. opposition to a military strike on Iran, his comments were at best reckless — and disingenuous. The argument that Israel is a sovereign state over which Washington has no control when it comes to mounting an unprovoked and illegal attack on another country using U.S. weapons and transiting U.S. controlled air space is as absurd as it is dangerous. The very fact that his comments have been universally reported as a “green light” to Israel underscore the fact that nobody buys the fig leaf of Israeli “sovereignty” in this instance; Israel will not be in a position to initiate a disastrous war if the U.S. Administration firmly resists it. It’s an open secret that Israel alone lacks the technical capability to make a successful job of wrecking Iran’s nuclear program from the air. (A dubious enterprise, to be sure, because most assessments conclude the setbacks to Iran’s technical capabilities would be temporary, and would almost certainly leave behind a dramatically more dangerous situation.)

The idea that the U.S. can do nothing to stop Israel from attacking Iran, without provocation, in violation of international law and norms, on the basis of a perceived threat, is the equivalent of the U.S. saying that out of respect for Iran’s sovereignty, it couldn’t act to stop Tehran from attacking Israel should it deem such action necessary on the basis of a perceived threat. It’s precisely this absurdity that had most of the Middle East reading Biden’s “sovereignty” comments as a fig leaf for green-lighting an Israeli attack on Iran.

The fact that the Biden comments coincided with a report in Britain’s Sunday Times — subsequently denied by all sides — that the Saudis have given the go-ahead to an Israeli strike on Iran suggests a concerted campaign to make the Iranians believe an attack is coming.

Does the Obama Administration think an Israeli attack on Iran is a good idea? Obviously not, they’ve made clear many times that they are quite aware of the disastrous consequences that would follow such an event. But I have a suspicion, as does Aluf Benn, that these comments are calculated to make Iran, and others, think that an Israeli military attack is possible and even likely if Iran declines Obama’s negotiating terms. Dennis Ross, ostensibly now a more senior Obama adviser, makes absolutely clear in his book his view that a diplomatic solution requires the Iranians and others to believe that an Israeli attack is a real and imminent threat. Ross even advocates sending the Israelis around European capitals threatening to bomb Iran as a way of stampeding the Europeans into backing tougher sanctions.

If this is the playbook the Obama Administration is adopting, it’s going to blunder its way into war. Because the Iranians are unlikely to simply fold in the face of threats, and will instead more likely raise the ante.

As I recently argued elsewhere, the post-election situation in Iran makes it unlikely that the Iranians will be ready to engage with the U.S. any time soon. There’s a high probability that the regime believes its own propaganda about the election debacle having been orchestrated by Western forces, and it is circling the wagons — whatever political compromise may be in the works, its narrative will likely be national unity against foreign designs. Now, it could be that Ahmadinejad had always planned to be the one to “deliver” an honorable accord with the U.S. — which his opponents would not want to block — but it’s equally, or perhaps more likely that the political turmoil rules out any short term engagement with Washington.

Yet Obama is now talking about waiting only weeks or months to see whether Iran is willing to engage, before moving on to escalate sanctions. Already, his Congress (at Ross’ behest) is passing legislation designed to create a blockade on Iran importing petroleum (it imports as much as half of its need, despite being an oil producing country – it’s refining capacity is very limited). And Ross’s people in Washington are putting out the spin that Obama is going to be seeking intensified UN sanctions this fall.

Even Obama says “the clock is ticking” on Iran’s nuclear program. But frankly, this is also somewhat misleading and dangerous. There were some wry smiles around the world last week when the new head of the IAEA — and remember, the U.S. worked so hard to get rid of Mohammed ElBaradei because he declined to chant the catechisms of alarmism over Iran’s nuclear program — declared that the IAEA had no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Of course he hasn’t, because there isn’t any; there are only suspicions of Iran’s motives. My own view, oft stated, is that Iran is building a civilian nuclear infrastructure that puts the option to build weapons closer to hand, i.e. a “breakout” capacity like Japan has. But let’s be clear, no matter how much low-enriched uranium gas Iran creates in its centrifuges, until it reconfigures those centrifuges (a process that would take at least six months) and then reprocesses that gas to higher levels of enrichment (at least another six months), it won’t have nuclear weapons materiel. And in order to even begin that process, Iran would have to withdraw from the NPT and kick out IAEA inspectors — an unambiguous signal of its intent to build weapons. And even once it had the weapons grade materiel, turning it into serviceable nuclear warheads could take another three years or more. Indeed, even the Mossad has publicly declared its assessment that the earliest date at which Iran could have a nuclear weapon would be 2014.

So, in fact, the urgency proclaimed by those who would escalate things along the road to confrontation this fall is hugely overstated. Combining efforts to engage Iran with escalating sanctions is unlikely to draw a positive response from Iran — although those sanctions are unlikely to happen via the UN, because Russia has no more interest in supporting the Obama Administration on Iran than it had in supporting the Bush Administration on Iran. Dangling the threat of Israeli military action over Iran is more likely to trigger nasty unintended consequences than to help stabilize the Middle East. And when it comes to the question of an Israeli air strike, Obama can profess neither neutrality nor powerlessness.

