Avuncular American

Israel's Long Straw, Palestine's Trickle

The Biblical "land of milk and honey" and the "wilderness" of the holy book are one and the same.  There's the freshwater Sea of Galilee, the saltwater Dead Sea (getting deader by the minute), and the Jordan River in between.  There is rocky desert, chaparral, and the occasional verdant spring.

Until the rampant development of urban Israel, suburban Israeli settlements on occupied Arab land, and the increasing gerrymandering, walling off, and bypass-roading of what is left of "Palestine" thanks to the Oslo Accords, there was basically enough water.  Enough even to build a swimming pool in the then sleepy West Bank town of Ramallah, where I went in 1972 to dig its foundations out of solid rock.  Even during those early years of The Occupation, Israelis and Palestinians managed to share the region's precious water resources.

"Share" is a word that would be difficult to justify in the current circumstances.  Today's release by Amnesty International of its damning "Troubled Waters" report elicited a predictable official Israeli response, essentially saying "Water? ...what water problem?"  After denying there is a problem, the Israeli MFA, in a reaction that is remarkable for its brevity and chutzpah, goes on to say that if there is a problem, it's the Palestinians own fault.  For a more realistic account, see the BBC's report from Gaza.

Better yet, watch "Drying Up Palestine," the short documentary film on how Israel has been sucking on a long straw, digging deep under future Palestinian independent territory and depriving currently-occupied Palestinians and future "independent" Palestinians of one of the very requisites of statehood: water resources.  Maybe Peter Snowdon and Rima Essa's film (you can see a clip here) should be up on the Amnesty site.

Image: AppleWorks clip art.

Obama's Nobel Preventive Peace Prize

24 hours after Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Middle East peace is "impossible" and, especially helpfully in case that message appeared overly pessimistic, that many countries "have learned to live with" a permanent state of war, the Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to US President Barack Obama.

The President's personal honor can be shared with all those Americans who voted for him almost one year ago - they made the election of a potential peace maker possible.  I stress potential, for that is obviously what the Nobel Committee has in mind in designating a President who currently has not one but two wars on his hands:

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.

As a former diplomat who joined hundreds of my colleagues in campaigning for Obama last year, it is gratifying that the Nobel Committee cited him for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples."

The award can't have come at a more important juncture.  Not only must the US deal with a belligerent Israeli government personified by Avigdor Lieberman, but Obama must craft an Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran policy that may contain as many military "elements of national power" as diplomatic.  The Nobel people are aware of this more than most, and want to put their weight preemptively on the side of diplomatic solutions.

At the same time, since the President will probably have to give the 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.4 million) to the US Treasury, the Nobel Foundation is doing its bit to help the parlous state of the deficit.  With the dollar falling by the day, those kronor might be even more valuable next week.

Seriously, the President brings great credit to an office that was seriously discredited by his predecessor, who practiced preventive war instead of waging peace.  My humble congratulations.

Now, to the job at hand.  Please, Mr. President, have a heart-to-heart talk with Mr. Lieberman and his boss Bibi, who once said that the 9/11 attack on the US was good for Israel.  Talk about giving fodder to the conspiracy theorists...

Barak Bulldozes Chances For Israel-Palestine Peace

"The Bulldozer" was Ariel Sharon's nickname, but current Israeli Defense Minister and onetime Camp David peace processor Ehud Barak was the one who today gave the green light for the construction of hundreds of additional homes in West Bank settlements.  Building cheap housing for Russian immigrants would appear to outweigh building goodwill with Palestinians who own (or owned) the land where these fortress-settlements are sited.

Running roughshod over Palestinians and other Arabs was par for the course for Sharon, but you might expect more of Labour man Barak.  Then again, he is part of the most right-wing government in Israel's history.  But what of the impact on the negotiations (or talks about negotiations) brokered by US envoy George Mitchell?  It would appear that this is a rather provocative Israeli poke in the eye of the Obama Administration.  Will the President blink?

Chutzpah is a commodity in plentiful supply in the Netanyahu government, but yesterday's op-ed by Jimmy Carter in the Washington Post detailed an Israeli practice that has to take the world record for gall:

I visited a family who had lived for four generations in their small, recently condemned home. They were laboring to destroy it themselves to avoid much higher costs if Israeli contractors carried out the demolition order.

Demolishing your own house to avoid an Israeli bill for same?  That's like having to pay for your water from the very people who drain your wells - another Israeli-imposed practice.  Or how about paying for the "losses" of the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, should it lose a court battle (highly unlikely) over confiscated Palestinian land, as lawyer Raja Shehadeh recounts in his award-winning book "Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape."

