Dear Friends,
We've just received word from the Spirit of Humanity. They are 24 miles off the coast of Gaza, and are still surrounded by Israeli warships. Israeli Occupying Forces have threatened to take violent action against the small boat unless it turns around. They will not turn around.
Our people on the boat have slowed their speed significantly and are telling the Israelis that they must not fire on unarmed human rights workers and journalists, including Nobel peace prize laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. Regardless of Israeli threats, they will not turn around. They continue, slowly, sailing toward Gaza.
PLEASE immediately call Israeli Occupying Forces and demand that they STOP threatening the Spirit of Humanity.
CALL & FAX the Israeli Navy at:
tel: +972 3737 7777 or +972 3737 6242
fax: +972 3737 6123 or +972 3737 7175
CALL Mark Regev in the Prime Minister's office at:
+972 2670 5354 or +972 5 0620 3264
mark.regev@it.pmo.gov.il
CALL Shlomo Dror in the Ministry of Defence at:
+972 33697 5339 or +972 50629 8148
mediasar@mod.gov.il
###
Boycott israHell!
Бойкот на израел и печелещите от окупацията! Boycott israHell and those who profit from occupation!
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Melbourne dumps Connex following boycott campaign
Press release, Australians for Peace, 28 June 2009
The following press release was issued by Australians for Peace on 25 June 2009:
Connex has been dumped by the Victorian State Government as Melbourne's train system operator. Moammar Mashni of Australians for Palestine said that after four months of campaigning and some 100,000 pamphlets distributed, Palestine advocacy groups can take heart.
"This is the first step in what we hope will become a strong boycotts, divestments and sanctions movement (BDS) in Australia against Israel's apartheid policies," Mashni said. "Our boycott pamphlet asked people to send a detachable petition to Minister Kosky and we understand that thousands have landed on her desk."
The Dump Connex campaign had been run to alert Melbourne's commuters to the unethical agreement that Connex had entered into with Israel. Under the contract, Connex had agreed to operate a public transport service to Jewish settlements that Israel is continuing to build deep inside the occupied West Bank in defiance of international law.
"However," said Mashni, "Connex may be losing on that score as well. Only recently, its parent company Veolia announced that it would be seeking to pull out of its contract with Israel to build the Jerusalem light rail, due to some $7 billion worth of losses. There is no doubt that the BDS campaigns run by Palestine solidarity groups in Europe had a lot to do with that."
These worldwide boycotts have become necessary as Israel continues to ignore calls to halt its illegal settlement expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
"They are," said Mashni, "nonviolent actions that were shown to be most effective in ending apartheid rule in South Africa and Australia can expect to see many more such actions being taken against companies doing business with Israel."
The following press release was issued by Australians for Peace on 25 June 2009:
Connex has been dumped by the Victorian State Government as Melbourne's train system operator. Moammar Mashni of Australians for Palestine said that after four months of campaigning and some 100,000 pamphlets distributed, Palestine advocacy groups can take heart.
"This is the first step in what we hope will become a strong boycotts, divestments and sanctions movement (BDS) in Australia against Israel's apartheid policies," Mashni said. "Our boycott pamphlet asked people to send a detachable petition to Minister Kosky and we understand that thousands have landed on her desk."
The Dump Connex campaign had been run to alert Melbourne's commuters to the unethical agreement that Connex had entered into with Israel. Under the contract, Connex had agreed to operate a public transport service to Jewish settlements that Israel is continuing to build deep inside the occupied West Bank in defiance of international law.
"However," said Mashni, "Connex may be losing on that score as well. Only recently, its parent company Veolia announced that it would be seeking to pull out of its contract with Israel to build the Jerusalem light rail, due to some $7 billion worth of losses. There is no doubt that the BDS campaigns run by Palestine solidarity groups in Europe had a lot to do with that."
These worldwide boycotts have become necessary as Israel continues to ignore calls to halt its illegal settlement expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
"They are," said Mashni, "nonviolent actions that were shown to be most effective in ending apartheid rule in South Africa and Australia can expect to see many more such actions being taken against companies doing business with Israel."
Hamas' political immaturity
Haidar Eid, The Electronic Intifada, 25 June 2009
Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh, seen here with former US President Jimmy Carter in Gaza, have adopted the two-state solution against the resistance party constituents' interests. (Muhammad Al-Ostaz/MaanImages)
When Hamas, unexpectedly, won the 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the message from the one-third of the Palestinian people living in those territories was clear: no more of the "peace process" facade -- with its untiring "two-state solution" slogan that never materialized, and no more of the bread crumbs offered to the new inauthentic NGOized, Osloized leadership classes. (In the years since the 1993 Oslo accords, funding NGOs -- nongovernmental organizations -- has been a major means for foreign governments to influence, co-opt and neutralize Palestinian politics. This process of "Osloization" made some Palestinian organizations more loyal to their funders than to their principles.)
Many of those who voted Hamas into power were not, in fact, supporters of the organization, but rather disgruntled Palestinians looking for change and reform after 13 years of futile, meaningless negotiations that did huge damage to the Palestinian cause and transformed it from a liberation struggle supported by millions all over the world into a dispute between "two equal parties," two countries fighting for border arrangements.
Undoubtedly, Hamas' electoral victory turned the whole equation upside down and was considered a blow to the Bush doctrine in the Middle East. The price paid by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been extremely heavy. Not because of their support for Hamas, but rather because of their choice to put an end to the "peace process" charade. Had there been another Palestinian political force that could be trusted to fight the outcome of the Oslo accords in a principled manner, it might have had a chance. But by 2006, the left had already gone through a process of NGOization and Osloization that put it to the right of Hamas, dovetailing with the right wing that was already in control of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Hamas, then, won the elections because it was expected, whether rightly or wrongly, to rectify historic mistakes made by the official leadership -- most importantly defending the right of return of refugees, and putting an end to the unattained two-state solution. A deadly, hermetic siege was imposed on the Palestinians of Gaza as soon as the election results came out, followed by numerous attempts to destabilize the situation through a US-backed coup attempt, culminating in Israel's 22-day genocidal war on Gaza.
The latest war was a political tsunami aimed at creating a sense of defeat amongst the Palestinians, and a sense that they are confronted with a metaphysical power that can never be defeated. The message was that their choice of an anti-Oslo political power was not only a political mistake, but an existential one as well, a mistake that would change their future altogether; hence, the calculated targeting of children and families. More than 90 percent of the victims of the massacre were civilians, according to leading human rights organizations. None of the declared objectives of the massacre, however, were achieved: Hamas is still in power and the resilience of the Palestinians of Gaza is stronger than ever. Israel has failed to make them feel that they are a defeated people.
Hamas rallied tens of thousands of its supporters in celebrations of the "historic victory over the Zionist entity." Its spokespersons reiterated again and again that based on this historic victory, there would be no return to the pre-massacre siege and that reality on the ground now "necessitated" new steps. The Palestinian people, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Diaspora and in 1948 Palestine (the part of Palestine on which Israel was declared in 1948), also had high expectations. Gaza 2009 was, rightly, expected to be the Sharpeville of Palestine, a turning point in the history of the Palestinian struggle against Israel's policy of occupation, colonization and apartheid.
This historic victory against Israel's aggression required a visionary leadership, one with a clear-cut strategy of liberation that divorces itself completely from the Oslo accords and the deceptive two-prison solution. Instead of building on this victory and on the outpouring of international support in the streets of Istanbul, London, Amman, Caracas, Johannesburg and even Muscat -- to mention but a few cities -- the leadership of the Palestinian resistance movement, including Hamas, rushed to Cairo for what turned out to be endless, futile rounds of national unity dialogue. One is not, of course, against any serious attempt for national unity, but one also takes it for granted that the ABC of leadership, especially elected ones, is to be with the masses. The siege, which so far has led to the death of more than 400 seriously ill persons (from lack of medicine or ability to travel abroad for treatment), should have been exposed as the obstacle that prevents the leaders of the resistance from having national dialogue because they, as leaders, cannot and should not leave their besieged, traumatized people and move freely outside Gaza. This should have become a condition. If any Arab dignitary wanted to have a discussion with the victorious leadership, he or she should have been invited to Gaza. One would have expected the Gaza leadership to act as a victorious one; to wait in Gaza for at least one month after the end of the massacre and make it clear that they would welcome any sign of real support and solidarity while they were staying with their people in Gaza. That, alas, did not happen.
This was a step in what I call the "abortion of victory." Instead of coming up with an alternative program to that of the Palestinian Authority, and all the organizations belonging to it, and instead of building on the unprecedented, growing solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza, the leadership of Hamas, in statements made by its leaders and -- more importantly -- letters sent to the US president, have started reinventing the wheel! I will limit myself to a couple of important examples: Hamas' flirtation with the Barack Obama administration and their endorsement of the two-prison solution.
After US President Barack Obama's much-talked-about speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, in which he had nothing of substance to say about the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, Dr. Ahmed Yousef, a senior advisor to Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, in an interview on Al-Jazeera International, was extremely happy with the speech which was, according to him, like Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech! Two nights later, and on Hamas' Al-Aqsa television, the ex-spokesperson of the first Hamas government argued, and I would say with conviction, that Obama's (in)famous speech was a clear indication of the change taking place in the US administration and that "we" need to make use of the "diversity" within the American establishment! This, of course, came after Hamas sent a letter to Obama which Senator John Kerry, who visited Gaza a few months ago, refused to carry.
Failing to understand that Obama's election does not represent a radical change in American Middle East policy is a sign of, to say the least, political immaturity. The "diversity" within the US establishment is like the difference between the Likud and Labor parties in Israel. Obama still represents the Democratic Party, which is a part of the mainstream American establishment. Obama's victory in the presidential elections, therefore, has not produced a change in the nature of American imperialism. Obviously, Hamas has bought the fiction brought about by the election of Obama and his "seriousness" in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas fails to see that in essence, what Obama is offering is not different from what George W. Bush and, before him, Bill Clinton offered. In his speech, Obama made it crystal clear that the US-Israel ties are "unbreakable;" prior to that he was more than clear in announcing that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of the Jewish state." For the Obama administration, Israel's security remains the issue, which, ultimately, marginalizes the whole issue of Palestine.
The Israeli-American siege imposed on Gaza would be lifted immediately, if Obama decided it should be so. In fact, the US is not merely complicit, but rather a participant in the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against the Palestinians of Gaza. Any freshman student of political science, not to say a child on the streets of Gaza, would tell you this.
The second, more important example, of Hamas' political immaturity, is its acceptance of the already dead two-state solution. In a joint a press conference with former US President Jimmy Carter, Palestinian Prime Minister Haniyeh said that Hamas accepts a state limited only to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the areas occupied by Israel in 1967 with Jerusalem as its capital. This is ironic, not to say bizarre, since every politician in Palestine knows that a two-state solution has been rendered impossible by Israeli colonization of the West Bank, by the looting and pillaging of Gaza, by the construction of the apartheid wall, and by the expansion of so-called "Greater Jerusalem." Since 1967, the US has supported and is still supporting Israel in creating conditions that have made the two-state solution impossible, impractical and unjust.
For a senior Hamas leader to reiterate what has already been said by the head of its political bureau, Khaled Meshal, one can conclude that this is the beginning of a process of deterioration -- even Osloization -- not only in rhetoric, but also in action. The Palestinian people are not only those living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There are six million refugees, the overwhelming majority of whom are waiting to return to their villages and towns in accordance with UN Resolution 194, and 1.4 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have third-class status. The Palestinian struggle is not for an independent state on the 1967 borders, but rather for liberation -- liberation for all the inhabitants of the historic land of Palestine. Accepting the illusion called an independent state on the 1967 borders is, in actual fact, an acceptance of a racist solution par excellence.
By launching its genocidal war against Gaza, Israel has shot the two-state-prison solution in the head, which consequently means a dire need for an alternative program that addresses the Palestinian question as one of democracy, equality, human rights and, ultimately, liberation from occupation, colonization and apartheid. Hamas, alas, has fallen within the trap of Oslo and its fetishization of statehood at the expense of Palestinian fundamental rights. Of course, one tends to agree that the current serious crisis in Palestine emanates from the nature of the deformed political system created by the Oslo accords and their claim of laying the foundation for a two-state solution. By participating in the January 2006 elections, most political organizations in Palestine, including Hamas, showed an implicit acceptance of the new political reality created by the Oslo accords and hence the two-state solution. But, ironically, Hamas claimed otherwise, that its objective was to bring Oslo to an end.
In the late 1980s, the Palestinian national movement accepted the two-state solution and at a later stage, recognized Israel. This is the same resistance movement that in the 1960s emerged to liberate Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Behind-the-scenes negotiations, ultimately, led to the signing of the notorious Oslo accords, which paved the way for the transformation of the Palestinian cause into one of charity. Now, Hamas is reinventing the wheel. No wonder, one has a sense of déjà vu.
Mohamed Hasanein Heikal and Azmi Bishara, two leading intellectuals in the Arab world, have repeatedly criticized Hamas for its lack of exposure to the external world. This world does not only include the US, Iran and the official Arab regimes. It is a world that also includes the same civil society organizations that pressured their governments in the late 1980s to boycott the apartheid regime of South Africa; it has the university students who have occupied their campuses in an attempt to pressure their administrators to divest from companies having ties with apartheid Israel; it has the students of Hampshire College, the University and College Union of the UK, the Scottish Trade Union Council, the South African trade union federation Cosatu, and others in Venezuela, Bolivia and further afield. It has the Palestinian BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) National Committee. The struggle is not only an armed one, but it includes other pillars as well, pillars that emphasize the importance of international solidarity and mass mobilization, rather than placing all hope and faith in Barack Obama and his administration.
Gaza 2009 -- the political steadfastness the people have shown in reaction to Israel's genocidal war -- has proven that the Palestinian people are way ahead of their leaderships!
Haidar Eid is an independent political commentator.
Australia's pro-Israel policies, pro-Palestine public
Peter Manning, The Electronic Intifada, 26 June 2009
Australians in Melbourne protest Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, January 2009. (Takver)
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard have made no secret of their love for Israel.
Rudd, who leads the Labor Party, formally congratulated Israel in the Parliament on reaching 60 years of statehood in 2008. He forgot to mention the fact that Palestinians lost 78 percent of their land in 1948, millions have been refugees for the 60 years since and the rest live under Israel's military occupation.
Gillard excused Israel's massive attack on the Gaza Strip last January by pointing to the rockets Hamas had fired into Israel, killing fewer than 10 Israelis. She forgot to mention the fact that Israel, the US, the EU and the UN had decided to respond to Hamas' democratic election victory as the Palestinians' government by imposing a siege on the whole population, depriving them of fuel for cars, hospitals and heating and cutting back on food supplies. And she ignored the fact, Australia unlike even the British government, watched without complaint as Israel went on to slaughter 1,400 Palestinian civilians, including 400 children.
And now Gillard is in Israel leading a bevy of Australian business, media, political and cultural leaders to Israel in an official "cultural exchange!" I thought she ran the twin, heavyweight portfolios of industrial relations and education, not arts?
What's happening, and why?
Well, Australia is sucking up to Israel once again, just like former prime ministers John Howard (Liberal) and Bob Hawke (Labor) did.
Certainly, this one-sided policy is not represented in Labor platform policy which is much more even-handed, committing the party to a two-state solution. Although, it's interesting that in the last four years of the Rudd ascendancy all reference to the original UN resolutions that defined Labor policy since 1948 -- guaranteeing an end to the 1967 occupation and right of return of the 1948 refugees or compensation -- have been quietly deleted.
But the last prime minister to ever have an even-handed policy on this issue was Gough Whitlam (1972-75), a fact that annoyed the local Israeli lobby to no end when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war occurred.
So why the one-sidedness, ignoring the platform and the Gough legacy?
To find out one possible answer, the little Sydney-based pro-Palestine lobby group which I chair called Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine decided we would commission a high class, well-known, opinion poll company to test whether the Labor machine or politicians knew something we didn't -- for example, that their one-sidedness reflected "the will of the people."
Were Palestine and Palestinians so on the nose -- as Muslims, as Arabs, as "terrorists," pick your nightmare -- that showing government sympathy towards them would hurt you electorally?
We chose the Roy Morgan Research company and they agreed to do an arm's length national, representative survey asking five crucial questions about awareness and knowledge, about overall sympathies, about the Gaza military action in January and about perceptions of the Rudd government's attitudes.
The results were a big surprise. They are the epitome of even-handedness, with a bit of a tilt in overall sympathies toward the Palestinians. And on Gaza, many more Australians found the Israeli military action in Gaza unjustified (42 percent) than justified (29 percent).
So Labor's cuddle-up to Israel does not fit with Australians' views.
Interestingly, the survey also found that many Australians don't in fact see the Rudd government as one-sided (42 percent) though of the 20 percent who do, 19 percent think it is tilted towards Israel.
There are two other points to make.
First, if you break the national figures down in to Sydney figures, a bias towards the Palestinians comes through clearer. This could be a result of the big Australian Arab and Muslim populations in Sydney. But, in any case, the sympathy towards Palestine is stronger and the condemnation of the Gaza war much stronger (49 percent thought it was unjustified, only 24 percent justified).
So Sydney is a pro-Palestine bastion.
Second, Morgan asked respondents whether they felt they knew "a lot," "a fair amount," "not very much," "nothing at all" or "can't say" about what happened in Gaza. If you group "a lot" and "fair amount" -- in other words, those who felt they knew at least a fair amount or more about what happened -- and break them down into their sympathies for the Israelis or the Palestinians, the bias towards the Palestinians is quite marked (29.7 percent for Israelis, 44.5 for Palestinians).
I take from that, that the more you know about the Israel-Palestine situation, the more your sympathies lie with the Palestinians.
Where does this leave the Labor Party? Or the opposition Liberals for that matter?
It means they have to re-align themselves with their electorates. It means the National Australian Labor Party Conference next month should ignore Kevin Rudd's obsequious attitude to everything Israeli -- did he really say "Israel is in my DNA!" at a Jewish community function? -- and get on with strengthening its adherence to peace and justice in the region.
Julia Gillard should also cancel her tour of Israel -- how many days is she spending in the Occupied Palestinian Territories with Palestinian guides? -- and plead "pressure of work." Or a more believable reason would be: do as Obama says and end settlement-building and I'll come and see you.
That's the kind of relationship the United States is forging right now with Israel. Maybe Rudd and Gillard, who seem to have trouble listening to what their own electorate thinks of Israel, need to pick up the phone to Obama for instructions.
Peter Manning is Convenor of Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at University of Technology, Sydney.
