This morning ABC Radio National’s Fran Kelly interviewed
Israeli film director Dror Moreh about his now documentary, “The Gatekeepers”,
in which six former heads of the Israeli internal security agency Shin Bet
speak about threats to Israeli security, including the threat posed by Jewish
extremism, and say the time for the two state solution is slipping away.
US-based Middle East expert Juan Cole thinks the Israeli
Cabinet isn’t serious about talks on a Palestinian state.
His core argument is to contrast the motivations of the two
sides:
For Palestinians, the point of
negotiating with the Israelis is to achieve a Palestinian state on the
territory of the West Bank and Gaza as they existed in 1967. That is also the
point of any serious Western negotiator attempting to achieve peace.
However, from the point of view
of the ruling far-right Likud Party of Israel, the point of negotiations is to
create a fig leaf of a “peace process” while continuing to appropriate as much
Palestinian land as possible, putting more hundreds of thousands of squatters
into the West Bank, while decisively and forever preventing the establishment
of a Palestinian state. In short, for the Likud Party, the “peace process” with
the US and the Palestinians is like the ski mask worn by a bank robber. It
allows you to get away with it.
In considering Israel’s approach at any given time to the
Palestinians living under its occupation, it is always instructive to go back a
few years and see what its apologists had to say about it then, and what trends
in Israeli policy they discerned.
Here is the introduction to an essay by Barry Rubin,
entitled Israel’s New Strategy,
published in the prestigious journal Foreign
Affairs, July/August 2006, pp. 111-125.
THE END OF OCCUPATION
Israeli politics and policy are
undergoing a revolutionary transformation -- one of the most important
developments in the nation's history. As dramatic as recent events have been,
equally important is the emergence of a new strategic paradigm that reverses 30
years of debate and practice and overturns some of Israelis' most basic
assumptions.
Why have perceptions, politics,
and strategy changed so dramatically? The shift began when Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon ordered a complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West
Bank, including the dismantling of Jewish settlements in those areas. Within a
few months, Sharon's Likud Party had revolted against him; Sharon had quit
Likud and formed another party, Kadima; the Labor Party had chosen a populist
outsider as its leader; the governing coalition had collapsed, necessitating
new elections; Sharon had been physically incapacitated by a stroke and
replaced by a top deputy, Ehud Olmert; and Olmert had gone on to win in the
March 2006 elections. Hamas' victory in the January 2006 Palestinian elections
only underscored already existing trends.
The emerging new policy is based
on a broad Israeli recognition that holding on to the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip is simply not in Israel's interest, despite the fact that the Palestinian
leadership has been uninterested in and incapable of making peace and that both
Fatah and Hamas will use that land to try to launch attacks on Israel. The
territories no longer serve a strategic function for Israel, given the
unlikelihood of a conventional attack by Arab state armies, and Israel could
better defend its citizens by creating a strong defensive line rather than by
dispersing its forces. Moreover, because a comprehensive peace deal is not
likely to be reached for many years, the territories are no longer of value as
bargaining chips. During the long era before the Palestinians will be organized
and moderate enough to make peace, Israel has to set its own strategy based on
these realities.
I wonder how he would explain the events of the five and a
half years that followed the publication of his essay. In similar terms to the
thrust of the essay, I guess – “the Palestinians are not ready for peace”.But evidence of “broad Israeli recognition
that holding on to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is simply not in Israel's
interest” remains as difficult to find now as it was in 2006.
According to this article
in the Saturday 8 September edition of The
Age, the jailing of three members of Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot
sparked a formal complaint from Australia over the "disproportionate"
two-year sentence handed down to them.
The band members were jailed for "hooliganism"
after a provocative performance in a Moscow cathedral in February when they
sang lyrics critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
There is no doubt that the sentences were disproportionate,
but it is hard to escape the feeling that this was rather a low cost demonstration
of concern on the part of our Government about a human rights issue – making representations
on behalf of three lively and attractive young middle class women who set out
to push the boundaries of what the Russian Church and the Russian State are
prepared to wear. That will play well in the suburbs, they are people we can
relate to, they are our sort of people in a way, and their will be no domestic
constituency to speak of that will come out in support of Putin.