Posted in Situation Report | 34 Comments

Iran’s ‘Zimbabwe’ Option

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Tony


Sunflowers aren’t the only reason for believing the ‘Tehran Spring’ is far from over, even if it’s battles will now be fought largely within the corridors of power

The political turmoil in Iran over the past two weeks was no “Color” Revolution in the sense that much of the Western media imagined it, superimposing the narratives of the fall of Eastern European regimes (in the way that a 24-hour cable news culture is prone to do) on a situation whose dynamics and character was profoundly different. Iran’s electoral contest was always, first and foremost, a battle between rival factions of the regime. And what brought the protesters out into the streets was that the ruling faction so blatantly broke the system’s own rules during the election. The opposition leadership has claimed, all along, to be out to rescue the Islamic Revolution from what they say is its betrayal by the Ahmadinejad faction, and the slogans of the protesters bear this out: “Ya Hussein” and “Allah U’Akbar” are hardly deemed counterrevolutionary chants in Iran, and nor is this necessarily simply camouflage: The 1979 revolution established two sources of legitimacy for the rulers of the Islamic Republic — the guidance or “guardianship” of unelected clerics interpreting Islamic law and philosophy, and the will of the people as expressed through democratic elections (albeit with a range of candidates sharply restricted by the clerics) to the legislature and presidency. And the actions of Ahmadinejad and his backers, who include Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, have violated both principles.

The improbable haste with which the election result was announced (I share the view that that many paper ballots could simply not have been counted that quickly), created an extraordinary situation. As I wrote on the first weekend of the crisis,

Khamenei has now done something extraordinary to the regime’s democratic apparatus. Even though Iran’s Electoral Commission allows three days to hear challenges before presenting results to Khamenei for approval, the Supreme Leader rushed to put his seal of approval on the outcome, and warned all political factions to refrain from challenging it. His imposition of the result, just hours after the polls closed, stunned the country as doubts about the legitimacy of vote were voiced widely both inside and outside Iran.

The very way Iran is ruled is now in convulsion. Since the revolution of 1979 brought on the Islamic Republic, Iran has been governed by a power structure that combines unelected clerics with an elected legislature and presidency. Under the revolution’s principle of velayat e-faqi or “guardianship of the jurisprudent,” ultimate political authority rests in the hands of the Shi’ite clergy, first among them the Supreme Leader, chosen by an unelected Assembly of Experts. Still, the regime always sought to affirm its legitimacy through holding elections for parliament and the president.

Despite clerical restrictions, the country’s democratic institutions have been capable of surprising and rebuking the conservative mullahs — as occurred in 1997, when reformist Mohammed Khatami won the presidency by a landslide. But if Khatami’s failed reformist tenure highlighted the limits of the power of Iran’s presidency, the Supreme Leader has also traditionally sought consensus within the regime. While Khamenei has clearly favored those, like Ahmadinejad, who most closely reflect his own views, he has tried to protect the cohesion of the Islamic Republic’s system by seeking to balance the influence of competing factions within its political establishment.

The democratic element of Iran’s system has functioned as an important safety valve for clerical rule by creating a managed channel for the release of popular frustrations. But now the Supreme Leader appears to have thrown his weight solidly behind what many are charging is a carefully staged putsch by Ahmadinejad…

… Ahmadinejad branded the entire revolutionary establishment as feckless and corrupt, prompting appeals to Khamenei from former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Assembly of Experts, who was one of Ahmadinejad’s chief targets. But he and others got little sympathy for their complaints that the president’s attacks undermined the legitimacy of the revolution itself. Some tartly pointed out that since Khamenei himself was president from 1981 to 1989, Ahmadinejad’s claim that his is the first Iranian administration that was not corrupt was a slap at the Supreme Leader.

Khamenei’s backing of the disputed election results has surprised many in Iran, precisely because it is directed against a substantial segment of the revolution’s political establishment. Just as Mao Zedong, in China’s Cultural Revolution, unleashed a campaign of terror carried out by poorer young people against what he decried as the more liberal, “bourgeois” elements of the communist party, so does Ahmadinejad claim to be waging a class war, with the backing of the poor and the security forces, against a corrupt political elite brought to power by the revolution. And he clearly has Khamenei’s backing.

Mir Hossein Mousavi doesn’t even represent the old reformist faction of former President Mohammed Khatami; he represents the old-guard pragmatic conservatives who defeated Khatami but were then themselves eclipsed by Ahmadinejad’s faction — Revolutionary Guard veterans of the Iran-Iraq war backed by an millenarian section of the clergy, led by Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi (who doesn’t even accept the founding principles of the Islamic Republic, i.e. clerical “guidance” and the popular vote as twin sources of legitimacy, but instead favors a clerical dictatorship that eschews even the controlled democracy of Iran’s parliamentary and presidential system of government).

As I wrote at the outset of the protest movement,

As the sun set on the fourth day of turmoil over Iran’s disputed election result, the political conflict looked less like a “Tehran spring” challenge to the Islamic regime than a high-stakes game of chicken among its rival factions.

Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei confronts one hard reality: if you summarily ignore the votes that millions of citizens have cast in good faith, even if those votes are against your favorite, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, you could fatally undermine the popular acceptance of Iran’s system of government. But opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi faces an equally acute dilemma. As he urges his supporters onto the streets to clash with authorities increasingly prone to use violence, he risks bringing down the very system in which he holds a great stake; on the other hand, holding them back risks simply conceding defeat to Ahmadinejad, even if the verdict of the electorate said otherwise.

Mousavi represents a faction of the regime determined to rally the electorate against the disastrous diplomatic and economic policies of Ahmadinejad, but that hardly makes him a natural to lead a “people’s power” movement against the regime. While insisting on the right to peaceful protest, he has been disinclined to seek confrontation, a fact that clearly piqued some armchair Trotskyist commentators in the West. Typical was the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall, who wrote: “Right now the perception grows that Iran’s transformatory moment finally arrived at the weekend, only to slip from the protesters’ grasp in a cloud of teargas, terror and vacillating political trepidation. Perhaps, for them, all is not yet lost. But as matters stand, Mousavi, the reluctant radical, will be remembered as the nearly man.” Of course in the fevered imagination of the eternal insurrectionist, revolution was but a stone’s throw (or was it a T-shirt?) away, but ever betrayed by “vacillating” political leaders.