Australians in Melbourne protest Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, January 2009. (Takver)
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard have made no secret of their love for Israel.
Rudd, who leads the Labor Party, formally congratulated Israel in the Parliament on reaching 60 years of statehood in 2008. He forgot to mention the fact that Palestinians lost 78 percent of their land in 1948, millions have been refugees for the 60 years since and the rest live under Israel's military occupation.
Gillard excused Israel's massive attack on the Gaza Strip last January by pointing to the rockets Hamas had fired into Israel, killing fewer than 10 Israelis. She forgot to mention the fact that Israel, the US, the EU and the UN had decided to respond to Hamas' democratic election victory as the Palestinians' government by imposing a siege on the whole population, depriving them of fuel for cars, hospitals and heating and cutting back on food supplies. And she ignored the fact, Australia unlike even the British government, watched without complaint as Israel went on to slaughter 1,400 Palestinian civilians, including 400 children.
And now Gillard is in Israel leading a bevy of Australian business, media, political and cultural leaders to Israel in an official "cultural exchange!" I thought she ran the twin, heavyweight portfolios of industrial relations and education, not arts?
What's happening, and why?
Well, Australia is sucking up to Israel once again, just like former prime ministers John Howard (Liberal) and Bob Hawke (Labor) did.
Certainly, this one-sided policy is not represented in Labor platform policy which is much more even-handed, committing the party to a two-state solution. Although, it's interesting that in the last four years of the Rudd ascendancy all reference to the original UN resolutions that defined Labor policy since 1948 -- guaranteeing an end to the 1967 occupation and right of return of the 1948 refugees or compensation -- have been quietly deleted.
But the last prime minister to ever have an even-handed policy on this issue was Gough Whitlam (1972-75), a fact that annoyed the local Israeli lobby to no end when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war occurred.
So why the one-sidedness, ignoring the platform and the Gough legacy?
To find out one possible answer, the little Sydney-based pro-Palestine lobby group which I chair called Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine decided we would commission a high class, well-known, opinion poll company to test whether the Labor machine or politicians knew something we didn't -- for example, that their one-sidedness reflected "the will of the people."
Were Palestine and Palestinians so on the nose -- as Muslims, as Arabs, as "terrorists," pick your nightmare -- that showing government sympathy towards them would hurt you electorally?
We chose the Roy Morgan Research company and they agreed to do an arm's length national, representative survey asking five crucial questions about awareness and knowledge, about overall sympathies, about the Gaza military action in January and about perceptions of the Rudd government's attitudes.
The results were a big surprise. They are the epitome of even-handedness, with a bit of a tilt in overall sympathies toward the Palestinians. And on Gaza, many more Australians found the Israeli military action in Gaza unjustified (42 percent) than justified (29 percent).
So Labor's cuddle-up to Israel does not fit with Australians' views.
Interestingly, the survey also found that many Australians don't in fact see the Rudd government as one-sided (42 percent) though of the 20 percent who do, 19 percent think it is tilted towards Israel.
There are two other points to make.
First, if you break the national figures down in to Sydney figures, a bias towards the Palestinians comes through clearer. This could be a result of the big Australian Arab and Muslim populations in Sydney. But, in any case, the sympathy towards Palestine is stronger and the condemnation of the Gaza war much stronger (49 percent thought it was unjustified, only 24 percent justified).
So Sydney is a pro-Palestine bastion.
Second, Morgan asked respondents whether they felt they knew "a lot," "a fair amount," "not very much," "nothing at all" or "can't say" about what happened in Gaza. If you group "a lot" and "fair amount" -- in other words, those who felt they knew at least a fair amount or more about what happened -- and break them down into their sympathies for the Israelis or the Palestinians, the bias towards the Palestinians is quite marked (29.7 percent for Israelis, 44.5 for Palestinians).
I take from that, that the more you know about the Israel-Palestine situation, the more your sympathies lie with the Palestinians.
Where does this leave the Labor Party? Or the opposition Liberals for that matter?
It means they have to re-align themselves with their electorates. It means the National Australian Labor Party Conference next month should ignore Kevin Rudd's obsequious attitude to everything Israeli -- did he really say "Israel is in my DNA!" at a Jewish community function? -- and get on with strengthening its adherence to peace and justice in the region.
Julia Gillard should also cancel her tour of Israel -- how many days is she spending in the Occupied Palestinian Territories with Palestinian guides? -- and plead "pressure of work." Or a more believable reason would be: do as Obama says and end settlement-building and I'll come and see you.
That's the kind of relationship the United States is forging right now with Israel. Maybe Rudd and Gillard, who seem to have trouble listening to what their own electorate thinks of Israel, need to pick up the phone to Obama for instructions.
Peter Manning is Convenor of Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine and Adjunct Professor of Journalism at University of Technology, Sydney.
The elephant in the room: Israel's nuclear weapons
David Morrison, The Electronic Intifada, 29 June 2009
(Nidal El Khairy)
At a White House press conference on 18 May 2009, US President Barack Obama expressed "deepening concern" about "the potential pursuit of a nuclear weapon by Iran." He continued:
"Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon would not only be a threat to Israel and a threat to the United States, but would be profoundly destabilizing in the international community as a whole and could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East."
By his side was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the room with them, there was an elephant, a large and formidably destructive elephant, which they and the assembled press pretended not to see.
I am, of course, referring to Israel's actual nuclear weapons systems, with which Netanyahu is capable of doing to numerous cities in the Middle East, including Tehran, what the US did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Iran, by contrast, has no nuclear weapons. The US President said so himself in Prague on 5 April 2009 in his major speech on nuclear disarmament. "Iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon," he admitted.
Obama's remark that "Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon" would be "profoundly destabilizing" and "could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East" is profoundly dishonest. In reality, the race started in the early 1950s when Israel launched its nuclear weapons program.
Let us suppose for a moment that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, capable of producing effective nuclear warheads and the means of delivering them to Israel, within a few years. Would that make Iran a serious threat to Israel, as Obama said? Of course not.
Rulers of Iran don't want their cities devastated and they know that if Iran were to make a nuclear strike on Israel, it is absolutely certain that Israel would retaliate by making multiple nuclear strikes on Iran and raze many Iranian cities to the ground -- so Iran won't do it. Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal, and the ruthlessness to use it, that is more than adequate to deter Iran from making a nuclear strike on the country.
Likewise, it is unimaginable that Iran would attack the US, or US interests abroad, for fear of overwhelming retaliation.
However, taking account of the elephant in the room puts a very different perspective on the impact of a nuclear-armed Iran.
The significance of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not that Iran would become a threat to Israel and the US, but that Israel and the US would no longer contemplate attacking Iran. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons of self-defense -- a state that possesses nuclear weapons doesn't get attacked by other states.
One thing is certain: attacking Iran, ostensibly to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, would make the case for it acquiring them like nothing else. It would then be abundantly clear that Iran could not protect itself by other means -- and it can be guaranteed that it would then make a supreme effort to acquire them.
Has Iran got a nuclear weapons program, in violation of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?
Iran has repeatedly denied that it has such a program. Furthermore, the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa on September 2004 that "the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons" ("Iran's Statement at IAEA Emergency Meeting," Mehr News Agency, 10 August 2005) . In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of his predecessor and founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini.
That's what Iran says. As required by the NPT, Iran's nuclear facilities are subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). And, despite many years of inspection and investigation, the IAEA has found no evidence that Iran has, or ever had, a nuclear weapons program, though Western media consistently give the opposite impression. True, the possibility exists that Iran has nuclear facilities for military purposes, which it hasn't declared to the IAEA. The IAEA has found no evidence for this, but the possibility cannot be completely ruled out.
Iran's possession of uranium enrichment facilities is not in breach of the NPT, so long as they are for civil nuclear purposes. The operation of these facilities at Natanz is subject to rigorous IAEA scrutiny. The IAEA has testified that only low enriched uranium suitable for a power generation reactor is being produced there and that none of it is being diverted from the plant for other purposes, for example, to further enrich uranium to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon. That being so, the ongoing demands that Iran suspend these enrichment facilities is a denial of its "inalienable right" under Article IV(1) of the NPT to engage in nuclear activities for peaceful purposes.
What is the current US intelligence assessment? A US National Intelligence Estimate, the key judgments of which were published in December 2007, concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the autumn of 2003, and hadn't restarted its program in the interim (see David Morrison, "Iran hasn't a nuclear weapons programme says US intelligence," Labour and Trade Union Review, 14 December 2007).
Commenting on this, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, noted on 4 December 2007 that:
"[T]he Estimate tallies with the Agency's consistent statements over the last few years that, although Iran still needs to clarify some important aspects of its past and present nuclear activities, the Agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran."
The present position of the US/EU seems to be that Iran should not have uranium enrichment facilities on its own territory, under any circumstances. As I have said above, this is a denial of Iran's "inalienable right" under Article IV(1) of the NPT to engage in nuclear activities for peaceful purposes. It is also discriminatory against Iran, since no objection has ever been raised to other states, for example, Brazil and Japan, having enrichment facilities on their own territory in order to manufacture reactor fuel.
Iran entered into negotiations with the UK, France and Germany about its nuclear facilities in October 2003. During these negotiations, Iran voluntarily suspended a range of nuclear activities, including uranium enrichment. The negotiations came to an abrupt halt in August 2005 when the European states made proposals, which required Iran to abandon all processing of domestically mined uranium, including enrichment, and to import all fuel for nuclear power reactors.
Had Iran accepted these proposals, its nuclear power generation would have been dependent on fuel from abroad, which could be cut off at any time, even though Iran has a domestic supply of uranium ore. It was no surprise, therefore, that Iran rejected these proposals out of hand -- and later resumed those activities it had suspended, including uranium enrichment.
Since then, the US/EU took Iran to the UN Security Council about its nuclear activities. The council has passed various resolutions demanding, inter alia, that Iran suspend uranium enrichment and imposing (rather mild) economic sanctions on it in an attempt to compel it to do so. Russia and China have gone along with this rather reluctantly, while using their veto power to keep the sanctions mild.
The key question is: are there any circumstances in which the US/EU would be content for Iran to have uranium enrichment facilities on its own territory? For example, could additional measures be put in place to provide assurance that these, and other nuclear facilities, are being used for peaceful purposes only?
In the past, Iran did allow an enhanced form of IAEA inspection, under a so-called Additional Protocol to its basic inspection agreement with the IAEA. This isn't mandatory on a state under the NPT (and Brazil, which also has uranium enrichment facilities, doesn't allow it). The Additional Protocol is designed to allow the IAEA to get a full picture of a state's nuclear activities by providing the agency with authority to visit any facility, declared or not, and to visit unannounced -- and thereby seek to eliminate the possibility that a state is engaging in nuclear activity for military purposes at sites that it hasn't declared to the agency.
Iran signed an Additional Protocol in 2003 and allowed the IAEA to operate under it from December 2003 until February 2006. But, it withdrew permission in February 2006 when it was referred to the Security Council. There is little doubt that Iran would be prepared to allow the IAEA to operate under an Additional Protocol again, if the Security Council dogs were called off and the economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council were lifted.
That is one additional measure that could be taken to help provide assurance that Iran's nuclear facilities are being used for peaceful purposes only. Another measure was suggested by Iran, as long ago as 17 September 2005. Then, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the following extraordinary offer, which goes way beyond the requirements of the NPT:
"... as a further confidence-building measure and in order to provide the greatest degree of transparency, the Islamic Republic of Iran is prepared to engage in serious partnership with private and public sectors of other countries in the implementation of [a] uranium enrichment program in Iran."
Needless to say, the US/EU have ignored this proposal, which would have put Iran's uranium enrichment facilities under a degree of international control. Perhaps, President Obama's staff should draw this proposal to his attention.
David Morrison is a political officer for the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
(Nidal El Khairy)
At a White House press conference on 18 May 2009, US President Barack Obama expressed "deepening concern" about "the potential pursuit of a nuclear weapon by Iran." He continued:
"Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon would not only be a threat to Israel and a threat to the United States, but would be profoundly destabilizing in the international community as a whole and could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East."
By his side was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the room with them, there was an elephant, a large and formidably destructive elephant, which they and the assembled press pretended not to see.
I am, of course, referring to Israel's actual nuclear weapons systems, with which Netanyahu is capable of doing to numerous cities in the Middle East, including Tehran, what the US did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Iran, by contrast, has no nuclear weapons. The US President said so himself in Prague on 5 April 2009 in his major speech on nuclear disarmament. "Iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon," he admitted.
Obama's remark that "Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon" would be "profoundly destabilizing" and "could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East" is profoundly dishonest. In reality, the race started in the early 1950s when Israel launched its nuclear weapons program.
Let us suppose for a moment that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, capable of producing effective nuclear warheads and the means of delivering them to Israel, within a few years. Would that make Iran a serious threat to Israel, as Obama said? Of course not.
Rulers of Iran don't want their cities devastated and they know that if Iran were to make a nuclear strike on Israel, it is absolutely certain that Israel would retaliate by making multiple nuclear strikes on Iran and raze many Iranian cities to the ground -- so Iran won't do it. Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal, and the ruthlessness to use it, that is more than adequate to deter Iran from making a nuclear strike on the country.
Likewise, it is unimaginable that Iran would attack the US, or US interests abroad, for fear of overwhelming retaliation.
However, taking account of the elephant in the room puts a very different perspective on the impact of a nuclear-armed Iran.
The significance of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not that Iran would become a threat to Israel and the US, but that Israel and the US would no longer contemplate attacking Iran. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons of self-defense -- a state that possesses nuclear weapons doesn't get attacked by other states.
One thing is certain: attacking Iran, ostensibly to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, would make the case for it acquiring them like nothing else. It would then be abundantly clear that Iran could not protect itself by other means -- and it can be guaranteed that it would then make a supreme effort to acquire them.
Has Iran got a nuclear weapons program, in violation of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?
Iran has repeatedly denied that it has such a program. Furthermore, the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa on September 2004 that "the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons" ("Iran's Statement at IAEA Emergency Meeting," Mehr News Agency, 10 August 2005) . In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of his predecessor and founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini.
That's what Iran says. As required by the NPT, Iran's nuclear facilities are subject to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). And, despite many years of inspection and investigation, the IAEA has found no evidence that Iran has, or ever had, a nuclear weapons program, though Western media consistently give the opposite impression. True, the possibility exists that Iran has nuclear facilities for military purposes, which it hasn't declared to the IAEA. The IAEA has found no evidence for this, but the possibility cannot be completely ruled out.
Iran's possession of uranium enrichment facilities is not in breach of the NPT, so long as they are for civil nuclear purposes. The operation of these facilities at Natanz is subject to rigorous IAEA scrutiny. The IAEA has testified that only low enriched uranium suitable for a power generation reactor is being produced there and that none of it is being diverted from the plant for other purposes, for example, to further enrich uranium to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon. That being so, the ongoing demands that Iran suspend these enrichment facilities is a denial of its "inalienable right" under Article IV(1) of the NPT to engage in nuclear activities for peaceful purposes.
What is the current US intelligence assessment? A US National Intelligence Estimate, the key judgments of which were published in December 2007, concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the autumn of 2003, and hadn't restarted its program in the interim (see David Morrison, "Iran hasn't a nuclear weapons programme says US intelligence," Labour and Trade Union Review, 14 December 2007).
Commenting on this, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, noted on 4 December 2007 that:
"[T]he Estimate tallies with the Agency's consistent statements over the last few years that, although Iran still needs to clarify some important aspects of its past and present nuclear activities, the Agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran."
The present position of the US/EU seems to be that Iran should not have uranium enrichment facilities on its own territory, under any circumstances. As I have said above, this is a denial of Iran's "inalienable right" under Article IV(1) of the NPT to engage in nuclear activities for peaceful purposes. It is also discriminatory against Iran, since no objection has ever been raised to other states, for example, Brazil and Japan, having enrichment facilities on their own territory in order to manufacture reactor fuel.
Iran entered into negotiations with the UK, France and Germany about its nuclear facilities in October 2003. During these negotiations, Iran voluntarily suspended a range of nuclear activities, including uranium enrichment. The negotiations came to an abrupt halt in August 2005 when the European states made proposals, which required Iran to abandon all processing of domestically mined uranium, including enrichment, and to import all fuel for nuclear power reactors.
Had Iran accepted these proposals, its nuclear power generation would have been dependent on fuel from abroad, which could be cut off at any time, even though Iran has a domestic supply of uranium ore. It was no surprise, therefore, that Iran rejected these proposals out of hand -- and later resumed those activities it had suspended, including uranium enrichment.
Since then, the US/EU took Iran to the UN Security Council about its nuclear activities. The council has passed various resolutions demanding, inter alia, that Iran suspend uranium enrichment and imposing (rather mild) economic sanctions on it in an attempt to compel it to do so. Russia and China have gone along with this rather reluctantly, while using their veto power to keep the sanctions mild.
The key question is: are there any circumstances in which the US/EU would be content for Iran to have uranium enrichment facilities on its own territory? For example, could additional measures be put in place to provide assurance that these, and other nuclear facilities, are being used for peaceful purposes only?
In the past, Iran did allow an enhanced form of IAEA inspection, under a so-called Additional Protocol to its basic inspection agreement with the IAEA. This isn't mandatory on a state under the NPT (and Brazil, which also has uranium enrichment facilities, doesn't allow it). The Additional Protocol is designed to allow the IAEA to get a full picture of a state's nuclear activities by providing the agency with authority to visit any facility, declared or not, and to visit unannounced -- and thereby seek to eliminate the possibility that a state is engaging in nuclear activity for military purposes at sites that it hasn't declared to the agency.
Iran signed an Additional Protocol in 2003 and allowed the IAEA to operate under it from December 2003 until February 2006. But, it withdrew permission in February 2006 when it was referred to the Security Council. There is little doubt that Iran would be prepared to allow the IAEA to operate under an Additional Protocol again, if the Security Council dogs were called off and the economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council were lifted.
That is one additional measure that could be taken to help provide assurance that Iran's nuclear facilities are being used for peaceful purposes only. Another measure was suggested by Iran, as long ago as 17 September 2005. Then, in a speech to the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made the following extraordinary offer, which goes way beyond the requirements of the NPT:
"... as a further confidence-building measure and in order to provide the greatest degree of transparency, the Islamic Republic of Iran is prepared to engage in serious partnership with private and public sectors of other countries in the implementation of [a] uranium enrichment program in Iran."
Needless to say, the US/EU have ignored this proposal, which would have put Iran's uranium enrichment facilities under a degree of international control. Perhaps, President Obama's staff should draw this proposal to his attention.
