Palestinians Need a State: Loosening Blockade is not Enough

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Juan

One problem with the focus the Israeli raid on the Gaza aid flotilla is that it may make it appear that the Israeli blockade of Gaza is the central issue. Then any Israeli loosening of the blockade would seem to be an advance.

In fact, the blockade is not the problem but is rather a symptom of the underlying issue, which is Palestinian statelessness. Gazans have no state. What the Israelis deign to call the ‘Hamas regime’ is no such thing because it lacks sovereignty, over its borders, air, sea, imports and exports. (The idea that Israel is ‘at war’ with its own occupied territory is laughable.) The Israeli ‘withdrawal’ of 2005 simply removed a few thousand colonists and withdrew troops, usually, to the borders. But it did not allow the creation of a sovereign state. Gazans are excluded from a third of their own farmland by Israeli restrictions on where people can live. That so many Gazans are unemployed, that their industries have collapsed, that they are food insecure, and that malnutrition is causing stunting in 10% of children– all these outrages derive from their lack of a sovereign state to look out for their interests.

The International Committee of the Red Cross issued a report this weekend detailing the harm to Gazan children and civilians of the blockade. Most do not even have clean water to drink.

Aljazeera English also reports on the impact of the blockade on Gaza’s children:

Nevertheless, the problems inflicted on Gazans by the Israeli blockade will not be resolved by a loosening of the blockade. They will only be resolved by the bestowal of citizenship on Gazans, either by a Palestinian state (which does not exist and would have to be created) or by Israel (which does not want the Gazans as citizens but may end up being stuck with them).

What I cannot understand is how Israel, the US, and the European Union expect this thing to end. In the West Bank there are three political processes. First, there are the proximity talks between Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and the Israelis (talks about the conditions for talks). Second, there are municipal elections this summer in the West Bank. Third, the ‘Fayyad Plan’ calls for the Palestine Authority to have some 20,000 trained security forces in the West Bank by summer 2011, at which point Salim Fayyad, the appointed prime minister of the Palestine Authority and his government could well declare an independent state.

But in Gaza there is no political process and no prospect of one. The fundamentalist party, Hamas, won the January 2006 parliamentary elections in the Palestine Authority. But the Israelis and the US immediately rejected its victory and kidnapped parliamentarians and disrupted the government and then supported a coup in the West Bank by Fatah, the secular nationalist party of president Abbas. An attempt to extend the coup to the Gaza Strip failed, so Hamas remained in power there. The Israelis have attempted to overthrow and dislodge Hamas, including through the blockade on ordinary civilians and through the 2008-09 Gaza War, but so far have failed.

Unless a way can be found to hold legitimate elections in Gaza, it will remain isolated, even from other Palestinians in the West Bank, both politically and economically, so that the lives of its inhabitants will continue to be hell. The Israeli far right, now in power politically, will use the isolation of Gaza to argue that there is no single Palestinian representative with whom they can negotiate, and that they therefore do not need to negotiate, and can go blockading Gazans and stealing the land of West Bank Palestinians.

To repeat: the Israeli blockade of Gaza is a war crime and it is harming the health and well-being of the Gazans. But it is not in and of itself the problem, such that easing the blockade solves anything fundamental. Incorporation of Gazans into a sovereign state such that they have citizenship and can exercise popular sovereignty is the key to any real advance.

It seems to me therefore less than earth-shaking that the White House is backing an internal Israeli inquiry into its fatal raid in international waters against an aid flotilla that aimed at helping the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The commission will have some distinguished Europeans on it as observers, but the performance of the Israeli authorities with regard to investigating their own during the 2008-2009 Gaza War and Tel Aviv’s demonization of Judge Richard Goldstone and the Goldstone Report do not encourage confidence. Moreover, even if the commission found that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu erred in sending commandos to board the Mavi Marmara aid ship, it is hard to see how the ordinary people of Gaza would benefit from such a finding.

In any case, Washington and Tel Aviv no longer have infinite time to resolve the issue. The blockade of civilians is backfiring on the Israelis by provoking more and more aid ships.

Even little Bahrain is sending aid to Gaza. And, Iran is planning an aid flotilla (I expect real trouble over that one). And Turkey is planning another, this time possibly with the Turkish prime minister aboard (major international conflict looming, possibly even hostilities).

