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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Feith no more

Oh happy day:

Douglas Feith (LAW ’78) may not have devised an exit strategy for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but according to the former Bush administration official, a group of Georgetown professors apparently had no trouble coming up with an exit strategy for him.

The distinguished practitioner in national security policy in the School of Foreign Service will not be returning to teach at Georgetown next semester after the university chose not to renew his two-year contract.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Bahrain appoints Jewish ambassador to Washington

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

Cambodian or American debt?

I was checking out the State Department's blog today to see if they had said anything there about Israeli ambassador Gillerman's remarks that Carter was a "bigot" and an "enemy of Israel" when I came across this post about Cambodia's war era debt to the US:

Cambodia’s debt to the U.S. totals $162 million, but with arrears factored in could reach approximately $339 million. This debt stems from shipments of U.S. agricultural commodities (e.g., cotton, rice, wheat flour) to Cambodia in the early 1970s -- during the Vietnam War and Cambodia’s Lon Nol era -- and financed with USDA loans. When the country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the regime ceased servicing this debt, and interest accumulated over the next three decades. In February 2006 -- after many years of deadlock followed by a fruitful series of negotiations -- an agreement in principle was reached on the amount of Cambodian principal owed to the U.S.

The Cambodian government, however, remains reluctant to sign a bilateral re-payment agreement due to domestic political obstacles on accepting responsibility for debts incurred by the Lon Nol regime, viewed by many Cambodians as an illegal and illegitimate government. Furthermore, many Cambodian observers believe a good deal of this assistance never arrived. They contend that Cambodia only served as a conduit for moving the USDA-financed commodities to other locations in Asia and that the Cambodian government and the Cambodian people did not benefit from the loans, even if some Cambodian individuals did gain. Finally, some argue that it is fundamentally unfair that Vietnam, which is far better off economically and was America’s major adversary in the war, was granted a form of debt forgiveness from the United States, while an innocent bystander to that conflict—Cambodia—is offered nothing.

The U.S. has on its side the international law principle that governments are generally responsible for the obligations of their predecessors.

Putting aside for a moment the irony of American lectures on "international law principle," there are some other things to consider here. 

Considering the fact that the covert American bombing campaign of Cambodia that killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people was also one of the factors that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who killed literally millions of people, you'd think that we could give Phnom Penh a pass on their paltry $339 million debt, incurred after a pro-American military putsch, by the way.

Given the context in which the debt was incurred, and that more than half of the debt is interest, and since we're currently spending over $400 million every day in Iraq, you'd think we could be a good sport and forgive the Cambodian tab.

On a somewhat related note, This American Life once did an excellent piece about US-Cambodian trade agreements. You might think that such a topic is boring. You'd be wrong. Give it a listen here by clicking on "Full episode."

Friday, April 25, 2008

Netanyahu: 9/11 was good for Israel

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Zambia steps up

Following the problems that a Chinese boat has had trying to unload 77 tons of weapons in Durban, South Africa destined for the regime in Zimbabwe, it seems like it might be going back home after the South African High Court banned the transport of the weapons and ammo and after the remarks of Zambian president and head of the Southern African Development Community:

The impromptu coalition of trade unions, church leaders and organizations trying to stop the delivery gained an important ally on Monday when Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, who heads a bloc of 14 southern African nations, called on other countries in the region not to let the ship dock in their ports.

“He actually said that it would be good for China to play a more useful role in the Zimbabwe crisis than supplying arms,” said a spokesman for the Zambian government, who asked not to be identified. “We don’t want a situation which will escalate the situation in Zimbabwe more than what it is.”

This photo from the NY Times of the Chinese embassy in Pretoria shows that the Chinese may no longer be getting a free pass from the media and other countries for their involvement in developing nations:

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

New online encyclopedia of mass violence

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Science and war

The Middle East Strategy at Harvard is one of those sites that I continue to read even though (nay, because) it makes me want to smash my head against the computer screen. Some of the pieces on they are interesting and intelligent, but some are really, really stupid. Salzman's most recent piece falls into the latter category. I haven't read Salzman's book, but I had a feeling that I might not like it, since his description of it and Stanley Kurtz's review smacked a little bit too much of another Kurtz. I hadn't made up my mind, though, and thought that while Kurtz's review in the Weekly Standard might be oversimplifying the region a little, the book must be more nuanced. But Salzman's most recent piece on MESH makes me not want to read his book at all.

He seems to be arguing that since people in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran think that scholars are spies in the first place, it doesn't do any harm to be one. (Harry Matthews takes this idea to a hilariously genius extreme in his most recent novel.) And besides, those who are against working with the Pentagon are really just a bunch of haters:

It is very common for anthropologists, and foreigners in general, to be regarded as spies, agents, dubious, and perhaps dangerous. So the oft heard plea of researchers—”We can’t ever work for government or people will think all of us all the time are spies and agents”—seems at the very least naive, and, one cannot help thinking, disingenuous.

...For many anthropologists, cooperating with the Pentagon would be cohabiting with the Devil. It would be siding with power, capitalism, whites, men, heterosexuals, and thus with the evil forces in the universe. When it comes to the American military, cultural relativism does not apply.

Personally, I don't know much about Human Terrain Teams, but I do know that I'd have some very ambivalent feelings about working for the government, particularly if it meant working on Iraq. On the one hand, I can understand the sentiment that as long as the US is going to do whatever it wants, a lot of damage control can come in the form of academic advice and research -- damage control that might mean saving lives, both American and Iraqi. On the other hand, I also sympathize with the idea that one wouldn't want to get sullied by having anything at all to do with the whole enterprise. In any case, it's a complicated subject for which I've got very mixed feelings.

But does Salzman really think that those who might have qualms with working at the Pentagon are self-loathing whites who equate the idea with "cohabiting with the Devil"? I mean come on, while I'm sure there are some idiots on both sides of the argument, there really isn't any need for straw men, right? It sounds to me like Salzman has an axe to grind with some of his colleagues.

Prophesying Palestine

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

Israel: enough already

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

American Schadenfreude

When I saw the previews for the new (for me, anyway) American reality television show, American Inventor, I thought that maybe the medium would be used for something more useful than "The World's Most Shocking Videos of People Getting Shot in the Face While Being Ejected From a Moving Car." After watching the show today and seeing two grown men come close to tears, I'm convinced that it's just another opportunity for people to watch their fellow compatriots humiliate themselves on international television in hopes of making a quick buck or earning their 15 minutes of fame.

Chinese arms to Zimbabwe

Here's another example of how China is helping out Africa:

A Chinese ship loaded with armaments for Zimbabwe steamed into the port of Durban this week and set off a political firefight, putting newfound pressure on South Africa — and now China — to reduce support for Zimbabwe’s government as it cracks down on its rivals after a disputed election.

The arms shipment was ordered from China before the elections, but its arrival amid Zimbabwe’s political crisis illuminated deep fissures within South Africa over how to respond, and brought new scrutiny on China at a time when its human rights record is already under fire for suppressing protesters in Tibet and supplying arms to the government of Sudan.

Both China and South Africa have some accounting to do as far as Zimbabwe is concerned. Kudos, though, go to the South African dock workers who refused to unload the shipment. And despite her misuse of the term "genocide," Helen Zille, leader of South Africa's opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, does well to remind us that, as the Guardian puts it, "a consignment of Chinese machetes had prefaced the genocide in Rwanda. After all, 77 tons of weapons can be used to kill a lot of people.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Something's the matter with something

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

New pro-peace Israel lobby

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:
[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."
J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:
I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.
He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:
It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

PJ protest

My man Ben Gilbert has a radio report for PRI's The World about the conflict in Gemmayzeh. For those who haven't kept up with it, the residents of the neighborhood came out a couple of weeks ago in their PJs to protest the loud nightlife that goes on until 2-3 in the morning. The government decided to crack down, closing some 15-20 pubs on the strip for licensing problems and instituting a new curfew: 11:30 during the week and 1 am on weekends.

As it happens, I live in Gemmayzeh and also enjoy its pubs. I empathize with the protesters, because I've also been kept up during the week by drunken idiots, loud music blasting from expensive cars and drag racing valets. I'm not sure how this new ruling will hold up, but I do know that the residents had tried other more friendly means only to be told where they could stick their pillows.

One thing is sure, though: it's comforting to see something political that revolves around actual policies as opposed to sectarianism. Another example is the fight over the minimum wage and a teachers' strike a couple of weeks ago in public universities and public and private primary and secondary schools hoping for higher wages. The one thing, however, that depresses me is that with all the problems Lebanon faces, it seems that the one issue the youth seem fired up about is having to leave the bar an hour or two early. The youth don't seem too concerned about increasing the minimum wage (currently $200 a month), but they get absolutely fired up about pubs closing down.

But I guess no one ever claimed that Beirut had its priorities straight...

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Special reports on Israel

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Israel's designated driver

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Monday, April 14, 2008

In the country of men

I recently picked up a copy of Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. It's a touching story that seems loosely autobiographical about a young boy whose father has been disappeared by the Libyan regime under Gadaffi. I'm only about 85 pages in, but I've been enjoying it a lot, if enjoying is the right word for reading about a child's pain in a repressive police-state.

In any case, I grew curious of Matar and his life, so I started looking him up online and came across this wonderful little piece about his father's abduction and disappearance. I won't extract any of it, because you should read it in its entirety.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Lord of War

I often think that I'm kind of out of the loop as far as American news and politics go. Mostly because I only get CNN International and online blog and newspaper sources here in Beirut. But then again, if I'm really honest with myself, I definitely watch more American television than I did in France and probably more than I ever did in the US. (I have cable here, something I haven't had in about ten years.)

In any case, I missed this story last month about the 21-year-old Miami kid cum arms dealer Efraim Divoli who was supplying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shoddy ammunition to American allies in Afghanistan and Iraq through connections with former Eastern bloc countries and other arms dealers suspected of selling weapons to Africa. The reason I mention being out of touch with American media is that I hadn't heard about this. One would think that this would be a huge deal in the news and that people would be trying to figure out how this kid got all these defense contracts. And maybe it is a huge story, but I imagine that it's been overshadowed by election coverage.

To my mind, this story is typical of the way the US has handled its wars abroad during the Bush administration: with incompetence and probably corruption.

The Times article is too long and juicy to find a money graph, but you should read the whole thing in order to get the details about corrupt Albanian officials, a Cypriot shell company, a Swiss middleman, illegal RPGs in the Congo, Czech arms dealers and the young Divoli trying to get leniency in a Miami court hearing the accusations of abuse from his girlfriend by mentioning his role "the fight against terrorism in Iraq."

