Monthly Archive for January, 2009

Letter to Obama

Published on January 28, 2009 in Iran. 0 Comments Tags: .

Norman wants to bomb bomb bomb Iran.

Iranian theocracy.. uh uh.. nuclear power.. uh uh.. long-feared.. ah ah.. messianic regime.. uh ah.. apocalyptic weapon.. ooooooooooh!

Was it good for you too?

Was it good for you too?

Christopher Hitchens proffers some advice to the incoming president, emphasizing that these words of his were written last November. One point of interest:

On the assumption that you will be held to what you have already repeatedly stated, and on the further assumption that you fully intended to be taken seriously, there will be four very urgent claims on your time. These will be Iran, Iraq, Pakistan/Afghanistan, and Russia (if we are fortunate enough to hold it to just those four).

So, make that five, then. On the first of them:

Having said, quietly but firmly, that the Iranian theocracy cannot be permitted to crash through every treaty and agreement and undertaking it has ever made or signed and declare itself a nuclear power, you will quite simply have to declare what the logical and probable consequences of this statement actually are. The Bush administration, despite its reputation for bellicosity, never managed to clarify the implications of its own statements on the matter. And it broke its own promise not to bequeath the problem to the next administration. You will have no such room for maneuver: the long-feared coincidence of a messianic regime with an apocalyptic weapon will either occur on your own watch or will be conclusively prevented from occurring. This is not a difference that can easily be split. Nor is it a question that can be subcontracted to Israel, since nobody will believe that if the Jewish state acts in any capacity it is acting independently of ourselves (or failing to make use of Iraqi airspace, which will come to the same thing).

Resistible confusion

Published on January 28, 2009 in The War Against The Guardian. 0 Comments

We are Norm. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Norman uses an article in The Guardian as a starting point to ruminate on the rights and wrongs of resistance. He concludes: “[N]othing …  entitles those resisting tyranny or occupation to murder the innocent”. It’s worth noting that in listing possible motives for resistance:  psychological release, national identity, a sense of not being defeated, Norm neglects to mention perhaps the most important: resistance to tyranny. Also missing is any explicit statement of the obligations  of a state resisting resistance. Shouldn’t what’s good for the goose be good for the gander? Israel has laid virtual siege to the entire population of Gaza denying them food, fuel and freedom of movement. She has also dropped hundred tonne “smart bombs” in “targeted assassinations” and used munitions containing white phosphorus and flechettes on the densely crowded streets of that territory. It seems pretty obvious that these actions will, as Norm puts it, result in murdering the innocent. So to ask one side to play by the rules while the other does as it pleases seems, at the very least, to be the height of hypocrisy.

Here’s an exercise in making what is already a difficult subject into an impossible one – impossible because now hopelessly muddled. It’s a piece by Peter Beaumont, and it begins by looking at the complex motivations involved in Palestinian resistance: psychological release, national identity, a sense of not being defeated. This is apropos, among other things, the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. Beaumont then goes on to ask, ‘when do we regard armed resistance as being acceptable?’

In the traditions of political and legal philosophy, there is a widely-recognized right of resistance against tyranny (or oppression), and this is matched by a right against foreign domination or occupation, as one variant of tyranny. The correlate of this right to resist are the rights to freedom and national self-determination. There are difficulties of application. How bad does non-democratic rule have to be to count as the kind of tyranny against which armed resistance is justifiable? Are there other viable roads to change? What are the chances of success? But, in any case, nothing in any of the several rights aforesaid entitles those resisting tyranny or occupation to murder the innocent. And according to well-established international norms governing military conflict, deliberately targeting civilians is a crime; it is a form of murdering the innocent.

Therefore, to write as Beaumont does as if armed resistance and targeting civilians were one and the same is to bury the discussion within a central, unhelpful obfuscation. Along with one or two other confusions which I shall bypass here (he considerably loosens Michael Walzer’s concept of ’supreme emergency’), Beaumont arrives, finally, at no conclusion:

None of the above should be read as a defence of terror, or even as an argument for armed resistance.

You end up not only without any answer to the question Beaumont posed, but without the intellectual resources – widely available on this subject – to think about the question clearly.

Untimely defiance

Published on January 26, 2009 in Shoah. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Norman Geras, in his ongoing War on The Guardian, targets a review of the film Defiance with a wholly disproportionate response.

I remember seeing trailers for the movie around halfway through the Gaza massacre. I thought it was ironic that a film that celebrated the resistance of Jewish “partisans” to the existential threat of the Nazi war machine should receive its UK premiere at the same time that the possible grandsons and granddaughters of those “partisans”, using weapons that the Germans could only have dreamed about, were trying to crush the resistance of the Palestinian “terrorists” in Gaza. Comparing recent history to current events, the oppressed have  become the oppressors.

Philip French, in the final sentence of his review, arrives at a similar conclusion. Norman disagrees. He makes some blindingly obvious points about accuracy, “taste” and timing but as for  the disturbing comparison French makes all Norman can manage as a rebuttal is to claim that French’s perception is a bit dodgy, perhaps from attending too many liberal dinner parties, and that nobody cares what he thinks anyway.

