The Shebab, the Shahids and the Champion’s League Final

Posted on May 27, 2009 by Tony

The Shebab gunman on the left appears to be a Gunner, i.e. an Arsenal fan…

In honor of today’s Champion’s League final, I republish my op ed that ran in the National a year ago.

What was most fascinating about the photograph of the Somali gunman who was part of the crowd dragging the body of an Ethiopian soldier through the streets of Mogadishu that appeared in newspapers last year was his shirt. It bore the number 13, beneath the legend “Ballack”. This particular fighter was declaring his fealty not only to the Islamist Shebab movement, but also to Chelsea football club and its newly acquired German midfielder.

That image reminded me of a 2002 story in the London Sunday Times, in which Hala Jaber painted an extraordinary portrait of a group of young Palestinians training to be suicide bombers. Amid the tension of the boys steeling themselves to kill and be killed, one of the fighters ran in with “very important news”: Manchester United had beaten West Ham 5-3. “David Beckham two score. Very good Manchester,” Jaber quoted him as saying, adding: “The announcement was greeted with unanimous pleasure, amid further calls of ‘Allahu akbar’.”

If they are still alive, it’s a safe bet that the Somali gunman and the Palestinian apprentice-shahids will, on Wednesday, be watching Chelsea and Manchester United slug it out in Moscow for the title of European Champions.

Football has always been a global game, but globalisation has fundamentally changed it. Of course, every child in the world knew Pele back in the 1970s, but they only saw him on TV every four years, at the World Cup. Nobody outside Brazil followed his exploits at Santos FC. Today, though, the football fans of the world follow every minute of the careers of Pele’s Brazilian inheritors — Kaka, say, or Ronaldinho — by watching every European league game.
The number of Brazilian players playing the beautiful game abroad is reported to number 5,000 or more. Brazil’s national team, like that of Argentina’s or any top-tier World Cup contender, is composed predominantly, or entirely, of players based in Europe, which is now the premier global “stage” on which the game is played, and watched. And a surge of foreign investment in English clubs has made them — somewhat improbably, given the woeful state of England’s national team — the powerhouse of the European game.
Not only are two English teams competing this year, for the first time, to be champions of Europe; three of the four teams at the semi-final stage were English. All four English entrants had reached the quarter-final stage, Arsenal having been knocked out by Liverpool before the Merseysiders fell to Chelsea.

Then again, beyond their names, there’s not much that’s “English” about those top four teams. Manchester United, coached by a Scotsman, is unique among them in fielding as many as five English players in a typical starting line up. But United’s recent success has been built around the electric skills of the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo, and the club’s major acquisitions last season — the Argentinian Carlos Tevez, the Brazilian Anderson and Portuguese-African Nani — all point to an increasingly Latin orientation for the club.
Chelsea’s team, built by a Portuguese manager and coached today by an Israeli, often starts with only two Englishmen. Liverpool, coached by a Spaniard, also usually features just two Englishmen. And, aside from a teenage prodigy who sometimes gets a zippy run-out as a substitute, the French-coached Arsenal usually plays without a single English player.

The predominantly foreign make up of the teams is reflected among the owners, too: Manchester United is owned by the American Glazer family; Chelsea by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich; Liverpool is the subject of a bitter battle for control between rival American sports moguls and Dubai International Capital; while Arsenal have a transnational gathering of shareholders who include American sports investors and an Uzbek steel magnate.

A further three of the top ten clubs in the English Premiership are owned by foreigners, reflecting a tsunami of foreign investment into the English game. And money buys success. It allows the English clubs to build bigger stadiums, attracting greater revenue through ticket sales, and to buy more and better stars from abroad — which allows them not only to reap the rewards of success in lucrative tournaments such as the European Champion’s League, but also to turn that success into an international “branding” operation through the sale of replica shirts like the one worn by that Somali gunman.

The cosmopolitan line ups of English teams is replicated across Europe, wreaking havoc with the traditional structure of fan support based on neighbourhood or tribal rivalries. In Glasgow, the Celtic vs Rangers rivalry echoes the sectarian Catholic vs Protestant conflict of Northern Ireland, although it’s hard to imagine what Celtic’s Japanese midfielder Shunsuke Nakamura makes of the chant “he eats chow mein, he loves Sinn Fein” apart from the muddled culinary anthropology.

But to the owners of Europe’s top clubs, tribal schisms don’t offer much of a business model. Far more important is to arouse the global passion for your team that prompts, not only the apprentice shahids of Gaza and the Shebab gunmen of Mogadishu, but also the tens of millions of consumers from Shanghai to Sharjah, Delhi to Denver lining up to buy its paraphernalia. It may be all about business, but how bad can any distraction be that — at least for a couple of hours — keeps young men who would otherwise be shooting up the streets channelling their passion into the shooting boots of Wayne Rooney or Didier Drogba, and demanding death only for those — like the referee — who are out of range?

Posted in Annals of Globalization, Glancing Headers, Situation Report | 22 Comments

Is Israel Planning to Provoke Iran?

Posted on May 26, 2009 by Tony


My, oh my, where would we be without a free press in Israel?

Haaretz’s Aluf Benn today reinforces the case I made earlier for Obama to keep Netanyahu on a tight leash concerning Iran. First, he reports, Netanyahu continues to talk up a frenzy of public expectation in Israel that leads only to military action. “These are not regular times. The danger is hurtling toward us. The real danger in underestimating the threat,” Netanyahu said on Iran. “My job is first and foremost to ensure the future of the state of Israel … the leadership’s job is to eliminate the danger. Who will eliminate it? It is us or no one.”

In other words, Israel cannot rely on the Obama Administration to bomb Iran (true), so Israel will have to do the job itself. As I noted in my last piece, Benn has previously pointed out that Netanyahu is creating a massive tide of public hysteria that will demand action in the face of this grave and gathering “threat” — bogus as it is. And he also makes clear, in a second piece, that it’s not just Netanyahu; Defense Minister Ehud Barak is with him every step of the way — despite the fact that Barak has made clear he believes that Iran does not pose an existential threat to Israel. (Then again, as Barak showed over the Camp David debacle in 2000, his cynicism knows no boundaries…)

But the real gem in Benn’s comment is his explanation of how Israel will go about launching an attack — and suggests that it won’t look anything like the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak reactor, when the public wakes up one morning to hear that the job’s been done. Instead, writes Benn, Israel might instead seek to provoke a conflict in Lebanon that draws in Iran, perhaps by making “a strike against a valuable target for the Iranian regime which leads Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to take action against ‘the Zionist regime.’ If Iran attacks Israel first, the element of surprise will be lost, but then Israel’s strike against the nuclear installations will be considered self-defense.”

So, if we wake up one morning and read, for example, that Israel has assassinated Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, we’ll understand just how that particular provocation fits into Israel’s game plan.

