Killing the Frog

2008-05-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

Israel and Hamas continue their indirect negotiations for a cease-fire in Gaza. According to Yedioth Ahronoth the most likely agreement would for two stages. The first would commit Hamas to cease all firing of rockets and other attacks from Gaza and to stop all smuggling of arms, money and combatants from Sinai into Gaza. In return Israel would commit to cease all military activities in Gaza. In the second stage, Israel would lift its blockade of goods in and out of Gaza and negotiate with Hamas for the release of Israel captured soldier Gilead Shavit in return for Israel's release of Palestinian prisoners. Reaching agreement on this exchange will likely take a long time because Hamas's list of the prisoners it wants includes many whom Israel claims are murderers. Since Israel's declared policy is not to release such prisoners, a decision will be needed at the ministerial level, i.e., agreement among PM Olmert, Foreign Affairs Minister Livni and Defense Minister Barak. In view of Olmert's political fragility and impending competition between Livni and Barak to succeed him, these ministers will not rush to any decision.

Piecework

2008-05-24T20:58:00.000-07:00

This past week's two beig Middle East developments drew mixed reviews. They also made the Bush administration look like a marginal player in Middle East affairs and its policies toward Lebanon, Hezbollah, Syria, Hamas, Israel and Iran like miserable failures. The agreement that key Lebanese political players signed in Doha, Qatar was a victory primarily for Hezbollah and secondarily for Arab League diplomacy. The agreement resolves for now the political crisis in Lebanon: It commits the parties to a National Unity government in which Hezbollah will have veto power; it agrees to the election of the compromise presidential candidate Gen. Michel Suleiman and calls for certain revisions of the electoral laws that will increase Shiite representation in the Lebanese parliament. These changes correspond to the probable populations of the respective communities and certainly to their respective military strengths, as Hezbollah's recent armed seizure of West Beirut bluntly demonstrated. Through the agreement the government parties averted a coup d'état or civil war, which would have cost them more. The agreement, however, does not address the wider issue of Hezbollah's future character, viz., political party, movement, army; it does not quiet fears in Lebanon of Hezbollah creating a state within a state.

The agreement generally received regional and international applause. Even the United States, which had called upon Lebanon's government to stand up to Hezbollah expressed some satisfaction. Its spin was that Hezbollah's gains, achieved at gunpoint, had cost it its reputation and so political partners among other Lebanese Some skeptics, however, questioned whether the agreement just delayed the collapse of Lebanon into civil or could really defuse the situation. Yet the Arab patrons of the parties -- primarily the Saudis, on one side, Syria, on the other apparently signed off on the agreement. That suggests they have interests in making the agreement work or, put another way, keeping Lebanon from becoming the battleground of a proxy war between the United States and Iran. If so, the politics of the regional system have trumped those of the global system (not that Iran is really a global player). Since the regional politics are traditionally contentious and solidarity weak, the agreement testifies to the extent of the Arab states' disdain for the United States and suspicions of Iran.

Official Israel and Syrian statements that the two countries are indirectly negotiating peace through the Turkish foreign ministry are no surprise since reports of such negotiations have been leaking for the past month. The statements, however, made the countries' respective patrons, the US and Iran, look ineffective, since each had publicly warned its client against such negotiations. Indeed, a New York Times editorial rather imaginatively argued that George Bush's condemnation of appeasers in his May 14 speech to the Knesset was aimed at both Obama and Israelis who want to negotiate with groups to whom the Administration refuses to speak, viz., Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah. Secretary of State Rice said rather coolly that it was okay for Israel to negotiate with Syria. She then claimed that Israel and the Palestinian Authority were making such progress in their US sponsored negotiations that agreements could be signed by the end of the year. Since neither the parties to these negotiations nor any informed observers believe this, Rice is either terribly out of touch or just plain lying. Given her record, it's hard to tell.

Iranian president Ahmadinejad and his circle were reportedly pissed off by the revelation to the point of branding Syria's negotiations a betrayal of its friendship with Iran. Iran's foreign ministry, however, denied the truth of such reports. So Ahmadinejad is likely to soft pedal his opposition while working behind the scenes to block the negotiations.

There is considerable doubt among Israelis that the negotiations can succeed, though arguably both sides can benefit if Israel gives Syria the entire Golan Heights in return for a peace that includes an end of Syria's alliances with Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran. For one thing, earlier negotiations between Syria and Israel failed because the two sides could not agree on the extent and modality of Syria's control of the Golan. Second, Israel PM Olmet is too weak politically to get the Israel public behind such a deal. Indeed many skeptics believe he chose to disclose the negotiations now to deflect attention from a police investigation of his possibly corrupt practices when he was Minister of Industry and Commerce in a previous government. Third, although Israeli governments have tended to look at negotiations as an alternative to negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israel will need some assurance that some peace can be reached with the Palestinians before it will agree to relinquishing all or most of the Golan.

On the Brink or in the Bazaar

2008-05-18T18:15:00.000-07:00

Reuters and al-Jazeera report that talks in Doha, Qatar among Lebanese leaders have fasiled to reach any agreement for ending the political crisis in Lebanon. According to al-Jazeera one major disagreement is over proposals concerning the size of electoral districts, particularly in Beirut, with Christians fearing that large sized districts would dilute their representation in Parliament. According to Reuters, the sticking point is Hezbollah's refusal to a compromise proposed by the Qatari hosts that would give Hezbollah 10 ministers in the government cabinet and some say over the appointment of a n eleventh. This would give it close to, but not guaranteed, veto power in the government.

The compromise proposal evidences Hezbollah's strength and indicates how out of touch with reality is the Bush administration in thinking, as Bush's Security Adviser Stephen Hadley puts it, the talks are an opportunity for the Lebanese government to clip Hezbollah's wings.

2008-05-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

Articles in Le Monde and The New York Times highlight the threat of radicalization among Lebanese Sunni, who feel humiliated by thrashing Hezbollah gave the Sunni militia and institutions in Beirut. Their attention has increasingly turned to hardline and even Salafists preachers who have denounced Hezbollah and Shiites in general as enemies. Fighting along sectarian lines broke out in Tripoli last week. Although the main players are different, this type of polarization has reminded many Lebanese of the situation before the outbreak of the civil war in the 1970s.

Of further interest regarding Lebanon: New York Times columnist David Brooks reports speaking to Barack Obama about Lebanon, among other flash points in the Middle East, and being impressed by the candidate's knowledge and policy sense. Obama clarified to Brooks's satisfaction that he did not consider Hezbollah just a political party and that he would strengthen the Lebanese state as a provider of services to its citizens in order to peel away Lebanese Shiite support for Hezbollah. Obama would not rule out any talking with Hezbollah, because tough strategies work best when coupled to diplomacy, but he would not talk unconditionally with Hezbollah, Hamas or Iran. Brooks concluded that Obama is a realist regarding the Middle East. That's quite a good thing for Brooks and other moderate conservatives.

Fighting Words

2008-05-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

In considering a comment on Crusader-in-Chief George Bush's speech yesterday to the Knesset, I recalled the contradictory advice of Proverbs 26: 4-5:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him.
Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.

Since Bush does not read this blog and much has already been written about his gratuitous, attack on Obama, McCain's hypocritical follow on and the Democrats' replies, I thought it better to focus on the Israeli response to the speech.

It was warm. Most Israelis were predisposed to applaud whatever he said. They think they owe him. On their view, the invasion of Iraq removed a threat to Israel, albeit an overrated one, and the occupation has created so much chaos in Iraq that another threat cannot arise from there for decades.
They found nothing wrong in what he said and a lot to their liking. Right wing Israelis could ignore his mention of a Palestinian state in a vague future, because they know in the present Bush ignores the building of settlements in the West Bank and does not even support his Secretary of State's demand to remove checkpoints. Israelis centrists could applaud the vacuous words that demanded nothing of them -- no flexibility in negotiations with Palestinians -- while congratulating Israel for comprising with the United States the moral center of the universe. Left wing Israelis could join with the others in applauding Bush's pledge to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. While many Americans view Iran's president Ahmadinejad as a scruffy, contemptible, little man, almost all Israelis see him as a an existential threat and even leftists do not want to relinquish Israel's nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.
Israelis felt honored that Bush attended the 60th anniversary celebration. Although Bush has disgraced the presidency and the United States, Israelis still regard the United States like an older brother, a friend and protector. With its leader present, along with several other foreign dignitaries, Jewish gliterrati from the Diaspora and a few goyisch celebrities, the Israelis could briefly feel relaxed and triumphant rather than kvetchy and apprehensive.

Well not entirely. An editorial on the speech in the supposedly dovish Haaretz applauded Bush's pledge on Iran, but worried that it would not bind his successor. No problem if McCain is elected, but if Obama becomes the next president... In that case, the editorial suggested, Bush should take military measures against Iran in the months between the election and the inauguration. He could be assured that Israel's military would willingly assist in such operations. The editorial was likely written by Yossi Melman, one of the newspaper's military correspondents. Melman has been extremely hawkish on Iran, but he often directly reflects what his IDF and Mossad sources tell him. So the editiorial might signal to the world that Israel's security establishment is running out of patience with and trust in the United States over Iran. That is scary.

The Only Place He is Loved

2008-05-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

Following upon the allegations that an American Jewish entrepreneur bribed Israel PM Ehud Olmert when Olmert was Minister of Commerce and Industry, Israel journalist gadfly Gideon Levy wrote a column asking American Jews to stop intervening in Israel politics. While Levy acknowledged the present case was somewhat different, it was pointed to the perversion and corruption of Israel politics and policies by American Jewish money. In particular, Levy took issue with American funding of the numerous settlements in the territories and the various settlers' movements. Without the more than $100 million which American Jews have contributed, these efforts would have failed. And the settlements and settlers, Levy argues, are the major obstacle and opponents to finding peace with the Palestinians.

Levy, I believe, is right. Over Israel's 60 years, especially since 1967, the money and political support raised by American Jews has relieved Israel of the need to seek seriously accommodation and peace with the Palestinians. The settlement policies and activities, in particular, have further Israel's relations with them, pushing farther off a peaceful two-state solution. Moreover, this support, like that given by most Christian evangelicals, was given to fulfill the donors' fantasies, such as revenge on the goyim, rather than out of consideration for Israel's best interests.

However, I would Levy to ask that Israeli Jews return the favor. He should tell them to stop intervening in American politics and, in particular, to stop their ridiculous support of George W. Bush. One might argue whether the U.S.'s invasion of Iraq, its threats to Iran and its acceptance of Israel settlements were in Israel's best interests. According to the prevalent short-sighted Israel analysis, they were. But clearly the Israelis who cheer Bush for these steps have no concern for what they have cost the American people. They express no concern for the American lives and money wasted in Iraq, the U.S.'s moral stature shrunk by the administration's torture policies nor the administration's violations of its own citizens' civil liberties. Perhaps they are use to similar conduct by their own governments, army, security agencies and police similarly rationalized in name of security.

Even many of the best are filled with such dispassionate intensity. The supposedly liberal newspaper Haaretz in an editorial urges the United States to attack Iran. The editors know the American army is stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it kindly advises the use of planes, missiles and naval ships. Its Washington correspondent Shmuel Rosner, who apparently has not heard of Katarina or seen the last five years of incompetence in Iraq, extols Bush as hard at work every day for the good of the world. Supposedly wise Israel president Shimon Peres, interviewed in the Washington Post, praises Bush for having toppled Saddam Hussein, for otherwise Israel would have to contend with both Iraq and Iran. He ignores that the revulsion through the Middle East, with the exception of Israel, to the occupation of Iraq has strengthen Iranian influence throughout the region. And it has strengthened the grip and audacity of the hardliners in Iran.

If Israelis lack the curiosity to ask why 72% of the American public disappove of Bush, if they are indifferent to costs other bear for their free ride, they might at least spare us the fawning over Bush.

Lebanon Update

2008-05-13T15:20:00.000-07:00

A tense quiet has settled in Lebanon. The Lebanese army took up positions in West Beirut that were vacated by Hezbollah gunmen and the streets have emptied of armed fighters. Army commanders declared they would suppress by force, if necessary, armed or other paramilitary activities by the various parties and factions. Supporters of the government have expressed some satisfaction with this outcome, although they were disappointed by the army's failure to intervene over the weekend. While some have explained the army could not for fear of spllitting the soldiers and officers along communal lines, others, like Christian far right winger Samir Gagea, questioned keeping the army intact at the price of letting the country fall apart. In any case, the army is ill equipped and untrained to quell factional fighting or less violent demonstrations, so it will be unlikely to intervene effectively, even should the commanders want that. So the main effect of the declarations is to give the various sides an excuse to take a break (or more hopefully step back from the brink), before the next flash point comes up. That will be next month, when the Lebanese government, having today passed on voting for a new president, is now scheduled to meet for that purpose.

An op-ed piece in Le Monde calls Hezbollah's actions a coup d'état. Actually they were more a rehearsal for one. Political scientists and schemers know that the neutrality of a country's army is vital for the success of a coup d'état. Hezbollah now knows (or believes) it can count on that if and when it goes for the real thing.

Sowing the Wind

2008-05-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

The cunning of history, Hegel's term for unintended consequences coming back to bite political actors, might be in the works in the country formerly known as Burma [Myanmar]. The Iriwaddy delta is devastated, 35,000 to 100,000 people (depending on whose estimate) have already died, another 1.5 million are without food, potable water, shelter and are vulnerable to disease. Yet the generals who rule Myanmar have limited the influx of aid from outside, diverted resources from relief efforts for a referendum to rubber stamp their rule and even prevented rich Burmese from providing money and aid to the cowevne's victims. They are suspicious that any collective actions, self-organization or outside intervention, which is not under their control, can become politically charged and weaken their grip on power. Such suspicions are frequent among leaders or authoritarian governments and even democracies, when facing or contemplating the aftermath of disasters.

The generals, however, may not have considered that a regime's refusal or inability to alleviate the suffering of its subjects after a disaster erodes whatever legitimacy it might have. Thus the Iranian government's incompetence in organizing effective relief for earthquakes in 1977 and 1978 fueled popular opposition to the Shah and hastened his downfall. Of course all such failures do not have such a result. The mullarchy in Iran has been no more effective in responding to earthquakes since the Shah, Stalin did not suffer for letting the Ukrainian peasants starve in the 1930s and George W. Bush is still president, despite his administration's miserable failure in responding to the devastation of Hurricaine Katrina.

But Christian Science Monitor's David Montero reports from Bangkok that observers expect the regime to lose some power as a result of its inaction. "This is an opportunity for opposition groups to make limited gains," says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, head of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. "There will be mounting pressures on the government because of its inadequacies. Opposition groups have the upper hand."

In contrast to the Burmese generals, Chinese authorities appear to be effectively handling the aftermath of today's devastating earthquake in Sichuan province. NPR's Melissa Block reports from the provicial capital Chengdu that cranes were on the scene in a few hours to remove debris of flattened buildings in desperate searches for survivors. Perhaps this contrast will finally convince Chinese officials that the Burmese generals do not merit China's support -- a conclusion that the Burmese dissidents and their supporters have long been pressing China to reach.

More on the Chinese response to the earthquake from James Fallows, an old China hand and editor of the Atlantic Monthly:

Most of the channels on the (state controlled) CCTV are running the normal game shows, Olympic warmups (especially torch-relay updates), teen music shows, etc. But the CCTV-1 news channel is having all-out coverage of the earthquake in Sichuan province. Brief cultural notes:

- The coverage included a long segment of premier Wen Jiabao reading a speech about his deep concern for the people of Sichuan, from aboard an airplane en route to the disaster scene. Background: after the country was paralyzed by unexpected snow storms in February, the leadership was criticized for a Katrina-like slowness in dealing with the problem. Prominent coverage now of the main officials responding immediately to this disaster.

Sounders of Swine

2008-05-11T21:03:00.000-07:00

With the fall of the US housing market only halfway to bottom, the Republican opposition to the House housing bill would be ironic were it not tragic. Led by House Minority leader John Beohner, most Republicans complain that the Federal government's helping homeowners facing foreclosure would create moral hazards at taxpayers' expense. That means, that people gulled into predatory mortgages or who jumped at some deal they knew was too good would not suffer the full consequences of their decisions. What is ironic is these same Republicans do not acknowledge they created greater moral hazards by voting for and continuing to support the war in Iraq. This war has already cost American tax payers over $800 billion dollars and will likely end up costing three or four times that amount.

The Republican leadership instead has been well compensated by the defense contractors and oil companies who have benefited from the misadventure in Iraq. They are looking forward to a similar payday from banks and other financial institutions when the sustain Bush's veto of any housing bill that emerges from Congress. This is because such a bill to be effective will include requiring the banks and other mortgage holders to write down the amounts of principal and/ or reset rates to amounts the homeowners can bear. Consequently, the institutions would be forced to write off the differences, which would increase their losses, further depress the share price of their stocks and reduce the bonuses of their senior managers.

Undoubtedly the bankers, insurance companies, investment houses and their Republican gofers will discover some national security argument that makes the dispossession of millions of Americans virtuous. For example: any alleviation of current economic hardship will make the current sign up bonuses for army recruits less attractive and hence prolong our path to victory.
Or: any lessening of individual responsibility will sap our will to resist the Islamic fascist collective.

The conduct and allegiances of the Republicans might recall Samuel Johnson's and Ambrose Bierce's definitions of patriotism. For Johnson, patriotism was the last recourse of the scoundrel, for Bierce, it was the first.

2008-05-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

Hezbollah appears the winner in the ongoing test of strength in Lebanon. The Lebanese government turned over to the army the decisions on shutting down Hezbollah's private telelphone network and the firing of the airport security chief, who had allowed Hezbollah to install its own security cameras. The army, still headed by the Michel Suleiman, the compromise candidate for Lebanese president, then revoked the government's decisions. Hezbollah, in return, withdrew its fighters from West Beirut, but continues to demand a government in which Shiites will have one third of the cabinet seats and hence veto power. Its fighter will also continue to carry weapons openly.

These moves have quieted Beirut, but fighting between government supporters and the opposition broke out on Saturday in Tripoli and on Sunday in mountain villages southeast of Beirut, a mainly Druze area. Druze leader and government supporter Walid Jumblatt called on his rival and opposition supporter Talal Arslan to stop the fighting and submit to army control. As this fighting demonstrates, the alignment of forces is not entirely along communal lines. While the Shiite parties, viz., Hezbollah and Amal, are in the opposition and the Sunni generally support the government, the Druze and Christians are split, mainly as a consequence of factions within these communities trying to increase their respective power and resources through opportunistic alliances. The fragmentation is far from that during the civil war, when militias were ubiquitous and rivalries played down to the street and family level. But it might be heading there.

The Arab League has dispatched an emergency mediation team to Beirut. It will meet with Hezbollah chairman Nasrallah and Sunni leader Sa'ad Hariri, in the hopes of getting their agreement to the long-delayed appointment of a new Lebanese president, a principal part of any exit strategy from the crisis. Lebanese PM Fuad Siniora in the meantime, according to the Israel press, bitterly criticized Hezbollah, saying "not even the enemy Israel dared do to Beirut what Hezbollah has done" [armed occupation and shutting access to the airport]. The rhetoric is especially provocative, because the rationalization in Lebanon for Hezbollah maintaining a heavily armed militia is its being the de facto resistance to any Israel incursions.

Hezbollah's convincing show of strength moves the regional balance of power toward its partron Iran. Iran also scored a symbolic success in Iraq this week, when it again brokered a face-saving truce for the Al-Maliki government in its indecisive struggle against the Mehdi army in Sadr city. These gains increase the unlikely prospects for diplomatic-political efforts to reduce Iranian influence, say, detaching Syria from its alliance with Iran or promoting a tacit alliance between Israel and Sunni Arab states . So Israel leaders will see little purpose in discussing peace with Syria at this time or speeding up peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Instead, feeling bracketed by Iranian clients, they are more likely to seek coordination with the Bush administration on some intervention in Lebanon or even confrontation with Iran.

A Gathering Storm?

2008-05-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's commemorations of Israel's independence and the Palestinians' nakba (catastrophe) are already overshadowed by crises in Israel and Lebanon. Israel PM Olmert is under another police investigation, his third in recent years, concerning new charges of bribe taking (in incidents uncovered during the course of an earlier investigation). He is liable to be indicted, in which case, he says, he will resign. That possibility raises the question of his succession by Foreign Minister Livni and her ability to keep a governing coalition, on one hand, or early elections, on another. Olmert and his supporters claim the charges are trumped up by opponents to peace talks the Palestinians or Syria, that, he says, are making progress. So far Olmert has not given any evidence for this claim. Moreover, to judge by the government's record and the current state of the talks, the opponents would need no help from the police to derail they. They can just leave that to Olmert, his coalition partners and the Israel army, all of whom appear quite capable and willing to do that themselves.

In Lebanon, Chairman Nasrallah declared war on the Lebanese government after, he says, the Lebanese government declared war on Hezbollah, by trying to shut down the private communications network that Hezbollah had set up throughout Lebanon, with Iranian help. Hezballah gunmen have blocked the road from Beirut's international airport to the city and also wrested control of West Beirut from Sunnis. These moves come after months of a political stalemate over choosing a Lebanese president, that has pitted Sunni, Druse and most Christian communities in Lebanon against Lebanese Shiites, dominated by Hezbollah. The political situation is aggravated by economic deterioration in Lebanon, due to several factors: a) the devastation from the war with Israel two years ago; b) the political stalemate itself scaring off foreign investment; and c) rising costs of food and other necessities which has provoked violent demonstrations.

In addition, Hezbollah military leaders want to show their muscles, because the party has failed to strongarm its candidate into the presidency of Lebanon, while the Sunni, Druse and Christians grouped in the anti-Syria, anti-Shia coalition would rather have a showdown now rather than later when Hezballah is even stronger. So the parties are likely to spiral into a civil war. In that case, Israel leaders, with or without Olmert at their helm, will decide to "help" the Lebanese government either overtly or clandestinely. The Bush administration would undoubtedly green light any such Israeli move, since it regards conflicts involving Iranian clients -- Sadrists in Iraq, Hamas, Hezballah -- as proxy wars with Iran. Iranian leaders have a corresponding view of conflict directed at US clients, viz., Israel, the Lebanese government, the Arab gulf states. Lebanon today is an opportunity for them to demonstrate Lebanon's disruptive power and consequently its being a necessary player in achieving some stabilities in the Middle East, regardless of Western efforts to isolate it over the nuclear program issue.

International relations in the Middle East are like the old joke about in New England. If you don't like what is happening now, just wait a bit.

School Daze

2008-04-30T19:46:00.000-07:00

A naive part of me wants to think of the US as a chill-out zone for combatants in the Israel-Palestinian conflict. That same part wants to believe that the US can be a pluralistic society where the politics of identity are left behind for a struggle over economic justice. These thoughts/ hopes explain why a recent New York Times article especially depressing. It reviewed the controversy over the effort to establish a school in the New York City public school system that would offer instruction in Arabic to children of Arab and other ethnic descents. Despite the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the agreement of school system officials, the leadership (designated school principal) of a talented, moderate Arab woman, her partnership with a well regarded organization providing social services to Muslim communities in New York, and buy in from other ethnic groups, the effort quickly ran into opposition from elements of the Jewish community. These included "outside [New York] agitators," such as Daniel Pipes, head of Campus Watch, who also played a role in the attempt to deny tenure to Columbia University professor Nadia Abu al-Haj. They had questions and accusation, repeated in the tabloid press, about the school's would be principal and curriculum, textbooks, etc., based on the assumption that anything in Arabic would inevitably be sympathetic to jihadists and hostile to Israel. But support the designated principal Deborah Almontaser received from other Jewish group led some Arab-Americans to question her loyalty to them.

The shit really hit the fan when the opponents of the school wrongly linked Ms. Almontaser to an Arab-American that has used the slogan Intifada NYC. The New York Post then distorted Ms. Almontaser's comments about this slogan, so it appeared that she supported jihad in New York. The school system officials then disowned her and forced her to resign, by threatening to not open the school otherwise. The school opened, survived a rough first year, but attracted far fewer Arab-American students than anticipated. The Arab-American communities might have been estranged by having little input in the planning, by the interim principal being a Jewish woman who knows no Arabic, by the controversy, perhaps even by the school being named for poet Khalil Gibran, a Christian. Meanwhile, Ms. Almontaser is suing the school system for reinstatement as principal, a case she is unlikely to win.

This case, like several tenures battles in the past year, bespeaks the intense politicization of US education of all grades over Middle East issues. On one hand, it resembles the struggle over "intelligent design" with the Jewish vigilantes in the role of the anti-Darwinian evangelicals. On the other, it seems a throwback to the Cold War days, when people who tried to create institutions to accommodate pluralism were accused of being pawns of a international conspiracy to subvert the young. (One might remember Socrates was convicted and executed on that charge.) But there is also some resonance with the nasty Oceanside-Brownsville battles between the New York teachers' union and the local communities, power struggles that paraded under the banners of the "canon" and multi-culturalism.

Of course, Jewish groups being pissed about people saying bad things about Israel or good things about Arabs, Palestinians in particular, is nothing new. For decades, American Jewish leaders have been denying any Israeli responsibility for the flight of Palestinians in 1948 or the suffering of Palestinians in the occupied territories, notwithstanding the historical records and their research by Israel historians, e.g., Benny Morris. They have denounced, boycotted and blacklisted people and media that have said differently, because they are more concerned with current public relations than truth in the past. And for the past two or three decades they have been formidable. A difference in today's battles is people of little stature and no followings have organized the campaigns against the offending Arabs -- more facilitators than leaders. Their success testifies to the Internet's power to arouse people and lower the costs of their participation over a wide catchment.

But what motivates individual Jews to join these campaigns on the basis of meager, one-sided information, without almost no thought. First, because people think in stereotypes, Americans and especially New York Jews are likely to identify Arab-Americans as threats, linked to the perpetrators of 9/11 and those militants lobbing rockets into Israel. Second, as Nation columnist Eric Alterman suggests, some join these campaigns to prove they are good Jews. This points to a spiritual and educational poverty that many Jews in the US experience, their own guilt regarding about it and the belief that unquestioning support of Israel is a basis of Jewish identity. Third, these small battles give their participants opportunities to lead or, at least, to feel they can make a difference. They do not need money or arguments, but rather passion and a some resentment at having been shut out of decision making. For such reasons, politics around school boards, hiring and curricula have been the most passionate in the United States.

The anthropologist Levi-Strauss defined neurotic conflict as grievance looking for a target. I think the definition applies to most Middle East conflicts and their recent extensions in the United States.

A Dismal Science

2008-04-28T15:15:00.000-07:00

The fighting in Gaza this morning produced another round of charges and counter charges between Hamas and Israel. Six unarmed Palestinians were killed this morning, including a mother and her four children. According to Hamas, they died when an Israeli tank shell crashed through the roof of their house as they were eating breakfast. According to an Israeli army spokesperson the tank shell hit two Palestinian gunmen who were carrying a large amount of ammunition. The ammunition exploded and killed the civilians. Almost any observer realizes that whatever the truth, both sides are liars or, to use Harry Frankfurt's useful distinction, bullshitters. Neither cares what the truth is, but will say whatever suits its purpose. The Israel army and government care no more about the deaths of Palestinians than Hamas cares about those of Israelis when its militants fire rockets at Israeli settlements.

Perhaps in this context, it is petty to be annoyed by the screeds of right wing Israelis who want Israelis to emulate Palestinian terrorists and suicide bomb Palestinian buses and restaurants. Don't these lunatics realize that Israeli has much more surgical and effective means, which result in a balance of deaths greatly in its favor.

Unfortunately, this lack of interest in the other's welfare -- the self regarding that is supposedly normative for groups on the realist view of international relations -- will continue to put a mutually acceptable accord beyond reach. Only a minimum of such interest can stop the perpetual whining of each side about the concessions it would have to make to get peace.

