Friday, December 4, 2009

"Pakistan and the Global War on Terror"

"President Obama's Afghanistan Election Speech"

-mm

Friday, November 20, 2009

"Israel's two-tiered justice system"

"Biggest state party to Obama: Get out of Afghanistan"

"Karzai's last chance"

"Green movement spreading despite crackdown"

-mm

Friday, November 13, 2009

"Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja"

"Israeli Jews and the one-state solution"

"The disastrous presidency of Mahmoud Abbas"


-mm

Friday, November 6, 2009

Afghanistan:
- "Women of Influence: Malalai Joya"
- "Stop US meddling; Support Afghan women at the table"
- "Cabinet of warlords"

Iran:
- "Iranian student dares to criticise Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to his face"
- Articles and videos from the 13th of Aban (Nov. 4)

Palestine:
- "Israeli soldiers, settlers violate Palestinian women's rights"
- "Gazans not allowed to rebuild their lives"
- "Israeli settlements could cause one-state solution"

Other:
- "Noam Chomsky: 'US foreign policy is straight out of the mafia'"
- "Why and to what end in Afghanistan"

On a side note, Malalai Joya will be in Seattle on November 11th and I highly encourage anyone and everyone to go if possible! For more information CLICK HERE

-mm

Friday, October 30, 2009

My favorite story of this week is about Matthew Hoh and so this post will be dedicated to him. Matthew Hoh has become "the first U.S. official known to resign in protest against American policies" in Afghanistan.

- "U.S. official resigns over Afghan war"

- Watch him, or read the transcript, on NewsHour

- "Matthew Hoh speaks truth to power"

-mm

Friday, October 23, 2009

Afghanistan:
-Three myths driving the Afghan war
-from Aljazeera, Inside Story: Afghan Election Runoff

Iran:
-Tehran says it favors deal on uranium but asks for more time
-Iran will emerge victorious

Iraq:
-from Aljazeera, Riz Khan: Iraqi Asylum Seekers, part 1 & 2


Pakistan:
-Taliban bombs in Pakistan strike air base, restaurant, and wedding party
-Obama's Pakistan problem
-Terrified whispers in Pakistan

Palestine:
-Israeli intelligence pose as Arabs to spy on citizens
-from Aljazeera, Locked in: Life in Gaza part 1 & 2

-mm

Friday, October 16, 2009

"Israel rejects UN council backing for Gaza war crimes report" - is anybody surprised by this??? didn't think so.

"Iran court seeks to try Mehdi Karroubi over alleging detainees were raped"

"Palestinian faith in Obama 'evaporates'"

"Eight years later, we still don't get it in Afghanistan"

-mm

Friday, October 9, 2009

Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize is undoubtably the dominating headline of today and think some of these articles give some perspective about this current confusion.

Does Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? What are your opinions?

IN OTHER NEWS:
"Israeli high schoolers choose jail over occupation army service"

"Why we must stay in Afghanistan"

"Iran activist sentenced to death for election protests"

"Iran's women are not afraid"

-mm

Friday, October 2, 2009

Interesting articles from today...

"Abbas helps Israel bury its crimes in Gaza"

"Why Israel hates Obama"

"Naive Obama gets Iran results"

"Obama's Afghanistan problem - It's in our hands"

This last article reminded me about the rally and demonstration that will be happening on October 7th to protest against the occupation in Afghanistan. So if you're in the Olympia area, come join us! More info on the rally: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=131615607457&index=1

-mm

Saturday, July 18, 2009

IDF uses undercover cops in recent Ni'lin protests, 2 arrested

The IDF has begun using undercover agents at protests against the apartheid wall being constructed in Ni'lin, the same location where International Solidarity Activist Tristan Anderson was shot in the head by a high velocity tear gas round fired by IDF solders. In the video, you can see what happened during a protest on July 10th. ISM describes the scene in this way:

"The demonstration ended abruptly when approximately 10 members of Israeli special forces, disguised as participants with masked faces pulled out pistols and telescopic batons. Soldiers armed with guns and riot shields then entered through the fence and shot large amounts of tear gas, smoke grenades, percussion grenades and live ammunition from their handguns.

Two Palestinian young men were arrested and led away in handcuffs with their heads forced downwards and arms pulled upwards."

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Iran: Inside the Protests

A look inside the protests within Iran a few days after June 12, 2009 (election day). This was shown on Al Jazeera's "People & Power."

-mm

Who is Mousavi?

Al Jazeera examines who Mir Hussein Mousavi is and his history with Iran past and present.
PART ONE

PART TWO


-mm

Monday, May 11, 2009

Prof. Juan Cole on Palestinian Statelessness:

King Abdullah II of Jordan revealed to the Times of London that the Obama administration may attempt a comprehensive peace treaty between Israel and the entire Muslim world. The latter would recognize Israel and grant El Al overflight rights. Israel in return would have to freeze settlement activity and move smartly toward a two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state, with Israeli settlers removed from the West Bank. The status of Jerusalem would be left for later negotiations.

Abdullah warned that if rapid progress is not made, another war will probably break out in the region within 18 months to two years.

In my view, the central problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the statelessness of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in their diaspora, the continued military occupation or blockade by the Israelis, and the rapid expansion of Israeli colonies, which are usurping Palestinian land and rights.

Until the statelessness of the Palestinians is understood and seen as the central problem that it is, there can be no real progress on the issues. Statelessness was an attribute of slaves in premodern times. The Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were the primary victims of the crime of stripping people of their citizenship in a state. It is monstrous that Palestinians should be stateless all these decades after 1948. Make no mistake; it is Israel that deprived them of statehood, which the 1939 British White Paper pledged to them, and which other League of Nations Mandates, such as French Syria and Lebanon and British Iraq, achieved.

A stateless person ultimately has no rights, since it is states that guarantee rights. A stateless person may be robbed, raped, and sometimes even killed with impunity. Stateless children are often deprived of schooling. Since the property of the stateless is ambiguous with regard to its legal status, the stateless are at risk for extreme poverty. The contemporary world is a world of states, and falling between the cracks because you lack citizenship in any state is a guarantee of marginality and oppression.

Apologists try to shift the blame for Palestinian statelessness from Israel to someone else. But it won't work. The original tort of derailing Palestinian independence was Israel's, and Israel has been the main force preventing the declaration of a Palestinian state, so it is Israel that must step up here. Other countries cannot be expected to solve a problem created by the Israelis, nor do most of the countries in the region havethe economic efflorescence or governmental stability to do so.

It seems obvious what needs to be done to end Palestinian statelessness. If a Palestinian state isn't created in short order, the world is in for decades of Apartheid and political decay and consequent trouble, including terrorism and further wars. At the end of this process likely Israel will be forced to absorb the Palestinians as its own citizens, i.e. you end up with a one-state solution. The reason that there is more talk about the latter now is that it does at least resolve the central problem, of Palestinian statelessness, a problem that cannot be solved in any other way once a Palestinian state is forestalled by the massive Israeli colonization of the West Bank. (Actually I should say "Israeli and American," since a third of the Israeli squatters in the West Bank are Americans).

If Obama really is making this push for a comprehensive settlement, it is an enormous undertaking and its success is by no means assured (to say the least). He will have to be tough with Netanyahu and Lieberman, who will try to sabotage any such move. At least, the Obama administration is demonstrating some independence, and is no longer doing extensive advance briefings for Israeli officials on US diplomacy in the region.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Baghdad Blues

In Baghdad, Iraqis fear return of sectarian bloodshed

Friday, May 1, 2009

War Crime, Hate Crime, Sex Crime.

