Rootless Cosmopolitan – By Tony Karon

A post-election piece for Vox on how Obama could redeem his promise to the Palestinians. Needless to add, perhaps, he failed to do so. Excerpts: 

All that survives of Oslo today are those elements that are useful to Israel: The Western-funded administrative and security institutions of the Palestinian Authority that were once intended as a transitional vehicle for a journey towards Palestinian statehood, but today are an integral part of the status quo. The stability of the PA is now based on a combination of repression and the fact that more than one in three West Bank Palestinian households depends on a PA salary.

Israel’s leaders and public are deaf to warnings by US officials and the remnants of the Israeli “peace camp” that the status quo is not tenable, because such warnings don’t jibe with their experience: For Israel, the occupation has no downside. For three quarters of Israel’s lifespan as a nation state, its flag has flown over the territories conquered in 1967.

Israelis are unmoved by the warning that they face a choice between being a Jewish state and a democratic one, or the alarm sounded by the likes of former Prime Ministers Ehud Barakand Ehud Olmert, as well as former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Secretary of State John Kerry that the “apartheid” reality created by the occupation threatens international isolation along the lines suffered by South Africa’s white minority regime in the 1980s. (Kerry later apologized for his word choice, in a classic illustration of the domestic political constraints cited by Obama on the US administration’s ability to speak uncomfortable truths …

… The demand for an even-handed US policy based on human rights and equality is gaining momentum in American public discourse, even if it does not yet influence the Washington policy process. Senator Bernie Sanders broke taboo during the primary campaign by speaking forcefully in support of Palestinian rights and equality, castigating Secretary Clinton for failing to even mention the Palestinians in her address to AIPAC.

Nor will the denial of Palestinian equality be tolerated by the growing movement of Americans of color challenging police violence, fighting for immigration rights or challenging infringements on Native American rights. The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, has wholeheartedly embraced the Palestinian cause, backing the call for economic pressure on Israel to end the occupation and for US policy to do the same. And activists from the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, led by Cornel West, made an impassioned plea for the US to embrace the cause of Palestinian civil rights during the debate over the Democratic Party program last summer, reflecting the sentiments of the party’s progressive wing, whose influence is likely to grow in the wake of Clinton’s defeat…

… Obama’s greatest legacy for achieving peace in the Middle East may lie less in diplomatic parameters, than in helping reverse the imbalance in leverage — by convincing Americans that Palestinian lives matter.

Wrote this one back in 2016 ahead of Obama’s Hiroshima visit, but could have written it any time before or since: 

‘I will never apologise for the United States – ever! I don’t care what the facts are.” Those words weren’t in some Donald Trump campaign speech, they were spoken by the then vice president George H W Bush in 1988 after the US Navy shot down an Iranian commercial airliner on a routine flight.

Apologising for any act of war is anathema in the nationalist narrative of US domestic politics, in which the assumption of American virtue is absolute.

So the White House took special care when announcing Barack Obama’s May 27 visit to Hiroshima to say that the US president won’t apologise for the August 1945 attack on the city that killed at least 80,000 civilians instantly and up to 100,000 more afterwards.

America’s conversation about Hiroshima and Nagasaki has long evaded uncomfortable moral and legal aspects of the decision to target civilian population centres. Many have suggested such a decision might be tantamount to a war crime.

Leo Szilard, one of the scientists who developed the bomb, questioned what would have happened had Germany developed two nuclear weapons and dropped them on American cities before being overrun by the Red Army in 1945: “Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atom bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?”

Former US defence secretary Robert McNamara recalls air force commander Gen Curtis LeMay, who delivered president Harry Truman’s decision to use the atom bomb, saying: “If we’d lost the war, we’d have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

Truman’s radio speech announcing the bombing seemed cognisant of the potential for reproach: “The world will note,” he said, “that the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”

That statement rings hollow, of course, because Hiroshima was no more a military base than any American city that housed munitions factories and an army base. In explaining the decision, Truman offered a narrative that started with the US in a race against Germany to develop nuclear weapons, winning that race only after Germany’s defeat.

