by Mitchell Plitnick
Like many of us, I’ve been very busy on social media since Israel began its military operation in Gaza. I see a lot of ignorant nonsense there, and it’s not limited to the pro-Israel side. I also see a lot of shoddy thinking and ignorance of the facts. Since [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
Like many of us, I’ve been very busy on social media since Israel began its military operation in Gaza. I see a lot of ignorant nonsense there, and it’s not limited to the pro-Israel side. I also see a lot of shoddy thinking and ignorance of the facts. Since I had to study up a lot of this for my job as the Director of the US Office of B’Tselem, I thought I might set the record straight.
“War crimes”
Various memes make the rounds in discussions of war crimes. One that I found particularly laughable was “Even the UN says Hamas is committing war crimes but they say Israel only might be.” I’ve also seen defenses of Hamas’ firing of missiles at civilian targets in Israel based on Palestinians’ right of self-defense.
Here is the long and short of it: War crimes are defined as “Serious violations of international humanitarian law constitute war crimes.” That’s going to encompass pretty much every violation that might become a public issue in any conflict.
International law recognizes that civilians are going to be hurt, killed and dispossessed in war. The obligation of combatants is to do all they can to minimize the death and destruction if they do need to operate in areas where it is likely that civilians will be hurt.
As a result, when Israel proclaims its innocence of violating these laws, no matter how suspicious we may be, enforcers of international law cannot declare that war crimes have been committed without an investigation. Reasonable people who are not international lawyers can make assumptions, but the investigation needs to happen, and it is always possible, especially when the conflict involves an area as densely populated as Gaza, that it will turn out that the state in question did its best to avoid civilian casualties. High civilian casualty numbers are not proof, but they obviously raise suspicions.
On Hamas’ side, this is true as well, but Hamas makes no secret of its use of weapons which, by their very nature, cannot be used in a manner that can discriminate between civilian and military targets. So, while the UN or other bodies would still investigate and make a case before taking any action, Hamas is committing war crimes. It’s not unfair to say so.
In this case, however, Israel has declared that the homes of leading Hamas activists (and those of other factions) are legitimate targets. They have, in fact, willfully bombed such houses during these engagements as a result. Unlike the 2002 assassination of Salah Shehade, where Israel claimed (falsely, many say) to have believed Shehade to be alone in the building they bombed, Israel has made no such claims this time around. Therefore, it is also not unfair to say that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, even before an investigation.
If not for Iron Dome, there would have been many more Israeli casualties
This statement seems to make sense, but the numbers don’t back it up. A study done through July 14, when rocket fire into Israel was at its most intense, showed that the number of rockets being fired from Gaza was fewer than in Operation Cast Lead and the frequency of hits was about the same.
I’m all for Iron Dome. Any defensive system whose purpose is to protect civilians is something I consider an absolute positive, and I only wish more countries would invest in such systems, endeavoring to protect, rather than avenge, their civilians. The concern that iron Dome would make Israel even more reckless and grant it even more impunity does not seem to be borne out by its actions in the current onslaught. Those actions, brutal as they are, are no worse than what Israel did in 2008 and 2012 to Gaza or what it did in 2006 to Lebanon. So, yeah, please let’s see more Iron Domes in the world.
By the same token, however, it doesn’t seem like Iron Dome is actually protecting Israeli civilians nearly as much as the rockets’ lack of any sort of targeting ability.
Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people
Opponents of Israeli policies in the United States and in Israel itself have an uphill battle against an entrenched propagandistic view of the entire conflict. We do ourselves no favors by using bombastic, easily assailable language in making our arguments.
Genocide has a specific meaning in international law. It does not mean large scale killing. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide provides that definition:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of thr group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
There is no evidence that this is what Israel is trying to do. Indeed, the best evidence that Israel is not doing this is the simple fact that the Palestinian population, in both the West Bank and Gaza, continues to grow, despite the occupation and all its concomitant hardships.
Would Israel like to find a way to get rid of the Palestinians in the West Bank and cut off Gaza? Sure, but that is not genocide, it is ethnic cleansing, and frankly, that’s bad enough. Israel has done that very gradually over the years, confiscating more and more land, forcing Palestinians into ever smaller enclaves and turning Gaza into one big open air prison.
Making claims that are contradicted by the facts, especially the weighty accusation of genocide, is irresponsible and self-defeating; it plays right into Israel’s propaganda hands.
Hamas is exercising legitimate self-defense
It is absolutely true that an occupied people has the right to resist its occupiers. It is also true that the unusual nature of Israel’s occupation makes it very difficult for guerrilla groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Resistance Committees and others to take any violent action that would conform to international legal standards. As international legal expert Noura Erekat puts it: “Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested.”
It is also true that Israel itself does not differentiate between attacks on its civilians and its soldiers. It views them as equally illegitimate and labels it all “terrorism,” even though legally, Israeli soldiers are combatants while on duty. Take, for example, the killing of IDF soldier Natanel Moshiashvili in 2012. The IDF statement about his death plainly states: “The IDF will not tolerate any attempt to harm Israeli civilians or IDF soldiers, and will operate against anyone who uses terror against the State of Israel.”
Nonetheless, the fact that Palestinians are mostly unable to strike exclusively at Israeli military targets does not mean that it is suddenly legal to use indiscriminate weapons or to target civilians. These are war crimes, and any credible investigation must investigate both sides while also taking into account the massive differences in capabilities and power of the two. Israel must also be scrutinized more closely because it has a far greater ability to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants than Hamas.
Hamas is using human shields
Saying something over and over again doesn’t make it true, but it does make a whole lot of people believe it. For instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu willfully and repeatedly lied to the Israeli public and the world about Hamas’ complicity in the kidnap and murder of the three young Israeli settlers, which sparked this latest round. He kept saying he had proof that he never produced, and now the Israeli police are admitting what everyone who was actually paying attention at the time knew: this was an independent act of violence.
It’s the same with the human shield argument. Like genocide, the term “human shield” has a legal definition. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, “… the use of human shields requires an intentional co-location of military objectives and civilians or persons hors de combat with the specific intent of trying to prevent the targeting of those military objectives.” Again, as Erekat wrote: “International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true.” Erekat correctly cites reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which focused on past engagements. There is also doubt being cast by journalists in Gaza today.
In fact, no evidence has ever been presented to support the accusation apart from the high number of civilian casualties and Israel’s word. On the other hand, Israel’s own High Court had to demand that Israel stop using human shields. That happened in 2005, but the practice continued.
In any case, even the presence of human shields does not absolve or mitigate Israel’s responsibility to minimize civilian casualties. Again quoting Erekat: “Even assuming that Israel’s claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties…In the over three weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel’s egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes.”