Those of us who live in countries where rule of law is generally applied to residents in a fair way, whatever the plaintiff's race or religion, will have difficulty even comprehending the daily lot of Palestinians in the West Bank, where confiscated Arab land may not be sub-leased to "non-Jews," as Shehadeh writes.

Shehadeh and other non-violent rights activists deserve our admiration and support.  Who among us would stand for years of niggling harassment over bypass roads (for Jews only), checkpoints (for Arabs only), and Separation Walls (which not only separate Jew from Arab, but also ensure that Palestinian farmers are cut off from their fields).

The poke in the eye, repeated enough, will result in self-defense mechanisms.  Have we not gotten beyond "an eye for an eye... ?"  How about "what goes around, comes around?"  Are a few hundred more houses really worth that much to Israel?

 

The Time That Remains: Palestinians, Israelis & Israeli Arabs

Had Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh ("Palestinian Walks") written the screenplay of The Time That Remains (poster at left, from the official site for the French release), the dwindling time might refer to the chance to hike the hills of Palestine before the Israelis completely cover them in concrete.  Or maybe the time remaining before Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman succeeds in expelling Arab Israelis from the land of their birth.

But the title of Israeli-Arab director/screenwriter Elia Suleiman's highly personal view of being an Arab in Israel may apply to family relations as much as Palestinian-Israeli relations, as in "appreciate your parents while they are still around," the theme so touchingly sketched in the recent Japanese film Still Walking.  In Suleiman's Nazareth of 1948 to the present, we see the Arab-Israeli conflict as experienced by and recounted to a boy growing up in a Palestinian family that has stayed on - in what has become part of Israel.

When I first saw the film's poster, I imagined that the little boy was getting a scolding from his father (it's actually the school headmaster; little Elia, it seems, is developing a reputation as a political dissident).  No, Suleiman's father Fuad (actor Saleh Bakri dominates the first third of the film as the young resistance fighter) is portrayed as a strong, silent type, who is left for dead after his capture in the 1948 fighting, and who spends the rest of his life under a cloud of Israeli suspicion that he hasn't abandoned his Palestinian nationalism.

We never see Suleiman-père old and frail.  He's the reliable go-to man for family and neighbors in a Nazareth left adrift, cut off from their cousins across the Green Line.  At the local school, children sing patriotic songs (but for which country?) in Hebrew and Arabic.

Though political themes are ever present (what honest film on the subject could avoid politics?), The Time That Remains is at times black comedic, and more than one reviewer (including Suleiman himself) has seen shades of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati in the absurdity of Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab relations.

The cinema in France where we saw "le Temps qu'il reste" distributed a very helpful flyer with a reprint from the Nouvel Observateur interview with Elia Suleiman, where he explains to Pascal Mérigeau that his novel view of the last sixty-plus years is his alone - and is not a documentary.  We read that "at 17 years old, I was accused of being a Communist sympathizer, and had 24 hours to make up my mind," which is how the young Suleiman ended up in London, which led to New York, which led to Paris...  This episode is alluded to in the film, when we see a teenaged Elia getting caught up in the first "Land Day" demonstrations to protest Israeli expropriation of its Arab citizens' land.

For objective students of the Arab-Israel conflict, The Time That Remains should stand up well to scrutiny.  For connoisseurs of the absurd, the film will show a collection of war and post-war situations that could be fodder for Ari Folman should Waltz With Bashir ever get a prequel.

In keeping with Suleiman's ambivalence over matters of nationality, statelessness, and patriotism, The Time That Remains was presented at Cannes 2009 as neither an Israeli nor a Palestinian film, but a product of France, Belgium, Italy, and the United Kingdom.  Suleiman, the "present absentee" Israeli/Palestinian/Expatriate and on-camera narrator of his own film, looks on silently at his life and gives us a rare look at the conflicted world of Arab-Israelis.

Cairo: Obama's 3 Rs - Respect, Rectitude, Resolve

No need for me to reprise President Obama's speech today at Cairo University - the White House website should have the text and video up soon, and the BBC already has an annotated version.  With our time zone advantage, we watched it live from our living room in Brussels, and a very stirring speech it was.

Respect was a repeated theme, no small matter for a religion - Islam - which has been the target of Western fear and disdain well before George W. Bush's benighted sojourn in the White House.   Whatever Rush Limbaugh may sputter tonight about the President of the United States quoting the Koran, Barack Obama's use of strategic texts from the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran struck a chord in the Cairo audience.

The man from Illinois had an Abe Lincoln air of moral rectitude when delivering The Truth to the audience.  Islam is too great a religion to be associated with terrorism (the unmentioned word), and there has to be room in the Middle East - specifically Jerusalem - for the people of the three great monotheistic religions.