David Morrison is a political officer for the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Free Gaza - Protecting the passengers
Dear Friends of Free Gaza:
The SPIRIT has left over 9 hours ago. They are on their way to Gaza and will be there tomorrow afternoon. We ask that you follow their progress by going to our website at www.freegaza.org and clicking on LIVE in the upper left hand side. You will be able to see where they are from the SPOT beacon on board.
If you also would like to make yourselves heard, you can call or fax the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and demand that Israel not harm the boat, the passengers or the cargo. Their numbers are listed below. The more of you who do that, the safer our mission.
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Tel +972-2-530-3111
Fax +972-2-530-3367
Finally, the updated photos are on flickr if you would like to see them www.flickr.com/photos/29205195@N02/
Greta
The SPIRIT has left over 9 hours ago. They are on their way to Gaza and will be there tomorrow afternoon. We ask that you follow their progress by going to our website at www.freegaza.org and clicking on LIVE in the upper left hand side. You will be able to see where they are from the SPOT beacon on board.
If you also would like to make yourselves heard, you can call or fax the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and demand that Israel not harm the boat, the passengers or the cargo. Their numbers are listed below. The more of you who do that, the safer our mission.
Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Tel +972-2-530-3111
Fax +972-2-530-3367
Finally, the updated photos are on flickr if you would like to see them www.flickr.com/photos/29205195@N02/
Greta
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Free Gaza Boat "Spirit of Humanity" Departs Cyprus
For more information, please contact:
Greta Berlin (English/French) or Caoimhe Butterly (Arabic/English/Spanish)
tel: +357 99 081 767
email: friends@freegaza.org
(LARNACA, 29 June 2009) - The Free Gaza boat the "Spirit of Humanity"
departed Cyprus at 7:30am on Monday, 29 July. Twenty-one human rights and
solidarity workers representing eleven different countries were aboard.
The passengers include Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S.
congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The ship also carries three tons of
medical aid, children's toys, and rehabilitation and reconstruction kits
for twenty family homes.
Over 2,400 homes were destroyed in Gaza during the Israeli massacre in
December/January, 490 of them by F-16 airstrikes, as well as 30 mosques,
29 educational institutions, 29 medical centers, 10 charitable
organizations, and 5 cement factories.
Each kit carries a small amount of supplies for a single family,
representing sectors of civil society currently being blockaded by Israel:
Agriculture, Building & Reconstruction, Education, Electricity, Health,
and Water & Sanitation. Although over 4 billion dollars in aid was
promised to Gaza in the aftermath of the Israeli onslaught, little
humanitarian aid and no reconstruction supplies have been allowed in.
###
Quotes:
Mairead Maguire, co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Peace prize for her work in
Northern Ireland:
"[The Palestinians of Gaza] must know that we have not and will not forget
them.”
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney:
"[T]he U.S. should send a message to Israel reiterating the reported White
House position that the blockade of Gaza should be eased, and that medical
supplies and building materials, including cement, should be allowed in
... Will [President Obama] stand by his own words and allow us to provide
relief for Gaza or will he back down?”
Huwaida Arraf, Chairperson of the Free Gaza Movement:
"Israel’s closure policy is a blatant violation of international law. We
call upon our governments to take action to uphold their obligations under
the Fourth Geneva Conventions. Until they do, we will act.
###
Passengers aboard the Spirit of Humanity include:
Khalad Abdelkader, Bahrain
Khalad is an engineer representing the Islamic Charitable Association of
Bahrain.
Othman Abufalah, Jordan
Othman is a world-renowned journalist with al-Jazeera TV.
Khaled Al-Shenoo, Bahrain
Khaled is a lecturer with the University of Bahrain.
Mansour Al-Abi, Yemen
Mansour is a cameraman with Al-Jazeera TV.
Fatima Al-Attawi, Bahrain
Fatima is a relief worker and community activist from Bahrain.
Juhaina Alqaed, Bahrain
Juhaina is a journalist & human rights activist.
Huwaida Arraf, US
Huwaida is the Chair of the Free Gaza Movement and delegation
co-coordinator for this voyage.
Ishmahil Blagrove, UK
Ishmahil is a Jamaican-born journalist, documentary film maker and founder
of the Rice & Peas film production company. His documentaries focus on
international struggles for social justice.
Kaltham Ghloom, Bahrain
Kaltham is a community activist.
Derek Graham, Ireland
Derek Graham is an electrician, Free Gaza organizer, and first mate aboard
the Spirit of Humanity.
Alex Harrison, UK
Alex is a solidarity worker from Britain. She is traveling to Gaza to do
long-term human rights monitoring.
Denis Healey, UK
Denis is Captain of the Spirit of Humanity. This will be his fifth voyage
to Gaza.
Fathi Jaouadi, UK/Tunisia
Fathi is a British journalist, Free Gaza organizer, and delegation
co-coordinator for this voyage.
Mairead Maguire, Ireland
Mairead is a Nobel laureate and renowned peace activist.
Lubna Masarwa, Palestine/Israel
Lubna is a Palestinian human rights activist and Free Gaza organizer.
Theresa McDermott, Scotland
Theresa is a solidarity worker from Scotland. She is traveling to Gaza to
do long-term human rights monitoring.
Cynthia McKinney, US
Cynthia McKinney is an outspoken advocate for human rights and social
justice issues, as well as a former U.S. congressperson and presidential
candidate.
Adnan Mormesh, UK
Adnan is a solidarity worker from Britain. He is traveling to Gaza to do
long-term human rights monitoring.
Adam Qvist, Denmark
Adam is a solidarity worker from Denmark. He is traveling to Gaza to do
human rights monitoring.
Adam Shapiro, US
Adam is an American documentary film maker and human rights activist.
Kathy Sheetz, US
Kathy is a nurse and film maker, traveling to Gaza to do human rights
monitoring.
###
For more information, please contact:
Greta Berlin (English/French) or Caoimhe Butterly (Arabic/English/Spanish)
tel: +357 99 081 767
email: friends@freegaza.org
(LARNACA, 29 June 2009) - The Free Gaza boat the "Spirit of Humanity"
departed Cyprus at 7:30am on Monday, 29 July. Twenty-one human rights and
solidarity workers representing eleven different countries were aboard.
The passengers include Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S.
congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The ship also carries three tons of
medical aid, children's toys, and rehabilitation and reconstruction kits
for twenty family homes.
Over 2,400 homes were destroyed in Gaza during the Israeli massacre in
December/January, 490 of them by F-16 airstrikes, as well as 30 mosques,
29 educational institutions, 29 medical centers, 10 charitable
organizations, and 5 cement factories.
Each kit carries a small amount of supplies for a single family,
representing sectors of civil society currently being blockaded by Israel:
Agriculture, Building & Reconstruction, Education, Electricity, Health,
and Water & Sanitation. Although over 4 billion dollars in aid was
promised to Gaza in the aftermath of the Israeli onslaught, little
humanitarian aid and no reconstruction supplies have been allowed in.
###
Quotes:
Mairead Maguire, co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Peace prize for her work in
Northern Ireland:
"[The Palestinians of Gaza] must know that we have not and will not forget
them.”
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney:
"[T]he U.S. should send a message to Israel reiterating the reported White
House position that the blockade of Gaza should be eased, and that medical
supplies and building materials, including cement, should be allowed in
... Will [President Obama] stand by his own words and allow us to provide
relief for Gaza or will he back down?”
Huwaida Arraf, Chairperson of the Free Gaza Movement:
"Israel’s closure policy is a blatant violation of international law. We
call upon our governments to take action to uphold their obligations under
the Fourth Geneva Conventions. Until they do, we will act.
###
Passengers aboard the Spirit of Humanity include:
Khalad Abdelkader, Bahrain
Khalad is an engineer representing the Islamic Charitable Association of
Bahrain.
Othman Abufalah, Jordan
Othman is a world-renowned journalist with al-Jazeera TV.
Khaled Al-Shenoo, Bahrain
Khaled is a lecturer with the University of Bahrain.
Mansour Al-Abi, Yemen
Mansour is a cameraman with Al-Jazeera TV.
Fatima Al-Attawi, Bahrain
Fatima is a relief worker and community activist from Bahrain.
Juhaina Alqaed, Bahrain
Juhaina is a journalist & human rights activist.
Huwaida Arraf, US
Huwaida is the Chair of the Free Gaza Movement and delegation
co-coordinator for this voyage.
Ishmahil Blagrove, UK
Ishmahil is a Jamaican-born journalist, documentary film maker and founder
of the Rice & Peas film production company. His documentaries focus on
international struggles for social justice.
Kaltham Ghloom, Bahrain
Kaltham is a community activist.
Derek Graham, Ireland
Derek Graham is an electrician, Free Gaza organizer, and first mate aboard
the Spirit of Humanity.
Alex Harrison, UK
Alex is a solidarity worker from Britain. She is traveling to Gaza to do
long-term human rights monitoring.
Denis Healey, UK
Denis is Captain of the Spirit of Humanity. This will be his fifth voyage
to Gaza.
Fathi Jaouadi, UK/Tunisia
Fathi is a British journalist, Free Gaza organizer, and delegation
co-coordinator for this voyage.
Mairead Maguire, Ireland
Mairead is a Nobel laureate and renowned peace activist.
Lubna Masarwa, Palestine/Israel
Lubna is a Palestinian human rights activist and Free Gaza organizer.
Theresa McDermott, Scotland
Theresa is a solidarity worker from Scotland. She is traveling to Gaza to
do long-term human rights monitoring.
Cynthia McKinney, US
Cynthia McKinney is an outspoken advocate for human rights and social
justice issues, as well as a former U.S. congressperson and presidential
candidate.
Adnan Mormesh, UK
Adnan is a solidarity worker from Britain. He is traveling to Gaza to do
long-term human rights monitoring.
Adam Qvist, Denmark
Adam is a solidarity worker from Denmark. He is traveling to Gaza to do
human rights monitoring.
Adam Shapiro, US
Adam is an American documentary film maker and human rights activist.
Kathy Sheetz, US
Kathy is a nurse and film maker, traveling to Gaza to do human rights
monitoring.
###
Friday, June 26, 2009
Jimmy Carter on the Gaza Siege
Gaza: Bombs, Missiles, Tanks And Bulldozers
06.20.2009 | Counter Currents
By Jimmy Carter
Transcript of former US President Jimmy Carter’s Address to the United Nations Relief Works Agency’s Human Rights Graduation in Gaza, June 16, 2009.
Director of UNRWA operations John Ging, thank you for inviting me to Gaza. Distinguished guests, children of Gaza, I am grateful for your warm reception.
I first visited Gaza 36 years ago and returned during the 1980s and later for the very successful Palestinian elections. Although under occupation, this community was relatively peaceful and prosperous. Now, the aftermath of bombs, missiles, tanks, bulldozers and the continuing economic siege have brought death, destruction, pain, and suffering to the people here. Tragically, the international community largely ignores the cries for help, while the citizens of Gaza are being treated more like animals than human beings.
Last week, a group of Israelis and Americans tried to cross into Gaza through Erez, bringing toys and children’s playground equipment – slides, swings, kites, and magic castles for your children. They were stopped at the gate and prevented from coming. I understand even paper and crayons are treated as “security hazards” and not permitted to enter Gaza. I sought an explanation for this policy in Israel, but did not receive a satisfactory answer – because there is none.
The responsibility for this terrible human rights crime lies in Jerusalem, Cairo, Washington, and throughout the international community. This abuse must cease; the crimes must be investigated; the walls must be brought down, and the basic right of freedom must come to you.
Almost one-half of Gaza’s 1.5 million people are children, whose lives are being shaped by poverty, hunger, violence, and despair. More than 50,000 families had their homes destroyed or damaged in January, and parents are in mourning for the 313 innocent children who were killed.
The situation in Gaza is grim, but all hope is not lost. Amidst adversity, you continue to possess both dignity and determination to work towards a brighter tomorrow. That is why educating children is so important.
I have come to Gaza to help the world know what important work you are doing. UNRWA is here to ensure that the 200,000 children in its schools can develop their talent, express their dynamism, and help create the path to a better future.
The human rights curriculum is teaching children about their rights and also about their responsibilities. UNRWA is teaching about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the struggle for these rights all over the world, Gaza’s children are learning that as you seek justice for yourselves, you must be sure that your behavior provides justice for others.
They are learning that it is wrong to fire rockets that may kill Israeli children. They are learning that arbitrary detention and the summary execution of political opponents is not acceptable. They are learning that the rule of law must be honored here in Gaza.
I would like to congratulate both UNRWA and the children who have completed the human rights curriculum with distinction. They are tomorrow’s leaders.
In addition to the tragedy of occupation, the lack of unity among Palestinians is causing a deteriorating atmosphere here in Gaza, in Ramallah, and throughout the West Bank.
Palestinians want more than just to survive. They hope to lead the Arab world, to be a bridge between modern political life and traditions that date back to the Biblical era. The nation you will create must be pluralistic and democratic – the new Palestine that your intellectuals have dreamt about. Palestine must combine the best of the East and the West. The Palestinian state, like the land, must be blessed for all people. Jerusalem must be shared with everyone who loves it – Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
With our new leaders in Washington, my country will move into the forefront of this birth of a new Palestine. We were all reminded of this renewed hope and commitment by President Obama’s recent speech in Cairo.
President Obama’s resolve to resume the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process based on the principle of two states for two peoples must be welcomed. This vision of two sovereign nations living as neighbors is not a mere convenient phrase. It is the basis for a lasting peace for this entire region, including Syria and Lebanon.
We all know that a necessary step is the ending of the siege of Gaza – the starving of 1 ½ million people of the necessities of life. Never before in history has a large community been savaged by bombs and missiles and then deprived of the means to repair itself. The issue of who controls Gaza is not an obstacle. As the World Bank has pointed out, funds can be channeled through a number of independent mechanisms and effective implementing agencies.
Although funds are available, not a sack of cement nor a piece of lumber has been permitted to enter the closed gates from Israel and Egypt. I have seen with my own eyes that progress is negligible.
My country and our friends in Europe must do all that is necessary to persuade Israel and Egypt to allow basic materials into Gaza. At the same time, there must be no more rockets and mortar shells falling on Israeli citizens.
I met this week with the parents of Corporal Gilad Shalit, and have with me a letter that I hope can be delivered to their son. I have also met with many Palestinians who plead for the freedom of their 11,700 loved ones imprisoned by the Israelis, including 400 women and children. Many of them have been imprisoned for many years, held without trial, with no access to their families or to legal counsel. Rational negotiations and a comprehensive peace can end this suffering on both sides.
I know it is difficult now, surrounded by terrible destruction, to see a future of independence and dignity in a Palestinian state, but this goal can and must be achieved. I know too that it is hard for you to accept Israel and live in peace with those who have caused your suffering. However, Palestinian statehood cannot come at the expense of Israel’s security, just as Israel’s security can not come at the expense of Palestinian statehood.
In his speech in Cairo, President Obama said that Hamas has support among Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a full role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, accept existing peace agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.
I have urged Hamas leaders to accept these conditions, and they have made statements and taken actions that suggest they are ready to join the peace process and move toward the creation of an independent and just Palestinian state.
Khaled Mashaal has assured me that Hamas will accept a final status agreement negotiated by the Palestinian Authority and Israel if the Palestinian people approve it in a referendum. Hamas has offered a reciprocal ceasefire with Israel throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Unfortunately, neither the Israeli leaders nor Hamas accept the terms of the Oslo Agreement of 1993, but the Arab Peace Initiative is being considered now by all sides.
I have personally witnessed free and fair elections in Palestine when Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas were elected president and when legislative members were chosen for your parliament. I hope to return next January for a similar event that will unite all Palestinians as you seek a proud and peaceful future.
Ladies and gentlemen, children of Gaza, thank you for inviting me and for sharing this happy occasion with me. Congratulations for your achievements.
06.20.2009 | Counter Currents
By Jimmy Carter
Transcript of former US President Jimmy Carter’s Address to the United Nations Relief Works Agency’s Human Rights Graduation in Gaza, June 16, 2009.
Director of UNRWA operations John Ging, thank you for inviting me to Gaza. Distinguished guests, children of Gaza, I am grateful for your warm reception.
I first visited Gaza 36 years ago and returned during the 1980s and later for the very successful Palestinian elections. Although under occupation, this community was relatively peaceful and prosperous. Now, the aftermath of bombs, missiles, tanks, bulldozers and the continuing economic siege have brought death, destruction, pain, and suffering to the people here. Tragically, the international community largely ignores the cries for help, while the citizens of Gaza are being treated more like animals than human beings.
Last week, a group of Israelis and Americans tried to cross into Gaza through Erez, bringing toys and children’s playground equipment – slides, swings, kites, and magic castles for your children. They were stopped at the gate and prevented from coming. I understand even paper and crayons are treated as “security hazards” and not permitted to enter Gaza. I sought an explanation for this policy in Israel, but did not receive a satisfactory answer – because there is none.
The responsibility for this terrible human rights crime lies in Jerusalem, Cairo, Washington, and throughout the international community. This abuse must cease; the crimes must be investigated; the walls must be brought down, and the basic right of freedom must come to you.
Almost one-half of Gaza’s 1.5 million people are children, whose lives are being shaped by poverty, hunger, violence, and despair. More than 50,000 families had their homes destroyed or damaged in January, and parents are in mourning for the 313 innocent children who were killed.
The situation in Gaza is grim, but all hope is not lost. Amidst adversity, you continue to possess both dignity and determination to work towards a brighter tomorrow. That is why educating children is so important.
I have come to Gaza to help the world know what important work you are doing. UNRWA is here to ensure that the 200,000 children in its schools can develop their talent, express their dynamism, and help create the path to a better future.
The human rights curriculum is teaching children about their rights and also about their responsibilities. UNRWA is teaching about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the struggle for these rights all over the world, Gaza’s children are learning that as you seek justice for yourselves, you must be sure that your behavior provides justice for others.
They are learning that it is wrong to fire rockets that may kill Israeli children. They are learning that arbitrary detention and the summary execution of political opponents is not acceptable. They are learning that the rule of law must be honored here in Gaza.
I would like to congratulate both UNRWA and the children who have completed the human rights curriculum with distinction. They are tomorrow’s leaders.
In addition to the tragedy of occupation, the lack of unity among Palestinians is causing a deteriorating atmosphere here in Gaza, in Ramallah, and throughout the West Bank.