Then, “having found the bomb we have used it … We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor,” he said, “against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretence of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it to shorten the agony of war, to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.”

The motives here combine revenge for Japanese abuses – and, perhaps, a tacit sense of acting outside “the international laws of warfare” – with the argument that it was necessary to do so to save the lives of American soldiers. Again, it’s not clear how the laws of war would treat deliberately targeting civilians to save soldiers.

Truman later said that invading Japan would have killed half a million Americans and as many or more Japanese soldiers and civilians. Despite historians questioning those claims, not to mention wider questions about the laws of war, his argument has become America’s Hiroshima conventional wisdom – despite opposition by a number of top US commanders at the time to using nuclear weapons, because they believed Japan was beaten and that a ground invasion wouldn’t be necessary, but also because it might violate the laws of war.

Truman invoked religious themes in describing America’s nuclear primacy: “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”

In the 71 years since Hiroshima, there has been too little public discussion in the US about the morality – and legality – of targeting civilians to force their rulers to end a conflict. When Washington’s Smithsonian Museum in 1995 sought to stage an exhibit that would have showed the effect of the bomb on the city of Hiroshima and its residents, Republican legislators led a successful campaign to shut down the “un-American” exhibit.

Nor was it only Republicans who objected: the US Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Smithsonian plan, declaring that the bombing of Hiroshima had helped “bring the war to a merciful end”, thereby “saving the lives of Americans and Japanese”.

Still, Obama’s visit suggests time may be loosening the nationalist grip on the narrative. Last year, a Pew survey found that 56 per cent of Americans believe using nuclear weapons on Japanese cities was justified, while 79 per cent of Japanese respondents felt the opposite. But more significant, perhaps, one in three Americans now agreed with the Japanese majority, and less than half of Americans younger than 29 believe the decision was justified.

That’s encouraging because America’s national conversation about the use of nuclear weapons remains woefully inadequate. Consider, The Washington Post recently mocked Donald Trump for declining to answer its editors’ question on whether he’d be willing to use nuclear weapons against ISIL — apparently unconcerned by the insanity of suggesting nuclear weapons should be considered for use in Syria or Iraq. Hillary Clinton, likewise, rebuked Mr Obama on the campaign trail in 2008 for declaring that nuclear weapons were not an option against Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Mr Obama is going to Hiroshima, in the words of his adviser Ben Rhodes, to “highlight his continued commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”.

A great symbolic gesture but it might have more credibility if Obama hadn’t last year committed to spending $348 billion [Dh1.3tn] to modernise the nuclear fleet. If nuclear weapons aren’t going anywhere, America urgently needs a more open and honest conversation about the circumstances under which it might consider using them again.

Found this, recently, from a piece I wrote in the National in 2016. Extract:

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews didn’t even try to conceal his establishment leanings as he berated Mr Sanders in a recent interview, demanding that the socialist senator from Vermont explain how he would persuade the senate to enact his promise of free college tuition. The senate would never do it, Matthews patronisingly explained. Mr Sanders clearly didn’t understand the rules of the game.

Mr Sanders patiently explained that he understood the rules of the game all too well – he was, in fact, running against the game. That has been the whole point of his campaign. His opponent, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, brands him an irresponsible dreamer, promising that she can “get things done”. He counters that the only things she could get done are things acceptable to the Republican-controlled Congress, and the corporate sponsors of both parties. His campaign and – in the unlikely event he’s elected – his presidency are a platform for protest against the political and economic status quo of which Mrs Clinton is an integral part.

Mr Sanders vows to get things done by mobilising millions of people in the streets – which, by the way, is how African Americans and women earned the right to vote and working people earned the right to a 40-hour week.

Justice in America has always been driven from below in often bitter battles before being codified by courts and legislatures. Mr Sanders is running as a radical challenge to the status quo rather than promising, as Mrs Clinton does, to be an agent of continuity and competent management.

And while a press corps finds Mr Sanders’s message incomprehensible, it has resonated with millions of voters whose living standards and economic prospects have steadily declined since 1980, regardless of which party has been in the White House.

