the human province

Makdisi had an op-ed in the LA Times last March (which I didn't see until today) about recognizing Israel's right to exist. Saree Makdisi is Edward Said's nephew, which I believe makes him Jean Said Makdisi's son. In any case, the UCLA professor makes the point that expecting Palestinians to recognize Israel's "right to exist" is absurd:

First, the formal diplomatic language of "recognition" is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to "recognize" a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).

Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to "recognize?" Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, "Israel" is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of "Israel"?

For that matter, why should the Palestinians recognize an Israel that refuses to accept international law, submit to U.N. resolutions or readmit the Palestinians wrongfully expelled from their homes in 1948 and barred from returning ever since?

If none of these questions are easy to answer, why are such demands being made of the Palestinians? And why is nothing demanded of Israel in turn?

I came across this article in the comments section (which I normally stay away from, as it's generally populated by nutbags of the anti-Semitic and über-Zionist Arab-hating varieties) of a post by Phil Weiss on the same topic. He quotes Chomsky, who responded to Weiss's question about recognizing Israel's right to exist:

No state demands a 'right to exist,' nor is any such right accorded to any state, nor should it be.  Mexico recognizes the US, but not its 'right to exist' sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by aggression.  The same generalizes.

To my knowledge, the concept 'right to exist' was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) formally recognized Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized borders (citing the wording of UN 242).  It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are.  They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of their dispossession -- and the point generalizes, as noted, to just about every state; maybe not Andorra.

This is a question that I've often thought about and have been hesitant to comment on, even with some friends, because of the tar and feathering that automatically comes about as soon as someone questions Israel's right to exist. I'll write a longer piece, with my own thoughts on the matter, this weekend, but in the meantime, this point made by Makdisi seems particularly relevant to me:

Israel wants the Palestinians, half of whom were driven from their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created in 1948, to recognize not merely that it exists (which is undeniable) but that it is "right" that it exists — that it was right for them to have been dispossessed of their homes, their property and their livelihoods so that a Jewish state could be created on their land. The Palestinians are not the world's first dispossessed people, but they are the first to be asked to legitimize what happened to them.

According to Al Jazeera, al-Megrahi, the Libyan spook convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has been granted an appeal by the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

For a more detailed discussion of this case and of the interesting piece in the London Review about it, see this post. 

The London Review has a summary piece about China's new love affair with Africa. If you've been keeping up with Chinese affairs on the continent, there probably won't be much new information in this piece, but it's a nice summary, and it's helpful to have it all in one piece. It's a subscription only article, but the main gist is summed up here:

In all likelihood China will be neither a saviour nor a destroyer. Some African opinion leaders have realised that it does not really stand for a different model. ‘Non-interference’ is not a value so much as a thin shield for old-fashioned realpolitik. China, like any other major power, generally puts its own strategic interests first. If its clients prove too embarrassing, it will restrain them, just as the United States once dumped Mobutu Sese Seko, when his taste for champagne, diamonds and bloodshed proved too embarrassing. Yet if China’s interests are better served by protecting rogues, it will protect them. If Chinese companies can get away with destroying Africa’s environment and paying little attention to its workers, they probably will. If they cannot – because local activists or consumers call them on it, or because it affects their sales in Africa and the West – perhaps they won’t.

Like the Western powers, China seems set to traffic in whatever images of Africa suit it: before the 2006 China-Africa summit in Beijing, Chinese officials plastered the city with posters of tribal warriors and lions that might have been taken from the National Geographic fifty years ago. Like the colonial powers, China will buy Africa’s resources and sell it manufactured products, regardless of whether Africa manages to produce anything that China wants to buy or succeeds in using China’s largesse to upgrade its own industries. ‘The key must be mutual benefit,’ Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, told a group of Chinese officials. ‘Otherwise we might end up with a few holes in the ground where the resources have been extracted, and all the added value will be in China.’

Last summer, when the main opposition leader in Zambia, infuriated by the deaths in the explosives factory, made Chinese investment an issue in the presidential election, the Chinese Embassy threatened to break off relations with Zambia if he was elected. Hardly a model of non-interference.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Ha'aretz has a story about the Israeli Land Administration and a group of Palestinian Bedouins that's been moved for the second time since the war. It's short and is worth quoting in full:

ILA destroys Bedouin homes to make way for Jewish town

By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent

The Israel Land Administration (ILA), with the assistance of a large police force and IDF soldiers, demolished dozens of tin shack homes Monday in the unrecognized Bedouin villages Um Al-Hiran and A-Tir in the northern Negev.

The ILA is destroying the village built on government-owned land and evacuating its inhabitants so that a Jewish Community named "Hiran" can be established in the area. Fourteen shacks, which housed some 100 people, have been destroyed by bulldozers so far.

Bedouin women attempted to get their children out of the house but police wanted to speed up the process so they grabbed the play pens with the children inside and did not let the mothers come near.

"Tonight we will sleep on the ground", Fajua Ab Abu Al-Cian said.

Young men, roughly 18-years of age, wearing orange shirts are taking part in the evacuation, removed the Bedouin's property from their homes and placing it in piles on the ground outside.

Haaretz has discovered that these teenagers are workers employed by sub-contractors hired by the ILA. According to the evacuators, they are being paid in cash and denied labor rights.

According to Adallah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the residents of the village have been living there for 51 years. They were transferred to the site in 1956 while under martial law. The land they originally owned was transferred to Kibbutz Shoval, while the Bedouin were leased 3000 dunam of land for agriculture and grazing.

In August 2001 the ILA submitted a report on the establishment of new communities, which included Hiran. The Bedouin residents living in the area appeared under the title of "special problems" that may affect the establishment of the community.

The government approved the establishment of Hiran in 2002, and in 2004 the state submitted a court order claiming that residents of Al Hiran should be evacuated as they are using state lands without permission.

For those who don't remember Andrew Jackson's role in land appropriation from the Native Americans, Dee Brown has a refresher in the first chapter of his Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee:

In 1829, Andrew Jackson, who was called Sharp Knife by the Indians, took office as President of the United States. During his frontier career, Sharp Knife and his soldiers had slain thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, but these southern Indians were still numerous and clung stubbornly to their tribal lands, which had been assigned them forever by white men's treaties. In Sharp Knife's first message to his Congress, he recommended that all these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi. "I suggest the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi ... to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, as long as they shall occupy it."

Although enactment of such a law would only add to the long list of broken promises made to the eastern Indians, Sharp Knife was convinced that Indians and whites could not live together in peace and that his plan would make possible a final promise which never would be broken again. On May 28, 1830, Sharp Knife's recommendations became law. 

 We all know how things worked out for those tribes and their ancestral lands...

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

I'm really into maps, which is one of the reasons I was so excited to see that the Guardian had an interactive one for the West Bank. You can see which areas are Israeli-controlled, which roads are off limits to Palestinians, and which areas have Israeli settlements in them. I think you'll also be able to see why a two-state solution is no longer possible...

I picked up a copy of Augustus Richard Norton's new short history of Hezbollah the other day, and so far, it's pretty good. I'm only on the second chapter, but from the little I've read, it's pretty solid. Although one thing is certain: at 159 pages, it certainly is a short history.

Here's a piece of trivia that I didn't know: in the late 80s, when Amal and Hezbollah were fighting, Nasrallah's brother Hussein (who is a fervent Amal partisan) was actually on the front lines fighting against Hezbollah.

Otherwise, here's an NPR interview with Norton available for streaming. 

The Onion, once again, has an article that made me laugh out loud:

Five years after settling in southern California and trying to blend into American society, a six-man terrorist cell connected to the militant Islamist organization Army of Martyrs has reportedly grown too complacent to conduct its suicide mission, an attack on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

According to cell leader and boat owner Jameel al-Sharif, the potentially devastating operation, which involves breaching the station's reactor core and triggering a meltdown that could rival the Chernobyl disaster, "can wait."

"We remain wholly committed to the destruction of America, the Great Satan," al-Sharif said. "But now is not a good time for us. The season finale of Lost was such a cliff- hanger that we have to at least catch the first episode of the new season. After that, though, death to the infidels."

Read the whole thing. It's hilarious...

Unbeknownst to me, The New Yorker started hosting blogs. George Packer, who wrote the excellent book on Iraq, The Assassins' Gate, has a blog called Interesting Times.

He's just started, so there isn't much there yet, but he's got a couple of posts about the US's shameful failure to give visas to Iraqi refugees as well as Tolstoy's take on guerilla warfare. I have a feeling that Packer's will be a blog to keep your eye on.