Palestinians want more than just to survive. They hope to lead the Arab world, to be a bridge between modern political life and traditions that date back to the Biblical era. The nation you will create must be pluralistic and democratic – the new Palestine that your intellectuals have dreamt about. Palestine must combine the best of the East and the West. The Palestinian state, like the land, must be blessed for all people. Jerusalem must be shared with everyone who loves it – Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
With our new leaders in Washington, my country will move into the forefront of this birth of a new Palestine. We were all reminded of this renewed hope and commitment by President Obama’s recent speech in Cairo.
President Obama’s resolve to resume the Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process based on the principle of two states for two peoples must be welcomed. This vision of two sovereign nations living as neighbors is not a mere convenient phrase. It is the basis for a lasting peace for this entire region, including Syria and Lebanon.
We all know that a necessary step is the ending of the siege of Gaza – the starving of 1 ½ million people of the necessities of life. Never before in history has a large community been savaged by bombs and missiles and then deprived of the means to repair itself. The issue of who controls Gaza is not an obstacle. As the World Bank has pointed out, funds can be channeled through a number of independent mechanisms and effective implementing agencies.
Although funds are available, not a sack of cement nor a piece of lumber has been permitted to enter the closed gates from Israel and Egypt. I have seen with my own eyes that progress is negligible.
My country and our friends in Europe must do all that is necessary to persuade Israel and Egypt to allow basic materials into Gaza. At the same time, there must be no more rockets and mortar shells falling on Israeli citizens.
I met this week with the parents of Corporal Gilad Shalit, and have with me a letter that I hope can be delivered to their son. I have also met with many Palestinians who plead for the freedom of their 11,700 loved ones imprisoned by the Israelis, including 400 women and children. Many of them have been imprisoned for many years, held without trial, with no access to their families or to legal counsel. Rational negotiations and a comprehensive peace can end this suffering on both sides.
I know it is difficult now, surrounded by terrible destruction, to see a future of independence and dignity in a Palestinian state, but this goal can and must be achieved. I know too that it is hard for you to accept Israel and live in peace with those who have caused your suffering. However, Palestinian statehood cannot come at the expense of Israel’s security, just as Israel’s security can not come at the expense of Palestinian statehood.
In his speech in Cairo, President Obama said that Hamas has support among Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a full role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, accept existing peace agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.
I have urged Hamas leaders to accept these conditions, and they have made statements and taken actions that suggest they are ready to join the peace process and move toward the creation of an independent and just Palestinian state.
Khaled Mashaal has assured me that Hamas will accept a final status agreement negotiated by the Palestinian Authority and Israel if the Palestinian people approve it in a referendum. Hamas has offered a reciprocal ceasefire with Israel throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Unfortunately, neither the Israeli leaders nor Hamas accept the terms of the Oslo Agreement of 1993, but the Arab Peace Initiative is being considered now by all sides.
I have personally witnessed free and fair elections in Palestine when Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas were elected president and when legislative members were chosen for your parliament. I hope to return next January for a similar event that will unite all Palestinians as you seek a proud and peaceful future.
Ladies and gentlemen, children of Gaza, thank you for inviting me and for sharing this happy occasion with me. Congratulations for your achievements.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
A World Apart? : The White House and the Middle East (Page 5)
Under the radar of the American media, however, Israeli political parties were having a fight of their own over who would overreach more in supporting West Bank settlement activities. From 1972 to 1983, mostly under Labor governments, the number of Jewish settlers in Jerusalem climbed from about 8,500 to more than 75,000. In 1977 Begin's Likud won power, and Gush Emunim went to work for real: 2,000 West Bank settlers became 6,000 by the time the Camp David accords were signed. President Carter--relatively sophisticated, with no particular softness for Israelis but politically weak and desperate for Jewish support in his primary campaign against Ted Kennedy--insisted that he had secured a freeze on settlements from Begin for as long as Camp David negotiations continued. He won an Israeli concession that Palestinian autonomy would lead to their acquiring "legitimate rights." But Begin double-crossed Carter and virtually dared him to fight with Israel's Congressional supporters as the 1979 Democratic primaries approached. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, there were something like 10,000 settlers.
President Reagan, for his part, called the settlements an obstacle to peace, urged on, by turns, by Alexander Haig and George Schultz. But nobody believed they meant it. Reagan left Sadat out on a limb, which may well have guaranteed Sadat's assassination. Reagan's team, meanwhile, was prepared to unleash Saddam's Iraq against Iran. There was talk of reviving a Jordan option, with King Hussein managing a federation with Palestine; but there was no heart to oppose Israeli retaliations against PLO guerrillas in southern Lebanon or, ultimately, Israel's catastrophic invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Reagan was a dream come true for the settlers: wildly popular, simple-minded, vaguely messianic and surrounded by Jewish neocons and Hollywood friends. By the time he left office, there were around 100,000 settlers outside Jerusalem and about 200,000 inside.
Curiously, Tyler gives rather short shrift to perhaps the biggest fight over settlements. After the Gulf War in 1991, Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, and his secretary of state, James Baker ("Fuck the Jews; they don't vote for us anyway"), threatened to withhold loan guarantees if Israel did not promise not to use the funds to settle Russian Jews in the West Bank. This occasioned AIPAC's most chilling show of force: a thousand volunteers stormed the Capitol in advance of the 1992 election. As it happens, the town of Ariel, which would become one of the biggest bones of contention between Olmert and Abbas, was largely populated by immigrant Russian Jews during this time. Ariel Sharon, then housing minister, picked up about 4,000 from the airport and plunked them down in the Samarian hills.
Clearly, I cannot do justice here to all the sordid details Tyler patiently recounts--much less to the ones he glosses over. I will say that the closer we get to the present, his book reads less like history and more like old news. Bill Clinton advanced the Oslo agreements, even cajoling Netanyahu into an interim deal on Hebron. His "bridging parameters" from December 2000 still form the spine of any American plan. But Clinton lacked "discipline" and needed Congress too much during the Lewinsky scandal. George W. Bush was, in our matrix, a replay of Reagan. You won't learn more about Clinton's fumbles than you learned from Robert Malley and Hussein Agha's essays in The New York Review of Books, or more on Bush than from, say, the pages of this magazine.
Where does A World of Trouble leave us? Tyler could not have anticipated Obama when he started writing, but something about his review of Middle East "trouble" seems vaguely "back to the future." Not since Eisenhower has there been a president with the necessary combination of attributes to reintroduce the idea of a regional settlement along lines determined by the great powers. America may be diminished in its own eyes, given the Iraq disaster, the financial crisis and the spreading insurgency in Afghanistan. But to Israelis--whose city-state earns less, and is somewhat smaller in habitable area and population, than greater Los Angeles--America and Europe are the world: markets, universities, culture, friendship, arms. Israel is a local military power, well entrenched in what Eisenhower called America's military-industrial complex. But Israel's actions in the territories have never been popular at the Pentagon, and the recent Gaza operation might be said to have violated every principle in Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency handbook. Friends don't let friends drive drunk.
Obama has worldly sophistication and a supportive European Union, an unprecedented mandate and even something Ike did not have, the affections of a majority of American Jews. Indeed, a recent J Street poll reveals that more than 70 percent of American Jews support Obama and a two-state deal pretty much like the one negotiated at Taba eight years ago. (J Street, a peace lobby backed largely by the progressive American Jews AIPAC has alienated, grew in parallel with the Obama campaign.) Against this trifecta, it will be hard to flog Israel's role in a clash of civilizations--a view of the world Obama all but denounced in Cairo.
None of this guarantees Obama will make the most of his opportunity. He is doing his best, clearly, to honor and attract the Islamic world. He has solidly endorsed a Palestinian state and an end to settlements. But if he's digested Tyler's implicit instruction, he'll quickly get beyond framing the peace process as a facilitated negotiation between Israel and Palestine, much as he got beyond the appeal for "bipartisanship" with Congressional Republicans. America in the Middle East is not some Dr. Phil, lively, well intentioned and--how did former Secretary Powell foolishly put it?--not wanting peace "more than the parties themselves." America has skin in the game. So do Europe and the neighboring Arab states. They must all want peace more than the Israelis and Palestinians, who are chronically distrustful of each other, trapped by their fanatics, and whose leaders cannot resist the demagogy of the vendetta.
The time has come, in other words, for Obama to stipulate and conduct a public worldwide campaign for an American plan, not just an American vision. The broad terms of the plan will surprise nobody: we are not talking about the price of a rug in the bazaar; Israel is not just Palestine's cross, and Palestine is not Israel's internal affair. And there can be no peace without outside commitments: NATO committing to include Israel; Egypt and Jordan committing Palestine peacekeepers, investment capital and a sympathetic press. The United States can have no leverage with Iran, therefore no orderly exit from Iraq, without a working partnership with the Arab League.
"America will not turn our backs," Obama said in Cairo, "on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own." The whole Middle East, with the span of a continent, is roiled by this conflict. In the background of Tyler's foreground, Obama knows, are the world's largest proven reserves of oil and dollars, teens and violence. There is a burgeoning Arab middle class opening to the West, in Fez, Tripoli and Amman. But they are surrounded by restless undereducated people governed only by mosques and fathers where state security services leave off. Obama's is the face of a more progressive globalization, but world economic stresses could make the mosques, the fathers and their acolytes only more volatile. The status quo, in any case, means the triumph of the settlers and Hamas. And it is all too easy to imagine the sad follow-on chapters to Tyler's sad chronicle.
President Reagan, for his part, called the settlements an obstacle to peace, urged on, by turns, by Alexander Haig and George Schultz. But nobody believed they meant it. Reagan left Sadat out on a limb, which may well have guaranteed Sadat's assassination. Reagan's team, meanwhile, was prepared to unleash Saddam's Iraq against Iran. There was talk of reviving a Jordan option, with King Hussein managing a federation with Palestine; but there was no heart to oppose Israeli retaliations against PLO guerrillas in southern Lebanon or, ultimately, Israel's catastrophic invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Reagan was a dream come true for the settlers: wildly popular, simple-minded, vaguely messianic and surrounded by Jewish neocons and Hollywood friends. By the time he left office, there were around 100,000 settlers outside Jerusalem and about 200,000 inside.
Curiously, Tyler gives rather short shrift to perhaps the biggest fight over settlements. After the Gulf War in 1991, Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, and his secretary of state, James Baker ("Fuck the Jews; they don't vote for us anyway"), threatened to withhold loan guarantees if Israel did not promise not to use the funds to settle Russian Jews in the West Bank. This occasioned AIPAC's most chilling show of force: a thousand volunteers stormed the Capitol in advance of the 1992 election. As it happens, the town of Ariel, which would become one of the biggest bones of contention between Olmert and Abbas, was largely populated by immigrant Russian Jews during this time. Ariel Sharon, then housing minister, picked up about 4,000 from the airport and plunked them down in the Samarian hills.
Clearly, I cannot do justice here to all the sordid details Tyler patiently recounts--much less to the ones he glosses over. I will say that the closer we get to the present, his book reads less like history and more like old news. Bill Clinton advanced the Oslo agreements, even cajoling Netanyahu into an interim deal on Hebron. His "bridging parameters" from December 2000 still form the spine of any American plan. But Clinton lacked "discipline" and needed Congress too much during the Lewinsky scandal. George W. Bush was, in our matrix, a replay of Reagan. You won't learn more about Clinton's fumbles than you learned from Robert Malley and Hussein Agha's essays in The New York Review of Books, or more on Bush than from, say, the pages of this magazine.
Where does A World of Trouble leave us? Tyler could not have anticipated Obama when he started writing, but something about his review of Middle East "trouble" seems vaguely "back to the future." Not since Eisenhower has there been a president with the necessary combination of attributes to reintroduce the idea of a regional settlement along lines determined by the great powers. America may be diminished in its own eyes, given the Iraq disaster, the financial crisis and the spreading insurgency in Afghanistan. But to Israelis--whose city-state earns less, and is somewhat smaller in habitable area and population, than greater Los Angeles--America and Europe are the world: markets, universities, culture, friendship, arms. Israel is a local military power, well entrenched in what Eisenhower called America's military-industrial complex. But Israel's actions in the territories have never been popular at the Pentagon, and the recent Gaza operation might be said to have violated every principle in Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency handbook. Friends don't let friends drive drunk.
Obama has worldly sophistication and a supportive European Union, an unprecedented mandate and even something Ike did not have, the affections of a majority of American Jews. Indeed, a recent J Street poll reveals that more than 70 percent of American Jews support Obama and a two-state deal pretty much like the one negotiated at Taba eight years ago. (J Street, a peace lobby backed largely by the progressive American Jews AIPAC has alienated, grew in parallel with the Obama campaign.) Against this trifecta, it will be hard to flog Israel's role in a clash of civilizations--a view of the world Obama all but denounced in Cairo.
None of this guarantees Obama will make the most of his opportunity. He is doing his best, clearly, to honor and attract the Islamic world. He has solidly endorsed a Palestinian state and an end to settlements. But if he's digested Tyler's implicit instruction, he'll quickly get beyond framing the peace process as a facilitated negotiation between Israel and Palestine, much as he got beyond the appeal for "bipartisanship" with Congressional Republicans. America in the Middle East is not some Dr. Phil, lively, well intentioned and--how did former Secretary Powell foolishly put it?--not wanting peace "more than the parties themselves." America has skin in the game. So do Europe and the neighboring Arab states. They must all want peace more than the Israelis and Palestinians, who are chronically distrustful of each other, trapped by their fanatics, and whose leaders cannot resist the demagogy of the vendetta.
The time has come, in other words, for Obama to stipulate and conduct a public worldwide campaign for an American plan, not just an American vision. The broad terms of the plan will surprise nobody: we are not talking about the price of a rug in the bazaar; Israel is not just Palestine's cross, and Palestine is not Israel's internal affair. And there can be no peace without outside commitments: NATO committing to include Israel; Egypt and Jordan committing Palestine peacekeepers, investment capital and a sympathetic press. The United States can have no leverage with Iran, therefore no orderly exit from Iraq, without a working partnership with the Arab League.
"America will not turn our backs," Obama said in Cairo, "on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own." The whole Middle East, with the span of a continent, is roiled by this conflict. In the background of Tyler's foreground, Obama knows, are the world's largest proven reserves of oil and dollars, teens and violence. There is a burgeoning Arab middle class opening to the West, in Fez, Tripoli and Amman. But they are surrounded by restless undereducated people governed only by mosques and fathers where state security services leave off. Obama's is the face of a more progressive globalization, but world economic stresses could make the mosques, the fathers and their acolytes only more volatile. The status quo, in any case, means the triumph of the settlers and Hamas. And it is all too easy to imagine the sad follow-on chapters to Tyler's sad chronicle.
A World Apart? : The White House and the Middle East (Page 4)
The second shift came with President Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, who leveraged Johnson's position to the hilt. Tyler quotes Kissinger, the closest thing his story has to a villain: "Our objective is always, when the Soviet Union appears, to demonstrate that whoever gets help from the Soviet Union cannot achieve its objective, whatever it is." Earlier Tyler writes:
Was there a distinction between defending Israel and defending her 1967 conquests? It was a question that Nixon, too, regarded as important. But Kissinger, the diplomatic practitioner who admired subtlety in foreign policy, dismissed this as irrelevant "fine-tuning."
It was Kissinger, Tyler argues, who initiated a pattern of standing up to the Soviets, ignoring the Arab states, neutralizing State and Pentagon skeptics and (by contrast) befriending Israel's diplomats and appeasing Israel's Congressional advocates--people like, most notably, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic senator from Washington. Kissinger provided the open door for the lobby to push on.
The turning point, Tyler stesses, was not the 1973 war but a meeting that might well have prevented it. The summer before, Brezhnev was visiting San Clemente on a kind of detente victory tour. Sleepless, he called Nixon and Kissinger to a late-night meeting and pleaded for a US-Soviet approach to resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict, arguing that another regional war would throw the superpowers into a potentially nuclear confrontation. He suggested broad principles: guarantees for Israeli security and an end to attacks on Israel from Arab territories, safeguards for Israeli shipping and Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. "If we can get agreement on these principles, we can then discuss how to use any influence on the contending parties," Brezhnev said.
But by then the United States was Israel's major arms supplier. Nixon, who fancied himself Eisenhower's protege, allowed that the United States did not "owe anything to the Israelis." Yet Kissinger prodded Nixon to reject the overture. Both were convinced that Israel had an overwhelming military advantage to preserve the status quo; Nixon was embattled in Watergate, and Kissinger argued that the last thing the administration needed was a fight with Senate Democrats over Israeli security. His enthusiasm for Israeli power was natural for a Jewish refugee who had been part of the US Army's occupation of Germany. (He was a German interpreter in the counterintelligence corps.) What Kissinger did not know was that Brezhnev had intimate knowledge of Anwar Sadat's preparations for retaking the Suez Canal by force of arms.
Kissinger had been so certain of Israel's superiority that when an Arab attack was imminent, he warned Prime Minister Golda Meir not to take pre-emptive action. But after a week of horribly bloody battles, it became clear that the IDF would only slowly gain the upper hand. The IDF had lost fifty planes, 500 tanks and 3,000 soldiers, and Meir felt the need to put Israel's nuclear forces on alert. At that moment, the United States faced the choice of working with the Soviets to impose a cease-fire and lay down the "principles" of a regional settlement, or of resupplying the IDF in a massive airlift and putting off a cease-fire until Israel could fight its way back to a military advantage. Kissinger chose the latter course, even daring to put US nuclear forces on alert when Brezhnev threatened to intervene in defense of Egypt's entrapped Third Army. After this, Tyler implies, the US-Israeli alliance was forged in blood.
Tyler's Kissinger seems true, on the whole. Kissinger did strike the Manichaean template that spread among politicians and reporters in the 1970s, representing Israel as the US ally and "strategic asset" in the region. (The State Department's traditional client Saudi Arabia made things easy by unleashing an oil embargo against the West.) After Kissinger, pressuring Israel seemed something like a basketball coach foolishly demoralizing his slightly brazen power forward. Still, there are some episodes left out of Tyler's narrative that would mitigate any one-sided portrait. Israeli air power, responding to Kissinger's request, actually did help save King Hussein's neck in 1970, when Jordan was invaded by Syria during Black September. Jimmy Carter's eventual Camp David initiative would have been unimaginable without Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy, which produced disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria.