Seems like if the Obama Administration wants to avoid a war, it may have to send Leon Panetta back, this time with a warning to refrain from trying to assassinate Nasrallah. (Somehow, I can’t see that happening…)

On these shores, however, Netanyahu’s efforts to churn up cataclysmic hysteria are not passing without challenge. In October 2007, I saluted Fareed Zakaria for courageously challenging the media’s hysterical (although largely unconscious) stampede to war with Iran. Back then, I wrote:

Fareed Zakaria deserves a medal for breaking with the mainstream media pack to slap down, with the requisite rudeness, the hysteria over Iran being manufactured by the neocons, opportunist Israeli politicians and the Bush Administration. Perhaps stung by having participated in a secret Bush Administration policy discussion to help shape the Iraq war policy before the invasion, Zakaria is acting with honor now to prevent another disaster. This while much of the rest of the media is futzing around asking the wrong questions on Iran and getting the answers that only the wrong questions can produce.

So, I’m pleased to see Zakaria is at it again. In his latest Newsweek column, he makes a cool, reasoned case that:

1. Iran isn’t seeking a bomb; it’s seeking a civilian nuclear program with the “breakout capacity” to build nuclear weapons, which gives it considerable leverage without actually weaponizing nuclear materiel;

2. Iran is not an apocalyptic regime; on the contrary, it has behaved in a very rational, national-interests based manner, even aligning with the U.S. where that suited its interests (Afghanistan and Iraq). Its leaders clearly don’t believe the world is about to end, and there’s no reason to believe they’ll act on that basis.

3. Serious negotiations that seek to accomodate both sides basic interests have yet to be tried, and they’re a jolly good idea.

Indeed, as Flynt Leverett and Hilary Mann Leverett argue, the Obama Administration’s diplomatic efforts appear to Iran as if they’re designed to fail — indeed, they make clear, failure of diplomacy is written into the script of Obama’s State Department Iran policy director, Dennis Ross. They write:

Mr. Ross has long been an advocate of what he describes as an “engagement with pressure” strategy toward Tehran, meaning that the United States should project a willingness to negotiate with Iran largely to elicit broader regional and international support for intensifying economic pressure on the Islamic Republic.

In conversations with Mr. Ross before Mr. Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past “diplomacy” would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.

Iranian officials are fully aware of Mr. Ross’s views — and are increasingly suspicious that he is determined that the Obama administration make, as one senior Iranian diplomat said to us, “an offer we can’t accept,” simply to gain international support for coercive action.

They make clear that many in the Obama Administration are serious about rapprochement with Iran as the path to resolving the nuclear standoff. But Israel, and its most hawkish ally in the Administration (Ross), may be on course towards a different outcome.

Posted in 99c Blogging, Situation Report | 25 Comments

Why Obama Must Shackle Bibi

Posted on May 18, 2009 by Tony


Without any sense of irony, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told fellow paranoiac Jeffrey Goldberg that Iran is ruled by “an apocalyptic messianic cult.” Because as Goldberg makes clear, perhaps inadvertently given his own sympathy with Netanyahu’s hysterical views on Iran ( which we’ve previously explored on this site), Bibi’s own views are clearly apocalyptic, and his own sense of himself somewhat messianic.

Golberg suggests that Netanyahu feels a compulsion to act (militarily) to stop Iran attaining nuclear weapons capability, based on, uh, biblical tradition:

“Amalek,” in essence, is Hebrew for “existential threat.” Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews. They appear in Deuteronomy, attacking the rear columns of the Israelites on their escape from Egypt. The rabbis teach that successive generations of Jews have been forced to confront the Amalekites: Nebuchadnezzar, the Crusaders, Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin are all manifestations of Amalek’s malevolent spirit.
If Iran’s nuclear program is, metaphorically, Amalek’s arsenal, then an Israeli prime minister is bound by Jewish history to seek its destruction, regardless of what his allies think.

Curiously enough, Goldberg then lets on that Netanyahu doesn’t, in fact, believe that this “apocalyptic, messianic cult” will actually risk suicide by actually launching a nuclear strike at Israel. No, the real threat of an Iranian nuclear capability would be that it would change the regional balance of power. This more sober, balance-of-power talk doesn’t really rouse the public, in Israel or beyond, to the sense of panic necessary to sustain the demand for apocalyptic military action against Iran, so it’s quickly dropped.

Goldberg is more inclined to warn us that Bibi is not, in fact, a rational geopolitical actor perhaps cynically cultivating the “Iran menace” as a red herring to deflect U.S. pressure to settle the conflict with the Palestinians. Heaven forbid! (Presumably Jeffrey didn’t know that when Bibi was last Prime Minister, he actually tried to forge a diplomatic opening with the “apocalyptic, messianic cult” in the hope of reviving Israel’s traditional alliance with non-Arab peoples of the Middle East against the Arabs).

Instead, we are told that Netanyahu is a product of his father’s views of the Spanish inquisition and Jewish history in general:

Over more than 1,300 pages, Benzion Netanyahu argued that Spanish hatred of Jews was not merely theologically motivated but based in race hatred (the Spanish pursued the principle of limpieza de sangre, or the purity of blood) that reached back to the ancient world… A close reading of Benzion Netanyahu suggests a belief that anti-Semitism is a sui generis hatred, one that is shape-shifting, impervious to logic and eternal. The only rational response to such sentiment, in the Netanyahu view, is militant Jewish self-defense.

And also, somehow, that it was the Netanyahu family that was chosen to organize this defense.
I was treated to this same view of world history as an endless drive to destroy the Jews — you know, the kind of thing that makes you think World War II happened because Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews. Goldberg may be impressed by the elder Netanyahu’s scholarship, but I’m more inclined to read the Spanish Inquisition against the politics of post-Reconquista Spain — Jews had traditionally been aligned with the Muslims that had been the main enemy of the Spanish crown, and the Inquisition not only went after Jews, but also those Muslims that had remained behind or converted — later it targeted Protestants, too. It was a vicious institution that underscores the fact that the Catholic Church, as an institution, has throughout its history been as capable of committing despicable evil as it has been of acting in ways that Jesus might have. But I have a hard time reading history with the idea of a shape-shifting, eternal anti-semitism — much less assuming that such a phenomenon defines the present. (For an antidote, I’d recommend Paul Kriwaczek’s marvelous history of Jewish life in Europe, Yiddish Civilization).
If I had more time to blog, I’d have noted during the breaking of the Bernie Madoff scandal how bizarre it was that so many Jewish communal fretted that Madoff would spur a new wave of anti-Semitism. What? In the United States of the 21st Century, anti-Semitism was lurking just below the surface, ready to stir the mob at the flimsiest pretext? And I was particularly angered by the view of the gentile world that this paranoia reflected — an utter inability to accept the sincerity of the Western world having learned, through the Holocaust, the toxic consequences of anti-Semitism, and to have relinquished it, so much so that Israel gets a free pass from much of the Western world to do as it pleases with the Palestinians because of concern that opposing it might be deemed anti-Semitic.