And the formal representations on their behalf will have
been a very civilised affair; no-one will have got hot under the collar about
it. Someone from the Embassy will have gone in “on instruction” and gone
through the motions of recording our Government’s deep concern, will have been
told that our Government’s views have been noted, no doubt given a cup of tea, a
bit of “how’s your father?” and that will be that, but our protest will be on
the record.
I wonder how often we express deep concern about
Israel's practice of holding Palestinian children in solitary
confinement and denying them legal representation, as well as its use of
physical violence, shackles and coerced confessions in interrogations
as reported by Ruth Pollard in this article
from the 27 August edition of The Age,
relying on the detailed testimony of “veteran soldiers in detailed statements
chronicling dozens of brutal incidents”. Other acts of violence reported by the
veterans include forcing the children to act as human shields in military
operations and “the wounding and killing of children in the occupied West Bank
and Gaza by either targeted shooting or by failing to protect minors during
military operations”.
From the quoted accounts by the Israeli veterans’
organisation Breaking the Silence, it is clear that the treatment of the
Palestinian children is arbitrary and disproportionate.
So I wonder just how often we formally register our concern
about this behaviour. That would require intestinal fortitude of an entirely different
order on the part of our Governmentthe Israelis would come back hot and strong
and domestic constituencies would react.
The matter gets worse when you consider a fundamental difference
between the young women of Pussy Riot and the Palestinian children whose arrest
may or may not be the result of their throwing stones or other forms of protest.
The Pussy Riot members are Russian citizens who were
arrested in their own country for actions they don’t deny taking, and tried in
a Russian court. They had a choice; if they had not taken the actions the
Russian State would presumably have left them alone.This is not to defend what happened to them
in any way – the treatment they received was unconscionably harsh - but they
must have gone into this with their eyes open, they must have known this was
going to get them into serious trouble.
The Palestinian children, on the other hand, have few if any
choices. They are minors living under a brutal military occupation, and the
treatment they receive is, by the testimony of the veterans’ organisation Breaking
the Silence, not only harsh but deliberately arbitrary – to make sure that the
people under occupation know no peace, to create “the feeling of being chased”
by being subjected to military incursions into their homes at any hour of the
day or night. Keeping your head down and causing no offence is no guarantee
that you won’t be hauled off in the dead of night with your hands tied tightly
behind your back and thrown into solitary confinement – that is the whole idea.
So I am afraid I cannot see the protests about the treatment
of the Pussy Riot members as a particularly courageous act on the part of our
Government, and I cannot see the violation of their human rights as the case
most deserving of our official attention.
In a 21 January post on his blog The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah asks whether Barack Obama is
running for re-election as President of the United States or Prime Minister of Israel,
and comments that
A new Obama campaign video makes it increasingly hard to tell, and even
more ominously ratchets further the Israelization of US politics.
Included in the post is the video in question: a 7-minute
YouTube Obama campaign video entitled America
and Israel: an unbreakable bond which
… alternates video and audio of Obama speaking before the Israel lobby,
AIPAC, and other Zionist groups, and clips of Israeli leaders endorsing Obama’s
leadership. It begins and ends with the US flag and the Israeli flag side by
side – thus bringing the Israeli flag directly into the US election campaign.
Although the clips of Israeli leaders … appear to have been taken from
interviews, they are cut to look as if they were provided specifically for the
purpose of endorsing the president.
…
As such, Obama is legitimizing the role of foreign – although certainly
only Israeli leaders – to participate directly in US campaigns. Can we imagine
Obama issuing a video in which he is endorsed as pro-Mexican by the President
of Mexico, or pro-Canadian by Canada’s prime minister? It’s inconceivable.