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

Pakistan is pissed, because on the occasion of the Queen's birthday, as tradition always has it, someone's getting knighted. Sir Salman Rushdie, known by many simpletons who never read it only for his splendid book, The Satanic Verses, is once again having trouble with the so-called land of the pure.

Iran accused Britain on Sunday of insulting Islamic values by knighting Rushdie.

Pakistan's parliament adopted a resolution condemning the knighthood and said Britain should withdraw it.

Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, minister for parliamentary affairs, told parliament: "This is a source of hurt for Muslims and will encourage people to commit blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad."

"We demand Britain desist from such actions and withdraw the title of knighthood," he said.

Mohammad Ejaz-ul-Haq, the religious affair minister, said insults to Islam were the cause of terrorism.

"The West always wonders about the root cause of terrorism. Such actions are the root cause of it," he told parliament.

"If Britain doesn't withdraw the award, all Muslim countries should break off diplomatic relations."

This is exactly the sort of nonsense that Rushdie fought against when he was still in hiding after a fatwa had been issued by Khomeini. In a 1989 piece in the New York Review, he had this to say about it:

Nowadays . . . a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other: I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight. 

...The Satanic Verses is not, in my view, an antireligious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. This is, for me, the saddest irony of all; that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages. I tried to write against stereotypes; the zealot protests serve to confirm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Muslim world.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

There was just another bomb on the Corniche in al-Manara next to the Military Sports Club and the cafe where I often go for arguileh and tea on Sunday mornings. According to Reuters, there have been 4 deaths and more injured so far.

LBC is reporting that Future party MP Walid 'Aydu was killed in the explosion. Judging from the pictures on television, the explosion was a pretty bad one.

Al-Manara is pretty much my old neighborhood in West Beirut. (I used to live about 5-6 minutes by foot from the bomb site.) I'm trying to call my friends who still live in the area, but, as usual, the networks are jammed and I can't get through. I'm sure they're all right, but you can never help yourself from worrying nonetheless...

UPDATE: LBC is now saying that the death toll is 10 people, including 'Aydu's son and bodyguards. (I'm not sure how people are spelling his name in English -- it may be Eidu.)

UPDATE2: The body count is now apparently up to 15. Ya haram.

Lately it seems like everyone is leaving Lebanon. Some have decided to go to grad school in Europe or the US; others are frantically searching for a job in Dubai or Saudi Arabia; while others are finishing school here just to settle somewhere else. Sometimes, I feel somewhat strange signing a three-year contract, finding some professional stability in a country with almost no political stability.

I feel like Lebanon would be a better place if more of the country's best and brightest stayed. But then again, who can blame them? Would I accept a job at an international magazine's Beirut branch for $500 a month after earning a master's degree at France's most prestigious business school? Furthermore, one could make (and already has made) the argument that my own country needs me more than Europe or the Middle East. In any case, there isn't much work, and what work there is doesn't pay very well, particularly for a city that's closer to Paris and Cairo in terms of its cost of living.

So where does that leave Lebanon? Many of its most promising young graduates and professionals are setting sail for safer waters. Bombs are still a rare occurrence in London, New York, Dubai and Paris.

Things are falling apart, and the center cannot hold. Until a time when it can, I suppose I'll be here, keeping the light on for my Lebanese friends who are pulling up anchor and looking for normality in their own diaspora exile.

Khartoum has finally accepted an AU/UN hybrid peacekeeping force. Or so they say. Given Khartoum's track record, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some serious backpedaling in the next couple of days.

Otherwise, Der Spiegel has a piece on Darfur and John Prendergast that's been reprinted by Salon. And I haven't read it yet, but Prendergast's report on Darfur is available online (pdf) through the Enough, the project to abolish genocide and mass atrocities, that's been formed by the International Crisis Group and the Center for American Progress.

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

This time CIA is getting help from Khartoum by intelligence gathering done in Iraq by embedded Sudanese spies, all while Khartoum is "bombing their people out the wazoo" in Darfur, according to an official at State.

This explains why Washington's most recent round of sanctions against Sudan are but window dressing."

If you're like me, you've heard a fair amount about the US doing "outreach" to Sunni tribes in Iraq. If you're also like me, you probably assumed that that was some sort of political outreach, aimed at convincing these groups (many of which have been involved in the insurgency against the American occupation and some of which have been involved with al-Qaida attacks against Iraqi civilians) to rejoin the political process and regain a say in the national government. Well, like me, you'd have been wrong:

With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.

... American officers who have engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups say many of them have had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but grew disillusioned with the Islamic militants’ extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. In exchange for American backing, these officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American units. Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations say that in some cases, Sunni groups have agreed to alert American troops to the location of roadside bombs and other lethal booby traps.

But critics of the strategy, including some American officers, say it could amount to the Americans' arming both sides in a future civil war. The United States has spent more than $15 billion in building up Iraq's army and police force, whose manpower of 350,000 is heavily Shiite. With an American troop drawdown increasingly likely in the next year, and little sign of a political accommodation between Shiite and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, the critics say, there is a risk that any weapons given to Sunni groups will eventually be used against Shiites. There is also the possibility the weapons could be used against the Americans themselves.

...Although the American engagement with the Sunni groups has brought some early successes against Al Qaeda, particularly in Anbar, many of the problems that hampered earlier American efforts to reach out to insurgents remain unchanged. American commanders say the Sunni groups they are negotiating with show few signs of wanting to work with the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. For their part, Shiite leaders are deeply suspicious of any American move to co-opt Sunni groups that are wedded to a return to Sunni political dominance.

...But officials of Mr. Maliki’s government have placed strict limits on the Sunni groups they are willing to countenance as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda. One leading Shiite politician, Sheik Khalik al-Atiyah, the deputy Parliament speaker, said in a recent interview that he would rule out any discussion of an amnesty for Sunni Arab insurgents, even those who commit to fighting Al Qaeda. Similarly, many American commanders oppose rewarding Sunni Arab groups who have been responsible, even tangentially, for any of the more than 29,000 American casualties in the war, including more than 3,500 deaths. Equally daunting for American commanders is the risk that Sunni groups receiving American backing could effectively double-cross the Americans, taking weapons and turning them against American and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government forces.

Americans officers acknowledge that providing weapons to breakaway rebel groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare, and that in places where it has been tried before, including the French colonial war in Algeria, the British-led fight against insurgents in Malaya in the early 1950s, and in Vietnam, the effort often backfired, with weapons given to the rebels being turned against the forces providing them.

This seems obviously short-sighted to me. Sure, it might help fight al-Qaida in the short run in Iraq, and attacks on American troops might drop initially, but if there's a single lesson that the US seems incapable of learning, it's that the enemy of your enemy is often still your enemy.

After being recommended for tenure by his department, Finkelstein was unsurprisingly (but disconcertingly) denied tenure when his dean and then DePaul's president cited concerns "collegiality" as a reason for not granting Finkelstein tenure. (Alan Dershowitz also had a role to play in the form of a dossier of allegations sent to DePaul's administration and faculty.)

Finkelstein's tenure bid has attracted an unusual degree of outside attention and his research has been much debated by scholars of the Middle East. In evaluating his record, DePaul faculty panels and administrators praised him as a teacher and acknowledged that he has become a prominent public intellectual, with works published by major presses. But first a dean and now the president of DePaul -- in rejecting tenure for Finkelstein -- have cited the style of his work and intellectual combat. Finkelstein was criticized for violating the Vincentian norms of the Roman Catholic university with writing and statements that were deemed hurtful, that contained ad hominem attacks and that did not show respect for others.

...Adding to the tensions over the Finkelstein case is another element to it. His tenure bid was backed by his department and a collegewide faculty committee, and hit roadblocks when a dean weighed in against him. And the same day DePaul's president denied Finkelstein tenure, he also denied tenure to another professor — who had backing from her department, the collegewide faculty panel, and the dean who weighed in against Finkelstein.

While most tenure processes are layered, several people at DePaul said it was unusual for tenure candidates there to advance several steps in the review process -- only to be rejected -- and that the cases raise questions about how much deference should go to a department.

"The real responsibility for assessing someone's scholarship and teaching and service rests with the department. Your closest colleagues are expected to understand what you do more precisely than an upper level body," said Anne Clark Bartlett a professor of English and president of the Faculty Council at DePaul. In the aftermath of Friday's announcements, she said that "people are very concerned."

For those unfamiliar with Harvard Law professor, Alan Dershowitz, he's the war hearted scholar who told us last summer that the IDF was right to kill "complicit" Lebanese civilians in the south.

The Times had this fabulously interesting little piece about the Albanian love affair with America:

"Albania is for sure the most pro-American country in Europe, maybe even in the world," said Edi Rama, Tirana’s mayor and leader of the opposition Socialists. "Nowhere else can you find such respect and hospitality for the president of the United States. Even in Michigan, he wouldn’t be as welcome."