Netanyahu, and Goldberg, are products of an apocalyptic Jewish nationalism whose toxic effects are brilliantly critiqued by Avraham Burg who calls it “a fearful Judaism, a paranoid Zionism”. Burg makes clear in his book that evoking a constant fear of recurrent Holocausts has been an organizing principle of modern Israel, maintaining cohesion and support from Jewish communities abroad by making the specter of annihilation its daily bread. But as the majority of the world’s Jews live in relative safety (outside of Israel, and even within), that starts to become increasingly absurd. Young American Jews don’t feel that their gentile peers are about to turn on them and build a new Auschwitz, which is why identification with Israel is on the wane among young American Jews. Because survival-in-the-face-of-annihilation is the only narrative on offer from the Zionists, and as Burg asks, for what moral purpose have we survived? That’s not a question the likes of Netanyahu and Goldberg can answer.
What Goldberg and Netanyahu are asking us to believe is that the Iranian regime exists in order to destroy the Jews. And that doesn’t really stand up to the most cursory historical scrutiny — and the Israeli leaders know it. (Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently became the latest to admit that Iran is no existential threat to Israel, even as his Prime Minister continues to toss out hysterical rubbish about Iran being the reincarnation of Nazi Germany — needless to say, that’s a contention with which Iran’s 20,000 Jews don’t exactly concur.)

My suspicion is that the reason Goldberg paints Netanyahu as an apocalyptic nutter basing his strategic assessments on Biblical scare stories is the idea, popularized by Dennis Ross, among others, that if governments believe the Israelis might launch military strikes on Iran, they may be more inclined to adopt tougher sanctions. But as Israeli journalist Aluf Benn warned recently if you tell Israelis, no matter how cynically, that they’re facing an annihilationist threat, they may be quite prone to believe you — and expect you to do something drastic about it. Benn writes:

In his speeches in recent years, Netanyahu has compared Iran to Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler, and has spoken of the international community’s silence in the face of both threats – in 1938 and at present.

“The second Holocaust” of which Netanyahu warns will not feature ghettos, trains or gas chambers, but will be characterized by an attempt to eradicate the State of Israel. In his opinion, the Jewish people’s continued existence depends on the State of Israel’s continued existence… Netanyahu sees Iran as the latest enemy that has surfaced and threatens the survival of the Jewish collective, an enemy that must be repelled, with the help of others or on our own.

A country’s leaders are obligated by commitments they make in public, which often compel them to keep their promises…

Netanyahu also sees himself as a prophet at the gate, who saw the dangers of terror and extremist Islam before others did, and has now received a second chance to prove the justice of his claims and remove the threats to Israel and the Jewish people. A person with such historical awareness does not just spew out empty words about existential dangers, Holocaust and destruction. These words obligate him to take action. And his declarations to date have been so extreme that he will have difficulty retreating from them.

In other words, Netanyahu has embraced an extreme view that obliges the U.S., in particular, to restrain him, and prevent him from initiating hostilities that have far-reaching tragic consequences, not least for Israel. To the extent that Netanyahu is truly caught up in his own apocalyptic fevers, he is a dangerous man — after all, if you believe you’re a Jew facing Nazi Germany, then any diplomacy amounts to appeasement, and you feel obliged to act militarily. The fact that Iran has not actually initiated a program to build nuclear weapons is irrelevant; they always could, and that in itself is intolerable. Israel, right now, has no meaningful role to play in resolving the Iran nuclear standoff. Obama appears to have recognized that, last week
dispatching CIA chief Leon Panetta to Israel to warn Netanyahu against launching any attack on Iran without first consulting the U.S. (If he asks, the answer will inevitably be no.) If Israel’s own messianic, apocalyptic cult leader is to be prevented from unleashing a catastrophe, the U.S. will have to effectively restrain him. Given the expectations he has created in his own public, doing so publicly may actually help Netanyahu behave more rationally.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | Tagged , , , | 60 Comments

The Writing on the Wall for Obama’s ‘Af-Pak’ Vietnam

Posted on May 13, 2009 by Tony


There was something almost painful about watching President Barack Obama last week reprising a track from his predecessor’s Greatest Hits when he hosted the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just like Bush, Obama invited us to suspend well-grounded disbelief and imagine that Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari have the intent, much less the capability, to wage a successful war against the Taliban. Then again, there had been something painful even earlier about watching Obama proclaim Afghanistan as “the right war” and expanding the U.S. footprint there, reprising the Soviet experience of maintaining an islet of modernity in the capital while the countryside burns.

It requires a spectacular leap of faith in a kind of superheroic American exceptionalism to imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan that occurred in November 2001 will end any differently from any previous invasion of that country. And it takes an elaborate exercise in self-delusion to avoid recognizing that the Taliban crisis in Pakistan is an effect of the war in Afghanistan, rather than a cause — and that Pakistan’s turmoil is unlikely to end before the U.S. winds down its campaign next door.

The Obama Administration has linked the fate of its campaign in Afghanistan to its efforts to persuade Pakistan to fight the Taliban on its own soil. That was always a risky bet. Pakistan’s military swung into action last week — in its own inimitable way, relying on artillery as a counterinsurgency weapon, with predictable “collateral damage” and massive displacement of civilians — following weeks of hysteria in Washington about the country falling to the Taliban, nukes and all. That was nonsense, of course, and you’d have expected better from a Secretary of State who had once chided her President for his “inexperience” than to be babbling about the Taliban’s gains in Pakistan as representing a “mortal threat” to global security, demanding that the Pakistani army go to war on its own soil.

As I wrote last week,

The generals don’t share Clinton’s view of the Taliban as some sort of external force invading territory the Pakistani military is obliged to protect; on the contrary, odious though it may be to the country’s established political class and to the urban population that lives in the 21st century, the movement appears to be rooted in Pakistan’s social fabric. The Taliban’s recent advances have been accomplished in no small part through recruiting locals to its cause by exploiting long-standing resentment toward the venal local judicial and administrative authorities that prop up a feudal social order.

The military may also be more sanguine about the Taliban than Washington has been because the generals tend to view the country’s political establishment, most directly challenged by the militants’ gains, as corrupt and self-serving. The army, rather than the relatively weak political institutions, is the spine of the Pakistani state, and democracy has never been seen as a precondition to its survival. If the turmoil in civil society reaches a boiling point, the military, however reluctant its current leadership may be to seize power, can be reliably expected to take the political reins.

What’s more, if the Taliban’s goal were to seize state power rather than local control, it would have little hope of doing so. The insurgency is largely confined to ethnic Pashtuns, who comprise little more than 15% of the population. It is unlikely to find significant resonance in the major cities such as Islamabad and Lahore — though an influx into Karachi of people displaced by the fighting in the tribal areas has swelled that city’s Pashtun population, which has in turn raised communal tensions there. While the Taliban is reported to have made some inroads in southern Punjab and has linked up with small militant groups based in the province, it remains a minor presence in those parts of the country where the majority of Pakistanis live. Even in the most generous assessments of their fighting strength, they are very lightly armed and outnumbered by the army by a ratio of more than 50 to 1.