Former US soldiers describe rape of Iraqi girl, killings:

Cortez said he attempted to rape Abeer al-Janabi but could not get an erection. He said he then held her down while Barker raped her.

When he heard gunshots in the room next door, Cortez said he ran to the door and found the rest of the family had been killed.

He said Green told them "he killed them all and that all of them were dead."

Cortez said that Green then raped the girl, put a pillow over her face and fired three shots into her head with an AK-47. Her body was then burned.

-mr

Little Shams found face down in burning asphalt


Video:
UK treatment for Iraqi toddler

Iraq's quiet healthcare crisis:
The boy looked like an old man. His lips moved slowly, trying to stretch against his inflexible, badly scarred skin, and bandages covered his eyes.

But the voice that came out of his disfigured face was loud and cheerful and it filled the hospital room.

"I want to go back to Iraq, I miss my dad," Hussein said. Read More

-mr

Israeli Lobby Wins Again

  • The heft that dares not speak its name.
-mr

Empire's Shitty Ice Cream . . .

Empire on the Run: Welcome to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad:
But let’s make no excuses. I had come to the embassy for one purpose: Food.
-mr

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Georgetown's 2009 Symposium on Palestine

Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies has made its 2009 Symposium "Palestine & the Palestinians Today" available online.

This is an amazing resource. Pass it on!

-mr

What kind of statehood? "Netanyahu and the 'Palestinian state' card"

Posted by Helena Cobban
April 28, 2009 7:58 AM EST | Link
Filed in Israel-2009

Israel's former failed prime minister and current defense minister, Ehud Barak, is now saying that PM Netanyahu

    will present the U.S. administration a diplomatic plan in line with the principle of "two states for two nations" during his upcoming visit to Washington.
Until now, Netanyahu has refused to commit himself to agreeing with the Obama administration that statehood for the Palestinians is the way forward for peace. So now, Barak is indicating Netanyahu may be a bit "flexible" on the statehood issue. (Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, however, remains strongly opposed. Oops.)

But here's the thing. It is not the word "state" that's important, regarding the outcome. South Africa's Bantustans were also called "states", remember.

It is the content of the sovereignty and decision-making powers, the independence of the decision-making process, and the territorial and economic foundations that support this independence that are important.

So people should not get hung up on the word "state"-- and certainly, they shouldn't suddenly rush to crown Netanyahu with a peacemaker's laurels if he should deign to say the Palestinians might be able to have one.

Look at the content of any proposal made, not just its name.

A couple other things to bear in mind:

1. Past PM Olmert also said he believed in a Palestinian "state." His concept of it was very restrictive, including of course territorially. The fact that he accepted the notion of a Palestinian state did not mean his proposals regarding the final settlement were in any way acceptable.

2. Ten years ago, Barak won a strong victory in the polls against Netanyahu, and replaced him as PM. On that occasion, Barak won by promising Israelis that he was the man who could conclude a final peace with the Palestinians "within six to nine months." Eighteen months later his premiership collapsed into chaos with that pledge still unfulfilled.

Worse than that, the peremptory and bullying way he conducted his peace "diplomacy" with the Palestinians ensured that the Camp David II summit was a disaster. Barak then loudly blamed PA leader Yasser Arafat for the failure and said Israel "had no partner for peace." (Clinton, quite shamefully, completely backed him up on that.)

Leaders and activists in the real Israeli peace movement say that Barak's behavior at that time was a stab in the heart for their movement, from which it has still, nine years later, not recovered.

This time, Barak is "promising" that the Netanyahu government will have peace with the Palestinians "within three years." He has no credibility.

-mr

Monday, April 27, 2009

Protesting American Imperialism in Kut

As submerged sectarian tensions re-surface in Iraq, US occupation forces defy the Status of Forces Agreement, killing several innocents in the process:

Al-Maliki Denounces US Raid as Violating SOFA;
Larijani dissatisfied with US

AP reports that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has denounced a US raid in Kut as a violation of the security agreement between Washington and Baghdad.

WaPo goes further and says that al-Maliki is actually calling for the troops involved to be prosecuted in Iraqi courts.

The US said its troops were targeting a major funder of militias, whom they accused of receiving monies and material from Iran. I.e. this was about the so-called 'special cells' or pro-Iranian groups inside the Shiite militias. Kut has a lot of Sadrists, who follow Muqtada al-Sadr and there are still Mahdi Army units active there. The raid left an innocent female bystander dead. Six captured alleged militiamen were released by the US military after al-Maliki's protest.

In Kut, hundreds gathered in an anti-US demonstration.

The US maintains that the raid was coordinated with the Iraqi government. But it appears that the officials the US dealt with were local and that they neglected to pass news of the plan up to their superiors.

Under the Status of Forces Agreement, the US must notify the Iraqi government before it takes military action.

Al-Maliki is touchy about such an operation in Kut and probably wants personal approval in such matters. Kut is in the Shiite south, where al-Maliki has been attempting to spread the influence of his Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa). It has a significant Sadrist constituency, and al-Maliki is trying to put together coalition provincial governments with the Sadrists. So the US raid made al-Maliki look weak and puppet-like and made him unpopular in a key area where he wants support.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Iraqi government officials are expecting further bombings this week, as the country prepares for a conference on investing in Iraq later this week. The officials say that the guerrillas are attempting to dissuade foreign investors and to give them the impression that Iraq is unstable and a poor place to invest. The guerrillas hope to keep the government of Nuri al-Maliki weak so as to be able to overthrow it.

The speaker of the Iranian House has warned Iraqi insurgents that Tehran would track them down and punish them for the attacks this past week on Iranian pilgrims to holy shrines in Iraq. He also took up the theme that the US might be behind attacks on Iranian targets.

(source: Prof. Juan Cole's, Informed Comment)


-mr

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Headlines:

  • Maliki: US Raid ‘Crime’ That Violated Pact
  • Clinton Pledges to Keep Troops in Iraq if Violence Escalates
  • CIA ignored warnings from US soldiers that torture and extreme stress would not work
  • 2008 'deadliest' year for Palestinians: rights group
  • Destroying Afghan opium crop: But does it help?
  • Iraqi forces dismantle two booby-trapped cars, 20 bombs in Baghdad
  • Injured soldier gets new face _ and anonymity
  • UK campaigners score victory towards arms embargo
  • Another muted scream: Basem Ibrahim Abu Rahme

Prof. Cole on Pakistani Taliban hype:

Pakistan Crisis and Social Statistics

Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days.

And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan's security prospects. He suggests that one problem is the difficulty of predicting a revolutionary situation. But Pakistan just had a revolution against the military dictatorship! The polling, the behavior in the voting booth, the history of political geography, aren't these data relevant to the issue? Why does no one instance them?

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can't see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People's Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.

Another major province is Sindh, with nearly 50 mn. of Pakistan's 165 mn. population. It is divided between Urdu-speakers and the largely rural Sindhis who are religious traditionalists, many of the anti-Taliban Barelvi school. They voted overwhelmingly for the centrist, mostly secular Pakistan People's Party in the recent parliamentary elections. Then there are the Urdu-speakers originally from India who mostly live in Karachi and a few other cities. In the past couple of decades the Urdu-speakers have tended to vote for the secular MQM party.

Residents of Sindh and Punjab constitute some 85% of Pakistan's population, and while these provinces have some Muslim extremists, they are a small fringe there.

Pakistan has a professional bureaucracy. It has doubled its literacy rate in the past three decades. Rural electrification has increased enormously. The urban middle class has doubled since 2000. The country has many, many problems, but it is hardly the Somalia some observers seem to imagine.