Barack Obama was elected in 2008 with expectations that he
would establish a new relationship with the Muslim world and bring some balance
to the US relationship with Israel. This was always more of a hope than a
reality. While he made a promising speech in Cairo and broadcast a greeting for
the 2009 Iranian New Year, he surrounded himself with the same old foreign
policy crowd who had spent their lives looking after Israel, and as they say in
business, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve
always got.
Sad to say too that when it comes to matters affecting
Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is both smarter than Obama and more
determined, so by September in Obama’s first year in office I was ready to
declare it all over as far any contest between the two was concerned (see Game,
set and match to Mr Netanyahu).
See Ali Abunimah’s post and the video in question here.
It is just over three years since the Israelis launched Operation
Cast Lead, their punitive attack on Gaza, the one which then Acting Prime
Minister Gillard characterised as Israel exercising its right to defend itself.
352 children were killed directly by Israeli action during
the 22 days of Operation Cast Lead.That
is not just a statistic. Every single one of those children was a living
breathing human being, of flesh and blood, with hopes, fears and dreams like
the rest of us.
They all had names, and if you click on this link here
you can find out the names and ages of every one of them, many not yet in their
teens, some as young as three months.
In the 13 December online edition of the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, Jonathan Pollak, one of the
founders of the Israeli organisation Anarchists
Against the Wall, published an opinion piece on the death of the young
Palestinian Mustafa Tamimi at the hands of the Israeli Defence Force. Tamimi was killed by a tear gas canister
fired at his head from close range from the rear of an armoured vehicle, during
the weekly demonstration at his home village of Nabi Saleh, a demonstration against
the theft of their water and land by the nearby illegal settlement of Halamish. The settlers at Halamish have appropriated for
their exclusive use the water from an important natural spring belonging to
Nabi Saleh villager Mr Bashir Tamimi, and denied the villagers of Nabi Saleh
access to their land.
Under the headline A
courageous Palestinian has died, shrouded in stones, Pollack writes:
The army spokesman was right. Mustafa died because he threw stones; he
died because he dared to speak a truth, with his hands, in a place where the
truth is forbidden. Any discussion of the manner of the shooting, its legality
and the orders on opening fire, infers that the landlord is forbidden to expel
the trespasser. Indeed, the trespasser is allowed to shoot the landlord.
Mustafa's body is lying lifeless because he had the courage to throw
stones on the 24th anniversary of the first intifada, which begot the
Palestinian children of the stones. His brother Oudai is imprisoned at Ofer
Prison and was not allowed to attend the funeral, because he too dared to throw
stones. And his sister was not allowed to be at his bedside in his final
moments, even though she is not suspected of having thrown stones, but because
she is a Palestinian.
Mustafa was a brave man killed because he threw stones and refused to
be afraid of a soldier bearing arms, sitting safely in the military jeep
covered in armor. On the day Mustafa died, the frozen silence roaming the
valley was only slightly less chilling than the shrilling sound of his mother's
laments which fell upon it occasionally.
One can understand the empathy Pollak feels for Mustafa
Tamimi and his family. Apart from his
support for their cause, he has been the victim of a remarkably similar attack. Amongst the numerous injuries he has suffered
at the hands of the IDF while demonstrating on behalf of the Palestinians, on 3
April 2005 an IDF soldier shot him in the head with a teargas canister from an
M-16, from a distance of approximately thirty metres, at a protest against the
Wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in (see here).
Readers of this blog will be aware that I am no fan of US
Middle East “expert” Dennis Ross, one of those members of the US foreign policy
establishment who migrates between the State Department and the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee and its offshoot and its offshoot the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), one of those people of whom I feel if
you asked the question, “Do you serve the United States or Israel”, they would
not understand the question.
Ross, who is known around Washington as “Israel’s lawyer” has
never made any secret of his feelings towards Israel, so there is nothing
stealthy or furtive about his manoeuvring in support of that country, but this
being the case, the reliance that the Obama Administration, supposedly
dedicated to creating a new relationship with the Muslim world and with Iran in
particular, placed upon him is nothing short of extraordinary.