...So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing "American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president." One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, "Please Occupy Us!"

...Albanians' support for the war in Iraq is nearly unanimous, and any perceived failings of American foreign policy are studiously ignored. A two-day effort to find anyone of prominence who might offer some criticism of the United States turned up just one name, and that person was out of the country.

Every school child in Albania can tell you that President Woodrow Wilson saved Albania from being split up among its neighbors after World War I, and nearly every adult repeats the story when asked why Albanians are so infatuated with the United States.

James A. Baker III was mobbed when he visited the country as secretary of state in 1991. There was even a move to hold a referendum declaring the country America’s 51st state around that time.

Yet another death from an Israeli cluster bomb from last summer's war, otherwise known as the gift that keeps on giving:

A cluster bomb left over from last summer's Israeli offensive on Lebanon denoted Friday, killing a 40-year-old man, the National News Agency reported.

It said Jamal Jafal was seriously wounded when the device exploded near his house in the southern Lebanese village of Bazouriyeh.

He later died in hospital at the port city of Tyre, NNA said.

A mortar shell also blew up late Friday at an orchard in Howsh area, four kilometers east of Tyre, causing no casualties.

Shadid is back reporting on Lebanon, and as usual, his coverage is probably the best in the English-language press:

Crisis usually defines Lebanon, but these days, the country is navigating threats that many describe in existential terms: a battle, entering its third week, between the Lebanese army and al-Qaeda-inspired fighters in a Palestinian refugee camp; a seemingly intractable and altogether separate confrontation between the government and opposition that has paralyzed the state and closed part of downtown Beirut for more than six months; and, as important, deadlock over the choice of the next president by November. Since last year's war in Lebanon between the Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah and Israel, the United Nations has stepped in twice to assume responsibilities usually left to a sovereign state, forming a court to try the suspected killers of a former prime minister and dispatching an international force to keep peace in the country's south.

While some analysts see the military's battle against the militants as a way to forge a stronger state, others worry about the prospect of its failure. The threat of civil war still looms large over this always fractious country, but the violence and paralysis may suggest a broader breakdown: not civil war, but entropy, where the country becomes hopelessly mired in instability.

"I can't say we're now in a failed state, but we could become a failed state if assassinations resume, we see more car bombs and if you see no political solution and no president elected in due time," said Sarkis Naoum, a columnist for al-Nahar newspaper. "If all this happens between now and November, it means we're in a big mess. And after that, you can say it's a failed state."

Lebanon's historically weak state -- in contrast to authoritarian neighbors such as Egypt and Syria -- helped to foster the country's redeeming qualities: a freewheeling press, relative freedom of expression and a measure of tolerance. The downsides were the descent into a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, Syrian dominance that continued until 2005 and the situation today, where Hezbollah maintains its own militia and the country's Palestinian refugee camps are suffused with arms.

My roommate and I were talking about strategies for creating a Lebanese nation-state. (One question we asked ourselves is why the Palestinians so often have to suffer in order for there to be a Lebanese state.)

People often speak of Hezbollah being a "state within a state," but that assumes that there is a state to be inside of, something I'm not sure is the case. As it is, Hezbollah has no real incentive to really and fully join such a weak state. But paradoxically, one of the reasons (but not the only one) why the Lebanese state is so weak is Hezbollah's external existence. So what could strengthen the state and give the Hizb a reason to join?

Ideally, a joint French/American/Iranian military funding and training venture would help Lebanon perform the military tasks that a sovereign state should be capable of, such as internal security, effective border control and defense against its neighbors (by land, sea and air). Since the chances of the US, France and Iran coming together for such a venture are slim to none, another, more doable, option would be military tutelage by a more neutral country, one that all parties in Lebanon could agree on. To my mind, Sweden would be perfect. They are a leading rich western arms manufacturer and are largely seen as neutral and even-handed.

So if the Swedes would train and arm the Lebanese army, then they could provide security within the country and stop things like the frequent Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace, something almost no other country in the world tolerates (except when Russia decides to bully its former satelites -- Georgia comes immediately to mind). For this, a well-trained and modern air force would be necessary.

And for Hezbollah, once a strong Lebanese army were formed, perhaps Hezbollah's militia would be more likely to let itself be folded into a sort of National Guard or reserve unit commanded by a Hezbollah cadre who was directly under the command of the head of the Lebanses Army. Their job would be the defense of Lebanon against an Israeli ground invasion, so if (when?) Israel attacked, they would be a trained part of the Lebanese Army whose objective would be to push back any Israeli advances, and if need be, fight a guerrilla war in the event of an Israeli occupation. IT must be stressed that the ultimate control of this force would be with Beirut, not Nasrallah, although they would probably have to be allowed some level of autonomy, so long as they didn't carry out any offensive attacks against Israel. (Any attacks would have to be punishable by a court martial within the framework of the Lebanese Armed Forces.)

Now the tough part would obviously talking Hezbollah into joining the army. If the military were significantly strengthened, that would definitely help things, but there would most likely need to be some political ground given up by Beirut, perhaps in the form of more seats in the government. If Israel were to give the Shebaa Farms back, that would also help matters a lot.

Of course this assumes a lot of things, not least of which is the continuance of the current power-sharing agreement, which, to my mind, needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, and in secular terms. A good step in that direction, however, would be a bicameral parliament in which the upper house stays as it is, but the lower house is decided by popular vote without any confessional quotas. But that, as they say, is an entirely different post...

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

Makdisi had an op-ed in the LA Times last March (which I didn't see until today) about recognizing Israel's right to exist. Saree Makdisi is Edward Said's nephew, which I believe makes him Jean Said Makdisi's son. In any case, the UCLA professor makes the point that expecting Palestinians to recognize Israel's "right to exist" is absurd:

First, the formal diplomatic language of "recognition" is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to "recognize" a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).

Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to "recognize?" Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, "Israel" is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of "Israel"?

For that matter, why should the Palestinians recognize an Israel that refuses to accept international law, submit to U.N. resolutions or readmit the Palestinians wrongfully expelled from their homes in 1948 and barred from returning ever since?

If none of these questions are easy to answer, why are such demands being made of the Palestinians? And why is nothing demanded of Israel in turn?

I came across this article in the comments section (which I normally stay away from, as it's generally populated by nutbags of the anti-Semitic and über-Zionist Arab-hating varieties) of a post by Phil Weiss on the same topic. He quotes Chomsky, who responded to Weiss's question about recognizing Israel's right to exist:

No state demands a 'right to exist,' nor is any such right accorded to any state, nor should it be.  Mexico recognizes the US, but not its 'right to exist' sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by aggression.  The same generalizes.

To my knowledge, the concept 'right to exist' was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) formally recognized Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized borders (citing the wording of UN 242).  It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are.  They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of their dispossession -- and the point generalizes, as noted, to just about every state; maybe not Andorra.

This is a question that I've often thought about and have been hesitant to comment on, even with some friends, because of the tar and feathering that automatically comes about as soon as someone questions Israel's right to exist. I'll write a longer piece, with my own thoughts on the matter, this weekend, but in the meantime, this point made by Makdisi seems particularly relevant to me:

Israel wants the Palestinians, half of whom were driven from their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created in 1948, to recognize not merely that it exists (which is undeniable) but that it is "right" that it exists — that it was right for them to have been dispossessed of their homes, their property and their livelihoods so that a Jewish state could be created on their land. The Palestinians are not the world's first dispossessed people, but they are the first to be asked to legitimize what happened to them.

According to Al Jazeera, al-Megrahi, the Libyan spook convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has been granted an appeal by the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

For a more detailed discussion of this case and of the interesting piece in the London Review about it, see this post. 

The London Review has a summary piece about China's new love affair with Africa. If you've been keeping up with Chinese affairs on the continent, there probably won't be much new information in this piece, but it's a nice summary, and it's helpful to have it all in one piece. It's a subscription only article, but the main gist is summed up here:

In all likelihood China will be neither a saviour nor a destroyer. Some African opinion leaders have realised that it does not really stand for a different model. ‘Non-interference’ is not a value so much as a thin shield for old-fashioned realpolitik. China, like any other major power, generally puts its own strategic interests first. If its clients prove too embarrassing, it will restrain them, just as the United States once dumped Mobutu Sese Seko, when his taste for champagne, diamonds and bloodshed proved too embarrassing. Yet if China’s interests are better served by protecting rogues, it will protect them. If Chinese companies can get away with destroying Africa’s environment and paying little attention to its workers, they probably will. If they cannot – because local activists or consumers call them on it, or because it affects their sales in Africa and the West – perhaps they won’t.