The extent to which Mrs Clinton has been forced to echo many of his positions underscores the extent to which Mr Sanders has transformed the conversation. The influence of his ideas will far outlive his campaign.

My February 2016 valedictory editorial note on the home page of Al Jazeera America the day we closed down. Still proud of the work we did, and the way we covered the American story

The core principle driving the journalism that distinguished Al Jazeera America online as a unique voice in a cluttered news landscape was the simple — yet radical — proposition that no single human life is worth less than any other.

Whether it was Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, teenage African-Americans killed in their prime; Syrian refugee child Alan Kurdi, whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach; Palestinian baby Ali Dawabshe, who died in the flames of his firebombed home in a village under Israeli occupation; Nicaraguan peasant farmer Carlos Wilson Bilis contemplating the destruction of his livelihood by an epic canal project; or LeeAnne Walters raising the alarm over the poisoned water pouring from the taps in Flint, Michigan, their stories deserved to be told. Their names needed to be known and their voices heard. Their plight, like those of so many hundreds featured in our coverage, revealed the human impact of decisions made — or evaded — in the corridors of power.

And when ordinary people stood up and took action to transform their fates, we paid attention. Whether it was Priestess Bearstop and her struggle to steer clear of Minneapolis gang life or Pamela Dominguez and her Dreamer compañeros fighting for the dignity of citizenship or St. Louis fast-food worker Olivia Roffle organizing for a living wage or Mexican student Salvador Castro Fernandez and his friends searching for justice for their 43 Ayotzinapa classmates who went missing during a protest, we believed our readers needed to hear their voices.

Our passion for telling their stories and setting them in context renewed our sense of purpose each day. When buildings teeter and collapse as the ground beneath them is shaken by violent spasms, we call that an earthquake — signaling that the sound and fury experienced at the scene could be understood only by reference to the unseen movement of tectonic plates. Our goal, whenever possible, was to provide the context, noting the tectonic shifts driving the dramas of the everyday news cycle.

For Al Jazeera America online, no human tragedy could be reduced to a statistic or dismissed as the collateral damage of another’s self-defense or an inevitable consequence of geography, politics, class, race, sect or ethnicity. Poverty, violence and environmental degradation are not immutable forces of nature; they are the product of choices made by those in power. The media’s function in a democracy is to enable the public to make informed choices, which in turn requires laying bare the human consequences of policy decisions. That was a challenge we accepted with relish. Freed of commercial pressure to serve up clickbait, we could focus on stories that needed telling.

Resonating through our stories are the cadences of ordinary Americans engaged in an urgent national conversation. And, mindful of the idea that journalists write history’s first draft, we constantly reminded ourselves that America’s social progress is, first and foremost, a story of the courage and sacrifice of ordinary women and men willing to put their bodies on the line to face down injustice. From slave revolts to suffragettes, Selma to Stonewall, from the epic mining and railroad strikes of the late 19th century to the Delano farmworkers’ strike of the 1960s and more, it was the courage of ordinary Americans willing to defy injustice that earned us the rights and dignity we take for granted today.

Black Lives Matter mattered to Al Jazeera America online not only because it highlighted the intolerable epidemic of police shootings of young people of color but also because it tapped into that tradition of active citizenship. So did the immigration reform campaign of the Dreamers. Our approach to politics was always centered far beyond the Beltway.

Our award-winning opinion page consistently punched above its weight, leading and shaping national conversations by going beyond the banal polarities of political partisanship. Our international coverage was guided by a belief in global citizenship, equality and shared responsibility for a connected world rather than narrated from the perspective of any one country’s foreign policy establishment. Awards came in recognition of our documentary-photography storytelling and our exceptional use of multimedia devices — even a comic on privacy and digital surveillance. And of course, day in and day out, our news desk weighed in on breaking news dramas with rare depth, breadth and perspective.

We set ourselves high standards on questions of race, class and gender biases in our reporting, always questioning from whose reality and experience a story was told, thinking about not only what was being said but also who was saying it. Much of the time, we knew we could do better. But the AJAM difference, for many of us, was that we sought to measure ourselves by those standards in the first place, trying amid the turbulence of an everyday American newsroom to question inherited assumptions about power and privilege in how stories are reported.