Still, the army is reluctant to launch an all-out campaign against the militants, not least because of a widely held perception in Pakistan that the Taliban’s rise is a product of America’s unpopular war in Afghanistan. There’s little support in the public — or within the ranks of the military — for deploying the military in a sustained civil war against the militants. Many in Pakistan were convinced that the Taliban had exceeded their bounds in Buner and Swat and needed to be pushed back — but not necessarily crushed. Whereas U.S. officials warn of the Taliban as an “existential” threat to Pakistan, the country’s own military continues to reserve that status for India, against which the vast bulk of its armed forces remain arrayed.

The military launched its current offensive both to satisfy its patron in Washington, and also in response to growing alarm in Pakistan’s urban middle classes at the Taliban’s excesses, and apparent intention to expand its writ. But the operation already appears to be following a familiar pattern: Anger at the Taliban will quickly give way to revulsion at the military operation to dislodge the militants in Swat, which has now — together with similar operations in Bajaur Agency, has turned 1 million Pakistanis into refugees in their own country. (The Islamists — not the Taliban, but groups associated with the likes of Lashkar e-Toiba, authors of the Mumbai massacre — have typically done a far better job than the state of caring for Pakistanis rendered destitute by catastrophes…)

That’s why Nawaz Sharif, the most popular politician in Pakistan right now, is not exactly full-throated in his endorsement of the military campaign, although is indicating sufficient support to convince Washington that he deserves U.S. backing to replace Zardari.

As public opinion turns against the current offensive, it will be blamed on America. The Taliban fighters in Swat will be driven out of the towns and into the hills and back into the Tribal Areas, which will allow for a new truce — the subtext of which will be that the Pakistani Taliban, should they want to wage war, should do so over the border in support of their Pashtun brethren in Afghanistan. (That, after all, is a point of consensus between them and the military establishment.)

The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban’s reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement’s heartland — which is in a northwestern part of the country which has always been beyond the government’s control.

The fallout from the operation, though, is likely to be an intensified terror campaign in the cities (where the Taliban can’t launch an insurrection, but can blow things up), and expanded hostility towards the U.S. which various Islamist forces will exploit. And Pakistan’s military will be no more likely to act against Taliban activities in Afghanistan than they are now.

The majority of Pakistanis are hostile to the Pakistani Taliban — which while aligned, is organizationally distinct from the Afghan Taliban, even though the latter operates on both sides of a border never recognized by the Pashtuns — but they see it as a problem stirred up by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistanis don’t blame the Taliban
for the U.S. drone strikes that kill Pakistani civilians. I suspect they won’t blame the Taliban for the civilian suffering inflicted in the battle to retake Swat. While they may loathe the Taliban, their loathing for the United States is even greater — as Anatole Lieven recently noted. He found that the best-educated and most cosmopolitan yuppies he met in Pakistan believe that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by Washington and Israel. So, ordinary Pakistanis and the commanders of the military believe the Taliban uprising on their soil will dissipate once the U.S. leaves Afghanistan — Pakistan’s military, in other words, has an incentive to see the U.S. go home.

Pakistanis have every reason to expect that the U.S. will sooner or later tire of spinning its wheels in the Hindu Kush, and their outlook is based on that assumption. That’s why the Pakistani military establishment continues to back the Afghan Taliban, which represents its interests in its strategic competition with India for influence in Kabul. President Hamid Karzai, for his part, appears to recognize the limits on U.S. involvement, too, breaking sharply with the U.S. and maneuvering to remain in power, with some very unsavory allies, even as Washington has been trying to ease him out. Karzai, too, expects the U.S. to leave some time soon, and is jumping into bed with various warlords to hedge his bets against going the way of Najibullah, the president left in place by the departing Soviets who was unceremoniously lynched in the streets of Kabul by the Taliban.

Sure, the U.S. has now appointed a hard-charging Special Forces general to lead its mission in Afghanistan. Perhaps, as a result, they will be able to strike more blows at the Taliban, but they’re unlikely to alter the overall outcome of the war. In fact, you could make a speculative case that appointing Stanley McChrystal, whose resume highlights include the capture of Saddam Hussein and the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, Washington may be looking for a “bring me the head of Osama bin Laden” scenario to create a pretext for beginning to dramatically scale back the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. But that would be a wild hunch.

In the interim, amid rising political chaos and social unrest spurred by ethnic tension and economic hardship, Pakistan’s generals may, once again, feel compelled to take charge of the political space in a new coup, and install a technocratic government charged with managing the impact of the economic crisis outside of the self-destructive party political competition that bedevils Pakistani governance, while enforcing security itself. But that’s unlikely to alter the equation in favor of Pakistan acting on Washington’s demands. On the contrary, the Pakistanis are simply treading water, doing the minimum necessary to keep U.S. aid flowing, and waiting for the Americans to leave Afghanistan.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | Tagged , , , , | 40 Comments

Can Bibi Force Abbas to ‘Recognize’ an Oxymoron?

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Tony


Satmar Hasidim, burying their rebbe: If they don’t recognize Israel as a “Jewish State”, why should the Palestinians?

In his own version of the evasion game that has become tradition for Israeli leaders when pressed by the U.S. and others to conclude a two-state peace agreement, Bibi Netanyahu has insisted that before he’ll talk to Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO Chairman would first have to recognize Israel as a “Jewish State” and “the national home of the Jewish people”.

Excuse me?

My own understanding of Judaism makes the very term “Jewish State” an oxymoron — a nation state cannot almost by definition be based on the universal ethical imperatives at the heart of Judaism; and as I’ve long argued, Israel is hardly an exemplar of Jewish values. And anyone who tells me that my “national home” is not Brooklyn or Cape Town or wherever I choose to make it, as I’ve also long argued, is an anti-Semite.

As I wrote in the National on Sunday,

In declining [Netanyahu’s demand that he recognize Israel as a “Jewish State”], Mr Abbas might also have inquired why a Palestinian national leader should be asked to confer upon Israel a status denied it even by many learned rabbis. The Satmar Hasidim, for example, one of the largest schools of ultra-Orthodox Judaism worldwide, has always refused to recognise the State of Israel, deeming its claim to Jewish sovereignty as blasphemy. In their reading of Jewish scripture, the mass return of Jews to the Holy Land is to coincide with the arrival of the Jewish Messiah, and any attempt to create a political regime of Jews to govern the Holy Land before that is an offence against God that will delay the Messiah’s coming. This perspective remains popular within a section of Israel’s own ultra-Orthodox community. When he visted Jerusalem in 1994, the late Satmar Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum paraded through the streets watched by a crowd of 100,000.