Like the Western powers, China seems set to traffic in whatever images of Africa suit it: before the 2006 China-Africa summit in Beijing, Chinese officials plastered the city with posters of tribal warriors and lions that might have been taken from the National Geographic fifty years ago. Like the colonial powers, China will buy Africa’s resources and sell it manufactured products, regardless of whether Africa manages to produce anything that China wants to buy or succeeds in using China’s largesse to upgrade its own industries. ‘The key must be mutual benefit,’ Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, told a group of Chinese officials. ‘Otherwise we might end up with a few holes in the ground where the resources have been extracted, and all the added value will be in China.’

Last summer, when the main opposition leader in Zambia, infuriated by the deaths in the explosives factory, made Chinese investment an issue in the presidential election, the Chinese Embassy threatened to break off relations with Zambia if he was elected. Hardly a model of non-interference.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Ha'aretz has a story about the Israeli Land Administration and a group of Palestinian Bedouins that's been moved for the second time since the war. It's short and is worth quoting in full:

ILA destroys Bedouin homes to make way for Jewish town

By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent

The Israel Land Administration (ILA), with the assistance of a large police force and IDF soldiers, demolished dozens of tin shack homes Monday in the unrecognized Bedouin villages Um Al-Hiran and A-Tir in the northern Negev.

The ILA is destroying the village built on government-owned land and evacuating its inhabitants so that a Jewish Community named "Hiran" can be established in the area. Fourteen shacks, which housed some 100 people, have been destroyed by bulldozers so far.

Bedouin women attempted to get their children out of the house but police wanted to speed up the process so they grabbed the play pens with the children inside and did not let the mothers come near.

"Tonight we will sleep on the ground", Fajua Ab Abu Al-Cian said.

Young men, roughly 18-years of age, wearing orange shirts are taking part in the evacuation, removed the Bedouin's property from their homes and placing it in piles on the ground outside.

Haaretz has discovered that these teenagers are workers employed by sub-contractors hired by the ILA. According to the evacuators, they are being paid in cash and denied labor rights.

According to Adallah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the residents of the village have been living there for 51 years. They were transferred to the site in 1956 while under martial law. The land they originally owned was transferred to Kibbutz Shoval, while the Bedouin were leased 3000 dunam of land for agriculture and grazing.

In August 2001 the ILA submitted a report on the establishment of new communities, which included Hiran. The Bedouin residents living in the area appeared under the title of "special problems" that may affect the establishment of the community.

The government approved the establishment of Hiran in 2002, and in 2004 the state submitted a court order claiming that residents of Al Hiran should be evacuated as they are using state lands without permission.

For those who don't remember Andrew Jackson's role in land appropriation from the Native Americans, Dee Brown has a refresher in the first chapter of his Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee:

In 1829, Andrew Jackson, who was called Sharp Knife by the Indians, took office as President of the United States. During his frontier career, Sharp Knife and his soldiers had slain thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, but these southern Indians were still numerous and clung stubbornly to their tribal lands, which had been assigned them forever by white men's treaties. In Sharp Knife's first message to his Congress, he recommended that all these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi. "I suggest the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi ... to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, as long as they shall occupy it."

Although enactment of such a law would only add to the long list of broken promises made to the eastern Indians, Sharp Knife was convinced that Indians and whites could not live together in peace and that his plan would make possible a final promise which never would be broken again. On May 28, 1830, Sharp Knife's recommendations became law. 

 We all know how things worked out for those tribes and their ancestral lands...

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

I'm really into maps, which is one of the reasons I was so excited to see that the Guardian had an interactive one for the West Bank. You can see which areas are Israeli-controlled, which roads are off limits to Palestinians, and which areas have Israeli settlements in them. I think you'll also be able to see why a two-state solution is no longer possible...

I picked up a copy of Augustus Richard Norton's new short history of Hezbollah the other day, and so far, it's pretty good. I'm only on the second chapter, but from the little I've read, it's pretty solid. Although one thing is certain: at 159 pages, it certainly is a short history.

Here's a piece of trivia that I didn't know: in the late 80s, when Amal and Hezbollah were fighting, Nasrallah's brother Hussein (who is a fervent Amal partisan) was actually on the front lines fighting against Hezbollah.

Otherwise, here's an NPR interview with Norton available for streaming. 

The Onion, once again, has an article that made me laugh out loud:

Five years after settling in southern California and trying to blend into American society, a six-man terrorist cell connected to the militant Islamist organization Army of Martyrs has reportedly grown too complacent to conduct its suicide mission, an attack on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

According to cell leader and boat owner Jameel al-Sharif, the potentially devastating operation, which involves breaching the station's reactor core and triggering a meltdown that could rival the Chernobyl disaster, "can wait."

"We remain wholly committed to the destruction of America, the Great Satan," al-Sharif said. "But now is not a good time for us. The season finale of Lost was such a cliff- hanger that we have to at least catch the first episode of the new season. After that, though, death to the infidels."

Read the whole thing. It's hilarious...

Unbeknownst to me, The New Yorker started hosting blogs. George Packer, who wrote the excellent book on Iraq, The Assassins' Gate, has a blog called Interesting Times.

He's just started, so there isn't much there yet, but he's got a couple of posts about the US's shameful failure to give visas to Iraqi refugees as well as Tolstoy's take on guerilla warfare. I have a feeling that Packer's will be a blog to keep your eye on.

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

Pakistan is pissed, because on the occasion of the Queen's birthday, as tradition always has it, someone's getting knighted. Sir Salman Rushdie, known by many simpletons who never read it only for his splendid book, The Satanic Verses, is once again having trouble with the so-called land of the pure.

Iran accused Britain on Sunday of insulting Islamic values by knighting Rushdie.

Pakistan's parliament adopted a resolution condemning the knighthood and said Britain should withdraw it.

Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, minister for parliamentary affairs, told parliament: "This is a source of hurt for Muslims and will encourage people to commit blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad."

"We demand Britain desist from such actions and withdraw the title of knighthood," he said.

Mohammad Ejaz-ul-Haq, the religious affair minister, said insults to Islam were the cause of terrorism.

"The West always wonders about the root cause of terrorism. Such actions are the root cause of it," he told parliament.

"If Britain doesn't withdraw the award, all Muslim countries should break off diplomatic relations."

This is exactly the sort of nonsense that Rushdie fought against when he was still in hiding after a fatwa had been issued by Khomeini. In a 1989 piece in the New York Review, he had this to say about it:

Nowadays . . . a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other: I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight. 

...The Satanic Verses is not, in my view, an antireligious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. This is, for me, the saddest irony of all; that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages. I tried to write against stereotypes; the zealot protests serve to confirm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Muslim world.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

There was just another bomb on the Corniche in al-Manara next to the Military Sports Club and the cafe where I often go for arguileh and tea on Sunday mornings. According to Reuters, there have been 4 deaths and more injured so far.

LBC is reporting that Future party MP Walid 'Aydu was killed in the explosion. Judging from the pictures on television, the explosion was a pretty bad one.

Al-Manara is pretty much my old neighborhood in West Beirut. (I used to live about 5-6 minutes by foot from the bomb site.) I'm trying to call my friends who still live in the area, but, as usual, the networks are jammed and I can't get through. I'm sure they're all right, but you can never help yourself from worrying nonetheless...

UPDATE: LBC is now saying that the death toll is 10 people, including 'Aydu's son and bodyguards. (I'm not sure how people are spelling his name in English -- it may be Eidu.)

UPDATE2: The body count is now apparently up to 15. Ya haram.

Lately it seems like everyone is leaving Lebanon. Some have decided to go to grad school in Europe or the US; others are frantically searching for a job in Dubai or Saudi Arabia; while others are finishing school here just to settle somewhere else. Sometimes, I feel somewhat strange signing a three-year contract, finding some professional stability in a country with almost no political stability.

I feel like Lebanon would be a better place if more of the country's best and brightest stayed. But then again, who can blame them? Would I accept a job at an international magazine's Beirut branch for $500 a month after earning a master's degree at France's most prestigious business school? Furthermore, one could make (and already has made) the argument that my own country needs me more than Europe or the Middle East. In any case, there isn't much work, and what work there is doesn't pay very well, particularly for a city that's closer to Paris and Cairo in terms of its cost of living.

So where does that leave Lebanon? Many of its most promising young graduates and professionals are setting sail for safer waters. Bombs are still a rare occurrence in London, New York, Dubai and Paris.

Things are falling apart, and the center cannot hold. Until a time when it can, I suppose I'll be here, keeping the light on for my Lebanese friends who are pulling up anchor and looking for normality in their own diaspora exile.