The Right for a Right of Departure

2008-04-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

It is no secret that Palestinian Israelis (or Arabs who are Israeli citizens) suffer systematic social and economic discrimination and that many Israeli Jews regard them as a fifth column. Lately, however, the religious and right wing leaders in Israel have renewed their questioning whether they have a place in Israel at all. At the beginning of March, Efi Eitam, a leader of the National Religious-National Front Coalition, warned Arab members of the Knesset who protested the Israel army's incursions in Gaza: "A day will come when we will expel you from this house [the Knesset] and the national homeland... we have to expel you to Gaza. The people that are fighting us live there and you belong there."

This past weekend, members of the National Religious and National Front parties, West Bank rabbis and other rightists had a conference in Ramle that examined the relationship of Israel to its minorities and the "stealthy conquest by Arabs of Israeli cities with mixed population," such as Jaffa, Haifa, Lod and Ramle. (Is it a sign of amnesia that once predominantly Arab towns are described as now being conquered by Arabs?) One of the speakers, M.K. Uri Ariel, emphasized Israel needs to encourage the voluntary emigration of Arabs. How nice, when the Palestinians' insistence on a right of return [to Israel] is a major obstacle to a peace deal, the folks at the conference are thinking about a Palestinian right of departure.

M.K. Ariel also called upon the government to develop programs that would make the mixed cities more attractive to Israeli Jews. In other words, using state resources for the benefit of only its Jewish citizens. But such notions about one sided allocation of resources is not peculiar to the right and religious, but shared by many people in the center. After all, Israel is the Jewish state. So when ex-President Carter said in his visit to Israel that he wanted to call attention to Israel's discrimination against its Palestinian citizens, the Israel ambassador to the UN called Carter a bigot. It was not a matter of Carter making false accusations, although Israelis perhaps rightly bristle at his use of the apartheid to describe results of administrative practices rather than legal codes. Rather his bigotry was to ignore the special right of the Jewish people in Israel.

Of course as the percent of Palestinians in Israel gets larger, more vocal and visible, to say nothing about the percent of Palestinians in the area west of the Jordan River, it is increasingly difficult for Israeli Jews to claim their system is also democratic. Hence Eitom, Ariel and their colleagues have a certain repugnant honesty: Keep the state Jewish and democratic by throwing anyone else out.

Judgements of Histories

2008-04-26T20:04:00.000-07:00

On the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, I remembered Thucydides's account of Athens's catastrophic expedition to Syracuse. Daniel Mendelsohn's brilliant New Yorker review of an annotated edition of Herodotus's Histories suggests to me that other Greek historian (and Thucydides's predecessor) had a better template for the Iraq expedition. In Mendelsohn's reading, Herodotus's point was not to gossip or celebrate Greek courage, but to recount the rise and fall of the great Persian empire. The empire fell because of a rash ruler's effort to expand it beyond its natural limits. That puts a nice socio-biological twist on hubris, the motor of Greek tragedy, and echoes Dirty Harry's line that "a man should know his limitations." In concluding his review, Mendelsohn lays the template thickly over the present case:

Then, there is the story itself. A great power sets its sights on a smaller, strange, and faraway land—an easy target, or so it would seem. Led first by a father and then, a decade later, by his son, this great power invades the lesser country twice. The father, so people say, is a bland and bureaucratic man [Darius], far more temperate than the son; and, indeed, it is the second invasion that will seize the imagination of history for many years to come. For although it is far larger and more aggressive than the first, it leads to unexpected disaster. Many commentators ascribe this disaster to the flawed decisions of the son[Xerxes]: a man whose bluster competes with, or perhaps covers for, a certain hollowness at the center; a leader who is at once hobbled by personal demons (among which, it seems, is an Oedipal conflict) and given to grandiose gestures, who at best seems incapable of comprehending, and at worst is simply incurious about, how different or foreign his enemy really is. Although he himself is unscathed by the disaster he has wreaked, the fortunes and the reputation of the country he rules are seriously damaged. A great power has stumbled badly, against all expectations.

Max Rodenbeck, the Economist's Middle East correspondent, also uses a book review to deliver a similar judgement of the Iraq expedition's effect on the American empire. He finds much wrong with Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East, especially her assuming that Middle East societies can easily adopt civic culture and democratic values. However, he agrees with her that the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath helped put an end to such efforts earlier in this decade.

As numerous interlocutors in the region tell her, not only did the debacle promote extremism and further isolate pro-Western liberals, it alerted people to the terrible risks of toppling tyrants. The Iraq adventure, in Wright's view, may have been the biggest American policy failure of all time. It could yet prove to mark the end of an imperial America's influence in the region, much as France and Britain's catastrophic invasion of Egypt in 1956 demolished the colonial powers' standing and dangerously boosted the fortunes of Egypt's reckless leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. That is surely a sound judgment.

Too Short Views

2008-04-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

Israel's quick rejection of Hamas's truce offer reflects too short a view. A spokesman from the Prime Minister's office dismissed it as an attempt to buy time for Hamas to regroup and rearm. Put another way, Israel believes it has Hamas at bay and sees no gain in callling off the chase now. That is consistent with zbang ve-gamarnu, the Israeli version of "shock and awe," those crushing displays of power which are supposed to reduce populations to acceptance, but never seem to work as planned. The problem for Israel is that treating Hamas and its supporters only as targets and objects, rather than as a political player and people will not make them disappear, just more obstinate and vengeful. Israel will never reach an effective, durable agreement with the Palestinians, without admitting Hamas at some point, in some capacity to the discussions for it. So if Israel wants an accord, it should respond more encouragingly to any signs of reasonableness from Hamas.

Hamas's alter ego PA President Mahmut Abbas (Abu Mazan) fared no better with George Bush. He came to Washington with the hope of getting Bush to tell Israel to stop building settlements on the West Bank, a requirement of the "road map" and, on the Palestinian view, a very major obstacle to peace. Instead his meeting was just another opportunity for Bush to display his lack of reality regarding the Middle East. He ignored the settlements issue, saying that he wanted to focus on the big picture "how to define a state that is acceptable to both sides," as if he were writing a term paper for a first year course in political science. If Abu Mazan was disappointed by Bush, he was angered by Secretary of State Rice, who is supposed to know something about the Middle East, the interests of the Palestinians and facts on the ground. In his discussion with her, she did not include the 1967 borders as part of the context for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The Administration's was saying to him, in other words, "Take what we give you and shut up about the particulars."

So he returns home less confident about reaching an agreement with Israel whenever and probably less confident about his having a home.

Round Up

2008-04-24T20:51:00.000-07:00

Today's big news in the Israel-Palestine perspective is Hamas's offer/ acceptance of a six-month truce over the Gaza Strip. Puts in the shade

UNWRA's stopping distribution of food in Gaza, because it lacks gasoline;
George Bush expressing his confidence that an agreement on a two state solution will happen before he leaves office (another "Mission Accomplished" statement? Or is he planning a coup that will declare him president for life?);
CIA officials identifying North Korea and Syria as part of a nuclear axis of evil;
Iranian president Ahmadinejad warning Syria against closer ties to the U.S. and Israel;
declarations by Israel settlers on the Golan Heights that they will not leave, regardless of any Syrian-Israel agreement that requires their removal.

Not your typical day, not even in the Middle East.

The Hamas offer comes after negotiations with Israel through Egyptian intermediaries and perhapas after a nudge from Syria. It does not extend immediately, as Hamas wanted, to the West Bank, so the Israel army will be free to hunt Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militants there. The move is undoubtedly motivated by short term desperation -- Hamas's realization that it cannot provide welfare for Gaza, amid its low intensity conflict with Israel and the economic blockade. The announcement by UNRWA demonstrates as much and has forced Hamas to promise UNRWA some of its own stockpiled gasoline, a move that will reduce Hamas's very limited military capabilities . The offer is a grudging acknowledgment that the blockade itself is mainly a response to the rocket attacks it orders or sanctions upon the Israeli periphery of Gaza. It is a step on Hamas's part toward political realism.

Israel will likely agree to the offer with some minor modifications. Even if it does not include Hamas's commitment to stop smuggling arms and rocket makings into Gaza, a truce would provide quiet in the south for Israel's celebration next month of its 60th anniversary. Also Israel maintains an upper hand: The offer does not demand that it end the economic blockade. Instead it will consider the security conditions that are achieved under the truce and ease the blockade accordingly. Somewhere in Saul Bellow's late novels, a character, asked what he has learned, replies "Sydney Smith, an English clergyman's advice: short views." Not bad advice for Israel and the Palestinians now.

Digging Up the Past - 2

2008-04-24T19:48:00.000-07:00

The arrest of Ben-Ami Kadish on charges of spying for Israel from 1979 to 1985 is a matter of the FBI settling old scores. The charges might also diminish Israel credibility in US eyes for several reasons. First, when Pollard was arrested in 1985, Israel claimed Pollard was its only spy in the US. Second, Israel's commitment at that time to no more spying in the US seemingly included no further contact with other spies there -- if such existed. Yet according to the allegation of obstruction of justice included among the charge, an Israel government official recently helped Kadish concoct the story he told FBI investigators Third, Rafi Eitan, who headed the agency that "ran" Pollard and Kadish, happens, for entirely unrelated reasons, to be a minister in PM Olmert's cabinet. That might be too great an irony for American officials at a time they are increasingly aware of the discrepancy between what the Israel government says it is doing to improve conditions for West Bank Palestinians and what the Israel army, housing ministry and other agencies are actually doing.

Of course, one wonders why the FBI saw fit to bring charges against an 84 old, stemming from activities that ended 23 years ago. Israel journalist Yoel Markus believes it both part of a long time FBI campaign against Jews in sensitive US security positions and a move that assures George Bush does not release Pollard next month as a gift to Israel on its 60th anniversary. He does acknowledge, however, that Kadish, who worked for free, even more than Pollard, who was paid, provides evidence for FBI suspicions of American Jews' having dual loyalties. Given the post 9/11 paranoia, Kadish's exposure is likely to discomfort American Jews even more than Pollard's.

Digging Up the Past

2008-04-23T21:25:00.000-07:00

Archeology in Israel, besides being a national pastime, has been a continuing source of contentions. Since the creation of the state in 1948, the government, universities and even private institutions have sponsored numerous digs with the primary purpose of uncovering the physical evidence of earlier Jewish life in the land, especially in the Biblical and Mishnaic periods (10th century BCE to 3rd century CE). Some digs have neglected, even damaged earlier and later strata evidencing non-Jewish habitants. Since the Land of Israel is highly contested resl estate, archeology poses the question whose history is being dug up and the secondary one of who owns the findings.

The digs might be obstacles to peace at several levels. The historical narratives that have been woven around or extended by the artifacts tends to strengthen some Israelis commitment to the entire land of Israel, making any territorial division a very painful idea. That is particularly true of the excavations in and around Jerusalem and the controversies over the ancient city's size in Davidic times. A more pragmatic matter is the control of digs, since 1967, at numerous sites in what would likely be the territory of a Palestinian state and the status of artifacts removed from those sites to Israel government and museum collections. A recently publicized initiative started five years ago by Israeli, Palestinian and American archaeologists provides a basis for answering these questions. The group has secured records of over 6,000 excavations and the tens of thousands of artifacts found there. It has proposed that the artifacts be repatriated to the future Palestinian state, with museums and laboratories be built to house them. It proposes with regard to Jerusalem, a zone up to the city's 10th century CE boundaries, where excavation sites would be accessible to anyone and research would be fully transparent.

Although there will be many problems for this plan, including that of funding, should Israel and the Palestinians reach a two-state solution, initial responsea from communities of Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists has been polite to favorable. The wonder is that a plan was reached at all. As could be expected where identity and cultural rights are the issues, early meetings of the group were described as tense and sometimes needed professional mediators.

A less productive struggle related to archeology in Israel concerned Nadia El-Haj's battle for tenure at Columbia University. El-Haj, the daughter of a Palestinian American, is a professor of anthropology whose dissertation turned into an award winning book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society(U. of Chicago, 2002). The book analyzes how the findings at sites are woven into historical narratives that validate the Jews' right to various parts of the Land of Israel. When El-Haj came up for tenure in 2006 at Columbia's Barnard College, an American Jewish West Bank settler and graduate of Barnard organized a petition drive against her. The petition claimed El-Haj's work was an academically worthless, anti-Israel screed. The petition gained considerable support from Jewish Columbia students, graduates and faculty, many of whom were totally unfamiliar with El-Haj's material and methods. It also attracted the attention of outside agitators who fancy themselves the arbiters of informed discussion of Israel in university campuses, viz., David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes and Charles Jacob, the head of the David Project. Many of El-Haj's colleagues, within and without Columbia, rallied to her support and she was awarded tenure in November, 2007. This battle continued a series of controversies and interventions by fired up Jewish groups regarding Palestinian scholars and advocates at Columbia, dating back to the late Edward Said's publication of Orientalism. By the way, El-Haj's title Facts on the Ground is a tremendously rich, mordant multiple entendre, based on the popular Israeli Hebrew expression Kve'at 'Uvdoth. Its choice attests to El-Haj's' knowledge of Hebrew, understanding of scientific practice, insight into the politics of culture and wariness of Israel.

Syria - ous Discussions

2008-04-23T09:31:00.000-07:00

Per the Los Angeles Times, CIA tomorrow officials will brief tomorrow several congressional committees on the Syrian installation which Israel bombed last September. They will confirm what has been suspected since the bombing -- that Syria with North Korean aid was building a nuclear reactor that could produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. This disclosure will also confirm the extremely close cooperation and convergence of interests between the United States and Israel in planning and conducting the raid.

The closed briefings are sure to raise lawmakers' and pundits' questions about the Bush administration's current willingness to ease sanctions against North Korea in return for further accounting by the latter of its nuclear program and evidence of its dismantling. There will also be more questions about the effectiveness of current efforts to stop Iran's nuclear development program, especially since many observers saw the raid on Syria as a rehearsal for raids of suspected Iranian nuclearinstallations. On that issue, Iranian President Ahmadinejad reiterated today that Iran would continue its nuclear program, while the International Atomic Economic Agency (IAEA) announced it had received a note from Iran promising cooperation in clarifying whether the nuclear program was involved in the development of weapons. Iran has maintained the program is for only peaceful purposes and the US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, issued earlier this year, partly supported that assertion.

Another question about the CIA briefing: Why is it coming now, after months of intense secrecy and stonewalling. One answer would link the timing to possibly serious developments in the Syria-Israel relationship. A Syrian official disclosed on Monday that President Bashir al-Asad and Israel PM Ehud Olmert have been discussing through Turkish intermediaries the resumption of peace negotiations. A semi-official Syrian source yesterday said that Olmert had stated Israel's willingness to withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for a full-peace with Syria, including security measure like demilitarization. Al-Asad has said he wants open negotiations with Israel, but since his and the ruling Baath Party's prime interest is the return of the Golan Heights to Syria, there are not huge obstacles on the Syrian side in getting to "Yes." Except, maybe, reluctance in selling out its Hezbollah and Hamas clients and breaking with its ally Iran.

The disclosure now of Syria's febrile nuclear efforts might prod Syria to make nice in public by seeking peace negotiations with Israel. Lacking Iran's energy resources and vast population, Syria is more vulnerable to international pressure and more likely to get it. However tying the CIA briefings tomorrow to a shift in US policy, currently that of shunning Syria, probably attributes too much agility to the Bush administration.

Indeed if the administration and its neo-con coteries are still intent on attacking Iranian nuclear installations before W. leaves office, it would not want to be distracted by peace negotiations between Syria and Israel or have such confuse its Manichean vision of the Middle East. The probability that the administration will push for such an attack increased today, with the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus to head the US Middle East Command. In contrast to his predecessor, who was fired for considering Iran an essential player in the Middle East and urging diplomatic engagement with it, Petraeus has a one dimensional view of Iran. In his recent testimony to Congress, he assigned it major responsibility for the instability in Iraq and appeared to favor confrontation in dealing with its clients and operatives there. He is unlikely to be less hawkish when dealing with Iran in a wider context, especially knowing what moderation cost his predecessor.

He Said, She Said and She Said

2008-04-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

Secretary of State Rice today said the Bush Administration explicitly warned ex-President Carter not to talk to Hamas leaders. Rice did not say who in the administration warned Carter, but was apparently not referring to herself. Rice did not take exception to Carter's remark that he had spoken to her before he left for Damascus and she had not warned him about speaking to Hamas.

Rice, who has been meeting with Arab leaders in the Gulf region, implied that Carter had damaged United States's credibility in the Middle East. It caused some Arab diplomats to wonder whether the US was still committed to shunning Hamas and might instead be making back door preparations for a shift in policy.

Meanwhile Hillary Clinton joined the war of words between Israel and Iran. On the morning of the crucial Pennsylvania primary, seeking to enhance her image of toughness and perhaps her share of Jewish voters, she stated that were she president and Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, the United States would obliterate Iran. Her statement seemingly contradicts earlier ones that it is unwise to publicly discuss US responses in hypothetical scenarios dealing with Iran.

The shrill, escalating rhetoric about who will obliterate whom fits the stereotype of Bedouin battles. Members of the warring clans line up on their camels at opposite sides of an open space and hurl insults at one another for several days.
This will either arouse enmity to such an extent that each side will heedlessly charge the other or it might exhaust them, so they drift away from the would-be battleground.

The Never Ending Story

2008-04-21T18:37:00.000-07:00

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri might or should be looking for a new job. The day after he blasted the idea that Palestinians vote in a referendum on any peace deal, ex-President Carter, in Jerusalem, and Hamas executive committee head Khalad Meschaal, in Damascus, said that Hamas leadership would agree to such a step. Carter was reporting on his conversations in Damascus with Hamas leaders. When asked on NPR radio about the spoke person's statement, Carter replied he did not know who Abu Zuhri was, but that he had been talking to the top Hamas leaders, including some from Gaza and they had taken time to give him a carefully worded answer. Meschaal's remarks were murkier. He said Hamas was ready to give truce to an Israeli state within the 1967 borders, that also permitted the Palestinians a right of return. These are three non-starters for Israel. On the other hand, Meschaal said that "Hamas would respect the Palestian people desire [regarding an accord with Israel], even if it contradicted [Hamas's] tenets."

Carter's remarks highlighted other ambiguities in Hamas's positions and his own role. He reported the Hamas leaders wanted direct negotiations with Israel over the exchange of the Israeli prisoner in Gaza for Hamas and Fatah prisoners in Israel, but they rejected any stop in firing rockets at Israel from Gaza. Asked about his own role as an intermediary, Carter emphasized that he was acting as a private citizen, but denied that the US State Department, despite its public statements on his trip, had discouraged him from talking to Hamas leaders. He suggested that the State Department might want to maintain a public image of no contact with Hamas, while attending to less public interactions.

That would be diplomatically sensible. Unfortunately, the State Department like other parts of the Bush administration does not do nuance. Assistant department spokesman Tom Casey proclaimed at the beginning of his office's daily press briefing there was nothing new in Carter's and Meschaal's statements. Hamas still refuses to recognize Israel, it is a terrorist organization, etc. When asked about Carter's claim that he was not advised against speaking to Hamas, Casey in effect called Carter a liar.

Amidst the talking, Hamas gunmen mounted several attacks against Israel units at the border crossings from Israel to the Gaza Strip. The soldiers repulsed these attacks, killing several of the gunmen. Subsequent Israel air strikes killed several more Hamas militants, leaving, as usual, a very lopsided body count in Israel's favor, even when the inevitable civilian casualties are not counted. Yet a Hamas spokesman -- not Sami, this time -- described the recent attacks were just rehearsals for larger. Such encounters and promises will likely further reduce the supplies that Israel allows into Gaza for humanitarian purposes. Because of Passover and the attacks, it is now a trickle.

In this context, does it matter that Hamas leaders might have inched a bit toward acceptance of Israel and readiness to negotiated? Is the refusal of the US and Israel to consider that possibility disappointing? Yes to both questions. Hamas is an ideological organization with little proven skills in pragmatic politics. The support it receives from Muslims abroad and followers within appears based on maintaining ideological purity, as well as holding the Gaza Palestinians willing hostages. Therefore Hamas leaders in changing their political program risk internal opposition and loss of financial support. If they want to change their tune they must do it incrementally, slowly, ambiguously. That does not mean that Meschaal's current rhetoric actually indicates change, but the blunt rejection of his words does not help. Instead demands for clarification and seeking other opportunities to get their focus on the "peace process" would be more constructive.

Irrational Politics

2008-04-20T10:54:00.000-07:00

Irrationality characterizes politics in the Middle East, perhaps more than politics anywhere else. The name of this blog admits that. It comes from the hoary story of a frog that is ferrying a scorpion across the Jordan River. The frog was initially reluctant to do that, explaining to the scorpion, "you will sting me in mid river and I shall die." The scorpion had answered, "that would not make sense. If you die, I shall die with you, since I cannot swim." And impressed by that argument the frog agreed. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog. As it died, the frog said, "we agreed that would not make sense." The scorpion replied, "Yes, but you forgot this is the Middle East."

Hamas, perhaps driven by desperation, incompetence or raw emotions, appears to have set a new example of irrationality, so mundane and instant as to be laughable -- were it not also symptomatic of the dead ends of efforts to limit violence, suffering and hate in the Middle East. Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri today rejected a proposal by the Egyptian Foreign Minister. That proposal called for a cessation of rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel, an end of Israeli targeting of Palestinians, the exchange of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for the Israel soldier Gilad Shavit and a referendum among Palestinians to decide the principles for negotiations with Israel. The spokesman particularly objected to the referendum, proclaiming that sacred national rights of Palestinians, e.g., Jerusalem, the right of return, could not be subject to a vote. At the same time he took exception to the foreign minister saying that Hamas in a Palestinian government would increase the difficulty of negoations with Israel and demanded a retraction. What is the man thinking and whom is he trying to fool?

¡No Pasaran!

2008-04-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

A sad irony is that Israel's celebration of Passover, the Festival of Freedom, includes blockades of Palestinians in the West Bank as well as the continuing blockade of those in the Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Ministry announced earlier today that starting this evening until the end of Passover, Palestinians would not be allowed to pass through army checkpoints, except for the most urgent of humanitarian reasons. While it is thoughtful of Israel's government to include Palestinians in its holiday plans, this measure will have the effect of reducing yet further the trickle of traffic among the fragments of territory under Palestinian control in the West Bank. Such blockades are typically part of Israel's celebrations of its major holidays and are a significant aspect of the humiliations and discrimination that Palestinians suffer under Israel occupation. The traffic of Jewish settlers in the West Bank will, of course, not be restricted during the holidays.

Such legal discrimination brings up an interesting issue, related in another way to Passover. The Torah enjoined the Israelites to consider strangers and sojourners among them as their legal equals, reminding them that they were once strangers in Egypt. "You should have one law for yourselves and the stranger amongst you." (Exodus 12:49; Leviticus 24:22) This argument for equality seems based on empathy and the idea that people would choose that all be treated equally, if they did not know what fate held in store for them, viz., the choice under philosopher John Rawls's veil of ignorance. However over the decades of Israel occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel doves and human rights activists have rarely quoted this Biblical claim to the settlers and annexationists. Even such a selective reading of the Bible would on its face support annexation and invite responses with the Biblical verses that proclaim the entire Land of Israel the patrimony of the Jews. Besides it is rather absurd to call the Palestinians strangers in the land. The doves see Zionist polemicists who have argued that case as preparing the grounds for further expulsions of the Palestinians from west of the Jordan -- the ethnic cleansing that Israelis euphemistically call transfer. So the lesson of Passover, which has come in many places and traditions to symbolize freedom, cannot be applied unambiguously to the case of the Palestinians whose freedom has been denied by Israel. That leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

No Animals were Harmed in these Episodes

2008-04-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

During the first intifada, Israel humorist and songwriter Dani Litani noted that the Palestinians must have a very large air force, because every time the Israel military spokesman reported that Israel soldiers were firing only into the air to break up demonstrations, five or six Palestinians fell down dead. Today it seems that many armed Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip have the magical power of turning into unarmed civilians once they are struck by Israeli bullets, shells or missiles.

After a brief lull two weeks ago, militant groups in Gaza and the IDF have resumed ratcheting up the violence. Today's series of incidents took the lives of three Israel soldiers, and, at least eighteen Palestinians, the majority of them unarmed civilians. The series began in the early morning when two armed militants, by approaching the border fence near Kibbutz Bari, drew an Israeli army unit into an ambush which killed the three soldiers. The Israelis replied with machine gun and tank fire, killing some Palestinian gunmen. Tanks and helicopters later fired shells and missiles at a nearby refugee camp, killing fifteen civilians. The Israel spokesman reported this shooting was directed at the source of the earlier fire. The Palestinians reported that the targets were actually two apartment buildings and a mosque and the dead included children and elders.

The sad truth is both sides long ago stopped caring how many Palestinian civilians get killed. Israel looks upon them as having gotten in the way of its soldiers killing as many Palestinian militants as possible, under current rules of engagement. Hamas and other organizations consider the civilian dead as both a recruiting tool and a reason for public opinion to sympathize with its cause.

Israel's overkill today might have also been meant as a "fuck you" to ex-President Carter for his hobnobbing with Hamas leaders. This is the Middle East, after all.

War of Words

2008-04-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

Today's editorial in the usually dovish Haaretz evidences the deep fear in Israel regarding Iran. In effect, the editorial implores George Bush to order US air and missile strikes -- "shock and awe" redux -- on Iranian sites where Israel believes nuclear weapons are being developed. The occasion for the editorial was the Iranian deputy chief of staff's response yesterday to last week's warning by Israel cabinet minister Ben Eliezer. Mr. Ben Eliezer said Israel would destroy Iranian society, if Iran attacked Israel. The Iranian said that if Israel tried, it would be destroyed. The editorial writers at Ha'aretz point to the many Iranian activities that undermine Israel's security to argue that these words should be taken seriously, whereas Ben Eliezer's can be ignored as empty rhetoric.

The editorial fears that nations in Europe and elsewhere, for their own reasons, will avoid sanctions on Iran for failing to open its nuclear program to inspection. They will excuse their inaction by citing the US National Intelligence Estimate that judged Iran stopped its weapons program in 2002 -- a conclusion that Israel vehemently rejected. In Israeli eyes, George Bush, while not a perfect policeman, is apparently the only one willing and able to stop Iran. True, the American army in running on fumes, but the US air force with its abundance of planes and missiles is enough to get the job done.

The editorial reflects the fears of Washington neo-cons, as well as many Israelis, that time is running out to remake the Middle East in Israel's and the US's favor. Hawkish Shmuel Rosner, the paper's Washington correspondent and a willing trumpet for the neo-cons, may have had a heavy hand in its writing. In any case. its proposal is insane, according to the popular definition that insanity is repeating an action with the expectation that the outcome will be different. The neo-cons failed to learn from Israel's experiences in the territories and Lebanon that invading a country is much easier than bringing it under control. Now Israelis, as represented by Haaretz, seem unable to learn from the US failures in Iraq that "shock and awe" bombing would not make Iran comply with US or Israeli wishes. It will just increase instability in the region. To be sure, most Israelis do not especially care about stability in the future. They have lived with instability and prefer their current anxieties be relieved by the destruction of the the suspected nuclear installations.

The editorial also signals the widening gulf between Israel's interests and US interests, at least as the American public perceives the latter. That public has no desire to extend the Bush crusade in the Middle East to Iran. It knows such action would be costly, bloody and fail. If Bush ordered an attack on Iran, Congress would likely start impeachment proceedings against him. Haaretz's ignorance and indifference to these conditions amount to a miserable failure on its part.

What Goes Around Come Around

2008-04-11T22:24:00.000-07:00

Considering the Bush administration's bad mouthing of Iran, Im sometimes tempted to think kindly of the Iranian government. That would be a mistake. It is an oppressive, often murderous regime that suppresses dissenters through jailing, intimidation, including death threats, beatings, deprivation of livelihoods, denial of licenses to print and perform. It abuses human rights, supports and arms clients that oppose peaceful settlement of conflicts, viz., Hezbollah and Hamas, and it ignores international demands to open its nuclear program to inspection. The Iranian government also lack a sense of humor and how ludicrous is its posturing. Instead it displays nauseating, self-righteous narcissism and a hideous lack of empathy for anyone except its supporters.