The reality, as I wrote at the time, was that the prospects for revolution were always remote, even when there were a million protesters on the streets:

Despite the Twitter-enabled street scenes and revived slogans of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution, a repeat of that successful insurrection remains highly improbable. For one thing, the protest movement is being led by a faction of the Islamic Republic’s political establishment, whose members stand to lose a great deal if the regime is brought down and thus have to calibrate their dissent. More important, an unarmed popular movement can topple an authoritarian regime only if the security forces switch sides or stay neutral. But Iran’s key security forces — the élite Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij militia — are bastions of support for Ahmadinejad. And they have used hardly a fraction of their repressive power. Also, while the opposition draws far larger crowds, there are still millions of Iranians strongly backing Ahmadinejad. So even if the government is unable to destroy the opposition, it’s unlikely that the opposition will be in a position to destroy the government.

At the same time, the regime would have to calibrate its own use of violence so as to limit the damage to its own legitimacy. And while there were some savage murders of opposition demonstrators, for the most part, the regime appears to have used hand to hand violence and the machinery of state to disorganize the protesters and prevent them from achieving critical mass on the streets. After the first days in which hundreds of thousands took to the streets in a green wave of support for Mousavi, the deployment of the Basij militia to harass and beat people on the streets, combined with mass arrests of hundreds of individuals who could contribute to an opposition movement — as well as restrictions on Mousavi himself, and the arrest of his inner circle — pretty much nullified the challenge on the streets.

The fact that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad were unlikely ever to retreat entirely from a bogus election result the Supreme Leader had called the “divine assessment” left only one possible outcome, which I labeled “The Zimbabwe Option“:

The option that would probably hold the most appeal to Khamenei now would be brokering an agreement similar to the one that has kept Zimbabwe’s President, Robert Mugabe, in power despite his essentially losing an election — by bludgeoning the opposition into settling for an important yet subordinate role in his government. Already, Khamenei has appealed to a sense of national unity and preserving the regime, hoping to cajole the opposition into accepting the results. And at his first press conference following the announcement of his victory, Ahmadinejad reportedly asked his opponents to submit lists of candidates for membership in his Cabinet. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad may be hoping that standing firm and having the Guardian Council affirm his victory after a 10-day recount will produce opposition fatigue that, combined with the threat of violence, will see the protests peter out. By so doing, Khamenei would hope that the pragmatic conservatives — embodied by Mousavi — can be weaned away from the reformists (led by former President Mohammed Khatami) by giving them a stake in a national unity government and assurances of moderating Ahmadinejad’s style of governance. However, that scenario would come into play only if Mousavi believed he was losing the battle and risked disaster by keeping his supporters out in the streets. Right now, there are no signs that the opposition feels beaten. (Mugabe’s opponents settled for the deal only when they had been so pummeled that they could see no hope of unseating him.) Which is why all four options may remain in play while the various camps test one another’s strength in the coming days.

And also, here:

The Zimbabwe strategy would involve first escalating repression to get the opposition off the streets, drawing enough blood to make many Iranians think twice about putting themselves at great physical risk in pursuit of an objective that begins to look beyond reach. And once the opposition is intimidated and demoralised, Mr Ahmadinejad might be prodded to offer concessions in the form of some kind of national unity government, albeit on his own terms. Right now, there’s no sign that the opposition would accept such a deal, but Mr Khamenei may be betting that suppressing the protest movement can split the opposition, isolating the more reformist elements from pragmatic conservatives like Mr Mousavi who didn’t back the previous reform presidency of Mohammed Khatami, but who have been alarmed by Mr Ahmadinejad’s militancy.

It’s unlikely, in fact, that Mr Mousavi had evolved a strategy for the situation as it has unfolded. Like Mr Khamenei, he is improvising. The Supreme Leader has now forced him to choose between becoming an enemy of the state, or settling for a secondary role and perhaps, after the crisis has passed, a more moderate and inclusive Mr Ahmadinejad.

In the short term, there is no easy path to victory for the opposition. But Mr Khamenei’s behaviour over the past couple of weeks may have dealt a body blow to the regime’s key sources of legitimacy – the clergy, and the democratic process which offers genuine political competition, even if the range of candidates is tightly limited. In the eyes of millions of Iranians, Mr Khamenei has thrown his weight behind a lie, and their faith in the institutions of the Islamic Republic may have been fatally undermined. Much of the clergy, which has never been impressed by Mr Khamenei – a theological lightweight elevated into the position only after Mr Khomeini’s original designated successor, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri had begun to question the regime’s murder of its political prisoners – has begun to openly challenge his decisions over the elections.

The cost of getting Mr Ahmadinejad reelected may prove to squander the moral and political authority attached to Mr Khamenei’s office. The 1979 revolution created two sources of authority; the electorate and the clergy, and it sought to balance those to some extent. Ayatollah Khamenei may have begun to irretrievably alienate himself from both, making the office of Supreme Leader less about offering the regime moral and spiritual guidance than about being an extension of one faction.

Whatever the outcome in the test of wills, Iran’s next great political battle may, in fact, not be fought on the streets, but in the closed chambers where the various unelected clerical councils of the regime meet – sooner or later – to choose a successor to Mr Khamenei himself.