Khartoum has finally accepted an AU/UN hybrid peacekeeping force. Or so they say. Given Khartoum's track record, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some serious backpedaling in the next couple of days.

Otherwise, Der Spiegel has a piece on Darfur and John Prendergast that's been reprinted by Salon. And I haven't read it yet, but Prendergast's report on Darfur is available online (pdf) through the Enough, the project to abolish genocide and mass atrocities, that's been formed by the International Crisis Group and the Center for American Progress.

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

This time CIA is getting help from Khartoum by intelligence gathering done in Iraq by embedded Sudanese spies, all while Khartoum is "bombing their people out the wazoo" in Darfur, according to an official at State.

This explains why Washington's most recent round of sanctions against Sudan are but window dressing."

If you're like me, you've heard a fair amount about the US doing "outreach" to Sunni tribes in Iraq. If you're also like me, you probably assumed that that was some sort of political outreach, aimed at convincing these groups (many of which have been involved in the insurgency against the American occupation and some of which have been involved with al-Qaida attacks against Iraqi civilians) to rejoin the political process and regain a say in the national government. Well, like me, you'd have been wrong:

With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.

... American officers who have engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups say many of them have had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but grew disillusioned with the Islamic militants’ extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. In exchange for American backing, these officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American units. Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations say that in some cases, Sunni groups have agreed to alert American troops to the location of roadside bombs and other lethal booby traps.

But critics of the strategy, including some American officers, say it could amount to the Americans' arming both sides in a future civil war. The United States has spent more than $15 billion in building up Iraq's army and police force, whose manpower of 350,000 is heavily Shiite. With an American troop drawdown increasingly likely in the next year, and little sign of a political accommodation between Shiite and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, the critics say, there is a risk that any weapons given to Sunni groups will eventually be used against Shiites. There is also the possibility the weapons could be used against the Americans themselves.

...Although the American engagement with the Sunni groups has brought some early successes against Al Qaeda, particularly in Anbar, many of the problems that hampered earlier American efforts to reach out to insurgents remain unchanged. American commanders say the Sunni groups they are negotiating with show few signs of wanting to work with the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. For their part, Shiite leaders are deeply suspicious of any American move to co-opt Sunni groups that are wedded to a return to Sunni political dominance.

...But officials of Mr. Maliki’s government have placed strict limits on the Sunni groups they are willing to countenance as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda. One leading Shiite politician, Sheik Khalik al-Atiyah, the deputy Parliament speaker, said in a recent interview that he would rule out any discussion of an amnesty for Sunni Arab insurgents, even those who commit to fighting Al Qaeda. Similarly, many American commanders oppose rewarding Sunni Arab groups who have been responsible, even tangentially, for any of the more than 29,000 American casualties in the war, including more than 3,500 deaths. Equally daunting for American commanders is the risk that Sunni groups receiving American backing could effectively double-cross the Americans, taking weapons and turning them against American and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government forces.

Americans officers acknowledge that providing weapons to breakaway rebel groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare, and that in places where it has been tried before, including the French colonial war in Algeria, the British-led fight against insurgents in Malaya in the early 1950s, and in Vietnam, the effort often backfired, with weapons given to the rebels being turned against the forces providing them.

This seems obviously short-sighted to me. Sure, it might help fight al-Qaida in the short run in Iraq, and attacks on American troops might drop initially, but if there's a single lesson that the US seems incapable of learning, it's that the enemy of your enemy is often still your enemy.

After being recommended for tenure by his department, Finkelstein was unsurprisingly (but disconcertingly) denied tenure when his dean and then DePaul's president cited concerns "collegiality" as a reason for not granting Finkelstein tenure. (Alan Dershowitz also had a role to play in the form of a dossier of allegations sent to DePaul's administration and faculty.)

Finkelstein's tenure bid has attracted an unusual degree of outside attention and his research has been much debated by scholars of the Middle East. In evaluating his record, DePaul faculty panels and administrators praised him as a teacher and acknowledged that he has become a prominent public intellectual, with works published by major presses. But first a dean and now the president of DePaul -- in rejecting tenure for Finkelstein -- have cited the style of his work and intellectual combat. Finkelstein was criticized for violating the Vincentian norms of the Roman Catholic university with writing and statements that were deemed hurtful, that contained ad hominem attacks and that did not show respect for others.

...Adding to the tensions over the Finkelstein case is another element to it. His tenure bid was backed by his department and a collegewide faculty committee, and hit roadblocks when a dean weighed in against him. And the same day DePaul's president denied Finkelstein tenure, he also denied tenure to another professor — who had backing from her department, the collegewide faculty panel, and the dean who weighed in against Finkelstein.

While most tenure processes are layered, several people at DePaul said it was unusual for tenure candidates there to advance several steps in the review process -- only to be rejected -- and that the cases raise questions about how much deference should go to a department.

"The real responsibility for assessing someone's scholarship and teaching and service rests with the department. Your closest colleagues are expected to understand what you do more precisely than an upper level body," said Anne Clark Bartlett a professor of English and president of the Faculty Council at DePaul. In the aftermath of Friday's announcements, she said that "people are very concerned."

For those unfamiliar with Harvard Law professor, Alan Dershowitz, he's the war hearted scholar who told us last summer that the IDF was right to kill "complicit" Lebanese civilians in the south.

The Times had this fabulously interesting little piece about the Albanian love affair with America:

"Albania is for sure the most pro-American country in Europe, maybe even in the world," said Edi Rama, Tirana’s mayor and leader of the opposition Socialists. "Nowhere else can you find such respect and hospitality for the president of the United States. Even in Michigan, he wouldn’t be as welcome."

...So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing "American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president." One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, "Please Occupy Us!"

...Albanians' support for the war in Iraq is nearly unanimous, and any perceived failings of American foreign policy are studiously ignored. A two-day effort to find anyone of prominence who might offer some criticism of the United States turned up just one name, and that person was out of the country.

Every school child in Albania can tell you that President Woodrow Wilson saved Albania from being split up among its neighbors after World War I, and nearly every adult repeats the story when asked why Albanians are so infatuated with the United States.

James A. Baker III was mobbed when he visited the country as secretary of state in 1991. There was even a move to hold a referendum declaring the country America’s 51st state around that time.

Yet another death from an Israeli cluster bomb from last summer's war, otherwise known as the gift that keeps on giving:

A cluster bomb left over from last summer's Israeli offensive on Lebanon denoted Friday, killing a 40-year-old man, the National News Agency reported.

It said Jamal Jafal was seriously wounded when the device exploded near his house in the southern Lebanese village of Bazouriyeh.

He later died in hospital at the port city of Tyre, NNA said.

A mortar shell also blew up late Friday at an orchard in Howsh area, four kilometers east of Tyre, causing no casualties.

Shadid is back reporting on Lebanon, and as usual, his coverage is probably the best in the English-language press:

Crisis usually defines Lebanon, but these days, the country is navigating threats that many describe in existential terms: a battle, entering its third week, between the Lebanese army and al-Qaeda-inspired fighters in a Palestinian refugee camp; a seemingly intractable and altogether separate confrontation between the government and opposition that has paralyzed the state and closed part of downtown Beirut for more than six months; and, as important, deadlock over the choice of the next president by November. Since last year's war in Lebanon between the Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah and Israel, the United Nations has stepped in twice to assume responsibilities usually left to a sovereign state, forming a court to try the suspected killers of a former prime minister and dispatching an international force to keep peace in the country's south.

While some analysts see the military's battle against the militants as a way to forge a stronger state, others worry about the prospect of its failure. The threat of civil war still looms large over this always fractious country, but the violence and paralysis may suggest a broader breakdown: not civil war, but entropy, where the country becomes hopelessly mired in instability.

"I can't say we're now in a failed state, but we could become a failed state if assassinations resume, we see more car bombs and if you see no political solution and no president elected in due time," said Sarkis Naoum, a columnist for al-Nahar newspaper. "If all this happens between now and November, it means we're in a big mess. And after that, you can say it's a failed state."

Lebanon's historically weak state -- in contrast to authoritarian neighbors such as Egypt and Syria -- helped to foster the country's redeeming qualities: a freewheeling press, relative freedom of expression and a measure of tolerance. The downsides were the descent into a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, Syrian dominance that continued until 2005 and the situation today, where Hezbollah maintains its own militia and the country's Palestinian refugee camps are suffused with arms.

My roommate and I were talking about strategies for creating a Lebanese nation-state. (One question we asked ourselves is why the Palestinians so often have to suffer in order for there to be a Lebanese state.)