The international community has to stop dithering and intervene to end this Israeli lawlessness in Gaza, and provide a path for Gazans to citizenship in some sovereign state. The consequences of not doing so are now potentially explosive.

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The Greens in Iran are a Movement, not a Coup

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Juan

Small protests broke out around Iran on June 12, the anniversary of the 2009 presidential election, which protesters say was stolen by the country’s clerical Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on behalf of his favored candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Associated Press has video:

What was the Green Movement? A debate rages among Iran-watchers. Partisans see it as a sign that Iran is on the verge of a massive democratization. Critics see it as an exaggerated hiccup, barely more important than the student protests of the late 1990s, which amounted to nothing. Which interpretation is right has implications for US foreign policy. If the regime is tottering, the Obama administration can afford to batter it with sanctions and ignore it, hoping to help it fall. If it is strong and enduring, then it will have to be dealt with and probably direct negotiations are called for.

The reality lies in the middle. Named in honor of the color associated with the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, among whom presidential candidate Mir Hosain Mousavi is counted, the Green Movement is a social movement that protested what its followers saw as the stealing of the June 12, 2009, election by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his patron, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

It is certainly the largest social movement in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It is frankly ridiculous to class it with the earlier small student demonstrations.

Sociologist Charles Tilly defined a social movement as a cluster of groups that challenge the state in a sustained way, engaging in an attempt to effect some change in the status quo. A movement is not an organization and so lacks the institutionalization and reporting lines of a political party’s electoral campaign. If that distinction is kept in mind, we can call a social movement a sort of campaign for some goal.

The civil rights movement of Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates is probably the best example of a successful social movement recognizable to most Americans.

The social movement attempts to demonstrate that it has large numbers of committed members, that it is united, and that it should be taken seriously.

To this end, the social movement engages in public political action, including demonstrations, processions, rallies, making statements, and sometimes violence and contention. But it also appeals to cultural symbols as part of these contentious gatherings.

The Green Movement failed in its initial goals, which were to force an aboveboard investigation of fraud in the June 12 election results, and possibly the holding of a new election. It is now sometimes forgotten that the movement did not seek the overthrow of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was about who should be president, and about insisting that the electoral institutions of that republic– the presidency and the parliament– be chosen through popular sovereignty without intervention from the appointive institutions (the supreme clerical Leader, the judiciary, the security forces).

The Greens probably did, however, succeed in weakening the legitimacy of the regime. Whereas before June, 2009, few Iranians would have been willing to say that supreme clerical leader Khamenei is a crook, a significant number now doubt his probity. That number is not a majority, but it is a vocal minority. In that sense, the debacle of the 2009 election saps Khamenei’s authority just as the priest pedophile controversy has much weakened Pope Benedict among Catholics. Those analysts who discount cultural movements and the whole idea of legitimacy as underpinning authority will be unpersuaded that this change is important. But I believe it is, in the medium to long term though not in the short term.

The movement failed to attain its short term primary goal for two major internal reasons:

  • The security establishment of the Islamic Republic remained united and rallied to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. A split in the military or the paramilitary institutions would have created a condition of multiple sovereignty, which Tilly sees as typical of revolutionary situations. But although the political elite split, unevenly, the generals did not.
  • The security establishment developed tools for combating the repertoires of social action deployed by the Greens. Did they use cell phones, texting, twitter and facebook to gather flashmobs, spontaneous urban crowds? Then cellphone signals were cut, web pages were blocked and facebook pages were infiltrated. Did they assemble in large numbers? Streets were cut off and crowds were controlled. Did they mount processions? Basij civil militiamen were sent out on motorcycles to disrupt them, beat them and arrest the recalcitrant. Did they gather in rallies to denounce the regime? They were assaulted by police. The beatings and torture and occasional executions to which some protesters were subjected served to signal that the regime was willing to raise the cost of protest to the maximum. The ways in which the regime attacked family members of prominent dissidents also terrorized would-be challengers.

    • The downside for the regime is that it must now depend more on power (i.e. imposition of rule by force) and less on authority (the likelihood that a command will be obeyed voluntarily). Regimes based on brute power are less often long-lasting than those based on authority.