Opinion polling shows that even before the rounds of violence of the past two years, most Pakistanis rejected Muslim radicalism and violence. The stock of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The Pakistani Taliban are largely a phenomenon of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas west of the North-West Frontier Province, and of a few districts within the NWFP itself. These are largely Pushtun ethnically. The NYT's breathless observation that there are Taliban a hundred miles from Islamabad doesn't actually tell us very much, since Islamabad is geographically close to the Pushtun regions without that implying that Pushtuns dominate or could dominate it. It is like saying that Lynchburg, Va., is close to Washington DC and thereby implying that Jerry Falwell's movement is about to take over the latter.

The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.

The Pakistani military is the world's sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan's size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.

So what is being alleged? That some rural Pushtun tribesmen turned Taliban are about to sweep into Islamabad and overthrow the government of Pakistan? Frankly ridiculous. Wouldn't the government bring some tank formations up from the Indian border and stop them?

Or is it being alleged that the Pakistani army won't fight the Taliban? But then explain the long and destructive Bajaur campaign.

Or is the fear that some junior officers in the army are more or less Taliban and that they might make a coup? But the Pakistani military has typically sought a US alliance after every coup it has made. Who would support Talibanized officers? Not China, not the US, the major patrons of Islamabad.

If that is the fear, in any case, then the US should strengthen the civilian, elected government, which was installed against US wishes by a popular movement during the past two years. The officers should be strictly instructed that they are to stay in their barracks.

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan's nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.

Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.

-mr

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Massive blasts roil illusions of peace in Iraq:

REUTERS
Reuters North American News Service

Apr 23, 2009 10:22 EST

* At least 75 killed in two suicide bomb attacks

* Many Iranian pilgrims among the dead

* Local insurgent leader reported captured

By Aseel Kami

BAGHDAD, April 23 (Reuters) - Two suicide bombers wearing vests stuffed with explosives blew themselves up in separate attacks in Iraq on Thursday, killing 75 people, including many Iranian pilgrims, in the bloodiest day for more than a year.

The blasts occurred as apprehension grows in Iraq ahead of a pullout by U.S. troops from city centres in June, and after warnings from officials that insurgent groups may try to take advantage of that to launch attacks.

A national election due at the end of the year also threatens to stir a resurgence in violence just as the bloodshed of the past six years appeared to be receding.

Shortly after the two attacks, the authorities in Baghdad said they had arrested the purported leader of an al Qaeda-affiliated insurgent group, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. His arrest, which has been reported before, could not be confirmed. One of the attacks occurred near Muqdadiya, 80 km (50 miles) northeast of Baghdad, in the volatile province of Diyala. The suicide bomber appeared to have targeted a group of Iranian pilgrims in a crowded roadside restaurant at lunchtime.

All but two of the 47 dead were Iranians visiting Shi'ite Muslim religious sites in Iraq, police said. Sixty-seven people were wounded.

It was the single deadliest attack since 50 people were killed by a suicide bomber in a restaurant near the northern city of Kirkuk on December 11 last year.

The blast in central Baghdad took place as a group of Iraqi national police were distributing relief supplies to families driven from their homes during the sectarian slaughter and insurgency unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Twenty-eight people died, and 50 were wounded, police said. At least five children were among the dead, they added.

Red Crescent food parcels and shattered packets of chocolate biscuits were strewn in the blood pooled on the pavement after the attack, while a woman dressed in a black abaya robe wailed and beat her thighs in anguish.

"It is a suicide bomber. Obviously that has the fingerprints of al Qaeda," said Baghdad security spokesman Major-General Qassim Moussawi.

BAGHDADI ARREST

Violence across Iraq has fallen sharply over the past year, but insurgents such as Sunni Islamist al Qaeda still carry out attacks. Suicide bombings are often associated with al Qaeda.

A suicide bomber on Wednesday killed at least five people and wounded 15 inside a mosque in central Iraq, and on Monday, a suicide bomber in a police uniform killed four policemen in Diyala. Eight U.S. soldiers were wounded.

While the bombings remain routine, it has been a while since so many people were killed on a single day in Iraq.

On June 17 last year, a truck bomb in Baghdad killed 63, two bombs on March 6, 2008, killed 68 people, also in Baghdad, and female suicide bombers targeting a pet market killed 99 in the capital on Feb. 1, 2008.

Shortly after Thursday's bombings, Moussawi's office in Baghdad reported on its website that Baghdadi, had been arrested in the east of the city.

Baghdadi is said to be the head of the Islamic State of Iraq, one of several groups thought to be behind suicide bombings in the northern city of Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq.

Security experts have speculated that Baghdadi was a character invented by some extremists rather than a real person.

Some Iraqis expect violence to increase in Iraq as rival political and armed groups position themselves ahead of a national election due to take place at the end of the year.

Iraqi officials say al Qaeda and others are also likely to try to test Iraqi security forces as U.S. troops prepare to pull out of cities ahead of a full withdrawal by the end of 2011. (Writing by Michael Christie; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Source: Reuters North American News Service
-mr

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

'Just World News' with Helena Cobban:

Veteran reporter and writer Helena Cobban on Israel's self-disclosed military doctrine of slow-motion ethnic cleansing, imperiled East Jerusalem Palestinians, and Israeli spooks . . .

The IDF's 'Dahiyah Doctrine', applied in Gaza


Posted by Helena Cobban
April 19, 2009 3:22 PM EST | Link
Filed in Gaza08-09 , Israel-2009

Kudos to Inter-Press Service's Daan Bouwens for this piece of reporting in which he reminded readers that Israel's strategic decisionmakers had integrated a policy of major, intentional destruction of civilian targets into their war-planning for certain contingencies considerably before they launched the assault on Gaza, December 27.

Bouwens quotes Valentina Azarov, a legal expert with the Israeli human-rights group HaMoked as arguing that the IDF's operations in Gaza, "were part of the military strategy called the 'Dahiyah policy', being that of indiscriminate killing and the use of excessive, disproportionate force."

Azarov and Bouwens were at pains to point out that this was Azarov's own personal assessment. However, she had adduced considerable evidence to back it up.

'Dahiyah' is, in this context, a reference to the the heavily populated southern suburb (dahiyeh) of Beirut, in which Hizbullah maintained its headquarters for many years prior to the Israeli assault of summer 2006-- and which it has substantially rebuilt since 2006.

But during Israel's 33-day war against Lebanon that year, it just about leveled the entire Dahiyeh, which was a neighborhood of densely packed eight- to ten-story buildings, most of them residential, but including numerous schools, mosques, shops, and so on, along with more than a few offices for Hizbullah's extensive social-service bodies, political bodies, and yes, also their military bodies.

The best online resource about the Dahiyah Doctrine is this contribution that Ben White made to the Guardian's 'Comment is free' section last October. This Wikipedia page on the 'Dahiya Strategy' is also helpful.

The White piece has good hyperlinks, including to the then-recent interview in which the GOC of the IDF's 'Northern Command', Gadi Eisenkot, talked openly about the Dayiha Doctrine in these terms:

    "What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on," said Gadi Eisenkot, head of the army's northern division.

    "We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases," Eisenkot told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

    "This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved," Eisenkot added.
In terms of "deterrence theory", this is a pretty standard threat of "massive retaliation." (Added to, I guess, a specifically Israeli version of Henry Kissinger's "Madman theory of deterrence", as indirectly alluded to here.)

But the results-- whether in the Dahiyah or in Gaza-- have been devastating.