Nor is the scepticism over Jewish statehood and Jewish nationalism confined to the ultra-Orthodox. When the Zionist movement first emerged a little over a century ago and began campaigning for the creation of a Jewish state, its fiercest opponents were Jews who insisted that they were at home in the countries where they lived, and that a move to create a “homeland” elsewhere dovetailed with the anti-Semitic goal of the mass deportation of Jews…

… even if the PLO were to recognise Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people” it wouldn’t change the fact that the majority of the world’s Jews have voted otherwise – with their feet.

I received an email last weekend from veteran Israeli peace campaigner and esteemed Rootless Cosmopolitan guest commentator Uri Avnery adding some interesting thoughts. (He’s more forgiving of the idea of “Jewish State”, but sees “national home of the Jewish people” as a shocking demand, which he’d deem a hostile action if anyone adopted it. I’ll quote at length from Uri:

A “Jewish State” can mean a state with a majority of citizens who define themselves as Jews and/or a state whose main language is Hebrew, whose main culture is Jewish, whose weekly rest day is Saturday, which serves only Kosher food in the Knesset cafeteria etc.

A “State of the Jewish People” is a completely different story. It means that the state belongs not only to its citizens, but to something that is called “the Jewish People” – something that exists both inside and outside of the country. That can have wide-ranging implications. For instance: the abrogation of the citizenship of non-Jews, as proposed by Lieberman. Or the conferring of Israeli citizenship on all the Jews in the world, whether they want it or not.

The first question that arises is: what does “the Jewish People” mean? The term “people” – “am” in Hebrew, Volk in German – has no accepted precise definition. Generally it is taken to mean a group of human beings who live in a specific territory and speak a specific language. The “Jewish People” is not like that.

Two hundred years ago it was clear that the Jews were a religious community dispersed throughout the world and united by religious beliefs and myths (including the belief in a common ancestry). The Zionists were determined to change this self-perception. “We are a people, one people”, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote in German, using the word Volk.

The idea of “the State of the Jewish People” is decidedly anti-Zionist. Herzl did not dream of a situation in which a Jewish State and a Jewish Diaspora would coexist. According to his plan, all the Jews who wish to remain Jews would immigrate to their state. The Jews who prefer to live outside the state would stop being Jews and be absorbed into their host nations, finally becoming real Germans, Britons and Frenchmen. The vision of the “Visionary of the State” (as he is officially designated in Israel) was supposed, when put into practice, to bring about the disappearance of the Jewish Diaspora – the Jewish people outside the “Judenstaat”.

David Ben-Gurion was a partner to this vision. He stated that a Jew who does not immigrate to Israel is not a Zionist and should not enjoy any rights in Israel, except the right to immigrate there. He demanded the dismantling of the Zionist organization, seeing in it only the “scaffolding” for building the state. Once the state has been set up, he thought quite rightly, the scaffolding should be discarded.

Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as “the State of the Jewish People” is ridiculous, even as a tactic for preventing peace.

A state recognizes a state, not its ideology or political regime. Nobody recognizes Saudi Arabia, the homeland of the Hajj, as “the State of the Muslim Umma” (the community of believers.)

Moreover, the demand puts the Jews all over the world in an impossible position. If the Palestinians have to recognize Israel as “the State of the Jewish People”, then all the governments in the world must do the same. The United States, for example. That means that the Jewish US citizens Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s closest advisors, are officially represented by the government of Israel. The same goes for the Jews in Russia, the UK and France.

Even if Mahmoud Abbas were persuaded to accept this demand – and thereby indirectly put in doubt the citizenship of a million and a half Arabs in Israel – I would oppose this strenuously. More than that, I would consider it an unfriendly act.

The character of the State of Israel must be decided by the citizens of Israel (who hold a wide range of opinions about this matter). Pending before the Israeli courts is an application by dozens of Israeli patriots, including myself, who demand that the state recognize the “Israeli nation”. We request the court to instruct the government to register us in the official Population Registration, under the heading “nation”, as Israelis. The government refuses adamantly and insists that our nation is Jewish.
I ask Mahmoud Abbas, Obama and everyone else who is not an Israeli citizen not to interfere in this domestic debate.

Netanyahu knows, of course, that nobody will take his demand seriously. It is quite obviously just another device to avoid serious peace negotiations. If he is compelled to drop it, it will not be long before he comes up with another.

To paraphrase Groucho Marx: “This is my pretext. If you don’t like it, well, I have a lot of others.”

Posted in 99c Blogging, Situation Report | 21 Comments

Israel’s Apartheid Anxiety

Posted on March 21, 2009 by Tony


The international anti-apartheid movement to isolate South Africa also started at grassroots level, and became so powerful that governments were forced to follow suit

This from my latest in the National:

In a remarkable interview last November, the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert cautioned that unless it could achieve a two-state solution quickly, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished”. The reason, he said, was that Israel would be internationally isolated. “The Jewish organisations, which are our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.”

Jewish communities in western countries have long been Israel’s trump card against international pressure, because they mobilise support for Israel and restrain critics by painting opposition to Israel’s policies as motivated by hostility to Jews – a toxic accusation in a world still sensitive to the horrors of the Holocaust. But what was palpable during the Gaza conflict was the diminished enthusiasm of young Jewish people abroad for Israeli militarism, and the increasing willingness of many to openly challenge Israel.

This change is personified by Jon Stewart, the Jewish-American comic whose Daily Show is the premier vehicle of contemporary American political satire. Stewart mercilessly mocked American politicians for their slavish echoing of the Israeli narrative during the Gaza conflict. “It’s the Möbius strip of issues,” he sarcastically enthused. “There’s only one side!” Clearly, the younger, hipper Jewish liberal mainstream exemplified by Stewart intends to judge Israel on the basis of its actions, rather than express morally blind ethnic solidarity.

To read the whole thing, click here

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 75 Comments

Bet on a Pakistan Coup

Posted on March 9, 2009 by Tony


Back to the future in Pakistan? Last week, General Ashfaq Kiyani flew to Washington for consultations with the Obama Administration; this week, it’s reported from Pakistan, he warned President Asif Ali Zardari to “set things right” in the country before March 16, when opposition forces are set to march on the capital. When the army puts the government on notice to clean up its act, you know what’s coming next.

Zardari, the husband of Benazir Bhutto, has refused to reinstate the judges sacked by former dictator Pervez Musharraf because if he did, they might resurrect corruption charges against Zardari. But his arch-nemesis, Nawaz Sharif (another self-serving politician loathed by the generals) wants the judges reinstated — even more so now that Zardari’s judges barred him from running for office.

As the country disintegrates in the face of multiple insurgencies and an economy on life support from the IMF, the generals’ patience for the shenanigans of civilian politicians is at an end. And, it seems, Kiyani has Washington’s blessing for cracking the whip.

Of course, the U.S. has traditionally relied on Generals to rule Pakistan and fight its proxy wars — most recently General Zia, and then General Musharraf. Now, after a brief and chaotic flirtation with civilian rule, it seems Washington is ready to resort to its traditional Plan B.