    I argued at Tomdispatch that US and Israeli hypocrisy also helped the hardliners internationally.

    The Greens could not split the generals and they could not withstand the onslaught of the dedicated security forces. They could have nevertheless won, perhaps, if a majority of parliamentarians and major clerics on the Guardianship Council were to swing behind their demand for new elections. No such swing occurred. The speaker of parliament was willing to criticize Ahmadinejad, but not to try to unseat him. The Guardianship Council in the end stood with Khamenei.

    One final possibility would have been for the movement to become so popular that it was able to put large numbers of people in the street sufficiently often, and to mount strikes and other crippling forms of contentious action with sufficient regularity, to make the ordinary functioning of the government impossible and so to force a compromise. But they were unable to maintain the momentum of the second half of 2009 in the new year, and could not be so disruptive throughout the country as to force the regime to the negotiating table.

    Unlike the US civil rights movement, which had as its major goal the repeal of Jim Crow laws, the Green Movement has no single, simple, legislative object that could easily be implemented by parliament and the supreme leader. It has not been able to force Ahmadinejad to resign or to force new elections.

    This failure to achieve a practical political change at the top in the course of a year does not indicate that the Green Movement is unimportant or dead. It can survive and be influential if it finds new tactics or repertoires of sustainable collective action that cannot so easily be forestalled by the security forces, and if it identifies some simple, practical change it wants legislated other than the holding of new elections. It should be remembered that the Civil Rights movement in the US took about a decade to succeed legislatively, and much longer to effect real social and cultural change.

    If it is a movement for free speech and political transparency, then it should put forward a program for legislation that would implement these ideals, and keep the pressure on the regime to enact it.

    In the meantime, the Obama administration must face certain realities:

  • The regime seems fairly stable in the short to medium term and so presents Washington with an ongoing political reality that must be engaged rather than ignored
  • Direct negotiations with the regime no more constitute a betrayal of the Greens than did direct negotiations with the Soviet leadership represent a betrayal of Soviet dissidents such as Sakharov.
  • There is no reason to think that were the Green Movement to come to power, it would suddenly mothball the country’s nuclear enrichment program, so that one of the main points of contention between Washington and Tehran must be addressed in any case.
  • It must be understood that a US or Israeli military strike on Iran would certainly cause the Iranian public to rally around the regime and would effectively destroy the Green Movement and any hope of internal political change.
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    Schumer’s Sippenhaftung and the Children of Gaza

    Posted on June 12, 2010 by Juan

    “Gaza” is an abstraction to most Israelis, including [partisans of Israel like] Sen. Charles Schumer of New York. A majority of the 1.5 million Gazans is not even from Gaza, but rather is from what is now Israel.

    Americans do not know, and perhaps do not care, that 68% of Gazans are refugees living in 8 refugee camps, who were ethnically cleansed and violently expelled from their homes in 1947-48, in what is now Israel. And no, they were not combatants, just civilians caught up in a civil war of sorts. They lost massive amounts of property and their homes, which would now be worth billions, but have never received a dime from the Israelis in reparations or compensation. Then in winter of 2008-2009, the Israeli military destroyed one in every eight Palestinian homes, rendering even more people homeless.

    Schumer accuses the Gazans of not ‘recognizing’ Israel, which is sort of like accusing the pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico of not ‘recognizing’ BP. If Schumer wants the recognition and good will of the Gazans, he should arrange for them to be paid for the homes and farms out of which they were chased by the Israelis, who made them homeless refugees in a kind of vast concentration camp in Gaza, and are now half-starving them.

    Think Progress reveals that Schumer told an Orthodox audience:

    ‘ SCHUMER: The Palestinian people still don’t believe in the Jewish state, in a two-state solution. More do than before, but a majority still do not. Their fundamental view is, the Europeans treated the Jews badly and gave them our land — this is Palestinian thinking [...] They don’t believe in the Torah, in David [...] You have to force them to say Israel is here to stay. The boycott of Gaza to me has another purpose — obviously the first purpose is to prevent Hamas from getting weapons by which they will use to hurt Israel — but the second is actually to show the Palestinians that when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have an economic advancement. When there’s total war against Israel, which Hamas wages, they’re going to get nowhere. And to me, since the Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas, while certainly there should be humanitarian aid and people not starving to death, to strangle them economically until they see that’s not the way to go, makes sense.