Back in October-November of last year, when Eisenkot was making his pronouncements about the doctrine and Israelis were commenting on it-- sometimes with great approval-- just about all the discussion seemed still to be solely about Lebanon and Hizbullah, and future prospects in that theater.

But as we know, Israel's military planners were meanwhile already working hard to plan an upcoming operation against Gaza-- one of the key goals of which was to "restore the credibility of Israel's deterrence" and to wipe away the stale traces of defeat, flat-out operational ineptitude, and flawed leadership decisionmaking that had marked Israel's previous war of choice, in 2006.

Only a few of the commentaries in Israel-- e.g., this one from Gabriel Siboni-- noted the applicability of the Dahiyah Doctrine to Gaza.

Siboni wrote:

    With an outbreak of hostilities, the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritize damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher. Punishment must be aimed at decision makers and the power elite.

    ... This approach is applicable to the Gaza Strip as well. There, the IDF will be required to strike hard at Hamas and to refrain from the cat and mouse games of searching for Qassam rocket launchers. The IDF should not be expected to stop the rocket and missile fire against the Israeli home front through attacks on the launchers themselves, but by means of imposing a ceasefire on the enemy...

It was left to one of Siboni's colleagues at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National security Studies, Zaki Shalom, to raise some significant questions about the new doctrine.

The last of his questions had particular significance to the situation in Gaza:

    Finally, how will the plan be applied if it becomes evident that village inhabitants are shunning a mass exodus? Would the IDF activate massive fire that results in hundreds or possibly thousands of civilians killed?
Okay, forget about "village". (Israelis tend to just assume that all Palestinians live in "villages". The Dahiyah is not a village, and most of the residents of Gaza don't live in villages, either.)

But what, more germanely, happens to the plan if there is no place for the civilian residents of the area targeted to safely flee to-- as was certainly the case in Gaza?

... Anyway, it seems clear that my longtime acquaintances Richard Falk and Richard Goldstone, both of whom are charged by the UN with investigating Israel's conduct during the war on Gaza, have an ample paper trail to look to-- and hopefully, also to follow up further on-- regarding the specific intent of Israel's political and military leaders to engage from the get-go in avowedly disproportionate operations inside Gaza, including against specifically civilian targets.

Goldstone had a generally good track record in the waning days of his country's apartheid system, in investigating some of the grosser excesses of the "securocrats", including the high level securocrats, who ruled the country in those days. Let's hope he brings that same sensibility, that same doggedness, and that same refusal to be rolled by all the securocrats' many excuses, special pleadings, and specious arguments, to his current task regarding Israel.


Threats to East Jerusalem Palestinians, Youtubed


Posted by Helena Cobban
April 19, 2009 8:44 PM EST | Link
Filed in Palestine 2009

Clayton Swisher has two super short pieces on Al-Jazeera English about the threats to the Palestinian communities in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. In the first of those, he finds a US diplomat who's been sent to "fact-find" with one of the threatened Sheikh Jarrah families.

Yes, "fact-finding" is fine. But really, how much more of it needs to be done? The numerous expropriations, home demolitions, and other gross rights abuses the Palestinians of occupied East Jerusalem have faced throughout 42 years of occupation have all been excellently documented.

The US government position still in fact tracks with the international law position that holds that East Jerusalem is indeed occupied territory. (Though for the past 16-plus years, US government officials have always tried to squirm their way out of admitting as much in public.

The fact that this portion of the city is occupied territory means that the implantation of Israeli settlers into colonies/settlements in and around it has been quite illegal under international law, as have all other steps taken to change the status of the this portion of the occupied West Bank. (Yes, of course including its annexation/Anschluss to Israel.)

The 270,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the built environment they hold so dear (and sacred) are under acute threat these days. EJ Palestinians pay high Israeli-style taxes but receive nothing like he kinds of municipal or other kinds of government services that the city's Jewish-Israeli population receives. They are prohibited from holding any kinds of public political gatherings. Though they live in a city Israelis claim has been "unified", they are subject to all the sanctions available to the military occupation authorities in the rest of the West Bank, including endlessly renewable terms of detention without trial. (As applied, also, to the legislators they elected back in January 2006.)

In addition, thousands of EJ Palestinians have hanging over their heads either the threat of confiscation of the special blue ID cards ("pass books") that allow them to continue living in the city of their birth, or the threat of demolition of their family home. Hundreds of demolition orders-- maybe more than a thousand?-- are outstanding. The East Jerusalemites never know where the municipal demolition crews will be sent to next month, or next week, in their endless forays around the city.

Many East Jerusalemites feel quite abandoned by the Lords of Ramallah, judging that the situation of their city took a marked turn for the worse after Oslo.

So let's hope Sen. Mitchell and the rest of the "international community" finally do something this time to buttress and restore the protections that international law accords to the East Jerusalemites, as to the Gazans and all other populations under military occupation.

We need only recall that the special protections that the Fourth Geneva Convention accords to residents of territories under military occupation were adopted by the world's nations in 1949 in the specific light of the gross violations that the vulnerable populations (including of course Jewish and Roma populations) of Eastern Europe had been subjected to during the foreign military occupation they had then so recently suffered.

More on Jane Harman, high-ranking pro-Israel mole?


Posted by Helena Cobban
April 20, 2009 9:07 AM EST | Link
Filed in US foreign policy

Just how deeply have the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and its longtime backers and contacts in the Israeli securocracy wormed their way into the heart of US national decisionmaking? Considerable new evidence on this is provided in this important piece of reporting by Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein yesterday. (HT: The Arabist.)

Stein's important scoop is about a series of moves that the high-ranking and strongly pro-Israeli California Congresswoman Jane Harman made in response to a telephonic appeal from an un-named "suspected Israeli agent" that she intervene politically to get the Justice department to reduce the charges against the two accused AIPAC spies, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.

Stein writes,

    Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.

    In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.

    Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to... Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

Ah, but what she didn't know was that the call was being wiretapped and recorded under the NSA's wiretap program... And now, someone has leaked the transcript of that call to Stein.

Jane Harman is no ordinary member of congress. She was at the time, as the Stein piece notes, poised to become the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and thus privy to many kinds of intelligence that are not shared with ordinary members of congress-- far less the citizenry.

It also meant she had powerful working relationships with members of the US securocracy and growing input into their decisions.

After the NSA overheard her saying she would intervene to try to save Rosen and Weissman's skins, they and CIA head Porter Goss opened an investigation into her actions (the previous wiretap having been only into the conversations engaged in by her interlocutor.)

Stein writes:

    And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests.

    First, however, they needed the certification of top intelligence officials that Harman’s wiretapped conversations justified a national security investigation.

    Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Department’s FISA application. He also decided that, under a protocol involving the separation of powers, it was time to notify then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Minority Leader Pelosi, of the FBI’s impending national security investigation of a member of Congress — to wit, Harman.

    Goss, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, deemed the matter particularly urgent because of Harman’s rank as the panel’s top Democrat.

    But that’s when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened.

    According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.

    Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.

    He was right.

    On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”

    Pelosi and Hastert never did get the briefing.

(The irony there was that Harman intervened strongly to defend the very wiretapping program that-- whether she knew it at the time or not-- had started to establish a pretty strong record of her own misdeeds.)

A year later, in November 2006, the Dems won control of the House-- and Jane Harman, by then the Minority (Democratic) Leader on the Intelligence Committee was on the point of becoming its Chair. However, something evidently happened at that point that persuaded the powerful Pelosi that this would be a bad idea. Stein does not say what that something was. Rep. Sylvestre Reyes (Texas) became Chair instead.