Move over Nicholas Cage, there's a new Lord of War in town, and he's being underwritten by US tax dollars.

Monday, April 07, 2008

"Allah" vs. "God"

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Expelling Arabs, again

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Feith no more

Oh happy day:

Douglas Feith (LAW ’78) may not have devised an exit strategy for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but according to the former Bush administration official, a group of Georgetown professors apparently had no trouble coming up with an exit strategy for him.

The distinguished practitioner in national security policy in the School of Foreign Service will not be returning to teach at Georgetown next semester after the university chose not to renew his two-year contract.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Bahrain appoints Jewish ambassador to Washington

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

Cambodian or American debt?

I was checking out the State Department's blog today to see if they had said anything there about Israeli ambassador Gillerman's remarks that Carter was a "bigot" and an "enemy of Israel" when I came across this post about Cambodia's war era debt to the US:

Cambodia’s debt to the U.S. totals $162 million, but with arrears factored in could reach approximately $339 million. This debt stems from shipments of U.S. agricultural commodities (e.g., cotton, rice, wheat flour) to Cambodia in the early 1970s -- during the Vietnam War and Cambodia’s Lon Nol era -- and financed with USDA loans. When the country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the regime ceased servicing this debt, and interest accumulated over the next three decades. In February 2006 -- after many years of deadlock followed by a fruitful series of negotiations -- an agreement in principle was reached on the amount of Cambodian principal owed to the U.S.

The Cambodian government, however, remains reluctant to sign a bilateral re-payment agreement due to domestic political obstacles on accepting responsibility for debts incurred by the Lon Nol regime, viewed by many Cambodians as an illegal and illegitimate government. Furthermore, many Cambodian observers believe a good deal of this assistance never arrived. They contend that Cambodia only served as a conduit for moving the USDA-financed commodities to other locations in Asia and that the Cambodian government and the Cambodian people did not benefit from the loans, even if some Cambodian individuals did gain. Finally, some argue that it is fundamentally unfair that Vietnam, which is far better off economically and was America’s major adversary in the war, was granted a form of debt forgiveness from the United States, while an innocent bystander to that conflict—Cambodia—is offered nothing.

The U.S. has on its side the international law principle that governments are generally responsible for the obligations of their predecessors.

Putting aside for a moment the irony of American lectures on "international law principle," there are some other things to consider here. 

Considering the fact that the covert American bombing campaign of Cambodia that killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people was also one of the factors that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who killed literally millions of people, you'd think that we could give Phnom Penh a pass on their paltry $339 million debt, incurred after a pro-American military putsch, by the way.

Given the context in which the debt was incurred, and that more than half of the debt is interest, and since we're currently spending over $400 million every day in Iraq, you'd think we could be a good sport and forgive the Cambodian tab.

On a somewhat related note, This American Life once did an excellent piece about US-Cambodian trade agreements. You might think that such a topic is boring. You'd be wrong. Give it a listen here by clicking on "Full episode."

Friday, April 25, 2008

Netanyahu: 9/11 was good for Israel

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Zambia steps up

Following the problems that a Chinese boat has had trying to unload 77 tons of weapons in Durban, South Africa destined for the regime in Zimbabwe, it seems like it might be going back home after the South African High Court banned the transport of the weapons and ammo and after the remarks of Zambian president and head of the Southern African Development Community:

The impromptu coalition of trade unions, church leaders and organizations trying to stop the delivery gained an important ally on Monday when Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, who heads a bloc of 14 southern African nations, called on other countries in the region not to let the ship dock in their ports.

“He actually said that it would be good for China to play a more useful role in the Zimbabwe crisis than supplying arms,” said a spokesman for the Zambian government, who asked not to be identified. “We don’t want a situation which will escalate the situation in Zimbabwe more than what it is.”

This photo from the NY Times of the Chinese embassy in Pretoria shows that the Chinese may no longer be getting a free pass from the media and other countries for their involvement in developing nations:

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

New online encyclopedia of mass violence

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Science and war

The Middle East Strategy at Harvard is one of those sites that I continue to read even though (nay, because) it makes me want to smash my head against the computer screen. Some of the pieces on they are interesting and intelligent, but some are really, really stupid. Salzman's most recent piece falls into the latter category. I haven't read Salzman's book, but I had a feeling that I might not like it, since his description of it and Stanley Kurtz's review smacked a little bit too much of another Kurtz. I hadn't made up my mind, though, and thought that while Kurtz's review in the Weekly Standard might be oversimplifying the region a little, the book must be more nuanced. But Salzman's most recent piece on MESH makes me not want to read his book at all.

He seems to be arguing that since people in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran think that scholars are spies in the first place, it doesn't do any harm to be one. (Harry Matthews takes this idea to a hilariously genius extreme in his most recent novel.) And besides, those who are against working with the Pentagon are really just a bunch of haters:

It is very common for anthropologists, and foreigners in general, to be regarded as spies, agents, dubious, and perhaps dangerous. So the oft heard plea of researchers—”We can’t ever work for government or people will think all of us all the time are spies and agents”—seems at the very least naive, and, one cannot help thinking, disingenuous.

...For many anthropologists, cooperating with the Pentagon would be cohabiting with the Devil. It would be siding with power, capitalism, whites, men, heterosexuals, and thus with the evil forces in the universe. When it comes to the American military, cultural relativism does not apply.

Personally, I don't know much about Human Terrain Teams, but I do know that I'd have some very ambivalent feelings about working for the government, particularly if it meant working on Iraq. On the one hand, I can understand the sentiment that as long as the US is going to do whatever it wants, a lot of damage control can come in the form of academic advice and research -- damage control that might mean saving lives, both American and Iraqi. On the other hand, I also sympathize with the idea that one wouldn't want to get sullied by having anything at all to do with the whole enterprise. In any case, it's a complicated subject for which I've got very mixed feelings.

But does Salzman really think that those who might have qualms with working at the Pentagon are self-loathing whites who equate the idea with "cohabiting with the Devil"? I mean come on, while I'm sure there are some idiots on both sides of the argument, there really isn't any need for straw men, right? It sounds to me like Salzman has an axe to grind with some of his colleagues.

Prophesying Palestine

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

Israel: enough already

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

American Schadenfreude

When I saw the previews for the new (for me, anyway) American reality television show, American Inventor, I thought that maybe the medium would be used for something more useful than "The World's Most Shocking Videos of People Getting Shot in the Face While Being Ejected From a Moving Car." After watching the show today and seeing two grown men come close to tears, I'm convinced that it's just another opportunity for people to watch their fellow compatriots humiliate themselves on international television in hopes of making a quick buck or earning their 15 minutes of fame.

Chinese arms to Zimbabwe

Here's another example of how China is helping out Africa:

A Chinese ship loaded with armaments for Zimbabwe steamed into the port of Durban this week and set off a political firefight, putting newfound pressure on South Africa — and now China — to reduce support for Zimbabwe’s government as it cracks down on its rivals after a disputed election.

The arms shipment was ordered from China before the elections, but its arrival amid Zimbabwe’s political crisis illuminated deep fissures within South Africa over how to respond, and brought new scrutiny on China at a time when its human rights record is already under fire for suppressing protesters in Tibet and supplying arms to the government of Sudan.

Both China and South Africa have some accounting to do as far as Zimbabwe is concerned. Kudos, though, go to the South African dock workers who refused to unload the shipment. And despite her misuse of the term "genocide," Helen Zille, leader of South Africa's opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, does well to remind us that, as the Guardian puts it, "a consignment of Chinese machetes had prefaced the genocide in Rwanda. After all, 77 tons of weapons can be used to kill a lot of people.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Something's the matter with something

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

New pro-peace Israel lobby

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:
[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."
J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:
I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.
He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:
It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

PJ protest

My man Ben Gilbert has a radio report for PRI's The World about the conflict in Gemmayzeh. For those who haven't kept up with it, the residents of the neighborhood came out a couple of weeks ago in their PJs to protest the loud nightlife that goes on until 2-3 in the morning. The government decided to crack down, closing some 15-20 pubs on the strip for licensing problems and instituting a new curfew: 11:30 during the week and 1 am on weekends.

As it happens, I live in Gemmayzeh and also enjoy its pubs. I empathize with the protesters, because I've also been kept up during the week by drunken idiots, loud music blasting from expensive cars and drag racing valets. I'm not sure how this new ruling will hold up, but I do know that the residents had tried other more friendly means only to be told where they could stick their pillows.

One thing is sure, though: it's comforting to see something political that revolves around actual policies as opposed to sectarianism. Another example is the fight over the minimum wage and a teachers' strike a couple of weeks ago in public universities and public and private primary and secondary schools hoping for higher wages. The one thing, however, that depresses me is that with all the problems Lebanon faces, it seems that the one issue the youth seem fired up about is having to leave the bar an hour or two early. The youth don't seem too concerned about increasing the minimum wage (currently $200 a month), but they get absolutely fired up about pubs closing down.

But I guess no one ever claimed that Beirut had its priorities straight...

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Special reports on Israel

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Israel's designated driver

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Monday, April 14, 2008

In the country of men

I recently picked up a copy of Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. It's a touching story that seems loosely autobiographical about a young boy whose father has been disappeared by the Libyan regime under Gadaffi. I'm only about 85 pages in, but I've been enjoying it a lot, if enjoying is the right word for reading about a child's pain in a repressive police-state.

In any case, I grew curious of Matar and his life, so I started looking him up online and came across this wonderful little piece about his father's abduction and disappearance. I won't extract any of it, because you should read it in its entirety.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Lord of War

I often think that I'm kind of out of the loop as far as American news and politics go. Mostly because I only get CNN International and online blog and newspaper sources here in Beirut. But then again, if I'm really honest with myself, I definitely watch more American television than I did in France and probably more than I ever did in the US. (I have cable here, something I haven't had in about ten years.)

In any case, I missed this story last month about the 21-year-old Miami kid cum arms dealer Efraim Divoli who was supplying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shoddy ammunition to American allies in Afghanistan and Iraq through connections with former Eastern bloc countries and other arms dealers suspected of selling weapons to Africa. The reason I mention being out of touch with American media is that I hadn't heard about this. One would think that this would be a huge deal in the news and that people would be trying to figure out how this kid got all these defense contracts. And maybe it is a huge story, but I imagine that it's been overshadowed by election coverage.

To my mind, this story is typical of the way the US has handled its wars abroad during the Bush administration: with incompetence and probably corruption.