    So anything short of ‘starving to death’, i.e. mass extermination in the camps, is all right as long as it convinces the enemy?

    How about something short of starving to death, such as 10% of children being stunted from malnutrition? Would that be worth it? Or a majority of Gazans being ‘food insecure’ according to the United Nations? [pdf]. Both are the current situation, which is supported by Schumer.


    How about Gaza children Looking for food in garbage?

    Some 56% of Gazans are children, who hardly voted for Hamas but whom Schumer wishes to punish economically.

    Meanwhile, Schumer doesn’t recognize a Palestinian state, but he nevertheless gets three solid meals a day.


    Sen. Charles Schumer at crumpets and tea

    As Think Progress explained, nothing Schumer said is true. A majority of Palestinians favors a two-state solution. Moreover, Palestinians are Christians and Muslims, who do in fact acknowledge the Torah (the Hebrew Bible, which the Qur’an praises as full of guidance and light) and David (whom the Qur’an calls “Da’ud.”) Schumer is shamelessly ignorant about Palestinian culture, but it is true that they do not draw from David’s existence or from the Qur’an’s praise of the Torah or Bible the same conclusion as contemporary political Zionists or Jewish nationalists, that Jews have a right to expel local people from Palestine and usurp their property without compensation. But then virtually no Jews drew such a conclusion in the United States until after World War II, and most diaspora Jews rejected such an idea until that era.

    As for the idea that all Gazans, including children, should be economically punished until they agree with Schumer’s Zionism, there is only one way that makes sense. Since the children of Gaza did not vote for Hamas, if they are being punished for Hamas’s crimes, then it must be because they are related to Hamas members.

    Punishing people because they are related to enemies of the state is called in German Sippenhaft or Sippenhaftung. Look it up. I don’t usually like such analogies from the 1930s and 1940s in Europe to contemporary Zionist thinking because they inevitably offend even a sympathetic Jewish audience. But it should be noted that Sippenhaftung was implemented against gentile German family members of dissidents such as those involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler, and that Stalin also deployed the tactic of punishing relatives of perceived dissidents. And there is no other way to read Schumer’s prescription for putting Gazan children on a diet than as a contemporary form of Sippenhaftung.

    And it is shameful, and he deserves the comparison for these inhumane sentiments.

    Here is the video of Schumer saying what he said:

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    Dayan Calls for Assassination of Erdogan via Sinking of his Proposed Aid Ship

    Posted on June 12, 2010 by Juan

    The former deputy general Chief of Staff of the Israeli military has called for a proposed aid ship to Gaza from Turkey to be sunk by the Israeli navy. Since the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, pledged to be aboard the proposed vessel, Uzi Dayan, the nephew of Moshe Dayan, was implicitly calling for the assassination of the Turkish prime minister.

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    One Hour of Video Released by Gaza Aid Worker

    Posted on June 12, 2010 by Juan

    A full hour of raw video from the Mavi Marmara Gaza aid ship from before and during the brutal and illegal assault on it in international waters by Israeli commandos is now up at YouTube. It was shot by Brazilian passenger Iara Lee of culturesofresistance. org:

    I thought this comment at reddit.com useful.

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    Russia: Missiles not Covered by UN Weapons Ban on Iran

    Posted on June 11, 2010 by Juan

    After wavering at first, Russian now maintains that the new round of UN Security Council sanctions on Iran do not forestall a sale by Moscow to Tehran of S-300 surface-to-air missiles, which are defensive in character.

    It is reassuring that the US State Department in the end agreed with Russia on this matter. If the US had been gung-ho to deprive Iran of a defensive weapon, it would have indicated that Washington had serious plans for an attack.