Philip French concludes his review of Defiance, Edward Zwick’s movie about the Bielski Partisans (which I mean to see but haven’t yet), thus:

But what is most striking is the ruthlessness shown by both Tuvia and Zus [Bielski], who begin by killing Russian collaborators in cold blood, shoot down those who challenge their leadership and end up slaughtering Germans with a glee associated with Hollywood wartime propaganda entertainments.

It took the American cinema quite a time to make pictures like Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow, which presented Jews fighting for the creation of Israel, but this week is not, I think, the best moment for a picture celebrating them in ruthless, take-no-prisoners mode.

As it seems to me, three different points are conflated here: they concern, in turn, accuracy, ‘taste’ (for want of a better word), and timing. Whether Defiance is accurate about the ruthlessness shown by Tuvia and Zus Bielski I don’t know, but if it is, then there is reason enough for Zwick to have portrayed that ruthlessness without being open to criticism for it – unless he does so in an aesthetically and/or morally brutalizing way. Why, however, a film about events in the 1940s – or, for that matter, the Bielskis, resisting one of the most unrestrainedly merciless of enemies – should be burdened with French’s perceptions of what is going on in Gaza at the moment, this is both a mystery and an anachronism. Apart from anything else, those who made the film won’t have known, while they were doing so, what was going to be happening in January 2009.

Elections past, elections future

Published on January 15, 2009 in Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Dear Mr. Geras,

I noticed that on January 12, 2009, you posted the following article on your blog:

From a column by Amir Taheri:

… Hamas… has closed Gaza to all Palestinian groups that have accepted a two-state solution.

Amongst those many who urge upon us Hamas’s legitimacy as having been democratically elected, it’s surprising how little airtime they devote to this (shall we say) counter-democratic circumstance. Not that I mean to imply that no negotiations should ever be undertaken with an organization with a bad record on democratic rights and practices; for the would-be negotiating partner – in the present case, Israel – that’s a matter of political and strategic judgement. But if it’s Hamas’s democratic legitimacy which, according to many of Israel’s critics, should dictate a willingness to negotiate with that organization, one would have thought winning an election isn’t all that counts. Being open to the contingency of losing one is also of some import. (See also here.)

I vaguely remembered the name Amir Taheri from somewhere or other so I did a spot of googling. The results were rather interesting to say the least. I found an article published in The Nation entitled Bunkum From Benador which claimed that he was “a journalistic felon”:

It was in 1989 that Taheri was first exposed as a journalistic felon. The book he published the year before, Nest of Spies, examined the rule and fall of the Shah of Iran. Taheri received many respectful reviews, but in The New Republic Shaul Bakhash, a reigning doyen of Persian studies, checked Taheri’s footnotes. Suddenly a book review became an investigative exposé. Bakhash, a history professor at George Mason University and a former fellow at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, detailed case after case in which Taheri cited nonexistent sources, concocted nonexistent substance in cases where the sources existed and distorted the substance beyond recognition when it was present. Taheri “repeatedly refers us to books where the information he cites simply does not exist,” Bakhash wrote. “Often the documents cannot be found in the volumes to which he attributes them…. [He] repeatedly reads things into the documents that are simply not there.” In one case, noted Bakhash, Taheri cited an earlier article of his own–but offered content he himself never wrote in that article. Bakhash concluded that Nest of Spies was “the sort of book that gives contemporary history a bad name.” In a response published two months later, Taheri failed to rebut Bakhash’s charges.

I also found Taheri’s Wikipedia and Sourcewatch entries which confirmed further his reputation as an unprincipled hack and a serial fabulist.

A quick scan of the column you linked to revealed  it to be his usual mix of half truths and outright lies. However, for the sake of brevity, I thought I would limit myself to analysing the sentence you quoted and the conclusions you drew.

Firstly, the events which lead to Hamas expelling Fatah from the Gaza Strip have been documented in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair by the writer David Rose, basing himself on internal US documents. In a nutshell, it seems that the United States and Israel in cahoots with the Palestinian Authority, unhappy with the results of the 2006 Palestinian election, were attempting a putsch on Hamas, and Hamas merely preempted their plan. I’m sure that you would agree that a democratically elected government has the right to defend itself against an unlawful military coup and that this right in no way erodes their legitimacy.

With regards to the two state solution, Hamas has repeatedly indicated that they accept it.

When asked by Newsweek-Washington Post correspondent Lally Weymouth on 26 February 2006 what agreements Hamas was prepared to honor, the new Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh answered, “the ones that will guarantee the establishment of a Palestinian State with Jerusalem as its capital with 1967 borders.” Weymouth went on, “Will you recognize Israel?” to which Haniyeh responded, “If Israel declares that it will give the Palestinian people a state and give them back all their rights then we are ready to recognize them.” (5) This view encapsulates the Hamas demand for reciprocity.