The Times article is too long and juicy to find a money graph, but you should read the whole thing in order to get the details about corrupt Albanian officials, a Cypriot shell company, a Swiss middleman, illegal RPGs in the Congo, Czech arms dealers and the young Divoli trying to get leniency in a Miami court hearing the accusations of abuse from his girlfriend by mentioning his role "the fight against terrorism in Iraq."

Move over Nicholas Cage, there's a new Lord of War in town, and he's being underwritten by US tax dollars.

Monday, April 07, 2008

"Allah" vs. "God"

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Expelling Arabs, again

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Feith no more

Oh happy day:

Douglas Feith (LAW ’78) may not have devised an exit strategy for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but according to the former Bush administration official, a group of Georgetown professors apparently had no trouble coming up with an exit strategy for him.

The distinguished practitioner in national security policy in the School of Foreign Service will not be returning to teach at Georgetown next semester after the university chose not to renew his two-year contract.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Bahrain appoints Jewish ambassador to Washington

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

Cambodian or American debt?

I was checking out the State Department's blog today to see if they had said anything there about Israeli ambassador Gillerman's remarks that Carter was a "bigot" and an "enemy of Israel" when I came across this post about Cambodia's war era debt to the US:

Cambodia’s debt to the U.S. totals $162 million, but with arrears factored in could reach approximately $339 million. This debt stems from shipments of U.S. agricultural commodities (e.g., cotton, rice, wheat flour) to Cambodia in the early 1970s -- during the Vietnam War and Cambodia’s Lon Nol era -- and financed with USDA loans. When the country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the regime ceased servicing this debt, and interest accumulated over the next three decades. In February 2006 -- after many years of deadlock followed by a fruitful series of negotiations -- an agreement in principle was reached on the amount of Cambodian principal owed to the U.S.

The Cambodian government, however, remains reluctant to sign a bilateral re-payment agreement due to domestic political obstacles on accepting responsibility for debts incurred by the Lon Nol regime, viewed by many Cambodians as an illegal and illegitimate government. Furthermore, many Cambodian observers believe a good deal of this assistance never arrived. They contend that Cambodia only served as a conduit for moving the USDA-financed commodities to other locations in Asia and that the Cambodian government and the Cambodian people did not benefit from the loans, even if some Cambodian individuals did gain. Finally, some argue that it is fundamentally unfair that Vietnam, which is far better off economically and was America’s major adversary in the war, was granted a form of debt forgiveness from the United States, while an innocent bystander to that conflict—Cambodia—is offered nothing.

The U.S. has on its side the international law principle that governments are generally responsible for the obligations of their predecessors.

Putting aside for a moment the irony of American lectures on "international law principle," there are some other things to consider here. 

Considering the fact that the covert American bombing campaign of Cambodia that killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people was also one of the factors that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who killed literally millions of people, you'd think that we could give Phnom Penh a pass on their paltry $339 million debt, incurred after a pro-American military putsch, by the way.

Given the context in which the debt was incurred, and that more than half of the debt is interest, and since we're currently spending over $400 million every day in Iraq, you'd think we could be a good sport and forgive the Cambodian tab.

On a somewhat related note, This American Life once did an excellent piece about US-Cambodian trade agreements. You might think that such a topic is boring. You'd be wrong. Give it a listen here by clicking on "Full episode."

Friday, April 25, 2008

Netanyahu: 9/11 was good for Israel

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Zambia steps up

Following the problems that a Chinese boat has had trying to unload 77 tons of weapons in Durban, South Africa destined for the regime in Zimbabwe, it seems like it might be going back home after the South African High Court banned the transport of the weapons and ammo and after the remarks of Zambian president and head of the Southern African Development Community:

The impromptu coalition of trade unions, church leaders and organizations trying to stop the delivery gained an important ally on Monday when Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, who heads a bloc of 14 southern African nations, called on other countries in the region not to let the ship dock in their ports.

“He actually said that it would be good for China to play a more useful role in the Zimbabwe crisis than supplying arms,” said a spokesman for the Zambian government, who asked not to be identified. “We don’t want a situation which will escalate the situation in Zimbabwe more than what it is.”

This photo from the NY Times of the Chinese embassy in Pretoria shows that the Chinese may no longer be getting a free pass from the media and other countries for their involvement in developing nations:

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

New online encyclopedia of mass violence

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Science and war

The Middle East Strategy at Harvard is one of those sites that I continue to read even though (nay, because) it makes me want to smash my head against the computer screen. Some of the pieces on they are interesting and intelligent, but some are really, really stupid. Salzman's most recent piece falls into the latter category. I haven't read Salzman's book, but I had a feeling that I might not like it, since his description of it and Stanley Kurtz's review smacked a little bit too much of another Kurtz. I hadn't made up my mind, though, and thought that while Kurtz's review in the Weekly Standard might be oversimplifying the region a little, the book must be more nuanced. But Salzman's most recent piece on MESH makes me not want to read his book at all.

He seems to be arguing that since people in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran think that scholars are spies in the first place, it doesn't do any harm to be one. (Harry Matthews takes this idea to a hilariously genius extreme in his most recent novel.) And besides, those who are against working with the Pentagon are really just a bunch of haters:

It is very common for anthropologists, and foreigners in general, to be regarded as spies, agents, dubious, and perhaps dangerous. So the oft heard plea of researchers—”We can’t ever work for government or people will think all of us all the time are spies and agents”—seems at the very least naive, and, one cannot help thinking, disingenuous.

...For many anthropologists, cooperating with the Pentagon would be cohabiting with the Devil. It would be siding with power, capitalism, whites, men, heterosexuals, and thus with the evil forces in the universe. When it comes to the American military, cultural relativism does not apply.

Personally, I don't know much about Human Terrain Teams, but I do know that I'd have some very ambivalent feelings about working for the government, particularly if it meant working on Iraq. On the one hand, I can understand the sentiment that as long as the US is going to do whatever it wants, a lot of damage control can come in the form of academic advice and research -- damage control that might mean saving lives, both American and Iraqi. On the other hand, I also sympathize with the idea that one wouldn't want to get sullied by having anything at all to do with the whole enterprise. In any case, it's a complicated subject for which I've got very mixed feelings.

But does Salzman really think that those who might have qualms with working at the Pentagon are self-loathing whites who equate the idea with "cohabiting with the Devil"? I mean come on, while I'm sure there are some idiots on both sides of the argument, there really isn't any need for straw men, right? It sounds to me like Salzman has an axe to grind with some of his colleagues.

Prophesying Palestine

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

Israel: enough already

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

American Schadenfreude

When I saw the previews for the new (for me, anyway) American reality television show, American Inventor, I thought that maybe the medium would be used for something more useful than "The World's Most Shocking Videos of People Getting Shot in the Face While Being Ejected From a Moving Car." After watching the show today and seeing two grown men come close to tears, I'm convinced that it's just another opportunity for people to watch their fellow compatriots humiliate themselves on international television in hopes of making a quick buck or earning their 15 minutes of fame.

Chinese arms to Zimbabwe

Here's another example of how China is helping out Africa:

A Chinese ship loaded with armaments for Zimbabwe steamed into the port of Durban this week and set off a political firefight, putting newfound pressure on South Africa — and now China — to reduce support for Zimbabwe’s government as it cracks down on its rivals after a disputed election.

The arms shipment was ordered from China before the elections, but its arrival amid Zimbabwe’s political crisis illuminated deep fissures within South Africa over how to respond, and brought new scrutiny on China at a time when its human rights record is already under fire for suppressing protesters in Tibet and supplying arms to the government of Sudan.

Both China and South Africa have some accounting to do as far as Zimbabwe is concerned. Kudos, though, go to the South African dock workers who refused to unload the shipment. And despite her misuse of the term "genocide," Helen Zille, leader of South Africa's opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, does well to remind us that, as the Guardian puts it, "a consignment of Chinese machetes had prefaced the genocide in Rwanda. After all, 77 tons of weapons can be used to kill a lot of people.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Something's the matter with something

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

New pro-peace Israel lobby

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:
[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."
J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:
I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.
He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:
It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

PJ protest

My man Ben Gilbert has a radio report for PRI's The World about the conflict in Gemmayzeh. For those who haven't kept up with it, the residents of the neighborhood came out a couple of weeks ago in their PJs to protest the loud nightlife that goes on until 2-3 in the morning. The government decided to crack down, closing some 15-20 pubs on the strip for licensing problems and instituting a new curfew: 11:30 during the week and 1 am on weekends.

As it happens, I live in Gemmayzeh and also enjoy its pubs. I empathize with the protesters, because I've also been kept up during the week by drunken idiots, loud music blasting from expensive cars and drag racing valets. I'm not sure how this new ruling will hold up, but I do know that the residents had tried other more friendly means only to be told where they could stick their pillows.

One thing is sure, though: it's comforting to see something political that revolves around actual policies as opposed to sectarianism. Another example is the fight over the minimum wage and a teachers' strike a couple of weeks ago in public universities and public and private primary and secondary schools hoping for higher wages. The one thing, however, that depresses me is that with all the problems Lebanon faces, it seems that the one issue the youth seem fired up about is having to leave the bar an hour or two early. The youth don't seem too concerned about increasing the minimum wage (currently $200 a month), but they get absolutely fired up about pubs closing down.

But I guess no one ever claimed that Beirut had its priorities straight...

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Special reports on Israel

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Israel's designated driver

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Monday, April 14, 2008

In the country of men

I recently picked up a copy of Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. It's a touching story that seems loosely autobiographical about a young boy whose father has been disappeared by the Libyan regime under Gadaffi. I'm only about 85 pages in, but I've been enjoying it a lot, if enjoying is the right word for reading about a child's pain in a repressive police-state.

In any case, I grew curious of Matar and his life, so I started looking him up online and came across this wonderful little piece about his father's abduction and disappearance. I won't extract any of it, because you should read it in its entirety.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Lord of War

I often think that I'm kind of out of the loop as far as American news and politics go. Mostly because I only get CNN International and online blog and newspaper sources here in Beirut. But then again, if I'm really honest with myself, I definitely watch more American television than I did in France and probably more than I ever did in the US. (I have cable here, something I haven't had in about ten years.)

In any case, I missed this story last month about the 21-year-old Miami kid cum arms dealer Efraim Divoli who was supplying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shoddy ammunition to American allies in Afghanistan and Iraq through connections with former Eastern bloc countries and other arms dealers suspected of selling weapons to Africa. The reason I mention being out of touch with American media is that I hadn't heard about this. One would think that this would be a huge deal in the news and that people would be trying to figure out how this kid got all these defense contracts. And maybe it is a huge story, but I imagine that it's been overshadowed by election coverage.

To my mind, this story is typical of the way the US has handled its wars abroad during the Bush administration: with incompetence and probably corruption.