Finally, one last point and one more citation of Noura Erekat. The claim that Israel is merely acting in self-defense fails on a number of counts. As I and others have been saying from the beginning, the Netanyahu government willfully and cynically used the murders of three Israelis as an excuse to provoke Hamas with mass arrests and widespread activities that included the deaths of nine Palestinian civilians before this operation started. That removes the self-defense argument from the start. But more than that, the Gaza Strip, despite it being emptied of settlements and soldiers, remains under Israeli control, and is thus occupied territory, contrary to Israel’s claims. Please check out Erekat’s excellent write-up of what this means for the right of self-defense. And please note, she never denies that Israel has a right to protect its own civilians, but that is not the same thing.
Photo: International and Palestinian volunteers accompanied Civil Defense and other rescue crews, as well as family members, into Shujaya, a neighborhood by the separation barrier in the east of Gaza City, in an attempt to locate survivors of overnight and ongoing shelling by the Israeli army on July 20. Credit: Joe Catron
]]>The moral high ground is always a tenuous piece of property. It is difficult to obtain and is easily lost. It is seen, however, as crucial because most people, all over the world, cannot accommodate the notion that life is composed of shades of grey; they desperately need to see black and [...]]]>
The moral high ground is always a tenuous piece of property. It is difficult to obtain and is easily lost. It is seen, however, as crucial because most people, all over the world, cannot accommodate the notion that life is composed of shades of grey; they desperately need to see black and white, good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains, in every situation. Nowhere is this truer than in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
It has become even more important for Israel to fight this rhetorical battle because, while it can always count on mindless support from Washington and from the most radically nationalistic and zealous Zionists around the world, the current escalation and ugliness are going to be very difficult to defend to even mainstream pro-Israel liberals, let alone the rest of the world. The hasbara (propaganda) has been flowing at a rapid pace, even more than usual, as Israel struggles to maintain the treasured hold on the “moral high ground” that its own actions have increasingly undermined.
The Setup
Here is the very simple reality of what is happening now between Israel and Gaza: Israel willfully and intentionally seized upon a crime to demolish the unity government between Hamas and Gaza and, at the same time, significantly downgrade Hamas’ administrative, political, and military capabilities.
Israel, of course, could not have foreseen the kidnapping and murder of three youths on the West Bank, but once it happened, the Netanyahu government went into high gear to press its advantage. Recognizing that it needed to whip the Israeli public into a frenzy, the government put a gag order on the case to avoid revealing that it knew almost right away that the young men were dead. Under the cover of what seemed to be a kidnapping, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to attack Hamas in both the West Bank and Gaza, launching a massive military operation throughout the former and increasing its bombing raids in the latter.
Hamas, for its part, didn’t react wisely, but the politics of its situation left its leadership little choice. They had advocated kidnappings too often in the past, and they delayed stating they were not behind this incident. They finally did, and when Israel named the two suspects, it gave weight to Hamas’ denial, as the alleged murderers were part of a powerful Hebron clan that, as J.J. Goldberg put it, “…had a history of acting without the [Hamas] leaders’ knowledge, sometimes against their interests.”
But while it is rather clear at this point that the Hamas leadership had nothing to do with the three boys’ murders, it did support the act, which played well into Netanyahu’s hands. All over Israel and all over social media, calls for revenge popped up, along with cries of “Death to the Arabs,” and horrifying, indeed genocidal, statements by Israeli politicians. Ayelet Shaked of the Jewish Home Party compared Palestinian children to snakes, called for a war on the entire Palestinian people, and said “They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads.” It’s difficult for even the most brazen apologist to see those words as anything other than an incitement to attack civilians without restraint.
Such words bore their fruit when a Palestinian youth of 16 years, Muhammed Abu Khdeir, was burned alive. And here, of course, is where the Israeli rhetoric ratcheted up another notch. Setting out to capture the criminals was an imperative for the Netanyahu government because it made the case that “we prosecute such murderers, while our enemy celebrates them,” a refrain that was uttered continuously in various forms.
“…That’s the difference between us and our neighbors,” Netanyahu said. “They consider murderers to be heroes. They name public squares after them. We don’t. We condemn them and we put them on trial and we’ll put them in prison.”
Not only is that rhetoric dehumanizing, it is also false. For example, the town of Kochav Yair in central Israel is named after the leader of the notorious LEHI, or “Stern Gang,” Avraham Stern, a terrorist who was summarily executed by the British. LEHI, along with the Irgun Z’Vai Leumi (or Irgun for short) was responsible for the massacre of the Palestinian Deir Yassin village in 1948, though this was after Stern’s death. The same group also boasted among its members about future Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who was behind, among other things, the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne, British Minister for Middle East Affairs, while the Irgun was led by Menachem Begin, the first Israeli prime minister from an opposition party. Many streets are named after them.
If that’s not enough, in the settlement of Kiryat Arba one can find the Meir Kahane Memorial Park, dedicated to the late “rabbi” who called for violence against Arabs in Israel (and whose Jewish Defense League often organized violence against African-Americans in the US). And, of course, right across from that park is the tomb of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians in 1994. That grave has been turned into a pilgrimage site for radical Jews.
So, Israelis are quite capable of celebrating murderers as well. But it’s important for Netanyahu to conceal this fact for now. During the staged operation to find the “kidnapped” youths, Israel arrested hundreds of Palestinians, many, but not all associated with Hamas. They virtually closed down Hebron and the surrounding area, and entered many Palestinian cities throughout the West Bank, provoking frequent clashes with residents. Several Palestinians were killed and many were injured.
Hamas eventually took responsibility for some rockets that had been fired at Israel, and the situation continued to deteriorate. Eventually, Israel launched the current operation, which was dubbed “Solid Cliff” in Hebrew; their marketing people felt that “Protective Edge” sounded better in English.
Since then, over 100 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians and minors. Houses have been targeted and destroyed, hundreds of people injured. United Nations human rights officials have warned that Israel may be committing war crimes by targeting private homes while the United States performs its usual task of preventing the Security Council from issuing critical statements about Israeli actions.
While the US works that task, both its president and its ambassador to Israel are reassuring Israel with total support. In a stunning example of double talk, President Barack Obama offered to broker a cease-fire, but Netanyahu bluntly stated he doesn’t want one. So, naturally US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro responded by saying the US would back a ground invasion of Gaza.
War of Choice
Israeli military leaders, whose role in deciding defense strategy has become increasingly, if quietly, marginalized under Netanyahu, are not enthusiastic about the current Israeli onslaught. They understand that Hamas is not going to be defeated militarily and that this action is further degrading Israel’s standing in the world. They also understand that the impetus for this action was not security, but politics.