The Truth, to Israeli listeners, also means that settlements are a major roadblock to a negotiated solution.  Hamas was addressed in a civil tone, perhaps a hint that change is afoot in the US attitude towards the party that won the Palestinian elections.

No one who has witnessed this President's first several months in office, or who listened to his speech in the Arab world's largest city, can doubt his resolve to do his utmost to bring a solution to the Israel-Palestine question.

More proof that Americans did themselves proud when they elected this man who, almost single-handed, is bringing the 3 Rs back to America's place in the world.

Settlements, Statehood, Shalom: Israel & Palestine

The clichéd phrase "decision time" comes to mind more than ever when it comes to that other cliché, the Middle East Peace Process.  Ever since 1948, the Middle East War Process has necessitated its peace-making counterpart.  American Presidents from Truman to Obama have had to deal with Arab-Israeli wars or endemic violence.  Some take the job more seriously than others.  President Obama appears to have put it high on the list of his foreign policy priorities.

Yesterday I took part in a discussion sponsored by GRIP (Groupe de Recherche et d'Information sur la Paix et la Sécurité, a Brussels think tank on the moderate left), inspired by the publication of their new book, "Who Arms Israel and Hamas?" (image, left).  Answer: the US arms Israel, of course, but certain EU countries (notably France) remain important suppliers.  As to "who arms Hamas?" the book makes a weak stab (one slim chapter) at describing the homemade nature of their armaments, but it is clear that the authors have paid much more attention to documenting Israel's overwhelming arsenal.  More on this later.

My part of the discussion was a look at the possibilities for change in US Mideast policy under President Obama (my remarks, in French, are here).  Basically I only had to point to the clear engagement of the President from Day One: his first phone call to a foreign leader was to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas; his early appointment of world-class negotiator George Mitchell to restart stalled talks; and his "tough love" talk with Benyamin Netanyahu on Israeli settlements, reinforced with gusto by Secretary of State Clinton two days ago.  As the discussion was taking place yesterday in Brussels, further proof of intensified engagement was going on in Washington, with the visit of Mahmoud Abbas to the White House.

Compare this to the "engagement" of George W. Bush in the Middle East (see Iraq).   As far as the MEPP was concerned, it was a matter of going through the motions.  A lackadaisical eight years, where Bush and Condoleezza Rice temporized on ceasefire calls ("premature") during Israel's 2006 attack on Lebanon, and where Bush ended his Presidency by washing his hands, Pilate-like, while Israel pounded densely-populated Gaza prior to Inauguration Day 2009.

Okay, but now we have a new, engaged President at the helm.  He's made his decision.  But it's now decision time for Israelis.  And also for Palestinians.

Israel must decide whether peace with the Palestinians, and the chance for a long term relationship with all its neighbors, is more important than settlements on cheap (because taken by force) land that rightfully belongs to a future state of Palestine.

Palestinians must decide if having a state of their own in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem is more important than perpetual pining for Haifa and Jaffa, which are Israeli now and will remain so.  And the PA must come to terms with the winners of the 2006 elections - Hamas.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which came about after much investment of time and effort by another American President, Jimmy Carter, and the Camp David Accords.  One of the confidence-building measures, assuring Israelis and Egyptians that there would be no more surprise attacks across their borders, was the creation of the MFO - Multinational Force & Observers - which still carry out their peace enforcement role.  The precedent is crucial, and the mechanisms are there, to be applied at the appropriate time along the Green Line.

In the negotiations that the Obama Administration will broker, this kind of security-conscious confidence-building will be absolutely essential.  It matters, of course, that Israel has a preponderance of weaponry, as the GRIP publication amply documents.  But armament hasn't procured Israel either peace or real security, and the continued occupation/siege of Palestinians makes Israel the equivalent of a garrison state.

It matters too that Israel feels threatened by the Hamas rockets, whether homemade or not.  In that sense, comparisons between sophisticated Israeli arsenals and subterranean Hamas caches are of limited utility.  To cede land, Israel must feel secure.  And if occupation of a hostile population and having the Middle East's most powerful military do not procure that security, then there is an opening for the concerted, rejuvenated MEPP that appears to be in the offing.

But Israelis and Palestinians have to want a peace/statehood settlement as least as much as does President Obama.  If they don't, then it will be more "process" than "peace."

Pope Visits the Over-Promised Land

For those keeping track of Pope Benedict's progress in The Holy Land, press agencies say that he just landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, where he made a statement calling for free access to Jerusalem for the faithful of the three religions that venerate sites in that city.