AJAM online’s legacy, some of it captured on these pages, is a journalism of value and of values not tied to any ideology or political entity but morally committed when confronted by racism and bigotry, violence against the innocent, injustice and inequality, sexism and homophobia.

We tried in our brief tenure to uphold the fine tradition of an American journalism that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. Tradition long predates AJAM and will hopefully long outlive it. But AJAM offered us a brief, inspirational taste of a world where talented journalists are unleashed to pursue the profession’s best traditions without commercial pressure.

We are proud and honored to have been a part of it.

Majority Report Radio conversation with Michael Brooks on the piece I wrote for the National on the political insurgency in the Republican mainstream.

In America, a new era of insurgency and turbulence has just begun

When Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb that killed 168 Americans in Oklahoma City in 1995, he claimed to be avenging white extremists killed by federal agents at Ruby Ridge and members of a religious cult who died during a government raid on their compound at Waco, Texas.

McVeigh hoped he would spur like-minded “patriots” to rise up and overthrow what he called a tyrannical federal government. No such rebellion materialised in 1995, but “patriots” who share his world view may have reason to believe conditions today are conducive to fulfilling their fantasy.

The election of America’s first black president in the same year that the financial collapse plunged millions more into poverty sparked an ammunition shortage in the nation’s gun stores. The same happened after Barack Obama’s reelection.

Hundreds of new white male “patriot” groups have emerged, their members brandishing semi-automatic rifles on the streets – outside mosques to intimidate Muslim worshippers, patrolling the border areas where migrants cross from Mexico, on the streets of Ferguson, where black protesters challenge racist policing, and in taking control of a state wildlife sanctuary in Oregon to protest against government land-use policy.

No modern state can survive without maintaining a monopoly of force within its territory. Legally permitting citizens to brandish weapons on the streets independent of government authority not only demonstrates the crumbling of state power, it raises the risk of bloody confrontations – and even civil war.

Read the whole piece here

You may have noticed that I don’t update this site much any more — that’s because I’m doing most of my writing on these matters on TIME.com and at the National, and doing my blogging on Facebook and Twitter (follow: @TonyKaron ) I’m not going to update this often, so follow me on those platforms. But for the record, a few of my recent Egypt pieces:

What the US Loses if Mubarak Goes

The revolt that appears to have fatally undermined President Hosni Mubarak’s prospects for remaining in power is a domestic affair — Egyptians have taken to the streets to demand change because of economic despair and political tyranny, not the regime’s close relationship with Israel and the U.S. But having tolerated and abetted Mubarak’s repressive rule for three decades precisely because of his utility to U.S. strategy on issues ranging from Israel to Iran, Washington could be deprived of a key Arab ally with his fall from power.

…the Egyptian rebellion may stand as the ultimate negation of the Bush Administration’s “moderates vs. radicals” approach to the region: Mubarak’s ouster might be a loss for the moderate camp, but it won’t necessarily translate into a gain for the radicals. Instead, it marks a new assertiveness by an Arab public looking to take charge of its own affairs, rather than have them determined by international power struggles. Even that, however, suggests turbulent times ahead for American Middle East policies that have little support on Egypt’s streets.

Egyptians No Longer Tolerate a Dictatorship Backed by the US Because of Israel and Iran

On Saturday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked a guest on his show how al Qa’eda fitted into events in Egypt. The question itself was reminiscent of Larry King a few years back asking Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, to explain yoga….

Fear of Islamists Paralyzes Washington (Time to get over it!)