The Times article is too long and juicy to find a money graph, but you should read the whole thing in order to get the details about corrupt Albanian officials, a Cypriot shell company, a Swiss middleman, illegal RPGs in the Congo, Czech arms dealers and the young Divoli trying to get leniency in a Miami court hearing the accusations of abuse from his girlfriend by mentioning his role "the fight against terrorism in Iraq."

Move over Nicholas Cage, there's a new Lord of War in town, and he's being underwritten by US tax dollars.

Monday, April 07, 2008

"Allah" vs. "God"

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Expelling Arabs, again

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Feith no more

Oh happy day:

Douglas Feith (LAW ’78) may not have devised an exit strategy for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but according to the former Bush administration official, a group of Georgetown professors apparently had no trouble coming up with an exit strategy for him.

The distinguished practitioner in national security policy in the School of Foreign Service will not be returning to teach at Georgetown next semester after the university chose not to renew his two-year contract.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Bahrain appoints Jewish ambassador to Washington

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

Cambodian or American debt?

I was checking out the State Department's blog today to see if they had said anything there about Israeli ambassador Gillerman's remarks that Carter was a "bigot" and an "enemy of Israel" when I came across this post about Cambodia's war era debt to the US:

Cambodia’s debt to the U.S. totals $162 million, but with arrears factored in could reach approximately $339 million. This debt stems from shipments of U.S. agricultural commodities (e.g., cotton, rice, wheat flour) to Cambodia in the early 1970s -- during the Vietnam War and Cambodia’s Lon Nol era -- and financed with USDA loans. When the country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the regime ceased servicing this debt, and interest accumulated over the next three decades. In February 2006 -- after many years of deadlock followed by a fruitful series of negotiations -- an agreement in principle was reached on the amount of Cambodian principal owed to the U.S.

The Cambodian government, however, remains reluctant to sign a bilateral re-payment agreement due to domestic political obstacles on accepting responsibility for debts incurred by the Lon Nol regime, viewed by many Cambodians as an illegal and illegitimate government. Furthermore, many Cambodian observers believe a good deal of this assistance never arrived. They contend that Cambodia only served as a conduit for moving the USDA-financed commodities to other locations in Asia and that the Cambodian government and the Cambodian people did not benefit from the loans, even if some Cambodian individuals did gain. Finally, some argue that it is fundamentally unfair that Vietnam, which is far better off economically and was America’s major adversary in the war, was granted a form of debt forgiveness from the United States, while an innocent bystander to that conflict—Cambodia—is offered nothing.

The U.S. has on its side the international law principle that governments are generally responsible for the obligations of their predecessors.

Putting aside for a moment the irony of American lectures on "international law principle," there are some other things to consider here. 

Considering the fact that the covert American bombing campaign of Cambodia that killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people was also one of the factors that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who killed literally millions of people, you'd think that we could give Phnom Penh a pass on their paltry $339 million debt, incurred after a pro-American military putsch, by the way.

Given the context in which the debt was incurred, and that more than half of the debt is interest, and since we're currently spending over $400 million every day in Iraq, you'd think we could be a good sport and forgive the Cambodian tab.

On a somewhat related note, This American Life once did an excellent piece about US-Cambodian trade agreements. You might think that such a topic is boring. You'd be wrong. Give it a listen here by clicking on "Full episode."

Friday, April 25, 2008

Netanyahu: 9/11 was good for Israel

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Zambia steps up

Following the problems that a Chinese boat has had trying to unload 77 tons of weapons in Durban, South Africa destined for the regime in Zimbabwe, it seems like it might be going back home after the South African High Court banned the transport of the weapons and ammo and after the remarks of Zambian president and head of the Southern African Development Community:

The impromptu coalition of trade unions, church leaders and organizations trying to stop the delivery gained an important ally on Monday when Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, who heads a bloc of 14 southern African nations, called on other countries in the region not to let the ship dock in their ports.

“He actually said that it would be good for China to play a more useful role in the Zimbabwe crisis than supplying arms,” said a spokesman for the Zambian government, who asked not to be identified. “We don’t want a situation which will escalate the situation in Zimbabwe more than what it is.”

This photo from the NY Times of the Chinese embassy in Pretoria shows that the Chinese may no longer be getting a free pass from the media and other countries for their involvement in developing nations:

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

New online encyclopedia of mass violence

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Science and war

The Middle East Strategy at Harvard is one of those sites that I continue to read even though (nay, because) it makes me want to smash my head against the computer screen. Some of the pieces on they are interesting and intelligent, but some are really, really stupid. Salzman's most recent piece falls into the latter category. I haven't read Salzman's book, but I had a feeling that I might not like it, since his description of it and Stanley Kurtz's review smacked a little bit too much of another Kurtz. I hadn't made up my mind, though, and thought that while Kurtz's review in the Weekly Standard might be oversimplifying the region a little, the book must be more nuanced. But Salzman's most recent piece on MESH makes me not want to read his book at all.

He seems to be arguing that since people in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran think that scholars are spies in the first place, it doesn't do any harm to be one. (Harry Matthews takes this idea to a hilariously genius extreme in his most recent novel.) And besides, those who are against working with the Pentagon are really just a bunch of haters:

It is very common for anthropologists, and foreigners in general, to be regarded as spies, agents, dubious, and perhaps dangerous. So the oft heard plea of researchers—”We can’t ever work for government or people will think all of us all the time are spies and agents”—seems at the very least naive, and, one cannot help thinking, disingenuous.

...For many anthropologists, cooperating with the Pentagon would be cohabiting with the Devil. It would be siding with power, capitalism, whites, men, heterosexuals, and thus with the evil forces in the universe. When it comes to the American military, cultural relativism does not apply.

Personally, I don't know much about Human Terrain Teams, but I do know that I'd have some very ambivalent feelings about working for the government, particularly if it meant working on Iraq. On the one hand, I can understand the sentiment that as long as the US is going to do whatever it wants, a lot of damage control can come in the form of academic advice and research -- damage control that might mean saving lives, both American and Iraqi. On the other hand, I also sympathize with the idea that one wouldn't want to get sullied by having anything at all to do with the whole enterprise. In any case, it's a complicated subject for which I've got very mixed feelings.

But does Salzman really think that those who might have qualms with working at the Pentagon are self-loathing whites who equate the idea with "cohabiting with the Devil"? I mean come on, while I'm sure there are some idiots on both sides of the argument, there really isn't any need for straw men, right? It sounds to me like Salzman has an axe to grind with some of his colleagues.

Prophesying Palestine

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

Israel: enough already

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

American Schadenfreude

When I saw the previews for the new (for me, anyway) American reality television show, American Inventor, I thought that maybe the medium would be used for something more useful than "The World's Most Shocking Videos of People Getting Shot in the Face While Being Ejected From a Moving Car." After watching the show today and seeing two grown men come close to tears, I'm convinced that it's just another opportunity for people to watch their fellow compatriots humiliate themselves on international television in hopes of making a quick buck or earning their 15 minutes of fame.

Chinese arms to Zimbabwe

Here's another example of how China is helping out Africa:

A Chinese ship loaded with armaments for Zimbabwe steamed into the port of Durban this week and set off a political firefight, putting newfound pressure on South Africa — and now China — to reduce support for Zimbabwe’s government as it cracks down on its rivals after a disputed election.

The arms shipment was ordered from China before the elections, but its arrival amid Zimbabwe’s political crisis illuminated deep fissures within South Africa over how to respond, and brought new scrutiny on China at a time when its human rights record is already under fire for suppressing protesters in Tibet and supplying arms to the government of Sudan.

Both China and South Africa have some accounting to do as far as Zimbabwe is concerned. Kudos, though, go to the South African dock workers who refused to unload the shipment. And despite her misuse of the term "genocide," Helen Zille, leader of South Africa's opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, does well to remind us that, as the Guardian puts it, "a consignment of Chinese machetes had prefaced the genocide in Rwanda. After all, 77 tons of weapons can be used to kill a lot of people.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Something's the matter with something

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

New pro-peace Israel lobby

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:
[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."
J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:
I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.
He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:
It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

PJ protest

My man Ben Gilbert has a radio report for PRI's The World about the conflict in Gemmayzeh. For those who haven't kept up with it, the residents of the neighborhood came out a couple of weeks ago in their PJs to protest the loud nightlife that goes on until 2-3 in the morning. The government decided to crack down, closing some 15-20 pubs on the strip for licensing problems and instituting a new curfew: 11:30 during the week and 1 am on weekends.

As it happens, I live in Gemmayzeh and also enjoy its pubs. I empathize with the protesters, because I've also been kept up during the week by drunken idiots, loud music blasting from expensive cars and drag racing valets. I'm not sure how this new ruling will hold up, but I do know that the residents had tried other more friendly means only to be told where they could stick their pillows.

One thing is sure, though: it's comforting to see something political that revolves around actual policies as opposed to sectarianism. Another example is the fight over the minimum wage and a teachers' strike a couple of weeks ago in public universities and public and private primary and secondary schools hoping for higher wages. The one thing, however, that depresses me is that with all the problems Lebanon faces, it seems that the one issue the youth seem fired up about is having to leave the bar an hour or two early. The youth don't seem too concerned about increasing the minimum wage (currently $200 a month), but they get absolutely fired up about pubs closing down.

But I guess no one ever claimed that Beirut had its priorities straight...

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Special reports on Israel

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Israel's designated driver

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Monday, April 14, 2008

In the country of men

I recently picked up a copy of Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. It's a touching story that seems loosely autobiographical about a young boy whose father has been disappeared by the Libyan regime under Gadaffi. I'm only about 85 pages in, but I've been enjoying it a lot, if enjoying is the right word for reading about a child's pain in a repressive police-state.

In any case, I grew curious of Matar and his life, so I started looking him up online and came across this wonderful little piece about his father's abduction and disappearance. I won't extract any of it, because you should read it in its entirety.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Lord of War

I often think that I'm kind of out of the loop as far as American news and politics go. Mostly because I only get CNN International and online blog and newspaper sources here in Beirut. But then again, if I'm really honest with myself, I definitely watch more American television than I did in France and probably more than I ever did in the US. (I have cable here, something I haven't had in about ten years.)

In any case, I missed this story last month about the 21-year-old Miami kid cum arms dealer Efraim Divoli who was supplying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shoddy ammunition to American allies in Afghanistan and Iraq through connections with former Eastern bloc countries and other arms dealers suspected of selling weapons to Africa. The reason I mention being out of touch with American media is that I hadn't heard about this. One would think that this would be a huge deal in the news and that people would be trying to figure out how this kid got all these defense contracts. And maybe it is a huge story, but I imagine that it's been overshadowed by election coverage.