People often speak of Hezbollah being a "state within a state," but that assumes that there is a state to be inside of, something I'm not sure is the case. As it is, Hezbollah has no real incentive to really and fully join such a weak state. But paradoxically, one of the reasons (but not the only one) why the Lebanese state is so weak is Hezbollah's external existence. So what could strengthen the state and give the Hizb a reason to join?

Ideally, a joint French/American/Iranian military funding and training venture would help Lebanon perform the military tasks that a sovereign state should be capable of, such as internal security, effective border control and defense against its neighbors (by land, sea and air). Since the chances of the US, France and Iran coming together for such a venture are slim to none, another, more doable, option would be military tutelage by a more neutral country, one that all parties in Lebanon could agree on. To my mind, Sweden would be perfect. They are a leading rich western arms manufacturer and are largely seen as neutral and even-handed.

So if the Swedes would train and arm the Lebanese army, then they could provide security within the country and stop things like the frequent Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace, something almost no other country in the world tolerates (except when Russia decides to bully its former satelites -- Georgia comes immediately to mind). For this, a well-trained and modern air force would be necessary.

And for Hezbollah, once a strong Lebanese army were formed, perhaps Hezbollah's militia would be more likely to let itself be folded into a sort of National Guard or reserve unit commanded by a Hezbollah cadre who was directly under the command of the head of the Lebanses Army. Their job would be the defense of Lebanon against an Israeli ground invasion, so if (when?) Israel attacked, they would be a trained part of the Lebanese Army whose objective would be to push back any Israeli advances, and if need be, fight a guerrilla war in the event of an Israeli occupation. IT must be stressed that the ultimate control of this force would be with Beirut, not Nasrallah, although they would probably have to be allowed some level of autonomy, so long as they didn't carry out any offensive attacks against Israel. (Any attacks would have to be punishable by a court martial within the framework of the Lebanese Armed Forces.)

Now the tough part would obviously talking Hezbollah into joining the army. If the military were significantly strengthened, that would definitely help things, but there would most likely need to be some political ground given up by Beirut, perhaps in the form of more seats in the government. If Israel were to give the Shebaa Farms back, that would also help matters a lot.

Of course this assumes a lot of things, not least of which is the continuance of the current power-sharing agreement, which, to my mind, needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, and in secular terms. A good step in that direction, however, would be a bicameral parliament in which the upper house stays as it is, but the lower house is decided by popular vote without any confessional quotas. But that, as they say, is an entirely different post...

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

Makdisi had an op-ed in the LA Times last March (which I didn't see until today) about recognizing Israel's right to exist. Saree Makdisi is Edward Said's nephew, which I believe makes him Jean Said Makdisi's son. In any case, the UCLA professor makes the point that expecting Palestinians to recognize Israel's "right to exist" is absurd:

First, the formal diplomatic language of "recognition" is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to "recognize" a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).

Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to "recognize?" Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, "Israel" is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of "Israel"?

For that matter, why should the Palestinians recognize an Israel that refuses to accept international law, submit to U.N. resolutions or readmit the Palestinians wrongfully expelled from their homes in 1948 and barred from returning ever since?

If none of these questions are easy to answer, why are such demands being made of the Palestinians? And why is nothing demanded of Israel in turn?

I came across this article in the comments section (which I normally stay away from, as it's generally populated by nutbags of the anti-Semitic and über-Zionist Arab-hating varieties) of a post by Phil Weiss on the same topic. He quotes Chomsky, who responded to Weiss's question about recognizing Israel's right to exist:

No state demands a 'right to exist,' nor is any such right accorded to any state, nor should it be.  Mexico recognizes the US, but not its 'right to exist' sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by aggression.  The same generalizes.

To my knowledge, the concept 'right to exist' was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) formally recognized Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized borders (citing the wording of UN 242).  It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are.  They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of their dispossession -- and the point generalizes, as noted, to just about every state; maybe not Andorra.

This is a question that I've often thought about and have been hesitant to comment on, even with some friends, because of the tar and feathering that automatically comes about as soon as someone questions Israel's right to exist. I'll write a longer piece, with my own thoughts on the matter, this weekend, but in the meantime, this point made by Makdisi seems particularly relevant to me:

Israel wants the Palestinians, half of whom were driven from their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created in 1948, to recognize not merely that it exists (which is undeniable) but that it is "right" that it exists — that it was right for them to have been dispossessed of their homes, their property and their livelihoods so that a Jewish state could be created on their land. The Palestinians are not the world's first dispossessed people, but they are the first to be asked to legitimize what happened to them.

According to Al Jazeera, al-Megrahi, the Libyan spook convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has been granted an appeal by the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

For a more detailed discussion of this case and of the interesting piece in the London Review about it, see this post. 

The London Review has a summary piece about China's new love affair with Africa. If you've been keeping up with Chinese affairs on the continent, there probably won't be much new information in this piece, but it's a nice summary, and it's helpful to have it all in one piece. It's a subscription only article, but the main gist is summed up here:

In all likelihood China will be neither a saviour nor a destroyer. Some African opinion leaders have realised that it does not really stand for a different model. ‘Non-interference’ is not a value so much as a thin shield for old-fashioned realpolitik. China, like any other major power, generally puts its own strategic interests first. If its clients prove too embarrassing, it will restrain them, just as the United States once dumped Mobutu Sese Seko, when his taste for champagne, diamonds and bloodshed proved too embarrassing. Yet if China’s interests are better served by protecting rogues, it will protect them. If Chinese companies can get away with destroying Africa’s environment and paying little attention to its workers, they probably will. If they cannot – because local activists or consumers call them on it, or because it affects their sales in Africa and the West – perhaps they won’t.

Like the Western powers, China seems set to traffic in whatever images of Africa suit it: before the 2006 China-Africa summit in Beijing, Chinese officials plastered the city with posters of tribal warriors and lions that might have been taken from the National Geographic fifty years ago. Like the colonial powers, China will buy Africa’s resources and sell it manufactured products, regardless of whether Africa manages to produce anything that China wants to buy or succeeds in using China’s largesse to upgrade its own industries. ‘The key must be mutual benefit,’ Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, told a group of Chinese officials. ‘Otherwise we might end up with a few holes in the ground where the resources have been extracted, and all the added value will be in China.’

Last summer, when the main opposition leader in Zambia, infuriated by the deaths in the explosives factory, made Chinese investment an issue in the presidential election, the Chinese Embassy threatened to break off relations with Zambia if he was elected. Hardly a model of non-interference.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Ha'aretz has a story about the Israeli Land Administration and a group of Palestinian Bedouins that's been moved for the second time since the war. It's short and is worth quoting in full:

ILA destroys Bedouin homes to make way for Jewish town

By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent

The Israel Land Administration (ILA), with the assistance of a large police force and IDF soldiers, demolished dozens of tin shack homes Monday in the unrecognized Bedouin villages Um Al-Hiran and A-Tir in the northern Negev.

The ILA is destroying the village built on government-owned land and evacuating its inhabitants so that a Jewish Community named "Hiran" can be established in the area. Fourteen shacks, which housed some 100 people, have been destroyed by bulldozers so far.

Bedouin women attempted to get their children out of the house but police wanted to speed up the process so they grabbed the play pens with the children inside and did not let the mothers come near.

"Tonight we will sleep on the ground", Fajua Ab Abu Al-Cian said.

Young men, roughly 18-years of age, wearing orange shirts are taking part in the evacuation, removed the Bedouin's property from their homes and placing it in piles on the ground outside.

Haaretz has discovered that these teenagers are workers employed by sub-contractors hired by the ILA. According to the evacuators, they are being paid in cash and denied labor rights.

According to Adallah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the residents of the village have been living there for 51 years. They were transferred to the site in 1956 while under martial law. The land they originally owned was transferred to Kibbutz Shoval, while the Bedouin were leased 3000 dunam of land for agriculture and grazing.

In August 2001 the ILA submitted a report on the establishment of new communities, which included Hiran. The Bedouin residents living in the area appeared under the title of "special problems" that may affect the establishment of the community.

The government approved the establishment of Hiran in 2002, and in 2004 the state submitted a court order claiming that residents of Al Hiran should be evacuated as they are using state lands without permission.

For those who don't remember Andrew Jackson's role in land appropriation from the Native Americans, Dee Brown has a refresher in the first chapter of his Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee:

In 1829, Andrew Jackson, who was called Sharp Knife by the Indians, took office as President of the United States. During his frontier career, Sharp Knife and his soldiers had slain thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, but these southern Indians were still numerous and clung stubbornly to their tribal lands, which had been assigned them forever by white men's treaties. In Sharp Knife's first message to his Congress, he recommended that all these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi. "I suggest the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi ... to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, as long as they shall occupy it."