The latest evidence of character flaws is a complaint by the Iranian ambassador to the UN. He complained about Israeli cabinet minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer's public statement this week that, if Iran rocket attacked Israel, Israel would destroy Iranian society. Ben-Eliezer plays the buffoon or court fool in Israel politics; he says aloud what others whisper in the back rooms. So he was probably echoing current Israel government discussions about Israel's options in the event of an attack on its major cities. It is no secret that Israel has the means and apparent will to use a nuclear option as a last resort, but it is not nice to rub the other guy's nose in that.

However, Ben-eliezer's remarks follow several years of the Iranian President Ahmadinejad's promising/ predicting that Israel would soon be wiped off the map. In Israel, such statements are rather provocative because a) Hitler's similar "predictions" were not taken seriously enough, and b) they provide a motive for the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which Israeli intelligence thinks Iran still pursues. Israel has repeatedly protested such threats and other Iranian behaviors that suggest a desire to destroy the Jewish people, e.g., hosting a Holocaust deniers' conference, blowing up a Jewish community center and embassy in Buenos Aires. The protests have not chilled Iran. Maybe the Iranian Ambassador was just playing tit-for-tat, but from a distant he looks like a stupid, arrogant clod.

Nation Building

2008-04-08T21:19:00.000-07:00

Iraq is a great place to practice nation-building, especially for an administration whose head wanted no part of it and whose skill set is consistent with that desire. That was clear from the testimonies today by David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker to the Senate Armed Forces and Foreign Relations Committee. Despite their efforts to simplify and talk up a complex, dismal situation, the complexities and fluidities in the Iraqi political landscape were evident from their words. So was their inability to see beyond a very narrow scope and the utter lack of visibility of what happens next. This is not surprising: there are numerous layers of regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious, tribal, economic and political faults in Iraq and very little shared tradition of living in a unified state. Ambassador Ryan's citing as a major accomplishment the creation of a new Iraqi flag and its being flown in all parts of Iraq --next to the Kurdish flag in the north -- was pathetic, but maybe that is all that can be expected. Crocker nearly referenced arguably the best model for understanding the politics and violence of current Iraq, when he projected the Lebanonization of Iraq in the event of US withdrawal. But not the Lebanon of today, to which Crocker indeed referred, casting the Mehdi Army in role of Hezbollah and Iran in the role of Iran and Syria. Rather the Lebanon of nearly 35 years ago, at the beginning of the civil war. Some features are different, to be sure, but there are similar fragmentations of power, corruption as standard government practice and militias doubling as political agents and extortionist gangs.

Lebanon's civil war lasted fifteen years, 1975 - 1990, and involved occupations of Lebanese territory by two neighboring powers, Syria and Israel, thirty and eighteen years, respectively, which outlasted the war itself. The US occupation was much shorter but costly. Recall the Marine Barracks bombing in Beirut. The civil war and the interventions killed at least 100,000 Lebanese residents, permanently injured another 100,000 and caused over 250,000 to emigrate, out of population of about 5 million, including the Palestinians. The civil war was not continuous fighting but broken into phases, separated by attempts at political reconciliation and the suppression of some violence by the occupying troops in league with one or more of the political factions. If Lebanon is the model, even if Iraq has already had five years of civil unrest or war, the end is still far off. To measure progress over months rather than years is foolhardy, to predict victory -- whatever that means and for whom -- is insane.

A Change of Mind

2008-04-08T13:51:00.000-07:00

At the height of the recent fighting in Basra, Tahseen Sheikhly, a high profile Iraqi government official and a Sunni, was abducted from his home in Baghdad by Shiite militiamen. He was held in Sadr City and released unharmed several days later. In an interview on NPR, Sheikhly said he was surprised by the depths of poverty he had seen in Sadr city. He now recognizes that the government must relieve some of this poverty, if it hopes to achieve greater security in Iraq. His words suggest 1) members of the al-Malaki government are awfully detached from the plight of common folks in their country; 2) new manuals on counter-insurgency notwithstanding, the strategy the US and the Iraqi government to achieve security is still largely that of killing or capturing insurgents and criminals, rather than winning over the people that support them. Sheikly's change of mind -- his questioning that strategy -- reverses the cliché that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Perhaps a voluntary hostage program by members of the Malaki government and the US command might help change their strategic thinking, like Sheikhly's was changed. Such human shields in Sadr City and other Mehdi army strongholds might also encourage the Malaki government to honor the cease fire it struck with Sadr that presumably included Baghdad as well as Basra. It would have the side benefit of reducing the bloodshed -- the killing of three bodyguards in Sheikhly's case -- that often initiate the guided tours of Shiite militia strongholds; it would also raise the probability of the tourists getting home alive and whole.

2008-04-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Prof. Saul Friedlander on winning the Pulitzer Prize in the general non-fiction category for his masterful The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. The book is the second volume of a general history of the Holocaust that deals with its various motivations and executions (pun unfortunately inevitable). With the first volume that covers anticipations of the Final Solution during Hitler's first six years of power, it sums up a lifetime's research into and a quest for understanding the events that shaped his own life, Israel where he found refuge, world Jewry and contemporary thought.

Not Yet Time for War

2008-04-06T17:25:00.000-07:00

Last week brought a bit more than the usual tensions in dealings between Israel and its neighbors to the north, Lebanon, Hezbollah and Syria. On Wednesday, the inner Israel cabinet that deals with security announced for this coming week a large, unprecedented exercise to test military and civilian readiness for an attack on the homeland. Another announcement said gas masks would be distribute to Israel households in the near future for protection against possible chemical missile attacks. These announcement and the actions are partly taken in response to renewed threats by Hezbollah Secretary Nasrallah to avenge the killing, presumably by Israel operatives, of his military commandeer Imad Mughniyeh in February in Dasmascus. Since Israel PM Olmert has already warned that Israel will punish Syria and Lebanon as well as Hezbollah for any such act, the security cabinet seems to have deemed likely a new, rapidly escalating edition of the Second (2006) Lebanon war, triggered by a high profile Hezbollah action. Perhaps a suicide bombing during Passover or next month's celebrations of Israel's 60th anniversay. The estimate might have been raised by a report, later discredited, of an unusual mobilizations in the Syrian army, as if Syria knew from its client Hezbollah that the trigger was going to be pulled.

The Lebanese government was understandably nervous and somewhat dubious that Israel would await provocation to go after Hezbollah. It is still beset by the stalemate over choosing a new President and unable to curb Hezbollah. Prime Minister Siniora expressed his fear of an Israel attack to the UN, US and world opinion. The situation in Syria, once the troop movement report was discounted, appeared calmer to Israelis. Nevertheless, Israel signaled that the combined military-civilian exercise was no prelude to an attack on Syria or anyone else. By week's end the tensions had subsided and Syrian President Assad even allowed that peace with Israel was an imaginable strategy for his country's security. That was consistent with the reendorsement at the Arab League meeting just concluded in Damascus of the Saudi 2002 proposal of peace, once Israel withdrew to the 1967 boundaries. In the meantime, attention in Israel began shifting to another aspect of its complex relationship with Syria: the prospect of fuller disclosure later this month about the Israel Air Force's bombing of some installation in northern Syria, last September. The rumor is the Bush administration will publicize material provided by Israel that confirms the installation was technology purchased from North Korea for purposes of nuclear weapons development.

According to Zvi Barel in Haaretz, the Israel government feared Syria might miscalculate Israel's intentions and drag both sides into a war that neither wants at this time. However, since the relationship between the two states is based on deterrence, arguably any step one side takes to reduce its vulnerability can be read by the other side as aggressive and encourage the other side to preempt before the vulnerability is reduced. On the other hand, if no effort is made to reduce the vulnerability, the other side may also be tempted to attack. So absent MAD capabilities and the will to use them, deterrence is likely to be a fumbling, unstable relationship. No wonder the Second Lebanon War left Israeli strategists brooding about Israel having lost its deterrence strength and what it must do to regain it. But, Barel notes, the brooding might be a waste of time, since both Israel in 2006 and Syria in 1973 showed they can start wars without considering their costs. He suggests the real problem instead is the strategists do not see much benefit in peace with Syria in its present condition. Neutralizing Syria would diminish, but not eliminate the threats from Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran. They would prefer peace only after certain conditions have been met: repudiation of Hamas and Hezbollah, a break with Iran, an isolated Syria without any strategic capabilities. In other words, peace would be reward for Syria rather than an opportunity for Israel vis a vis the Middle East and for Syria vis a vis the West.

Eyeless in Gaza, Toothless in the West Bank

2008-04-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

In the wake of US Secretary of State Rice's visit last weekend, the Israel government has removed one of the fifty road blocks it promised to remove from the West Bank and announced it would build 1400 housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile the IDF launched several raids into Gaza that resulted in the killing of several alleged Palestinian gunmen. These actions need not indicate deception on Israel's part in dealing with Rice or the customary Israeli foot dragging on matters of peace. They point instead to the weakness of Israel Prime Minister Olmert and the power of the IDF and goverment offices to pursue own policies. As Le Monde correspondent Benjamin Barthe recently observed, while Olmert repeatedly expresses his desire for peace based on Israel's longer term interests, IDF focuses on local security in the immediate present. Consequently every army officer or non-com in charge of a checkpoint, village or region in the West Bank can execute his own foreign and security policies. These policies do not aim to build trust among the Palestinians or reduce their grievances toward Israel, but rather to suppress violence toward the occupation and Jewish settlers that are the source of most of the Palestinians' grievances. The restrictions and privations suffered by the Palestinians, symbolized in large by the security fence and in small by the checkpoints, raids, infiltrations, webs of informers, etc. are credited by the army with reducing the number of attacks on Israelis initiated from the West Bank and Jerusalem. Given their focus on the immediate, the army commanders do not see these measures as intensifying grievances to the point of triggering a third intifada. IDF's power to ignore the Prime Minister's words, to replace one removed checkpoint with another, to explain as necessary the endless disruption of Palestinian life, to dismiss as unimportant settler violence, has made the Prime Minister, with his talk of peace, a ridiculous figure for Palestinians.

The story is similar with regard to the powers of local councils, regional planning councils, the housing ministry and Olmert's coalition partners to force through expansion of settlements in the West Bank and Jewish neighborhoods in and around East Jerusalem. Such moves leave the government with casuistic explanations as to why they are not violations of the freeze on settlements. These outcomes strongly suggest that few, if any, people in or near power in Israel care enough about peace to seek a top-down implementation of Israel's declared policies, whatever the risk to their careers. This corruption of the political process is paralleled by a hypocrisy of refusing to acknowledge that Israel's actions are not consistent with the promises and commitments government has made.

Of course, a similar and more bleak appraisal can be made of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Mazen is even weaker than Olmert and more dependent on the goodwill of officials under his nominal control. Although some progress has been made to reduce the corruption, self-dealing and duplicities that were rampant in Arafat's era, the PA does not have the resources and personnel for effective, consistent social and security services. So to unite Palestinians with him for the cessation of terrorism and the ideological demobilization that Israel demands, Abu Mazen would need to get significant concessions from Israel. But Israel is loathe to do that.

The loathing accounts for some Israelis, including Defense Minister Barak, talking up the Syrian option, as soon as Secretary Rice left the area. Such talk is a standard recourse when there is pressure on Israel to deal constructively with the Palestinians. On this option, Israel would make peace with Syria first by returning to some form of Syrian authority most or all of the Golan Heights. Presumably, that would satisfy Syria's grievances, remove it as a military threat to Israel and greatly reduce any threats from Syrian clients Hezbollah and Hamas. The Palestinians would be isolated, with little choice but to settle the conflict on Israel's terms.

A New Gulf

2008-03-29T20:43:00.000-07:00

Despite the US Congress's predictable, one sided expressions of support for Israel, there is a widening gulf of understanding between Israelis and Americans regarding US policy in the Middle East. If a Democrat is elected president, especially if it is Obama, the next administration and Israel are likely to be at odds over whether Israel needs to take any steps toward settling its conflict with the Palestinians or cooperate with the United States in seeking some stability in the Middle East. This is because the present limbo is far more acceptable for many Israelis and their government than outcomes of steps toward accommodating Palestinian needs and Syrian interests. To them, the rockets falling on Sderot, the threats from Hezbollah, the building demographic problem and the risk of become evermore an apartheid state are minor compared to fears about a coherent Palestinian state, an invigorated Syria, and a region where nations compete for preeminence without assured outside intervention.

Without claiming that Israel through its American neo-con supporters shares some responsibility for the invasion of Iraq, one can easily argue that Israel welcomed and benefited from it and the subsequent occupation. The invasion removed Saddam, a feared, if over-rated enemy; the occupation has prevented the reconstitution of a state whose leadership would likely be hostile to Israel. More importantly, the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan, bracketing Iran dissuades any conventional, direct action against Israel, that Iranian ideologues might consider. On the other hand, the Bush administration's perceptions of Iranian meddling in the occupation strengthens its inclination to use force to thwart Iran's presumed ambitions, most notably the acquisition of nuclear weapons, a possibility that Israel dreads. No one wonder John McCain, with his open-ended commitment to keep US troops in Iraq and his declared hostility to Iran, is the favored presidential candidate in Israel and among its right wing supporters in the United States.

Signs of the potential gulf have already appeared at the rhetorical and symbolic levels. The Bush administration has finally heard that pushing Israel toward peace with the Palestinians can help restore the US's prestige in the Middle East and the world at large. So W. has declared his desire to see an Israeli-Palestinian peace by the end of his term and pushed Israel and the PLO government (nominally in control of only the West Bank) to restart formal negotiations. Each side has declared its desire to meet Bush's goal, the leaders and negotiating teams have met, but nothing has changed on the ground. The IDF continues in full the West Bank road blocks and travel restrictions, which fragment the territory and undermine the possibilities of its economic development. Israel continues building and settlement activities instead of freezing them as required by the roadmap. Gaza remains under Israel blockade and Hamas which controls it is excluded from participation in any negotiations. For its part, the Palestinian Authority (a.k.a. Fatah) remains unwilling or unable to suppress activities by terrorist groups in the West Bank. It has failed to soften Hamas's insistence on Israel withdrawal to the 1967 borders as a precondition for any change Hamas's rejection of Israel, and Hamas continues to reject Fatah's claim to lead the Palestinians. The headline, as Secretary of State Rice admitted a few weeks ago, is neither side has done enough to move the peace process forward. But the not-so secret story is nobody in the Bush administration, Rice possibly excepted, cares. She is now in the Israel and the West Bank trying to restart the negotiations for the third or fourth time. A fool's errand or photo op?

But the next administration will need to move to a more substantive level. In some way, the US will need to extricate itself from Iraq; the cost of its present engagement is unsustainable. One of the better scenarios for the pullback will involve a loose regional alliance of the Arab states and Israel partly to promote stability in Iraq and partly to blunt Iranian ambitions in the region. That can only happen if Israel begins serious efforts to settle with the Palestinians. At its meeting last week, the Arab league, perhaps recognizing the possibilities for such a scenario, again endorsed the Saudi proposal for peace with Israel on the basis of total Israel withdrawal to the 1967 borders and creation of a Palestinian state. The next administration might have little choice but to accept that, rather than the status quo, as the starting point for negotiations with the Arab states and an Israel government would do well to recognize such constraints on its American partner. Otherwise push could come to shove.

Purim and Narratives

2008-03-24T14:19:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, some Jews observed Purim with food, drink, costumes, gifts of food, charitable donations and hearing the Book of Esther. Purim commemorates events described in that book, principally the intervention of a Jewish royal concubine to foil a plot to exterminate Jews in the Persian Empire and the Jews in turn slaying the would be exterminators. The story is apocryphal, although it may have echoed incidents of inter-ethnic violence in the Persian Empire as well as steamy Persian romances. Despite this, the book's failure to mention God and the heroine's sexual conduct, the Rabbis of the first century C.E. readily included it in the Bible. Perhaps Purim by then was too popular a holiday for them to do otherwise.

Like other carnival days, Purim, as the story suggests,celebrates reversals of fortune: the lowly can pretend to be royal; the down-trodden rulers; the poor rich. It encourages conduct disparaged at other times, like public drinking and mocking the powerful. There is also a darker side to the holiday: a call to vendetta. The Rabbis highlighted that by associating with Purim the Torah's account of the Amalek tribe's attack on the Jews who followed Moses in the desert. The Torah passage enjoins Jews to remember the episode and annihilate descendants of Amalek. According to Midrash, Haman, the Persian plotter against the Jews, was one such descendant, and according to some commentators, every generation has an Amelek avatar. In short, Purim was a round in a trans-historical vendetta.

The Likud and Religious Zionist versions of the Israel national narrative are anchored in such bedrock. It explains the evil of the enemies who beset Israel and Israel's obligation to fight back, without reliance on supernatural help or negotiations. So it was not unexpected to hear vendetta thinking in the eulogy for the eight Jerusalem yeshiva students gunned down by a Palestinian at the beginning of the Hebrew month Adar, two weeks before Purim. The head of the yeshiva, who delivered the eulogy, first characterized the killings as a continuation of the 1929 massacre of religious Jews in Hebron by local Arabs. He then labeled the killer and his cohorts as Amalek and castigated the Israel government for trying to negotiate with such people on the basis of territorial division. Present political exigencies and metaphysical, eternal struggles were seamlessly fused in his speech, at least for the well versed in his audience.

Other narratives in Israel have diluted this vendetta thinking by treating Jewish achievements and tragedies as history rather than sacred struggles, dismissing Amalek along with most of the Bible as a dead letter and treating Purim as pure carnival. Some folks, troubled by the vengeful message of the holiday, have muted its celebration or ignored it altogether. The philosopher and educator Ernst Simon took another approach to its celebration. He was an observant Jew, but along with Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, he advocated a bi-national state for Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Simon reportedly would spend the usual day of Purim (Adar 14) in Jerusalem, where people celebrate on the following day (Adar 15). Then as night and the start of celebrations in Jerusalem approached, he left for Tel Aviv, where the celebration was ending.

Resurrection

2008-03-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

The coincidence of (Catholic & Protestant) Easter and the celebration of Purim in Jerusalem (a day later than elsewhere) seems an ironically appropriate day to resurrect this blog. Since we last posted a scant 18 months ago, a few changes have occurred in Israel and among the Palestinians. Two thirds of the spectaculary unsuccessful triumvirate (Olmert, Peretz, Halutz) that led Israel into the Lebanon war are gone, the President of Israel, accused of rape, resigned but plea bargained out of jail time. A US instigated Fatah-led coup against the Palestinians' Hamas government failed. leaving Hamas in control of Gaza, and Fatah in control of the West Bank. Efforts at their reconciliation have gone nowhere. For the last year, Hamas and other militants have been firing home made rockets from Gaza at Israeli southern cities and settlements, while Israel has responded with targeted killings, incursions resulting in broader killings and the blockade of Gaza. Or is it the other way around? Gaza has become arguably the world's largest prison and a humanitarian disaster, an outcome which just perpetuates Hamas's rejection of Israel and Israel's retaliation.

George Bush, building upon the failures in Iraq, New Orleans, the US economy, etc., visited the area a few months ago, called upon Palestinians and Israel to make peace by the end of this year and pledged US help for that end. (A day late and a few billion dollars short?) That touched off the charade of the powerless Israel PM Olmert and the powerless PA President Abu Abbas meeting -- to the exclusion of Hamas -- to discuss the conditions for discussing the conditions for peace, only to emerge from their meetings with different accounts of what was discussed. Bush's pledge explains US Vice-President Dick Cheney's presence in Jerusalem today. It was Purim; he was masquerading as a peace-maker.

2006-09-12T20:23:00.000-07:00

Daniel Levy at TPM Cafe serves up a good summary of the latest small steps toward renewed negotiation in the Israel-Palestinian-Arab conflict. These include the agreement of Hamas and Fatah to form a unity PA government, an IDF tribunal ordering the release of 21 imprisoned Hamas parliamentarians and US Secretary of State Rice's praise of Syria for foiling an attack on the US embassy in Damascus. Secretary Rice's remarks indicate the continuing American interest of wooing Syria away from its alliance with Iran. As this blog noted before, Syria is warming to the idea and has signaled interest in moving toward negotiations with Israel.

There are two general points worth making about these developments. First, wars between Israel and its neighbors that end inconclusively are followed by brief flurries of peace-making talk and efforts. This is because the war proved the situation before the wasr was very explosive but did little to change it. The participants or bystanders therefore need to seek some diplomatic means to prevent or mitigate another imminent war. Second, any initiatives for peace by Palestinans or Arabs would be very inopportune for Israel at this time. Such moves could require Israel's government to express what territories it would give and what risks it would take for peace. With the recent war having shaken Israel's self-confidence and created an ongoing political crisis, it is impossible for the government or public to reach an agreement on these points.

2006-09-11T22:13:00.000-07:00

A report in Haaretz quotes an IDF rocket artillery officer on Israel's use of cluster bombs in the war with Hezbollah: "We carpeted entire villages with cluster bombs. What we did was crazy and monsterous." The officer also cited his commander as saying that during the war IDF shot over 1800 multiple rockets containing 1.2 million cluster bombs. IDF used these weapons, despite their being highly inaccurate. They are frequently classified as non-discriminating weapons whose use is outlawed in civilian areas. Perhaps as many as 40%, of the shells failed to explode and consequently became anti-personnel mines that litter southern Lebanon. Since the end of the war, twelve Lebanese civilians have been killed when they stepped on or handled one.

Israel's cluster bombs include American-made ones, for which Israel requested expedited delivery during the war. The US Department of State announced a week ago that it was investigating Israel's use of such bombs during the war. Although IDF spokespeople maintain that the bombs are acceptable under international law, a secret agreement with the United States restricts Israel's use of them.

Gunners in the armor corps have reported that IDF also fired phosphorous shells, which, according to many experts, are outlawed by international treaties

Crawling toward the Starting Line

2006-09-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

Freud's notion of the narcissism of small differences affects politics and ideology. Ideologically differentiated groups within the same camp often need to make concessions to one another in order to create a common front. They often consider their concessions enormously painful. Yet outside observers often see these changes as small and inconsequential. Hamas leaders of late are struggling to make such concessions to Fatah, but no one else seems to care.

Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazzan), Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman, and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas agreed today to form a unity government. This step implies indirect recognition of Israel by Hamas and its willingness for the PA to participate in a "peace process," guided by a "roadmap." That, however, threatens the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and their supporters. Any approximation of peace between the Palestinians and Israel would involve Israel's removal of the "illegal" settlements and some "legal" settlements as well -- more extensively than would Olmert's abandoned program of consolidation. Any approximation of peace would also diminish the settlers' status in the West Bank, where they are a law unto themselves, or, as Israel likes to say regarding others places, "a state within a state."

The reasons for Hamas's amenability are evident: a) the failure of the Hamas government to rescind the sanctions from western countries and aid donors; b) insufficient replacement aid from Iran and other Muslim sources; b) the economic collapse and virtual cessation of government services as consequences of the sanctions; d) the rapid loss of support for Hamas among the Palestinians; e) Israel's continued punishment of Gaza and Hamas's inability to respond. Hamas leaders also learned how easily the world (including this blog) coud forgot the Palestinians' plight while the war between Israel and Hezbollah raged. Finally, it is possible that Israel's targeted killing of mid level Hamas militants has diminished internal opposition to a more pragmatic approach to Israel. Quite expectedly, Israel offered no encouragement for this ministep by Hamas. Foreign Minister Tsippi Livni decried it as insufficient . She added that what mattered was whether the proposed unity government met the West's three conditions for restoring aid. The conditions are recognizing Israel, renouncing terror and abiding by previous Palestinian Authority agreements with Israel.

Meanwhile other bases for dealing with the Palestinians are being publicly advocated in Israel. MK Effi Eitam (National Religious Party - National Union) raised a storm of outrage on Sunday when he called for West Bank Palestinians to be transferred and for Palestinian Israelis to be ejected from politics. Eitam is a candidate for Minister of Defense should a right wing government under the leadership of Netanyahu come to power. Speaking at a memorial service for a soldier killed in Lebanon, he said "We will have to expel the great majority of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria. It's impossible with all those Arabs, and it's impossible to give up the territory." In regard to the Israeli Palestinians, he added, "We will have to take another decision, and that is to sweep the Israeli Arabs from the political system. Here, too, it's clear and simple. We've raised a fifth column, a league of traitors of the first rank. Therefore, we cannot continue to enable so large and so hostile a presence within the political system of Israel." Now that makes fascism's difference quite clear.

Update on Speaking Truth to Power

2006-09-10T22:26:00.000-07:00

In the entry below, "Speaking Truth to Power," I wished that Israel emulated the Biblical precept of equal application and enforcement of the law for people under its control. A report to be issued today by Yesh Din, an Israel human rights group, tells me to continue wishing. The West Bank is still very much the Wild West Bank. According to the report, a total of 90 percent of the complaints filed by Palestinians in the West Bank against Israeli citizens for violent attacks have been closed without charges being filed. However, at least one (and there are more) group in Israel, namely Yesh Din, has emulated the prophet Nathan in speaking truth to power. And in view of the continual deterioration of the Palestinian economy, the story that Nathan told David can be applied literally to the situation in the West Bank.

Speaking Truth to Power

2006-09-06T22:02:00.000-07:00

The Bible, by which out of habit I mean the Old Testament, is a saga or family history, full of difficult births and sibling rivalries. It has obvious importance for the current territorial and political conflicts among Israel and the Palestinians. Israelis and Jews base their claims to the Land of Israel on biblical promises and history. On the other hand, for many Christians and Muslims these claims are moot, because they regard their own religions and books as supersessions of the Old Testament and its god. This adds a theological dimension to the Jewish fear of being expendable or sacrificial. By the way this fear has reappeared in the discourse over the Iran crisis. Some Jewish commentators believe that the United States and Europe will eventually do a deal with Iran at Israel's expense and endangerment. Put another way, most Christians and virtually all Muslems will have no religious objections to the disappearnace of Israel. That is one reason that Israel has so firmly embraced the Christian fundamentalists who think that Israel is a necessary part of a world ordered according to divine inspiration. Never mind that some of them also believe that the return of the Jews to Israel is a prelude to an End Time that would include their conversion or annihilation. The sense of the fragility of the Biblical promise of land might also explain why some Jews so stubbornly insist on settling the entire land, even if Palestinian and other Arab responses to that can make Israel's existence more precarious.

It is unfortunate, perhaps devastating, for Jews that the reenactment of settling the land and cultic practices associated with it have nearly excluded reenactments of any other Biblical messages that have counterparts elsewhere in the universal library. I refer, for example, to the insistence of Hebrew prophets on social welfare and justice. There is also the precept about the same laws and judicial diligence applying to both the Jews and the "strangers" in their midst. Such a standard has been sadly lacking over decades of Israel's dealing with its own Palestinian minority, with the Palestinians in the territories and even with guest workers.

Another Biblical episode is particularly relevant now as the penitential season in the Jewish calendar approaches and Israel also debates what commissions of inquiry could adequately investigate the conduct of the latest war. The story (Samuel 2, 12:1-13) encapsulates the idea of speaking truth to power. The prophet Nathan visits King David after David had engineered the death of his soldier Uriah in order to take Uriah's widow Bathsheva as his wife. Nathan told David about two men living in the city. One was rich and had many sheep. The other was poor and had only a small ewe lamb to provide milk, but the man loved that lamb and raised it as one of the family. A traveler visited the rich man, but the rich man did not kill one of his own flock for the welcoming feast. Instead he stole the poor man's lamb, slaughtered and served it to his guest.

And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, "As the Lord lives, the man that did this thing deserves to die. He shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity." And Nathan said to David, "You are the man."

Nathan then explained that God had saved David from being killed by the previous king. God had given David that king's wives and possessions. Nevertheless, David had arranged the death of Uriah so he could take Uriah's only wife Bathsheva. (Note women = chattel was a sign of the times.) David most remarkably for a political and war leader of that period acknowledged his sin.