Indeed, ironically, perhaps, the opposition may have found itself in a situation of having greater prospects within the corridors of power than on the streets. As I noted in another piece,

Despite fantasies of insurrection in some of the more fevered Western media assessments of the confrontation, the balance of forces appears to militate against a knockout blow by either side. U.S.-based Iran scholar Farideh Farhi, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, stressed that Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader may not have the majority of the people behind them, “but they do have support. They also have the resources of the state — both financial and military. So that makes them quite robust.”

At the same time, Farhi noted, the opposition coalition includes some very powerful figures from within the regime, who together command the support of a large section of the population. Thus, she warned, “To assume that this will lead ultimately to a victory of one over the other is unrealistic as well as dangerous because it may come at the cost of tremendous violence.” More likely, she argued, is the pursuit of some sort of compromise that allows the regime to back down to some extent, without necessarily surrendering.

Such a compromise may be shaped by the battles inside the corridors of power. The clergy, whose blessings are a key source of legitimacy for the regime, is clearly divided over the government’s handling of the election and its aftermath. Much has been made of the fact that the Assembly of Experts, the 86-member clerical body that picks the Supreme Leader, also has the right to remove him from office, and there has been speculation that former President and Mousavi ally Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who chairs the assembly, has been lobbying clerics to rebuke Khamenei’s handling of the debacle. Whatever the reality, there’s little doubt that many of Iran’s senior clerics view Khamenei as having degraded the principle of a clerical Supreme Leader acting as a guide and arbiter to the regime’s factional battles. Khamenei has clearly become a partisan participant.

Rafsanjani has also called on the opposition to create a single political bloc to challenge Ahmadinejad. That move could have significant consequences in the Majlis, Iran’s elected parliament. Its Speaker, Ali Larijani, is a Khamenei loyalist who has long been antagonistic to Ahmadinejad, and he appears to have hedged his bets in the present crisis. He has echoed Khamenei’s initial celebration of the election results, blaming foreign forces for some of the current turmoil; but he has also slammed Ahmadinejad’s government for attacks on students and backed an opposition call for an independent investigation of the election, on the grounds that the Guardian Council is biased toward Ahmadinejad.

Parliament will not be decisive, but it could be significant in any longer term strategy of an opposition movement that claims the mantle of the Islamic revolution. It must approve the President’s budget, and it has the power to impeach him. It must also approve and can dismiss Cabinet ministers — as Ahmadinejad discovered in 2005, when the legislature rejected his first three nominees for Oil Minister, and again late last year, when it fired his Interior Minister for faking a degree from Oxford University.

Currently, Ahmadinejad’s coalition controls 117 of the 290 seats in the Majlis, while the reformists control 46 and pragmatic conservatives aligned with Rafsanjani and Mousavi have 53. Five seats are reserved for religious minorities, and 69 are in the hands of independents, among whom the opposition will presumably be lobbying hard for support against the President.

Whatever happens in the streets in the coming days, the opposition to Ahmadinejad, which has one foot deep inside the regime and the other in civil society, may be girding for a long-term campaign against the President’s power grab. The end result is likely to be some form of compromise between what remain factions of the same regime — albeit factions with increasingly catastrophic differences. But the question that will be in play in the weeks and months ahead is which side will have to give up more.

Khamenei and Ahmadinejad may well find that the cost of stealing the election is actually diminished authority within the regime. The battle is far from over, even if it’s not being fought primarily on the streets. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad would like to impose something akin to what Robert Mugabe did in Zimbabwe, when he lost the election but stayed in power, with his opponent in a subordinate role. While Mousavi is very much part of the regime, he may have reason to believe he can do better than Tsvangirai, though…

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… on Lebanon/Iran democracy claims

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Tony

If I was a blogger, I’d feel duty bound to comment on Elliot Abrams spurious claim in today’s NY Times that Iran’s election is a sham because the Supreme Leader makes the real decisions and unelected bodies can and do disqualify candidates, while Lebanon’s is supposedly the purest expression of democracy (which, we all know, Elliot would never have said if the U.S.-backed government had lost).

Of course this is just Elliott Abrams (literally) repeating the AIPAC talking points of the day, but still, it’s worth noting the following: Lebanon’s system gives everyone a vote, but not an equal one — in fact, a Christian vote is, in reality, worth about 1.5 Muslim votes, and among Muslim voters, a Shi’ite vote is worth about half of what a Sunni vote is. That’s because voting occurs according to sect, with seats allocated according to a formula based on the 1936 population census. Back then, Christians were supposedly 50% of the population, and half the seats in parliament are reserved for them, further allocated on the basis of the relative size of Maronites, Orthodox, Armenians etc. Muslims are also awarded 50% of the seats, with Shi’ite and Sunni awarded the same number of seats, and a small bloc for the Druze. The political contest in Lebanon occurs within those strictures — rival parties running for the Sunni vote, or the various sections of the Christian vote etc, but the allocation of seats according to sect is set in stone. The point, of course, is that the 1936 population statistics are no longer valid — Muslims are close to 70% of the entire population, and Shiites alone make up almost half of the total population. Hizballah and its allies easily claimed the majority of the popular vote in last weekend’s election; it was only the archaic allocation of seats that kept the government in power. And the takeaway message from the result was that Christian voters chose to vote against Michel Aoun, Hizballah’s Christian ally.

As for Abrams’ claims about Iran, I think the repudiation will be the scale of the turnout. After all, Iranians who share his “a pox on all their houses” outlook would do the logical thing and boycott the polls. The uncomfortable thing for all the neocons is that the election is making nonsense of the “regime-change” argument.