In March 2009, in Hillary's
envoy: not everyone is cheering, I commented on his bizarre appointment as
Hillary Clinton’s special adviser on Iran, and followed up with a post in May
2009 – Iran:
Hillary’s envoy (contd.) – in which I noted the views of an Orthodox Jew
who had served as US Ambassador to Israel and Egypt, who commented that in
Middle East peace negotiations:
The perception always was that Dennis started from the Israeli bottom
line, that he listened to what Israel wanted and then tried to sell it to the
Arabs.
Further posts
included Dennis
Ross on the move?, noting rumours that he was moving to the White House,
and Making
U.S. Iran policy, an extended analysis of the dysfunctional way in which
the US Administration was approaching Iran, and Dennis Ross’s role in that.
Andrew Sullivan
addressed this theme in March 2010 in a post Dennis
Ross Bats for Netanyahu on The Atlantic’s blog The Daily Dish.
An interesting addition to the dossier was published as an
op-ed piece in Al Jazeera, 23 November 2011, following the announcement that
Ross is leaving his post. Entitled The incomplete
legacy of Dennis Ross, it was contributed by Robert L. Grenier, chairman of ERG Partners, a financial advisory and
consulting firm. Grenier retired from the CIA in 2006, following a 27-year
career in the CIA's Clandestine Service. He served as Director of the CIA
Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) from 2004 to 2006, coordinated CIA activities in
Iraq from 2002 to 2004 as the Iraq Mission Manager, and was the CIA Chief of
Station in Islamabad before and after the 9/11 attacks.
During the Clinton era he was the
deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, and saw
at first hand how Ross exercised his undoubted influence to undermine rather
than strengthen efforts to create a durable peace following the signature of
the Oslo accords.
Grenier’s summary assessment of
Ross’s contribution over his time in US Government is:
During his eight years as chief architect of the peace process under
Bill Clinton, Dennis was not so much a cause as a symptom of the deep,
disqualifying political dysfunction at the heart of US policymaking in the
Middle East. Without the dysfunction, you would not have had a Ross to exploit
it.
And now, we are told, Dennis is leaving, after nearly three years in
the Obama administration. His increasing prominence over those three years is a
mark and a measure of Obama's growing disappointment and failure. For an
administration which started with such elevated goals in the Middle East, it
has come to this: Instead of engaging Iran constructively, as it had hoped, it
has devolved instead to a sterile, sanctions-based stalemate, with scant
international support, strongly shaped by Ross, who advocates an Israel-centric
posture against the Islamic Republic. And instead of exerting judicious
pressure on both Israel and the Palestinians to achieve the two-state
breakthrough which US interests would dictate, Obama has had to cave instead to
the overwhelming political influence of Binyamin Netanyahu, and has looked to Ross
as his shield against a pro-Israel lobby which would otherwise turn against
him, and may yet do so.
The problem is, as Grenier puts it:
In his many years of successful advocacy, he has precisely mirrored
both the strengths and weaknesses of his client, and therefore must be assessed
as having represented his client badly: Like the Israelis, he is a brilliant
tactician and a strategic ignoramus. A better advocate might have saved his
client from himself. Instead, Dennis' many years of successful temporising have
helped to bring Israel to the point where a two-state solution is no longer
possible. Thanks in some measure to Dennis' efforts, Israel in future can be
Jewish, or it can be democratic: It cannot be both. Having served Israel to the
point of helping to destroy Zionism: That is the very definition of
catastrophic success.
In this must-read post on the blog Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah puts a compelling case for why President Obama’s speech on US Middle East policy, delivered overnight, changes little. The introductory paragraphs sum it up:
“Obama Endorses 1967 Borders for Israel” as part of a “Broad Speech Rejecting Status Quo in the Middle East” – that was the instant spin on the front of The New York Times website within minutes of the president speaking.
But while President Barack Obama laid out in a little bit more detail a US “vision” of what “peace” would look like in his much anticipated speech on US policy in the Middle East and North Africa, there was precious little new.
Moreover, the speech affirmed that the United States will not take any effective action to advance its vision of a two-state solution.