…Democracy movements are attractive to Washington when they target a regime such as Iran’s, but in allied autocracies, they’re a problem. There’s no way for Egypt to be democratic and exclude the Islamists from political participation. The same is true for most other parts of the Arab world — a lesson the U.S. ought to have learned in Iraq, where Islamists have dominated all the democratically elected governments that followed Saddam Hussein’s ouster. But when the Islamists of Hamas won the last Palestinian elections in 2006, held under pressure from Washington, the Bush Administration literally did a 180-degree turn on the question of Palestinian democracy…

Explaining why the U.S. continues to support Mubarak, the State Department’s Crowley on Thursday told al-Jazeera that “Egypt is an anchor of stability in the Middle East … It’s made its own peace with Israel and is pursuing normal relations with Israel. We think that’s important; we think that’s a model that the region should adopt.”

The problem for Washington is that Arab electorates are unlikely to agree. The democratically elected Iraqi government, for example, despite its dependence on U.S. support, has stated its refusal to normalize relations with Israel. A democratic Egypt, whether led by the Muslim Brotherhood or any other opposition party, is unlikely to go to war with Israel given the vast imbalance in military capability, but they’re even less likely to accept normal ties given the present condition of the Palestinians. And the most secular liberal activists in Egypt reject with contempt the argument that regional stability can come at the expense of their right to choose their government.

Egypt: Obama Caught in a Bind

The Administration is caught in a bind, but it’s more strategic than just moral: Supporting tyrants loathed by their own people but willing to do Washington’s bidding in international matters is a decades-old U.S. tradition in the Middle East, as well as in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The problem with Mubarak is not simply that his methods are at odds with professed U.S. values; it’s that his brittle autocracy appears to have entered a period of terminal decline, with the U.S. potentially on the wrong side of history.

And for old time’s sake, a piece wrote in 2003 on Egypt and Bush’s ‘democracy agenda’

…Democracy in the Middle East and nearby Muslim lands would almost certainly restrain cooperation with the U.S. war on terror. Just look at what happened in Turkey on the eve of the Iraq war: Washington had simply assumed that Ankara would jump into line once the U.S. was on the march to war — after all, the country had been effectively ruled since World War II by generals closely aligned with Washington. But Turkey is far more democratic today, and when it was left up to the elected parliament to choose, the U.S. request to invade Iraq from Turkish territory was declined. And it’s a safe bet that if Jordan and Saudi Arabia had put the matter of their own cooperation with the Iraq invasion to a freely elected legislature, the response would have been the same as Turkey’s….

…The biggest test of the seriousness of President Bush’s commitment to promote democracy will come in Egypt, which is due to hold parliamentary elections in 2005. Egypt is especially vulnerable to U.S. pressure as the recipient of around $2 billion annually in U.S. aid, as its reward for making peace with Israel in 1979. “The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East, and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East,” Bush intoned. But if Egypt were a democracy, it’s far from certain that it would still a peace treaty with Israel.

Egypt is a good illustration of President Bush’s point that the absence of channels for democratic political participation in Arab states has helped foster terrorism, which has eventually been exported. Osama Bin Laden may be Saudi, but most of the top-tier al-Qaeda leadership at the time of 9/11 were veterans of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that turned to terrorism in response to the Sadat regime’s peace treaty with Israel, and found hundreds of willing recruits in Egypt’s middle class and in its officer corps. The Brotherhood, of course, is a far more moderate Islamist entity than Jihad, originating in early 20th agitation against British colonial rule. It enjoys a strong, some say dominant, presence among Cairo’s professional classes, and has eschewed violence. Although its activities are formally banned and it is precluded from contesting parliamentary elections, Egypt analysts suggest it may nonetheless be the dominant opposition force in Egyptian society. The impact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on Egyptian public opinion has also seen a growing alignment in the views of the Brotherhood and more traditionally liberal democratic opposition groups, around the questions of democracy and sovereignty. Today, the overarching criticism of the Mubarak regime is that it is more responsive to Washington than to its own citizenry, and the internal demand for democratic reform is linked with opposition to, rather than support for U.S. policies….

In the spirit of Monty Python & the Holy Grail, Bibi: “I’m am your king!” Me: “I didn’t vote for you!” My latest in the National. Extract:

(Israel’s) demand for recognition of “Jews as a people, indigenous to the region and endowed with the right to self-government” is problematic, not only for Palestinians, but also for many Jews. Israeli Jews may have constituted themselves as a nation with the right to security and self-determination, but the majority of the world’s Jews have not claimed a right to self-determination as Jews. On the contrary, we’re very happy that anti-Semitism in the West has been marginalised to the point that we can freely integrate ourselves into the democratic societies in which we’ve chosen to live.