Both Iran and Lebanon are imperfect democracies (to put it charitably), but Abrams appears to want to hang on to the illusion that democracy in the Middle East will produce an endorsement of Bush-approved “moderates” while repudiating Iran-backed “radicals”…

This I’d point out, if I was a blogger… Yabadaba-dabadaba-dabadee…

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Obama, the Holocaust and the Palestinians

Posted on June 8, 2009 by Tony


Obama at Yad Vashem: Honoring the Holocaust and protecting Israel, but not the ‘Greater Israel’ of the settlements

The line in last Friday’s New York Times summed it up: Some Israelis and their American supporters are furious with President Barack Obama, the Times reported, because they saw his Cairo speech as “elevating the Palestinians to equal status.” And those who would be threatened by Palestinians being viewed as equal human beings to Israelis may have reason to be concerned. That’s because whatever its policy implications — and the jury is very much still out on those — Obama’s Cairo speech marked a profound conceptual shift in official Washington’s discourse on the nature and causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and of America’s obligations to each side. So much so that one as prone pessimism as I was before the speech was forced to note that the reason Israel’s more right-wing supporters are worried is that, rhetorically at least, Obama was trying to move the U.S. position towards one of an honest broker.

He began with the Israelis, rooting America’s “unbreakable bond” with Israel on a recognition of the centuries of persecution suffered by Jews that culminated in the Holocaust.

“Six million Jews were killed, more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today,” he noted. “Denying that fact is baseless. It is ignorant, and it is hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews is deeply wrong and only serves to evoke in the minds of the Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.”

This, of course, is sound advice. As I’ve previously written on this site,

“Arab Holocaust denial … evades confronting the fact that not only did the Holocaust happen to the Jews of Europe, but because it happened to the Jews of Europe — and because of the reaction by other Western powers before and after the fact — the Holocaust profoundly changed the Arab world. Indeed, in this sense, the Holocaust may have been one of the most important historical events shaping Arab history over the past century…

The memory of the Holocaust is such a powerful ideological tool for Zionism precisely because of its reality — it speaks the collective memory of Ashkenazi Jews of our fate in Europe, and it pricks the conscience of the perpetrators and those who preferred to turn away.

To respond by trying to deny the reality of the Holocaust is as profoundly immoral as it is idiotic — creating a kind of binary game in which if Israel says mother’s milk is good for babies, the likes of Ahmedinajad will convene a symposium to prove the superiority of formula. The point about the Holocaust is that it happened to the Jews of Europe, and afterwards, as a result of the efforts of the Zionist movement and some combination of shame and latent anti-Semitism in the West, many of its survivors had no choice but to go to Palestine, where they were willing to fight with every fiber of their being for survival, without the luxury of considering the history and context into which they’d been thrust. In the war that followed, Palestinian Arabs, who had been 55 % of the population and had controlled around 80 % of the land, now found themselves displaced and dispossessed, confined to a mere 22 % of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza), and prevented by a series of ethnic-cleansing laws passed by the State of Israel at its inception from reclaiming the homes and land from which they’d mostly fled in legitimate fear of their lives.

So, the Holocaust, in a very real way, reverberated traumatically in Palestinian national life: It was the narrative that fueled the ferocity with which many of those who drove the Palestinians from their homes in 1948 approached the struggle.

Indeed, Obama appeared well aware of that reality in turning to the Palestinians’ story: He became the first American president to officially enter into the public record an official acknowledgment of the Palestinian national trauma known as the “Nakbah”. He didn’t use the term, of course, but he made clear that for the Palestinians, Israel’s creation in 1948 was a catastrophe that resulted in their “displacement,” leaving many languishing in refugee camps ever since. That trauma was followed, since 1967, with the humiliation of occupation. So, Obama identified the Palestinians as an oppressed and dispossessed people engaged in a struggle for their national rights — although he was sharply critical of their methods, and urged them to follow the strategic examples of the African-American civil rights struggle and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, even if some of his characterizations and comparisons were a bit iffy. Obama said

“It is also undeniable that the Palestinian people, Muslims and Christians, have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years, they’ve endured the pain of dislocation.

Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations, large and small, that come with occupation.

So let there be no doubt, the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.”

Obama here roots the Palestinian plight in the expulsions of 1948 — he’s not just talking about the Palestinians under occupation; he’s talking about the refugees, too, and vowing not to turn his back on them, even if a two-state solution necessarily truncates their aspirations. To frame the Palestinian national experience as a 60-year quest for statehood is misguided, of course — as Rob Malley and Hussein Agha make clear, the Palestinian national movement has always been organized around the principle of throwing off occupation and recovering that which was taken from Palestinians in 1948. Statehood, as in the two-state conception in which the Palestinians would have cede their claims to much of what was once theirs, was a realpolitik political compromise adopted by the PLO leadership from around 1988, and never especially enthusiastically embraced by their base. Still, it appears increasingly likely that Hamas will, in its own way, reach a similar realist conclusion, based on the fact that as much as they’d prefer that Israel had never been born (so would Mahmoud Abbas and all of Fatah, frankly), they know it’s not going anywhere.

Obama’s scolding of the Palestinians on violence was also double-edged:

“Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia, to Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: violence is a dead end.”

That formulation is replete with flaws, of course: The grim reality for Palestinians is that they were a forgotten people until the late 1960s and early 70s, when the PLO’s campaign of high profile terror attacks put them back in the headlines. And the only reason Israel agreed to talk to the PLO ahead of the Oslo Accords was that the intifada uprising that began in 1987 made the occupation politically untenable. Moreover, following Obama’s civil rights analogy, Palestinians could not peacefully appeal to the “ideals at the center of” Israel’s founding for full and equal rights in the way that African Americans did of the United States, since the very principle of a “Jewish State” required their exclusion. (If the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan had been implemented, Palestinian Arabs would have been 45% of the population of what would become Israel).