Today, indeed, Harman is no longer even on the House Intelligence Committee.

This indicates to me that the extreme permeability to Israeli influence of many of the US's leading national-security decisionmaking bodies that we saw during the early years of the Bush administration (and before that, during much of the Clinton administration) has slowly started to be rolled back in the past 2-3 years.

That early-Bush-era permeability-- as manifested in the extremely strong influence of hawkish pro-Israelis in the Rumsfeld Defense Department, in Cheney's office, and also, certainly in Congress-- helped to feed completely skewed disinformation into the pre-2003 decisionmaking process over Iraq, and thus played a huge role in jerking our government into launching that mega-lethal and extremely ill-considered military aggression.

Now, today's big "question" is whether the US will either launch a military attack against Iran or give Israel the permission it certainly needs if it is to use US assets and support to do launch one in its own name.

Might US decisionmaking once again be so permeable to Israeli disinformation and manipulation that Washington could get jerked into launching or allowing another ill-considered war-- one that, this time, would draw our already overstretched military directly into a shooting war with a non-trivial and extremely sensitively located regional power?

This clearly is something that all US citizens have a strong interest in preventing. So the more we know about previous attempts by the Israeli securocrats to distort our country's security-affairs decisionmaking, the better.

Huge kudos to CQ for publishing this story. I hope we see a lot more reportorial resources devoted to follow-up stories about all aspects of it.

But one last big question: Why, once again, do we see the WaPo and the NYT completely ignoring this important story, which CQ broke yesterday and should therefore have been in today's editions of both papers?

-mr


Sunday, April 19, 2009

Israeli Soldier Slaughters Another Peaceful Protester


From Informed Comment:

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Do You want more Gas?

First the Israeli government built a separation wall right through a Palestinian village, Bilin, on the West Bank inside the Palestine Authority (i.e. beyond the Israeli border).

Then young people assembled regularly to protest that their village was cut in two, with villagers on each side now unable easily to visit, and with the villagers having had land stolen from them without compensation.

On Friday, Israeli troops replied to the unarmed protesters by firing tear gas at them. But the tear gas canisters are intended to be shot from a fair distance. An Israeli soldier appears to have aimed a canister at close distance right at Basim Abu Rahmah, killing him on the spot. In mid-March Tristan Anderson of Oakland, California, was shot in the head with a canister and badly wounded while protesting the Apartheid Wall Israel has built; he is still in a coma.

Philip Weiss provides video demonstrating that that protesters were not violent. Basim was trying to reason with the Israeli soldiers just before he was killed. Weiss says that with the young man lying dead on the ground, one Israeli soldier asks a protester, "Do you want more gas?" (I have to say, I found the question chilling).

Aljazeera English also did a report:



Aljazeera English reports on the aftermath of the Gaza War, finding that "At least 83 children lost both parents and 2,200 lost at least one during Israel's recent war on Gaza."

Video:



-mr

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Headlines:


-mr
Update on Iraq from Informed Comment:

26 Killed, 37 Wounded in Baghdad Bombing;Women's Condition Deteriorating

A car bombing in a market district of Shaab, Baghdad, killed 26 and wounded 37 on Thursday, the fifth large bombing in March. The LAT underlines that blast walls separating Shiite Shaab from nearby Sunni Arab areas have recently been removed. But it should be remembered that Shaab used to be mixed and is now almost wholly Shiite, so there could be some disgruntled Sunnis and who struck back.

AP has video:



Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Iranian speaker of the House Ali Larijani is on a secret mission in Iraq to mediate between the Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his sometime coalition partner, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). The two parties are seeking to form coalitions in several southern Shiite provincial councils, and Iran is said impatient for the deal to be concluded.

Compare this item to the complaints of the incoming US ambassador to Iraq, slamming Iranian influence.

Iraqi women are in the grip of a silent emergency, according to Oxfam:

' "Women are the forgotten victims of Iraq. Despite the billions of dollars poured into rebuilding Iraq and recent security gains, a quarter of the women interviewed still do not have daily access to water, a third cannot send their children to school and since the war started, over half have been the victim of violence.'


McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Thursday:
' Baghdad

A car bomb targeted civilians near al Zahraa Hospital in Shaab neighbourhood, northern Baghdad at 1 p.m. Thursday killing 16 civilians including four women, injuring 40 others including four women.

Nineveh

Gunmen attacked and killed a store owner in his store in Faisaliyah neighbourhood, central Mosul at 11.30 a.m. Thursday.

A joint Iraqi police and Iraqi army patrol opened fire upon a suspect speeding car that wouldn't stop at the checkpoint in al Jamiaa neighbourhood in which Mosul University is located injuring the driver and accidentally killing a female student who was passing by. The car turned out to be booby trapped and was detonated under control without casualties.

- A gunman threw a grenade at a shop in Dawasa neighborhood in downtown Mosul in the afternoon. The shop owner was wounded and the gunman was arrested by police.

Kirkuk

Gunmen attempted to kidnap one of the body guards of the President of the Criminal Court in Kirkuk, Thursday morning. And during the ensuing hand fight, people started to gather and the gunmen fled leaving the body guard, Murad Fikret with superficial injuries.

Three workers in the Electricity Department in Kirkuk were injured when a roadside bomb targeted them while working in Rashad neighbourhood, western Kirkuk, early Thursday afternoon.'


My interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com is now available on the web. It concerns my book:


Engaging the Muslim World


Sunni Arab Refugees from Iraq Not Returning; $3-5 Bn. US Reconstruction Aid Wasted

Hamza Hendawi of AP says his interviews and on-the-ground researches in Baghdad support my contention that the Iraqi capital is now only 10 percent to 15 percent Sunni (in 2003 it was roughly 50/50 Sunni and Shiite):

' Among the statistics obtained by the AP:

— Only an estimated 50,000 of 300,000 displaced families — or 16 percent — have returned to their Baghdad homes, according to the U.S. military. Most are believed to be Sunnis.

— In Hurriyah, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 families, most of them Sunnis, fled in 2006 and 2007. Of those, only 648 families — or 16 to 22 percent — have come back since September.

In addition, 350 to 400 of the displaced families have sold or rented their Hurriyah homes, suggesting they intend to stay away forever, said Maj. Hussein al-Qaissy, Hurriyah's Iraqi army commander.


Note that 300,000 displaced Iraqi families would likely be 1.5 million individuals.

I did research in August, 2008, in Jordan on Iraqi refugees, and it became very clear to me that they are not returning to Iraq. Many are traumatized, having seen horrific violence against neighbors, friends or family members. One fourth of the families applying for refugee aid reported having had a child kidnapped. Many have been personally threatened by militias who still control their old neighborhood. Sometimes the militias track them down in East Amman and threaten them again. Iraqi Sunnis do not feel safe returning to districts that are now largely Shiite. Mixed families feel that they no longer have a place to live safely. Most refugees have had their property confiscated. Many former Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad are now ghost towns.

-mr

Friday, March 20, 2009

In Iraq, a boy named 'War' turns 6:

That same year, War sat in the car as his dad drove down the dark streets of his neighborhood one night. A car stopped in front of them, and members of the Shiite militia, the Mahdi army, pulled a man from the trunk of the car and shot him.

They left him on the street and drove away. It was one of thousands of killings by street militias at the height of sectarian violence. The body was one of many that littered the streets like garbage in 2006 and 2007. Often, 50 bodies were found a day.

Badr got out of the car to see if it was someone from the neighborhood. Some boys distracted him briefly and warned him not to approach the body. When he turned, his son was gone.