2006-09-05T22:48:00.000-07:00

Governor Mitt Romney has ordered Massachusetts state agencies to withhold all support for former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami's appearance at Harvard University this coming Sunday. Romney's order speaks more to his ambitions to run on the Republican ticket for president in 2008 than to his understanding of Iranian politics. He depends, correctly, on most Americans having an unnuanced and negative image of Iran. So any rebuff of an Iranian past or present official will ingratiate him with them. To wrap himself more firmly in the flag, Romney condemned Harvard's invitation to Khatami as "a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of extremists.”

Whether on purpose or through ignorance this view focuses on Khatami as a symbol of a hated Iran than on him as a figure of the recent past in a complex political landscape. As President of Iran from 1997 - 2005, he tried to introduce reforms that would broaden freedom of expression and asssociation in Iran. Inspired by German sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas's work on the public sphere, Khatami worked to strengthen public debate and civic organizations as counter weights to the dictates of the mullarchy and the state institutions. The conservative-controlled Iranian parliament blocked his efforts, and Khatami seemed to lack the resolve to rally the Iranians against it. He might best be characterized as a well-intentioned loser.

However, his critics in the US, like Romney, point to acts that happened on his watch and statements by him that indicate his support for destabilizing the Middle East. These includes arms shipments to Hezbullah and questions about Israel's right to exist. But the critics' real worry is that the visit to Harvard and other places in the US can give the American publlic a view of Iran other than the one that looks ready to be bombed. The debate on the propriety of the Khatami visit looks like a mirror image of the 2001-2002 controversy in Germany over Habermas's visit to Iran at the invitation of the Center for Dialogue Between Civilizations, organized by Khatami. Habermas's visit was criticized as lending credibility to Iranian claims to being a democracy at a time when Iranian security agencies were cracking down on liberals and intellectuals.

2006-09-03T18:40:00.000-07:00

The odds worsened today for the political survival of Israel PM Ehud Olmert. State comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss called for a criminal investigation of Olmert over suspicions regarding political appointments by Olment, when he was Minister for Industry, Trade and Employment. Specifically, the comptroller submitted a report to the State's Attorney that alleges that Olmert used improper processes to give members of his political party jobs for which they were unqualified. These are essentially the same type of charges for which Tsahi Hanegbi, the former Minister for the Environment now awaits trial. Leadership in Israel is rather baleful these days, with the figurehead President an alleged rapist, the Prime Minister allegedly corrupt, the Chief of Staff an alleged war criminal and the Defense Minister more than allegedly incompetent. It's enough to drive honest folks into the street to demand "off with their heads." In another sign of the grim political situation, Speaker of the Knesset and member of Olmert's party Dalia Itzik asked the right wing parties and the small Zionist leftwing Meretz to join the government in forming an emergency national coalition government. Predictably, all refused. They prefer to the see the government collapse on its own rather than be associated with it. This strategy will better serve them in the next elections, which Likud officials believe could come as early as next spring.

Iran and Israel

2006-09-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

Few people outside of Israel realize how much Iranian President Ahmadinejad's remarks over the past year have dismayed Israelis. It makes little difference to them whether his mentions of eradicating Israel are in the subjunctive -- ah, that Israel were eradicated -- (as Prof. Juan Cole parses them) or in the imperative. For Israelis putting Israel and its eradication in the same sentence, together with Iran's nuclear ambitions are enough to raise the spectre of the Holocaust. To be sure, in Israel that spectre is never far away. In Israel, someone wisely put it, "the Holocaust is still memory, not history." This is one reason why the response to the provocation by Hezbollah, which most Israelis see as a proxy for Iran, was so severe and so broadly supported. Now after the conduct of the war further shook Israel self-confidence, some Israelis have have called for a strategic reassessment: Israel must regard Iran as its foremost enemy. In addition, the neoconservative term "Islamic-fascist" has entered Israel discourse. Except there it has the more pointed meaning of "Islamic Jew-killer."

The calls for new strategies do not necessarily demand greater Israel aggressiveness. Veteran military writer Zev Schiff thinks a regional balance of power coud emerge if Syria were split off from Iran. That could be achieved through a Syrian-Israel deal based on land (the Golan Heights) for recognition and peace (of Israel). He also raises the need to reach an enforceable peace with the Palestinians in order to defuse the ideological conflict between Israel and the Arab world. On the other hand, Schiff recognizes that US and Israel interests are not identical. He urges that Israel make clear to the US the "red lines" regarding its security that cannot be violated in a US or UN deal with Iran.

It is a good idea for Israel to rethink its needs and priorities in dealing with its neighbors. However, Schiff and others who work this vein have several shortcomings. Foremost is their undifferentiated image of Iran. They have no insight into the structural role that Ahmadinejad plays as an individual and the nuclear ambition plays as a value in the politics of Iran. Rather they seem driven by the false idea that the Europeans in the 1930s did not take Hitler seriously. (They did, but for other reasons could not get their act together to stop his aggression.) But it would be helpful to know, as do Iran analysts Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr, that Ahmadinejad is a hardline conservative, whose populism helps prop up a mullarchy and state institutions. These have been losing touch with the Iranian lower clergy, middle class and some of the working class. Similarly, the nuclear ambition is a military, nationalistic value. Such values were invoked in the past when the state apparatus could not deliver on its economic and social promises to the Iranians. These distinctions do not imply that Iranians will reject Ahmadinejad's apparent effort to turn Iran into the regional power, but they do qualify his room for maneuver. For that reason, the threat of sanctions or even of Iran's isolation by the rest of the world can be potent weapons.

On a bleaker note, those who want Israel to play "balance of power" at the regional level should ask whether the pan-Islam movements have superseded the traditional games of states. To be sure, how the Islamic revival shapes institutions and collective choices is being determined within each state, sometimes in struggle with countervailing instutitions and interests. Yet, there is the strong possibility that the revival can set priorities for states that differ from the traditional national interests of territory, security and wealth. Put less abstractly, the Alawi "heretics" who rule Syria may find Muslim objections blocking their path to a deal with Israel.

One more point: The recent support of Hizbullah in the Arab and Muslem worlds suggest that most observers overrate the enmity between Sunni and Shia, at least during the current Islamic revival. On the other hand, they also tend to ignore the ethnic differences of Arabs and Persians. In the mid term future these might thwart Iran's pretensions to dominate the region. A scholar I know studies long term, territorial conflicts, the average of which is three hundred to four hundred years. I once asked him what was the longest in his database. He replied immediately, with a smile: "Over the Shatt al-Arab; about 3500 years."
Iran Israel Ahmadinejad nuclear weapons

Will the Cease Fire Hold? Syria and Iran

2006-09-01T20:40:00.000-07:00

Syrian and Iranian compliance with the arms embargo under Resolution 1701 are vital for sustaining the cease fire. Syria’s President Bashir Asad may be coming around to the idea that his country’s compliance could win it some points (or carrots). Last week he said the deployment of UNIFIL troops along the Lebanese-Syrian border to enforce the embargo would be a hostile act. Shortly thereafter, the Itallian Foreign Minister said the embargo would be enforced by some means. Today, after Asad met with UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, his government said he had promised to stop any shipments across the border. Furthermore, Syria would be prepared to give full diplomatic recognition to Lebanon. That move would reverse Syria’s long time insistence that, at least in theory, Lebanon is part of Syria, and thereby void any justification of its arming Hizbullah as, say, an auxiliary to its own military forces.

Some Lebanese and Israel were unimpressed. Today, Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druse Party and an outspoken opponent of Syria, claimed that last Saturday night (August 26) Syria shipped arms to Hizbullah with the connivance of Lebanese customs officials. The Israel Defense Ministry said that yesterday it showed Annan proof of continuing Syrian shipments. The government official added that based on Syria’s recent behavior, Asad’s promise is not credible. Instead UNIFIL should patrol the border. Nevertheless, they demanded that Syria use its influence on Hizbullah and Hamas to expedite the release of the captured Israeli soldiers. The Israel government is under tremendous pressures from its public to get the soldiers back. Syrian help in that matter could let the government take more of a wait-and-see attitude regarding Syrian compliance on the arms embargo.

At this time, however, Syria’s public commitment is the best that the other interested parties to the cease fire have. The Lebanese government has stated that it will not allow UNIFIL to deploy along the Syrian border.

Annan this Saturday (September 2) will be in Tehran and intends to bring up the arms embargo with Iranian officials. Iran’s current position is that it gives Hizbullah political, economic and moral support, but no arms. That position of course did not stop Hizbulah's using Iranian made weapons in the recent war. Iran obviously has a larger issue to haggle over with Annan and the UN Security Council, namely its refusal to stop its uranium enrichment program and the possibility of sanctions. So it might publicly commit to the arms embargo to gain some negotiating capital. It only needs to promise to stop what it says it does not do.

Drama and Narrative

2006-09-01T00:25:00.000-07:00

A colleague complains how little people and professors understand the dramatics of politics, especially world politics. He insists that leaders are frequently trying to enact their favorite stories in imaginative spaces they try to recreate in reality. The Bard knew something when he had Jacques declaim “All the world’s a stage…” And perhaps our only comfort when tyros and tyrants seize that stage is the knowledge they too will sink into me oblivion, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

Given the impulse of leaders and their followers to pose heroically and preen, I feel that realist theories of international relations miss a lot of what goes on the world’s stage, at least at the descriptive level. I would like to believe that groups of people combine into states to better compete against one another for scarce resources, including security, and tell themselves stories about past heroes and future idylls only to overcome their present fears. If that were the case, we folks might eventually create enough wealth and allocate it wisely enough to satisfy everyone. That of course was the dream of Freud, who wanted to get rid of surplus repression, and Marx, who wanted to get rid of surplus. But I can hear my son saying “boring” to such a reality and he is only eight. And even if the hero stories that motivate many people these days are a response economic despair and social dislocation, they rapidly acquire lives of their own. The attract those for whom the mundane or absurdity of life it too great a challenge.

A remarkable set of apocalyptic myths and imagined reenactments haunts today's Middle East. Gilles Kepel observes that the Sunni jihadists, from Bin Laden and Zawahiri down, imagine they are recreating the early days of Islam, when Muhammad took on the infidels to establish his faith. The Shiites, Nir Rosen explains, imagine they are experiencing and resisting the same injustice, personified in Yazid,that killed their hero Hussain. Today's Yazid is the United States and Israel. Some Shiites -- perhaps, including Iran's Ahmadinejad -- believe the struggle with this Yazid can hasten the advent of the Mahdi or Messiah. The Jewish settlers on the West Bank believe they are redeeming the patrimony of Abraham; some connect their struggles with the “birth pangs” of a Jewish Messiah. Jews throughout Israel believe they are reexperiencing the threat of Holocaust, but are determined it will come out different this time. The United States has a president who wants to be both a Christian soldier and Winston Churchill fighting an "Islamic fascism." Maybe he expects the Rapture to attend victory.

In such a world of Manichean dramas, where the sons of light and dark struggle, good writers are terribly needed. They have the courage to stare at other people and recall that those who puff themselves up to cosmic proportions also shrink and shuffle off the stage sans everything. Their view is not cynical, but perhaps the contrary: a down-to-earth celebration of the shades, shapes, flavors and follies of humanity, devoid of metaphysics. After the dramas are played, they can write the narratives. The death this week of Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz reminds us how much the Middle East needs writers of his taste and courage. He looked long at the unraveling tapestry of Egyptian life and dared hope that education and science could repair it. The Islamists hated him for that.

So I am distressed at the ambivalence of A.B. Yehoshua, one of Israel’s best writers, about the appropriate narrative for the Israel-Hizbullah war. Soon after the beginning, he, Amos Oz and David Grossman, like many in the Israel left detected the transcendentally evil Iran behind Hizbullah’s provocation. In a message of support for the war, they feared a new Holocaust was in the making, proclaimed the war's just cause and voiced only minor concern about IDF’s disproportionate force. Ten days later, when the UN finally moved toward a cease fire, Yehoshua, Oz and Grossman about faced; they demanded that the government accept the proposed cease fire, instead of expanding ground operations. The government of course does not listen to writers. It expanded operations; tragically,Grossman’s own son was killed in that last phase of the war. Early this week, however, Yehoshua reversed himself again. He told a reporter that indeed the war was good and successful. Like many Israelis, he was surprised by Nasrallah’s confession of having miscalculated the size of the Israeli response. They took Nasrallah'sregret for this as a sign that Israel had reestablished, rather than diminished its deterrent power. Alas, this reading lacks the needed nuance that Nasrallah's statements warrant.

But it is unclear whether Yehoshua still thinks Israel was engaged in conflict against a transcendent evil. If he is, it would be a disappointing sign that the decades of conflict experienced have corroded his sensibilities. Yehoshua is typically social and historical, rarely metaphysical. His novels excavate the ordinary to discover below the extraordinary, macabre, sometimes even the Gothic, Middle Eastern style. He published, decades ago, a collection of essays that discusses Israel's mission as trying to build a floor over the abyss of the past, and called it For the Sake of Normalcy.

So is he now declaring a victory over evil or putting things into a more mundane perspective? Perhaps his latest narrative for the war is a strategic choice: “If we say we won and meanwhile get some diplomatic gains, there is no need to prove our military superiority in a second round. If we say we won, despite all the mistakes our leaders and generals made, the government will not fall and the extreme right will not come to power. Then maybe we can go back to trying to be normal.”

Will the Cease Fire Hold? The US Role

2006-08-30T20:04:00.000-07:00

The United States, as an editorial in Lebanon’s Daily Star infers, has little, if any concern for the welfare of the Lebanese. It permitted Israel to pursue its devastation of Lebanon at will and only bowed to international pressure for a cease-fire, when it was clear that continuing the war would enhance Hizbullah stature in the Middle East. Moreover, the US condones Israel’s continued sea and air blockade of Lebanon and other violations of the cease-fire. So no one in the Middle East believes the US is committed to the cease-fire any longer than it serves its tactical interests.

These interests are to block the expansion of Iranian influence and Hizbollah power in Lebanon. Their realization would give the US some traction in its struggles with pan-Islamists and Iran. However in pursuing them too aggressively, the US can damage the UNIFIL mission. It wants UNIFIL’s primary goals to be disarming Hizbullah and blocking arms shipments to it across the Syrian border. These are not specified goals for UNIFIL, under Resolution 1701. The Israelis excepted, nobody else wants to discuss them explicitly now. First, UNIFIL needs to deploy in strength and establish good working relations with the Lebanese government and army. But the Bush administration, desperate for a foreign policy achievement before the November elections, may not have the patience for that. It might loudly call for aggressive action by UNIFIL and submit a resolution to the UN Security Council saying so. Such a resolution would go nowhere, but the noise could help energize Bush’s anti-UN base to get out the vote. Unfortunately, it would also delay, possibly doom UNIFIL’s expanding its mission and its collaboration with the Lebanese government.

On the other hand, there are reasons why Bush and friends might bite their tongues. First, the neoconservatives around Bush know that Israel is not yet ready for a second round in Lebanon, much less for the war with Syria and Iran to which they hope the second round will lead. The neoconservatives also prefer to wait some months to see if Israel’s Olmert government falls, and a right-wing coalition headed by Netanyahu comes to power. That would make Israel leadership a more willing partner to their dreams. Second, the US State Department has begun some conversations with Syria to see what it wants to split from Iran. So with regard to this, rhetorical gestures or actions that force Syria to take a public stand would be counter productive. Third, the US’s undermining UNIFIL will upset Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states which see UNIFIL as protecting Lebanon against Israel. The US does need some support from these states for its political and possible military struggle against Iran.

On balance, the Bush administration has virtually no positve commitment to the cease-fire. I doubt that anyone in it particularly cares that if the cease fire breaks down and a second round ensues, Lebanon will be totally devastated and Israel will suffer damage. Indeed for the neonconservative, the cease fire is just a pause in a war they cast in theological terms as much as their enemy does. The Bush administration will give the cease-fire nominal support only because its few Arab friends in the region support it and Israel for now tolerates it. It will not, however, use its influence to have Israel observe the cease-fire, when Israel wants to violate it.
Lebanon Hizbullah Israel Middle East UNIFIL Iran

2006-08-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

Lebanes Prime Minister Fouad Siniora rejected calls for the resignation of his government. In a move to outbid Hizbullah and Iran, he announced a goverment program that will give $33,000 apiece to families whose home Israel destroyed. (The offer is 2.75 times the $12,ooo Hizbullah is handing out.) Up to 50,000 homes might be included. In solidarity with the moderate Arab states that will help the reconstruction, he said Lebanon would be the last, not the next, Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel. If Israel wants peace, it should consider the terms in the 2002 Saudi peace initiative.

Michael Young, an editor of Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper, writes that Siniora needs to move fast on his promises to placate those many Lebanese who would like to toss out the corrupt political class as part of the reconstruction. He explains that Hizbullah supports resignation not so much to enhance its own political power but because resignation would produce a political deadlock. That would delay demands on Hizbullah to disarm as part of its political integration into Lebanon.

Veteran Middle East commentator Rami Khouri, also in the Daily Star, contends that Hizbullah has little choice now, but to devote its enegies entirely to the polital realm. It must therefore clarify its ties to Syria and Iran, shelve its pan--Islamist pretensions and get down to the seriousness of governance. Otherwise, it can find itself like its pan-Islamist double Hamas, which has brought the Palestinian cause to an apparent deadend.

Lebanon Hizbullah

Studies in Chaos Theory

2006-08-29T20:38:00.000-07:00

Nir Rosen's book In the Belly of the Green Bird is a gripping and gritty account of the American occupaiton of Iraq, from mostly an Iraqi perspective. Rosen, who speaks Iraqi-accented Arabic, worked in Iraq as a free-lance journalist from April, 2003, soon after the invasion, to early 2005. He observed and mixed with Iraqis, interviewed insurgents as well as accompanying US army units on raids, heard and collected sermons at the major mosques in Iraq. His main tale is about how the occupation forces blew it, time after time, locale after locale. They turned the population's initial ambivalence into extreme hostility; they enabled various groups to plunge into violent, escalating conflict over the succession to power. The reasons were the same that Thomas Ricks finds in his closer study of the US operations themselves Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq: A confusion of goals, lack of security in the months following the invasion, lack of interest in the Iraqis and their welfare, cultural and linguistic ignorance, heavy handed, misinformed and frightened responses to agitation.

By the time Rosen left Iraq in 2005, nearly every Iraqi was certain that the US was encouraging violence to "divide and rule" and perpetuate its stay in Iraq. Noam Chomsky & Gilbert Achcar in their forthcoming Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy make the same argument on the basis of a fine grained looked at various moves by US officials, like Paul Bremer, that played off one Iraqi faction against another in the allocation of power.

Rosen's and the other books have takeaways that certainly belie the neo-conservatives' dream of the New Middle East and the competence of their agents.

A conventional army, staffed by uneducated kids and commanded by callous officers, is not the best instrument for the policing and administration that a successful "liberation" requires. On the other, as seen in the recent Israel war against Hezbollah, the use of the conventional army for policing blunts its fighting skills.
Almost all the Arab Iraqis Rosen met were virulently anti-Semitc and anti-Israel. They understood and demonstrated against the occupation as part of a Zionist or Jewish plot to dominate the world.
The insurgencies in Iraq have deep religious inspiration. Most insurgents see themselves in a dramatic struggle of the faithful against injustice and evil.

The Iraqi Shiites saw their struggle against the occupation as a recreation of the foundational story of Shiism -- the fight and martyrdom of Hussain against the wicked Yazid. This was the same story in which the Ayatollah Khomenei in the late 1970s, cast the Iranian people in its struggle against the Shah.
Some Iraqi Sunni insurgents and the foreign jihadists see themselves recreating the struggle of Muhammed and his companions against the infidels and Jewish tribes.

Rosen makes brilliant use of mosque sermons that he and his friends recorded as indicators of political trends among the Iraqis. Collection and analysis of sermons was an idea that some political and information scientists repeated proposed to the US Defense Department, only to be rejected each time.

Iraq

Crise du Jour

2006-08-28T18:27:00.000-07:00

Israel PM Ehud Olmert rejected calls for a state or government level commission to investigate the decision making and handling of Israel's war with Lebanon. Instead he has appointed a committee of three elderly, moderately distinguished figures to investigate the government's conduct. A similar committee will investigate the army's conduct. The second committee will probably be the one previously appointed by Defense Minister Amir Peretz. The committees will be unable to subpoena, immunize witnesses or make binding recommendations, i.e., fire anyone. Each will be under the authority of Olmert and Peretz, respectively. The Israel public and political figures on both the right and left in Israel are already screaming whitewash. The Hebrew translation of "cover your ass" has become so widespread that an abbreviation for it is already in the Israel press. The noises from the right are particularly ominous with religious nationalist leaders Effie Eitam and Zevulon Orlev talking about the army having "been stabbed in the back" and "held back from victory."

Support for the right is growing. If elections were held today, they would produce a right wing coalition with enough strength that could form a ruling coalition with the purchased additon of the religious Shas party. It would have Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister and most probably Eitam as Defense Minister. This prospect might be the only glue holding the current coalition together, since differences over policies are widening between Labor and other coalition members. Several Labor members have rejected Kadima's proposal to cut $500 million from the social, education and development budgets to help pay for the war. More Labor party members also reject Kadima's proposal of increasing the defense budget by $7 billion per year, over the next four years, to replace, add and develop weapons. Critics of the proposal say the yearly increase, about 5% of Israel's current GDP, would seriously dent economic growth in Israel. Also, the request is like the army saying "We didn't spend wisely what you already gave us; so give us more." Finally, the Labor minister of education has angered coalition member Shas with her refusal to give additional funding to that party's chain of private kindergartens. Olmert and her own party will probably overrule her, since Shas bolting the coalition would bring down the government.

In past periods of government failure, folllowing the 1973 and 1982 wars respectively, Israel eventually benefitted from the skilled leadership of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. Rabin is gone, Peres is too old and nobody of their stature is on the scene. Most Israelis know this. Their current joke about the government is the army captain who tells his battle weary soldiers: "I have good news and bad news. The good news is each of you will be getting new underwear. The bad news is each of you will get it by exchanging yours with someone else's."

Meanwhile the government of Lebanon might also be at risk. Al-Jazeera reports that Michael Auon, a Christian parliamentarian and a contender for president of Lebanon in next year's election, has called for the resignation of the government. Auon, a political ally of Hezbollah, is perhaps expressing what Hezbollah would like to say, but cannot, since it is a member of the government. Hezbollah's popularity has defintely risen among the Shi'a and even among the Sunni in Lebanon, because of its leading role in rebuilidng the south and Beirut. Leader Hasan Nasrallah may therefore think the moment is ripe to use elections to gain the leading role in Lebanon.

The thought of a Lebanon led by Nasrallah facing an Israel led by Netanyahu is enough to make a UNIFIL peacekeeper duck.

Middle East Israel Lebanon Olmert Nasrallah

2006-08-28T10:04:00.000-07:00

Akiva Eldar in Haaretz argues that the replacement of Israel's present government by a right-wing coalition -- the apparent demand of the growing protest movement -- would not answer Israel's security problems. A right-coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu would surely please the American neo-conservatives around Bush. But, as Eldar observes, that is the problem. The neo-conservatives are the folks that gave the US the debacle in Iraq. As argued here, they are ideologues, for whom the pronouncement "democracy," whether ersatz or genuine, chosen or imposed, is the magical solution to everything. In Eldar's opinion, to meet the challenge of Iranian-led, pan-Islamic radicallism, Israel will need to have a pragmatically based alliance with moderate Arab states. His article cites a revelatory piece by former NSC Mideast expert Flynt Leverett in the The American Prospect. It nicely illustrates the interminable folly of Bush and his neo-conservative advisors. One vignette:

In White House meetings, I heard President Bush say confidently that democratization would even facilitate a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by shaping a Palestinian leadership more focused on internal governance (i.e., providing services such as collecting garbage) and less “hung up” on final-status issues like territory, settlements, and Jerusalem.

neoconservatives Netanyahu Bush

Nasrallah Reads Game Theory

2006-08-27T10:05:00.000-07:00

Hassan Nasrallah often says that Hezbollah is well read in Israel and military lore. Apparently, his military readings have included Nobel laureate Tom Schelling or other game theorists on the strategic logics of conflict. Today, in an interview on Lebanese television, he said that Hezbollah was not preparing for a second round and he saw Israel why not preparing for a second round, but instead rebuilding the north. These remarks were intended as much for Israeli officials as well as the Lebanese. Nasrallah was following the guidelines for getting to a cooperative outcome in a non-zero sum game: Announce your intention to cooperate and your perception that the second player will cooperate. That way, the second player will not think you will defect because you think he will defect. This explicit move seems intended to reduce uncertainty, rather than deceive Israel, because Nasrallah also acknowledged that he had miscalculated the Israel repsonse to the capture of the IDF soldiers. A wise Israeli government would signal it had gotten the message. Unfortunately, Israelis have a long history of either demonizing the Arab, considering them irrational creatures or, at best, condescending to them. Nashrallah himself took particular offense at Israel hero Moshe Dayan's infamous remark that "I know that Arabs don't read." He emphasized in his autobiographical notes how much he read as child.

Nasrallah's strategic rationality raises questions about the meaning of rationality with regard to religiously motivated terrorism. We tend to call jihadists fanatics and irrational, regardless of the sophistication of their planning and methods. One reason we do is that jihadists suppress their own individual (or group) interests in favor of a distant ideological goal. Another reason is they ignore the humanity of anyone outside their own group. But that does mean jihadists or other fundamentalists are not rational. A psychological study in the mid-1990s compared the personal narratives of Islamic fundamentalists and moderates (in the religious sense). It found that both groups were equally adept at doing cost/ benefit analysis over choices. However the moderate group applied the calculus for choosing among competing goals as well as among the different means for reaching a chosen goal. The fundamentalists, who included Nasrallah as unnamed subject, selected their goals according to the dictates of Islam, as they saw them. Then they applied the rational calculus to select means for reaching these goals. While the moderates considered themselvess individuals with several social identities, the fundamentalists considered themselves examplars of Islam. They believed that Islam was a complete way of life, encompassing their entire being.

Nasrallah's interview today, as well as his management of Hezbollah's war, partly breaks the mold. In employing strategic rationality, he is acknowledging, at least formally, the rationality and, obliquely, the humanity of his opponent. His message indicates that he defines the current conflict with Israel as a non-zero sum game, where both parties can benefit from mutual cooperation, i.e., no second-round. Put another way, he accepts that Israel also wins in a win/ win outcome. Compare this position with that of Hitler, who allocated German resources to kill Jews, when they could have been better used in the German defense effort at the end of World War II. Nasrallah might not have abandoned his fundamentalist vision of a world dominated by Islam or his personal ambition of eliminating Israel. However, he clearly postpones their pursuit. Jihad can wait.
Nasrallah Islamic fundamentalism Lebanon

Can the Cease-fire Hold? UNIFIL's Role

2006-08-26T22:48:00.000-07:00

4. UNIFIL faces three organizational challenges to its becoming a successful peacekeeping force: its strength, area of deployment and rules of engagement. The Europeans countries have now assured that the number of peacekeepers will approach, if not reach, the total of number of 16,000 (including the 2,000 already in Lebanon) envisioned by the cease fire resolution (1701). At midweek, the Ieftist Italian government of Romano Prodi committed to contributing 3,000 soldiers. This move and the adverse international opinion that had greeted France’s initial paltry offer of 200 soldiers embarrassed French President Jacques Chirac into raising his bid to 2,000. By the time UN General Secretary Kofi Annan met with the EC last Friday, other countries – Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Germany – had fallen in line. So Annan came away with commitments of 6000 - 7000 troops, with more than half to be deployed in a few weeks. The European participation is reassuring to Israel, which historically has identified more with Europe than the developing world. On the other hand, the EC believes its participation will strengthen its voice in both negotiations between Israel and Lebanon, and in any renewed “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians. The Italian foreign minister Massimo D’Alema gave a broad hint of that. In an interview with an Israel newspaper, he said if the deployment of the UN force in Lebanon works out, an international force could also be sent to Gaza.