To my mind, this story is typical of the way the US has handled its wars abroad during the Bush administration: with incompetence and probably corruption.

The Times article is too long and juicy to find a money graph, but you should read the whole thing in order to get the details about corrupt Albanian officials, a Cypriot shell company, a Swiss middleman, illegal RPGs in the Congo, Czech arms dealers and the young Divoli trying to get leniency in a Miami court hearing the accusations of abuse from his girlfriend by mentioning his role "the fight against terrorism in Iraq."

Move over Nicholas Cage, there's a new Lord of War in town, and he's being underwritten by US tax dollars.

Monday, April 07, 2008

"Allah" vs. "God"

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Expelling Arabs, again

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Feith no more

Oh happy day:

Douglas Feith (LAW ’78) may not have devised an exit strategy for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but according to the former Bush administration official, a group of Georgetown professors apparently had no trouble coming up with an exit strategy for him.

The distinguished practitioner in national security policy in the School of Foreign Service will not be returning to teach at Georgetown next semester after the university chose not to renew his two-year contract.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Bahrain appoints Jewish ambassador to Washington

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

Cambodian or American debt?

I was checking out the State Department's blog today to see if they had said anything there about Israeli ambassador Gillerman's remarks that Carter was a "bigot" and an "enemy of Israel" when I came across this post about Cambodia's war era debt to the US:

Cambodia’s debt to the U.S. totals $162 million, but with arrears factored in could reach approximately $339 million. This debt stems from shipments of U.S. agricultural commodities (e.g., cotton, rice, wheat flour) to Cambodia in the early 1970s -- during the Vietnam War and Cambodia’s Lon Nol era -- and financed with USDA loans. When the country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the regime ceased servicing this debt, and interest accumulated over the next three decades. In February 2006 -- after many years of deadlock followed by a fruitful series of negotiations -- an agreement in principle was reached on the amount of Cambodian principal owed to the U.S.

The Cambodian government, however, remains reluctant to sign a bilateral re-payment agreement due to domestic political obstacles on accepting responsibility for debts incurred by the Lon Nol regime, viewed by many Cambodians as an illegal and illegitimate government. Furthermore, many Cambodian observers believe a good deal of this assistance never arrived. They contend that Cambodia only served as a conduit for moving the USDA-financed commodities to other locations in Asia and that the Cambodian government and the Cambodian people did not benefit from the loans, even if some Cambodian individuals did gain. Finally, some argue that it is fundamentally unfair that Vietnam, which is far better off economically and was America’s major adversary in the war, was granted a form of debt forgiveness from the United States, while an innocent bystander to that conflict—Cambodia—is offered nothing.

The U.S. has on its side the international law principle that governments are generally responsible for the obligations of their predecessors.

Putting aside for a moment the irony of American lectures on "international law principle," there are some other things to consider here. 

Considering the fact that the covert American bombing campaign of Cambodia that killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people was also one of the factors that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who killed literally millions of people, you'd think that we could give Phnom Penh a pass on their paltry $339 million debt, incurred after a pro-American military putsch, by the way.

Given the context in which the debt was incurred, and that more than half of the debt is interest, and since we're currently spending over $400 million every day in Iraq, you'd think we could be a good sport and forgive the Cambodian tab.

On a somewhat related note, This American Life once did an excellent piece about US-Cambodian trade agreements. You might think that such a topic is boring. You'd be wrong. Give it a listen here by clicking on "Full episode."

Friday, April 25, 2008

Netanyahu: 9/11 was good for Israel

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Zambia steps up

Following the problems that a Chinese boat has had trying to unload 77 tons of weapons in Durban, South Africa destined for the regime in Zimbabwe, it seems like it might be going back home after the South African High Court banned the transport of the weapons and ammo and after the remarks of Zambian president and head of the Southern African Development Community:

The impromptu coalition of trade unions, church leaders and organizations trying to stop the delivery gained an important ally on Monday when Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, who heads a bloc of 14 southern African nations, called on other countries in the region not to let the ship dock in their ports.

“He actually said that it would be good for China to play a more useful role in the Zimbabwe crisis than supplying arms,” said a spokesman for the Zambian government, who asked not to be identified. “We don’t want a situation which will escalate the situation in Zimbabwe more than what it is.”

This photo from the NY Times of the Chinese embassy in Pretoria shows that the Chinese may no longer be getting a free pass from the media and other countries for their involvement in developing nations:

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

New online encyclopedia of mass violence

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Science and war

The Middle East Strategy at Harvard is one of those sites that I continue to read even though (nay, because) it makes me want to smash my head against the computer screen. Some of the pieces on they are interesting and intelligent, but some are really, really stupid. Salzman's most recent piece falls into the latter category. I haven't read Salzman's book, but I had a feeling that I might not like it, since his description of it and Stanley Kurtz's review smacked a little bit too much of another Kurtz. I hadn't made up my mind, though, and thought that while Kurtz's review in the Weekly Standard might be oversimplifying the region a little, the book must be more nuanced. But Salzman's most recent piece on MESH makes me not want to read his book at all.

He seems to be arguing that since people in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran think that scholars are spies in the first place, it doesn't do any harm to be one. (Harry Matthews takes this idea to a hilariously genius extreme in his most recent novel.) And besides, those who are against working with the Pentagon are really just a bunch of haters:

It is very common for anthropologists, and foreigners in general, to be regarded as spies, agents, dubious, and perhaps dangerous. So the oft heard plea of researchers—”We can’t ever work for government or people will think all of us all the time are spies and agents”—seems at the very least naive, and, one cannot help thinking, disingenuous.

...For many anthropologists, cooperating with the Pentagon would be cohabiting with the Devil. It would be siding with power, capitalism, whites, men, heterosexuals, and thus with the evil forces in the universe. When it comes to the American military, cultural relativism does not apply.

Personally, I don't know much about Human Terrain Teams, but I do know that I'd have some very ambivalent feelings about working for the government, particularly if it meant working on Iraq. On the one hand, I can understand the sentiment that as long as the US is going to do whatever it wants, a lot of damage control can come in the form of academic advice and research -- damage control that might mean saving lives, both American and Iraqi. On the other hand, I also sympathize with the idea that one wouldn't want to get sullied by having anything at all to do with the whole enterprise. In any case, it's a complicated subject for which I've got very mixed feelings.

But does Salzman really think that those who might have qualms with working at the Pentagon are self-loathing whites who equate the idea with "cohabiting with the Devil"? I mean come on, while I'm sure there are some idiots on both sides of the argument, there really isn't any need for straw men, right? It sounds to me like Salzman has an axe to grind with some of his colleagues.

Prophesying Palestine

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

Israel: enough already

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

American Schadenfreude

When I saw the previews for the new (for me, anyway) American reality television show, American Inventor, I thought that maybe the medium would be used for something more useful than "The World's Most Shocking Videos of People Getting Shot in the Face While Being Ejected From a Moving Car." After watching the show today and seeing two grown men come close to tears, I'm convinced that it's just another opportunity for people to watch their fellow compatriots humiliate themselves on international television in hopes of making a quick buck or earning their 15 minutes of fame.

Chinese arms to Zimbabwe

Here's another example of how China is helping out Africa:

A Chinese ship loaded with armaments for Zimbabwe steamed into the port of Durban this week and set off a political firefight, putting newfound pressure on South Africa — and now China — to reduce support for Zimbabwe’s government as it cracks down on its rivals after a disputed election.

The arms shipment was ordered from China before the elections, but its arrival amid Zimbabwe’s political crisis illuminated deep fissures within South Africa over how to respond, and brought new scrutiny on China at a time when its human rights record is already under fire for suppressing protesters in Tibet and supplying arms to the government of Sudan.

Both China and South Africa have some accounting to do as far as Zimbabwe is concerned. Kudos, though, go to the South African dock workers who refused to unload the shipment. And despite her misuse of the term "genocide," Helen Zille, leader of South Africa's opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, does well to remind us that, as the Guardian puts it, "a consignment of Chinese machetes had prefaced the genocide in Rwanda. After all, 77 tons of weapons can be used to kill a lot of people.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Something's the matter with something

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

New pro-peace Israel lobby

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:
[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."
J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:
I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.
He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:
It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

PJ protest

My man Ben Gilbert has a radio report for PRI's The World about the conflict in Gemmayzeh. For those who haven't kept up with it, the residents of the neighborhood came out a couple of weeks ago in their PJs to protest the loud nightlife that goes on until 2-3 in the morning. The government decided to crack down, closing some 15-20 pubs on the strip for licensing problems and instituting a new curfew: 11:30 during the week and 1 am on weekends.

As it happens, I live in Gemmayzeh and also enjoy its pubs. I empathize with the protesters, because I've also been kept up during the week by drunken idiots, loud music blasting from expensive cars and drag racing valets. I'm not sure how this new ruling will hold up, but I do know that the residents had tried other more friendly means only to be told where they could stick their pillows.

One thing is sure, though: it's comforting to see something political that revolves around actual policies as opposed to sectarianism. Another example is the fight over the minimum wage and a teachers' strike a couple of weeks ago in public universities and public and private primary and secondary schools hoping for higher wages. The one thing, however, that depresses me is that with all the problems Lebanon faces, it seems that the one issue the youth seem fired up about is having to leave the bar an hour or two early. The youth don't seem too concerned about increasing the minimum wage (currently $200 a month), but they get absolutely fired up about pubs closing down.

But I guess no one ever claimed that Beirut had its priorities straight...

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Special reports on Israel

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Israel's designated driver

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Monday, April 14, 2008

In the country of men

I recently picked up a copy of Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. It's a touching story that seems loosely autobiographical about a young boy whose father has been disappeared by the Libyan regime under Gadaffi. I'm only about 85 pages in, but I've been enjoying it a lot, if enjoying is the right word for reading about a child's pain in a repressive police-state.

In any case, I grew curious of Matar and his life, so I started looking him up online and came across this wonderful little piece about his father's abduction and disappearance. I won't extract any of it, because you should read it in its entirety.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Lord of War

I often think that I'm kind of out of the loop as far as American news and politics go. Mostly because I only get CNN International and online blog and newspaper sources here in Beirut. But then again, if I'm really honest with myself, I definitely watch more American television than I did in France and probably more than I ever did in the US. (I have cable here, something I haven't had in about ten years.)