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer four days after the PLC elections, the new Hamas Foreign Minister, Mahmoud Zahar (considered the party’s hard-liner) remarked, “We can accept to establish our independent state on the area occupied [in] 1967.” Like Haniyeh and other Hamas members, Zahar insists that once such a state is established a long-term truce “lasting as long as 10, 20 or 100 years” will ensue ending the state of armed conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. (6)

Hamas government spokesman Ghazi Hamad commented to reporters on 10 May 2006, “Yes, we accept an independent state in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War. This attitude is not new and it is declared in the government’s platform.” (7)

In an effort to clarify the Hamas position on Abbas’ call for a referendum, Hamas parliamentary speaker Aziz Duweik explained that it had nothing to do with a lack of support for the two-state settlement. “Everybody in Hamas says ‘Yes’ to the two-state solution,” he said. “The problem comes from the fact that the Israelis so far [have not said they] accept the 1967 borders between the two states.”(8)

Other leaders are just as explicit. “Hamas is clear in terms of the historical solution and an interim solution. We are ready for both: the borders of 1967, a state, elections, and agreement after 10-15 years of building trust,” commented Usama Hamdan, the Hamas Chief Representative in Lebanon. (9) Notable here is that his remarks were made in 2003 well before the Hamas victory of January 2006. Indeed, it should be pointed out that most of the on-the-record comments to this effect were made prior to these elections.

Additional Hamas spokespersons who have made explicit reference to acceptance of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 lands include Sheikh Ahmad Haj Ali, a Muslim Brotherhood leader and Hamas legislative candidate currently imprisoned in Israel (interviewed in July 2005); Muhammad Ghazal, Hamas spokesperson also currently in an Israeli jail (Sept. 2005); Hasan Yousef, West Bank political leader (August 2005); and the Hamas Electoral Manifesto Article 5:1 which calls for “adherence to the goal of defeating the [1967] occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.” (10)

In 1989, Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin (assassinated by Israel in March 2004) stated, “I do not want to destroy Israel. We want to negotiate with Israel so the Palestinian people inside and outside Palestine can live in Palestine. Then the problem will cease to exist.” (11)

The hard-line Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, assassinated by Israel in April 2004 commented in 2002 that, “[T]he Intifada is about forcing Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 borders.” This “doesn’t mean the Arab-Israeli conflict will be over,” but rather that the armed resistance to Israel would end.” (12)

In a 2004 report published by the highly regarded International Crisis Group, “During the 1987-1993 uprising, Hamas leaders proposed various formulas for Israeli withdrawal to the June 4th 1967 borders, to be reciprocated with a decades’-long truce (hudna).” That same report notes that, “In a March 1988 meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and then with Defense Minister Rabin in June 1989, Hamas leader (now FM) Mahmud Zahar explicitly proposed an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 boundaries, to be followed by a negotiated permanent settlement.” The offer was refused. (13)

Sadly, the same cannot be said of Israel or Fatah.

In the years following the 1993 Oslo Agreement between the PLO and Israel it became clear that nothing was being done to advance the formation of a viable Palestinian state. Hamas pointed out that the Agreement was, by Israeli design, open-ended, in stages, calculatedly vague and non-commital, and with no guarantees regarding key issues like settlements, land and water, the status of Jerusalem and the return of refugees.

Moreover, even as the Oslo negotiations proceeded, and lasting for years thereafter, Israel continued to build settlements at an accelerated pace. The settlement blocs were positioned in such a way as to create “facts on the ground” which would make it impossible to designate an area that could constitute a viable Palestinian state.

The Israeli-born Haifa University history professor Ilan Pappe has accurately described the Oslo Accords as a trick to allow Israel to continue to build settlements such as to corral Palestinians in South African-style bantustans.

All this culminated, at Camp David in 2000, in Barak’s “generous offer”, a striking vindication of Pappe’s accusation: a Palestinian “state” with no territorial continuity, divided by settlement blocs, bypass roads and roadblocks, with Israeli control of the entire border. The area permitted to Palestinians would include 69 settlement blocs, housing 85% of all Israeli settlers. Palestinians would have to travel 50 miles from one town to another, with many pointless delays at checkpoints and roadblocks,in order to traverse a real distance of 5 miles.

And during the entire process, Israel continued to expand its colonization of the West Bank, doubling the number of settlers in the ten years following the signing of the Accords.

This was a slap in the face to Palestinians, who had agreed, through the PLO, to accept a mere 22 percent of the land that was theirs before 1948. Conceding 78 percent of the land was an historical Palestinian compromise.

Since the Oslo and Camp David meetings the condition of Palestinians continued to deteriorate. It became increasingly clear that the PLO and its successor, the Palestinian Authority (PA), were not merely inept at negotiation, but that the PA and its leader Yasir Arafat were steeped in corruption, with much of the Authority’s funds lavished on cronies while Arafat spent much of his time living in luxury far from Palestine. The last straw was the PA’s decision to assign its police to assist the occupation authorities in the suppression of Palestinian resistance.

Anyway, in conclusion, it seems the reality of the situation seems to be the exact opposite of what you suggest. I do hope that you will update your post accordingly.

Regards

Not Norm

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