Although enactment of such a law would only add to the long list of broken promises made to the eastern Indians, Sharp Knife was convinced that Indians and whites could not live together in peace and that his plan would make possible a final promise which never would be broken again. On May 28, 1830, Sharp Knife's recommendations became law. 

 We all know how things worked out for those tribes and their ancestral lands...

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

I'm really into maps, which is one of the reasons I was so excited to see that the Guardian had an interactive one for the West Bank. You can see which areas are Israeli-controlled, which roads are off limits to Palestinians, and which areas have Israeli settlements in them. I think you'll also be able to see why a two-state solution is no longer possible...

I picked up a copy of Augustus Richard Norton's new short history of Hezbollah the other day, and so far, it's pretty good. I'm only on the second chapter, but from the little I've read, it's pretty solid. Although one thing is certain: at 159 pages, it certainly is a short history.

Here's a piece of trivia that I didn't know: in the late 80s, when Amal and Hezbollah were fighting, Nasrallah's brother Hussein (who is a fervent Amal partisan) was actually on the front lines fighting against Hezbollah.

Otherwise, here's an NPR interview with Norton available for streaming. 

The Onion, once again, has an article that made me laugh out loud:

Five years after settling in southern California and trying to blend into American society, a six-man terrorist cell connected to the militant Islamist organization Army of Martyrs has reportedly grown too complacent to conduct its suicide mission, an attack on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

According to cell leader and boat owner Jameel al-Sharif, the potentially devastating operation, which involves breaching the station's reactor core and triggering a meltdown that could rival the Chernobyl disaster, "can wait."

"We remain wholly committed to the destruction of America, the Great Satan," al-Sharif said. "But now is not a good time for us. The season finale of Lost was such a cliff- hanger that we have to at least catch the first episode of the new season. After that, though, death to the infidels."

Read the whole thing. It's hilarious...

Unbeknownst to me, The New Yorker started hosting blogs. George Packer, who wrote the excellent book on Iraq, The Assassins' Gate, has a blog called Interesting Times.

He's just started, so there isn't much there yet, but he's got a couple of posts about the US's shameful failure to give visas to Iraqi refugees as well as Tolstoy's take on guerilla warfare. I have a feeling that Packer's will be a blog to keep your eye on.

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

Pakistan is pissed, because on the occasion of the Queen's birthday, as tradition always has it, someone's getting knighted. Sir Salman Rushdie, known by many simpletons who never read it only for his splendid book, The Satanic Verses, is once again having trouble with the so-called land of the pure.

Iran accused Britain on Sunday of insulting Islamic values by knighting Rushdie.

Pakistan's parliament adopted a resolution condemning the knighthood and said Britain should withdraw it.

Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, minister for parliamentary affairs, told parliament: "This is a source of hurt for Muslims and will encourage people to commit blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad."

"We demand Britain desist from such actions and withdraw the title of knighthood," he said.

Mohammad Ejaz-ul-Haq, the religious affair minister, said insults to Islam were the cause of terrorism.

"The West always wonders about the root cause of terrorism. Such actions are the root cause of it," he told parliament.

"If Britain doesn't withdraw the award, all Muslim countries should break off diplomatic relations."

This is exactly the sort of nonsense that Rushdie fought against when he was still in hiding after a fatwa had been issued by Khomeini. In a 1989 piece in the New York Review, he had this to say about it:

Nowadays . . . a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other: I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight. 

...The Satanic Verses is not, in my view, an antireligious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. This is, for me, the saddest irony of all; that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages. I tried to write against stereotypes; the zealot protests serve to confirm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Muslim world.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

There was just another bomb on the Corniche in al-Manara next to the Military Sports Club and the cafe where I often go for arguileh and tea on Sunday mornings. According to Reuters, there have been 4 deaths and more injured so far.

LBC is reporting that Future party MP Walid 'Aydu was killed in the explosion. Judging from the pictures on television, the explosion was a pretty bad one.

Al-Manara is pretty much my old neighborhood in West Beirut. (I used to live about 5-6 minutes by foot from the bomb site.) I'm trying to call my friends who still live in the area, but, as usual, the networks are jammed and I can't get through. I'm sure they're all right, but you can never help yourself from worrying nonetheless...

UPDATE: LBC is now saying that the death toll is 10 people, including 'Aydu's son and bodyguards. (I'm not sure how people are spelling his name in English -- it may be Eidu.)

UPDATE2: The body count is now apparently up to 15. Ya haram.

Lately it seems like everyone is leaving Lebanon. Some have decided to go to grad school in Europe or the US; others are frantically searching for a job in Dubai or Saudi Arabia; while others are finishing school here just to settle somewhere else. Sometimes, I feel somewhat strange signing a three-year contract, finding some professional stability in a country with almost no political stability.

I feel like Lebanon would be a better place if more of the country's best and brightest stayed. But then again, who can blame them? Would I accept a job at an international magazine's Beirut branch for $500 a month after earning a master's degree at France's most prestigious business school? Furthermore, one could make (and already has made) the argument that my own country needs me more than Europe or the Middle East. In any case, there isn't much work, and what work there is doesn't pay very well, particularly for a city that's closer to Paris and Cairo in terms of its cost of living.

So where does that leave Lebanon? Many of its most promising young graduates and professionals are setting sail for safer waters. Bombs are still a rare occurrence in London, New York, Dubai and Paris.

Things are falling apart, and the center cannot hold. Until a time when it can, I suppose I'll be here, keeping the light on for my Lebanese friends who are pulling up anchor and looking for normality in their own diaspora exile.

Khartoum has finally accepted an AU/UN hybrid peacekeeping force. Or so they say. Given Khartoum's track record, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some serious backpedaling in the next couple of days.

Otherwise, Der Spiegel has a piece on Darfur and John Prendergast that's been reprinted by Salon. And I haven't read it yet, but Prendergast's report on Darfur is available online (pdf) through the Enough, the project to abolish genocide and mass atrocities, that's been formed by the International Crisis Group and the Center for American Progress.

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

This time CIA is getting help from Khartoum by intelligence gathering done in Iraq by embedded Sudanese spies, all while Khartoum is "bombing their people out the wazoo" in Darfur, according to an official at State.

This explains why Washington's most recent round of sanctions against Sudan are but window dressing."

If you're like me, you've heard a fair amount about the US doing "outreach" to Sunni tribes in Iraq. If you're also like me, you probably assumed that that was some sort of political outreach, aimed at convincing these groups (many of which have been involved in the insurgency against the American occupation and some of which have been involved with al-Qaida attacks against Iraqi civilians) to rejoin the political process and regain a say in the national government. Well, like me, you'd have been wrong:

With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.

... American officers who have engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups say many of them have had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but grew disillusioned with the Islamic militants’ extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. In exchange for American backing, these officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American units. Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations say that in some cases, Sunni groups have agreed to alert American troops to the location of roadside bombs and other lethal booby traps.

But critics of the strategy, including some American officers, say it could amount to the Americans' arming both sides in a future civil war. The United States has spent more than $15 billion in building up Iraq's army and police force, whose manpower of 350,000 is heavily Shiite. With an American troop drawdown increasingly likely in the next year, and little sign of a political accommodation between Shiite and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, the critics say, there is a risk that any weapons given to Sunni groups will eventually be used against Shiites. There is also the possibility the weapons could be used against the Americans themselves.

...Although the American engagement with the Sunni groups has brought some early successes against Al Qaeda, particularly in Anbar, many of the problems that hampered earlier American efforts to reach out to insurgents remain unchanged. American commanders say the Sunni groups they are negotiating with show few signs of wanting to work with the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. For their part, Shiite leaders are deeply suspicious of any American move to co-opt Sunni groups that are wedded to a return to Sunni political dominance.

...But officials of Mr. Maliki’s government have placed strict limits on the Sunni groups they are willing to countenance as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda. One leading Shiite politician, Sheik Khalik al-Atiyah, the deputy Parliament speaker, said in a recent interview that he would rule out any discussion of an amnesty for Sunni Arab insurgents, even those who commit to fighting Al Qaeda. Similarly, many American commanders oppose rewarding Sunni Arab groups who have been responsible, even tangentially, for any of the more than 29,000 American casualties in the war, including more than 3,500 deaths. Equally daunting for American commanders is the risk that Sunni groups receiving American backing could effectively double-cross the Americans, taking weapons and turning them against American and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government forces.