Netanyahu is meanwhile not striking a blow for security, or even revenge. The purpose of all this, from the deception of the Israeli people and the world about the fate of the three murdered youths, the mass arrests and provocative behavior during the staged “search” for the boys, and the following attacks on Gaza were directed not at Palestinian terrorists, but at Palestinian political leaders. While it’s true that Netanyahu envisions no exit strategy (he never does) for this operation, he does have objectives; three of them, in fact.
The first is obvious: to deliver a blow to Hamas. He is well aware that the group is already struggling financially, even more than usual, and these attacks are diverting resources toward fighting Israel and creating greater needs among Gazans.
The second is to humiliate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Netanyahu is absolutely furious that Abbas acted without Israel’s permission by joining international treaties and forming a unity government — two things which, actually, are not only Palestine’s right, but Abbas’ duty. Netanyahu is showing Palestinians how ineffective Abbas is: the PA president can do nothing but sit on the sidelines. This is a stupid thing for Netanyahu to do, of course, because it undermines the man who has been keeping the West Bank quiet for Israel, but when has that ever stopped him?
Finally, and most importantly, the goal that probably spurred all of this was Netanyahu’s desperation to dismember the Palestinian unity government. Bibi knows that while a unity government might not make progress in securing Palestinian rights, the split between Gaza and the West Bank makes it utterly impossible for there to be any progress toward ending Israel’s 47-year old occupation. From the day the unity agreement was signed, Netanyahu has been enraged about it and obsessed with undoing it. He hopes that the current violence will either increase international pressure on Abbas to dissolve his partnership with Hamas or that Hamas will grow so angry at Abbas that it will walk away.
Given that the West Bank has remained largely quiet, thanks entirely to Abbas’ security forces clamping down on any protests, let alone any action against Israel, it is entirely possible that Hamas will indeed bolt from the unity arrangement. This is rather remarkable because Netanyahu continues to demonize Abbas publicly and no one wants to compliment him on maintaining order because he is doing so at the expense of enraging his own people. Most Palestinians in the West Bank see their relatives being slaughtered in Gaza while their own president not only sits by helplessly but prevents his people from even protesting.
That is Netanyahu’s agenda, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with keeping Israelis safe and secure. Indeed, as has always been the case, far more Israelis are threatened and injured when Israel attacks than at other times.
To even maintain this thin façade, Israel must continue to make the false case that it has the moral high ground. While Hamas could be easily assailed because they only target Israeli civilians, Netanyahu has still found a way to be even more criminal, Machiavellian and ruthless, and ultimately the most culpable villain here by far.
Make no mistake about what the United States is backing here. This is as pure a war of choice as any. Netanyahu has set up this fight, and has waged it. And, as always, it is the people of Gaza who pay the heaviest price. But Israelis too will bear the cost of this ruthless escapade in the long run. And the United States can only look at itself in shame as it supports this murderous and reckless endeavor.
Photo: Five people were reported killed in an air strike on Rafah, southern Gaza, on July 11. Credit: AP
]]>In an attempt to engage with the world’s population, a team headed by the United Nations Millennium Campaign is polling individuals across the globe and making those results available to [...]]]>
In an attempt to engage with the world’s population, a team headed by the United Nations Millennium Campaign is polling individuals across the globe and making those results available to everyone, including U.N. decision makers.
The initiative, called My World, asks global citizens to rank 16 priorities, ranging from freedom from discrimination to equality between men and women.
The results, a visual break down of priorities by demographics (for example, the priority of women over 61 in Brazil is healthcare), are also available by country via an interactive map.
“How do you make sure an indigenous woman is influencing decision making in New York?” asked World We Want Co-chair Ravi Karkara, an advisor for the U.N. Millennium Campaign on child and youth engagement. “One of the criticism of U.N. Millennium Development Goals,” which set out to end poverty by 2015, “is that they’re very top down.” This new initiative aims to be bottom up, surveying “the people who are not part of the traditional development conversation, including the poorest of the poor.”
Global Youth Advocates, such as Girl Guides and Oxfam, polls villagers, urban slum residents – the majority of which were not submitted electronically – on what matters to them.
On May 16, World We Want and U.N. Millennium Campaign will present the interactive database to the General Assembly. “When you’re sitting in the General Assembly, you don’t have time to read through thousands of pages,” said Karkara.
Instead, organizers argue decision makers can use the database to easily access the priorities of their own communities. And the data doesn’t stop there.
“This platform allows for open knowledge sharing across the world,” said Karkara. “We have no copyright. It’s data by people for people.”
The survey found that a good education is the number one priority of the global community; action taken on climate change was last on the list. As an interesting aside, Karkara’s team shared that of the respondents who cited “fast cars” as a priority, these were also more likely to prioritize protecting rivers, forests and oceans and taking action against climate change than the general public.
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
In an earlier article I discussed the apoplectic reaction by the United States to the Palestinian decision to send letters of accession to fifteen international conventions and treaties. This was condemned by Samantha Power in congressional testimony as a threat to Israel. Earlier, a White House spokesman had [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
In an earlier article I discussed the apoplectic reaction by the United States to the Palestinian decision to send letters of accession to fifteen international conventions and treaties. This was condemned by Samantha Power in congressional testimony as a threat to Israel. Earlier, a White House spokesman had equated this Palestinian move with Israeli settlement expansion and reneging on the agreed release of prisoners by calling both moves “unhelpful, unilateral actions.”
So let’s examine these unilateral steps by the Palestinians and what existential threat they pose to Israel. Here is the list of the fifteen conventions that the Palestinians want to become a party to:
1. The Four Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and the First Additional Protocol
2. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations
3. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations
4. The Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in armed conflict
5. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
6. The Hague Convention (IV) respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its annex: Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land
7. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
8. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties
9. The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination
10. The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
11. The United Nations Convention against Corruption
12. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
13. The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid
14. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
15. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
As you can see, the Palestinian applications do not affect Israel in any way. In fact, the Palestinians went out of their way to avoid impactful applications, such as to the Rome Statute (which would allow them to bring war crimes charges against Israel to the International Criminal Court) or to any United Nations bodies (which, thanks to Israel’s bought-and-paid-for US Congress would force the United States to suspend funding to any such bodies, as it did in response to UNESCO accepting the Palestinians in 2011).
If we want to really stretch our imaginations, we can come up with two things Israel might be concerned about. One is that by joining these conventions, Palestine looks a little bit more like a state. The second is that if Palestine is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, it helps to undermine Israel’s argument that the Conventions don’t apply to the Occupied Territories because after the 1948 war, they were merely occupied by other countries, rather than being truly part of a neighboring state.