Annan has offers of troops from Muslim countries. He figures that he needs to take all offers and consider Muslim participation a legitimating factor. However Israel diplomats have objected to the inclusion of troops from Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh or any Muslim country that does not have diplomatic relations with Israel. More than symbolic politics is involved. Israelis strongly felt that Hezbollah’s provocation last month challenged its legitimacy, but both the government and public have been rattled by Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s repeated suggestion that Israel should be annihilated. So the issue of recognition is also one of trust at the gut level. Annan thinks he can overcome Israel’s resistance by putting leadership of the new UNIFIL in European hands, first the French for six months, then the Italians. But Israel also does not trust the French much.

How many troops are actually needed depends on the area of their deployment and mission. It the peacekeepers are assigned only to the Israel-Lebanon border, then Chirac makes sense in claiming that not more than 10,000 or so are needed to assist the Lebanese army. On this view, the peacekeepers primary job would be maintaining a buffer zone along the border, apart from the Lebanese army. They would prevent any unauthorized, armed personnel from entering the zone and disarm any who did. According to Annan, “Troops are not going in there to disarm -- let's be clear. Disarming Hezbollah cannot be done by force. It has to be political agreements among the Lebanese.” Yet, one can anticipate that even this limited mission will have points of friction with Hezbollah where weight of UNIFIL numbers at any locale would help. To wit, Hezbollah has announced that its fighters will remain in their villages in southern Lebanon and not disarm. Per an agreement with the Lebanese government, they will make not carry arms or make any public display of them. What happens if they forget?

More troops and their wider deployment are needed if their mission includes stopping arms shipments from or through Syria to Hezbollah. As a matter of sovereignty, the Lebanese government insists that such operations be at its request. At the same time, Syria has reacted coolly to the idea of the peacekeepers being deployed along its borders for that purpose and said that would be a hostile act. This response is certainly a test to see what the West can offer Syria for cooperating with the arms embargo. Movement toward any negotiation with Syria, however, will be slower than the efforts to the get the peacekeepers in place. So in the initial stages of UNIFIL operations, any troops to enforce the embargo will be deployed in small contingents near the major Lebanon-Syria border crossings. In other words, the force can get to work, even before it reaches peak strength.

To sum up: The European commitments have assured the feasibility of the peacekeeping mission. How effective can it be? That depends considerably on Lebanese government's willingness to ask its help, but everyone understands that the peacekeepers will be there can increase the government's willingness. If other things are equal, the new UNIFIL will be a mainstay for the cease-fire and enable more formal relations between Israel and Lebanon. Unfortunately, its efforts might be overtaken by confrontations between the United States and Iran, in which each will use its respective client, Israel and Hezbollah, respectively, much more deliberately than was the case last month.
UNIFIL United Nations France Lebanon Israel Syria

Resign or Redesign

2006-08-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

Yedioth Ahranot has the results of the latest, representative poll of the Israel public (usually means just the Jewish population). They are in line with my predictions a few days ago: A large majority wants the present leadership to resign, a sharp rise in support for the right (Likud) and extreme right (Yisrael Beitenu) , a sharp drop for the center (Kadima and Labor). Here are the main numbers.

Resign v. stay on: Olmert -- 63% v. 29%; Peretz -- 74% v. 20%, Halutz -- 54% v. 38%;
Knesset seats if elections now (present seats): Likud 20 (12), Kadima 17 (29), Labor 11 (19), Yisrael Beitenu 17 (11);
Choice for Prime Minister: Netanyahu -- 22%, Leiberman (YB) -- 18%, Shimon Peres -- 12%, Ehud Olmert -- 11%, Tsippi Livni -- 10%;
Match-up: Olmert - 29% v. Netanyahu -- 45%.

Accompanying this shift are growing public protests, led by army reservists, with distinctly right wing themes: we were misled, let down, unprotected, ill-supplied and betrayed. But unlike the Mel Gibsons of the world, the protesters cannot blame "the Jews." Maybe they should blame the Palestinians? Veteran military analyst Zev Schiff thinks the time and energy IDF spends on policing Gaza and the West Bank blunted its fighting ability. Hmm. If IDF trained the Palestinian militants, it might then have a good sparring partner in tuning up for the next big fight.

Yoram Peri, a specialist on Israel's military, op-eds in the Washington Post on Israel's frayed civil-military relationship. In the 1990s, he says, the generals were bolder than the politicians in seeking political solutions for Israel's security, particularly through negotiations with Syria. Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon turned down their proposals, which would have involved withdrawal of Israel from the Golan Heights in return for a peace treaty. The situation was reversed in the recent war, when militarily inexperienced political leaders hastily bowed to the demands of the generals, only to find later that the generals could not deliver. Uri Segei, a retired high ranking IDF general, weighed in on that point. At a Jerusalem forum, yesterday, he said IDF needs "fundamental treatments" from top to bottom, not just a few fixes: The conduct of the opening stages of the war were perplexing and its final stages were pathological. These criticisms do not daunt neoconservative Max Boot in The Los Angeles Times. Back from a junket to Israel, courtesy of the American Jewish Committee (proud sponsor of Commentary), he commands Israel to go to war against Syria. Why Syria? It supplies missiles to Hezbollah and could supply them to Hamas, it is an ally of Iran, and, above all, it is the enemy that Israel can most easily defeat through conventional means.

Do Israel generals have doctor envy? Israel military speak has become heavily medicalized. Of course, some terms like surgical strike are part of a universal military vocabulary. But IDF senior officers seemed to play doctor when they called Hezbollah a cancer that had spread beyond the red lines and that would have to be vomited out. Then last night, as noted, a retired general prescribed fundamental treatment for IDF pathologies. Maybe such talk indicates that Israelis are reverting back to more traditional Jewish choices of role models? Maybe Israeli mothers now want their children to become doctors or, at least, computer scientists, instead of generals?

Wiil the Cease Fire Hold? Lebanon's Part

2006-08-24T21:09:00.000-07:00

[This is part 2 of a continuing essay on factors that stabilize and destabilize the current cease-fire. Part 1 is below.]
3. The Lebanese government’s primary goals are recovery from the devastation of the war and the extension of state authority to southern Lebanon. The realization of both goals depends largely on containing Hezbollah. Its provoking Israel to a second round would signal defiance of state authority, while inevitably bringing more destruction, courtesy of Israel, to Lebanon. In theory, the restraints would involve the disarming of Hezbollah, especially since it is the only movement or community in Lebanon that remains armed. In practice, the government will move gingerly to avoid a confrontation that would prematurely test its army’s strength against Hezbollah. Moreover, the recovery effort will require Hezbollah’s participation for both the funds it can get from Iran and the effective administration it can provide for reconstruction in the Shiite areas.

Suggestions like former US State Department officials Carlos Pascual and Martin Indyk’s that the US and the petro-rich Arab states freeze Hezbollah and Iran out of the reconstruction process are just plain stupid. They ignore the extent and degree of the destruction, evident in survey maps, the Amnesty International Report on Israel’s war crimes and the near one million refugees trying to return home. These and Lebanese central bank reports indicate recovery costs of ten billion dollars, so every contribution from abroad will be needed. These pundits also ignore that the Lebanese government lacks personnel who could knowledgably and honesty administer southern Lebanon. It has been decades since government officials were in charge there, and then they were as corrupt as officials elsewhere in Lebanon – which is to say, very. Pacual and Indyk’s view of Lebanon, like that of Israeli pilots in the past month, is from 20,000 feet up. Like those pilots, they have no concern for Lebanon’s welfare. They are writing for an inside-the-Beltway audience that emotionally resembles someone who secretly thrilled when her pet chased a rabbit and half destroyed the neighbor’s garden. Now, needing to mollify the outrage of the other folks on the block, she’s willing to pay some damages, thinking she’s being generous, but is not willing to take any responsibility.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has displayed considerable confidence that his government can both use and contain Hezbollah. He knows that he enjoys the backing of the non-Shiite Lebanese and of many Shiites, who prefer a pluralistic, prosperous state to a pan-Islamist future or a return of Syrian hegemony. He also believes that Hezbollah was considerably weakened in the conflict with Israel. However to prevent any confrontations from spiraling out of control, he insists that the Lebanese army rather than UNIFIL disarm Hezbollah; in other words, he will take the integration of Hezbollah into Lebanon slowly. In that scenario, he wants UNIFIL as protection from Israel rather than for Israel.

In addition to meeting pressure from Israel, which continues its sea and air blockade of Lebanon, Siniora’s government also has to face pressure from Syria. Damascus is disturbed by the prospect of the Lebanese army denying it the right to smuggle arms to Hezbollah, its remaining ally in Lebanon. In response, it has threatened to close its extensive borders with Lebanon, completing the blockade of the country. Seeking some counterweight, Siniora has made tentative peace overtures to Israel, and, were the Israel government smart -- what a counter-factual! -- it would take him up on those. It could suggest setting a time table of steps toward mutual recognition that would include turning over the Shebaa Farms area to Lebanon. Israel demurred at the inclusion of the last step as projected actions under the cease fire, on the grounds it would look like a victory for Hezbollah. But the step would look different, if it came toward the beginning of direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel. The Lebanese would grudgingly welcome this process. As much as they dislike the Israelis, with the exception of Hezbollah, they dislike the Syrians more. And Hezbollah, for its part, could claim a victory.

On balance, Lebanon has interest and options for making the cease-fire hold and lead to more solid arrangements. For it to follow the options, its army will need better training and equipment. There is also need for the deployment of UNIFIL forces of near 10,000, with clear rules of engagement. The US, the EC and the UN have gotten the message on both counts, but now must follow through.

2006-08-24T11:13:00.000-07:00

Just what the Israel public needs: Well before the end of the war, members of the Israel government and pundits began worrying about the situation on the "Day After" [the war ended]. As noted before, the "day after" has produced a political crisis for the government, as public disgruntlement with the mismanagement of the war rises. So the headline in the Hebrew edition of today's Haaretz caught my eye:

Pills for the "Day After" will be Sold without Prescription

I first thought the article would be on some super pain killer, but realized after a few seconds it was a report on the decision in the United States to let women buy the "Morning After Pill" over the counter.

Will the Cease-fire Hold?

2006-08-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

[This is part 1 of a continuing essay]
Will the cease-fire hold? Can it lead to something resembling a political settlement – dare one say peace – between Israel and Lebanon? That depends to varying degrees on the actions and inactions of relevant parties to the recent war and its cease fire. In order of their importance (or ability to sink the cease fire), the parties at the national and international level are:

Israel;
Hezbollah ("the state within a state");
Lebanon;
UNIFIL;
United States
Iran;
Syria;
European countries;
UN Security Council;
Palestine;
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other moderate Arab states.

Players at the sub-national level include the offices of the Israel prime, security and foreign ministers and the major Israel political parties, the White House and State Department in the United States, Hamas and the PLO militias among the Palestinians and, god only knows what, inside the opaque Iranian decision making process. Whew! It does not seem to me as complex as the very fluid situations in the Lebanese civil war, 1976 - 1989. What happened then on any Beirut street often depended on linkages among six or seven higher levels of conflict, plus what the local militia men had eaten in the morning. Still the list itself hints there are many opportunites to sink the cease-fire. So let’s look at how and why each of the parties could do that.

1. Israel hopes the implementation of the cease-fire will complete the job it failed to do: disarm Hezbollah, at least south of the Litani River. It also expects UNIFIL or some yet unauthorized UN force to assure the 1701 stipulated embargo on arms to Hezbollah. Fred Kaplan correctly notes that Israel broadly construes the right to defensive military measures that the cease-fire permits it. So if Israelis see little evidence in the near future that Hezbollah is being disarmed and the embargo being enforced, IDF will likely conduct an increasing number of commando and bombing raids to destroy Hezbollah armories and interdict arms shipments. These actions are highly likely to reignite a full-scale war.

The dissatisfaction of Israelis with the cease-fire and deepening political crisis tend to push government and army command toward a second round. That would, at least, postpone inquiries into the recent failures, stop splitting in the ruling coalition, and, probably, produce a better outcome for Israel. Most Israelis, however, will have problems trusting the current leaders for a second round. Moreover, US , if it wants, can assure some Israeli restraint on the frequency and focus of the ramp-up actions. That would stop the escalation short of full-scale war. Hezbollah could also take some edge off Israel through its release of the two captured Israel soldiers, a move that is now low cost for it.

2. Hezbollah and its leader Hasan Nasrallah are being celebrated throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds for having shattered the image of Israel military invincibility. Their perceived success makes it difficult for them to disarm, demobilize ideologically and assume the role of a banal political party in a convoluted Lebanese political order. Ideologically, Hezbollah is a pan-Islamic vanguard party and there little in a Lebanese national political identity to attract them. In addition, the leadership cohorts are Islamic fundamentalists in the sense of seeing themselves as exemplars of Islam and only secondarily as individuals for whom personal gains and losses matter. Finally their ability to meet the social and economic needs of their Shi'a constituency depends heavily, like their military clout, on Iran, and Iran has given no signal that it would like them to demobilize. On the contrary, it has vigorously asserted a Hezbollah right to remain armed.

These motives, however, do not mean that Nasrallah will seek to provoke Israel into another round. He knows the other Lebanese communities and even many Shiites susupect his intentions and would oppose this behavior. As Marc Lynch, who surveys Arab media discourse, reports, there is a sharp division between Lebanese and non-Lebanese on Hezbollah:

non-Lebanese commentators primarily writing about the war's impact on the Islamic movement, on Israel's power, or on the fortunes of various Arab governments; and Lebanese commentators writing about those things, but also about what is to become of Lebanon's politics. Arab and Muslim pundits applaud Hezbollah as a new champion against Israel, but Lebanese worry about its influence at home.

Nasrallah has a compromise with Lebanon's government under which his movement will neither disarm nor flaunt their arms. This "don't show, don't ask" agreement and a leading role in rebuilding Lebanon might suffice Hezbollah for a few years, unless Israel, the Lebanese army or UNIFIL presses too hard for disamament. However crunch time could also come, if the UN someday imposes sanctions on Iran for continuing to enrich uranium. Iran might then ask Hezbollah to heat up the Israel-Lebanon border, leaving Hezbollah again having to decide whether it was a national, pan-Arabist or pan-Islamist party.

[Right now a mutual wariness between Israel and Hezbollah seems to be the main reason why the cease-fire is holding. Going forward, the power and willingness of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL to police the situation in southern Lebanon will be nearly as crucial. These factors in turn depend on support from nations both outside and inside the region. The linkages will be examined tomorrow.]

Middle East Israel Hezbollah cease-fire UNIFIL

2006-08-22T23:41:00.000-07:00

More on machismo in high and other places: Israel police today are questioning the President of Israel Moshe Katsav about accusations that he forced a former office worker to have sex with him by threatening to fire her. The Presidency of Israel is a largely symbolic post and Katsav was not involved in the July 12, decision to go to war. However, the disrepute and possible resignation of Katsav peripherally affects the growing political crisis. If the government coalition collapses, the President might have to be involved both formally and informally in forming a new ruling coalition. The investigation of Katsav comes just a few days after the resignation of Justice Minister Haim Ramon, who was indicted for offensive sexual conduct (not quite harassment) toward a government worker.

Feel the Strain

2006-08-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

The political crisis in Israel is deepening within the government and the public at large. The governing coalition is threatened by the refusal of Labor members of the Knesset finance committe to approve a Kadima move to cut $400 million from the current education and welfare budgets. The cuts are intended to help pay for the war, without increasing the taxes on business. A Kadima official has threatened negotiations with other (rightwing) parties to offset the implied threat of Labor's leaving the government. Within Labor itself, efforts are building to dump Amir Peretz as leader.

Generally, the situation resembles the aftermath of the Yom Kippur war (1973), which Israelis then considered at best a tie. Most Israelis are dissatisfied with the current cease fire, with their government and with army leadership. Approval ratings for Olmert, Peretz and Halutz have fallen sharply; they will be no more than 25% in the next opinion polls. Opposition inside and outside the government has apparently checked Peretz’s effort to keep the postwar inquiry at the ministerial level and narrowly focused on tactics, operations and logistics. The inquiry board that he appointed met today and promptly suspended its operations. Olmert’s effort to set up an inquiry at the governmental level, also with limited powers and scope, will likely fare no better. The public and even some government figures wants a broad investigation that looks at strategies and decision making, as well.

One guage of the public mood is an online, non-scientific poll, by Israel’s largest newspaper, the hawkish Yedioth Aharanot. Readers told who they would vote for if the elections were today. Olmert, Peretz, and Benyamin Netanyahu (Likud) each received a couple of percent; leftwing leader Yossi Bellin (Meretz) had virtually none. But both far right wing leader Avigdor Lieberman (National Union) and Ariel Sharon (Tel ha-Shomer) each had percents in the mid-40s. Not having a “none of the above” choice, I chose Sharon, because, in his present condition, he would do the least harm.

A rather muffled debate during the war was over the need to probe even more deeply into the Israeli mindset that went to war. Several writers have argued that the hasty response to launch a massive attack on Lebanon was driven more by machismo than rational calculations. Retired left-wing leader Shulamit Aloni latched onto the theme in a bitter column today. She excoriates the men in Israel’s government for their incapability to consider diplomacy before charging to war. Moreover, she says, they rejected Foreign Minister Tsippi Livni proposal to first try tough diplomatic moves, like giving Lebanon a 72 hour ultimatum to return the soldiers, because a woman proposed it.

Similar ego involvement may have biased the men’s decision to expand IDF operations on Friday, August 11, just as the Security Council was approving the cease fire. The decision makers could have taken less than what they originally wanted, by accepting the cease-fire on the spot. Or they could gamble they would improve their military situation (and their reputations) through more fighting in the days before they had to accept the cease-fire. They chose to gamble. The two more days of fighting produced no significant gains for Israel, but earned it a reputation for spite in some eyes and cost it some forty more soldiers. (Israelis Dan Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky showed the preference for the gamble over the sure loss is a common distortion of rational decision making. This result is part of their Nobel prize winning (Kahneman, 2004) research on decision making heuristics. In particular, it shows the effects of framing on decision. Since the result has been in the literature for 25 years, it is doubly disappointing that Israeli decision makers were unaware of such professionally relevant knowledge.)

Israelis also want an investigation of the failure of their external propaganda. Most still believe that in any of their conflicts, they are entitled to the world’s sympathy. When it is not forthcoming, they blame anti-Semitism, Arab oil money and their own ineffective propaganda. Hopefully, any investigation of this failure would also ask why the world no longer accepts Israel’s standard exculpation of being a victim. Unfortunately, with few exceptions like foreign minister Tsippi Livni, the government and army leaders are clueless as to how people outside the Bush administration and the US Congress think. This is an arrogance of power that Israel cannot afford. The lack of attention to media any place but in the US, is a fatal flaw when fighting a guerilla force. In such conflicts public relations victories are important. Some attention to that point might also keep army and government officials from spinning clumsy lies, for example with regard to the success of commando raids.

Getting Ready for Round Two?

2006-08-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

Member of the Opposition Efi Eitam in the Knesset, August 14, 2006: The war is not over, the ceasefire is only a temporary recess which Nasrallah can exploit to reorganize. Our soldiers are still with their finger on the trigger in enemy territory, and therefore if we start to fight now, we can really turn into spider's web. Eitam is a leader of the National Union, a coalition of extreme right wing parties and a former leader of the National Religious Party. He is the Israeli political leader who most resembles Nasrallah. Both are "born-again" in their respective religions, but proved poor students of its texts. They each have a large number of children. Each has a Messianic complex and was a military leader. Eitam commanded the IDF troops in Lebanon during the 1990s, which faced Nasrallah's guerillas.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz at Israel cabinet meeting, August 20: The points noted as [IDF] failures along the way will be examined. We will look into them, put them on the table. Our duty is to prepare for the next round He also said, however, if a multinational force deploys in southern Lebanon and we find ourselves opposite a demilitarized area, then we have reached our goals.

Minister of National Infrastructure Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, at the same meeting, added the next round of fighting against Hizbullah could come within several months: You have to read between the lines. Hizbuallh is getting organized, the Syria army is learning lessons. We have to rehabilitate the north, the reserve forces and the army and be prepared for the next round.

Such sabre-rattling makes French liberal newspaper Le Monde nervous enough to headline in today's paper: Israel does not exclude a second round in its war with Hezbollah. The report will surely encourage France to increase its contribution to the multinational force. As if this was not sufficient evidence of Peretz's inability to understand the consequences of what he says and does, he provided more at the meeting. He complained no one had followed his suggestion at the beginning of the war of getting the Europeans ready to fund the rehabiliation of Lebanon. So now Iranian money has flowed into the vaccuum. Peretz sounds like something from Monty Python:

Peretz (or delegate) to European governments: We're about to destroy most of Lebanon's infrastructure, some cities, towns and villages in southern Lebanon and a few districts in Beirut and Balbek. Please get ready to hand out money when we're done so the Lebanese can rebuild.

European governments: Instead of doing that, how about negotiating with Hezbollah? That way, we'd save our money, the Lebanese would be spared their lives and you'd get your soldiers back.

Peretz (or delegate): No. That isn't in the script.

At the same cabinet meeting Chief of Staff Dan Halutz sounded less bellicose. He said that IDF won the match with Hezbollah on points, not by a knockout. (Note how his use of a boxing metaphor complements the idea that the Bush administration briefly regarded Israel as its Great White Hope.) Consequently, he added, Hezbollah was observing the cease fire, and other Lebanese would not tolerate actions that again threatened them. The takeaway was Hezbollah is not likely to provoke a second round or, rather, Halutz is not anxious to find in some Hezbollah activity an excuse for starting a second round. His position, incidentally, puts in question the point of the commando raid the night before, because it contradicts the official story that the raid aimed to interdict arms shipments from Syria to Hezbollah.

Chutzpah Award

2006-08-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

In a long, rambling hodge-podge of an essay in the Washington Post, Dan Byman and Ken Pollack state the obvious: Iraq is in a civil war. Then they remind us of something less obvious: Civil wars create refugees, who flee to other countries and might destabilize them. They recommend that the US set up protected catchments for refugees inside Iraq. If this sounds like domino theory thinking, it is -- but a bit in reverse. Ken Pollack was an ardent tub thumper for invading Iraq. Like Tom Friedman and the neo-conservatives, he predicted taking out Saddam would slam-dunk lead to a democratic Iraq and a democratic Iraq would lead to democratization in other Arab countries. But nevermind that, he says in the closing paragraph of the essay:

How Iraq got to this point is now an issue for historians (and perhaps for voters in 2008); what matters today is how to move forward and prepare for the tremendous risks an Iraqi civil war poses for this critical region.

Like much of what he says, Pollack even gets this exculpation wrong. Iraq is already an issue for American voters in 2006.

Lessons Too Late for the Learning?

2006-08-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

Anthony Cordesman, a noted strategic analyst of the Middle East, has just published a preliminary report on lessons from the Israel-Hezbollah war. The lesson are for both Israel and the US military, especially with respect to its effort in Iraq. Middle East scholar Helana Cobban and others have criticized aspects of the report, but not its main thrust: Israel failed to fully achieve any of its war aims. Per Coredesman, these included

destroy Hezbollah's strategic missile capabilities vs. Israel;
restore credible deterrence;
force Lebanon to be accountable for Hezbollah;
permanently cripple Hezbollah as a military organization;
force the release of the two captured soldiers.

He does not include the assassination of Hezbollah leadership, a publicly stated goal at the outset, that also was not achieved. Nevertheless, Cordesman found the Israeli army sources were relatively pleased by IDF's performance. They believe they destroyed 80% of Hezbollah's medium and long range rockets and launchers on the first two days of war, and Hezbollah learned that IDF troops would beat it in a direct engagement. They attribute any short comings to the political echelon's dithering.

Nevertheless Cordesman has a telling conclusion: If Hezbollah is crippled as a military force, it will be because of US and French diplomacy in creating an international peacekeeping force and helping the Lebanese Army move south with some effectiveness. It will not be because of IDF military action. Also on the strategic level, Cordesman suggests that much of the bombing campaign was ill-conceived because it underestimated the anger that the disproportional response would create in the Arab world. This anger will strengthen Syria and Iran while weaking moderate regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

With regard to operations, Cordesman fudges on issues like the extent of Israeli intelligence failures, the deliberateness of its attacks on purely civilian targets, the disjointed Israeli decision making, the degree of success in Hezbollah's tactics, its capabilities as a fighting organization and how much Syria and Iran resupplied Hezbollah during the war. And he is plain wrong in his estimates of Israeli equipment destroyed by Hezbollah.

The report is entirely from the Israeli perspective, based on interviews and data he collected in Israel, in a research trip financed by an American Jewish organization. Given this slant, three additional points in the report are interesting:

No one in Israel thought the capture of the soldiers was a provocation ordered by Iran to deflect attention from the Iranian nuclear issue -- so much for that Bush theory and Halutz's belief the Hezbollah is a puppet of Iran.
His Israeli sources tended to have narrow outlooks and did not understand the sweep of the failures;
Strategy and tactics against well armed, urban based subnational groups have to be rethought, especially if "clean out and hold indefinitely" is not an option.

Steve Erlanger in The New York Times reports on an interview several days ago with an unnamed Israel senior officer that repeats the same Israeli claims in Cordesman's report. His source is most likely Halutz or his assistant Kaplinski. The officer's evident failure to have learned anything from the war, coupled with today's IDF commando raid in Lebanon, suggests IDF is keen on starting a second round in the very near future.

2006-08-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

David Ignatius in today's Washington Post thoughtfully looks at the appropriateness of calling Hezbollah and other Islamic radical groups "Islamic Fascists." The piece has a few problems. Ignatius dervies his definition of fascism from a controversial, comparative study by the German historian Ernst Nolte, who later evolved into a Nazi apologist. He neglects to mention that "Islamic Fascism" was used by the Bush administration at the behest of the neo-conservatives. Third, although he rejects the use of "fascism" to describe all Islam, he does not ask whether this label might fit some folks closer to home. Nevertheless, his unpacking of the term shows why the neo-conservative narrative, analyzed below, uses it to label any Muslim resistance to its vision of the New Middle East. Juan Cole in his blog of August 8, question the meaningfulness (internal consistency) of the term: fascism is state-glorify, war-worshipping and racist. Islam, at least in doctrine, is none of these. It transcends state boundaries, embraces people of all races and regards war as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. These discussions are useful for me, since I grew up in a political culture where you called any power-grabbing shithead "a fascist."

Once Upon a Time

2006-08-17T22:49:00.000-07:00

[latest blog entries here]

This is a story about the neo-conservative thought process. It is also an answer to the question in what world does George W. Bush live?

Say you have two uninteresting stories. The first about a teen age boy and girl who meet, fall fiercely in love with each other, talk all the time about their love and want to be together forever. The second story is about two families who have been feuding for several generations. Every times members of one family bump into those of the other in the city square, trouble erupts. Now put the two stories together and for interest have the boy be from one family and the girl from another. Suddenly the expectations, values and actions in each story begin to constraint or challenge those in the other. The atoms of each part of the respective stories combine into molecules of a new story. We might get a story of desperate, forbidden love in a world of violence and plans that go awry. In the hands of a good playwright, it could become a very interesting and moving play.

Hollywood has a nifty shorthand for creating or describing a new story as the meld (or interference) of two familiar ones. It is “meets,” as in “Tootsie meets Fiddler on the Roof equals Yentl,” the Barbra Streisand vehicle also known in the trade as Tootsie on the Roof. Or Romeo and Juliet meets Blackboard Jungle to get West Side Story. In his brilliant book The Political Unconscious, literary critic Frederick Jameson deepens the idea of “meets” by developing a grammar (rules and constraints) for how conflicting narratives gives rise to novels seeking to resolve or transcend the conflict. Jameson’s convincing argument is startling because the novels he analyzes are generally considered to be realistic or naturalistic, e.g., Balzac, Gissing, Conrad. Most people regards them as either simple reflections of a world “out there” or reflections mediated by the author’s approvals and disapprovals of what is in that world. The mediated case gives rise to genre like satire, melodrama. For Jameson, the conflicting narratives can be such reflections. Embedded in their respective socio-economic situations, they reflect its normative expectations, world views and notions of social identities. But the story their interaction generates is not similarly grounded. It is ideological in the sense of being the product of ideas playing against one another rather than against a perception of some reality.