No doubt, Kiyani looks an infinitely preferable option in terms of getting Washington’s business done in the region. So did Musharraf. Indeed, Kiyani being a rather reluctant politician may even call on Musharraf to front the operation again once the military has taken power.

But it’s the military, particularly the ISI (of which Kiyani used to be the head) that’s been at the center of the very policies that most irk Washington. That, somehow, is unlikely to change.

Posted in 99c Blogging | Tagged , , , | 22 Comments

Evans: Confessions of a Teenage Marxist

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Tony

Guest Column: Gavin Evans As the world lurches into an economic and social crisis that threatens the political stability of the the current global order, I can’t help thinking how I might have relished this moment in my misguided youth, when I imagined that capitalism, with its inherent injustices, was riddled with structural contradictions that would cause its collapse in the face of the triumphant march of the organized working class, the midwife of a new world order of rationality, equality and human progress and dignity. Like most of my peers, I outgrew the Marxist shibboleths of my youth in the last few years of my activist career in South Africa — the end of apartheid, which allowed for a revolutionary remaking of South African society, coincided with the end of the Cold War and the triumph of capitalist globalization. It would have taken epic leaps of fanatical faith to imagine that a centrally-planned command economy represented a viable alternative model; its failures were palpable and inescapable. So many of us quietly (sometimes noisily) renounced the illusions of our youth, embracing the sort of reformist social democratic outlook we had once despised with post-adolescent venom.

Still, even then, I never doubted for a moment that while we had been wrong about socialism, we had not been entirely wrong about capitalism: it could raise many people out of poverty and develop spectacular productive capacity where none had existed before, its creativity and ability to innovate were breathtaking, and, of course, it was the only game in town. And yet it also reinforced and deepened social inequality, and its free market was never going to take care of the basic needs of majority in society. The market was not going to feed and house the poor or provide the education and health systems that made for a stable society. Unregulated, capitalism was also prone to lurch from boom to bust, not least because of its fundamental inequalities. Capitalism was, to borrow from Churchill, the worst form of economic system except for all the others that had been tried.

With capitalism having once again revealed its flaws in the spectacular global financial meltdown of the past six months, and the Depression into which it appears to have plunged, I asked my good friend Gavin Evans, who recently lost his own web site to a technological glitch, to reflect on his own political and intellectual journey through Marxism, in light of the, uh, current crisis. (I haven’t used that phrase in about two decades…)

Confessions of a Teenage Marxist
By Gavin Evans

I was away on South African ‘struggle’ business when I heard Hungary had opened its doors to Austria – the first metaphorical crack in the Berlin Wall in 1989. In fact, I was a guest in the Lusaka home of a bigwig in the South African Communist Party, an organisation that for all its virtues had earned the epithet ‘slavish’ when it came to relations with countries in the Soviet orbit. My first reaction that morning in the Zambian capital, was a silent ‘oh well’. By then, I was beyond caring, which was awkward because I was a Party member with all sorts of jobs in its underground structures. My solution was to approach Party secretary general Joe Slovo (who’d recently returned from a visit to the GDR, where he was given a lovely bottle of something delicious by Erich Honecker) to request a demotion. Joe said no and I could have just walked, but instead wriggled and squirmed until a year later, when the Party was unbanned, I was permitted to withdraw, allowing a 12-year relation with the left to fizzle out.

This relationship had started in 1978 when as a fired-up teenage idealist, I was invited to an anti-apartheid protest at the University of Texas in Austin. I stayed with a flame-bearded, MG-driving Marxist lecturer called Dr Ed Steinhart, who cheerfully instructed me in the ‘science’ of historical materialism, comparing Marx’s revelations to Newton’s – objective, certain, provable. (Years later, it dawned on me that not only did Marxism lack any resemblance to science, but neither did economics, or psychology, or any of the social ‘sciences’ but I digress…) Anyway, at the time I lapped up the certainty and universality of the Marxism he was evangelizing, using it to fill the void left by my abandonment of evangelical Christianity less than a year earlier. I devoured A Communist Manifesto, and strenuously worked my way through Volume 1 of Capital, returning to Cape Town a fervent convert.

At the time, Western Marxism was undergoing its own existential crisis as working class people on both sides of the Atlantic voted, repeatedly, for the supply-side conservatism of Thatcher and Reagan. Its academic discourse was also in trouble — although the volume of Marxian babble we ploughed through at college might have suggested otherwise — its essential problem being the, uh, contradiction between the real world and its theoretical depiction. Marxist ‘class analysis’ seemed peculiarly ill-equipped to understand and predict the behaviour of nation states, governments and political parties and ideologies, just as Marxist labour theory of value offered no clues about the motions of economies. Some theorists buried their heads deep in the catechisms of “the classics”, while others made futile attempts to tie Marxist theory, with its inherent economic determinism, to what we might have called “bourgeois political science” across the yawning chasm of reality in which class struggles were clearly not shaping politics and society.

All this ought to have been cause for concern for an 80s leftie: not only did Marxism have nothing of interest to say about the world we were operating within, but its innate determinism was an obstacle to a politically useful understanding of the reality we were trying to transform. But I had no more than the occasional intellectual wobble on this score, because by then a higher calling had arrived: the ANC, the underground, the Revolution. The theoreticism of Althusser and Poulantzas and their African disciples, along with those we called the ‘library lefties’, lost its attraction, and the process of thinking for myself was also shelved.

In its place came VI Lenin – convenient, because, looking back, Lenin was not really a Marxist at all (the same could be said of Stalin, Trotsky, Mau, Rosa Luxembourg and the rest). Marxist theory was supposed to be all about objectivity and science – history being driven inexorably forward by its inbuilt dialectic until, under capitalism, the contradiction between the forces and relations of production produced a new synthesis, leading to communism. Capitalism held within it the means of its own inevitable destruction. Lenin, on the other hand, was the ultimate voluntarist – advocating an un-elected, centralised party seizing state power on behalf of the working class as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Hurry history along, in other words. The Communists were the vanguard of the ANC, its most disciplined, dedicated and far-sighted element, and so I shelved my previous objections to Soviet policy in Poland and Afghanistan, joined the Party and got the lump in the throat when singing the Internationale. Behind the scenes, I would quietly acknowledge that Soviet socialism was hardly ideal, but, dammit!, they defeated Hitler, funded and armed the ANC, and held America in check – and look at Cuba: now that’s what it’s all about!

This defence of the indefensible was made easier when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. We were all immensely relieved by his reforms and grasped onto his every word (there was even a fan base for his wife, Raisa, at least among a certain kind of leftish woman -the kind just dying to dress up to the nines). Gorbachev’s Perestroika was required reading in leftist circles, but when I finally got around to it I was in for a shock. The main thing I absorbed was his remark that socialism lacked the thing that gave capitalism its extraordinary creative power: the market. The implications of that verse, when it gelled with emerging dilemmas at a personal level, allowed the doubts to flood in. So by the time of the fall of the Wall, it had dawned on me that this market had broken the back of its putative protagonist: the other side had won, and that was that. Time to move on.