    Russia Today reports on Iran’s dismissive reaction to the sanctions, which were weak and watered down, and did not include any oil or gasoline boycotts:

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    Cameron Plans changed by RPG Threat;
    Taliban Resurge in Helmand

    Posted on June 11, 2010 by Juan

    British Prime Minister David Cameron was forced to abandon a planned visit to a military base in Helmand, Afghanistan during his trip to that country because of fears that the Taliban might attempt to shoot rocket propelled grenades at his helicopter. It is always a bad sign when the imperial leader cannot safely visit the outskirts of the empire.

    The incident underlined that the Anglo-American campaign in Helmand this winter did not in fact defeat the insurgents in the area. That assertion is supported by reporting from the field by Rajiv Chandrasekarn of the Washington Post, showing that the Taliban have come back strong in the past two weeks.

    Given the ambiguous outcome in Marjah, which was supposed to be a demonstration project for a subsequent US campaign against the city of Qandahar, Gen. Stanley McChrystal appears to be putting off and softening the operation in the southwestern Pashtun city.

    Although McChrystal maintains that he is in no hurry, in fact he is under enormous pressure to produce some game changers in Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said on Thursday that he wanted to see substantial progress by the end of this year or he would have to rethink the counter-insurgency campaign.

    Aljazeera English reports on the suicide bombing of a wedding on Thursday, which killed 40 and wounded 70. The attack seems to have been primarily targeting a group of 17 fighters who were being supported by the US in their struggle against the Taliban — i.e. they were ‘sons of Afghanistan’ on the model of the Awakening Councils in Sunni Arab Iraq.

    ITN follows up with a report on the funeral and aftermath of the horrific bombing.:

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    Gaza Humanitarian Workers Release Video

    Posted on June 11, 2010 by Juan

    Democracy Now! interviews Iara Lee about the video she managed to get past Israeli jamming, from the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara aid ship in international waters.

    She later that day released 15 minutes of footage at the website, Culturesofresistance.org. It shows scenes from the period before and during the Israeli commandos’ boarding of the ship, which are difficult to interpret but which some observers are alleging show firing from the helicopters as well as blood and a wounded passenger.

    Israeli Attack on the Mavi Marmara, May 31st 2010 // 15 min. from Cultures of Resistance on Vimeo.

    The confiscation by Israel of the photographs and videos taken aboard the ship, as well as attempts to erase them, looks an awful lot like a cover-up of criminal activity.

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    Colbert: Palestinians Should Go Back where they Came From

    Posted on June 11, 2010 by Juan

    Stephen Colbert, who parodies rightwing t.v. pundits, debates himself on the Israeli assault on the Gaza aid flotilla and tells the Israeli ambassador to the US that ‘the Palestinians should go back where they came from.’

    The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
    Formidable Opponent – Michael Oren
    www.colbertnation.com
    Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

    Tragically, there is in fact a strain of Israeli propaganda (technically known as ‘hasbara’), consisting of fraudulent ‘scholarship’ that alleges that today’s Palestinians were late arrivals in British Mandate Palestine. The fraud was perpetrated by someone allegedly called Joan Peters in her ‘From Time Immemorial’ and perpetuated (without attribution, since academics had busted Peters) by that great dispassionate historian of the Middle East, Alan Dershowitz.

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    Video Shows Israeli Commando Executing American

    Posted on June 10, 2010 by Juan

    Update: Paul Woodward has discovered an earlier video posted to the Web from which the following was apparently culled, via what he calls ‘creative editing.’ Obviously, raw footage is preferable, but it isn’t clear if the effect of the editing was actually any falsification of the sordid reality of what occurred.

    Original posting:

    The Israeli military attempted to confiscate and erase the photographic and video evidence of its brutal asault on the Mavi Marmara aid ship on Memorial Day. But it turns out that digital images can often be recovered after erasure, and can be put on small memory sticks that can be hidden in nooks and crannies of luggage. So some images are in fact surfacing.

    The most damaging is a film of an Israeli soldier kicking an American citizen while the latter is on the ground,and then executing him. This film completely refutes the rightwing Israeli government’s narrative of besieged lightly armed troops haplessly fending off naked aggression on the part of the aid workers. (In the Israeli scenario the victim would not be prostrate on the ground being kicked before being shot). The video, which has not been confirmed, is
    now at YouTube:

    Warincontext.com says that they asked the Israeli military about the video but did not get a substantive comment

    See also Tikkun’s remarks.

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