Indeed, the second interim agreement with Egypt, which saw Israeli cargoes pass through the Suez Canal for the first time, never would have been consummated had Kissinger not gotten tough with Israel. (I covered this period, contributing reports from Jerusalem to The New York Review of Books.) Yitzhak Rabin's government had refused to withdraw the IDF behind the Sinai's Mitla Pass. Kissinger, now running foreign policy for Gerald Ford, announced a "reassessment," during which time new arms agreements with Israel were suspended. Thousands of Israeli rightists, led by the settlers' group Gush Emunim, took to the streets, shouting "Jew boy! Jew boy!" at Kissinger: the organizer of the airlift was now a traitor to their dream of Greater Israel. (All of this is missing from Tyler's account.)
It was precisely during the period of the reassessment that seventy-six senators, led by Scoop Jackson (and his protege Richard Perle), delivered a letter to the White House supporting Israeli claims. AIPAC had been formed in 1953, but it came into its own with this letter, which, hoisting Kissinger with his own anti-Soviet petard, made detente its foil. (Perle had been the moving force behind the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which, in effect, made detente hinge on Soviet Jewish emigration--a kind of dry run for hounding Kissinger on Israel, too.) It all seems so quaint now, Kissinger's fight with the neocons over who was overreacting enough to Soviet power.
Was there a distinction between defending Israel and defending her 1967 conquests? It was a question that Nixon, too, regarded as important. But Kissinger, the diplomatic practitioner who admired subtlety in foreign policy, dismissed this as irrelevant "fine-tuning."
It was Kissinger, Tyler argues, who initiated a pattern of standing up to the Soviets, ignoring the Arab states, neutralizing State and Pentagon skeptics and (by contrast) befriending Israel's diplomats and appeasing Israel's Congressional advocates--people like, most notably, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic senator from Washington. Kissinger provided the open door for the lobby to push on.
The turning point, Tyler stesses, was not the 1973 war but a meeting that might well have prevented it. The summer before, Brezhnev was visiting San Clemente on a kind of detente victory tour. Sleepless, he called Nixon and Kissinger to a late-night meeting and pleaded for a US-Soviet approach to resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict, arguing that another regional war would throw the superpowers into a potentially nuclear confrontation. He suggested broad principles: guarantees for Israeli security and an end to attacks on Israel from Arab territories, safeguards for Israeli shipping and Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. "If we can get agreement on these principles, we can then discuss how to use any influence on the contending parties," Brezhnev said.
But by then the United States was Israel's major arms supplier. Nixon, who fancied himself Eisenhower's protege, allowed that the United States did not "owe anything to the Israelis." Yet Kissinger prodded Nixon to reject the overture. Both were convinced that Israel had an overwhelming military advantage to preserve the status quo; Nixon was embattled in Watergate, and Kissinger argued that the last thing the administration needed was a fight with Senate Democrats over Israeli security. His enthusiasm for Israeli power was natural for a Jewish refugee who had been part of the US Army's occupation of Germany. (He was a German interpreter in the counterintelligence corps.) What Kissinger did not know was that Brezhnev had intimate knowledge of Anwar Sadat's preparations for retaking the Suez Canal by force of arms.
Kissinger had been so certain of Israel's superiority that when an Arab attack was imminent, he warned Prime Minister Golda Meir not to take pre-emptive action. But after a week of horribly bloody battles, it became clear that the IDF would only slowly gain the upper hand. The IDF had lost fifty planes, 500 tanks and 3,000 soldiers, and Meir felt the need to put Israel's nuclear forces on alert. At that moment, the United States faced the choice of working with the Soviets to impose a cease-fire and lay down the "principles" of a regional settlement, or of resupplying the IDF in a massive airlift and putting off a cease-fire until Israel could fight its way back to a military advantage. Kissinger chose the latter course, even daring to put US nuclear forces on alert when Brezhnev threatened to intervene in defense of Egypt's entrapped Third Army. After this, Tyler implies, the US-Israeli alliance was forged in blood.
Tyler's Kissinger seems true, on the whole. Kissinger did strike the Manichaean template that spread among politicians and reporters in the 1970s, representing Israel as the US ally and "strategic asset" in the region. (The State Department's traditional client Saudi Arabia made things easy by unleashing an oil embargo against the West.) After Kissinger, pressuring Israel seemed something like a basketball coach foolishly demoralizing his slightly brazen power forward. Still, there are some episodes left out of Tyler's narrative that would mitigate any one-sided portrait. Israeli air power, responding to Kissinger's request, actually did help save King Hussein's neck in 1970, when Jordan was invaded by Syria during Black September. Jimmy Carter's eventual Camp David initiative would have been unimaginable without Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy, which produced disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria.
Indeed, the second interim agreement with Egypt, which saw Israeli cargoes pass through the Suez Canal for the first time, never would have been consummated had Kissinger not gotten tough with Israel. (I covered this period, contributing reports from Jerusalem to The New York Review of Books.) Yitzhak Rabin's government had refused to withdraw the IDF behind the Sinai's Mitla Pass. Kissinger, now running foreign policy for Gerald Ford, announced a "reassessment," during which time new arms agreements with Israel were suspended. Thousands of Israeli rightists, led by the settlers' group Gush Emunim, took to the streets, shouting "Jew boy! Jew boy!" at Kissinger: the organizer of the airlift was now a traitor to their dream of Greater Israel. (All of this is missing from Tyler's account.)
It was precisely during the period of the reassessment that seventy-six senators, led by Scoop Jackson (and his protege Richard Perle), delivered a letter to the White House supporting Israeli claims. AIPAC had been formed in 1953, but it came into its own with this letter, which, hoisting Kissinger with his own anti-Soviet petard, made detente its foil. (Perle had been the moving force behind the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which, in effect, made detente hinge on Soviet Jewish emigration--a kind of dry run for hounding Kissinger on Israel, too.) It all seems so quaint now, Kissinger's fight with the neocons over who was overreacting enough to Soviet power.
A World Apart? : The White House and the Middle East (Page 3)
"Judeans," in other words, have developed a world apart--theocratic, militant, tribalist--though many of them, in fact, are wards of the state, supported by state-supplied settlement infrastructure, family allowances and religious schools. (Just after Obama's speech, I watched one strapping settler tell Israeli television that the American president had been very professional and good on human rights but that he'd quoted the Talmud, and if he'd really read it he'd know that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.) Judeans may half believe that one fine morning Iran's mullahs will accept the incineration of Tehran and Qom for the pleasure of incinerating Tel-Aviv. Yet when they speak of existential threats, what they actually fear is the return of a couple of million Palestinian refugees to East Jerusalem and West Bank towns, transforming the city into an Arabic-speaking megalopolis, much as Tel-Aviv is a Hebrew-speaking one. They fear Arab rights in the state of Israel--and the very concept of an inclusive Israeliness. They regard Palestinian nationalism, in fact, much the way Arabs on the coastal plain in 1948 regarded Zionism, as bound to bring a flood of immigrants that will overwhelm their way of life.
So no Israeli leader, Tyler knows, will confront Judeans, many of them armed with automatic weapons, for the sake of Palestinians--who, Benjamin Netanyahu warns, just might fire missiles at Ben-Gurion Airport. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Fatah's Mahmud Abbas reportedly got stuck in talks over such matters as the town of Ariel, smack-dab between Ramallah and Jenin; the status of Jerusalem; and Palestinian refugees--always the five-foot leap over a seven-foot pit. Why should Olmert have conceded things that would tear Israel apart?
On the other hand--so Tyler's story of Dulles instructs--how long can any Israeli leader dare to defy an America administration that would lead the Western powers with a plan of its own, rooted in what Obama called "interests" of its own? Tyler might have added that Israeli moderates need the specter of American abandonment--of diplomatic isolation leading to economic isolation, a grave threat to Israel's high-tech economy--to confront Judeans and win back at least the Russian Israelis, who did not leave the Soviet Union to live in a little Jewish Pakistan.
But what, then, of the Israel lobby? Dulles, shmulles? Actually, the idea that presidents have been trapped by American Jewish pressure--and that Obama is bound to be--does not stand up to Tyler's history. It is better to rely on the taxonomy he implies, even if the intersecting categories are not airtight and every administration is not just one thing or another.
First, we might categorize presidents according to their knowledge of the region--if not their subtlety about the Arab world, their sophistication about the developing world more generally--as compared with, say, a Manichaean ideology in which preemption of dark forces takes precedence over any peace, which could anyway never be trusted. The latter view was hammered into a platform by neoconservatives during the late 1970s--one that cast America in a perpetual fight against evil (serially, "evil empire," "radical evil," "axis of evil") and cast Israel as America's biggest aircraft carrier. Second, we might categorize presidents as relatively strong or weak. Do they have broad popularity and reliable Congressional support for their agenda, however modest, or does presidential popularity fluctuate with media-hyped judgments of their efficacy or ineffectuality, or their virtues or peccadilloes, while each Congressional action hinges on tough votes? Finally, do presidents have a peculiarly soft spot for Israel, a penchant for seeing the Jewish state as a tribute to freedom or the answer to an ingenuous religious impulse--as natural to the Middle East as the Holocaust museum is to the Mall or "Jerusalem" is to Baptist hymns? Or do presidents see Zionism admiringly enough but mainly through the prism of the practical security problems Israeli leaders say they have?
Eisenhower--Tyler's hero, in a way--might be classified as sophisticated, popular and focused sincerely on Israel's security. (Eisenhower's army liberated the death camps, after all.) Kennedy can be classified pretty much the same way. Both administrations wanted to keep the region calm and were mainly set against Israel's acquiring nuclear weapons. They were certainly unwilling to indulge Zionism's irredentist claims.
The first shift came with President Johnson, especially after the Six-Day War, when his power was still great. But Johnson's ignorance of the Middle East, made worse by Vietnam-induced paranoia, was twinned with peculiar affections for liberal and Jewish allies--not just Fortas and Krim but Arthur Goldberg and the New York bankers Abe Feinberg and David Ginsburg--who prompted him to throw his considerable political strength directly behind Israel's cause. At first, as reciprocal escalations in May 1967 seduced Nasser into reimposing a blockade on the Strait of Tiran, Johnson tried to restrain Israeli forces and deal with the matter by international action. Then, after Israel's mobilization was followed by a shocking victory, Johnson tried to bask in its reflected glory. He delivered Israel its first Phantom jets, opening decades of codependent relations between the IDF and the Pentagon. He backed Israel's interpretation of UN Resolution 242, which nurtured its hope of keeping much of the conquered land and all of Jerusalem. "Johnson and Rusk," Tyler writes, "faced a choice: support Israel's occupation strategy or demand a full withdrawal. There was very little debate, at least in the White House. Johnson believed that Nasser had provoked the war, and though Israel had ignored his pleas to avoid a rush to combat, Johnson acceded to Israel's desire on how to play the postwar diplomacy."
So no Israeli leader, Tyler knows, will confront Judeans, many of them armed with automatic weapons, for the sake of Palestinians--who, Benjamin Netanyahu warns, just might fire missiles at Ben-Gurion Airport. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Fatah's Mahmud Abbas reportedly got stuck in talks over such matters as the town of Ariel, smack-dab between Ramallah and Jenin; the status of Jerusalem; and Palestinian refugees--always the five-foot leap over a seven-foot pit. Why should Olmert have conceded things that would tear Israel apart?
On the other hand--so Tyler's story of Dulles instructs--how long can any Israeli leader dare to defy an America administration that would lead the Western powers with a plan of its own, rooted in what Obama called "interests" of its own? Tyler might have added that Israeli moderates need the specter of American abandonment--of diplomatic isolation leading to economic isolation, a grave threat to Israel's high-tech economy--to confront Judeans and win back at least the Russian Israelis, who did not leave the Soviet Union to live in a little Jewish Pakistan.
But what, then, of the Israel lobby? Dulles, shmulles? Actually, the idea that presidents have been trapped by American Jewish pressure--and that Obama is bound to be--does not stand up to Tyler's history. It is better to rely on the taxonomy he implies, even if the intersecting categories are not airtight and every administration is not just one thing or another.
First, we might categorize presidents according to their knowledge of the region--if not their subtlety about the Arab world, their sophistication about the developing world more generally--as compared with, say, a Manichaean ideology in which preemption of dark forces takes precedence over any peace, which could anyway never be trusted. The latter view was hammered into a platform by neoconservatives during the late 1970s--one that cast America in a perpetual fight against evil (serially, "evil empire," "radical evil," "axis of evil") and cast Israel as America's biggest aircraft carrier. Second, we might categorize presidents as relatively strong or weak. Do they have broad popularity and reliable Congressional support for their agenda, however modest, or does presidential popularity fluctuate with media-hyped judgments of their efficacy or ineffectuality, or their virtues or peccadilloes, while each Congressional action hinges on tough votes? Finally, do presidents have a peculiarly soft spot for Israel, a penchant for seeing the Jewish state as a tribute to freedom or the answer to an ingenuous religious impulse--as natural to the Middle East as the Holocaust museum is to the Mall or "Jerusalem" is to Baptist hymns? Or do presidents see Zionism admiringly enough but mainly through the prism of the practical security problems Israeli leaders say they have?
Eisenhower--Tyler's hero, in a way--might be classified as sophisticated, popular and focused sincerely on Israel's security. (Eisenhower's army liberated the death camps, after all.) Kennedy can be classified pretty much the same way. Both administrations wanted to keep the region calm and were mainly set against Israel's acquiring nuclear weapons. They were certainly unwilling to indulge Zionism's irredentist claims.
The first shift came with President Johnson, especially after the Six-Day War, when his power was still great. But Johnson's ignorance of the Middle East, made worse by Vietnam-induced paranoia, was twinned with peculiar affections for liberal and Jewish allies--not just Fortas and Krim but Arthur Goldberg and the New York bankers Abe Feinberg and David Ginsburg--who prompted him to throw his considerable political strength directly behind Israel's cause. At first, as reciprocal escalations in May 1967 seduced Nasser into reimposing a blockade on the Strait of Tiran, Johnson tried to restrain Israeli forces and deal with the matter by international action. Then, after Israel's mobilization was followed by a shocking victory, Johnson tried to bask in its reflected glory. He delivered Israel its first Phantom jets, opening decades of codependent relations between the IDF and the Pentagon. He backed Israel's interpretation of UN Resolution 242, which nurtured its hope of keeping much of the conquered land and all of Jerusalem. "Johnson and Rusk," Tyler writes, "faced a choice: support Israel's occupation strategy or demand a full withdrawal. There was very little debate, at least in the White House. Johnson believed that Nasser had provoked the war, and though Israel had ignored his pleas to avoid a rush to combat, Johnson acceded to Israel's desire on how to play the postwar diplomacy."
A World Apart? : The White House and the Middle East (Page 2)
Stymied in the UN Security Council, where England and France had a veto, Dulles pressed the General Assembly to call on them to withdraw their forces. A resolution was approved, and they were out within a week. What was left to contend with was Israel's occupation of the Sinai. Ben-Gurion talked tough. Dulles and Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson answered with the creation of a UN international peacekeeping force, and Pearson warned, "You run the risk of losing all your friends." Tiny Israel was almost entirely reliant on the good graces of Western powers that were, in turn, beholden to the United States. Israel, it is true, enjoyed Congressional support, especially from the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, who was surrounded, like most Democratic leaders, by party bosses and influential Jewish friends--Abe Fortas, Arthur Krim--whose liberalism seemed of a piece with the saga of Zionism. Yet Dulles would not be moved. Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai was an American interest.
In what Tyler calls the administration's "finest hour," Eisenhower went on television in February 1957 and acknowledged that Israel should have free shipping to Eilat. He spoke of the UN charter and of UN forces ensuring free navigation. But of Israel seeking "something more," Eisenhower added: "Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal?" Dulles told Israelis that they "were on the verge of a catastrophe." (Tyler's narration, here and in the rest of the book, is convincing if slightly overdramatized: "Dulles could see that he was up against a lioness.... [As he] walked [Foreign Minister Golda] Meir to the door, he could not let her have the last word.")
That was that, and Ben-Gurion knew it. By the end of March 1957, Ben-Gurion had withdrawn Israeli forces from the Sinai, though with gains Israelis did not think trivial at the time. The port of Eilat was opened to Israeli shipping, which meant oil from the shah's Iran. It also meant flourishing relations between decolonized sub-Saharan African countries like Nkrumah's Ghana and "socialist" Israel, which dispatched military and agricultural advisers (often the former in the guise of the latter).
On the whole, this turned out to be Israel's golden age of state building, Hebrew cultural innovation and immigrant absorption. In a bittersweet twist of fate, a good many of the immigrants from North Africa were stampeded to Israel by the reaction of Arab governments to the 1956 invasion. The UN placed buffering troops in the Sinai, "the umbrella," as Abba Eban complained to UN Secretary General U Thant in the aftermath of the 1967 war, that would be taken away "as soon as it begins to rain"; it would indeed take another war for Israel to prove it could not be destroyed. Still, occupation of the Sinai would hardly have made new wars less likely. As Israelis learned bitterly in 1973, occupation made war inevitable.
Tyler's account of Eisenhower and Ben-Gurion is clearly meant to trigger a thought: why has no subsequent president approached matters quite this way? Should we assume that Israel will always be a third rail--that the Israel lobby has made American pressure incredible? Tyler takes for granted that such questions fuel growing skepticism, in and out of Israel and the Palestinian territories, about the prospects for any new peace negotiations. (Disclosure: Tyler interviewed me in 2005 when he was getting started on his book.) Whether or not the Palestinian Authority creates a unity government--or Israel reaches a deal with Syria over the Golan--skeptics assume that Israel's government will continue to come up shy of an acceptable offer to the Palestinians, especially regarding the settlements and Jerusalem. The only hope, though Tyler is tactful about spelling it out, is for a US president willing to make Israeli elites fear diplomatic isolation more than they fear the collapse of national solidarity. Diplomacy, to use the phrase of CBS's veteran correspondent Bob Simon, means putting Israelis "into a panic."
Tyler does not get into this, but we must be clear about the dynamic here, since new generations of correspondents have a way of writing about Israeli politics without his, or Simon's, sense of history. The problem is not some spontaneous drift "to the right" in Israel owing to, say, Hamas's missiles or Ahmadinejad's threats. Israel, after all, has been integrating these territories for forty years; Hamas did not even exist during the first twenty. Of course Israelis distrust Arab intentions, and vice versa. But although Tyler doesn't get into this, polls have shown for many years that a slight majority of Israelis would want to do a deal anyway--actually, a large majority of globalist professional and entrepreneurial elites in greater Tel-Aviv. Assume peace with Palestine, and the lives of Israelis on the coastal plain will change, if at all, for the better. The problem is that the Israeli population of greater Tel-Aviv is a decreasing majority relative to Jewish settlers and Orthodox residents of Jerusalem--call them "Judeans"--and the less well-educated Mizrahi and ultranationalist Russian immigrants who tend to support them. The Israeli right does not oppose a deal the way residents of New Hampshire oppose an income tax. For them, Greater Israel and a policy of deterrence is a way of life, inextricably bound up with sustaining a "Jewish" state--not only against Palestine but in spite of Israel's Arab minority, a fifth of its citizens.