And as for using South Africa as a stick with which to beat home the message that the Palestinians have to “renounce violence”, it ought to be remembered that the Nelson Mandela and the ANC never, in fact, renounced violence, until the apartheid regime had accepted the principle of democratic majority rule.

Still, far more significant than these flaws in his reasoning is the fact that Obama appeared to acknowledge that the Palestinians have a right to resist their plight — he challenged their resorting to violent resistance, instead urging them to pursue non-violent means of resistance, both on moral grounds and also because they’re more likely to effective. And in suggesting that the Palestinians learn from African-Americans or black South Africans under apartheid, he was recognizing their narrative of dispossession and oppression.

I don’t remember the Palestinian side of the story ever having been explained to the American people by its government in this way. Instead, the Palestinians have usually entered the American conversation on the conflict mostly through the prism of the Israeli narrative, i.e. as a threat to Israel. Obama, as the NYT noted Israel’s boosters are complaining, has elevated the Palestinian narrative to equal status.

Doing so, Obama believes, is actually vital to achieving peace. He argued,

“For decades, then, there has been a stalemate. Two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It’s easy to point fingers.

For Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel’s founding and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history, from within its borders as well as beyond.

But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth.

The narratives also connect, of course: It was not the Palestinians who authored the Holocaust, yet they paid a heavy territorial price for the establishment Jewish safe haven in its wake. And their resistance to their dispossession, and later occupation, has reinforced the belief, among many Israelis, that they remain under threat of extermination — a belief often callously exploited by politicians with an expansionist agenda: They called the 1967 borders “Auschwitz borders” (even though those included twice as much territory as was awarded to Israel in the UN Partition plan), and began to expand their grip on the West Bank. And any move, even by Israeli authorities, to evict settlers who have stolen and colonized Palestinian land, is denounced by settlers and their supporters as an echo of Jewish dispossession under Nazism.

One of the sticking points in talking to Hamas, on the other hand, is its refusal to recognize the State of Israel. Yet that’s explained by the place of the Nakbah in the Palestinian national narrative: For many Palestinians, even Fatah supporters, “recognizing” Israel appears to be a demand that they accept and legitimize the very “dislocation” of 60 years ago that Obama recognized.

In recognizing both competing narratives, Obama has waded into the conflict’s most intractable issues.

He hopes to navigate that minefield with the two-state concept, which is why he was so harsh on Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — their very existence undercuts prospects for a two-state solution, not simply because they were created in violation of international law, but because the physical space they occupy makes a mockery of the physical integrity of any Palestinian state. (To recap on our political geography, the 1947 partition plan offered what the Palestinians deemed a bitter pill by requiring that they, then 55% of the population and owners of most of the land, accept 55% of Palestine being awarded to a Jewish state comprised mostly of refugees from Europe, leaving them in political control of the remaining 45%. The 1948 war left them, under Egyptian and Jordanian authority, in control of the West Bank and Gaza, comprising only half of what had been allocated them in the partition plan — and those territories came under Israeli occupation after the 1967 war. When the Palestinians in 1988 moved to accept a state on the occupied 22% of historic Palestine — the West Bank and Gaza — that was a massive compromise. But ever since then, the settlements have been systematically carving up and shrinking even that 22%…)

Obama attempted to draw a red line on settlements, saying “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

Hence, a solid U.S. bond with Israel to guarantee its survival and security in a hostile environment, but no endorsement of an expansive Zionism that calls on Jews to “redeem” the Biblical Land of Israel by settling on West Bank land. By insisting that Palestinians are born equal to Israelis and that their side of the conflict be understood, and that Israel halt its expansion into Palestinian territory, Obama is forcing Israel to confront a basic question of its own identity — and also to reckon with the fact that its creation, and expansion, have occurred at the expense of another people who are deemed of equal status in the mind of the American president. No wonder, then, that some Israelis and their American supporters are annoyed.

Obama’s real impact will be measured by what he does on the conflict rather than by what he says. Still, those prone to pessimism about U.S. policy on the Middle East changing should consider the fact that even before he’s done a thing, he’s changed the discourse, signaling that the United States has moral obligations to both sides.

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Can Obama Offer Change the Muslim World Can Believe In?

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Tony

In an indispensable commentary on Obama and the Middle East, Rob Malley and Hussein Agha conclude with some important advice to the President who heads to Cairo this week to address “the Muslim world”:

A window exists, short and subject to abrupt closure, during which President Obama can radically upset Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim preconceptions and make it possible for his future plan, whatever and whenever it might be, to get a fair hearing—for American professions of seriousness to be taken seriously. It won’t be done by repackaging the peace process of years past. It won’t be done by seeking to strengthen those leaders viewed by their own people as at best weak, incompetent, and feckless, at worst irresponsible, careless, and reckless. It won’t be done by perpetuating the bogus and unhelpful distinction between extremists and moderates, by isolating the former, reaching out to the latter, and ending up disconnected from the region’s most relevant actors.

It won’t be done by trying to perform better what was performed before. President Bush’s legacy was, in this sense, doubly harmful: he did the wrong things poorly, which now risks creating the false expectation that, somehow, they can be done well.