I'm not there, but I do know a bit about the spell Jerusalem can cast over people, even those that are not particularly religious.  I spent some time there in the seventies and the eighties, mostly on the Arab side, before travel between Arab East Jerusalem and its natural Palestinian hinterland became a nightmare for the inhabitants.

Here's what brought me to use the Promised Land in the title of this post, rather than the "Holy Land" of Vatican parlance.  It was the sight of the Pope on Mount Nebo in Jordan, purported to be the place where Moses first saw "the Promised Land."  His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, had also made the pilgrimage to Mt. Nebo in 2000.  He too wanted peace, but little of that has happened in the interim.

It's probably sacrilegious of me to say this, but isn't it a bit presumptuous of a religion to claim a particular territory based on a promise by its own deity?  How about the Philistines?  Maybe they had a promise too?  I guess theirs wasn't written on tablets.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years to the late 19th and early 20th century, and the Philistines - now as Arab Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian - got to deal again with foreigners bearing more promises, this time from Europeans called Sykes, Picot, and Balfour.  Promises that compromised their rights to a home and a country.

Palestinian writer Ghada Karmi wrote about how 19th century Zionists sent a delegation of rabbis to Ottoman Palestine, to scout out prospects for settlement by European Jews.  They reported back: “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”  The "bride" was the Holy Land, but the "other man" were the Palestinian inhabitants who had seen Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and British rulers come and go.  But they couldn't withstand the people to whom the Land had been Promised.

You can get mired in controversy about Palestinians and Philistines, about whose land - those promises - and about something called the Middle East Peace Process.  I suppose the Pope has to give the MEPP a try, and he does bear a responsibility for the welfare of the Middle East's dwindling Christian population.  But the Pope will come, and he will go.

In yesterday's Toronto Globe and Mail, Fouad Twal, the Pope's Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, told reporter Patrick Martin that "at the end of the visit the Pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences.”  He might have added that when the Pope returns to Rome, all those restrictions that make life hell on earth for Christian (and Muslim) Palestinians - temporarily eased during the Pope's visit - will be reinstated.

And the "Palestine" that remains after continuous Israeli chipping, walling, and bypassing will still look like this.

Iran, Israel, and Intolerance: Ahmadinejad & Avigdor

The fact that a racist like [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad is the main speaker proves the true aim and nature of the conference.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, speaking on the eve of the UN conference on racism in Geneva, from the Israel Beytenu website

Following World War Two, they [note: WW II victors] resorted to making an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish suffering. They sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine. In compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive, racist regime in Palestine.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Geneva; excerpted remarks on the BBC website

The old saw about the pot calling the kettle black comes to mind.  Personally, I don't think either Mahmoud Amadinejad or Avigdor Lieberman represent all their citizens or the ethos of their respective countries.  Both, however, are the product of elections, and therfore do represent currents that are alive in broad segments of their societies.  That said, I would like both of them to go to hell.

Since they are respectively President and Foreign Minister of Iran and Israel, my wish to send them to Hades is irrelevant.  Maybe as irrelevant as the UN Conference - official site here - itself.

A UN conference to condemn racism?  I am not going to fall into the facile complaint about wasting money on sending hundreds of people to talking shops; international conferences can often lead to useful conclusions.  Even the original Durban Declaration is credited with fostering minority rights in places like Latin America and India.

But yesterday's set-piece speech + walkout/boycott was guaranteed from the start to steal whatever credibility the organizers had provided the conference.  They would have done better to invite Avigdor Lieberman, so that he could expound on his plan - remember, he is now Israel's Foreign Minister - to eject Arab citizens of Israel and "trade" their land for the burgeoning Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  "The more homogeneous a country is, the better it develops," he told Der Spiegel in 2007.  According to Ben Lynfield, Jerusalem-based freelance writer for The Nation, Lieberman illustrates "the ascendance of fascist ideas in Israel."

Whatever pious imprecations are mouthed in Geneva over the next few days, racism and intolerance will continue to abound.  A few leagues south of Geneva, in Italy, football crowds continue in their racist ways.  In Iran, Ahmedinejad has returned to a rapturous welcome after sticking it to the West.  Maybe he can apply himself to the question of press freedom and Roxana Saberi.  And, out of sight of the world's media, Israel under Netanyahu/Lieberman continues to make life miserable for Arabs.

Here's my question: will any of the countries whose delegations walked out on or boycotted Ahmadinejad similarly spurn Avigdor Lieberman?  A man whose current "diplomatic" duties cannot cover a lifetime of racism?