In what Tyler calls the administration's "finest hour," Eisenhower went on television in February 1957 and acknowledged that Israel should have free shipping to Eilat. He spoke of the UN charter and of UN forces ensuring free navigation. But of Israel seeking "something more," Eisenhower added: "Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal?" Dulles told Israelis that they "were on the verge of a catastrophe." (Tyler's narration, here and in the rest of the book, is convincing if slightly overdramatized: "Dulles could see that he was up against a lioness.... [As he] walked [Foreign Minister Golda] Meir to the door, he could not let her have the last word.")
That was that, and Ben-Gurion knew it. By the end of March 1957, Ben-Gurion had withdrawn Israeli forces from the Sinai, though with gains Israelis did not think trivial at the time. The port of Eilat was opened to Israeli shipping, which meant oil from the shah's Iran. It also meant flourishing relations between decolonized sub-Saharan African countries like Nkrumah's Ghana and "socialist" Israel, which dispatched military and agricultural advisers (often the former in the guise of the latter).
On the whole, this turned out to be Israel's golden age of state building, Hebrew cultural innovation and immigrant absorption. In a bittersweet twist of fate, a good many of the immigrants from North Africa were stampeded to Israel by the reaction of Arab governments to the 1956 invasion. The UN placed buffering troops in the Sinai, "the umbrella," as Abba Eban complained to UN Secretary General U Thant in the aftermath of the 1967 war, that would be taken away "as soon as it begins to rain"; it would indeed take another war for Israel to prove it could not be destroyed. Still, occupation of the Sinai would hardly have made new wars less likely. As Israelis learned bitterly in 1973, occupation made war inevitable.
Tyler's account of Eisenhower and Ben-Gurion is clearly meant to trigger a thought: why has no subsequent president approached matters quite this way? Should we assume that Israel will always be a third rail--that the Israel lobby has made American pressure incredible? Tyler takes for granted that such questions fuel growing skepticism, in and out of Israel and the Palestinian territories, about the prospects for any new peace negotiations. (Disclosure: Tyler interviewed me in 2005 when he was getting started on his book.) Whether or not the Palestinian Authority creates a unity government--or Israel reaches a deal with Syria over the Golan--skeptics assume that Israel's government will continue to come up shy of an acceptable offer to the Palestinians, especially regarding the settlements and Jerusalem. The only hope, though Tyler is tactful about spelling it out, is for a US president willing to make Israeli elites fear diplomatic isolation more than they fear the collapse of national solidarity. Diplomacy, to use the phrase of CBS's veteran correspondent Bob Simon, means putting Israelis "into a panic."
Tyler does not get into this, but we must be clear about the dynamic here, since new generations of correspondents have a way of writing about Israeli politics without his, or Simon's, sense of history. The problem is not some spontaneous drift "to the right" in Israel owing to, say, Hamas's missiles or Ahmadinejad's threats. Israel, after all, has been integrating these territories for forty years; Hamas did not even exist during the first twenty. Of course Israelis distrust Arab intentions, and vice versa. But although Tyler doesn't get into this, polls have shown for many years that a slight majority of Israelis would want to do a deal anyway--actually, a large majority of globalist professional and entrepreneurial elites in greater Tel-Aviv. Assume peace with Palestine, and the lives of Israelis on the coastal plain will change, if at all, for the better. The problem is that the Israeli population of greater Tel-Aviv is a decreasing majority relative to Jewish settlers and Orthodox residents of Jerusalem--call them "Judeans"--and the less well-educated Mizrahi and ultranationalist Russian immigrants who tend to support them. The Israeli right does not oppose a deal the way residents of New Hampshire oppose an income tax. For them, Greater Israel and a policy of deterrence is a way of life, inextricably bound up with sustaining a "Jewish" state--not only against Palestine but in spite of Israel's Arab minority, a fifth of its citizens.
A World Apart? : The White House and the Middle East
By Bernard Avishai
This article appeared in the July 6, 2009 edition of The Nation.
June 17, 2009
Israeli troops departing a Sinai outpost, March 1957 AP IMAGES
A writer can't tackle a subject as immense as the United States and the Middle East without a kind of working conundrum. Patrick Tyler, a former New York Times and Washington Post correspondent, does not tell us what prompted him to write A World of Trouble, other than the declassification of some documents; but his conundrum is fairly easy to infer from the book's first chapter, which chronicles President Eisenhower's strong response to Israel during the aftermath of the 1956 Sinai War. Roughly, it is this:
The United States had reasons for becoming Israel's patron after the Six-Day War in 1967, but the continuing conflict has seriously damaged America's relations in the Middle East and across the Muslim world. And there is plenty of evidence--ever since Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser accepted UN Resolution 242 in July 1970--that at least Egypt and Jordan were prepared for a peace deal if the United States could have forced Israel back into its pre-1967 boundaries (allaying Israeli security fears with, say, a defense pact). During all this time, Israel has been almost entirely dependent on the United States for diplomatic cover, guns and money. During most of this time, US policy has been that Israel's colonization of the West Bank is "an obstacle to peace." Yet successive presidents allowed Israel a free hand while successive prime ministers expanded settlements to more than half a million people, a great many of them neo-Zionist fanatics--people who are inarguably an (arguably the) obstacle to peace. Why did these American presidents not dictate peace terms to Israel--by 1974 a client state--the way Eisenhower did in 1957? Was this incapacity or reluctance really, as some have famously charged, the work of the Israel lobby?
The good news you derive from Tyler's book--if good is the word for it--is that you cannot explain US foreign policy as the product of any permanent force, or quirk, of domestic politics. There are complex stories behind presidential responses. Yes, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been influential; but you also need to consider factors like presidential ideology, real international rivals, varying levels of political vulnerability, narcissism and sheer stupidity. Tyler's book exposes so many presidents, in so many diplomatic fixes, that we derive something like a comparative taxonomy just from reading through it. And when you project Barack Obama into the obvious categories--worldly versus naive, vulnerable versus popular, and so forth--it seems clear that no president since Eisenhower is better positioned to bring Israel into line with an American version of, and interest in, regional peace. Obama has now delivered his Cairo speech. Will he--can he--follow through?
By the end of 1956, Tyler reminds us, Israel occupied most of the Sinai Peninsula, after attacking Nasser's forces in late October. The Israeli government was made up of virtually the same people who would be in power during the Six-Day War; their justifications for making the occupation of the Sinai permanent were ones that would become familiar after 1967: control of Palestinian terrorism, strategic depth through territorial expansion, "deterrence." The black joke at the time was that Hitler had swum to Egypt and become nasser ("wet" in Yiddish). Actually, though the Egyptian president spoke of rallying the "Arab nation" against colonialism, he shifted away from American patronage only after Eisenhower's powerful secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, failed to deliver on a promise to build a high dam at Aswan. Nasser then acquired an enormous quantity of tanks and MIGs from the Soviets. He also nationalized the Suez Canal.
Israeli Prime Minster David Ben-Gurion, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and France's Guy Mollet had plotted the whole "crisis" in advance. Israel would say that its invasion was to pre-empt insurgents operating from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, where about 1 million Palestinian refugees languished in camps. But this would serve as a pretext for England and France to intervene and reoccupy the canal zone. Ben-Gurion had brushed aside his foreign minister Moshe Sharett's secret contacts with Nasser and wanted urgently to pre-empt Egypt's assimilation of Soviet arms. He also wanted to open the port of Eilat, blockaded by Egypt at Sharm el-Sheikh since the 1949 cease-fire, and turn his newly minted Israel Defense Forces into a shaper of both diplomatic facts and the immigrant Hebrew nation. He was already developing a nuclear bomb.
And Ben-Gurion was not without a grand design that might well have appealed to cold warriors like Dulles. He had presented to his co-conspirators a plan that entailed Israel's annexing not only a large swath of the Sinai but also the West Bank of the young King Hussein's Kingdom of Jordan and southern Lebanon up to the Litani--while France installed a sympathetic regime in Damascus. Meanwhile, Britain's client, the Hashemite regime in Baghdad, would annex what was left of cousin Hussein's East Bank. Eden and Mollet, to their credit, refused to play Sykes and Picot to Ben-Gurion's Jabotinsky. But British and American intelligence agents (the head of the CIA was Dulles's brother Allen) were indeed plotting a coup in Syria. The Dulles brothers had, after all, already engineered the toppling of Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953, reinstalling the shah.
Nevertheless, Eisenhower and his secretary of state were furious--and not only because the plot was hatched without telling them. For America had other interests, too--most obviously, in Persian Gulf oil fields and desert kingdoms. Eisenhower and Dulles were founders of the United Nations and wished to establish a stable order in the Middle East where international corporations could operate and that was not a necessary theater of cold war confrontation, as Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia had become. Besides, how could Dulles discredit the Soviet Union for its suppression of the Hungarian revolution while two of NATO's leading members crushed Nasser and re-entered the Canal Zone? How could America sponsor the Saudi regime when the region, inflamed by Israel's triumphs and imperial associations, was turned toward Nasserism and against the West?
Stymied in the UN Security Council, where England and France had a veto, Dulles pressed the General Assembly to call on them to withdraw their forces. A resolution was approved, and they were out within a week. What was left to contend with was Israel's occupation of the Sinai. Ben-Gurion talked tough. Dulles and Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson answered with the creation of a UN international peacekeeping force, and Pearson warned, "You run the risk of losing all your friends." Tiny Israel was almost entirely reliant on the good graces of Western powers that were, in turn, beholden to the United States. Israel, it is true, enjoyed Congressional support, especially from the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, who was surrounded, like most Democratic leaders, by party bosses and influential Jewish friends--Abe Fortas, Arthur Krim--whose liberalism seemed of a piece with the saga of Zionism. Yet Dulles would not be moved. Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai was an American interest.
In what Tyler calls the administration's "finest hour," Eisenhower went on television in February 1957 and acknowledged that Israel should have free shipping to Eilat. He spoke of the UN charter and of UN forces ensuring free navigation. But of Israel seeking "something more," Eisenhower added: "Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal?" Dulles told Israelis that they "were on the verge of a catastrophe." (Tyler's narration, here and in the rest of the book, is convincing if slightly overdramatized: "Dulles could see that he was up against a lioness.... [As he] walked [Foreign Minister Golda] Meir to the door, he could not let her have the last word.")
That was that, and Ben-Gurion knew it. By the end of March 1957, Ben-Gurion had withdrawn Israeli forces from the Sinai, though with gains Israelis did not think trivial at the time. The port of Eilat was opened to Israeli shipping, which meant oil from the shah's Iran. It also meant flourishing relations between decolonized sub-Saharan African countries like Nkrumah's Ghana and "socialist" Israel, which dispatched military and agricultural advisers (often the former in the guise of the latter).
On the whole, this turned out to be Israel's golden age of state building, Hebrew cultural innovation and immigrant absorption. In a bittersweet twist of fate, a good many of the immigrants from North Africa were stampeded to Israel by the reaction of Arab governments to the 1956 invasion. The UN placed buffering troops in the Sinai, "the umbrella," as Abba Eban complained to UN Secretary General U Thant in the aftermath of the 1967 war, that would be taken away "as soon as it begins to rain"; it would indeed take another war for Israel to prove it could not be destroyed. Still, occupation of the Sinai would hardly have made new wars less likely. As Israelis learned bitterly in 1973, occupation made war inevitable.
Tyler's account of Eisenhower and Ben-Gurion is clearly meant to trigger a thought: why has no subsequent president approached matters quite this way? Should we assume that Israel will always be a third rail--that the Israel lobby has made American pressure incredible? Tyler takes for granted that such questions fuel growing skepticism, in and out of Israel and the Palestinian territories, about the prospects for any new peace negotiations. (Disclosure: Tyler interviewed me in 2005 when he was getting started on his book.) Whether or not the Palestinian Authority creates a unity government--or Israel reaches a deal with Syria over the Golan--skeptics assume that Israel's government will continue to come up shy of an acceptable offer to the Palestinians, especially regarding the settlements and Jerusalem. The only hope, though Tyler is tactful about spelling it out, is for a US president willing to make Israeli elites fear diplomatic isolation more than they fear the collapse of national solidarity. Diplomacy, to use the phrase of CBS's veteran correspondent Bob Simon, means putting Israelis "into a panic."
Tyler does not get into this, but we must be clear about the dynamic here, since new generations of correspondents have a way of writing about Israeli politics without his, or Simon's, sense of history. The problem is not some spontaneous drift "to the right" in Israel owing to, say, Hamas's missiles or Ahmadinejad's threats. Israel, after all, has been integrating these territories for forty years; Hamas did not even exist during the first twenty. Of course Israelis distrust Arab intentions, and vice versa. But although Tyler doesn't get into this, polls have shown for many years that a slight majority of Israelis would want to do a deal anyway--actually, a large majority of globalist professional and entrepreneurial elites in greater Tel-Aviv. Assume peace with Palestine, and the lives of Israelis on the coastal plain will change, if at all, for the better. The problem is that the Israeli population of greater Tel-Aviv is a decreasing majority relative to Jewish settlers and Orthodox residents of Jerusalem--call them "Judeans"--and the less well-educated Mizrahi and ultranationalist Russian immigrants who tend to support them. The Israeli right does not oppose a deal the way residents of New Hampshire oppose an income tax. For them, Greater Israel and a policy of deterrence is a way of life, inextricably bound up with sustaining a "Jewish" state--not only against Palestine but in spite of Israel's Arab minority, a fifth of its citizens.
"Judeans," in other words, have developed a world apart--theocratic, militant, tribalist--though many of them, in fact, are wards of the state, supported by state-supplied settlement infrastructure, family allowances and religious schools. (Just after Obama's speech, I watched one strapping settler tell Israeli television that the American president had been very professional and good on human rights but that he'd quoted the Talmud, and if he'd really read it he'd know that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.) Judeans may half believe that one fine morning Iran's mullahs will accept the incineration of Tehran and Qom for the pleasure of incinerating Tel-Aviv. Yet when they speak of existential threats, what they actually fear is the return of a couple of million Palestinian refugees to East Jerusalem and West Bank towns, transforming the city into an Arabic-speaking megalopolis, much as Tel-Aviv is a Hebrew-speaking one. They fear Arab rights in the state of Israel--and the very concept of an inclusive Israeliness. They regard Palestinian nationalism, in fact, much the way Arabs on the coastal plain in 1948 regarded Zionism, as bound to bring a flood of immigrants that will overwhelm their way of life.
So no Israeli leader, Tyler knows, will confront Judeans, many of them armed with automatic weapons, for the sake of Palestinians--who, Benjamin Netanyahu warns, just might fire missiles at Ben-Gurion Airport. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Fatah's Mahmud Abbas reportedly got stuck in talks over such matters as the town of Ariel, smack-dab between Ramallah and Jenin; the status of Jerusalem; and Palestinian refugees--always the five-foot leap over a seven-foot pit. Why should Olmert have conceded things that would tear Israel apart?
On the other hand--so Tyler's story of Dulles instructs--how long can any Israeli leader dare to defy an America administration that would lead the Western powers with a plan of its own, rooted in what Obama called "interests" of its own? Tyler might have added that Israeli moderates need the specter of American abandonment--of diplomatic isolation leading to economic isolation, a grave threat to Israel's high-tech economy--to confront Judeans and win back at least the Russian Israelis, who did not leave the Soviet Union to live in a little Jewish Pakistan.
But what, then, of the Israel lobby? Dulles, shmulles? Actually, the idea that presidents have been trapped by American Jewish pressure--and that Obama is bound to be--does not stand up to Tyler's history. It is better to rely on the taxonomy he implies, even if the intersecting categories are not airtight and every administration is not just one thing or another.
First, we might categorize presidents according to their knowledge of the region--if not their subtlety about the Arab world, their sophistication about the developing world more generally--as compared with, say, a Manichaean ideology in which preemption of dark forces takes precedence over any peace, which could anyway never be trusted. The latter view was hammered into a platform by neoconservatives during the late 1970s--one that cast America in a perpetual fight against evil (serially, "evil empire," "radical evil," "axis of evil") and cast Israel as America's biggest aircraft carrier. Second, we might categorize presidents as relatively strong or weak. Do they have broad popularity and reliable Congressional support for their agenda, however modest, or does presidential popularity fluctuate with media-hyped judgments of their efficacy or ineffectuality, or their virtues or peccadilloes, while each Congressional action hinges on tough votes? Finally, do presidents have a peculiarly soft spot for Israel, a penchant for seeing the Jewish state as a tribute to freedom or the answer to an ingenuous religious impulse--as natural to the Middle East as the Holocaust museum is to the Mall or "Jerusalem" is to Baptist hymns? Or do presidents see Zionism admiringly enough but mainly through the prism of the practical security problems Israeli leaders say they have?
Eisenhower--Tyler's hero, in a way--might be classified as sophisticated, popular and focused sincerely on Israel's security. (Eisenhower's army liberated the death camps, after all.) Kennedy can be classified pretty much the same way. Both administrations wanted to keep the region calm and were mainly set against Israel's acquiring nuclear weapons. They were certainly unwilling to indulge Zionism's irredentist claims.
The first shift came with President Johnson, especially after the Six-Day War, when his power was still great. But Johnson's ignorance of the Middle East, made worse by Vietnam-induced paranoia, was twinned with peculiar affections for liberal and Jewish allies--not just Fortas and Krim but Arthur Goldberg and the New York bankers Abe Feinberg and David Ginsburg--who prompted him to throw his considerable political strength directly behind Israel's cause. At first, as reciprocal escalations in May 1967 seduced Nasser into reimposing a blockade on the Strait of Tiran, Johnson tried to restrain Israeli forces and deal with the matter by international action. Then, after Israel's mobilization was followed by a shocking victory, Johnson tried to bask in its reflected glory. He delivered Israel its first Phantom jets, opening decades of codependent relations between the IDF and the Pentagon. He backed Israel's interpretation of UN Resolution 242, which nurtured its hope of keeping much of the conquered land and all of Jerusalem. "Johnson and Rusk," Tyler writes, "faced a choice: support Israel's occupation strategy or demand a full withdrawal. There was very little debate, at least in the White House. Johnson believed that Nasser had provoked the war, and though Israel had ignored his pleas to avoid a rush to combat, Johnson acceded to Israel's desire on how to play the postwar diplomacy."