But those imaginative leaps don’t amount to much, because even if they were Israel’s concerns — and they’re not — they’d be very minor. The accession to these conventions would be nothing next to the UN General Assembly’s decision to admit Palestine as a “non-member observer state” in November 2012. And no one who takes international law seriously buys Israeli arguments that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to the Occupied Territories.
No, Israel’s concerns are that the Palestinians took an action that Israel did not agree to, and that the action they took is a reminder that the Palestinians can, any time they wish to, apply for accession to the Rome Statute, which Israel clearly fears.
There’s a real irony in the Israeli and US reactions. Ethically, and as a way to take some sort of action, the Palestinian decision is beyond reproach. But strategically, the particular conventions they applied to could cause some problems for them. The fact is, the Palestinian Authority (PA), from its inception, has had major problems with human rights. As attorney Darryl Li explains, “Many of the human rights agreements Abbas signed have monitoring mechanisms whereby committees of experts monitor state compliance through periodically holding hearings and issuing reports.” Israel, which has never been concerned about hypocrisy, will no doubt use such reports to attack the PA while condemning the same bodies when they issue reports critical of themselves.
That aside, the real issue here is that the United States is criticizing and threatening the Palestinian Authority for signing conventions committing them to international law, protecting human and civil rights, and agreeing to diplomatic norms. At the same time, Israel reneges on its commitments to the US, expands settlements and threatens to withhold tax monies from the Palestinians that Israel is not legally entitled to control, and the US expresses mild displeasure but threatens absolutely no action in response.
All of us who have followed this conflict for any length of time have likely become jaded by the US double standard. That’s why it’s worthwhile to examine what’s happening when that double standard is this blatant. We need to remember how much of a problem it really is.
Photo: US Secretary of State John Kerry and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas shake hands before a meeting in Paris, France, on February 19, 2014. Credit: State Department/Public Domain
]]>by Mitchell Plitnick
Syria’s declaration that it would accept a Russian proposal to hand over its chemical weapons to an international body was the latest in a string of surprises around international concern over the ongoing, horrific civil war in that country. It is extremely premature, at this point, to declare the [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
Syria’s declaration that it would accept a Russian proposal to hand over its chemical weapons to an international body was the latest in a string of surprises around international concern over the ongoing, horrific civil war in that country. It is extremely premature, at this point, to declare the threat of a US escalation over, but the delay this proposal produced does go a long way toward lowering the heat on the crisis and, at minimum, stretching the timetable.
President Obama’s willingness to bring this idea to the U.N. Security Council opens the door to averting a U.S. strike and pushes back the likely strike date and a congressional vote on Obama’s decision. That has led to a collective sigh of relief, at least for the moment, throughout the country. And nowhere has that sound been louder than in the offices of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The debate has been a difficult one in Washington. A hawkish minority see striking Syria as a necessary deterrent, both to Bashar al-Assad reusing chemical weapons and emboldening Iran to pursue nuclear weapons, a decision hawks think will be influenced by a perception that the U.S. is so reluctant to get involved in another military escapade that it will not back up threats of using force. That’s what is meant by “protecting U.S. credibility.” But the majority of the U.S. public and, at least for the time being, the House of Representatives seems to be opposed to Obama’s idea of hitting Syria.
In one of a series of surprises around this issue, AIPAC publicly dove in to the Syria debate in DC, and faced the most daunting challenge they had in many years. One of the things that gives AIPAC its air of invincibility is their astounding record of success on Capitol Hill. One of the reasons they have that record is that they rarely get into fights they are not sure they are going to win. This one was far from that.
A vote held immediately after the president announced he was going to request authorization from Congress would have likely been unsuccessful. Some, myself included, believed that a full court press by the president combined with hard lobbying by AIPAC and the Saudis would, over the course of time, sway enough votes to give the president what he wanted. I’m pretty sure the Senate, in any case, will support Obama. The House is certainly more questionable.
If the vote in either chamber went against the president, it would mean an unprecedented loss for AIPAC. They’ve lost before, but never when they were working with, rather than against, the president of the United States. That they got involved with such an iffy proposition can only be explained by an Israeli desire to see Obama win this one, but also for the Israeli government itself — which, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has faced unprecedented criticism for interfering in U.S. politics — to remain distant from the debate. In a most unusual development, it is Obama who keeps talking about Israel being a factor in his decision. AIPAC has adamantly refused to name Israeli concerns as a reason for their support of an attack on Syria.
Chemi Shalev, the very sharp Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz wrote:
If AIPAC goes ‘all out,’ as Politico reported on Thursday, and ‘250 Jewish leaders and AIPAC activists will storm the halls on Capitol Hill beginning next week,’ but the House of Representatives nonetheless votes against the President, then the lobby’s image of invincibility, to which it owes much of its influence, will inevitably be jeopardized.
I’m not sure AIPAC’s air of invincibility would be jeopardized so much as it might be slightly diminished, another step on the unfortunately long road to normalizing the U.S. discussion of Middle East policy.
The other, younger and more moderate side of the Israel Lobby, J Street, had its own problems with the Syria issue. Internal debate in the organization had a stymying effect and left them without a position. While some were content with no stance from the “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” lobbying group, their silence can hurt them in the long term on the Hill.
Long-time DC observer Ron Kampeas has it just right when he says:
One of the most effective ways for lobbyists to accrue influence on the Hill is to convey to overwhelmed congresspersons and their staffers that the lobby has the expertise to help them arrive at an informed opinion. And if in addition to expertise, your lobby has a cadre of seasoned staffers who are able to shape a lawmaker’s concerns into legislative language that is likely to attract cosponsors and even achieve passage (the golden ring for a body that passes less than five percent of its proposed legislation), then you have influence.
J Street has been able to make some headway in recent years in campaign fundraising. But they have not been able to establish themselves as a reliable source of expertise on Capitol Hill. AIPAC remains a source for expert analysis, and that has a great effect on how members of Congress and their staffers, except for those few who actually have their own expertise on the Middle East, end up voting on Middle East matters. As Kampeas says, J Street wants influence, “…and answering ‘We dunno’ on Syria is not the way to go about earning it.”
J Street bills itself as the group that “has Obama’s back.” That involves giving him political cover to exert some moderate pressure on Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians, which, to date, they really have not been able to deliver (but they’re young — AIPAC also took a good number of years to build the sort of gravitas it has). J Street can also recover from the Syria crisis, as long as it doesn’t have more incidents where its own membership and leadership are so divided on an issue that they can’t take a stance.
But AIPAC has already taken a hit by openly lobbying, and declaring that it will flex serious muscle, in support of a military action that, for better or worse, is opposed by the majority of US citizens. If the issue does come to a vote, which still seems likely, and they lose one or both congressional chambers (which I don’t think will happen, but I hold a minority view), it will be a more serious blow. That’s reinforced by the fact that not only AIPAC, but also a lot of the more mainstream Jewish groups that tend to follow it, like the American Jewish Committee and World Jewish Congress, have come out forcefully behind a strike on Syria, and continued to press the point, even after the Russian proposal.