Gilles Kepel’s magisterial The War for Muslim Minds suggests that a similar process produced the neo-conservatives vision of The New Middle East and the US policies needed to realize it. In the mid-1990s, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Richard Perle and their associates, including Richard Cheney, recognized a basic conflict between the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security and to the security of Middle East oil. To secure the oil reserves, the US relied on a series of government and corporate alliances with the traditional rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The neo-conservatives, however, anticipated increasing instability of these regimes, because of their populations’ economic frustrations and susceptibility to Iran’s message of radical Islam. Moreover the neo-conservatives judged that the regime’s standard way of coping with public unrest was to direct it at Israel, but their doing so would again would be inimical to Israel’s security.

Their ideological solution story was democratizing the Middle East. There were several key beliefs that developed the story:

market organized, liberal democracies are the only possible outcomes of economic and social development – Fukuyama’s “end of history” theory;
development in the Arab world is being blocked by traditional and dictatorial rulers, most notably Saddam Hussein;
“smart bombs” and other precision guided munitions can enable the United States to surgically remove Saddam and his supporters, and send a message to other rulers to speed reforms;
Most Arabs and Muslims do not deeply care about the Palestinians, but their rulers and clergy use it to divert attention from their real interests.

The neo-conservatives story of the New Middle East has been ridiculed for being simplistic and naïve. It told of an international system composed only of states, ignored the variety in radical Islam, missed completely Saudi Arabia’s deal with Islamic fundamentalism to bolster its regime, overstated the importance of economic development and understated the accompanying social dislocation and insecurities, etc. These critiques miss the point: The neo-conservatives did not misperceive reality, they did not look at reality at all. Their story was not based on an analysis of the international terrain under some suitable model that would identify forces, trends, challenges, opportunities amid shifts in power distributions. It was the resolution of an intellectual conflict.

The New Middle East story would almost certainly have remained a cult text, except for two events: The Supreme Court awarded George W. Bush the election of 2000, and September 11, 2001. In Bush the neo-cons found a man who experienced existentially the conflict they had resolved theoretically. He had a born-again Christian’s commitment to Israel’s security and years of involvement in the oil industry. But 9/11 forced him to take action. The equation of Iraq with Islamic terrorism having already been made, the creation of The New Middle East was on its way.

So in what world does George Bush live? In that of "Once upon a time…”

Middle East neoconservatives Bush

Speculations

2006-08-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Observers of the American government are well aware of the resistance of indicted, unindicted or ethically challenged public officials to resigning. They similarly know that public officials refuse to accept responsibility for their failed policies, by resigning. One need look no further than the White House and Congress. A friend assured me that such behavior has become standard in parliamentary democracies everywhere, although I think that British officials, especially cabinet ministers, still resign when their fingers are caught in the cookie jar. So it is not surprising that Israel Chief of Staff Halutz has refused to resign over what, at best, was a lapse of moral judgement -- nothing more than his usual behavior -- and perhaps a dereliction of duty. Halutz sold a stock portfolio on the eve of Israel's war with Hezbollah. His timing was perfect, coming three hours after two soldiers were captured and eight killed, and moments before he would demand from Israel's security cabinet approval for massive bombings of Lebanon. Halutz knew then he would get his way. The government owed him for having helped with the withdrawal of army and settlers from Gaza last year. Since he did not calculate that the war would be so costly to Israel, the sale was probably more a hedge than a speculation. As one comment said, If he wanted to speculate, he would have bought puts on the market.

Grotesque, but not suprising is the way senior army officers and government officials have been falling over one another to stand up for Halutz and condemn those who have problems with what he did. After all, as the government's legal advisor stated, it was not against the law: neither trading on inside information -- that applies to information about particular companies -- nor violations of conflict of interest. That law does not cover the Chief of Staff. Besides, according to his colleagues on the General Staff, Halutz has exceptional ability to concentrate on several things at once. Do they as well? Perhaps they also paused to take stock or sell it before the security cabinet met? In any case, per Halutz's order, the colleagues who praised his ambidexterity, had already cleared their remarks with the IDF spokesperson. One wonder were there officers with a different story who got no clearance.

For rightwing politicians, like Shaul Mufaz and Tshai Hanegbi, Halutz is a kindred spirit. He is as sensitive as they are to the plight of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians and to taking innocent lives in the course of assassinations and other targeted killings. Last year, they commiserated about the slight physical disturbance he reported feeling when bombing Palestinians, as a result of the plane bumping up in reaction to the release of the bomb. I am, however, surprised that Defense Minister Amir Peretz has jumped to Halutz's defense, despite their blaming each other for having fucked up the planning and conduct of the war. Peretz is head of the Labor Party, which once claimed to be a socialist party. Might it be out of role for him to insist on the rights of individual army officers to sell their stocks on the eve of a social solidarity event called war?

The religious nationalists have another problem: They love Halutz because he is a militarist, but despise his having helped uproot the settlers from the Gaza Strip last year. I think they will find a solution based on Deuteronomy 20:6 that excuses from war anyone whose orchard has not yet born fruit. Since Halutz's portfolio had apparently not realized the profit he expected, he would by analogy fall into this category. So he was doing everyone a favor by selling the stocks and joining the war.

A few other questions remain. The portfolio, valued at $30,000, is rather paltry for a high ranking public servant, even in Israel. Were there other sales or does he have foreign assets that did not need hedging? And what does the silence of PM Olmert and some other cabinet members mean? After all, they cannot have much love for Halutz's having sold them the unsound plan of winning a war through air power alone and then accusing them of vacillating when it was clear that ground troops were needed. Okay, they were amateurs, but he made them look like suckers, as well. Maybe, they do not want to pour gasoline on a fire, recognizing that the civil-military relationship in Israel is more frayed than even in 1982, when Defense Minister Sharon and Chief of Staff Eitan deceived the rest of the government about their invasion of Lebanon.

One more explanation. Maybe government officials and other would be critics recall that Halutz glories in "precision" killings achieved through aircraft launching missiles into the target's house or car. So all he needs is just one blindly loyal pilot... Farfetched? Yes, but being a critic of his, I think I'll remain anonymous until he resigns or completes his tour of duty.
Israel Olmert Halutz

2006-08-16T00:53:00.000-07:00

The Israel post-war inquiries are beginning to play like farce or ironic tragedy, depending on one's critical predilections. Today, Tsahi Hanegbi opened a session of the Knesset's Security and Foreign Policy Committee with a complaint regarding the bad publicity that Chief of Staff Halutz received in the past day: I have the feeling that we are developing a culture of rushing to judgement, like that of the executioners in the French Revolution. That is not our culture. Mr. Hanegbi is an expert on Israeli political culture. He is about to be indicted for illegal political appointments he made while Minister of the Environment in 2001 - 2003. The charges will include fraud and breach of trust, but Negbi has refused to resign his chairmanship of the Security and Foreign Policy Committee. He is the son of Geulah Ha-cohen, the Passionara of Menahem Begin's fascoid Herut party of the 1950s and 1960s. He began his own political career 35 years ago, at the Hebrew University, by organizing rock-throwing demonstrations against Arab students.

The committee session exposed further rifts between the army and government leaders. Senior officers told the committee members that the deployment of the expanded UNIFIL force will take a long time and that Israel troops must remain in Lebanon for months. In contrast, Foreign Minister Tsippi Livni said yesterday that Israel should withdraw its troops as quickly as possible in compliance with the cease-fire resolution.

A Good Day for C.Y.A.

2006-08-14T19:48:00.000-07:00

Israel Chief of Staff Dan Halutz disgraces IDF's tradition of strategic nimbleness. However he wasted no time today in moving to cover his ass, while Israel government leaders were busy declaring victory. He ordered all officers to refrain from talking to journalists without prior authorization by the IDF spokesperson. He claimed this step was needed to keep the enemy from getting sensitive information by monitoring interviews. His real reason is more likely a desperation to muffle insiders' criticisms of his and the General Staff's conduct of the war.

Update (Tuesday night): After this order was published, disgraced but still serving General Udi Adam of Northern Command gave an interview to Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahranot. Adam blamed the Israel government for the confusion and shortcomings of IDF ground operations in Lebanon. He said its hesitations barred an early mobilization of reserves and their timely introduction into the war. Although he also expressed dismay at Halutz's temporarily demoting him in the chain of command, he presumably cleared doing the interview with the spokesperson. In other words, he was trusted to deliver the message that Halutz wanted.

Update: Turns out Halutz also quickly covered his ass before the war began. After receiving notification of Hezbollah's killing and capture of soldiers on July 12, but before Israel responded, Halutz sold a portfolio of Israeli stocks worth about $30,000. This action does not constitute insider trading, because it was based on information about the impending general economic situation rather than a particular company. Nevertheless, some Knesset members have questioned his priorities and demanded his resignation.

Meanwhile, aides of beleagured Defense Minister Amir Peretz are trying to pin some blame for the army's lack of readiness on his predecessor Shaul Mafouz, a cabinet member from Olmert's Kadima party. They also complain about Olmert's efforts to distance himself from Peretz and place some blame on his predecessor Sharon's government. They point out that Olmert was a high ranking official in that government and so in any case share some responsibility.

Storm Warning

2006-08-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

Results of a poll published in Israel today show Israel's generally disapprove of their leaders and the results of the war. These results sharply contrast with those of last week and indicate political turbulence ahead for Israel. 52% believe that IDF was unsuccessful in its Lebanon offensive, and 58% believe Israel achieved few if any of its objectives.
62% and 65% disapproved of Olemert's and Peretz's respective handling of the war. Only 49% gave Chief of Staff Halutz a passing grade, while 44% failed him. This is unprecedentedly low approval for a Chief of Staff.

If elections held today Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party would receive less than 20 mandates (as opposed to the 29 it received in the March elections), while Defense Minister Amir Peretz’s Labor party would receive only 12 mandates (as opposed to the 19 it obtained in the recent elections). 60% of those who voted for these parties in March report they are now undecided.

Only 6% believe the cease fire agreement is good for Israel, 38% believe it is not good, but the best that could be obtained under the circumstances. 50% believe it is not good and Israel could have gotten a better agreement.

Learning

2006-08-13T21:20:00.000-07:00

Today's Washington Post features an excellent article on the development and organization of Hezbollah's capabilities. At the start of the war most observers, including this writer, expected IDF to quickly rout or severely damage Hezbollah. They were surprised by its ability to withstand Israeli attacks and keep counter-punching. Knowledgable obervers and IDF high command were also surprised by Hezbollah's possession and sophisticated use of certain weapons, like anti-tank missiles. As the article points out, IDF's experience in this war was quite different from its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, when it sliced through disorganized and (informant) penetrated Palestinian forces to reach Beirut in a matter of days.

Hezbollah's relative success creates two immediate problems for IDF. First, Hezbollah will resist standing down ideologically and disarming. Second, IDF will need to learn why it had such difficulty in mastering Hezbollah. To do, it must acknowledge that it had difficulties, that its intellgence was faulty, its tactics unsuccessful and its strategies virtually non-existent. Doing that will be very hard. If Israeli general Ido Nahustan, as quoted in the article, is indicative, the General Staff is already blustering past such admissions.

Moreover Israel and its supporters need to recognize a fundamental point about IDF: for the last 30 years it has been an army of occupation, dependent as much on its spies among the Palestinians as on its own initiative. Such armies tend to rust, micro-management and incessant office politics. With regard to their operations, right wing military historian and former paratrooper Michael Orren perhaps said it best: I was trained [in the 1970s] to take out Syrian tanks. My son was trained to arrest Palestinians in their houses at 2 in the morning.

Condolences

2006-08-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

Wars have a way of wounding their opponents as well as supporters, like they injure both participants and bystanders. Uri Grossman, 20, an IDF armor corp soldier, was killed today in Lebanon. Uri was the son of David Grossman, the novelist, who with A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz, held a press conference last Wednesday to declare opposition to the expansion of the war. My deepest condolences to David, his family and to all the families in Israel and Lebanon who have lost children, parents, siblings, friends and neighbors.

The deaths of soldiers and civilians on the eve of a cease fire seems particularly tragic and ironic. One wonders what operations or advantage gained could possibly justify their occurence. It is especially astounding to me that Foreign Minister Tsippi Livni says she was told (and apparently accepted) that IDF's expanded operations over the past two days were intended to protect the soldiers already in Lebanon. Under what logic was there a need to send in twice as many more soldiers?

Paying the Piper

2006-08-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

The Israel Treasury Ministry estimates that Israel's cost for the war with Hezbollah for the last month has been 23 billion Israel Shekels or $5.27 billion at today's conversion rate. The breakout for this amount is $1.6 billion for the direct military costs, $1.14 for direct and indirect damage to Israel property, $2 billion in lost productivity, and $0.5 billion in aid to first responders and local authorities. This total is about equal to the direct monthly costs of the US military effort in Iraq. (The absence of any direct American property damage associated with that effort just shows why, like the Bush administration claims, it is better we're fighting them there than here.) The total for either Israel or the US does not include the forward going costs of healing, rehabilitating and supporting those wounded in the war.

The continuing military operations and new damages, assuming the cease fire holds, will probably add another billion dollars to the total. The resulting six plus billion dollars is relatively a large enterprise for Israel. Here are some recent deals: Warren Buffet paid $4B for 80% of the Israel company Iscar, Hewlitt-Packard paid $4.5B for Mercury Interactive and SanDisk bought M-Systems, a fabless flash chip company for $1.56B. However, the largest Israel company Teva Pharmaceutical has a market capitalization of $26B and had $6.5B in sales last year.

Even without assigning cost for the near 150 Israeli dead, the war appears to have been very inefficient for Israel. Israel's declared main purpose in fighting a broad war was to destroy Hezbollah's personnel and armament. An optimistic Israeli estimate would put the number of Hezbollah fighters killed so far at 500 and the number of missiles used or destroyed at 5000. The elimination costs therefore were about $12 million per fighter or $1.2 million per missile. Israel would have done better by offerring Hezbollah fighters $2.5 million apiece (ten times his expected lifetime earnings) for retiring, plus a half-million bonus for each unfired rocket he brought to Israel. (The US Federal Witness Relocation Program might have been willing to take fighters who feared returning home.) Israel could have also gotten the Lebanese government to share in funding this buyout program. Like most Lebanese of a certain age, its members were well acquainted with the costs and inefficiencies of war.

"The past is dead," goes the Arab proverb, and that is more true in this case than most. Nevertheless, Israel decision makers might consider the buyout program the next time a flare up with Hezbollah seems imminent. Perhaps now during IDF's brief occupation of southern Lebanon, they might try it on a limited basis. Since I have no relatives who are or likely to become Hezbollah fighters, be assured I have no personal interest in such a program.

Israel Lebanon Hizbullah

A Yellow Light

2006-08-12T10:45:00.000-07:00

Israel would best serve its interests by scrupulously observing the cease fire, that it will agree to start at 7 AM, Monday. Even if IDF has not completed the thrust to the Litani River, it should nevertheless stop. It should also not broadly interpret "defensive actions" to mean attacks on Hezbollah that will be behind its front lines, i.e, "cleaning them out." Since the cease fire provisions on the whole are favorable to Israel, it benefits if the cease fire holds and confounds the widespread scepticism about that. Second, when the cease fire resolution is viewed in context with the Security Council's recent demand that Iran stop uranium enrichment, it is clearly another step to contain Iran. Since curbing Iran and its nuclear program are paramount Israeli goals, Israel be would unwise to split the unity of the Security Council. The pattern of violations, which Israel's General Staff contemplates, would force the US to defend these actions in response to charges by its fellow members on the Council and the Sectary General. That split would impede the Council from acting decisively with regard to Iran, should the need arise, as anticipated, on August 22. Third, a well-policed and observed cease fire can over time split Hezbollah off from Iran. During the war, Hezbollah has presented itself to other Lebanese as a national resistance fighter and tried to live down its image as irresponsible provocateur. It has verbally committed itself to acting as part of the Lebanon state. A stable Lebanese government might force it to live up to these commitments. Israel can support the stability by observing the cease fire conditions and permitting speedy resettlement of the 500,000 people who fled southern Lebanon.

Israel Lebanon Hezbollah Iran

The Day Before the Day After

2006-08-12T07:34:00.000-07:00

The IDF responded to the Security Council's declaration of a cease-fire by tripling its forces in Lebanon, bringing the total up to 30,000 troops. This is both a bit surprising and bad faith. Everyone expected, on the basis of precedents and military logic, some forward movement by IDF forces already in Lebanon. US Secretary of State Rice greenlighted that with her remarks to the Security Council yesterday. However, the introduction of so many new troops signals that

IDF will occupy as much area in southern Lebanon as it can, until the Lebanese army and expanded UNIFIL are deployed there;
IDF will continue to attack Hezbollah fighters and facilities anywhere in Lebanon, even after the government accepts the cease-fire.

Even if Israel, under the cease-fire, must eventually rely on the Lebanese army and UNIFIL to contain Hezbollah, it wants to make sure that there are as few as possible Hezbollah for them to contain. However, I continue to believe that the expanded operations are more a cover your ass move by the General Staff than they are a concerted step toward a strategic victory that would warrant the use of so many troops and material. The Chief of Staff, I believe, is purposefully setting up a phoney basis for telling the Israel public "I could have won, but the government stopped me."

We might therefore get an Israeli version of the confrontation between American General Douglas MacArthur and President Harry Truman over policy in the Korean War. I'll call that a mini-MacArthur moment. Tomorrow the government will accept the cease-fire, effective as of 7 AM, Monday. But the army will continue actions that violate it. The international community will holler, the government will then order the General Staff to stop. The General Staff will find some pretext to continue the advance in defiance of government orders. And then? I have asked several students of Israel government and laws whether the Prime Minister could fire the Chief of Staff. I received several different answers but no one seemed to know. The joke now going around Israel is if Prime Minister Olmert fires Chief of Staff Halutz it will have been on Halutz's orders.

Unfortunately while this farce or constitutional crisis plays out, Israelis and Lebanese will continue to kill and be killed.

One more note on tensions in Israel's government: Josh Marshall notes that Olmert clipped Foreign Minister Tsippi Livni's wings, by denying her permission to fly to New York for the Security Council meeting. Livni, a moderate and potential rival to Olmert for leadership of Kadima party, opposed escalation early in the war. We should add that Livni is the only government leaders who now enjoys high (61%) approval by the Israel public. If the Olmert government falls, she would be the most likely candidate to put together a new one. It would not be the first time a female Foreign Minister became the Prime Minister of Israel.

The Day After Starts Now

2006-08-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

Israel government leaders have greeted the cease fire resolution with satisfaction, but most Israelis will regard the government’s acceptance of it with dismay. For them, the cease fire now, with so little of Hezbollah destroyed, represents at best a draw with a very outnumbered and outgunned enemy. Indeed, no goal that Israel set at the outset of its campaign – re-establishing Israel’s deterrence vis a vis Hezbollah, pounding it to a pulp and securing the release of the captured soldiers – was achieved. Instead, Israel must rely going forward on the Lebanese army and an international force to contain and hopefully disarm that enemy.

Israelis might have been able to accept the outcome with some equanimity if Hezbollah were a state, as they more or less swallowed the draws with Egypt and Syria in 1973. However, Hezbollah in Israeli eyes is not a state that pursues national interests, but a group of Islamic fanatics, sponsored by Iran and, like its sponsor, dedicated to the erasure of Israel and its people from the map. Because of this association, underscored by Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s diatribes against Israel over the last several months, Israeli Jews overwhelmingly supported the war as an existential struggle, i.e., a struggle of survival, against a transcendental evil. Much of the cheerleading for the war produced in Israel played upon the theme of an impending Holocaust that could now be squashed. Public intellectuals like A.B. Yehoshua initially justified Israel’s massive bombing of Lebanon in response to the soldiers’ capture as the appropriate answer to an enemy that did not want to negotiate but wanted only to kill you. This enemy is different from Palestinians, who they see more like children dominated too long by the Israeli parent and acting out demands for freedom. Hezbollah and the Iranians are adult, evil and thoroughly other. This was the sound of doves, men of the left. Those on the right were even more Biblical or clinical in demanding Hezbollah’s destruction – “a cancer that the Lebanese must vomit out,” Chief of Staff Dan Halutz put it, while prescribing bombing as the proper emetic for Lebanon.

So Israelis of all stripes are unhappy with the outcome, but they are each unhappy in their own way and with their own narrative. The narratives have the common thread of a great unhappiness with the government for the past and present and a lack of confidence in it going forward. Either Olmert and Peretz blew it by shackling army command, trusting army command, too hastily signing off on army plans, too slowly signing off, not doing enough to protect the northern settlements. Most narratives will also express unhappiness and mistrust about the army, still Israel’s central institution, as the failures of intelligence, tactics and strategies become manifest in the numerous post mortems. This mood does not portend well for the survival of the government or more basic political stability. Israel was quite polarized last year over the withdrawal from Gaza and one can expect more screaming and trauma over how to address the current crisis – the days after. The national anxieties are sure to be deepened by the certain absence of efforts to humanize the enemy and that enemy now being celebrated throughout the Middle East as a role model.

An Unclear Green Light

2006-08-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

(This marks my return from the utopian dreams below to murky reality)

This afternoon, Olmert and Peretz gave IDF the go ahead for expanding ground operations in southern Lebanon. According to army sources, it will take the IDF divisions involved one to two weeks to reach the Litani River and another six weeks to mop up Hezbollah fighters and strongpoints in the area. The military purpose of the operations is to push Hezbollah short range rockets back from firing points where they can hit Israel, or over 20 kilometers. Accordingly, IDF troops will move beyond the Litani at some points.

The green light comes as diplomats continued negotiations for a cease-fire resolution. The major hangup appears to be Lebanon's resistance to a beefed up United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNFIL), authorized to act coercively, i.e., shoot, under Chapter 7 of the UN charter. Currently, UNIFIL is authorized to monitor, under Chapter 6, and Israelis regard it as impotent. Lebanon President Siniora says Hezbollah's rejection of an enhanced UNIFIL is the reaon for his country's rejection of the amended draft that now, per his demand, explicitly calls for Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon. So the loudly announced start of the new campaign might stiffen Siniora or the campaign itself might erode Hezbollah's refusal. Thus the advocates of the campaign argued today it was needed to assure Israel gets political gains.

The army sources also said operations could stop if an acceptable-to-Israel cease-fire were approved. That is more dubious. If the campaign is well underway, when the Security Council finally approves a cease-fire resolution, it will be hard, as hisotry shows, for the troops to stop short of their goals. For example, at the end of the 1973 war, Israel units violated cease-fires in order to improve their offensive and defensive positions versus Egypt. Russian diplomats probably recalled such precedents -- the Soviet Union threatened to send "volunteers" to stop the 1973 violations -- and sought to buy time, by proposing a 72-hour cease-fire for "humanitarian purposes."

A pause imposed from the outside might be okay, in an Israeli perspective, even if it gave Hezbollah fighters time to reorganize. Like the US going AWOL two weeks ago, the campaign creates a new situation with an uncertain future. How many more lives will it cost Israel and Lebanon? Will Syria get involved? Will Hezbollah rockets strike Tel Aviv? If they do, what will be Israel's response? Making predictions on the Middle East is a very humbling experience. Without a cease-fire resolution today, Olmert and Peretz arguably had no choice than to give the go ahead. Israel's leaders and army have lost considerable credibility in the eyes of their own people and the world. Fresh polls of Israel public opinion show approval for Olmert down to 48%, for Peretz way down at 35% and for Halutz at 40%. A sizable minority of the population oppose broadening military operations and more doubt its success. Almost everyone faults the government's efforts to protect northern Israel and its residents.

Even more disconterting for the leaders could be signs that Israel risks the loss of neo-conservative and other Americans' affections. In a Haaretz opinion piece, two neo-cons argue unless Israel knocks out Hezbollah, Washington will not see it as a dependable strategic ally and a front line player against Iran. Anything less will embolden Iran, and the Bush administration will have nothing in return for the loss of political capital in the region due to its unnuanced support of Israel These changes will lead to less rather than more US involvement in the Middle East. Conventional wisdom holds that is not good for Israel. An Israeli failure will also disenchant many ordinary Americans. They like a winner or an underdog who proves it can win in the end.

Update:The U.S., France and Britain have announced agreement on a resolution for a cease-fire that will be submitted to the Security Council later today. The resolution works around the Lebanese objection to an earlier draft, by not basing the authority of the beefed up UNIFIL on Chapter 7. However, it satisfies Israel by mandating a 16,000 person force with powers to prevent any renewal of attacks on Israel by Hezbollah and to enforce an embargo of weapons to it. It also calls for the deployment of the Lebanese army in southern Lebanon and these forces and UNIFIL are deployed. The governments of Israel and Lebanon have received copies of the resolution, but UN sources said the vote at the Security Concil will not wait upon their responses.

Putting Pieces Together Is More Important than Connecting the Dots

2006-08-10T17:37:00.000-07:00

(I apologize if my optimism below offends anyone.)

update:The piece below proposes that Israel and Lebanon compensate each other the war damages they have suffered. Lebanon on this view is held accountable for the actions of Hezbollah. Some readers have usefully criticized the idea that it would require each side to acknowledge responsibility or blame. It is absurd to expect that. Besides calculating blame is backward looking. So I should rebrand the proposed payments as investments for peace. The respective war damages then estimate the investments that are needed for each country to regain the life and prospects it had on the eve of the conflict, given new trajectories.

With a cease-fire draft resolution in the pipeline and probably a cease fire itself to follow, the “Day After” should already look challenging to most leaders in the Israel-Hezbollah war. In Israel, Hezbollah, Lebanon, the United States, there will be scores to settle. The Israeli public might want to know why its political leaders trusted their generals, bowed to public expectations and authorized wide scale bombing of Lebanon in response to Hezbollah’s capture of two reservists. They will certainly want to know why the army could not produce the outcomes that the generals promised. The survivors in Hezbollah might want to know how Nasrallah so badly miscalculated Israel’s response to this incident. Other Lebanese might ask why their government had let Hezbollah continue for so long in its irresponsible provocations of Israel. Finally, Americans and others around the world should want to learn why the Bush administration shirked its responsibility as a superpower and failed to demand a cease-fire sooner.

Amid the recriminations, I hope some might consider mutual reparations as a right step toward a more peaceful future. One cannot and should not put a value on the over one thousand Lebanese and over one hundred Israelis that have been killed in the conflict. But one can estimate on each side the direct expenses of the war, the material damages, and the loss of future revenues and income. I propose that Israel and Lebanon compensate each other for the material damages and the foregone revenues. In saying this, I consider Lebanon responsible for Hezbollah’s action both because Hezbollah was part of the national unity government and because the national government was derelict in exercising authority over Hezbollah. One might argue that only with the Cedar revolution and Syria’s exit form could Lebanon exercise such authority in accordance with its obligations under Resolution 1559. This point might entitle Lebanon to a discount.

The reparations can be in money, kind or service. They should not cover the costs of expended and destroyed military equipment, which includes Hezbollah offices and facilities, used for the hostilities or supporting propaganda. They should also not cover the foreign currency reserve that the central banks in Israel and Lebanon used to support their local currencies during the conflict. The material damage can be evaluated as, first, the repair or replacement costs for the roads, housing, factories, farms, stores, schools and other physical facilities that were damaged, less their respective cumulative depreciation on the eve of the conflict. The evaluation also needs to include the costs for the rehabilitation and support, as long as needed, for people physically or psychologically wounded by the war. The foregone revenue would include the loss of industrial production and service sales during the conflict or as an immediate consequence of it, e.g., the loss of fall harvests in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. But these estimates should also calculate the impact that the damage, memories and lessons of the war will have on certain sectors of the respective economies. Tourism in both countries will inevitably suffer for some years. Paradoxically, Israel’s burgeoning sale of high tech military equipment might decline because such equipment had limited success in the type of war that Israel fought and that its customers will likely fight.