War looked into the face of the dead Sunni man.

"What are you doing?" his father asked, running up to the little boy.

"Look baba," he said. "Poor man."

He's seen things a child should never see.

His parents try to protect him, but he asks questions.

"If he sees a man with a gun, he asks if he's going to kill someone," Iman, his mother, said as she baked bread in her home. "I don't know yet how it is going to affect him."

She looked at her son and held her daughter, not yet 2, in her arms.

"Our life is destruction, on top of destruction," she said.

War has never been to a playground and never been on a picnic. He's never been on a ride at an amusement park.

"He always asks to go out," his mother said. "He tells me, 'We haven't seen anything in our lives. Why are we like prisoners in our house?'"

Today, War turns 6. He's never had a birthday party. READ MORE

-mr

Dressed to Kill

From The Angry Arab News Service:
"A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it." Remind me to design T-shirts when Palestine is finally liberated. I have a few ideas. (thanks Asa)

From Informed Comment:

Israeli Excesses in Gaza Revealed

A discussion among Israeli veterans of the past winter's military campaign against Gaza has become public, embarrassing the Israeli military and the politicians who launched that attack, which killed many more innocent civilians than it did Hamas militants, and which wrought enormous damage on Gaza's already dilapidated civilian infrastructure. The Israeli soldiers complained of their inability to stop war crimes such as the arbitrary killing of unarmed civilians. They spoke of deliberate vandalism and destruction of property, including just tossing household effects of Gazan homes out the window.

The BBC adds,

'The soldiers' testimonies also reportedly told of an unusually high intervention by military and non-military rabbis, who circulated pamphlets describing the war in religious terminology.'
There was a general feeling, the soldiers reported, that Palestinian lives counted for little.

Aljazeera English has video:



Aljazeera English also interviews Gazan families who corroborate what the Israeli soldiers divulged.



M. J. Rosenberg has more, including a round-up of news about the ongoing hostilities between Hamas and Israel.

See also Richard Silverstein.

-mr

Monday, March 16, 2009

The Inside View

Another rich, nuanced and illuminating post on the state of affairs in three occupied West Bank cities by veteran journalist and writer Helena Cobban.

What you won't find in The Press: Fateh/Hamas accord, Jewish-Israeli de-development and subsequent gentrification of historic Palestinian city centers, the insignificance of the Arab Peace Initiative, and Zayyad's best-known poetry:

Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem: Not a Christmas Story

Posted by Helena Cobban
March 15, 2009 10:32 PM EST | Link
Filed in Palestine 2009

1. Bethlehem

One morning at the end of February I spent 90 minutes hanging out in the office of Bethlehem mayor Victor Batarseh. Bethlehem in the West Bank, Palestine, that is. And yes, the mayor's office overlooks Manger Square, looking south toward the Church of the Nativity; so there is a certain sense of history to the place.

During our conversation, Batarseh wanted to make sure he got on the record with his scalding criticisms of Israel's recent war against Gaza. "This war was not against Hamas. It was against the Gaza Strips' women and children and its whole infrastructure," he said.

    They were trying to destroy the whole society there... Just as Sharon did here in the West Bank in 2002, and we still haven't totally rebuilt from that.

    How can the western governments, time and time again, ask their people to pay for all these damages caused by Israel's military actions?

Bethlehem's city council has 15 members: eight are Christians and seven are Muslims, and of the Muslims, five are members of Hamas. Batarseh is a Christian, affiliated with one of the venerable leftist factions of the PLO: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP.

I'd been taken to Batarseh's office by council member Zoughbi Zoughbi, a veteran peace activist and also, fwiw, a Christian. Visiting the office that morning were two of the Hamas council members and one of the Fateh members. Batarseh sat behind his desk, the council members and I sat in the easy chairs in front of the desk. Mainly we talked politics-- in English and Arabic. There was a lot of camaraderie and good-natured teasing amongst the council members in the gathering, which assumed the feel, very familiar to me, of an Arabic style "majlis" get-together. Every so often a city official would come in to do some business, and there were some discussions of serious differences among the council members on the question of whether the number of peddlers' cart licenses should be increased or not. (That one sounded like an issue of expanding the economic opportunities available to low-income people versus not scaring off valuable, revenue-bearing foreign tourists by having too many peddlers in the streets.)

Of course, given that the weather was very chilly that day the whole gathering was also lubricated by numerous rounds of hot drinks: yensoon (aniseed tea), mint tea, Arabic coffee, back to yensoon...

Armchair analysts in the west who believe that there are deep and possibly irreconcileable rifts between Fateh and Hamas would have done well to spend a morning with me in Batarseh's office. "In Bethlehem, there are no problems between Fateh and Hamas because we know each other well," Hamas councillor Saleh Shawkeh said. And the way the council members from the different Palestinian movements all interacted together seemed to bear out his words.

"Hamas has to join the PLO!" Zoughbi exclaimed at one point. Batarseh clarified that he thought that Hamas and Islamic Jihad should come in "under the PLO umbrella... and the PLO needs to be renewed and reformed so it can assure the representation of all Palestinians both inside the homeland and in the diaspora."

Shawkeh said, "Yes, the PLO is a legitimate body but it's not the only one in the field. So our idea is that the PLO needs to be fixed before we can come into it." (That echoed exactly what I'd heard from two Hamas parliamentarians I'd interviewed a few days earlier, in Ramallah/Bireh.)

Batarseh jumped in with: "Hamas needs to change too... It shouldn't reach for power by force, as it did in Gaza in 2007."

Shawkeh: "Look, we did win power firstly by votes, but no-one let us even start to exercise our constitutional power after the election!"

Half an hour later a Fateh councillor (whose name I didn't write down) also joined us. "There is no alternative but for both Hamas and Fateh to end the conflict between us," he said, "for the sake of the Palestinian people." Later on, though, he also chided the Hamas councillors, saying many Arab satellite news channels had been strongly biased toward Hamas-- "and they never mentioned the suffering Hamas inflicted on the people in Gaza."

When the conversation turned to broader political principles Batarseh betrayed his PFLP origins when he said,

    We and Hamas both want peace based on justice... We preferred an outcome of one state for all the people in in it: the secular democratic state that used to be the PLO's dream. A state based on religion or ethnicity is always going to have many problems.

    Is there any space left for a Palestinian state any more, with all these Israeli settlements all around us and all these settler-only roads? If we're going to have a Palestinian state we need it to be viable!

Later in the conversation he laid stress on the fact that, "All of us agree that the Oslo Agreement was a big mistake in which Arafat and the PLO gave away far too much."

... All in all, it was a good-- and very good-natured-- political discussion.

Outside Batarseh's office, the streets that snake around and up and down the steep hills on which Bethlehem sits were much quieter than usual. A commercial strike had been called by the PA that day, to protest against Israel's newly announced plans to demolish 88 homes in the Silwan area of Jerusalem.

That strike was significant: It was the first nationwide public action called for jointly by both Fateh and Hamas. It was also an evocative reminder of the heady days of the First Intifada, 1987-93, during which the vast majority of the Palestinians' protest actions had been nonviolent mass actions like commercial strikes, sit-ins, and marches. And yes, the commercial strike announced that day (Feb. 28) was remarkably widely observed-- in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, in East Jerusalem, and in many other areas of the occupied West Bank.

The discussions inside the mayor's chamber may have been friendly and warm, and the streets outside subdued and calm. But around the Bethlehem and its sister cities of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala stood The Wall, its forbidding 30-foot-high presence a constant and very "concrete" reminder of the encirclement of the Palestinian communities of the West Bank.