Since taking office, President Obama has taken great pains, at least rhetorically, to distinguish himself from President Bush. He has vowed to close the prison camp at Guantanamo and abide by the rule of law in the treatment of detainees; he has vowed to end the war in Iraq; he has declared his intention to reach out for talks with Iran; and he has vowed to revive the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Obama’s openness to engagement and his legacy of opposition to the Iraq war has gone down well in the Middle East, with opinion polls showing the President having a remarkably high approval rating for a U.S. leader. But it’s hardly majority support, and even those who approve of Obama seem to retain a negative view of the United States. Here lies the rub: Obama has actually raised expectations that he will substantially change the policies that have antagonized much of the Middle East and beyond — expectations that, on current indications, he is unlikely to even come close to satisfying.

And that considerably raises the political peril of his planned speech to “the Muslim world” — I use quote marks in deference to the fact that the singularity of that noun may be more a figment of the jihadist imagination than a reality, but I’ll leave that conversation to others. The greater danger lies in the fact that Obama has no new policies to offer in Cairo. As his Deputy National Security Adviser Dennis McDonough told the Wall Street Journal, the Cairo speech will, instead, attempt to “change the conversation”. Said McDonough, “We want to get back on a shared partnership, back in a conversation that focuses on the shared values.”

The problem, of course, is that the breakdown between the U.S. and “the Muslim world” is not a misunderstanding of values, or a communication failure; it’s entirely about U.S. actions and policies, rather than the rhetoric in which they’re wrapped. People in Muslim countries understand American values, or the values America professes to uphold, and many are passionately attached to some of those same values. What they expect of America is that it apply its own values when dealing with the Middle East. They would like very much, for example, the U.S. to act on that basis of Lincoln’s “self evident truth” that Palestinian men and women were created equal to Israeli men and women — an approach Obama’s own Administration has yet to demonstrate, as my friend Rami Khouri notes.

And it’s all very well to proclaim democracy and government reflecting the popular will as American values, but the dominant feature of U.S. dealings over the past six decades with Muslim countries ranging from Indonesia and Iran to Pakistan, Palestine, Egypt and Algeria, has been to stifle the popular will and its free and democratic expression, by backing dictators who are willing to do Washington’s geopolitical bidding. Even now, now it’s far from clear that Obama is willing to accept the outcome of the democratic process in the Palestinian territories, or in Lebanon, or to suggest that a democratic process may be a good idea in Egypt. Indeed, one of the salient features of the Arab world with which Obama is dealing, is the disconnect between its leaders and its people. And currently, it’s with the leaders that Obama is looking to do business — indeed, as former Bush Mideast policy chief Elliot Abrams recently noted, the purpose of Obama’s speech is really to try and create a public climate that makes it easier for those leaders to cooperate with the U.S.

Let’s not forget that President Bush, and Condi Rice, also went to the Middle East and made lofty speeches about freedom and about how the U.S. was not in conflict with Islam. It was not the rhetoric that failed them; it was the disconnect between the rhetoric and the policies. The same disconnect casts a shadow over Obama’s speech: Despite his changing of the tone, he comes to Cairo as the head of a government that looks likely to keep Guantanamo open for some time yet (his arrival follows days after the news that a Yemeni inmate there committed suicide), while convicting some of its inmates not in courts of law, but in military tribunals — and limiting the probe into torture committed under the Bush Administration. He arrives as the Commander in Chief responsible for two occupations of Muslim countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of which looks likely to end any time soon — and in Afghanistan, U.S. involvement looks likely to increase, and with it civilian casualties from U.S. air strikes. The substance of his Iran policy thus far seems to have not shifted substantially from that of Bush, and it remains to be seen just what he intends with Israel and the Palestinians: He has demanded that Israel freeze settlements, and Israel has said no. Israel’s many friends in both parties on Capitol Hill are growing increasingly uneasy, and moving to restrain the Administration from publicly pressing Israel, even on the settlements issue.

Then, there are the worrying signs that he appears to have endorsed a renewed offensive by Palestinian Authority security forces against Hamas. That would be an unmitigated disaster, although the Israelis would love it — by ramping up their own assassination efforts against Hamas operatives in the West Bank, they seem to be trying to goad Hamas into relaunching its suspended rocket offensive in Gaza, knowing that a new security clash will take peace discussions entirely off the agenda.

And the problem here, of course, is that Obama’s key Arab partners — President Mahmoud Abbas and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak — for their own domestic political reasons (neither has a democratic mandate, and both would lose free elections to their Islamist challengers), share Israel’s animus towards Hamas, and have been content until now to tacitly back its efforts to destroy the organization. That’s not likely to happen, of course, but it leaves us contemplating a situation in which Obama is trying to build a “peace process” based on the fatally flawed foundations of a decrepit Arab (and Palestinian) political order largely at odds with its own citizenry, and, as Malley and Agha warned, disconnected from the region’s main players. In other words, to borrow from their warning, Obama may be trying to make a better job than Bush did of doing the wrong things.

Like some of his predecessors, Obama may have an exaggerated sense of the power of his own considerable charm to unlock geopolitical stalemates. But he shouldn’t underestimate the impatience of his audience with flowery rhetoric, and their determination to claim their own sovereign voice. What he says in Cairo will make little difference to the way he’s perceived in the Arab world and beyond; he’ll be judged by what he does.