An international mediation board, with technical expertise, under United Nations auspices could facilitate the assessment of reparations and assure equity. This board should include representatives of Israel, Lebanon, permanent members of the Security Council and one of Hezbollah’s putative sponsors, Syria or Iran. Decisions regarding estimates of damage might be governed by a rule that each side’s aggregate estimate should not exceed the other’s or some other agreement at the outset. Both Israel and Lebanon can raise the money to pay the reparations in anyway they wish, short of bank robbery or similar illegal acts. Friends of the respective sides might willingly contribute to the reparations, if they believe these will help underwrite peace for future decades. Nevertheless, it helps for certain high profile, feel-good but vital projects be publicized to encourage contributions -- poster children for the reparations. One such effort could be an Israeli organized fund to clean up the Lebanese coast, polluted by oil as a consequence of Israel bombing the Jiyye power plant. A Lebanese fund might be directed at restoration of burned forests in northern Israel.

In addition to its direct benefits, even a mildly successful implementation of this idea could contribute in several ways to stability in the Middle East. First, it might encourage real efforts for reparations to Palestinian refugees from 1948 and 1967, and to Jews forced out of Arab countries in the 1950s. That would remove a major impediment to settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Second, since the payouts in both the Lebanon-Israel and the Israel-Palestinian cases would occur over years, it would also give each side a stake in the other’s economic development and welfare. Finally, it would publicize with excruciating clarity the costs of a war. Those figure might give politicians, generals and publics pause before turning to a military solution for a crisis.

Write On

2006-08-10T09:41:00.000-07:00

David Grossman, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua are arguably Israel's most distinguished novelists. They are also leading doves. Today they tooks the rare act for writers of holding a press conference to express their opposition to Israel's widening the war against Hizbollah. In the shadow of the Ministry of Defense, they called for the government to negotiate with Lebanon on the basis of Siniora's seven point plan. They iterated that they believed Israel had a right to response vigorously to Hizbollah's capture of the soldiers, but insisted that it should stop now and accept Siniora's program as a political victory. The deployment of the Lebanese army along the border is what Israel wants. Grossman added (my translation)

This war has surfaced our deep seated fears and traumas. Perhaps that has caused people to lose their sense of proportion and their ability to identify what is in our best interests for now and in the long run. We are not exactly the hunted Jews. We have several hundred planes and thousands of tanks. I do not ignore that some aspects of the fundamental Jewish tragedy are present in this war. I do not ignore the feeling that still after sixty years we are not accepted in the Middle East and that many nations regard this place more as our shelter than our home. Nevertheless, I think we must act differently than we have [in this war].

The press conference proceeded a demonstration sponsored by Meretz and Peace Now against widening the war.

The writers' statements today much more strongly articulated the demand for a cease-fire and political settlement than an essay they published article last Sunday. The essay called for a cease fire, but justified the war as an appropriate, legitimate response to the capture of the soldiers. A few Israeli Jews further to their left criticized the essay, because it ignored that government's top declared purpose was to destroy Hizbullah. The Talmud has a felicitous means of reconciling two differing statements by sages on the same point. It explains the second statements as made "after they learned."

And more learning: The decision of Olmert and Peretz to wait for diplomatic developments before launching expanded operations is commendable. The US and France have just asnnounced they have agreed on an amended resolution that was approved by Israel and apparently by Lebanon. It calls for an immediate cease fire, withdrawal of Israel forces from Lebanon as the Lebanese army is deployed in the south and the expansion of an international force there. According to Israel sources, an embargo on arms shipments to Hizbullah will be included.

All in the Family

2006-08-09T19:02:00.000-07:00

Family ties are very important in the Middle East. Many personal and family ties link Shiites in Lebanon and Iraq. For example, Musa as-Sadr, founder of Amal, from which Hezbollah split off, was from a family of prominent Iraqi Shite clerics that also includes Motqada as-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi army and Shiites in Baghdad. Mohammad Husein Fadl allah, a spiritual leader of Hezbollah was born in Najaf, Iraq, and Hasan Nasrallah is reported to have studied in Irag in his teens. The United States's support of Israel thus particularly compounds the Iraqi Shiites' grievances toward it as occupier of their country. I am remined of these connections by a fresh Israel media report that an IDF missile attack at Mashghara, a Bekaa Valley town in Lebanon, assassinated Hasan as-Sadr, a senior Hezbollah leader, and five of his family. I suspect, on the basis of the name, he was related to the Iraqi as-Sadr. So expect an extremely large demonstration in Baghdad this Friday in support of Hezbollah and against the United States.

Families ties also figured in remarks by Israel Justice Minister Haim Ramon during the security cabinet meeting today that decided to authorize expanded ground operations in Lebanon. Ramon said afterward

I told the Defense Minister and IDF to attack without mercy all areas from where rockets are fired. They must shoot to pieces every house where Katyushas are fired. I know there is a risk of repeating tragedies, like the one at Qana. But if someone uses children as shields and forces me to choose between the safety of his children or mine, I will choose my children's safety.

Ramon forgets that was not the choice at Qana or, per Human Rights Watch, many other places where IDF bombs and shells killed children and families. But he also seems bent on sharing with Alberto Gonzales the dubious distinction of being a Minister of Justice who advocates violations of Geneva conventions and offers flimsy excuses for doing so. (Mr. Ramon is a member of Ehud Olmert's Kadima party. However he did not begin his political career as a fascist in Likud, but as a socialist in the Labor party.)

For tracking the war closely, the University of Texas online collection of war related maps is outstanding. It is updated daily with maps that track Israel troop movements, bombings, missile launches, humanitarian relief efforts, etc. It also has maps on the topology and ethnic distributions of Lebanon.

I was Wrong before I might be Right

2006-08-09T09:01:00.000-07:00

Israel's security cabinet has just approved an expansion of military operations with the aim of occupying southern Lebanon up to the Litani River and even beyond. Furthermore Peretz and Halutz were vociferous and relentless in pressing for its adoption. So I was wrong in predicting the plan would not be approved and for suggesting that Halutz and Peretz were less than fully committed to it. However, the decision added that the timing and extent of the operations would be at the discretion of Defense Minister Peretz and Prime MInister Olmert and with consideration of the diplomatic steps toward settlement of the conflict. So I still might be right to have doubted the expansion will actually happen. (I should remember that making predictions about the Middle East is a very humbling.)

The approval raises the stakes for the diplomatic moves. Israel now can accept nothing less than a ceae-fire that effectively guarantees the goal of the plan -- the suppression of Katyusha fire into northern Israel. Thus Peretz argued that only be capturing the sites from which the rockets are launched can Israel extract maximum gain from a diplomatic settlement. That means Israel and the US will resist a proposal for a cease fire that demands an Israel withdrawal from southern Lebanon before the full deployment of an international peace keep force. It might even try to raise the stakes by calling for the disarmament of Hizbullah as a pre-condition for the withdrawal.

Officers of the two mobilized reserve divisions that are designated for the expansion are reportedly critical of its plan. They fear, like Olmert himself, that it can go awry with considerable loss of soldiers. On the other hand, the announcement itself considerably stresses Hizbullah. Its planners now face the problem of whether, where and how to challenge Israeli advances, under considerable resource constraints. They have only several thousand first class fighters and dwindling armament. Their vehicular movement has been inhibited by the IAF. Of course their problem would be worse if Lebanon whose army will be mobilizing to their north and Israel to their south were on good terms.

Another Casualty of War

2006-08-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

Udi Adam, the general in charge of IDF’s ground forces in Lebanon, was kicked down the chain of command today. Chief of Staff Dan Halutz effectively relieved him of his responsibilities by sending General Moshe Kaplinski to Northern Command to take charge of combined air, naval and ground operations. Adam might be a fall guy or just could not hack fighting well-trained, well-armed guerillas. Clearly his forces’ negligible progress in cleaning out villages in southern Lebanon and suppressing the Katyushas striking Israel dismayed the General Staff, government officials and the public. The continued fighting in villages that were “captured” a week ago, the rising number of Israeli military casualties and destroyed equipment suggest a failure to learn.

These losses also undermine the claims by Halutz and his puppet Defense Minister Peretz for the new operations they want the government to authorize tomorrow. They say IDF ground forces can speedily occupy the area up to the Litani River and beyond, thereby pushing 80% of Hizbullah’s Katyushas out of range, while the air force neutralizes the long range missiles. As suggested here yesterday, their touting new operations is primarily a cover-your-ass move in preparation for the inevitable post-war investigations, like “we could have won, but they did not let us.” They probably do not expect or even want the authorization. They would look even worse than they do now, if the operation were short of its goals, when a cease-fire is declared. They would then have to order violations of the cease-fire to complete the operation. could be they also hope their talk will make the Lebanese government stop insisting that a cease-fire resolution include Israel’s immediate withdrawal of its troops from Lebanon. However I doubt that, since they have shown no interest in a cease-fire except to regard it as an impediment to their actions. Seemingly, their main intent toward Lebanon is to destroy it, because they can do that, if they cannot destroy Hizbollah. Yesterday, they approved a 24-hour curfew on the area south of the Litani that licenses IDF to shoot anything moving there, including humanitarian aid vehicles. Today, IDF killed fourteen people when it bombed a funeral procession in Reiza for fifteen people whom its bombing had killed there yesterday.

Update: Tomorrow's Haaretz reports that Olmert is deliberating (or hesitating) over the expansion of operations, because of his worry that it will cost too many lives -- perhaps in the hundreds -- and produce too few gains. So he is asking for alternatives to the ground operations with estimates of their respective gains and losses. He seems to be learning!

Israel Lebanon Hizbullah Olmert

Time for Playing

2006-08-07T18:19:00.000-07:00

The ground fighting continued in southern Lebanon; people killed more people. An Israeli bombing of a shia neighborhood in Beirut killed fifteen people and wounded as many more. War fatigue and resignation spread among both Lebanese and Israeli publics. In August, many are usually on vacation, tourists flock to Lebanese beaches and Israelis go abroad. Now the Lebanese beaches are deserted and fouled with oil; many Lebanese are displaced, sleeping in schools and parks. Some have left the country, while others have actually returned to their bombed home towns, for nowhere else to go. Those Israelis still in the north sleep in the bomb shelters; a bit further south they stay home, some waiting to be mobilized, others worrying about friends and family who have been called.

Several blown scenes, wrong lines and poor acting highlight the differences between front stage and back stage in the unfolding political drama of bringing this sixth Arab-Israeli war to a close. In Beirut, Lebanese President F0uad Siniora gives an impassioned speech to the foreign ministers of Arab states. He asks their support for a seven point program that includes the deployment of the Lebanese army in southern Lebanon, the subordination of Hizbullah forces to government control, and the sovereignty of Lebanon over all its territory. He demands a change in the cease-fire draft resolution so that it will tell Israel to withdraw immediately from Lebanon. The ministers applaud as much for his determination to put a subnational militia under state authority as his wanting Israel out. Then he breaks down in tears describing the physical destruction of his country, one thousand dead so far, and the death of forty more people today in Israel’s bombing of Hulea in southern Lebanon. But wait -- only one person, not forty died in Hulea. After the ministers have left for New York to present the case for changing the draft resolution language, Siniora admits the mistake: Fortunately the first reports were wrong, people buried in the rubble of a collapsed building were rescued. His slip reminds us that he is posturing: not insincerely, but not boldly, either toward Hizbullah, the Security Council or even Israel. A deal with Hizbullah, whatever its provisions, has already been cut. Later in the day, the Lebanese cabinet, including two Hizbullah ministers, votes unanimously to deploy the Lebanese army in the south. The government spokesperson announces that after the deployment of the army in about ten days, Hizbullah will operate in the south only as a political party representing an integral part of the population.

In Texas, George Bush stumbles through some words supporting the draft resolution. He is unrehearsed and uncertain of the meaning of what he says. But he is sure that Hizbullah is still a proxy for Syria and Iran. Israel must stay in Lebanon, until an international force is there to prevent these sponsors from rearming their client. Bad choice of words, George! You've greenlighting an occupaiton, after you greenlighted an invasion. The French foreign minister said it better in addressing the same point. He told Lebanon that it needed to consider it was not the only party to the crisis. Bush’s words might cause a few more days wrangling at the Security Council, by the diplomats playing to their domestic audiences, until some cosmetic changes are made in the draft. The changes will probably call for something like Israel’s withdrawal "as troops are securely deployed and monitoring assured.”

In Israel preparation for the “Day After” the cease fire grinds forward. Relevant ministers and army commanders are getting their stories or excuses ready for the storm of criticism that many Israelis are willing to defer until then. The head of Northern Command, who is directly responsible for combat operations, says the army has a new plan for driving Hizbullah rockets out of range. It involves moving forces far deeper into Lebanon, but, he complains to journalists, the government is not unleashing the army. The Prime Minister’s office says Olmert has not seen a plan, and Olmert says if the rockets keep falling on Israel, there will be no stopping IDF. Defense Minister Amir Peretz says unless the cease-fire resolution comes in a few days, Israel will move its forces to the Litani and even further. Apparently after two weeks of inconclusive fighting around the same villages, the generals think they can now deal speedily with the guerillas. We probably will not find out if they are right. Despite the bravado, the Israel government would prefer a cease-fire, even if it has to wait through this weekend. Read the threats as a way of speeding up the process. And it is trying to neutralize the Lebanese and other Arab objections to the draft resolution by raising its own demands. These include more emphasis on stopping arms shipments and no inclusion of the Shebaa Farms area as a matter of negotiations with Lebanon. The government can drop that last demand for a resoultion otherwise similar to the present draft.

Today’s question: Why didn’t these events happen last week?

Tell Me not in Mournful Numbers

2006-08-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

News of the draft resolution for a cease fire produced no lull in the fighting between Israel and Hizbullah. Instead the pace picked up. Each side seemed trying to get in some more licks, before the international community says “stop,” or to convince the other side its best interest is to heed that word when it comes. Salvos of Hizbullah rockets produced the deadliest day for Israel, since the beginning of the conflict. About 200 rockets were fired into northern Israel. A Katyusha landed amidst a group of reservists waiting near Kiryat Shmona to cross into Lebanon. Its explosives and anti-personnel ball bearings killed thirteen and wounded several more. Several longer range rockets slammed into Haifa, killing three people outright, wounding about one hundred more and destroying at least one apartment building. The Iranian made rockets carried heavier payloads than those previously fired at Haifa. Israel officials said their use was an escalation.

Israel used bombs and missiles to attack Hizbullah installations in southern Beirut, Tyre and Qana. It also used artillery and air-to-surface missiles to attack several villages in southern Lebanon. Lebanese officials said at least sixteen people were killed, including a passenger in a UN aid convoy truck that was struck by an Israeli missile. Much of the bombing was directed at further destruction of Lebanon’s road system, with the ostensible purpose of preventing any Syrian overland resupply of Hizbullah armament. Israel is seriously concerned about that possibility and said it now wants the cease-fire resolution also to call on states to enforce an arms embargo on Hizbullah. Might the total disruption of transportation, by cutting down the interaction of Lebanese communities, help foment a civil war of other Lebanese against Hizbullah. At the beginning of the fighting, Israel leaders hoped that would be one outcome of their pummeling all Lebanon for Hizbullah's action. Or perhaps there is less chance for that outcome, because the communities will find it harder to attack one another.

In response to the carnage in northern Israel and Lebanon, Amnesty International has called for a cease-fire vigil on Monday August 7th. It describes attacks by both sides as violations of international humanitarian law and war crimes. It criticizes unnamed governments for not having moved sooner to end the crisis, but choosing instead to “to prioritize their own political and military interests over innocent lives of civilians.”

Meanwhile back at the Gaza Strip

A new theme emerged today amid the reports of Israel attacks in Lebanon: the targeting of Palestinian militants/ terrorists. The dead in Lebanon included a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command, a small, secular faction funded by Syria. This item reminds us that IDF units and Hamas and other militants have been fighting in the Gaza strip for the last four weeks, since the abduction of Israel soldier by Hamas militants. About 150 Palestinians have been killed , including innocent adult civilians and children -- on one occasion, almost all members of a nuclear family. Besides shooting at the soldiers in Gaza, Hamas and Islamic Jihad continue to fire occasional Kasem rockets into Israel’s Negev in the hope of killing civilians there.

Israel hopes that its further degradation of Palestinian national and economic life will undermine support for the elected Hamas government. It has accordingly destroyed many Hamas and Palestinian authority facilities in Gaza. Since the beginning of the crisis, it has arrested in Gaza and the West Bank eight government ministers and thirty Palestinian Parliament members from Hamas. Today, the Israel army arrested another Hamas member, the Speaker of the Palestinian Parliament. The secretary to the Palestinian Authority government (cabinet) wondered in a BBC interview how Israel could expect to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, if it arrests their elected officials.

I suspect his question is code. Israel has publicly declared for months that it sees no one among the Palestinians as a partner in peace negotiations. But Israel is still negotiating with Hamas via Egyptian officials for the release of Corporal Shalit. The arrest of the Palestinian parliamentarian today was probably due to Israel’s wanting one more high value bargaining chip. Israel is balking at the Hamas demand that in return for the soldier, it has to release 1,000 male Palestinian prisoners in addition to the several hundred women and children it has in custody. So the secretary in effect was telling Israel that the arrest today would not change Hamas’s bargaining position.

My heart aches in a certain way for Shalit, for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two reservists captured by Hizbullah three weeks ago, and even for Samir Kantar, the terrorist for whom Hizbullah wanted to bargain. I deeply wish for the soldier’s release and even for Kantar’s, if that’s needed to make the deal. But I wonder what they will think and feel when they learn the extent of the violence, death and destruction that has been unleashed in their names. The Talmud says that a person is obligated to say “the world was created for my sake.” This should encourage him or her to enjoy the gifts of this world and take responsibility for what happens in it. But what can one feel, when he or she has to say “the world was destroyed for my sake.”
Israel Lebanon Hizbullah Gaza

Is It the Good Turtle Soup or merely the Mock?

2006-08-05T15:31:00.001-07:00

The White House agreed this morning to submit with France a draft resolution calling for an immediate end to all Israeli offensive action in Lebanon and to all Hizbullah attacks [on Israel and Israeli soldiers in Lebanon]. The US had objected to the draft resolution, saying that the call for a cease fire should only come with the deployment of a strong UN peacekeeping force in the area south of the Litani River. Now, as ambassador to the UN John Bolton put it, the US “is prepared to move as quickly as other members of the council want to move.” A second resolution will authorize the peacekeeping force and its deployment.

Per the theory of Bush in the grip of neo-conservatives, this agreement (a humiliating surrender to the French!) indicates that neo-conservatives have thrown in the towel for the time being. They know Israel’s present government will not expand the current fighting into the wider war they want. So they see little point in having the war continue. The sooner it ends, the quicker recriminations will begin against the Olmert government’s handling of the war and its diplomatic aftermath.

Israel is likely to accept the draft resolution. Its conditions are favorable to Israel: it lets IDF stay in Lebanon, until the international force is deployed and Hizbullah fighters removed from south of the Litani. It emphasizes (though does not require) the need for Hizbullah to return the soldiers, whose capture provoked the current fighting. The government also knows the public will no longer unquestioningly support expanded operations in Lebanon. By now many Israelis understand that IDF's moving further into Lebanon will not stop the long range Hizbullah rockets from hitting Israel. That will require negotiations and agreements. As political scientist Yaron Ezrahi says, "we can have a lot to gain by stopping now and moving to convert what we have done to political assets." There is already open criticism of the government and general staff for their poor strategies, worse decision making and clumsy spinning. Criticism in another form came today with a peace rally in Tel Aviv of over 5,000 people. They heard former Knesset members Yael Dayan and Naomi Chazan and others call for an end to fighting and a prisoners swap to get back the captured soldiers. (Neither MK was speaking on behalf of her party Meretz, which continues to support the war.)

In contrast, a Hizbullah member of the Lebanese cabinet publicly rejected the cease fire call, saying there would be no cease fire as long as there are Israeli troops in Lebanon. Clearly Hizbullah would like to reclaim its role as a national resistance force, especially since the cease fire resolution foresees its disarmament or, at least, its integration in the Lebanese army. But by prolonging the fight and destruction of Lebanon, Hezbullah would lose much of the the sympathy it has won in Lebanon and alienate the other communities there. Moreover, Syria and Iran are very unlikely to rearm Hizbullah, while the Security Council is paying close attention to the conflict. More positively for Hizbullah, the resolution "encourages" the meeting of certain Hizbullah goals: Israel's return of Lebanese prisoners and its handing the Shebaa Farms to Lebanon. So, another week of bombs and rockets may ensue, but, I think, Hizbullah will accept the the draft resolution's substance in some fashion, in some way.

What Makes George Sit?

2006-08-04T15:47:00.000-07:00

Dan Froomkin's priceless White House Briefing rounds up the current speculations on why George Bush continues to greenlight Israel’s attacks on Hizbullah and Lebanon. With Israeli leaders needing more time to achieve their unclear objectives, he nixed Condi Rice's belated and brief effort to join European and other leaders in seeking an immediate cease fire. At his bidding, she has also stalled the negotiations over the political and security arrangements that would accompany and follow the cease fire, thus assuring even more delay.

The speculations put the onus variously on Bush's

unresolved Oedipal conflicts with his more pro-Arab father Bush 41;
a personal Christian devotion to the Holy Land and the Jews living in it;
a desire to hasten the Rapture or End of Days by promoting Middle East turmoil;
being a puppet of Dick Cheney and the neo-conservatives.

A decade ago the neo-conservatives saw a conflict between Israel and Hizbullah as the start of a war in which Israel, backed by the US, would also attack Syria and Iran. The war would lead to a new Middle East. In the meantime, the vision dimmed, as Israel withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza, and Israelis turned from making war to making money. But given Israel's initial response to Hizbullah's provocation and the failure of their Iraq adventure, the neo-conservatives again saw Israel as a Great White Hope. According to Sidney Blumenthal's intelligence community sources, NSC Middle East Director Eliot Abrams (a neo-con prince), with Bush's approval, directed NSA to share with Israel its monitoring of Syria and Iran. The hope is information on any arms shipments to from these states to Hizbullah will prompt Israel to bomb them, thus opening a four-front war.

However, some neo-cons already sense that Israel will again disappoint them. It has not delivered the quick, utterly smashing defeat of Hizbullah, which they expected. Israel leaders show little inclination to bomb Syria. PM Ehud Olmert even hesitates to expand the buffer zone in Lebanon to the Litani River. So neo-con mouthpiece Charles Krauthammer now sneeringly dismisses Olmert as weak and vacillating. Perhaps, blogger Max Bumenthal suggests, most would prefer the conflict to stop inconclusively and see the Olmert government collapse in consequence of its ill-conceived, poorly executed, costly campaign. That could clear the way for Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud to return to power. After a decent interval and the inevitable Hizbullah provocation, the grand scheme could start anew. So if the neo-cons' really want that and they do control Bush, we could expect him soon to tell Rice to speed up the preparations for a cease-fire. Yes, that's a lot of if's . Foreign policy decision-making in the White House is too damn opaque to do any better guessing.

This account of the influence on Bush is scary, but less so than the speculation that he's thirsting for Rapture or Apocalypse now. He would then be the perfect mastch for Iran's President Ahmadinejad, who is reported to have a similar yearning. Ahmadinejad, though, reverses the casting for the sons of light and the sons of darkness.

On Human Rights and Wrongs

2006-08-04T08:49:00.000-07:00

The spiraling conflict between Israel and Hizbullah has produced numerous violations of human rights by both sides. All of Hizbullah’s rocket attacks on Israel constitute indiscriminate targeting of civilian populations that are not directly participating in the hostilities. These attacks violate every international standard; they are criminal and cannot be justified as appropriate retaliation for Israel’s attacks on Hizbullah or other Lebanese targets.

“Israeli forces have systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon,” according to a Human Rights Watch report released yesterday. The pattern of attacks, the report argues, cannot be “dismissed as mere accidents and cannot be blamed on wrongful Hezbollah practices. In some cases, [the] attacks constitute war crimes.” The report rejects the standard Israel exculpation that all the civilians killed by Israel were, in effect (or perhaps after the fact), used as human shields by Hizbullah. “In the many cases of civilian deaths examined by Human Rights Watch, the location of Hezbollah troops and arms had nothing to do with the deaths because there was no Hezbollah around.”

IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz’s insensitivity to human rights was well known before his appointment and prompted calls in Israel for blocking the appointment. (Of course, the same must be said of Nasrallah.) But Halutz’s leadership only incrementally worsens a tradition of human rights abuse that Israel developed in 40 years of occupying the West Bank and Gaza and 18 years of war and occupation in Lebanon. During this entire period, IDF investigated and punished almost none of the thousands of documented human rights abuses. As military columnist Yossi Melman noted in this morning’s Haaretz, during the first week of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, IDF killed between 6,000 – 10,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, the majority of them civilians. Since in three weeks of fighting, Israel has killed only 800 civilians, Melman concludes this war is being more carefully managed and constrained.

Melman’s argument, however, reminds me of Amos Oz’s sad reflection in The Slopes of Lebanon, a book about that first invasion: “We used to say we are a light unto the nations. Now we say we’re no worse than anyone else. So shut the fuck up."

A Stairway to Hell

2006-08-03T11:51:00.000-07:00

Today Hizbullah rockets (160) took their heaviest toll on Israeli civilians since the beginning of hostilities three weeks ago: 8 killed, 4 seriously wounded and 20 plus lightly wounded. The death raised the civilian death count to 27. IDF reported that 3 soldiers were killed in fighting today, bringing to 40 the number of soldiers killed in the conflict with Hizbullah in the past three weeks.

Lebanese authorities announced that over 800 Lebanese have died in the conflict. This figure includes only about 40 Hizbullah fighters and several Lebanese army soldiers. The rest are said to be civilians with nearly half of them children. To estimate total dead in Lebanon, you might add the several hundred Hizbullah fighters that IDF claims it killed (or adjust that for inflation by PR flacks).

They are Snarling at One Another: Israeli planes resumed heavy bombing of Shia neighborhoods in southern Beirut. Hasan Nasrallah warned in response that if the bombing continued, Hizbullah would hit Tel Aviv with rockets. The rockets yesterday into the northern West Bank signal that Hizbullah has some capability to fulfill the threat. A senior IDF officer answered Nasrallah by threatening that Israel would destroy Lebanon's entire infrastructure, if Tel Aviv were hit. Israel certainly has the power to make good on that threat and more. For example, its destruction, at the outset of the war, of a Lebanese power plant and its oil tanks caused a giant oil spill now polluting most Lebanese beaches.

Buffer Zone Buffed Up: It keeps growing! Today, Amir Peretz and the General Staff indirectly acknowledged the flaw in the idea of buffer zone only 6 kilometers in depth. It will not push Hizbullah rocket launchers beyond range of hitting Israel. Consequently Peretz now wants the authorization of a plan to occupy and clear out all of Lebanon south of the Litani (about 20 kilometers beyond the Israel border). This will require putting another 20,000 to 30,000 Israeli soldiers into an area that includes the city of Tyre, and more than 20 towns and villages. Before the conflict the area's population was perhaps 500,000; the IDF plan will apparently have zero tolerance for indigenous population. This plan would get most Israel settlements out of Katyusha rocket range, but not out of Hizbullah's long range rockets. So, according to the latest report in Haaretz, Olmert is not enthusiastic about the plan: Too costly with too little gain. Apparently, Peretz has been completely captured by the IDF General Staff and Olmert only partly. Their differences are likely to grow, as Chief of Staff Halutz seeks more time, men and equipment to make good on his pretensions. He probably does not want to be remembered as a clumsy, unsuccessful butcher.

On the Ideological Front: One IDF press briefer today linked the Tisha b'av fast, which is today in the Hebrew calendar and commemorates the destruction of the two temples in Jerusalem, with Iran president Ahmadinejad's renewed call for the disappearance of Israel and to the current war. The timing he claims proves that Israel is fighting a war of survival. Considering such religious fervor, we appreciate that the leader of the ultra Orthodox Degal ha-Torah party called upon the government to consider a cease fire in order to save lives and avoid alienating the nations of the world. Thank God!