I should mention that for a while I’d had niggling suspicions that socialism was not exactly on the agenda for a liberated South Africa, but in 1989, when those cracks in the Wall first appeared, it became glaringly obvious that capitalism was the only game in town – in South Africa and beyond. It took the unbanning of the ANC before this dawned on the ANC at large, after which long-suppressed personal ambition was unshackled, and what followed was a feeding frenzy of acquisition. Overnight, one-time dedicated revolutionaries who had been prepared to endure torture and risk their lives for the greater good, were transformed into dedicated capitalists or worse – chasing after the shiny things denied to them for so long.

Twenty years on, we live in a world so different that the short historical spell of Soviet socialism (1917 – 1991) seems like brief diversion of no great importance. All the ideas tied up with its existence, including Marxism and socialism more generally, have just faded away because it turned out that even the anti-Soviet socialists (from Trots to social democrats) were more dependent on the Wall than they realised. Soviet socialism had been such a terrible failure – and, in the end, the reason it imploded related to that lack of anything to replace the market mechanism – anything other than a command-based structure incompatible with democracy. Once it fell, the left lost its compass and suffered from a crisis of confidence at the intellectual level, watching from the sidelines as ‘actually existing socialism’ was replaced by a rapacious, robber baron form of capitalism – in many cases accompanied by political dictatorship rather than democracy.

Capitalism was striding ahead, its waters flooding the old eastern bloc, at the same time that the system was undergoing one of its periodic technological revolutions, changing form in all sorts of ways and creating new markets within the existing capitalist world and beyond. It seemed so confident, so immutable, that many of the thinkers of the Left gave up trying to visualize an alternative. The world seemed so chaotically immune to their analysis that Leftists retreated to the navel-gazing post-modern universes of signs and symbols. The global constructs were left to thinkers of the right – like Francis Fukuyama, who declared that the highest stage had already arrived. Human society, he wrote, in language remarkably resonant of Marx and Engels, was free from fundamental internal contradictions and, eventually, all societies would move in this direction because the “logic of modern natural science” would prompt “a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism”.

In the early 1990s, a doctoral thesis returned me to the business of theorising. By now, Marx’s flaws were obvious. Hegel’s quaint notion that the collision of two forces produces a new synthesis was silly enough when applied to ideas, but when applied by Marx to history, with an in-built hierarchy topped by the sphere of production, it became absurd. Historical change was the product of vast range of forces, with the pressures and counter-pressures coming from all angles, with no in-built hierarchy of causation. Marx (like that modern Hegelian, Fukuyama), shared an inherent faith in modernization and linear progress towards social perfection with 300 years of European thought before him (from Hobbes, via Adam Smith to Hegel). Marx’s premise that progress was driven by the resolution of contradictions within each mode of production (workers vs. capitalists under capitalism), ultimately leading to a world free from contradiction. That had clearly looked daft well before the fall of the Wall, and having been released from Marxism’s spell it bemused me that I had ever believed this nonsense. The evidence against it was overwhelming: the working class was declining in relative size and strength; capital was no longer bringing workers together in larger numbers; class, however defined, was no longer the key point of division.

Curiously enough, though, post-Cold War capitalism seemed to be doing pretty much what Marx and Engels predicted. They were way off the mark about the underlying reasons for capitalism’s need for perpetual growth, but were more perceptive when it came to the scale this compulsion. “All fixed, fast frozen relations… are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify,” they wrote. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” Marx wrote beautifully on capitalism (particularly in Capital), describing its power in a way that it hard to match, and some of this seemed prescient in the 1990s as capital spread its wings with the arrival of the information age. The “network society” was, as the Spanish urban theorist Manuel Castells wrote, able to “link up or de-link the entire realm of human activity”, switching territories on and off, bypassing government control and individualising workers. Governments of the former left (Britain, Europe, Brazil, South Africa) felt powerless to intervene, instead joining in as cheer-leaders.

For close on two decades, this evolving form of globalised capitalism was the only game in town. But then, wouldn’t you know, it turned out there was indeed a paradox ingrained within it. I’m not talking simply about the fissure exposed by the current economic crisis, nor about the contradictions that Marx had obsessed about, but rather, something far more fundamental: the very thing that made capitalism so strong and vibrant – its immense capacity for innovation, expansion and growth – turned out to be the source of its most profound challenge. The reason for this is that the more we produce, the more the earth protests, which in turn could destroy the capacity for production and for life.

When I began writing about climate change, I clung to the hope that if we only geared the world to war footing, we had a shot at keeping global warming within 2-degree C of pre-industrial levels. I read the Stern Report and the IPCC report and watched Al Gore’s movie and came away with a sense of urgency. Well, perhaps I have since been reading too much James Lovelock, or too much George Monbiot, but I am now less hopeful. Monbiot cites figures showing we’ll need to cut carbon emissions by over 87 percent per person within the next 40 years to have even a 50-50 chance of avoiding the tipping point, after which climate change becomes self-sustaining and irreversible. Lovelock suggests the tipping point has already been reached and that we may exceed 6 degrees C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century – and that 90 percent of humanity will be wiped out. Our main task, he says, is to adapt to these changes. To take an Old Testament analogy, Monbiot is like the prophets warning the chosen that unless they turn from their wicked ways, plagues and pestilence will descend. Lovelock is like Abraham telling Lot that, sorry mate, destruction is certain, so get the hell out, chop-chop. But when it comes to climate change, the differences are less profound, because even if Monbiot is right, there’s not much hope of us turning from our wicked ways – or not far enough, quickly enough. An example: China is building 544 new coal-fired power stations (old-style, dirty coal) and 80 percent of its power comes from coal. Another example: the world’s population will grow from 6.7 billion to nine billion over the next 30 years. More people means more carbon emissions (just by breathing, let alone whatever else they do), as well as more over-crowding, less food, less water and more population relocation, but no government other than one-child-per-couple-or-else China, has a serious population reduction strategy.The word ‘impossible’ seems apposite.

We are currently enduring a global recession caused not just by the greed of bankers, but by a systemic failure that has exposed the limitations of markets and the importance of state intervention. It has shaken the confidence of monetarists and of supply side economics more generally, and has presented a fundamental challenge to the underlying philosophy of the libertarian right. I have to admit to a touch of schadenfreude in all this, but, beyond that, there are positive elements to this crisis. The reason I say this is because the coming years climate change will produce political and economic spinoffs far more profoundly challenging than the credit ‘crunch’. These challenges will either be met by massive state intervention – more big brother, more United Nations, more European Union – or they will overwhelm us. We’ve already seen the consequences of the politics of water shortages in Dafur and the West Bank, and its very early days yet. Add in massive food shortages, large parts of the world that become uninhabitable, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, and all the political problems that come with these inevitabilities (mass migration from south to north, more conflicts and wars that take on religious or national or racial hues, and the continued rise of competing forms of religious fundamentalism as people search for answer to the destruction of their ways of life), and you can see why strong, bossy states will be necessary.