In any case, I missed this story last month about the 21-year-old Miami kid cum arms dealer Efraim Divoli who was supplying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shoddy ammunition to American allies in Afghanistan and Iraq through connections with former Eastern bloc countries and other arms dealers suspected of selling weapons to Africa. The reason I mention being out of touch with American media is that I hadn't heard about this. One would think that this would be a huge deal in the news and that people would be trying to figure out how this kid got all these defense contracts. And maybe it is a huge story, but I imagine that it's been overshadowed by election coverage.

To my mind, this story is typical of the way the US has handled its wars abroad during the Bush administration: with incompetence and probably corruption.

The Times article is too long and juicy to find a money graph, but you should read the whole thing in order to get the details about corrupt Albanian officials, a Cypriot shell company, a Swiss middleman, illegal RPGs in the Congo, Czech arms dealers and the young Divoli trying to get leniency in a Miami court hearing the accusations of abuse from his girlfriend by mentioning his role "the fight against terrorism in Iraq."

Move over Nicholas Cage, there's a new Lord of War in town, and he's being underwritten by US tax dollars.

Monday, April 07, 2008

"Allah" vs. "God"

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Expelling Arabs, again

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Feith no more

Oh happy day:

Douglas Feith (LAW ’78) may not have devised an exit strategy for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but according to the former Bush administration official, a group of Georgetown professors apparently had no trouble coming up with an exit strategy for him.

The distinguished practitioner in national security policy in the School of Foreign Service will not be returning to teach at Georgetown next semester after the university chose not to renew his two-year contract.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Bahrain appoints Jewish ambassador to Washington

I've long thought that morally and politically, it would be a great move if the Lebanese government were to invite Lebanese Jews who left during the civil war to Europe and America to come back. And if Beirut were really clever, it would appoint a Lebanese Jew to a ministerial position or as an ambassador to the UN or the US. This would help turn the Lebanese-Israeli conflict into a national one instead of a religious one. In 2006, it would have been a tremendous PR move to have a Jewish minister criticizing the systematic destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure.

In this context, Bahrain has made a really smart move:

A Jewish woman, Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, is set to become Bahrain's ambassador to Washington, sources close to diplomats told Gulf News on Thursday.

"Huda is Bahrain's nominee for the post and this is of course very good news for Bahrain's deep-rooted values of tolerance and openness," Faisal Fouladh, a Shura Council representative, and Western diplomats said.

Huda, a businesswoman, was the first Jewish woman to sit in the Shura Council, the 40-member upper house of the bicameral legislature, replacing her uncle. A Christian woman, Alice Samaan, also sits on the council which has 11 women, compared with only one woman MP, Lateefa Al Gaood, in the 40-member lower house.

Cambodian or American debt?

I was checking out the State Department's blog today to see if they had said anything there about Israeli ambassador Gillerman's remarks that Carter was a "bigot" and an "enemy of Israel" when I came across this post about Cambodia's war era debt to the US:

Cambodia’s debt to the U.S. totals $162 million, but with arrears factored in could reach approximately $339 million. This debt stems from shipments of U.S. agricultural commodities (e.g., cotton, rice, wheat flour) to Cambodia in the early 1970s -- during the Vietnam War and Cambodia’s Lon Nol era -- and financed with USDA loans. When the country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, the regime ceased servicing this debt, and interest accumulated over the next three decades. In February 2006 -- after many years of deadlock followed by a fruitful series of negotiations -- an agreement in principle was reached on the amount of Cambodian principal owed to the U.S.

The Cambodian government, however, remains reluctant to sign a bilateral re-payment agreement due to domestic political obstacles on accepting responsibility for debts incurred by the Lon Nol regime, viewed by many Cambodians as an illegal and illegitimate government. Furthermore, many Cambodian observers believe a good deal of this assistance never arrived. They contend that Cambodia only served as a conduit for moving the USDA-financed commodities to other locations in Asia and that the Cambodian government and the Cambodian people did not benefit from the loans, even if some Cambodian individuals did gain. Finally, some argue that it is fundamentally unfair that Vietnam, which is far better off economically and was America’s major adversary in the war, was granted a form of debt forgiveness from the United States, while an innocent bystander to that conflict—Cambodia—is offered nothing.

The U.S. has on its side the international law principle that governments are generally responsible for the obligations of their predecessors.

Putting aside for a moment the irony of American lectures on "international law principle," there are some other things to consider here. 

Considering the fact that the covert American bombing campaign of Cambodia that killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people was also one of the factors that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who killed literally millions of people, you'd think that we could give Phnom Penh a pass on their paltry $339 million debt, incurred after a pro-American military putsch, by the way.

Given the context in which the debt was incurred, and that more than half of the debt is interest, and since we're currently spending over $400 million every day in Iraq, you'd think we could be a good sport and forgive the Cambodian tab.

On a somewhat related note, This American Life once did an excellent piece about US-Cambodian trade agreements. You might think that such a topic is boring. You'd be wrong. Give it a listen here by clicking on "Full episode."

Friday, April 25, 2008

Netanyahu: 9/11 was good for Israel

(Via TPM) Ha'aretz reports Benjamin Netanyahu, hawkish Israeli "ally" of the US, as saying that 9/11 was good for Israel:

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

This actually mirrors comments made by Netanyahu on the day of the attacks:

Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, ''It's very good.'' Then he edited himself: ''Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.'' He predicted that the attack would ''strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.''

With friends like these, right?

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Zambia steps up

Following the problems that a Chinese boat has had trying to unload 77 tons of weapons in Durban, South Africa destined for the regime in Zimbabwe, it seems like it might be going back home after the South African High Court banned the transport of the weapons and ammo and after the remarks of Zambian president and head of the Southern African Development Community:

The impromptu coalition of trade unions, church leaders and organizations trying to stop the delivery gained an important ally on Monday when Levy Mwanawasa, the president of Zambia, who heads a bloc of 14 southern African nations, called on other countries in the region not to let the ship dock in their ports.

“He actually said that it would be good for China to play a more useful role in the Zimbabwe crisis than supplying arms,” said a spokesman for the Zambian government, who asked not to be identified. “We don’t want a situation which will escalate the situation in Zimbabwe more than what it is.”

This photo from the NY Times of the Chinese embassy in Pretoria shows that the Chinese may no longer be getting a free pass from the media and other countries for their involvement in developing nations:

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

New online encyclopedia of mass violence

The French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, along with the French research institution, CNRS and Sciences-Po, have begun an Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence with the help of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. The project is under the direction of Jacques Sémelin, whose 2005 book on genocide (which I have but have yet to read) has recently been translated into English and published by Columbia.

The site's still pretty bare bones for the moment, but it's designed to provide information of mass violence based chronologically and geographically, so when it's done, you'll be able to click on any country you want to get information about mass violence in that country. There's also an encyclopedia of terms that looks to be pretty complete.

Strangely enough, for a French initiative, it's only available in English for the moment. The international advisory board includes scholars like Omer Bartov, Samantha Power, Frank Chalk, Antonio Cassesse, Ben Kiernen, René Lemarchand, William Schabas and Eric Weitz, just to name a few.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Science and war

The Middle East Strategy at Harvard is one of those sites that I continue to read even though (nay, because) it makes me want to smash my head against the computer screen. Some of the pieces on they are interesting and intelligent, but some are really, really stupid. Salzman's most recent piece falls into the latter category. I haven't read Salzman's book, but I had a feeling that I might not like it, since his description of it and Stanley Kurtz's review smacked a little bit too much of another Kurtz. I hadn't made up my mind, though, and thought that while Kurtz's review in the Weekly Standard might be oversimplifying the region a little, the book must be more nuanced. But Salzman's most recent piece on MESH makes me not want to read his book at all.

He seems to be arguing that since people in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran think that scholars are spies in the first place, it doesn't do any harm to be one. (Harry Matthews takes this idea to a hilariously genius extreme in his most recent novel.) And besides, those who are against working with the Pentagon are really just a bunch of haters:

It is very common for anthropologists, and foreigners in general, to be regarded as spies, agents, dubious, and perhaps dangerous. So the oft heard plea of researchers—”We can’t ever work for government or people will think all of us all the time are spies and agents”—seems at the very least naive, and, one cannot help thinking, disingenuous.

...For many anthropologists, cooperating with the Pentagon would be cohabiting with the Devil. It would be siding with power, capitalism, whites, men, heterosexuals, and thus with the evil forces in the universe. When it comes to the American military, cultural relativism does not apply.

Personally, I don't know much about Human Terrain Teams, but I do know that I'd have some very ambivalent feelings about working for the government, particularly if it meant working on Iraq. On the one hand, I can understand the sentiment that as long as the US is going to do whatever it wants, a lot of damage control can come in the form of academic advice and research -- damage control that might mean saving lives, both American and Iraqi. On the other hand, I also sympathize with the idea that one wouldn't want to get sullied by having anything at all to do with the whole enterprise. In any case, it's a complicated subject for which I've got very mixed feelings.

But does Salzman really think that those who might have qualms with working at the Pentagon are self-loathing whites who equate the idea with "cohabiting with the Devil"? I mean come on, while I'm sure there are some idiots on both sides of the argument, there really isn't any need for straw men, right? It sounds to me like Salzman has an axe to grind with some of his colleagues.

Prophesying Palestine

I'm not generally fond of Jeffery Goldberg's work when it comes to the Middle East, so I was pretty skeptical about the Atlantic's big Israel story this week. (I haven't read it yet, so I'll reserve judgment until then.)  One thing that's very interesting though, is that Goldman has dug up some old pieces on Palestine and Zionism that appeared in the Atlantic.

So far, I've only had the time to read William Ernest Hocking's 1930 piece, Palestine: An Impasse? You can tell that these old pieces have been scanned, because there are a few mistakes with indentations, quotes and even a couple of letters ('d' for 'cl'), but this article really warrants being read. Here are a couple of meaty extracts to whet your appetite:

If we in America, Jews and Gentiles, could see things as they are in Palestine, we should recognize as axiomatic three things: (1) That nothing like the full plan of Zionism can be realized without political pressure backed by military force; (2) that such pressure and force imply an injustice which is inconsistent with the ethical sense of Zionism, undermining both its sincerity and its claim; (3) that every increase of pressure now meets with increasingly determined Arab resistance, within and beyond Palestine. Hence the question which political Zionism must answer is whether or not it proposes to-day, as in ancient times, to assert its place in Palestine by aid of the sword.