The second shift came with President Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, who leveraged Johnson's position to the hilt. Tyler quotes Kissinger, the closest thing his story has to a villain: "Our objective is always, when the Soviet Union appears, to demonstrate that whoever gets help from the Soviet Union cannot achieve its objective, whatever it is." Earlier Tyler writes:
Was there a distinction between defending Israel and defending her 1967 conquests? It was a question that Nixon, too, regarded as important. But Kissinger, the diplomatic practitioner who admired subtlety in foreign policy, dismissed this as irrelevant "fine-tuning."
It was Kissinger, Tyler argues, who initiated a pattern of standing up to the Soviets, ignoring the Arab states, neutralizing State and Pentagon skeptics and (by contrast) befriending Israel's diplomats and appeasing Israel's Congressional advocates--people like, most notably, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic senator from Washington. Kissinger provided the open door for the lobby to push on.
The turning point, Tyler stesses, was not the 1973 war but a meeting that might well have prevented it. The summer before, Brezhnev was visiting San Clemente on a kind of detente victory tour. Sleepless, he called Nixon and Kissinger to a late-night meeting and pleaded for a US-Soviet approach to resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict, arguing that another regional war would throw the superpowers into a potentially nuclear confrontation. He suggested broad principles: guarantees for Israeli security and an end to attacks on Israel from Arab territories, safeguards for Israeli shipping and Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. "If we can get agreement on these principles, we can then discuss how to use any influence on the contending parties," Brezhnev said.
But by then the United States was Israel's major arms supplier. Nixon, who fancied himself Eisenhower's protege, allowed that the United States did not "owe anything to the Israelis." Yet Kissinger prodded Nixon to reject the overture. Both were convinced that Israel had an overwhelming military advantage to preserve the status quo; Nixon was embattled in Watergate, and Kissinger argued that the last thing the administration needed was a fight with Senate Democrats over Israeli security. His enthusiasm for Israeli power was natural for a Jewish refugee who had been part of the US Army's occupation of Germany. (He was a German interpreter in the counterintelligence corps.) What Kissinger did not know was that Brezhnev had intimate knowledge of Anwar Sadat's preparations for retaking the Suez Canal by force of arms.
Kissinger had been so certain of Israel's superiority that when an Arab attack was imminent, he warned Prime Minister Golda Meir not to take pre-emptive action. But after a week of horribly bloody battles, it became clear that the IDF would only slowly gain the upper hand. The IDF had lost fifty planes, 500 tanks and 3,000 soldiers, and Meir felt the need to put Israel's nuclear forces on alert. At that moment, the United States faced the choice of working with the Soviets to impose a cease-fire and lay down the "principles" of a regional settlement, or of resupplying the IDF in a massive airlift and putting off a cease-fire until Israel could fight its way back to a military advantage. Kissinger chose the latter course, even daring to put US nuclear forces on alert when Brezhnev threatened to intervene in defense of Egypt's entrapped Third Army. After this, Tyler implies, the US-Israeli alliance was forged in blood.
Tyler's Kissinger seems true, on the whole. Kissinger did strike the Manichaean template that spread among politicians and reporters in the 1970s, representing Israel as the US ally and "strategic asset" in the region. (The State Department's traditional client Saudi Arabia made things easy by unleashing an oil embargo against the West.) After Kissinger, pressuring Israel seemed something like a basketball coach foolishly demoralizing his slightly brazen power forward. Still, there are some episodes left out of Tyler's narrative that would mitigate any one-sided portrait. Israeli air power, responding to Kissinger's request, actually did help save King Hussein's neck in 1970, when Jordan was invaded by Syria during Black September. Jimmy Carter's eventual Camp David initiative would have been unimaginable without Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy, which produced disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria.
Indeed, the second interim agreement with Egypt, which saw Israeli cargoes pass through the Suez Canal for the first time, never would have been consummated had Kissinger not gotten tough with Israel. (I covered this period, contributing reports from Jerusalem to The New York Review of Books.) Yitzhak Rabin's government had refused to withdraw the IDF behind the Sinai's Mitla Pass. Kissinger, now running foreign policy for Gerald Ford, announced a "reassessment," during which time new arms agreements with Israel were suspended. Thousands of Israeli rightists, led by the settlers' group Gush Emunim, took to the streets, shouting "Jew boy! Jew boy!" at Kissinger: the organizer of the airlift was now a traitor to their dream of Greater Israel. (All of this is missing from Tyler's account.)
It was precisely during the period of the reassessment that seventy-six senators, led by Scoop Jackson (and his protege Richard Perle), delivered a letter to the White House supporting Israeli claims. AIPAC had been formed in 1953, but it came into its own with this letter, which, hoisting Kissinger with his own anti-Soviet petard, made detente its foil. (Perle had been the moving force behind the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which, in effect, made detente hinge on Soviet Jewish emigration--a kind of dry run for hounding Kissinger on Israel, too.) It all seems so quaint now, Kissinger's fight with the neocons over who was overreacting enough to Soviet power.
Under the radar of the American media, however, Israeli political parties were having a fight of their own over who would overreach more in supporting West Bank settlement activities. From 1972 to 1983, mostly under Labor governments, the number of Jewish settlers in Jerusalem climbed from about 8,500 to more than 75,000. In 1977 Begin's Likud won power, and Gush Emunim went to work for real: 2,000 West Bank settlers became 6,000 by the time the Camp David accords were signed. President Carter--relatively sophisticated, with no particular softness for Israelis but politically weak and desperate for Jewish support in his primary campaign against Ted Kennedy--insisted that he had secured a freeze on settlements from Begin for as long as Camp David negotiations continued. He won an Israeli concession that Palestinian autonomy would lead to their acquiring "legitimate rights." But Begin double-crossed Carter and virtually dared him to fight with Israel's Congressional supporters as the 1979 Democratic primaries approached. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, there were something like 10,000 settlers.
President Reagan, for his part, called the settlements an obstacle to peace, urged on, by turns, by Alexander Haig and George Schultz. But nobody believed they meant it. Reagan left Sadat out on a limb, which may well have guaranteed Sadat's assassination. Reagan's team, meanwhile, was prepared to unleash Saddam's Iraq against Iran. There was talk of reviving a Jordan option, with King Hussein managing a federation with Palestine; but there was no heart to oppose Israeli retaliations against PLO guerrillas in southern Lebanon or, ultimately, Israel's catastrophic invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Reagan was a dream come true for the settlers: wildly popular, simple-minded, vaguely messianic and surrounded by Jewish neocons and Hollywood friends. By the time he left office, there were around 100,000 settlers outside Jerusalem and about 200,000 inside.
Curiously, Tyler gives rather short shrift to perhaps the biggest fight over settlements. After the Gulf War in 1991, Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, and his secretary of state, James Baker ("Fuck the Jews; they don't vote for us anyway"), threatened to withhold loan guarantees if Israel did not promise not to use the funds to settle Russian Jews in the West Bank. This occasioned AIPAC's most chilling show of force: a thousand volunteers stormed the Capitol in advance of the 1992 election. As it happens, the town of Ariel, which would become one of the biggest bones of contention between Olmert and Abbas, was largely populated by immigrant Russian Jews during this time. Ariel Sharon, then housing minister, picked up about 4,000 from the airport and plunked them down in the Samarian hills.
Clearly, I cannot do justice here to all the sordid details Tyler patiently recounts--much less to the ones he glosses over. I will say that the closer we get to the present, his book reads less like history and more like old news. Bill Clinton advanced the Oslo agreements, even cajoling Netanyahu into an interim deal on Hebron. His "bridging parameters" from December 2000 still form the spine of any American plan. But Clinton lacked "discipline" and needed Congress too much during the Lewinsky scandal. George W. Bush was, in our matrix, a replay of Reagan. You won't learn more about Clinton's fumbles than you learned from Robert Malley and Hussein Agha's essays in The New York Review of Books, or more on Bush than from, say, the pages of this magazine.
Where does A World of Trouble leave us? Tyler could not have anticipated Obama when he started writing, but something about his review of Middle East "trouble" seems vaguely "back to the future." Not since Eisenhower has there been a president with the necessary combination of attributes to reintroduce the idea of a regional settlement along lines determined by the great powers. America may be diminished in its own eyes, given the Iraq disaster, the financial crisis and the spreading insurgency in Afghanistan. But to Israelis--whose city-state earns less, and is somewhat smaller in habitable area and population, than greater Los Angeles--America and Europe are the world: markets, universities, culture, friendship, arms. Israel is a local military power, well entrenched in what Eisenhower called America's military-industrial complex. But Israel's actions in the territories have never been popular at the Pentagon, and the recent Gaza operation might be said to have violated every principle in Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency handbook. Friends don't let friends drive drunk.
Obama has worldly sophistication and a supportive European Union, an unprecedented mandate and even something Ike did not have, the affections of a majority of American Jews. Indeed, a recent J Street poll reveals that more than 70 percent of American Jews support Obama and a two-state deal pretty much like the one negotiated at Taba eight years ago. (J Street, a peace lobby backed largely by the progressive American Jews AIPAC has alienated, grew in parallel with the Obama campaign.) Against this trifecta, it will be hard to flog Israel's role in a clash of civilizations--a view of the world Obama all but denounced in Cairo.
None of this guarantees Obama will make the most of his opportunity. He is doing his best, clearly, to honor and attract the Islamic world. He has solidly endorsed a Palestinian state and an end to settlements. But if he's digested Tyler's implicit instruction, he'll quickly get beyond framing the peace process as a facilitated negotiation between Israel and Palestine, much as he got beyond the appeal for "bipartisanship" with Congressional Republicans. America in the Middle East is not some Dr. Phil, lively, well intentioned and--how did former Secretary Powell foolishly put it?--not wanting peace "more than the parties themselves." America has skin in the game. So do Europe and the neighboring Arab states. They must all want peace more than the Israelis and Palestinians, who are chronically distrustful of each other, trapped by their fanatics, and whose leaders cannot resist the demagogy of the vendetta.
The time has come, in other words, for Obama to stipulate and conduct a public worldwide campaign for an American plan, not just an American vision. The broad terms of the plan will surprise nobody: we are not talking about the price of a rug in the bazaar; Israel is not just Palestine's cross, and Palestine is not Israel's internal affair. And there can be no peace without outside commitments: NATO committing to include Israel; Egypt and Jordan committing Palestine peacekeepers, investment capital and a sympathetic press. The United States can have no leverage with Iran, therefore no orderly exit from Iraq, without a working partnership with the Arab League.
"America will not turn our backs," Obama said in Cairo, "on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own." The whole Middle East, with the span of a continent, is roiled by this conflict. In the background of Tyler's foreground, Obama knows, are the world's largest proven reserves of oil and dollars, teens and violence. There is a burgeoning Arab middle class opening to the West, in Fez, Tripoli and Amman. But they are surrounded by restless undereducated people governed only by mosques and fathers where state security services leave off. Obama's is the face of a more progressive globalization, but world economic stresses could make the mosques, the fathers and their acolytes only more volatile. The status quo, in any case, means the triumph of the settlers and Hamas. And it is all too easy to imagine the sad follow-on chapters to Tyler's sad chronicle.
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About Bernard Avishai
Bernard Avishai is the author, most recently, of The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last (Harcourt). He blogs at www.bernardavishai.com. more...
This article appeared in the July 6, 2009 edition of The Nation.
June 17, 2009
Israeli troops departing a Sinai outpost, March 1957 AP IMAGES
A writer can't tackle a subject as immense as the United States and the Middle East without a kind of working conundrum. Patrick Tyler, a former New York Times and Washington Post correspondent, does not tell us what prompted him to write A World of Trouble, other than the declassification of some documents; but his conundrum is fairly easy to infer from the book's first chapter, which chronicles President Eisenhower's strong response to Israel during the aftermath of the 1956 Sinai War. Roughly, it is this:
The United States had reasons for becoming Israel's patron after the Six-Day War in 1967, but the continuing conflict has seriously damaged America's relations in the Middle East and across the Muslim world. And there is plenty of evidence--ever since Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser accepted UN Resolution 242 in July 1970--that at least Egypt and Jordan were prepared for a peace deal if the United States could have forced Israel back into its pre-1967 boundaries (allaying Israeli security fears with, say, a defense pact). During all this time, Israel has been almost entirely dependent on the United States for diplomatic cover, guns and money. During most of this time, US policy has been that Israel's colonization of the West Bank is "an obstacle to peace." Yet successive presidents allowed Israel a free hand while successive prime ministers expanded settlements to more than half a million people, a great many of them neo-Zionist fanatics--people who are inarguably an (arguably the) obstacle to peace. Why did these American presidents not dictate peace terms to Israel--by 1974 a client state--the way Eisenhower did in 1957? Was this incapacity or reluctance really, as some have famously charged, the work of the Israel lobby?
The good news you derive from Tyler's book--if good is the word for it--is that you cannot explain US foreign policy as the product of any permanent force, or quirk, of domestic politics. There are complex stories behind presidential responses. Yes, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been influential; but you also need to consider factors like presidential ideology, real international rivals, varying levels of political vulnerability, narcissism and sheer stupidity. Tyler's book exposes so many presidents, in so many diplomatic fixes, that we derive something like a comparative taxonomy just from reading through it. And when you project Barack Obama into the obvious categories--worldly versus naive, vulnerable versus popular, and so forth--it seems clear that no president since Eisenhower is better positioned to bring Israel into line with an American version of, and interest in, regional peace. Obama has now delivered his Cairo speech. Will he--can he--follow through?
By the end of 1956, Tyler reminds us, Israel occupied most of the Sinai Peninsula, after attacking Nasser's forces in late October. The Israeli government was made up of virtually the same people who would be in power during the Six-Day War; their justifications for making the occupation of the Sinai permanent were ones that would become familiar after 1967: control of Palestinian terrorism, strategic depth through territorial expansion, "deterrence." The black joke at the time was that Hitler had swum to Egypt and become nasser ("wet" in Yiddish). Actually, though the Egyptian president spoke of rallying the "Arab nation" against colonialism, he shifted away from American patronage only after Eisenhower's powerful secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, failed to deliver on a promise to build a high dam at Aswan. Nasser then acquired an enormous quantity of tanks and MIGs from the Soviets. He also nationalized the Suez Canal.
Israeli Prime Minster David Ben-Gurion, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and France's Guy Mollet had plotted the whole "crisis" in advance. Israel would say that its invasion was to pre-empt insurgents operating from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, where about 1 million Palestinian refugees languished in camps. But this would serve as a pretext for England and France to intervene and reoccupy the canal zone. Ben-Gurion had brushed aside his foreign minister Moshe Sharett's secret contacts with Nasser and wanted urgently to pre-empt Egypt's assimilation of Soviet arms. He also wanted to open the port of Eilat, blockaded by Egypt at Sharm el-Sheikh since the 1949 cease-fire, and turn his newly minted Israel Defense Forces into a shaper of both diplomatic facts and the immigrant Hebrew nation. He was already developing a nuclear bomb.
And Ben-Gurion was not without a grand design that might well have appealed to cold warriors like Dulles. He had presented to his co-conspirators a plan that entailed Israel's annexing not only a large swath of the Sinai but also the West Bank of the young King Hussein's Kingdom of Jordan and southern Lebanon up to the Litani--while France installed a sympathetic regime in Damascus. Meanwhile, Britain's client, the Hashemite regime in Baghdad, would annex what was left of cousin Hussein's East Bank. Eden and Mollet, to their credit, refused to play Sykes and Picot to Ben-Gurion's Jabotinsky. But British and American intelligence agents (the head of the CIA was Dulles's brother Allen) were indeed plotting a coup in Syria. The Dulles brothers had, after all, already engineered the toppling of Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953, reinstalling the shah.
Nevertheless, Eisenhower and his secretary of state were furious--and not only because the plot was hatched without telling them. For America had other interests, too--most obviously, in Persian Gulf oil fields and desert kingdoms. Eisenhower and Dulles were founders of the United Nations and wished to establish a stable order in the Middle East where international corporations could operate and that was not a necessary theater of cold war confrontation, as Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia had become. Besides, how could Dulles discredit the Soviet Union for its suppression of the Hungarian revolution while two of NATO's leading members crushed Nasser and re-entered the Canal Zone? How could America sponsor the Saudi regime when the region, inflamed by Israel's triumphs and imperial associations, was turned toward Nasserism and against the West?
Stymied in the UN Security Council, where England and France had a veto, Dulles pressed the General Assembly to call on them to withdraw their forces. A resolution was approved, and they were out within a week. What was left to contend with was Israel's occupation of the Sinai. Ben-Gurion talked tough. Dulles and Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson answered with the creation of a UN international peacekeeping force, and Pearson warned, "You run the risk of losing all your friends." Tiny Israel was almost entirely reliant on the good graces of Western powers that were, in turn, beholden to the United States. Israel, it is true, enjoyed Congressional support, especially from the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, who was surrounded, like most Democratic leaders, by party bosses and influential Jewish friends--Abe Fortas, Arthur Krim--whose liberalism seemed of a piece with the saga of Zionism. Yet Dulles would not be moved. Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai was an American interest.
In what Tyler calls the administration's "finest hour," Eisenhower went on television in February 1957 and acknowledged that Israel should have free shipping to Eilat. He spoke of the UN charter and of UN forces ensuring free navigation. But of Israel seeking "something more," Eisenhower added: "Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal?" Dulles told Israelis that they "were on the verge of a catastrophe." (Tyler's narration, here and in the rest of the book, is convincing if slightly overdramatized: "Dulles could see that he was up against a lioness.... [As he] walked [Foreign Minister Golda] Meir to the door, he could not let her have the last word.")
That was that, and Ben-Gurion knew it. By the end of March 1957, Ben-Gurion had withdrawn Israeli forces from the Sinai, though with gains Israelis did not think trivial at the time. The port of Eilat was opened to Israeli shipping, which meant oil from the shah's Iran. It also meant flourishing relations between decolonized sub-Saharan African countries like Nkrumah's Ghana and "socialist" Israel, which dispatched military and agricultural advisers (often the former in the guise of the latter).
On the whole, this turned out to be Israel's golden age of state building, Hebrew cultural innovation and immigrant absorption. In a bittersweet twist of fate, a good many of the immigrants from North Africa were stampeded to Israel by the reaction of Arab governments to the 1956 invasion. The UN placed buffering troops in the Sinai, "the umbrella," as Abba Eban complained to UN Secretary General U Thant in the aftermath of the 1967 war, that would be taken away "as soon as it begins to rain"; it would indeed take another war for Israel to prove it could not be destroyed. Still, occupation of the Sinai would hardly have made new wars less likely. As Israelis learned bitterly in 1973, occupation made war inevitable.