But I don’t think this will be as damaging as either Shalev or MJ Rosenberg think it will be. There is still no significant opposition to AIPAC’s lobbying power; this question was not directly connected to Israeli policy; and the most powerful tool in AIPAC’s arsenal — the public US misunderstanding of the Middle East, the Arab world and Israel, and especially the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict — is still in place, as is the perception that AIPAC speaks for, not the Jewish community as is often argued, but Jewish donors. US Jews make up a wildly disproportionate fraction of individual political gift givers, but while some large donors like Sheldon Adelson or Haim Saban are very clear about the decisive role Israel plays in where their money goes, it is far less clear how important Israel is in broader Jewish donations, and it’s virtually certain that the issue is not as prominent as is commonly argued.
Still, just by going so public with the Syria issue, AIPAC has suffered a setback, and this has not been lost on Israelis. Leaders and opinion makers in Israel from the liberal Ha’aretz to veteran Israeli diplomats are criticizing AIPAC for their actions on Syria. It’s not a huge hit, but AIPAC will feel it. If only someone, be it J Street or another group, would just take advantage of this opportunity…
]]>Turnover in top US foreign policy and national security jobs can often be a “good thing” — for the nation and the world. New brooms at least start out with a different look at the world, its problems, challenges to the United States, and choices about what to do.
This also [...]]]>
Turnover in top US foreign policy and national security jobs can often be a “good thing” — for the nation and the world. New brooms at least start out with a different look at the world, its problems, challenges to the United States, and choices about what to do.
This also often happens when the presidency changes, though that time is also fraught with the downside of newness — what in Washington jargon is sometimes referred to as the need first to find one’s way to the washroom, in addition to getting to know and adjust to one’s new colleagues.
The foreign policies of those leaving office (especially if the party in control of the presidency also changes) are remembered as almost universally bad — the partisan spin; though within months, the old gang is understood to have not got things all that wrong, given the (necessarily) limited latitude that the US has, even as the world’s most powerful country.
Change at the top in the midst of an administration is a different thing. Even if a new team has a will to change things — note, for instance, Secretary of State John Kerry’s hyperactive efforts to restart talks between Israel and the Palestinians — existing policies and practices already have momentum, or a quality of bureaucratic inertia and integration within Washington politics.
At the same time, however, members of the new team have an advantage in that they have likely already been working together, developing their relationships and learning how the government “really works.”
Thus it is with Susan Rice’s moving from her position as US Ambassador to the United Nations to National Security Advisor in the White House and her replacement, from the current National Security Council staff, Samantha Power. Both have the critical quality of lengthy (and trusted) associations with President Obama, one of the most invaluable “coins of the realm” in Washington power politics and position.
Instant commentary has largely focused on the foreign policy activism of both officials newly at the top. And that has apparently been true — up until now.
In 2011, both were reportedly in the camp, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, credited with tipping the president over the edge into supporting Britain and France in their efforts to topple Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.
While that account is most likely exaggerated, the key point is that Rice/Power’s activism for “humanitarian interventions,” as several commentators have opined, will be sharply constrained by a more basic fact of life: Obama has made clear he is not about to trade his ending US military engagement in Iraq and sharply reducing it in Afghanistan for more wars in the Middle East.
Thus Obama has resisted pressures from US hawks and Israel to make war on Iran, though he has given hostages to fortune by accepting “red lines,” of some indefinite nature, along with his continued claims that “all options are on the table”.
In other words, he has made a critical war-peace decision conditional on Iranian and Israeli restraint — never a good place for a US president to be — but so far his bet (a handful of aces or bluffing with a busted flush) has not been called.
Obama has also been so reluctant to get the US more deeply engaged in the Syrian civil war that it is unlikely that the change in personnel will produce a decisive difference. At the margins, perhaps — and in those details lurk a hundred devils.
It’s also important to understand what Obama has been about up until now. It appears, at least to this writer, that he sees his legacy as domestic; summarized in two words: economy and equality.
This is quite an agenda and one that, if considerably advanced, would mark him as a major figure in US history, a legitimate legatee of FDR and LBJ. This inference contains a lesson for engagement abroad, however: Obama should accomplish what the US has to do, but keep this from interfering with the pursuit of his domestic agenda.
This can include accomplishing abroad tasks critical to that purpose, such as working to restore confidence in the global financial system, launching a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and recognizing the growth of the Economic Beasts of Asia: China, the Greater, and India, the Lesser.
Hence the “pivot” to Asia slogan, or the less-colorful, “rebalancing”. But so far there’s only slogans with limited policy substance and certainly no coherence across the different instruments of power and influence and US domestic fiefdoms.
Keeping the world from interfering unduly with Obama’s own “rebalancing” or primary attention to his domestic agenda (which, on the economic side, is actually a demand, given the mess he was handed in 2009) — was arguably the principal job of the foreign policy team for the First Term.
Tom Donilon, the outgoing National Security Advisor, was not a foreign policy mastermind, but in the Obama scheme of things he didn’t need to be.
Helping Obama with the running down of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, making sure that two more didn’t begin, maintaining a pretty tight hold on policy overall, and keeping foreign policy to the extent possible out of the 2012 presidential campaign, Donilon did his job.
But trying to put the world “on hold” has now run its course.
For more than two decades, the United States has in effect been eating its seed corn in terms of strategic assessment, thought and planning for the post-Cold War world.
Following George H.W. Bush’s two signal foreign policy achievements of wrapping up the Cold War in Europe (as well as setting the basis, followed by Bill Clinton, for writing finis to the European Civil War of 1870-1991) and showing that the US could and would use its unmatched and unmatchable military power to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, the US has been acting as though its great reserves of power and influence can substitute for thinking about a truly new construction of global relationships.
While there has been an attempt to understand that, in the new world, working with others is absolutely necessary, along with sharing the right to make the Big Decisions and melding effectively military, diplomatic and economic instruments, not much has been done to build on that basis.
Iraq and Afghanistan have been major cases in point. While “kinetic” power has largely done its job, the work of economic and political development has largely failed.
And in Afghanistan, not long after the 2014 end of the lead role for Western forces, the world’s verdict is likely to be — both there and in much-more-important Pakistan — Mission Not-Accomplished.
Much can be said about the various tasks that Susan Rice will now assume in the White House, but nowhere with more immediate importance than in regard to the Middle East (and Southwest Asia).
There, three administrations in a row have not managed to forge an integrated approach and strategy, but have tended to see the bits and pieces of the region from North Africa to the Hindu Kush as just that — bits and pieces.