It's the Story, Stupid

2006-08-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

Steve Erlanger reports in the New York Times on Israelis' concern that the war with Hizbullah can be spun into a narrative of Israel’s military victory and power. Different Israelis weigh in on what outcomes would make for a good narrative, as if they had all become literary critics. Most believe the narrative needs to be so unquestionably obvious that Arabs will accept and be deterred from future attacks on Israel, but almost nobody believes a basis for that can be achieved. Olmert, nevertheless, adamantly rejects any cease-fire now in the hope further fighting could secure that basis. (A sociologist friend Gordon Fellman suggests Olmert's persistence is due to more than wanting to tell a good story and, incidentally, save his political skin. He is also succumbing to the worst influences of normative masculinity -- the compulsion to win. This compulsion may flourish in Israel,as in many other places, in both the individual psyche and the collective ideology. The Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin has critiqued Zionism for its unreflected incorporation of such vainglorious masculine ideals.)

The dean of Washington pundits, Washington Post columnist David Broder questions the assumption that an inarguable win for Israel in Lebanon or for the US in Iraq is needed to create deterrence. As counter examples, he cites the US draw in Korea, in the 1950s, and the loss in Vietnam in the 1970s. North Korea in the last half century has not attacked South Korea. Vietnam has been self-contained over the past decades. True Broder overlooks Vietnam's short war with China which might have encouraged its subsequent self-containment. But his approach does suggest a wider variety of stories for how peace or stability can be reached than the Israelis imagine.

The simplistic narratives that Israel political and military elites continue to tell about their conflicts with the Palestinians and other Arabs, like the stories Arabs tell about Israel, do contribute to the conflict. Despite the efforts of Israel’s new historians to demythologize the past and Israel having some world class novelists (all doves, by the way), the political leaders espouse terribly one dimensional views of their enemies’ motivations and goals. (Rabin and Shimon Peres were major exceptions to this generalization.) The current view is that the enemy is motivated by a fanatical, religiously inspired transcendental hatred of Israel that can only be satisfied by the destruction of Israel. Only the knout can curb it. (Several decades ago the motivation was a fanatical, pan-Arab inspired, transcendental hatred.) However U. of Chicago Professor Robert Pape in today's New York Times tells a more interesting story about the Lebanese "terrorists" that gathered around Hizbullah in the 1990s. Many of them were not religious, some were not even Muslim, but they shared a burning desire to free their homeland of a foreign occupier. Hizbullah gave them the needed organizational framework.
Israel Lebanon Hizbullah Middle East

Latest Israeli Report on the Buffer Zone Plan

2006-08-02T18:38:00.000-07:00

The following is a slightly abridged translation of a report in the Israel daily Yediot Ahranot on the buffer zone: "IDF expects to complete by tomorrow night the deployment of troops in a buffer zone that runs 70 kilometers from Rosh ha-Nikrah (Ras Nikourah) to Metula and extends 5-6 kilometers into Lebanon. The purpose of the zone is to keep Hizbullah from the border, to cleanse it of any factors that could be exploited for terrorism and to use it as a jumping off point for IDF attacks deeper into Lebanon, as the need asrises. IDF does not intend to build fixed outpost in this zone and will instead concentrate on destroying all Hizbullah fortifications and military material. IDF companies will circulate through the area with the aim of locating and destroying the fortifications and material. In the future, should Israel desire it, an international force or a Lebanese force could enter the area, if its purpose was to neutralize Hizbullah and to enforce the type of orderly and stable border situation of two neighboring states."

I believe that it is clear from this report that the General Staff has no intention of handing over this buffer zone to an international force, until far in the future and for its own convenience. It is also clear, that IDF will destroy all Hizbullah social and educational facilities in the area on the grounds that they are all terrorist installations. Destruction of farms, orchards, livestock as well as infrastructure in the area can also be expected since these could be exploited for terrorist purposes. IDF will probably prohibit the return of any civilians to villages in the buffer zone, since they could also be used for terrorism. I try these conclusions from the Israeli argument that all civilians will be used as human shields. No doubt Israel spin masters will claim the ethnic cleansing here is being done for humanitarian purposes.
Israel Lebanon Hizbullah buffer zone

Mr. Arkin's Barkin

2006-08-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

Bll Arkin, who writes a savvy column on National Security for the Washington Post, has taken a swing at critics of Israel's military efforts and targeting of civillian populations in its war against Hizbullah. He argues Israel is doing fine militarily and that the critics are blinded by their anti-Bush, anti-Israel or lack of stomach for innocent casualties. War is war. To decide who won look at the balance of lost material, combatants and position, not at the public relations or perceptions.

Mr. Arkin is underinformed about Israel's own war aims. If IDF's performance until now is measured against those, then it is failing. According to Olmert, Peretz and Halutz, the immediate war objectives were to a) reestablish Israel's deterrent power, b) turn the Lebanese population against Hizbullah, c) degrade Hizbullah's armament and suppress its attacks on Israel, d) permanently cripple the organization, if not destroy it, e) win through air power and avoid commiting any large number of ground troops to Lebanon. On the basis of experience there, they wanted to avoid a quagmire.

None of these objectives have been or are likely to be achieved. On the contrary, Israel has already had to send five brigades to six brigades (7500 - 9000) men into Lebanon, and might have to double that number before a cease fire. It also finds itself etnically cleansing all of Lebanon south of the Litani. This certainly will not make Lebanes vomit out the cancer of Hizbullah, as Hulutz predicted they would. Moreover, the Hizbullah rocket attacks have not been suppressed.

Arkin is right about the attrition of considerable Hizbullah resources. This has not been without cost for Israel. Israel's costs in jet fuel, lost and expended armament, loss of production, etc. has been enormous. Furthermore, the war has revealed the rustiness of Israel's military intelligence and its vulnerability to surprises, such as the shore-to-ship missile that crippled a Israeli frigate.

One further point. Mr. Arkin, in fighting a guerilla organization, each side's perceptions of itself and the other side, and the perceptions of the surrounding civilian populations are very important. Now what would you say about the military efforts in Iraq?

Olmert’s Bet on Bush for Time Pays Off for the Time Being

2006-08-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

PM Ehud Olmert appears to have won his bet that Bush would override Condi Rice’s efforts to get the US to join the international community in seeking a quick cease-fire in Israel’s war with Hizbullah and the destruction of Lebanon. After talking with Bush, Rice is now gating a cease-fire on conditions for first meeting conditions for its stability, including the deployment of an international peace keeping force. Since the UN Security Council is unlikely even to authorize this force before next week, the war will contine for weeks, if not months. That extension should give IDF the time to occupy the area south of the Litani and turn it into a buffer zone. This means clearing the area of all inhabitants, Hizbullah and civilians alike.

Olmert says that Israel would relinquish control of this zone to an international peace keeping force, but is unclear whether this excludes a strip along the border that Israel would control, per his colleague Peretz. Moreover, Israel will probably demand that this force prevent the return of civilians to the area for fear Hizbullah will infiltrate with them. Given these sticky points, look for an Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon lasting months, maybe years. This prediction sadly reminds me of a story from the Israel 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Several days after it began, a peacenik friend had a politically savvy printer make up several thousand bumper stickers reading “Israel out of Lebanon.” The printer looked at the text and said “It will be good for a long time.”

What do Israeli leaders expect? First, they expect the Lebanese, Palestinians and Arab world will see a defeated Hizbullah, signified by its fighters being expelled from southern Lebanon and prevented from returning. But that might not a clear sign, if Hizbullah can mount guerilla attacks on IDF forces in the south, as in did in the 1990s, and thereby reassert its claim to be a national resistance force. Israel’s obvious dislike for such attacks and the enhancement of Hizbullah’s reputation might therefore force it to compromise somewhat on the timing, extent and condition of the peacekeepers deployment.

Second, Israeli leaders expect a disarming of Hizbullah. They will only be partly satisfied. While military operations continue, this goal is partly achieved through attrition – Hizbullah using up some weapons in its own attacks, others being destroyed in IDF attacks – and keeping Syria and Iran from rearming Hizbullah. The leaders anticipate additional disarmament as Hizbullah fighters and resources are caught between the hammer of Israel forces in the south and the anvil of a Lebanese army, strengthened by the international force. However, I don’t think the international force will receive a mandate to forcibly disarm Hizbullah, and, even if it did, its troops would be reluctant to do the job. And as British experiences with the IRA shows, armed sub-national groups do not willingly disarm without some ideological demobilization on their own parts and incentives from others.

Even with these more restrained and realistic goals, Israeli leaders are likely to be disappointed. There will neither be the clear victory they loudly seek nor the birth of a new Middle East. Much of the disappointment they should attribute to their own failures: These include the hasty decision to rush into wide scale operations with insufficient military intelligence and unclear goals. But another failure is a mentality that unfortunately construes the present conflict as a zero-sum game and regards the enemy as a cancer to be obliterated.
Israel Lebanon Hizbullah

Rerun

2006-08-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

update to story below: The IDF spokesperson said the commandos captured several Hizbullah personnel and returned safely to Israel. Lebanese security officials said the commandos took three minor Hizbullah officials, one of them named Nasrallah. 15 civilians were killed as collateral damage. Hizbullah has denied that any of its personnel were captured. It has not repeated the report that the commandos are surrounded by its fighters.

original comment starts here: An attempt by Israel to return to the glory days of daring commando raids in Lebanon might have seriously misfired. According to Al-Jazeera and other Arab news networks, Israeli commandos were landed by helicopter at a hospital north of Baalbek. Their mission was to abduct a Hizbullah leader reportedly hospitalized there. According to these reports, the unit is now holed up in the hospital and surrounded by Hizbullah fighters. The sides are engaged in a fierce fire fight, with some killed and wounded in the hospital. The IDF, however, is saying nothing.

The raid suggests growing impatience in Israel with the limited success, until now, in fighting Hizbullah. There is fear that time will run out, i.e., a cease-fire will be ordered, before IDF succeeds in crippling Hizbullah. That will prompt efforts to get as many bargaining chips as possible and show Israel has seized the initiative. Some Israeli security managers might have recognized these needs a week ago. When the Israel cabinet approved plans to mobilize several reserve divisions and widen the ground war (July 27, 2006), Mossad head Meir Dagan proposed another more daring plan. Dagan also placed a lower estimate than army intelligence chief Yadlin on the damage that IDF had inflicted on Hizbullah up to then. The report however provided no other hints of the plan, but typically the Mossad targets the enemy's key people rather than positions, bases or armament. (Interestingly enough, the mention of that plan is not found in the archived copy of Haaretz article where it appeared, but Powerline copied it. Might the deletion indicate that Israeli military censors, who seemed fairly relaxed at the start of the war, are tightening up.)

Undoing the Holocaust -- Part I

2006-07-31T22:02:00.000-07:00

The figuration of the Holocaust is always close to the surface in Israel. One popular understanding, even there, is the creation of this state was more due to Western powers compensating survivors for the murder of six million Jews than it was the realization of a nationalist movement’s practical work. Another understanding is that others surrounding and inside Israel want to finish Hitler’s Final Solution by destroying Israel and its Jews. The idea generates warnings against any concession to the others. Since the Palestinians, other Arabs or fundamentalist Muslims have this transcendent goal, nothing short of its achievement will satisfy them. Any concession will incite the others to press harder on Israel and weaken Israel’s ability to resist them. These thoughts can and have been repressed, sometimes for long periods, like the years following the Six Day War, or the 1990s. However, they resurface when a security surprise occurs, some concession is contemplated or someone appears to have exploited a concession.

These anxieties have a substantial geneology: 2000 years of Diaspora, of defeat and displacement, commemorated and re-enacted, taught Jews to grieve, but gave them concepts, liturgies, metaphors, stories that were insufficient to measure the Final Solution. Of course, there are other genocides. One thinks immediately of the Hutu doing it to Tutsi, Indonesians to Timorese, Turks to Armenians, arguably the US government to Native Americans in the 19th century. But the Holocaust is unique in the devotion of so much wealth, organization and time to the methodical killing of a people. The mind boggles; in some sense, it feels demeaning to be a survivor or inheritor. This feeling or trace, known but unexpressed in the public imagination, gives birth again and again to a desire to undo the Holocaust.

Sometime during the Vietnam years, General Lewis Hershey, director of the US draft, said he a received a letter explaining the writer's resistance to the draft. The writer would gladly serve if the war were against Hitler, but Vietnam was a different matter. General Hershey wrote back, expressing his regrets that he could not supply a war against Hitler. The war in Vietnam was the only one he had available. Israel has dealt with a similar situation by imagining that every war it fights is against Hitler. This is not just for recruiting purposes or consolidation of popular support for the effort. It is trying to undo Israel's not being there, when Hitler was available.

Two vignettes, featuring Israeli leaders, can make the point clearer. About 1975, a radio interviewer asked Golda Meir to describe the feeling of Jews in World War II Palestine, once they were aware of the Final Solution. She answered: “Furious impotence.” In 1982, with IDF armor columns and jets attacking Beirut, PM Menahem Begin said he felt like a bomber pilot on his way to bomb Berlin.

The casting of the present enemy as Hitler and defeating him – the undoing of the Holocaust – has resonance on both the psychological and ideological levels. It erases the trace of impotence. It also resolves the paradox of Israel as the solution for the Jewish problem that came too late to save the bulk of Jews for whom it was intended.

The inclination to rerun the drama and produce a different outcome became irrepressible given Hizbullah's provocations. Israelis perceive Hizbullah as an understudy for the best suited to play Hitler -- Iran. Its president Ahmadinejad has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, while embracing the idea of Israel's annihilation.

Middle East Holocaust Israel

Olmert to Rice: Buzz Off

2006-07-31T15:29:00.000-07:00

Israel PM Ehud Olmert today took the risk of alienating Secretary of State Rice by telling the Israeli people and the world there is no cease-fire, partial or otherwise, in Lebanon and there will be no cease-fire, until Israel achieves its aim of significantly degrading Hizbullah’s armament and crippling it as an organization. Trying his best imitation of Churchill, he warned this would take weeks and it would cost Israel more pain, tears and blood. This message came a day after Rice had wrung from Israeli leaders an agreement to suspend bombing in southern Lebanon for two days and also said the UN Security Council was likely order a cease-fire by the end of the week.

In dissing Rice, Olmert counts on support from his friends in the White House, who are no fans of Rice’s efforts to have foreign policies, rather than spin international adventures, and, of course, from the Middle-East ignorant Bush himself. They all just lap up memes like Defense Minister Amir Peretz’s “Israel’s fight with Hizbullah is the frontline of the war with Iran.” Whether he wants to align himself so tightly with them is another matter. Olmert himself appears less unilateralist, extreeme and pretentious than they, but regardless of preferences, he has to press defiantly on. He is fighting for his political life. The wide scale operations to which he so hastily committed Israel have not yet realized their promised results.

They eventually will, he asserts. This is to reassure the Israelis in the north that the rockets will one day stop falling on them and to reassure the world that on the same day Israel will stop killing Lebanese civilians who are in the way. Meanwhile, no one should try to teach Israel morals. After all, we invented them.

Middle East

Bush or was it Rice Tells Israel to Stop the Shit

2006-07-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

Israel has agreed to suspend its aerial bombardment of southern Lebanon for 48 hours, effective immediately, to allow for an investigation into Sunday's bombing that killed 54 civilians, a U.S. State Department official said early Monday.

Both The New York Times and LA Times emphasize Rice's insistence and Israeli leaders adament resistence on this concession, during several hours of conversations after the news of the bombing. Apparently Olmert and Peretz cannot accept how badly they blew it. Maybe someone should tell them that Rice still remembers the murder of four young girls, including a friend of hers, in the church bombing of Birmingham Sunday (September 15, 1963).

There is no indication that Bush called in. According to the Washington Post, he and his White House advisors still dream on of a New Middle East arising from the ashes of Lebanon.
Middle East

Putting Things in Perspective -- Middle East Style

2006-07-30T14:59:00.000-07:00

As a term of art, perspective originally meant to look through a window with one eye closed. In the Middle East, perspective usually means to look at a wall with both eyes closed. That way one’s memory and imagination can project the scene one wants or one cannot repress without reality interfering.

Israel says it does not deliberately target civilian populations on the enemy side, although who is a civilian might be a matter for debate. If it did, the number of civilians it killed would be much larger. Israel targets people whom its soldiers believe are enemy combatants. That might include kids throwing stones, people who appear to be carrying weapons, people in cars that try to evade check points, officials of militant organizations, etc. Sometimes the soldiers make mistakes, sometimes they miss and hit innocent people, sometimes innocent people get in the way. Because IDF targets many combatants and has a lot of firepower, many civilians among the enemy are killed. Because of this intention of self-defense or preemption, but lousy execution, Israel’s killing of civilians is, according to some moral calculi different from that of Palestinian and other Arab militants, terrorists or whatever you want to call them. They shoot and bomb to kill as many Israeli Jews as possible, with no thought of distinguishing between soldier and civilian. They apologize when they kill Palestinian Israelis. Because they have less sophisticated weapons than the Israelis, over the last 30 years, Israel has killed between five to ten the number of civilians on their sides than they have killed on the Israel side. The ratio is even higher for children under eighteen. This is evidence of Israel's technological superiority. I fail to see how it evidences Israel's moral superiority.

Several narratives of the current Israel-Hizbullah conflict:

Israel Narrative 1 (Amir Peretz): We are fighting on the front line of the war with Iran. Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas are evil. We are making an exception of Syria this week.
Israel Narrative 2 (Ehud Olmert): We are fighting a tough local enemy and need to degrade it, so it will not be any threat in the future. We need more time to do that. Too bad if more innocent people get killed.
Hizbullah (Hasan Nasrallah): We are proving that we can stand up to the Israelis and give as good as we get. This has nothing to do with Iran. The Israelis should stop listening to the United States and bargain. I don't understand why they don't trust us.
George Bush: This is a great chance to turn things around and create a New Middle East. Israel can go on smashing Lebanon, just tell it to be careful not to destabilize the government, destroy the infrastructure or kill too many civilians, especially children.
The international community (Kofi Anan): Bush should get on the phone with Olmert or whomever and tell him to stop the shit.

Update: It looks like Bush just did. Adam Ereli, Rice's spokesperson has just announced that Israel has agreed to stop its air campaign against Lebanon for the next 48 hours. During the time the bombing at Qana will be investigated and the inhabitants of southern Lebanon will be allowed to leave the area.
Middle East

Qana: A Tragedy Worse than a Mistake

2006-07-30T05:11:00.000-07:00

I mourn and condemn Israel's slaughter of innocent men, women and children this morning at Qana. It is tragic in itself, part of an ongoing tragedy and an uncanny reminder of a wretched past. In 1996, Kfar Qana sufferred an IDF attack aimed at Hizbullah that killed about 100 civilians, and galvanized international pressure against Israel’s 1996 Grapes of Wrath operation.

For Israel, this bombing is worse than a mistake; it is a blunder. I would like to believe it was a deliberate act by IDF command to prevent a cease-fire that involved the ceding of Shaba Farms and hence could be interpreted by some as victory for Hizbullah. More likely, its timing and location result from operational stupidity that approaches autism -- the reduction of everyone else to objects. More generally, these reflect the callousness among Israel's leaders toward the suffering of Arabs, a callousness that is nourrished by Israeli Jews' own sense of victimization and self-righteousness. In any case, Israel's political leadership must hold the Chief of Staff Dan Halutz accountable and fire him immediately. Defense Minister Amir Peretz should also resign. He has clearly been in over his head since the beginning of the conflict.
Middle East

Samson's Columns

2006-07-29T20:52:00.000-07:00

The war in Lebanon has pushed the situation in Gaza into the background. This is unfortunate, because a tragedy in humanitarian terms is unfolding there as well. The IDF operations in response to the capture of Cpl. Gilad Shalit by Hamas militants more than three weeks ago have killed over 100 Palestinians. Relative to the population of Gaza, this is about the same as the Lebanese dead, although the percentage of combatants among the Palestinians is higher. Moreover the various diplomatic efforts to secure Shalit's release have taken a back seat to the diplomatic efforts over Lebanon. Weirdly, the IDF code-named its latest operation in Gaza Samson's Columns. The name refers to the Biblical strongman pulling down the temple in Gaza upon himself and thousands of Philistines as he uttered the wish to die with them. The related term Samson Complex has been used to describe a syndrome of uncontrolled, near suicidal rage, fueled by a sense of betrayal. The name could reflect the rage that many Israelis felt over the abductions of Cpl. Shalit and the soldiers on the Lebanon border. This rage also has a feeling of betrayal, because Israelis feel that their leaving Lebanon and Gaza should have removed the grievances of people there against them. On the other hand, maybe the code name is just the work of a remarkably inept junior officer at IDF's General Staff.

Deterrence vs. Destruction

2006-07-29T20:25:00.000-07:00

Secretary of State Rice has reportedly told Prime Minister Olmert there will be a cease fire by the end of this coming week. That is probably more an order than a prediction. So it is now time for Middle East players to remember the difference between deterrence and destruction. Destruction is a strategy to eliminate an enemy’s threat by eliminating the enemy. It requires preponderant force that rapidly reduces the enemy’s capability to retaliate and then reduces the enemy to a disorganized, powerless mass. It also requires some vigilance to prevent that enemy’s reappearance in one form or another.

Deterrence is a strategy of meeting a threatening enemy with one’s own threat. The idea is to make the enemy think twice about attacking you and then a third and fourth time. And so on, until it gets to thinking about something else. Effective deterrence has three requirements: The threat must be understood by its recipients, it must be potent and it must be credible. “Potent” means the punishment you can inflict upon the enemy, if it attacks, is more than the enemy wants to pay for its expected gain in attacking you. “Credible” means the enemy can believe you might punish it, despite your costs for administering the punishment and for possible retaliation by the enemy. This calculus of deterrence was formalized in the 1950s and 1960s; to the extent it was internalized by the US and USSR, it helped stabilize the Cold War.

During the past two weeks, Israelis living in the northern villages, towns and cities have done a tremendous job in assuring the credibility of Israel’s future threats. They continue to support the war on Hizbullah, despite IDF’s failure to stop the rocket attacks on them. The public knowledge of this result increases the probability that Israel leaders in the future will enforce a threat, even if the enforcement exposes their civilian population to prolonged attack.

The civilian population in Lebanon, more than Hizbullah itself, now knows how potent the Israel punishment can be. Their suffering might eventually cost Hizbullah something, when they have opportunities to express their disgust at the organization having invited Israel to go wild at their expense. Clueless about this possibility twenty days ago, when he ordered the abduction of the Israeli soldiers, Hassan Nasrallah is belatedly coming to its recognition. In a speech today, he told the Lebanese that Hizbullah would free the last bit of Lebanese soil held by the occupier – a reference to a possible deal over Shaba Farms – and would become part of Lebanon. In other words, it would stop reaming other Lebanese for its own sake. How refreshing! Still the Israeli responses to its provocation has cost Hizbullah directly: Several hundred dead and wounded fighters, a few dead middle managers, a depopulated southern Lebanon, destroyed housing and facilities, overwhelmed social services, criticism in the Arab world, perhaps a dressing down from its patrons Syria and Iran, probably a refusal of any rearmament for the present and a commitment by every outside power that Hizbullah fighters will be pushed back from the border with Israel.

Yet, Hizbullah can claim some deterrent power of its own. Its forces have killed a significant number of Israeli soldiers as well as civilians, maintained operations and communications, while under attack, and sprung some surprises on the IDF, like the shore-to-ship missile that crippled an Israeli corvette. Also Nasrallah appears to be playing a very skillful escalation game, pausing at each stage to indicate a willingness to escalate further or to deescalate. This is very surprising, because the abduction of the soldiers demonstrated an ignorance of the international game, seemingly as profound as Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust or Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Perhaps even more surprising, Israeli leadership seems to have gotten the message.

In the looking glass world of strategic logics, mutual deterrence is not the balance of fear or terror established by strategies of destruction. It is more a grudging exchange of respect. If Israel and Hizbullah have begun to approach that, they can each declare victory and start talking.

A Personal Note

2006-07-29T09:21:00.000-07:00

My writing is more critical of Israel and the United States than of Hizbullah, Hamas, other Palestinians, Arab states and Iran. This is because I best know and care most about Israel and the United States. Their politics and societies most directly affect me, despite globalization. Over the last forty years, I spent a lot of time in Israel and the United States working with others to change certain Israel policies and American support for them, because I believed they were unjust, needlessly cruel and not in Israel’s best interests. The policies included the colonization of the territories captured in the Six Day War, the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, collusion with the apartheid regime in South Africa, the brutal response to the first intifada, failures to enact a settlement freeze, building the security wall, assassinations and incursions into the morsels of Palestinian territory. I have also been critical of Palestinian and other Arab policies that have been cruel, stupid, corrupt and counterproductive, that have undermined trust in their own communities and betrayed peace groups in Israel and elsewhere.

I and kindred spirits are often accused of holding the US and/ or Israel to a higher moral standard. First, I believe the United States should be held to some moral standard shared by the international community and not just to its own convenient notion of morality. Second, as the world’s only superpower, a.k.a. global empire, the United States has a responsibility to join with other states in trying to create a more stable, peaceful milieu for the conduct of international relations. Too often it has acted unilaterally through policies of "regime change" to satisfy its interests, with the Bush administration’s behavior being the latest and most egregious case in a sorry history.

My reply with regard to Israel is more complex. First, I cannot accept the evasions by Israeli governments over the last forty years of resolutions for Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and through that with the Arab world. Their failures cannot be excused by Arab recalcitrance or the traumas of Jewish history. They are primarily due to many Israelis’ having fallen in love with the territories and their influence on fractious Israel governments. Second, what moral standards is a significant issue in Zionism, Israel’s founding ideology that still has some claims on its people and supporters. On one hand, Zionism wanted a state where Jews could live normal lives, make their own collective history and not be at the mercy of others. On the other hand, this state was to be exemplary, a “light unto the nations,” a redeemer of both land and people.

I do not believe Jews are or expect them to be ethical supermen. I do not believe they have special genes for fighting injustice or natural immunity to fascism. However, I think Jewish communities have a tremendous tradition of self-criticism that demands we do the right thing. That tradition, for me, is a source of courage and hope.

“Hope,” the poet Seamus Heaney recently said, “is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.”

Sleepless over Seattle

2006-07-28T22:54:00.000-07:00

News of the shootings at the Jewish Federation Building in Seattle horrifies and saddens me. According to early reports, the assailant was a lone gunman who said he was upset about what was "going on in Israel." This is not the first time the hatred that bubbles up between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East has lethally spilled into the United States. Yet it puts another crack in an illusion I want to keep. I want to believe there are some places in the US and elsewhere that are like half-time at brutal (American) football games. These are where the antagonists and their partisans act civilly toward one another; where the rules of engagement are different. Others also want to keep the illusion. The Council on American-Islamic Relations in Seattle has already issued a statement condemning the incident in no uncertain terms. Many Jewish organizations, when they condemn the incident, will also urge their members to be calm and repudiate any calls for revenge by extremists. Nevertheless, the murder and woundings in Seattle shake me. Enough to ask about the security arrangements at my son's Hebrew school.

Haim Ramon's Big Mouth

2006-07-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

A United States State Department spokesman denounced Israel Justice Minister Haim Ramon for having said publicly what everybody in the Middle East believes: The Bush administration greenlighted an Israel invasion of Lebanon. Ramon is presumably in the know, so his statement supports the belief being true. Ramon is known in Israel for having a big mouth. The Israel police say he could be indicted for another inappropriate use of that organ. The indictment for commiting a vile act would be based on the police investigation of a complaint by a female government secretary that Ramon recently kissed her against her will and "even stuck his tongue into her mouth."

Update on another leader: IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz was hospitalized and examined today for two hours, after he felt ill. He was released without any restrictions and returned to work. A former head of the air force, Halutz is notriously callous about civilian deaths in IDF bombings and missile attacks. At the beginning of the current war he bragged that the air force could turn Lebanon back fifty years, quickly deplete Hizbullah's store of rockets and deal it a decisve blow. Since events have demonstrated that Halutz is even more incomptent than arrogant, today's episode suggests he might be considering death as a career move.