To many Arabs, the Balfour Declaration, in spite of its careful safeguarding of all existing civil and religious rights, is understood as obliging Great Britain to 'do something' for the Jews. Many Zionists have the same conception. And the Arab mind inquires: What can Great Britain now do for Zionism which is not against the Arabs? What favor can it show which is not favoritism? If the question is capable of an answer, it needs to be a dear answer, plainly spoken. Great Britain is serving Zionism. It is doing so not only by maintaining security and order in the land (with some lapses), but by furnishing the administrative staff without which no such settlement would have been possible, and by creating new opportunities. Under the older Ottoman regime, foreign Jews were at a disadvantage: they—like other foreigners—could acquire land only in the name of Ottoman subjects. These disabilities are now removed; as is often said, Jews are now in Palestine by right, not on sufferance. Why press for more than this equitable opening, when more means a reversed injustice? The rural and industrial centres already founded need no more than an equal legal status for their normal peaceful development. The great Hebrew University on Mount Scopus needs no more than this on the legal side to realize its destiny. And this university, be it said, under the prophetic leadership of Dr. Judah Magnes, is the symbol of all that is best in Zionism. For the true and attainable Zion is the Zion of culture and faith, not the Zion of political nationalism.

It is indeed a bitter thing to the sincere Zionist that his ideal community cannot have in that unique spot of earth its perfect body as well as its perfect soul. What I have to say, I say with deep personal regret. For I went to Palestine seized with the idea of Zionism and warmed by the ardor of Jewish friends to whom this vision is the breath of life, prepared to believe all things possible. I came away saddened, seeing that to strive for the perfect body, as things now are, can only mean the loss of soul and body alike. To pursue any campaign for a more vigorous fulfillment of 'the British promise,' to force cantonization on Palestine and so to repeat the standing grievance of divided Syria, to press for any further favor of the state, is to work blindly toward another bloody struggle involving first the new settlements, then Great Britain, then no one knows what wider area. In this we have been assuming that on the issue of Jewish dominance the Arab mind is irreconcilable. Is this true?

The answer lies partly in the fact that for the Arab, whose local attachments are peculiarly strong, Palestine, beside being his home, is also a holy land. It lies partly in the fact that to his mind Palestine is not a separate province: it is an integral part of Syria, with Damascus as its natural trading and cultural capital, while Syria is an integral part of greater Arabia. In his dream of a free Arab empire, Damascus may have served as capital for the whole; or Syria, together with Palestine, may have constituted an autonomous province. In any case, the new Arabia through Palestine reached the western sea; while Palestine as a part of Syria became a partner in that new and proud political enterprise. The expulsion of Feisal from Damascus by the French was a cruel mutilation of this dream. The mandate for Palestine excludes it from the imagined kingdom and shuts that kingdom from the Mediterranean. Even so, political arrangements may be unmade. But village settlements are a more final obstacle—they build a human barrier and put an end to hope. The progress of Zionist colonization thus becomes for the Arab national outlook a culminating stroke in a series of breaches of faith.

...The two enemies of peace in the Holy Land are fanaticism and fear. The movement of the modern spirit within all creeds is having for one of its beneficent effects the gradual melting of fanaticism without argument. Fixed and antagonistic dogmas are transforming themselves into alternative sets of symbols which can dwell together. But fanaticism is kept alive and sharpened by fear; clashes at the Wailing Wall are symptoms of political rather than religious apprehension. These fears of displacement, of national thwarting, must be put to rest; and they can only be quieted by unequivocal public commitments, renouncing the intention to dominate and to exclude. If there is to be peace within the gates of Jerusalem, the first condition, as I see it, is that Zionism publicly disavow its unholy alliance with Western military power, and therewith (following the lead of a recent resolution within the Jewish Agency) its purpose to dominate in Palestine.

Hocking's solution is finally a binational, or more accurately a multi-religious, state under the mandate of Britain, a solution that is obviously out the question as far as British rule is concerned. Nonetheless, he brings up a fundamental conflict between the Zionist body and the Zionist soul, the latter being crushed by what it would take (has taken) to create a Jewish state -- something Avraham Burg's new book is about.

I'm a little uneasy with the idea he has of keeping Palestine technologically "backward" so as to keep Palestine as a multi-religious spiritual land above all else. But that's a small detail in an otherwise insightful analysis of the situation. To my mind, he really hits the nail on the head when he points out the violent and unjust conditions that would be necessary to create a Jewish majority in Palestine.

Goldberg, for his part claims that Hocking is arguing for "an exclusive Arab right to the territory of Palestine," which is silly when you read the piece. What he does do is analyze the Jewish right to Palestine:

This claim of right, based on a mission which it is felt a religious disloyalty to compromise, cannot be shaken in the Jewish mind by analogies from history or international law. To urge that the same reasoning which leads the Jew to claim Palestine after eighteen hundred years would give the Arab a right to Spain after seven hundred years is quite sound so far as it appeals to the ordinary flux of historic conquest and possession; but it wholly misses the sense of this 'organic indissoluble connection,' this right of destiny. Such a right has the force of a religious conviction for those who have that vision; it has the weakness of subjectivism for those who do not share it.

He, correctly, I think, calls the Jewish right to Palestine a subjective one for those who do not believe in God's covenant with the Jewish people and an ineluctable truth for those who do.

Israel: enough already

On a completely different note, I know that this blog has been focusing on Israel a lot lately. This reminds me of a woman whom I used to date who was doing her doctoral thesis on Jewish communities in the Middle East. She told me that if I was going to be with her, I'd have to deal with the three following things: "1. I am insanely jealous; 2. I smoke in bed; and 3. I'm obsessed with the Jews."

So at the risk of sounding like I'm obsessed with Israel, I'd just like to say in my defense that with the upcoming 60th anniversary of Israel's independence and the Nakba, there's plenty of material to comment on these days.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, I just looked at my stat log, and Israel is where a good part of my hits come from, after the US, France and Lebanon. So shalom, dear readers, and happy passover!

American Schadenfreude

When I saw the previews for the new (for me, anyway) American reality television show, American Inventor, I thought that maybe the medium would be used for something more useful than "The World's Most Shocking Videos of People Getting Shot in the Face While Being Ejected From a Moving Car." After watching the show today and seeing two grown men come close to tears, I'm convinced that it's just another opportunity for people to watch their fellow compatriots humiliate themselves on international television in hopes of making a quick buck or earning their 15 minutes of fame.

Chinese arms to Zimbabwe

Here's another example of how China is helping out Africa:

A Chinese ship loaded with armaments for Zimbabwe steamed into the port of Durban this week and set off a political firefight, putting newfound pressure on South Africa — and now China — to reduce support for Zimbabwe’s government as it cracks down on its rivals after a disputed election.

The arms shipment was ordered from China before the elections, but its arrival amid Zimbabwe’s political crisis illuminated deep fissures within South Africa over how to respond, and brought new scrutiny on China at a time when its human rights record is already under fire for suppressing protesters in Tibet and supplying arms to the government of Sudan.

Both China and South Africa have some accounting to do as far as Zimbabwe is concerned. Kudos, though, go to the South African dock workers who refused to unload the shipment. And despite her misuse of the term "genocide," Helen Zille, leader of South Africa's opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, does well to remind us that, as the Guardian puts it, "a consignment of Chinese machetes had prefaced the genocide in Rwanda. After all, 77 tons of weapons can be used to kill a lot of people.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Something's the matter with something

When I read this report in Ha'aretz, it was hard for me to believe what I was reading:

Driving along the road from Be'er Sheva to Arad, shortly before the turn toward Darijat, you can see the unrecognized Bedouin village that was home to Manhash al-Baniyat, the Israeli soldier who was killed yesterday in a clash with Palestinian gunmen near the Gaza Strip border, across from Kibbutz Be'eri.

In order to reach the village, you have to travel for several hundred meters along a dirt path, until you come to a few houses, built close together. One of these is the house Manhash built for himself in preparation for his marriage, next month. Since building permits are not granted to Bedouin, he had no choice but to build the house illegally. A demolition order has already been issued. The only water pipe leading to the village is also disconnected. Yesterday, a mourners' tent was added to the already harsh landscape, erected by the army. Now that the army's there, at least there's water, someone remarked half-jokingly.

There are a lot of Israelis or supporters of Israel who say that since Palestinians with Israeli citizenship aren't treated as badly as those in the occupied territories, Israel couldn't possibly be an apartheid state. If that's the case, then I'm not sure how we account for al-Baniyat, who died for the state that's bulldozing his home. His sister puts it well when she says, "Sometimes you feel like belonging to the state, but sometimes you get fed up because you build a house and they come and destroy it."

It just so happens that I read a piece by Roger Cohen today that mentions a video of a black woman during the civil rights movement who sums up the situation perfectly: "If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me."

New pro-peace Israel lobby

In case you haven't heard, there's a new Israel lobby in town. It's called J-Street and is supposed to be a progressive alternative to the hawkish pro-Likud lobby that is AIPAC et al. Spencer Ackerman has a piece about how the new group wants to reframe the Israel debate:
[Co-founder Daniel] Levy, though a long-time peace negotiator, is eager to debate what it means to be pro-Israel, and draws a comparison between AIPAC and the hard-liners who ended up compromising the Jewish future millennia ago. "We'll say, 'Zealots like you led to the destruction of previous Jewish commonwealths,'" Levy said. "We're not going to be intimidated."
J-Street gives us some examples of the current militant rhetoric surrounding Israel these days and asks if that's what it truly means to be pro-Israel and, more to the point, if these voices truly speak for American Jews:


Ezra Klein weighs in to talk about his experience of being alienated at his synagogue:
I can't recall now if it was the Jenin incursions or the riots at the Temple Mount that set my rabbi off. Or perhaps he was just enraged by one of the obscure convulsions of violence that occur with such regularity as to virtually mark time in the Middle East. What punctures the haze of memory is when he transitioned from sports to politics, telling the assembled alumni that the Jews would be within their rights to forcibly deport and displace the entire Palestinian population. I objected, and we began shouting at each other as my classmates looked on in annoyance. I stormed from the room and it was the last time I set foot in that temple. In my temple.
He later goes on to talk about the link between Judaism and human rights and how, to his mind, this is "no time for silence."

On the other side of the aisle, of course, things are different. In truly predictable style, our favorite philistine Noah Pollak (who once visited "Upper Galilee") is already slamming J-Street. It seems that a pro-peace lobby is just too much to stomach for Pollak, so he makes a big deal of the fact that Avraham Burg is "near the top of its list of [Israeli] supporters." (Note to Pollak, when a list is in alphabetical order, people whose names begin with the letter B will usually be "near the top.") He paints Burg as some sort of a radical but fails to mention that he used to be the Diaspora advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, chairman of the Jewish Agency, speaker of the Knesset and chair of the World Zionist Organization.