As much as anything else, domestic politics has driven much of US policy in the region, in particular the US part of the long-running confrontation with Iran, and there is no indication that this will change.
The US still has not been willing to put “all options on the table” by recognizing that the legitimate security needs of three counties — the US, Israel, and Iran — all need to be considered.
The failure to create a viable strategy toward Iran and its nuclear program, short of the president’s hand being called at some point regarding military attack, was underscored this past week when he signed an executive order further ratcheting up sanctions.
He did this a mere 10 days before the Iranian presidential elections on June 14th.
If someone in Washington were trying to think up a way to ensure that the worst of the worst will be elected — to the extent we could have any impact — it would be hard to think of a more effective tactic.
(Consider, for instance, how the US electorate would have responded if, say, China or Russia had rattled sabers in 2008 just when “dovish” Barack Obama was running against “hawkish” John McCain).
Then there is Syria, in civil war, with a rolling civil war across the region, where the US has got itself smack in the middle of age-old competitions and hatreds between Sunnis and Shi’as, and where some of America’s closest Sunni allies are deeply involved in supplying weapons (and ideologies bitterly and aggressively hostile to the West) to the so-called rebels.
And at least in public, there is not even a hint that the administration has been planning what it will do if Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is removed from power…or if he stays.
In either event, there will be another product of the ripples of the religious and geopolitical rivalries that began spreading across the region when the US dropped a great big bolder on Iraq in 2003, thus ending three centuries of minority Sunni dominance over the majority Shi’as, and thus leading Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and others to try righting the region’s Sunni-Shi’a balance through Syrian regime change.
When it comes to what the new National Security Advisor should do, the first step is obvious: Ms. Rice should assess the NSC team she is inheriting and ensure she has first-rate players in terms of capacity to engage in strategic thinking and relate systematically the world’s apples to its oranges.
Whether Susan Rice is herself a top-rate strategic thinker and leader, able to do what has to be done in terms of analysis and craft, is not yet clear; we must hope that she will prove to have these skills.
In any event, she needs to get the best people possible for her Senior Staff, where it is a great stretch of the imagination to argue that the Obama Administration has either sought out the best, from within and without the government, or employed them effectively.
This is at a time when the NSC staff has become bloated to being the largest ever: effective, perhaps to meet the Donilon task of having enough people-power to assert control over the rest of the foreign policy apparatus, but an oxymoron in regard to serious strategic thinking.
The rule of thumb (demonstrated when Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft were National Security Advisors) is that capacity for strategic analysis, thought, planning and policy tends to exist in inverse proportion to the number of people involved in doing it.
In sum, shifts in global power and influence mean that we must learn to think our way toward the future.
In particular, as has happened to every US president since Harry Truman, the Middle East demands that the president and his team get it right or suffer unfortunate consequences.
As the top official closest to the president, both in physical distance (a few yards) and in prior association, this buck stops with Susan Rice.
]]>The US government has swept into action in the aftermath of the Palestinians’ overwhelming victory at the United Nations on Thursday. No less than three amendments were brought in the Senate, to be attached to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — a bill which has nothing to do [...]]]>
The US government has swept into action in the aftermath of the Palestinians’ overwhelming victory at the United Nations on Thursday. No less than three amendments were brought in the Senate, to be attached to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — a bill which has nothing to do with Israel and the Palestinians, but is a high-priority bill that the Senate must pass, and as such is a perfect target for frivolous amendments).
Two of the amendments are purely partisan and with a Republican minority in the Senate, they are unlikely to pass. The third, however, is bipartisan and the leading Democrat sponsoring it is Charles Schumer (D-NY) whose position as the Democrats’ lead fundraiser means he gets his senate colleagues’ attention. The partisan amendments are somewhat more draconian than the bipartisan one, which will make the bipartisan amendment look relatively moderate, thereby increasing the chances of its passage.
Along with Schumer, the amendment is sponsored by Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Barrasso (R-WY) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ). It calls for the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) office in the US unless the Palestinians return to talks with Israel. No timeframe is given for the return to talks, nor is there any mention of anything Israel must do to make that return politically feasible for the Palestinians. This amounts to an attempt to force the Palestinians back into talks on Bibi Netanyahu’s terms, which, as I explain here, would be political suicide for the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The more important clause, however, would end all aid — with no provision for a presidential national security waiver — to the Palestinian Authority if it or any entity “that purports to represent the interests of the Palestinian people” should ever bring a case, or even support one brought by someone else, that the International Criminal Court (ICC) adjudicates. Access to the ICC is the biggest tangible gain the Palestinians got from their upgraded UN status, and this amendment is an attempt to ensure that it is useless. Significantly, according to the way the amendment is written, the aid cutoff would be automatically triggered even if the Palestinians support another case or if some other entity brings a case on the Palestinians’ behalf.
This may be only the beginning of legislative activism aimed at punishing the Palestinians for their UN move. The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) also issued a memo that echoed the condemnation of the Palestinian action from US officials starting with President Obama; painted an extremely distorted picture of the circumstances around and meaning behind the PLO’s move; and made a list of “recommendations” for the US government to follow. These include pressuring Mahmoud Abbas to refrain from similar actions in the future, “…demonstrate to the PLO that unconstructive unilateral actions have consequences;” close the PLO office in DC; and threaten aid to the Palestinians.
It’s standard procedure for such bills that AIPAC be at least consulted on its contents and this certainly would have been the case for a response to the UN vote. The presence of AIPAC talking points in the bill leaves little doubt about its influence; the fact that AIPAC’s own statement is much broader implies this is not the end of such legislation. In announcing their memo, Ron Kampeas at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that AIPAC in fact called for a “full review” of the U.S. relationship with the PLO.
AIPAC tries to push a point frequently made in the run-up to the UN vote — that Congress will cut off all aid to the PA if the PLO pursues gains at the UN. In fact, Congress has only mandated such cut-off if Palestine becomes a full member state of the UN, something the US can easily prevent because it requires Security Council certification. Still, it is clear that AIPAC is determined to punish the Palestinians in some way. Whether or not they are willing to risk the PA’s collapse — something the Obama Administration certainly wants to avoid, as does, quite likely, the Netanyahu government (at least currently) – remains to be seen.
Even granting that there was a good deal of lead time before the UN vote, it’s still worth noting how quickly Congress jumped to respond. It would be nice if they were so quick to respond to matters that are far more pertinent to US citizens, like, oh, the “fiscal cliff” for example. Maybe we can get AIPAC to push them on that.
- Mitchell Plitnick is the former Co-Director of Jewish Voice for Peace and former Director of the US Office of B’Tselem. You can follow him on Twitter at @MitchellPlit or at his blog, The Third Way.