But whatever happens, the notion of progress that has dominated political philosophy for so long will be challenged. In contrast to the hope of moving forward to a new world, free of fundamental contradictions, there is strong chance of moving backward as large parts of the world did after the decline of the Roman Empire, so that we end up with depopulated planet, with pockets of technological progress, surrounded by oceans and deserts where people either cannot survive or are forced to return to pre-industrial modes of existence – the kind of world hinted at by the Zachry section of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, for example.

That’s for the future. Right now, the state of the planet is more chaotic and dangerous than it was prior to 1989. For a while it appeared that the bi-polar world of the Cold War had been replaced the uni-polar New World Order, but that proved to be a temporary chimera. The United States remains the world’s largest economic and military power, but its reach has declined relative to that of China, India and oil-rich, autocratic Russia – with none of these countries sharing America’s foreign policy interests. And while I’d agree with Fukuyama that Islamism does not represent a fundamental threat to liberal, capitalist democracy, its spread (along with other forms of highly politicised religious fundamentalism – evangelical Christian, Zionist-Jewish and Hindu) presents a long-term danger for peace, stability and prosperity in large chunks of the world, not least the Middle East. Throw into this mix the world’s declining oil reserves, and the potential for catastrophe seems far from remote.

So, to return to the start: does anything of use remain of the pre-1989 world of socialist ideas? Put differently, aside from the faint afterglow of warm feelings from the past, and a touch of delight at the fate of the bankers and US Republicans, a surge of anger about the Israelis, and a reflex urge to fill the green bin, does it mean anything today to say you’re of the Left? Well, yes. For me, what remains is this: a preference for solutions to societal problems favouring the collective over the individual. For a long time this was an unfashionable view and I would get funny looks when dropping into conversations that I quite liked the nanny state, and was far from ‘intensely relaxed’ about the super rich, or when I ranted on about the silliness of the brand of liberalism that opposes identity cards or CCTV or speed cameras. But that’s all changing – in the short term through the impact of the recession, but in the longer term through the devastating impact of the climate change. The collective is back in vogue.

One last question: for people like me who were so intensely involved in trying to change the world prior to the fall of the Wall, is there anything left of that energy? I can only answer that at a personal level. The issue that still gets me excited is the debate on the cusp between biology and the humanities around human nature – in particular, the backlash against feminism from the misogynistic snake oil salesmen who call themselves ‘evolutionary psychologists’. This stuff gets me angry and exercised. But for the rest, well, the fact that I have not lived in South Africa for 16 years (and that in that time have managed to attend a grand total of two political meetings – leaving both early- and one march against the Iraq war), obviously points to an absence of activist impulse. I remain excited about Barack Obama, but for the most part I just watch with interest and sometimes write about it, but it doesn’t make me want to raise my fist, or get me churned up inside – and that applies as much to, say, Jacob Zuma, Robert Mugabe or Benyamin Nethenayu, as to climate change. These are just issues of fascination, along with many others, like religion and linguistics and anthropology. It is not cynicism – just a kind of detachment. I guess that’s quite a damning self-indictment.

Posted in Guest Columns, Situation Report | Tagged , , | 46 Comments

Israel & the Man Next Door…

Posted on February 18, 2009 by Tony

Israel’s deputy PM Haim Ramon today had this to say on the question of how to get Hamas to release captive soldier Gilad Shalit: “Tell the Egyptians to invite Hamas representatives to Cairo and we will send Ofer Dekel. Each one will sit in a different room, they will negotiate, and within a week Gilad Shalit will be returning home. Tell them that only then will the border crossings open. We can’t put off addressing the Gilad Shalit issue, and we must begin immediately.”

So, the U.S. can’t talk to Hamas, but Israel must?

But following Ramon’s own logic, Shalit would be home even quicker if the Israelis and Hamas would sit in the same room, saving the time taken for the Egyptians to shuttle between the two rooms. Something to think about, eh? But the Israelis won’t. After all, sitting in the same room would “legitimize” Hamas…

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Fatah’s Long March

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Tony


The rank-and-file of Fatah has long known that Mahmoud Abbas’ habit of jumping through hoops for Condi Rice was political suicide, and that much has been confirmed in recent weeks: Hamas has emerged from the Gaza war stronger than ever politically, and Abbas’ blaming of Hamas for the carnage at the beginning of Israel’s operation cast him as a collaborator in the eyes of many of his own people. Abbas has spent eight years sitting politely in the back seat of the Bush/Condi limo, pretending that endless photo ops with Olmert and Livni were actually part of a process towards ending the occupation. But they couldn’t even give him a “shelf” agreement for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders and sharing Jerusalem. If Olmert couldn’t do even the fetish deal envisaged by Bush, then what could Abbas expect from an Israeli government that will be ten steps to the right?

As I wrote on TIME.com this week,

Many members of Abbas’ Fatah movement, seeing themselves steadily eclipsed by Hamas, are urging a break from their President’s strategy of negotiating with the Israelis and a return to confronting the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Fatah leaders see the Israeli election as confirming what they already knew: there’s nothing to be gained by continuing the charade of U.S.-sponsored talks about talks with the Israelis. Palestinians could not get what they needed from Olmert, and they know that his successors will take even more of a hard line. From the Palestinian perspective, the past eight years of waiting for negotiations with Israel have left Abbas empty-handed, while the latest Gaza conflict has put Hamas in a stronger position than ever in the court of Palestinian public opinion. Despite the violence by Hamas gunmen against Fatah activists in Gaza since the Israeli offensive, many in Fatah view their movement’s only hope of re-establishing a leading role in Palestinian politics as being to join a unity government with Hamas — and begin to directly challenge the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. The fact that such a sentiment coincides with Israel’s electing a more hawkish government suggests that the Middle East could be in for a long, hot summer.

Fatah is to hold a national congress next month, in Cairo or Amman, and while Abbas might survive as its titular head, the mantle of leadership will pass to the Barghouti generation. The terms of the unity government being brokered by Egypt include planning new elections, and many in Fatah know that their chances of prevailing are slim — and improve somewhat if they oust Abbas and replace him with Barghouti as their presidential candidate. Strategically, Barghouti may have more in common with the Hamas pragmatists than with those who have been toeing Washington’s line for the past eight years.

Even Abbas is making a turn, calling for a Likud-led Israel to face diplomatic isolation. And Fatah officials began petitioning the International Criminal Court in the Hague to investigate war crimes allegations in Gaza.

In other words, Fatah — whether on the diplomatic front, or on the organizational front on the ground in the West Bank — looks set to try and redeem itself by reverting to the path of struggle.

Israel abandoned Oslo eight years ago when Sharon was elected; now, the Palestinian leadership appear to realize that it’s over, and that there’s no diplomatic route in the near term to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. For the new Administration in Washington, that means their working assumptions need to be those of 1988, not 1998 or 2008.

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