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The Pathologies of Israel’s Guilty Conscience

Posted on May 28, 2009 by Tony

Negating the truth about the Nakbah — the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from what became Israel in 1948 — has been a staple of Jewish-nationalist propaganda as long as I can remember: As a youngster in Habonim, I was told bubbemeis tales about foolish Arabs marching off into the wilderness like zombies after being hypnotized by radio broadcasts urging them to leave; a “miracle” on a par with the parting of the Red Sea that ostensibly gave the Zionist movement the “land without a people” about which it had fantasized. It should have been painfully obvious that this was a preposterous self-serving myth (which even then didn’t account for the fact that the ethnic cleansing was sealed by Israel in one of its founding laws that denied the right of any Arab absent from their property on the day of Israel’s creation to return to that property). But to suggest anything less than a miraculous conception and bloodless birth for the state of Israel was to deny its “legitimacy”, we were told. As international pressure grows for an historic reckoning between Israelis and Palestinians, the frenzy of denial and negation has intensified. Suddenly, Netanyahu is demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”, even though to do so requires that Palestinian refugees simply sign away their birthright, erase their history and identity. Even more bizarre, perhaps, is the effort by members of Israel’s parliament to outlaw commemoration of the Nakba. There are other Israelis, of course, who don’t deny the Nakba, but strive to reveal its history to their fellow citizens, precisely because the pathological denial of their own country’s own history as perpetrators of dispossession and ethnic cleansing, there can be no true healing between Israelis and Palestinians. One such brave and visionary Israeli is Eitan Bronstein, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year. He graciously agreed to allow Rootless Cosmopolitan to republish an English translation of his article published in Yediot Ahoronot today article challenging the proposed Nakba law.

A Response to the Proposal to Ban Commemoration of the Nakba on Independence Day

By Eitan Bronstein

The proposal to legally bar the commemoration of the Nakba on Israel’s Independence Day reflects growing trepidation in Israel about the inevitable encounter with the Palestinian Nakba and the understanding that the Nakba is a foundational part of Israeli identity. Until recently, the threat of exposing the Nakba was barely felt. There was no need to fight this repressed demon, which might suddenly reveal itself and disrupt the seeming calm of a harmonious Jewish democracy. But the Nakba is not a demon, not the fruit of deceptive imagination, and therefore we should not underestimate the challenge facing Israeli society: to recognize Israel’s part in the expulsion of most of the Palestinian inhabitants of the land in 1948, the destruction of most of their localities (upwards of five hundred), the annihilation of urban Palestinian culture, and tens of massacres, rapes, incidents of looting, and dispossession. Looking into so dark a mirror takes courage and maturity, demonstrated in the research of such scholars as Morris, Gelber, Milstein, Khalidi, Pappe, and others, as well as in the diaries of Netiva Ben Yehuda and Yosef Nahmani.

It is not surprising that the “appropriate Zionist response,” to inscribe the forgetting of this human horror into law, comes from the circles of the political right-wing. They have always been more sincere in their racist attitudes toward Arabs in Israel, compared to the Left, which marketed to the world and to us its honest (yet illusory) longing for peace.

More than eighty years ago, it was clear to Jabotinsky, the leader of the historic Right and perhaps the most realistic Zionist thinker, that the establishment of the Jewish state required citizens to be forever soldiers under the protection of the “Iron Wall.” Jabotinsky understood that Jewish existence depended upon violent strength, on killing and being killed in a predominantly Arab region that would never accept them. A year ago his student, Tzipi Livni, suggested that Palestinians remove the word ‘Nakba’ from their lexicon as part of a comprehensive peace deal. Our current Prime Minister announced during his recent campaign that he would expunge the Nakba from educational curricula (since when has the Nakba been taught anyway?) and would order the teaching of Jabotinsky’s legacy.

The Greek philosopher Thrasymachus taught us that “the law is what is good for the stronger,” but no law, not even that of the democratic Jewish Knesset, can erase the horrors of history. Traces of these horrors will always be visible, in both personal and collective memory and forgetfulness. In Israel, the sabras, prickly cactus bushes, have become vivid and thorny monuments of the Palestinian Nakba. This obstinate plant was brought by the Palestinians from Mexico to mark and defend their territory. The sabra not only persists in the landscape long after Israel expelled those who planted it, it also grows wild despite attempts to eradicate it. Perhaps, in response, the Israeli government should make it unlawful to eat its fruit?

At the same time, remembrance of the Nakba is growing and takes root in the deepening fissures in the Iron Wall. The Palestinian refugees – the majority of Palestinians are, indeed, refugees – have mourned the Nakba from the moment it occurred and demand justice. After the Oslo Accords, when they realized their concerns would be pushed aside indefinitely, they began to struggle effectively against the worldwide disregard for their tragedy. However, the proposed law to forget the Nakba is in actuality a response to cultural shifts in Jewish-Israeli society to coping with this disaster. The real threat to the colonialist Iron Wall occurs as the majority of its soldiers refuse to obey the commandment not to remember. In the last few years, hundreds of Jews in Israel (and around the world) have participated in events commemorating the Nakba during Israel’s Independence Day. In recent years hundreds of Israelis have turned to Zochrot – an organization working to bring the Nakba to the consciousness of Jews in Israel – to request information on the topic. Journalists, writers, architects, as well as people in film, television, and theater who grew up on the good old stories of Israel seek to discover their repressed past. Educators are requesting the educational packet on the Nakba developed by Zochrot. Soldiers from the Palmach are turning to Zochrot towards the end of their lives to share stories of what they did and saw in 1948.

Who knows, maybe the day is not far off when the choice at the center of the political debate will be the State of Israel as it is today versus recognition of the Nakba and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. When this day comes, the citizens of Israel will be able to choose between two clear visions: separation and perpetual violence versus a life of equality for all the country’s residents and refugees. To hurry this day forward, maybe we should make up another Hebrew word: “de-colonization.”

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