]]>The vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the Palestinian application for non-member status is a foregone conclusion. They’re going to win and it’s not really going to matter much, at least in the short term. Nonetheless, the decidedly warped world of diplomacy around the Israel-Palestine conflict has managed to [...]]]>
The vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the Palestinian application for non-member status is a foregone conclusion. They’re going to win and it’s not really going to matter much, at least in the short term. Nonetheless, the decidedly warped world of diplomacy around the Israel-Palestine conflict has managed to give us a small degree of drama around the bid, which is also illustrative of why there seems to be so little hope for change.
I posted a draft of the resolution on my blog earlier this month. You can see the final version here (pdf). There is simply nothing there that anyone with even the mildest interest in resolving the conflict could have the slightest objection to. This says a lot about where Israel and the US stand. No, the drama lies outside, with the Israeli-US-UK efforts to scuttle the initiative.
It’s been clear for quite some time that the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was not going to back down from bringing this resolution to the UNGA. At this stage, any threatening actions by Israel or the US could cause the PLO’s collapse, which Israel very much wants to avoid. So they had no way to stop the initiative from going forward and instead tried to change the substance of the resolution.
That, too, failed, but the changes they tried to make are instructive. Israel wanted to change or insert three conditions, none of which made any sense for the Palestinians. The US took the three conditions whole cloth and tried to convince the Palestinians to insert them. When that failed, it was passed off to the UK, who could offer the Palestinians something the US could not — namely, a yes vote on the UNGA resolution if they agreed to these conditions. Based on various reports, it seems that the Palestinians simply wanted to end the debate and went ahead and submitted the proposed resolution to forestall further discussion of it.
So, all the attempts at change seem to have failed. But the truth is that there is very little here for Israel to be worried about, at least for the time being. And this is why their reaction, as well as those of the US and UK, are all very telling. Let’s look at the three conditions Israel wanted to insert:
- 1. Israel wanted the resolution to state that the Palestinians would not seek membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC). Had the Palestinian Authority (PA) agreed to this, it would have sacrificed the one tangible benefit it gets from the General Assembly’s recognition of its non-member status. The other benefits are a matter of prestige and hopefully some diplomatic weight. But this is something the Palestinians can actually use at some point. Israel does not want to answer to the ICC, a court in which it is not a member, but whose decisions can make Israel more uncomfortable and give weight to protest movements, especially in Europe, where there is much more regard for international law than in the United States.
- Indeed, had the PA agreed to something like this, the reaction in the West Bank might have been as bad as if they had agreed to withdraw the resolution altogether. That issue only gets magnified in the wake of Hamas emerging from the latest Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza not only alive, but strengthened politically and with a ceasefire whose terms are surprisingly favorable to the government of Gaza.
- I strongly suspect that while the possibility of Palestine going to the ICC is probably the single most vexing aspect of this move in Israel’s eyes, they also probably knew that this was a non-starter, and perhaps didn’t even really want the PA to agree, as it might have spelled doom for the quisling Authority. In any case, it was a foregone conclusion that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would refuse Israel’s condition.
- 2. Israel wants a clause stressing that this is a symbolic decision that grants no sovereignty over the West Bank, Gaza Strip or East Jerusalem. This was just an attempt at bullying. The UNGA resolution is, by definition, symbolic. It does not carry the weight of law, but merely expresses the view of the GA, as far as such weighty matters as sovereignty are concerned. Yes, specific statuses in the GA can allow the Palestinians access to certain international bodies, but there is no recognition of sovereignty here, nor could there be.
- Israel wants this kind of statement to blunt the impact of the resolution in the diplomatic field, but really it wouldn’t do much of that either. It was just a way to diminish the Palestinians’ claim on paper, and more than anything else, it was a lead-in to the one thing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really hoped to get out of this.
- 3. Israel wants any decision to include a Palestinian commitment to renewing direct negotiations with Israel without preconditions. This has become Netanyahu’s Holy Grail. He would love nothing more than the continuing sham “peace process” to drag on while settlements expand. But he also knows too much had already been discussed in the Oslo process, and fears, perhaps with some reason, that US President Barack Obama might eventually press for an endgame along the lines of the Clinton Parameters. Even if he doesn’t, Bibi doesn’t want to maintain the framework of withdrawal from more than 90% of the West Bank and some sort of sharing of East Jerusalem.
- For Netanyahu, “no preconditions” is a mantra, but one which means something very different than what the term implies. “No preconditions” means starting from absolute zero from the Palestinian point of view. It means no presumption that the 1967 borders are the starting point for discussion, or that there is any legitimate Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem. It means forgetting the Oslo Accords, other than perhaps the lines that Netanyahu wants to hold talks with the starting point at the facts on the ground. Those facts involve the settlements, including those in East Jerusalem that cut the city off from the rest of the West Bank and hemmed Bethlehem in, among other Palestinian towns. They include separation between the West Bank and Gaza and no presumption that they must be rejoined.
- Within that framework, any land Israel surrenders, any settlement or outpost Israel evacuates, is a “concession” to the Palestinians and more than that, a gift and symbol of Israeli largesse. Given not only Netanyahu’s right-wing orientation, but the even more radical rightward tilt of his party and, even more, his coalition, this is the only way he could sit and talk with the Palestinians, even if it is just for show.
- In other words, no preconditions means no to any Palestinian conditions at all and yes to plenty from the Israelis.
Ultimately, Israel knew it would have to tolerate this Palestinian move. It really couldn’t even respond to it without risking its West Bank subcontractor whose demise would mean that Israel would have to foot much more of the bill for its occupation. So, they tried to get the one thing they thought they had at least an outside shot at: talks without preconditions.
Israel’s failure to achieve that goal is not surprising. But the buy-in Netanyahu got from both the US and UK is something we should all be looking at. Abbas didn’t break off talks with Netanyahu on principle, or even because of settlement expansion itself. He broke them off because he knew that, after 17 years of negotiations in the shadow of expanding settlements, the clock had expired and the Palestinian people would no longer tolerate such a state of affairs. The peace process had been exposed as a sham to cover an entrenching occupation, and only a complete halt to settlement construction would allow Abbas to come back to the table without seriously risking the existence of the PA.
Maybe the US and UK knew that Abbas would not accept the “no preconditions” condition and that’s why they felt comfortable pressing for it. But I doubt it. Both countries simply want to see talks resume, fearing the stalemate and vacuum diplomatic silence produces while Hamas continues to establish itself as the more credible Palestinian leadership body.
And what choice do the US and UK have? The same choice they’ve always had, the same one that was always the only way this was ever going to be resolved: pressure both sides — but especially the powerful and comfortable one, Israel — to make the deal. (Pressure on Israel has been totally absent, while both the US and UK are quite practiced in pressuring the Palestinians). Remind them that the exports they both depend on, the cooperation they both need, will no longer be so forthcoming if they don’t achieve a lasting peace.
