Health report from Zimbabwe

Published on February 4, 2009 in Israel and Zimbabwe. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Norman says don’t watch that, watch this.

The number of dead from the cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe has passed 2,000, and the number of diagnosed cases is nearly at 40,000. Two members of a team sent to the country last month by Physicians for Human Rights, Chris Beyrer and Frank Donaghue report on the situation there; follow this link for the grim details. They say:

This tragedy has many terrible features, but chief among them is that this catastrophe is entirely man-made. The Mugabe regime has destroyed the health-care system, as it has devastated virtually every other sector of public life, with its ruinous mix of corruption, mismanagement, violence and human rights violations.
…..
Zimbabwe’s agonies… result from a political crime – the refusal of Mugabe and his cronies to accept defeat.

(Thanks: IM.)

Concerning Gaza

Published on February 4, 2009 in Iran and Israel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Norman Geras is concerned.

Some reading links…

  1. Ethan Bronner on opinion inside Israel: ‘[W]hile tens of thousands have poured into the streets of world capitals demonstrating against the Israeli military operation, antiwar rallies here have struggled to draw 1,000 participants.’
  2. Tom Segev on the receding prospect of peace: ‘I belong to a generation of Israelis who grew up believing in peace. At the end of the Six-Day War of 1967, I was 23, and I had no doubt that 40 years later, the Israeli-Arab war would be over. Today, my son, who is 28, no longer believes in peace. Most Israelis don’t. They know that Israel may not survive without peace, but from war to war, they have lost their optimism. So have I.’
  3. Paul Sheehan on a recent demonstration in Melbourne: ‘Amid demonstrators protesting against the Israeli attacks on Gaza were those carrying signs that said: “Clean the Earth from the dirty Zionists”… “Chosen dirty people of the Earth”… “Stop the sub-human Zionist land-grabbing barbarian mass murder in occupied Palestine”. Then there was the young man with an Australian accent, interviewed by the BBC in Beirut last week, during a demonstration against Israel’s actions in Gaza: “I’m an Australian, but I’m here to kill Jews.”‘
  4. Iran opposed to a ceasefire.
  1. So according to Ethan Bronner of The New York Times, a hundred and ten percent of the citizens of Israel, that light unto nations, were in favour of dropping thousands of tonnes of munitions both legal and illegal onto the densely crowded streets of Gaza; destroying UN shelters, warehouses, schools, hospitals, homes and farmlands, killing 1,285 people, of whom 1,062 were non-combatants (281 children and 111 women) and wounding 4,336, among them 1,133 children. If this were true then it is surely a blood libel against the Israelis. An accusation that they are evil ogres happily advocating the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians. Has Professor Norman missed a clear cut case of anti-semitism?
  2. In his Op-Ed, Tom Segev bemoans the now familar and entirely facetious lament: “The poor Israelis have no partner for peace”. The reality is somewhat different:

    For the past three decades the international community has consistently supported a settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict that calls for two states based on a full Israeli withdrawal to its June 1967 border, and a “just resolution” of the refugee question based on the right of return and compensation. The vote on the annual U.N. General Assembly resolution, “Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine,” supporting these terms for resolving the conflict in 2008 was 164 in favor, 7 against (Israel, United States, Australia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau), and 3 abstentions. At the regional level the Arab League in March 2002 unanimously put forth a peace initiative on this basis, which it has subsequently reaffirmed. In recent times Hamas has repeatedly signaled its own acceptance of such a settlement. For example, in March 2008 Khalid Mishal, head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, stated in an interview:

    There is an opportunity to deal with this conflict in a manner different than Israel and, behind it, the U.S. is dealing with it today. There is an opportunity to achieve a Palestinian national consensus on a political program based on the 1967 borders, and this is an exceptional circumstance, in which most Palestinian forces, including Hamas, accept a state on the 1967 borders….There is also an Arab consensus on this demand, and this is a historic situation. But no one is taking advantage of this opportunity. No one is moving to cooperate with this opportunity. Even this minimum that has been accepted by the Palestinians and the Arabs has been rejected by Israel and by the U.S.[29]

    Israel is fully cognizant that the Hamas Charter is not an insurmountable obstacle to a two-state settlement on the June 1967 border. “[T]he Hamas leadership has recognized that its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future,” a former Mossad head recently observed. “[T]hey are ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967….They know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their cooperation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: They will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.”[30]

  3. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel should perhaps be updated to accusation of anti-semitism is the last refuge of Zionists.
  4. On the 5th of November 2008, Israel unilaterally broke the truce that been in place since June of that year. According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s own information, Hamas had basically kept its side of the bargain. Israel had not. In mid-December Israel rejected an offer from Hamas for a renewed ceasefire agreement. After the hostilities had begun, neither Israel nor her Western allies seemed in a rush to conclude a ceasefire. But Norman thinks only the alleged Iranian rejection is worth mentioning. Odd.

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.

Bad Behavior has blocked 30 access attempts in the last 7 days.