I'm not going to say that Avraham Burg isn't polemical in Israel; he is, and if you're interested in reading his opinions for yourself, Ha'aretz published a fascinating interview with him. But Pollak prefers to brandish a single controversial supporter of J-Street (without even mentioning his former role in the Israeli establishment) and build a strawman in an attempt to discredit an entire movement rather than, say, actually debate the issue on the merits. But that's par for the course for Pollak and his ilk. And by the by, TNR is already preparing a hit piece against J-Street, according to Ackerman.

To my mind, a new lobby will give progressive Jews a chance to have a voice in the Israel/Palestine debate and have a tangible (although much less so than AIPAC) effect on Middle East policy. It seems that, like the Arabs, there's an aversion to public dissension in the ranks, a certain disgust at airing the community's dirty laundry in public. J-Street might just be overcoming this fear to become an avenue for progressive American Jews to have a say in what's being done and said in their name by the likes of AIPAC and Alan Dershowitz.

UPDATE: In another post attacking J-Street, the hilariously yet unintentionally ironic Pollak has this to say:
It seems to me that the J Streeters are never going to be able to escape the fact that, sitting in Washington, they are advocating policies for Israel that are overwhelmingly unpopular among Israelis — and attempting to brand this paternalism as "pro-Israel."

PJ protest

My man Ben Gilbert has a radio report for PRI's The World about the conflict in Gemmayzeh. For those who haven't kept up with it, the residents of the neighborhood came out a couple of weeks ago in their PJs to protest the loud nightlife that goes on until 2-3 in the morning. The government decided to crack down, closing some 15-20 pubs on the strip for licensing problems and instituting a new curfew: 11:30 during the week and 1 am on weekends.

As it happens, I live in Gemmayzeh and also enjoy its pubs. I empathize with the protesters, because I've also been kept up during the week by drunken idiots, loud music blasting from expensive cars and drag racing valets. I'm not sure how this new ruling will hold up, but I do know that the residents had tried other more friendly means only to be told where they could stick their pillows.

One thing is sure, though: it's comforting to see something political that revolves around actual policies as opposed to sectarianism. Another example is the fight over the minimum wage and a teachers' strike a couple of weeks ago in public universities and public and private primary and secondary schools hoping for higher wages. The one thing, however, that depresses me is that with all the problems Lebanon faces, it seems that the one issue the youth seem fired up about is having to leave the bar an hour or two early. The youth don't seem too concerned about increasing the minimum wage (currently $200 a month), but they get absolutely fired up about pubs closing down.

But I guess no one ever claimed that Beirut had its priorities straight...

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Special reports on Israel

The Economist has a special report on Israel on the occasion of its 60th year. I've been skipping through the various sections of it, and so far it seems fairly interesting, although nowhere near as interesting as Le Monde Diplo's Manière de voir on the subject: "Histoires d’Israël." The latter is put together by Dominique Vidal and includes articles by Edward Said, Avraham Burg, Tom Segev, Samir Kassir, Shimon Peres, Alain Gresh, Amira Hass, and the list goes on.

I'll be reading the Economist report online and the Manière de voir in print - both, I'll add, at home, because while I'm sometimes fond of creating a stink, I'm not sure I've got the balls to bring a blue and white magazine with Israel printed on the front cover to my local café.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Israel's designated driver

If this Reuters report is accurate, then the Israelis have got some explaining to do:

JERUSALEM, April 14 (Reuters) - Israeli leaders shunned former U.S. President Jimmy Carter during a visit because of his plans to meet Hamas and Israel's secret service declined to assist U.S. agents guarding him, U.S. sources said on Monday.

"They're not getting support from local security," one of the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

An American source described as "unprecedented" the lack of Shin Bet cooperation with the U.S. Secret Service, which protects all current and former U.S. presidents, as well as Israeli leaders when they visit the United States.

...American sources close to the matter said the Shin Bet, which helps protect visiting dignitaries and is overseen by Olmert's office, declined to meet the head of Carter's Secret Service detail or provide his team with assistance as is customary during such visits.

Jimmy Carter has the thankless job of being the best friend Israel's ever had. He reminds me of those public service/beer commercials in which some drunken asshole keeps trying to crawl into his truck but his buddy refuses to give him his keys back: Friends don't let friends drink and drive.

The Israelis are spitting on the man who is responsible for brokering the peace deal with Egypt and is now telling Israel some truths that it doesn't want to hear. I suppose it's normal to expect the Israelis to be unhappy about being told not to drive, but I somehow never expected Israeli foolishness to go so far as to refuse to protect Carter.

What would people say if the secret service refused to protect and Barack Obama refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu during a future trip to the US? Or better yet, imagine if the Egyptian or Pakistani governments refused to provide security for a former US president. Americans would be up in arms, and it would be a bipartisan contest to see who could yell the loudest for suspending aid to Cairo or Islamabad. This should be a huge scandal in the US, but if I know America at all, reactions will range from disgusted sighs to total silence to rants that Carter is an antisemite and is getting the treatment he deserves.

Monday, April 14, 2008

In the country of men

I recently picked up a copy of Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. It's a touching story that seems loosely autobiographical about a young boy whose father has been disappeared by the Libyan regime under Gadaffi. I'm only about 85 pages in, but I've been enjoying it a lot, if enjoying is the right word for reading about a child's pain in a repressive police-state.

In any case, I grew curious of Matar and his life, so I started looking him up online and came across this wonderful little piece about his father's abduction and disappearance. I won't extract any of it, because you should read it in its entirety.

Friday, April 11, 2008

Lord of War

I often think that I'm kind of out of the loop as far as American news and politics go. Mostly because I only get CNN International and online blog and newspaper sources here in Beirut. But then again, if I'm really honest with myself, I definitely watch more American television than I did in France and probably more than I ever did in the US. (I have cable here, something I haven't had in about ten years.)

In any case, I missed this story last month about the 21-year-old Miami kid cum arms dealer Efraim Divoli who was supplying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shoddy ammunition to American allies in Afghanistan and Iraq through connections with former Eastern bloc countries and other arms dealers suspected of selling weapons to Africa. The reason I mention being out of touch with American media is that I hadn't heard about this. One would think that this would be a huge deal in the news and that people would be trying to figure out how this kid got all these defense contracts. And maybe it is a huge story, but I imagine that it's been overshadowed by election coverage.

To my mind, this story is typical of the way the US has handled its wars abroad during the Bush administration: with incompetence and probably corruption.

The Times article is too long and juicy to find a money graph, but you should read the whole thing in order to get the details about corrupt Albanian officials, a Cypriot shell company, a Swiss middleman, illegal RPGs in the Congo, Czech arms dealers and the young Divoli trying to get leniency in a Miami court hearing the accusations of abuse from his girlfriend by mentioning his role "the fight against terrorism in Iraq."

Move over Nicholas Cage, there's a new Lord of War in town, and he's being underwritten by US tax dollars.

Monday, April 07, 2008

"Allah" vs. "God"

I've written before about the western media's use of Allah:

Every time there's a suicide bombing or some sort of an anti-American rally being reported on, the press seems to translate most everything, with the glaring exception of the word Allah (oftentimes in the phrase Allahu Akbar).

It seems like an innocuous omission on the surface, but I'm convinced that it has fairly sizeable consequences. I imagine the average evangelical Christian from Wisconsin hearing the word Allah and immediately conjuring up pictures of bearded and Turban-clad terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs or improvised explosive devices. "Their god is not my God," the Midwesterner thinks to himself. However, anyone who knows even a smidgen of Arabic knows that Arabophone Jews, Muslims and Christians all use the name Allah. Furthermore, on a theological level, we know that each of these faiths submits to the same God of Abraham: the details may differ, but in the end, they're all praying to the same god.

Yesterday, though, the Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine had very similar things to say on the op-ed page of the LA Times:

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word "Allah" to talk about any other religion. The two words, "God" and "Allah," do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

...We never say the French pray to Dieu, or Mexicans pray to Dios. Having Allah be different from God implies that Muslims pray to a special deity. It classifies Muslims as the Other. Separating Allah from God, we only see a vengeful, alarming deity, one responsible for those frightful fatwas and ghastly jihads -- rarely the compassionate God. The opening line of every chapter in the Koran is "Bi Ism Allah, Al Rahman, Al Rahim": In the name of God, the Gracious, the Merciful. In the name of Allah. One and the same.

...In these troubled times, creating more differences, further parsing so to speak, is troubling, even dangerous. I suggest we either not use the word Allah or, better yet, use it in a non-Muslim context.

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

One nation under Allah?

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Expelling Arabs, again

Last week McClatchey had an important story about the fate of Bedouins in Israel. There is a lot of talk about how Israel is a beacon for democracy in the Middle East, and often even those who admit that the Jewish state's founding myths are untrue and protest the occupation are hesitant to admit that there are many Israeli citizens who are treated unequally by the law. The Bedouins are a case in point. The government is destroying their homes and trying to remove them from their land to make room for Jewish citizens. In any other context, this would be called ethnic cleansing:

Israeli leaders have a $3.6 billion plan to transform the vast Negev desert into prospering Jewish communities. Finesh and 80,000 other Bedouin say the land is theirs, however.

As Israel presses ahead with the development, a Human Rights Watch report released Monday concludes that it's using "discriminatory, exclusionary and punitive" policies to push the aside the Bedouin, who are descendants of Arab tribes that once roamed the Negev.

"Israeli policies have created a situation whereby tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens in the Negev have little or no alternative but to live in ramshackle villages and build illegally in order to meet their most basic shelter needs," the report says.

Since Israel was founded nearly 60 years ago, its leaders have been wrestling with what to do with its small Bedouin minority, now climbing above 160,000.

Israel has pushed about half the Bedouin into sterile, depressed new desert towns, demolished thousands of illegal shanties and transformed their sheep-grazing pastures into dangerous military zones.

About 80,000 Bedouin living in more than three dozen unauthorized shantytowns and villages refuse to move, even though they receive no electricity or water from Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up a commission to come up with innovative ways to handle the holdouts.

"The government of Israel understands that it needs to solve the problem of the Bedouin," said Yehuda Bachar, the director general of a newly established government department for Bedouin affairs. "If it is not solved now, it will not be solved for many years."

The intent behind the plans is clear: Israeli leaders want to move the Arab residents to make way for Jewish developments.

The Israeli government is looking to spend $3.6 billion over the next seven years to lure more Jewish residents to the Negev, a triangular desert that makes up more than half of the nation's land.

"The only chance for the development of the Negev is that we bring more Jews," said Shmuel Rifman, the mayor of the local Ramat Negev Regional Council, who supports a trickle-down theory when it comes to the Bedouin.