Growing up as a Jewish anti-apartheid activist in South Africa, I was often told by white racists to “go back to Israel”. The idea that Jews don’t belong among non-Jews is the traditional language of anti-Semitism – and also of the modern ideology of Zionism that emerged in the late 19th century. Zionism’s founder, Theodore Herzl, believed that anti-Semitism of the sort I encountered was inevitable and even “natural” whenever Jews lived among gentiles. He effectively concurred with the anti-Semites’ remedy: that I should “go back to Israel”.

Apartheid, by the way, denied black people the rights of citizenship on the basis that their “national homelands” were in Bantustans such as Transkei and Kwazulu – bogus “states” in which they supposedly would exercise their right to self-determination.

Jews have certainly suffered for the right to live in security and safety, but the majority have chosen to exercise that right not in a separate Jewish nation state, but instead as Americans, Argentines, British or French…

Read the rest here

My latest, posted on TomDispatch:

America’s march to a disastrous war in Iraq began in the media, where an unprovoked U.S. invasion of an Arab country was introduced as a legitimate policy option, then debated as a prudent and necessary one. Now, a similarly flawed media conversation on Iran is gaining momentum.

Last month, TIME’s Joe Klein warned that Obama administration sources had told him bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities was “back on the table.” In an interview with CNN, former CIA director Admiral Mike Hayden next spoke of an “inexorable” dynamic toward confrontation, claiming that bombing was a more viable option for the Obama administration than it had been for George W. Bush. The pièce de résistance in the most recent drum roll of bomb-Iran alerts, however, came from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic Monthly. A journalist influential in U.S. pro-Israeli circles, he also has access to Israel’s corridors of power. Because sanctions were unlikely to force Iran to back down on its uranium enrichment project, Goldberg invited readers to believe that there was a more than even chance Israel would launch a military strike on the country by next summer.

His piece, which sparked considerable debate in both the blogosphere and the traditional media, was certainly an odd one. After all, despite the dramatics he deployed, including vivid descriptions of the Israeli battle plan, and his tendency to paint Iran as a new Auschwitz, he also made clear that many of his top Israeli sources simply didn’t believe Iran would launch nuclear weapons against Israel, even if it acquired them.

Nonetheless, Goldberg warned, absent an Iranian white flag soon, Israel would indeed launch that war in summer 2011, and it, in turn, was guaranteed to plunge the region into chaos. The message: the Obama administration better do more to confront Iran or Israel will act crazy.

It’s not lost on many of his progressive critics that, when it came to supporting a prospective invasion of Iraq back in 2002, Goldberg proved effective in lobbying liberal America, especially through his reports of “evidence” linking Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Then and now, he presents himself as an interlocutor who has no point of view. In his most recent Atlantic piece, he professed a “profound, paralyzing ambivalence” on the question of a military strike on Iran and subsequently, in radio interviews, claimed to be “personally opposed” to military action.

His piece, however, conveniently skipped over the obvious inconsistencies in what his Israeli sources were telling him. In addition, he excluded perspectives from Israeli leaders that might have challenged his narrative in which an embattled Jewish state feels it has no alternative but to launch a quixotic military strike. Such an attack, as he presented it, would have limited hope of doing more than briefly setting back the Iranian nuclear program, perhaps at catastrophic cost, and so Israeli leaders would act only because they believe the “goyim” won’t stop another Auschwitz. Or as my friend Paul Woodward, editor of the War in Context website, so brilliantly summed up the Israeli message to America: “You must do what we can’t, because if you don’t, we will.”

Goldberg insists that he is merely initiating a debate about how to tackle Iran and that debate is already underway on his terms — that is, like its Iraq War predecessor, based on a fabricated sense of crisis and arbitrary deadlines.

To read the complete piece, click here