the human province

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.

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."

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."

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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."

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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."

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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."

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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."

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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."

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.