I cannot overstate how brutal and ugly the Wall is. It becomes a fence in many of the more rural parts of the West Bank. But here, as all around east Jerusalem, and in nearby Ramallah, it is definitely and inescapeably a Wall-- one that's about twice the height of the Berlin Wall, which was already shocking enough.

The Israeli Wall where it comes anywhere close to populated areas-- and oftentimes, it will cut right through them-- is punctuated by cylindrical concrete watch-towers that are even taller than the Wall. At the top of the towers are large, slanted-forward bullet-proof glass windows from which heavily armed Israelis look down on the Palestinians living below. There are also numerous free-standing watch-towers, also of 35-40 feet high. Sometimes their thick slanted glass windows looks directly into apartments on the upper stories of buildings.

The sheer size and extent of these Walls and towers-- and the massive investment that has gone, and continues to go, into their ever-expanding construction-- make a mockery of the idea that the Israeli government might be seeking peace with its neighbors any time soon.

Concentration camps were first invented by the British, during their wars against the Boers in South Africa in the early years of the 20th century. The experience of being "concentrated" into these closely guarded camps did not make the Boer civilian population that was herded into them into a warm, pliant, peace-loving people, to say the least. No reason to think that Israel's ongoing attempts to quadrillage, "concentrate", and control the Palestinians of the West Bank would be much different.

But at least the Anglo-Boer wars came to an end and after just a few years of concentration the Boers were allowed back to their farms.

In Bethlehem or Beit Jala, by contrast, if you look out across the Wall to the areas outside it, most of what you see are the gigantic new Jews-only settlements of Gilo and Har Homa eating up more and more land with every month that passes. Those settlers don't look as though they are going anywhere anytime soon. So the Walls and fences that keep the indigenous Palestinians away from those expropriated portions of their native lands likely won't be coming down anytime soon, either.

As Zoughbi and I looked out westward across a valley toward what is now the settlement of Gilo he said, "Those used to be the fields and grazing lands for the landowners of Beit Jala. Beit Jala's people had such wonderful lands-- they used to stretch from here right down to the coastal plain. They took all that land... "

At the end of my visit to Bethlehem and Beit Jala, Zoughbi took me to a bus-stop in the center of Beit Jala where we were lucky (on a strike day) to find a mini-bus heading for Jerusalem. You can read a bit about that trip here.

I can't tell you how sad and guilty I felt that I-- a complete foreigner-- was able to travel fairly easily from Bethlehem to Jerusalem while Zoughbi, like the vast majority of other residents of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour have been forbidden since 2000 from traveling to Jerusalem, their close relatives and business associates there, and the many holy places there for both Christians and Muslims. And they, like all the other Palestinians of the West Bank have absolutely zero prospect, as of now, that these roads will be reopened to them any time soon.

Downtown Bethlehem is about seven miles as the crow flies from the center of Jerusalem.

2. Nazareth.

Back in the 1980s I made a couple of visits to Nazareth, which is the largest city in northern Israel and the largest Arab city anywhere in Israel. Back in those days if you started off from the-- in my view exceedingly ugly-- Church of the Basilica you could immediately climb upward into the dense network of tiny stone-paved streets that laced up the hills up behind it forming the dense and busy Arabic-style suq (market) that lies at the heart of all ancient Middle Eastern cities.

Back then, the guidebooks said that if you go to the second haberdasher on the right side of a certain street in the suq, you could get the key to a nearby, half-underground structure that was absolutely reputed to be the very synagogue in which Jesus of Nazareth, aged 12, had delivered his first sermon. In 1989 my father, a devout Anglican and something of a sermonizer in his own right, was staying with us in Israel/Palestine for ten days, and we couldn't resist the temptation to seek out the haberdasher in question, and get hold of the key... Before long, we were standing in that very synagogue room, imbibing many centuries' worth of pure ambience from the roughcut, cobwebby walls around us. Gosh, I must still have the photos of that somewhere...

And then, we exited the synagogue, coming out directly into the hustle-bustle of the suq that was all around us.

When I was planning the return trip I made to Nazareth ten days ago, I asked Jonathan Cook, a very smart British writer who I think has now earned the title of "The Sage of Nazareth", where would be a good place to stay. Jonathan suggested I try one of the two little guest houses that have recently opened up within the Old City. I was excited. I love the intricacies, history, and bustle of the Middle East's "Old Cities". When I was in Damascus back in January our delegation stayed in a place called the Talisman Hotel, which is one of a number of small boutique hotels that have opened up in recent years-- along with an even greater number of very fancy restaurants-- inside the traditional, courtyard-based homes and "palaces" of the Old City... Or, you could think of the often smaller "riyadh" guest-houses established in lovely old homes in Marrakesh... One of the principal attractions of such lodgings is the fact that they are located in, and help to sustain the economic fabric of, fully functioning ancient downtown areas.

Well, that is there. But Nazareth is in Israel, which apparently doesn't place much value on fully functioning Arab-style (and Arab-peopled) downtown areas.

Back in 2000, the Pope decided he wanted to visit Nazareth for the millennium. So a few years before that the Israeli government decided to gussy the whole city center up. That, according to Jonathan, involved closing down the entire downtown area for three years so the facades of the buildings could be entirely cleaned and standardized. The Pope came, and I imagine he may have looked at the facades for some minutes (or not.) But most of the shopowners and the residents who once lived above and all round them never returned. Downtown Nazareth became a nearly deserted urban wasteland, inhabited only by a small number of very poor squatters and drug addicts.

Jonathan has described the process as the "de-development" of the Nazareth downtown. You can see a few of his photos of Life in Nazareth here.

And guess what. Here as in Jaffa and Acre and the "de-developed" historic centers of other Palestinian cities inside Israel, Jewish-Israeli entrepreneurs have just now moving in to try to gentrify, boutiquize, and rebrand the Old City.

That is after, of course, the Israeli government has already, over the years, taken numerous steps to expropriate and re-purpose-- for Jews only-- many of the lands around the city that for generations were owned by Palestinian landowners. One of the biggest of these land-grabs was the one that resulted in the building of an whole new Jewish town, called Nazareth Illit ("Upper Nazareth") on the hills north of town.

Historian Geremy Forman has written that,

    Like other Jewish settlements in the Galilee, an important aim of Upper Nazareth was to ensure Jewish state control and sovereignty in the region. According to IDF Planning Department Director Yuval Ne'eman, the new settlement would "emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole, and ... demonstrate state sovereignty to the Arab population more than any other settlement operation." More specifically, Upper Nazareth was meant to address the challenge perceived as emanating from the all-Arab city of Nazareth. It would do this not by achieving a Jewish majority within the city of Nazareth itself, but rather by quickly evolving from a neighborhood into a city and eventually overpowering Arab Nazareth numerically, economically, and politically. According to Northern Military Governor Colonel Mikhael Mikhael, the final aim of the settlement was to "swallow up" the Arab city through "growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group" and "the transfer of the center of gravity of life from Nazareth to the Jewish neighborhood." (G. Forman: Military Rule, Political Manipulation, and Jewish Settlement: Israeli Mechanisms for Controlling Nazareth in the 1950s, The Journal of Israeli History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2006), p.351, cited in Wikipedia.)
...Well, despite my disappointment about the sad fate of Nazareth's Old City, I did have a good time during my short stay there. Jonathan and his wife, Sally Azzam, were extremely kind in showing me around. They showed me how to find some of the small number of functioning businesses inside the Old City. But we also wondered around many streets looking at some of the fine architectural details of beautiful old homes now falling into disrepair.