Tyler's account of Eisenhower and Ben-Gurion is clearly meant to trigger a thought: why has no subsequent president approached matters quite this way? Should we assume that Israel will always be a third rail--that the Israel lobby has made American pressure incredible? Tyler takes for granted that such questions fuel growing skepticism, in and out of Israel and the Palestinian territories, about the prospects for any new peace negotiations. (Disclosure: Tyler interviewed me in 2005 when he was getting started on his book.) Whether or not the Palestinian Authority creates a unity government--or Israel reaches a deal with Syria over the Golan--skeptics assume that Israel's government will continue to come up shy of an acceptable offer to the Palestinians, especially regarding the settlements and Jerusalem. The only hope, though Tyler is tactful about spelling it out, is for a US president willing to make Israeli elites fear diplomatic isolation more than they fear the collapse of national solidarity. Diplomacy, to use the phrase of CBS's veteran correspondent Bob Simon, means putting Israelis "into a panic."
Tyler does not get into this, but we must be clear about the dynamic here, since new generations of correspondents have a way of writing about Israeli politics without his, or Simon's, sense of history. The problem is not some spontaneous drift "to the right" in Israel owing to, say, Hamas's missiles or Ahmadinejad's threats. Israel, after all, has been integrating these territories for forty years; Hamas did not even exist during the first twenty. Of course Israelis distrust Arab intentions, and vice versa. But although Tyler doesn't get into this, polls have shown for many years that a slight majority of Israelis would want to do a deal anyway--actually, a large majority of globalist professional and entrepreneurial elites in greater Tel-Aviv. Assume peace with Palestine, and the lives of Israelis on the coastal plain will change, if at all, for the better. The problem is that the Israeli population of greater Tel-Aviv is a decreasing majority relative to Jewish settlers and Orthodox residents of Jerusalem--call them "Judeans"--and the less well-educated Mizrahi and ultranationalist Russian immigrants who tend to support them. The Israeli right does not oppose a deal the way residents of New Hampshire oppose an income tax. For them, Greater Israel and a policy of deterrence is a way of life, inextricably bound up with sustaining a "Jewish" state--not only against Palestine but in spite of Israel's Arab minority, a fifth of its citizens.
"Judeans," in other words, have developed a world apart--theocratic, militant, tribalist--though many of them, in fact, are wards of the state, supported by state-supplied settlement infrastructure, family allowances and religious schools. (Just after Obama's speech, I watched one strapping settler tell Israeli television that the American president had been very professional and good on human rights but that he'd quoted the Talmud, and if he'd really read it he'd know that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.) Judeans may half believe that one fine morning Iran's mullahs will accept the incineration of Tehran and Qom for the pleasure of incinerating Tel-Aviv. Yet when they speak of existential threats, what they actually fear is the return of a couple of million Palestinian refugees to East Jerusalem and West Bank towns, transforming the city into an Arabic-speaking megalopolis, much as Tel-Aviv is a Hebrew-speaking one. They fear Arab rights in the state of Israel--and the very concept of an inclusive Israeliness. They regard Palestinian nationalism, in fact, much the way Arabs on the coastal plain in 1948 regarded Zionism, as bound to bring a flood of immigrants that will overwhelm their way of life.
So no Israeli leader, Tyler knows, will confront Judeans, many of them armed with automatic weapons, for the sake of Palestinians--who, Benjamin Netanyahu warns, just might fire missiles at Ben-Gurion Airport. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Fatah's Mahmud Abbas reportedly got stuck in talks over such matters as the town of Ariel, smack-dab between Ramallah and Jenin; the status of Jerusalem; and Palestinian refugees--always the five-foot leap over a seven-foot pit. Why should Olmert have conceded things that would tear Israel apart?
On the other hand--so Tyler's story of Dulles instructs--how long can any Israeli leader dare to defy an America administration that would lead the Western powers with a plan of its own, rooted in what Obama called "interests" of its own? Tyler might have added that Israeli moderates need the specter of American abandonment--of diplomatic isolation leading to economic isolation, a grave threat to Israel's high-tech economy--to confront Judeans and win back at least the Russian Israelis, who did not leave the Soviet Union to live in a little Jewish Pakistan.
But what, then, of the Israel lobby? Dulles, shmulles? Actually, the idea that presidents have been trapped by American Jewish pressure--and that Obama is bound to be--does not stand up to Tyler's history. It is better to rely on the taxonomy he implies, even if the intersecting categories are not airtight and every administration is not just one thing or another.
First, we might categorize presidents according to their knowledge of the region--if not their subtlety about the Arab world, their sophistication about the developing world more generally--as compared with, say, a Manichaean ideology in which preemption of dark forces takes precedence over any peace, which could anyway never be trusted. The latter view was hammered into a platform by neoconservatives during the late 1970s--one that cast America in a perpetual fight against evil (serially, "evil empire," "radical evil," "axis of evil") and cast Israel as America's biggest aircraft carrier. Second, we might categorize presidents as relatively strong or weak. Do they have broad popularity and reliable Congressional support for their agenda, however modest, or does presidential popularity fluctuate with media-hyped judgments of their efficacy or ineffectuality, or their virtues or peccadilloes, while each Congressional action hinges on tough votes? Finally, do presidents have a peculiarly soft spot for Israel, a penchant for seeing the Jewish state as a tribute to freedom or the answer to an ingenuous religious impulse--as natural to the Middle East as the Holocaust museum is to the Mall or "Jerusalem" is to Baptist hymns? Or do presidents see Zionism admiringly enough but mainly through the prism of the practical security problems Israeli leaders say they have?
Eisenhower--Tyler's hero, in a way--might be classified as sophisticated, popular and focused sincerely on Israel's security. (Eisenhower's army liberated the death camps, after all.) Kennedy can be classified pretty much the same way. Both administrations wanted to keep the region calm and were mainly set against Israel's acquiring nuclear weapons. They were certainly unwilling to indulge Zionism's irredentist claims.
The first shift came with President Johnson, especially after the Six-Day War, when his power was still great. But Johnson's ignorance of the Middle East, made worse by Vietnam-induced paranoia, was twinned with peculiar affections for liberal and Jewish allies--not just Fortas and Krim but Arthur Goldberg and the New York bankers Abe Feinberg and David Ginsburg--who prompted him to throw his considerable political strength directly behind Israel's cause. At first, as reciprocal escalations in May 1967 seduced Nasser into reimposing a blockade on the Strait of Tiran, Johnson tried to restrain Israeli forces and deal with the matter by international action. Then, after Israel's mobilization was followed by a shocking victory, Johnson tried to bask in its reflected glory. He delivered Israel its first Phantom jets, opening decades of codependent relations between the IDF and the Pentagon. He backed Israel's interpretation of UN Resolution 242, which nurtured its hope of keeping much of the conquered land and all of Jerusalem. "Johnson and Rusk," Tyler writes, "faced a choice: support Israel's occupation strategy or demand a full withdrawal. There was very little debate, at least in the White House. Johnson believed that Nasser had provoked the war, and though Israel had ignored his pleas to avoid a rush to combat, Johnson acceded to Israel's desire on how to play the postwar diplomacy."
The second shift came with President Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, who leveraged Johnson's position to the hilt. Tyler quotes Kissinger, the closest thing his story has to a villain: "Our objective is always, when the Soviet Union appears, to demonstrate that whoever gets help from the Soviet Union cannot achieve its objective, whatever it is." Earlier Tyler writes:
Was there a distinction between defending Israel and defending her 1967 conquests? It was a question that Nixon, too, regarded as important. But Kissinger, the diplomatic practitioner who admired subtlety in foreign policy, dismissed this as irrelevant "fine-tuning."
It was Kissinger, Tyler argues, who initiated a pattern of standing up to the Soviets, ignoring the Arab states, neutralizing State and Pentagon skeptics and (by contrast) befriending Israel's diplomats and appeasing Israel's Congressional advocates--people like, most notably, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic senator from Washington. Kissinger provided the open door for the lobby to push on.
The turning point, Tyler stesses, was not the 1973 war but a meeting that might well have prevented it. The summer before, Brezhnev was visiting San Clemente on a kind of detente victory tour. Sleepless, he called Nixon and Kissinger to a late-night meeting and pleaded for a US-Soviet approach to resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict, arguing that another regional war would throw the superpowers into a potentially nuclear confrontation. He suggested broad principles: guarantees for Israeli security and an end to attacks on Israel from Arab territories, safeguards for Israeli shipping and Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. "If we can get agreement on these principles, we can then discuss how to use any influence on the contending parties," Brezhnev said.
But by then the United States was Israel's major arms supplier. Nixon, who fancied himself Eisenhower's protege, allowed that the United States did not "owe anything to the Israelis." Yet Kissinger prodded Nixon to reject the overture. Both were convinced that Israel had an overwhelming military advantage to preserve the status quo; Nixon was embattled in Watergate, and Kissinger argued that the last thing the administration needed was a fight with Senate Democrats over Israeli security. His enthusiasm for Israeli power was natural for a Jewish refugee who had been part of the US Army's occupation of Germany. (He was a German interpreter in the counterintelligence corps.) What Kissinger did not know was that Brezhnev had intimate knowledge of Anwar Sadat's preparations for retaking the Suez Canal by force of arms.
Kissinger had been so certain of Israel's superiority that when an Arab attack was imminent, he warned Prime Minister Golda Meir not to take pre-emptive action. But after a week of horribly bloody battles, it became clear that the IDF would only slowly gain the upper hand. The IDF had lost fifty planes, 500 tanks and 3,000 soldiers, and Meir felt the need to put Israel's nuclear forces on alert. At that moment, the United States faced the choice of working with the Soviets to impose a cease-fire and lay down the "principles" of a regional settlement, or of resupplying the IDF in a massive airlift and putting off a cease-fire until Israel could fight its way back to a military advantage. Kissinger chose the latter course, even daring to put US nuclear forces on alert when Brezhnev threatened to intervene in defense of Egypt's entrapped Third Army. After this, Tyler implies, the US-Israeli alliance was forged in blood.
Tyler's Kissinger seems true, on the whole. Kissinger did strike the Manichaean template that spread among politicians and reporters in the 1970s, representing Israel as the US ally and "strategic asset" in the region. (The State Department's traditional client Saudi Arabia made things easy by unleashing an oil embargo against the West.) After Kissinger, pressuring Israel seemed something like a basketball coach foolishly demoralizing his slightly brazen power forward. Still, there are some episodes left out of Tyler's narrative that would mitigate any one-sided portrait. Israeli air power, responding to Kissinger's request, actually did help save King Hussein's neck in 1970, when Jordan was invaded by Syria during Black September. Jimmy Carter's eventual Camp David initiative would have been unimaginable without Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy, which produced disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria.
Indeed, the second interim agreement with Egypt, which saw Israeli cargoes pass through the Suez Canal for the first time, never would have been consummated had Kissinger not gotten tough with Israel. (I covered this period, contributing reports from Jerusalem to The New York Review of Books.) Yitzhak Rabin's government had refused to withdraw the IDF behind the Sinai's Mitla Pass. Kissinger, now running foreign policy for Gerald Ford, announced a "reassessment," during which time new arms agreements with Israel were suspended. Thousands of Israeli rightists, led by the settlers' group Gush Emunim, took to the streets, shouting "Jew boy! Jew boy!" at Kissinger: the organizer of the airlift was now a traitor to their dream of Greater Israel. (All of this is missing from Tyler's account.)
It was precisely during the period of the reassessment that seventy-six senators, led by Scoop Jackson (and his protege Richard Perle), delivered a letter to the White House supporting Israeli claims. AIPAC had been formed in 1953, but it came into its own with this letter, which, hoisting Kissinger with his own anti-Soviet petard, made detente its foil. (Perle had been the moving force behind the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which, in effect, made detente hinge on Soviet Jewish emigration--a kind of dry run for hounding Kissinger on Israel, too.) It all seems so quaint now, Kissinger's fight with the neocons over who was overreacting enough to Soviet power.
Under the radar of the American media, however, Israeli political parties were having a fight of their own over who would overreach more in supporting West Bank settlement activities. From 1972 to 1983, mostly under Labor governments, the number of Jewish settlers in Jerusalem climbed from about 8,500 to more than 75,000. In 1977 Begin's Likud won power, and Gush Emunim went to work for real: 2,000 West Bank settlers became 6,000 by the time the Camp David accords were signed. President Carter--relatively sophisticated, with no particular softness for Israelis but politically weak and desperate for Jewish support in his primary campaign against Ted Kennedy--insisted that he had secured a freeze on settlements from Begin for as long as Camp David negotiations continued. He won an Israeli concession that Palestinian autonomy would lead to their acquiring "legitimate rights." But Begin double-crossed Carter and virtually dared him to fight with Israel's Congressional supporters as the 1979 Democratic primaries approached. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, there were something like 10,000 settlers.
President Reagan, for his part, called the settlements an obstacle to peace, urged on, by turns, by Alexander Haig and George Schultz. But nobody believed they meant it. Reagan left Sadat out on a limb, which may well have guaranteed Sadat's assassination. Reagan's team, meanwhile, was prepared to unleash Saddam's Iraq against Iran. There was talk of reviving a Jordan option, with King Hussein managing a federation with Palestine; but there was no heart to oppose Israeli retaliations against PLO guerrillas in southern Lebanon or, ultimately, Israel's catastrophic invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Reagan was a dream come true for the settlers: wildly popular, simple-minded, vaguely messianic and surrounded by Jewish neocons and Hollywood friends. By the time he left office, there were around 100,000 settlers outside Jerusalem and about 200,000 inside.
Curiously, Tyler gives rather short shrift to perhaps the biggest fight over settlements. After the Gulf War in 1991, Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, and his secretary of state, James Baker ("Fuck the Jews; they don't vote for us anyway"), threatened to withhold loan guarantees if Israel did not promise not to use the funds to settle Russian Jews in the West Bank. This occasioned AIPAC's most chilling show of force: a thousand volunteers stormed the Capitol in advance of the 1992 election. As it happens, the town of Ariel, which would become one of the biggest bones of contention between Olmert and Abbas, was largely populated by immigrant Russian Jews during this time. Ariel Sharon, then housing minister, picked up about 4,000 from the airport and plunked them down in the Samarian hills.
Clearly, I cannot do justice here to all the sordid details Tyler patiently recounts--much less to the ones he glosses over. I will say that the closer we get to the present, his book reads less like history and more like old news. Bill Clinton advanced the Oslo agreements, even cajoling Netanyahu into an interim deal on Hebron. His "bridging parameters" from December 2000 still form the spine of any American plan. But Clinton lacked "discipline" and needed Congress too much during the Lewinsky scandal. George W. Bush was, in our matrix, a replay of Reagan. You won't learn more about Clinton's fumbles than you learned from Robert Malley and Hussein Agha's essays in The New York Review of Books, or more on Bush than from, say, the pages of this magazine.
Where does A World of Trouble leave us? Tyler could not have anticipated Obama when he started writing, but something about his review of Middle East "trouble" seems vaguely "back to the future." Not since Eisenhower has there been a president with the necessary combination of attributes to reintroduce the idea of a regional settlement along lines determined by the great powers. America may be diminished in its own eyes, given the Iraq disaster, the financial crisis and the spreading insurgency in Afghanistan. But to Israelis--whose city-state earns less, and is somewhat smaller in habitable area and population, than greater Los Angeles--America and Europe are the world: markets, universities, culture, friendship, arms. Israel is a local military power, well entrenched in what Eisenhower called America's military-industrial complex. But Israel's actions in the territories have never been popular at the Pentagon, and the recent Gaza operation might be said to have violated every principle in Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency handbook. Friends don't let friends drive drunk.
Obama has worldly sophistication and a supportive European Union, an unprecedented mandate and even something Ike did not have, the affections of a majority of American Jews. Indeed, a recent J Street poll reveals that more than 70 percent of American Jews support Obama and a two-state deal pretty much like the one negotiated at Taba eight years ago. (J Street, a peace lobby backed largely by the progressive American Jews AIPAC has alienated, grew in parallel with the Obama campaign.) Against this trifecta, it will be hard to flog Israel's role in a clash of civilizations--a view of the world Obama all but denounced in Cairo.
None of this guarantees Obama will make the most of his opportunity. He is doing his best, clearly, to honor and attract the Islamic world. He has solidly endorsed a Palestinian state and an end to settlements. But if he's digested Tyler's implicit instruction, he'll quickly get beyond framing the peace process as a facilitated negotiation between Israel and Palestine, much as he got beyond the appeal for "bipartisanship" with Congressional Republicans. America in the Middle East is not some Dr. Phil, lively, well intentioned and--how did former Secretary Powell foolishly put it?--not wanting peace "more than the parties themselves." America has skin in the game. So do Europe and the neighboring Arab states. They must all want peace more than the Israelis and Palestinians, who are chronically distrustful of each other, trapped by their fanatics, and whose leaders cannot resist the demagogy of the vendetta.
The time has come, in other words, for Obama to stipulate and conduct a public worldwide campaign for an American plan, not just an American vision. The broad terms of the plan will surprise nobody: we are not talking about the price of a rug in the bazaar; Israel is not just Palestine's cross, and Palestine is not Israel's internal affair. And there can be no peace without outside commitments: NATO committing to include Israel; Egypt and Jordan committing Palestine peacekeepers, investment capital and a sympathetic press. The United States can have no leverage with Iran, therefore no orderly exit from Iraq, without a working partnership with the Arab League.
"America will not turn our backs," Obama said in Cairo, "on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own." The whole Middle East, with the span of a continent, is roiled by this conflict. In the background of Tyler's foreground, Obama knows, are the world's largest proven reserves of oil and dollars, teens and violence. There is a burgeoning Arab middle class opening to the West, in Fez, Tripoli and Amman. But they are surrounded by restless undereducated people governed only by mosques and fathers where state security services leave off. Obama's is the face of a more progressive globalization, but world economic stresses could make the mosques, the fathers and their acolytes only more volatile. The status quo, in any case, means the triumph of the settlers and Hamas. And it is all too easy to imagine the sad follow-on chapters to Tyler's sad chronicle.
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About Bernard Avishai
Bernard Avishai is the author, most recently, of The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last (Harcourt). He blogs at www.bernardavishai.com. more...
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