Israel-US: Agrément Denied, Freeman Chas-tised

Another "I-forgot-to-post-it-note"

 Photo: "Do not forget to live," © Alexey Ivanov, iStockphoto

There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government – in this case, the government of Israel.  I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel.  It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so.  This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States.

Ambassador (ret'd) Chas Freeman, on his short-lived nomination to head the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC)

The ways of diplomacy are ancient and mysterious indeed:

...formal application for agrément, or consent, is made by the envoy being replaced. Then the new ambassador is sent forth with a letter of credence addressed by his head of state to the head of the host state to introduce the ambassador as his or her representative. In most major capitals a copy of credentials is now first...

Britannica.com, Extract from "Letter of credence (diplomacy)"

Diplomats know that host nations can sometimes reject the ambassadors who are proposed by foreign capitals.  Usually this takes place out of the limelight, like the story (apocryphal or not, I do not know) about the highly qualified prospective young female ambassador - a respected and hard-charging regional affairs expert - proposed to a Central American junta in the late Seventies.  The colonels' answer to Washington?  "Can't you just send us another middle-aged white male, like we're used to dealing with?"

The late great Arabist Hume Horan, probably the best-qualified representative to Saudi Arabia, was unceremoniously expelled - in part because he probably knew the country too well.  Chas Freeman - himself a former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia - might now be suffering from the same fate.  He knows the Middle East too well - so much so that he questions the underpinnings of the sacrosanct Israel-US "special relationship."

But the operative terms in matters of agrément are "foreign" and "nation."  Not domestic political action committee or PAC, as in AIPAC's objection to Freeman for his questioning - as opposed to rote acceptance of - the Israeli tail wagging the American dog.

It is the Obama NIC's loss: Freeman appears to be a diplomat of uncanny ability.  Just read his masterful "Impressions of Arabia" from November 2007 for his insights into the troubled region.  His view of AIPAC/Israeli conniving to remove him: "Israel is driving itself toward a cliff."  There is an example of the kind of "tough love" that we were supposed to be hearing towards our MNNA (major non-NATO ally) from the new administration.

I can almost imagine the AIPAC lobbyists: "Can't you just appoint...?"  Remember, Wag The Dog ends badly.

Robert Capa Remembered in Brussels

Readers who find themselves in Brussels before 19 April 2009 would do worse with a couple hours' free time than going to the Jewish Museum for its Robert Capa Retrospective.  Many of the legendary war photographer's most famous photos - including his "Falling Soldier" from the Spanish Civil War - are on display.  Others, including many from Israel's early days, when refugees were as likely to be Jewish as Arab, show Capa's ability to capture human feeling on film.

Since Capa was instrumental in getting intellectual property protection for photographers, I hesitate to illustrate this post (for aficionados, the International Center of Photography's eMuseum has some 1,500 of his photos here).  But I make an exception by including the poster for "Robert Capa in Love and War," the award-winning 2003 Anne Makepeace PBS documentary of the photographer's eventful life.

One of the biggest treats of the visit was the screening of Makepeace's film, which helps the uninitiated get to know the rakish Capa, who was a legend in his own lifetime.  Indeed the Jewish Museum's retrospective seems to be timed to mark the 70th anniversary of "Picture Post" magazine's consecration of Capa as the "greatest war-photographer in the world" in late 1938.

Capa already had years of wartime coverage to his credit - he was all of 25 years old - and there were more wars to come: after Spain, there was China fighting Japanese invaders; Capa covering fighting with American soldiers in North Africa and Italy in 1943; landing with the first wave on D-Day; jumping with paratroopers into Germany; and the 1948 Israel-Arab war.  He was killed covering the end of the French Indochina War in 1954.

Anne Makepeace found soldiers' testimony on how much Capa was one of them.  Several remembered him being conversational in the foxhole under fire.  Watching her film, I was reminded of my late father's stories about war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who was killed while covering my father's 77th Division in the Pacific.  Capa, Pyle... the tradition of honoring courageous correspondents continues with the Robert Capa Gold Medal.

Capa was much more than a chronicler of his times, he was an active anti-Fascist, his resistance starting in his native Hungary.  His temporary refuge in Germany ended - Capa, born Endre Friedmann, was Jewish - when Hitler came to power.  He continued to document Fascism, triumphant in Spain, defeated with Hitler's fall, throughout much of this life.  Belgium's own wartime collaborator Léon Degrelle was the subject of one of his shots.

I could go on.  With some 70,000 negatives to his name (most of his D-Day pictures were ruined in the lab!), Robert Capa alone constituted a record of much of what mattered in the mid-20th century.  Hurry to Rue des Minimes in Brussels while this exhibit still lasts.

(Image source: Films Transit)