Both of them are really interesting people. Jonathan is an amazingly prolific and smart writer. He's now published three books of his own, as well as contributing chapters to several edited volumes. (Details here.)

I managed to buy and read his latest book, Disappearing Palestine, before I got to Nazareth, and strongly recommend it. On his website he describes his perspective in these terms:

    Geographically, I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ - a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.

    Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.

    From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism's appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.

Sally was equally interesting to talk to. She is probably somewhere in her early thirties, and she's a native of Nazareth. She talked about how, growing up there and going to one of the city's many nun-run schools, she never heard very much talk at all-- either at home or from her teachers at school-- about the Nakba (catastrophe) that struck the whole Arab community of Palestine in 1948. She said her grandmother, who had lived through the whole Nakba, "never wanted to talk about it at all", and her mother never said much about it until recently, either.

It was only after Sally went to university, in Haifa, that she really started to hear the Nakba discussed openly. And it was then, too, that she started to explore and strengthen her identity as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. (Official Israeli policy has always been to try to downplay the "Palestinian-ness" of the country's Palestinian-Arab citizens, describing them only as "Israeli Arabs", or further sub-dividing them into even smaller categories like ""Christian Arabs", or "Israeli Druze", or "Israeli Beduins", or whatever... Anything but the dreaded P-word that might cause them-- gasp!-- to identify more closely with those of their cousins and brothers who had left as refugees in 1948 or who, living just a few miles south of Nazareth, were living under the yoke of Israeli military occupation in the confines of the West Bank.)

Sally also talked a little about how, young and eager to be "modern", she was eager when she went to university to have her first real opportunity to make friends with Jewish Israeli girls her age. But she said that most of her efforts to do so were rebuffed: "They really didn't want anything to do with us."

These days, one of the things Sally is doing is working with one of the many "co-existence and conflict resolution" projects that have been started by NGOs within the Palestinian-Israeli community. She's been working with a group of Palestinian-Israeli girls in Nazareth on life-skills, nonviolent communication, and things like that.

She recalled one recent event when "her" group of Palestinian-Israeli girls were scheduled to meet up and do a joint activity with a group of Jewish-Israeli girls who had been taking part in a parallel program someplace else. "Our girls were pretty excited at the opportunity to get together as equals, for once, with these Jewish girls. But when we got there, none of the Jewish girls turned up. They just couldn't be bothered. It was pretty hard to explain to the girls in my group that this event they had been looking forward to, and preparing for, for quite some time-- to the Jewish girls, it was just nothing."

for me, that story of Sally's was an echo of something Jewish Israeli strategic analyst Yossi Alpher had told me just a few days earlier.

We were having lunch in a nice cafe in northern Tel Aviv, and at one point Alpher said,

    You know, for the Arab states, they seem to act as if this 'normalization of relations' that they are holding out to Israel as part of the Arab Peace Initiative is a big deal. But it really isn't. Most Israelis don't give a toss these days about having good relations with the Arab world, becoming well integrated into the Middle East region, and all that. For an earlier generation of Israelis-- maybe that mattered. But nowadays? No. The present generation of Israelis have largely turned their back on the Arab world. They're much more focused on Europe.

    Now, you have numerous Israelis who commute on a weekly basis between Tel Aviv and London or Amsterdam. Then you have the descendants of all those earlier generations of Israelis who came here from Poland or Romania or wherever in the 1930s: Now that most of those countries have gone into the EU, Israelis are reclaiming their citizenship rights there, and those EU passports, at a fast rate. Why would they want to be bothered with the Arabs?

Anyway, back to Nazareth: Guess who's coming to the city again, (though in a new instantiation) this May?

The pope. H'mmm.

3. Tawfiq Zayyad

From 1973 until his untimely death in 1994, the Palestinian-Israeli Communist poet Tawfiq Zayyad was both Mayor of Nazareth and a member of Israel's Knesset (parliament.)

Here, thanks to Wikipedia, are English-language translations of two of Zayyad's best-known poems:

    Here We Will Remain

    In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
    we shall remain
    like a wall upon your chest,
    and in your throat
    like a shard of glass,
    a cactus thorn,
    and in your eyes
    a sandstorm.
    We shall remain
    a wall upon your chest,
    clean dishes in your restaurants,
    serve drinks in your bars,
    sweep the floors of your kitchens
    to snatch a bite for our children
    from your blue fangs.
    Here we shall stay,
    sing our songs,
    take to the angry streets,
    fill prisons with dignity.
    In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
    we shall remain,
    guard the shade of the fig
    and olive trees,
    ferment rebellion in our children
    as yeast in the dough.

    * * *

    All I Have

    I never carried a rifle
    On my shoulder
    Or pulled a trigger.
    All I have
    Is a flute's melody
    A brush to paint my dreams,
    A bottle of ink.
    All I have
    Is unshakeable faith
    And an infinite love
    For my people in pain.

Zayyad was killed in a car accident in July 994, as he drove back to Nazareth after a visit he made to Jericho to welcome Yasser Arafat on the occasion of Arafat's post-Oslo return to the West Bank.

How tragic was that?

4. Jerusalem

I have written quite a lot about Jerusalem here already-- about the Jewish-Israeli western part of the city, from which some 60,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during the fighting of 1948, and have never since been allowed to return, and about the now Israeli-occupied eastern part of the city from which some 2,000 Jewish people were ethnically cleansed during the 1948...

The eastern half of the city includes the city's historic and fascinating walled Old City, home of some of the holiest sites of the three monotheistic religions: The Kotel, or Wailing Wall, beloved as a place of intense lamentation by Jews; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is, truth be told, much fought over among a myriad of Christian churches; and the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif) of the Muslims, home to the highly venerated Al-Aqsa mosque and the gold-carapaced Dome of the Rock, a shrine on the spot from which the prophet is reputed to have sprung on his horse during his mystic Night Journey... The Haram al-Sharif is also reputedly on the site of the Jewish people's destroyed Third Temple. (The Kotel that we can see is the wall facing a portion of its foundation. The lamentations there are over the destruction of the temple.)

Ah, as soon as I write about this sacred geography, and its intimacy, you can start to see the complexity and incendiary nature of the issues involved.

No wonder my friend Moshe Ma'oz says "The negotiators should start with the issue of Jerusalem, not end with it. With goodwill and mutual respect all round these issues can be resolved. And once you've solved Jerusalem everything else falls easily into place."

However, the mutual respect part of this might require quite some effort to build. After Israel's military occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967 it almost immediately set about trying to Judaize as much of the city as it could. First it seized back control over the historic Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Then it decided to make a big ceremonial plaza in front of the Kotel, for which purpose it demolished 135 Palestinian homes in the Mughariba Quarter near the Wall, along with two neighborhood mosques and the shrine of a Sufi saint. Then, almost immediately, it set about building thick swathes of Jewish settlements in such a way as to stifle the city's remaining Palestinian residents and to cut them off from their cousins and compatriots in the rest of the West Bank.

For this purpose, too, the Israeli government unilaterally expanded the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem considerably beyond where they had previously been and then declared the unilateral Anschluss of the whole expanded city to the State of Israel. The Palestinians trapped inside the annexed city now number 220,000. The number of Israeli settlers quite illegally planted into the occupied east of the city number around 195,000. The boundaries of the city are ringed by the brutal concrete Wall.

And still the demolitions of Palestinian homes inside the city continues, as does the creeping forward of Israeli settlement projects right through the heart of historic Palestinian neighborhoods both within the Old City and outside it..."

-mr