And, of course, that is an option that neither country is willing to take for no good reason other than domestic politics. This isn’t about forcing anything on anyone. Israel and the Palestinians are perfectly free to choose their own course, but if they choose one that is contrary to US or UK interests, those countries can also choose not to do business with them. This wouldn’t exactly cripple either nation, but domestic politics continue to rule the day, and the craven leaderships in both countries cannot even conceive of such actions.
]]>This lonely press briefing issued today by the United Nations about ongoing political imprisonment in Iran reminds us that the more the international community focuses on Iran’s nuclear program, the less attention is given to Iranian human rights. These rights are consistently endangered and violated not only by the Iranian [...]]]>
This lonely press briefing issued today by the United Nations about ongoing political imprisonment in Iran reminds us that the more the international community focuses on Iran’s nuclear program, the less attention is given to Iranian human rights. These rights are consistently endangered and violated not only by the Iranian government, but by sanctions and threats of war too.
Iran’s rial is once again in free fall while Iran and the United States remain in political gridlock. Bibi Netanyahu may have backed off his Iran campaign for now but is unlikely to stop agitating for conflict. Today during an event at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Mark Fitzpatrick said that Iran is unlikely to change it’s stance prior to the Iranian presidential election in June 2013 because no one wants to grant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a diplomatic success while he is in office. Fitzpatrick added that the West is likely to implement even more sanctions during to this time.
So while Iranians are being strangled by the Islamic Republic’s ever-present hand in their public and personal lives, so too ar they being forced to endure a strangulated economy that will only worsen. This feeling of impending suffocation — imposed from above and below — was at the core of Asghar Farhadi’s oscar-winning film “A Separation” which resonated so strongly with Iranians. In Iran the personal is political and vice versa while absurdity has become the norm.
In a recent interview with Nazila Fathi, the Iranian human rights defender Shirin Ebadi explained that war on Iran would “stir nationalistic feelings and rally the people behind the government to defend the country” as well as “save Iran’s rulers.” But she didn’t or couldn’t provide any indication as to what can be done to ease the burden being imposed on Iranians by their government and foreign governments.
“I don’t favor more sanctions against Iran, but I do not want to see the world ignore what the regime is doing to its people,” said Ebadi.
What then is in store for Iran’s people?
]]>In making his case against Iran in his United Nations speech, Benjamin Netanyahu held up a crude graphic intended represent an Iranian bomb. The Israeli Prime Minister drew a line with a red marker to emphasize the urgent need for action against the Islamic Republic and sound the alarm bells.
Instead, the [...]]]>
In making his case against Iran in his United Nations speech, Benjamin Netanyahu held up a crude graphic intended represent an Iranian bomb. The Israeli Prime Minister drew a line with a red marker to emphasize the urgent need for action against the Islamic Republic and sound the alarm bells.
Instead, the rendition of an “Iranian bomb” that Bibi chose to make his case–which most likely would earn no more than a C if submitted as a fourth grade science project– is eliciting giggles and guffaws, inviting comparisons with the Acme devices used in Road Runner cartoons.
Robert Mankoff of the New Yorker launched a caption contest for the photo of Bibi and his bomb sketch. As of this writing, Mankoff has received 164 online entries. Mankoff’s own contribution to start it off: ”And, what’s worse, if Wile E. Coyote ever gets hold of this, the Roadrunner is toast.”
Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, after sardonically skewering both Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and President Barack Obama for their speeches in a segment dubbed Bore Games, asks, “Isn’t anybody going to give us the red-meat rhetoric and pop comedy we’ve come to expect from the United Nations?” There’s a cut to Netanyahu, drawing his red line. “Bibi, bubby, what’s with the Wile E. Coyote nuclear bomb?” Stewart asks. “Are you gonna pretend you don’t know what a nuclear bomb looks like? You’re Israel! Go downstairs and look in the basement!”
Even the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, plenipotentiary pundit on the Iranian threat to Israel, tweeted that “Netanyahu didn’t even draw his Wile E. Coyote red line in the right place” opined that Netanyahu had trivialized and undercut whatever point he thought he was making:
Netanyahu shouldn’t have waved around that cartoonish drawing on the podium of the United Nations. It made him look unserious, and a man in his position can’t afford to look unserious. I’m hearing ridicule of that stunt from people in the United States government who are a) militant on the subject of Iran, and b) needed by Israel to carry-out effective anti-proliferation efforts. Don’t confuse massive press coverage of his ACME bomb chart with approval of his ACME bomb chart. A non-Wile E. Coyote chart with a red line would have been more useful than this.
ComPost blogger Alexandra Petri asked in the Washington Post:
Was this a poor choice of a ridiculous-looking, over-simplified bomb cartoon, created decades before the invention of the Internet by someone who had a limited understanding of bombs? Or was it a calculated choice of a ridiculous-looking, over-simplified picture, created decades before the invention of the Internet by someone with a limited understanding of bombs — in order to create the one indelible image of the afternoon that everyone would be talking about?
But maybe Netanyahu was indeed sending a message about how the strategic logic behind Israel’s relationship with Iran.
In his book Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times Of An Animated Cartoonist, Chuck Jones, Jones suggests that he and the other artists behind the Road Runner and Wile E. cartoons adhered to some simple but strict rules. As identified and enumerated on Wikipedia, these rules are:
- 1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “meep, meep.”
- 2. No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.
- 3. The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” — George Santayana).
- 4. No dialogue ever, except “meep, meep” and yowling in pain.
- 5. The Road Runner must stay on the road — for no other reason than that he’s a roadrunner.
- 6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
- 7. All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation. There were sometimes exceptions when the Coyote obtained other items from the desert such as boulders to use in his attempts.
- 8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy (e.g., falling off a cliff).
- 9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
- 10. The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.
- 11. The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner.
Reading these rules carefully, and substituting Israel for Road Runner and Iran for Wile E. Coyote, it’s difficult not to conclude that (with the exception of #10, since Iran receives no sympathy from anyone) the Israeli Prime Minister has indeed chosen an apt metaphor–what looks like an Acme bomb straight out of a Road Runner cartoon to describe a relationship that seems to follow the same rules: “No dialogue ever” and “The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner.” There’s at least one rule Netanyahu would like to change–the one about “no outside force” being able to harm the Coyote.
Perhaps when President Barack Obama told Steve Kroft of Sixty Minutes
When it comes to our national security decisions, any pressure that I feel is simply to do what’s right for the American people. And I am going to block out any noise that’s out there”
the noise he meant was meep! meep! ?
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