Americans officers acknowledge that providing weapons to breakaway rebel groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare, and that in places where it has been tried before, including the French colonial war in Algeria, the British-led fight against insurgents in Malaya in the early 1950s, and in Vietnam, the effort often backfired, with weapons given to the rebels being turned against the forces providing them.

This seems obviously short-sighted to me. Sure, it might help fight al-Qaida in the short run in Iraq, and attacks on American troops might drop initially, but if there's a single lesson that the US seems incapable of learning, it's that the enemy of your enemy is often still your enemy.

After being recommended for tenure by his department, Finkelstein was unsurprisingly (but disconcertingly) denied tenure when his dean and then DePaul's president cited concerns "collegiality" as a reason for not granting Finkelstein tenure. (Alan Dershowitz also had a role to play in the form of a dossier of allegations sent to DePaul's administration and faculty.)

Finkelstein's tenure bid has attracted an unusual degree of outside attention and his research has been much debated by scholars of the Middle East. In evaluating his record, DePaul faculty panels and administrators praised him as a teacher and acknowledged that he has become a prominent public intellectual, with works published by major presses. But first a dean and now the president of DePaul -- in rejecting tenure for Finkelstein -- have cited the style of his work and intellectual combat. Finkelstein was criticized for violating the Vincentian norms of the Roman Catholic university with writing and statements that were deemed hurtful, that contained ad hominem attacks and that did not show respect for others.

...Adding to the tensions over the Finkelstein case is another element to it. His tenure bid was backed by his department and a collegewide faculty committee, and hit roadblocks when a dean weighed in against him. And the same day DePaul's president denied Finkelstein tenure, he also denied tenure to another professor — who had backing from her department, the collegewide faculty panel, and the dean who weighed in against Finkelstein.

While most tenure processes are layered, several people at DePaul said it was unusual for tenure candidates there to advance several steps in the review process -- only to be rejected -- and that the cases raise questions about how much deference should go to a department.

"The real responsibility for assessing someone's scholarship and teaching and service rests with the department. Your closest colleagues are expected to understand what you do more precisely than an upper level body," said Anne Clark Bartlett a professor of English and president of the Faculty Council at DePaul. In the aftermath of Friday's announcements, she said that "people are very concerned."

For those unfamiliar with Harvard Law professor, Alan Dershowitz, he's the war hearted scholar who told us last summer that the IDF was right to kill "complicit" Lebanese civilians in the south.

The Times had this fabulously interesting little piece about the Albanian love affair with America:

"Albania is for sure the most pro-American country in Europe, maybe even in the world," said Edi Rama, Tirana’s mayor and leader of the opposition Socialists. "Nowhere else can you find such respect and hospitality for the president of the United States. Even in Michigan, he wouldn’t be as welcome."

...So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing "American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president." One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, "Please Occupy Us!"

...Albanians' support for the war in Iraq is nearly unanimous, and any perceived failings of American foreign policy are studiously ignored. A two-day effort to find anyone of prominence who might offer some criticism of the United States turned up just one name, and that person was out of the country.

Every school child in Albania can tell you that President Woodrow Wilson saved Albania from being split up among its neighbors after World War I, and nearly every adult repeats the story when asked why Albanians are so infatuated with the United States.

James A. Baker III was mobbed when he visited the country as secretary of state in 1991. There was even a move to hold a referendum declaring the country America’s 51st state around that time.

Yet another death from an Israeli cluster bomb from last summer's war, otherwise known as the gift that keeps on giving:

A cluster bomb left over from last summer's Israeli offensive on Lebanon denoted Friday, killing a 40-year-old man, the National News Agency reported.

It said Jamal Jafal was seriously wounded when the device exploded near his house in the southern Lebanese village of Bazouriyeh.

He later died in hospital at the port city of Tyre, NNA said.

A mortar shell also blew up late Friday at an orchard in Howsh area, four kilometers east of Tyre, causing no casualties.

Shadid is back reporting on Lebanon, and as usual, his coverage is probably the best in the English-language press:

Crisis usually defines Lebanon, but these days, the country is navigating threats that many describe in existential terms: a battle, entering its third week, between the Lebanese army and al-Qaeda-inspired fighters in a Palestinian refugee camp; a seemingly intractable and altogether separate confrontation between the government and opposition that has paralyzed the state and closed part of downtown Beirut for more than six months; and, as important, deadlock over the choice of the next president by November. Since last year's war in Lebanon between the Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah and Israel, the United Nations has stepped in twice to assume responsibilities usually left to a sovereign state, forming a court to try the suspected killers of a former prime minister and dispatching an international force to keep peace in the country's south.

While some analysts see the military's battle against the militants as a way to forge a stronger state, others worry about the prospect of its failure. The threat of civil war still looms large over this always fractious country, but the violence and paralysis may suggest a broader breakdown: not civil war, but entropy, where the country becomes hopelessly mired in instability.

"I can't say we're now in a failed state, but we could become a failed state if assassinations resume, we see more car bombs and if you see no political solution and no president elected in due time," said Sarkis Naoum, a columnist for al-Nahar newspaper. "If all this happens between now and November, it means we're in a big mess. And after that, you can say it's a failed state."

Lebanon's historically weak state -- in contrast to authoritarian neighbors such as Egypt and Syria -- helped to foster the country's redeeming qualities: a freewheeling press, relative freedom of expression and a measure of tolerance. The downsides were the descent into a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, Syrian dominance that continued until 2005 and the situation today, where Hezbollah maintains its own militia and the country's Palestinian refugee camps are suffused with arms.

My roommate and I were talking about strategies for creating a Lebanese nation-state. (One question we asked ourselves is why the Palestinians so often have to suffer in order for there to be a Lebanese state.)

People often speak of Hezbollah being a "state within a state," but that assumes that there is a state to be inside of, something I'm not sure is the case. As it is, Hezbollah has no real incentive to really and fully join such a weak state. But paradoxically, one of the reasons (but not the only one) why the Lebanese state is so weak is Hezbollah's external existence. So what could strengthen the state and give the Hizb a reason to join?

Ideally, a joint French/American/Iranian military funding and training venture would help Lebanon perform the military tasks that a sovereign state should be capable of, such as internal security, effective border control and defense against its neighbors (by land, sea and air). Since the chances of the US, France and Iran coming together for such a venture are slim to none, another, more doable, option would be military tutelage by a more neutral country, one that all parties in Lebanon could agree on. To my mind, Sweden would be perfect. They are a leading rich western arms manufacturer and are largely seen as neutral and even-handed.

So if the Swedes would train and arm the Lebanese army, then they could provide security within the country and stop things like the frequent Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace, something almost no other country in the world tolerates (except when Russia decides to bully its former satelites -- Georgia comes immediately to mind). For this, a well-trained and modern air force would be necessary.

And for Hezbollah, once a strong Lebanese army were formed, perhaps Hezbollah's militia would be more likely to let itself be folded into a sort of National Guard or reserve unit commanded by a Hezbollah cadre who was directly under the command of the head of the Lebanses Army. Their job would be the defense of Lebanon against an Israeli ground invasion, so if (when?) Israel attacked, they would be a trained part of the Lebanese Army whose objective would be to push back any Israeli advances, and if need be, fight a guerrilla war in the event of an Israeli occupation. IT must be stressed that the ultimate control of this force would be with Beirut, not Nasrallah, although they would probably have to be allowed some level of autonomy, so long as they didn't carry out any offensive attacks against Israel. (Any attacks would have to be punishable by a court martial within the framework of the Lebanese Armed Forces.)

Now the tough part would obviously talking Hezbollah into joining the army. If the military were significantly strengthened, that would definitely help things, but there would most likely need to be some political ground given up by Beirut, perhaps in the form of more seats in the government. If Israel were to give the Shebaa Farms back, that would also help matters a lot.

Of course this assumes a lot of things, not least of which is the continuance of the current power-sharing agreement, which, to my mind, needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, and in secular terms. A good step in that direction, however, would be a bicameral parliament in which the upper house stays as it is, but the lower house is decided by popular vote without any confessional quotas. But that, as they say, is an entirely different post...

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

Makdisi had an op-ed in the LA Times last March (which I didn't see until today) about recognizing Israel's right to exist. Saree Makdisi is Edward Said's nephew, which I believe makes him Jean Said Makdisi's son. In any case, the UCLA professor makes the point that expecting Palestinians to recognize Israel's "right to exist" is absurd:

First, the formal diplomatic language of "recognition" is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to "recognize" a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).

Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to "recognize?" Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, "Israel" is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of "Israel"?

For that matter, why should the Palestinians recognize an Israel that refuses to accept international law, submit to U.N. resolutions or readmit the Palestinians wrongfully expelled from their homes in 1948 and barred from returning ever since?

If none of these questions are easy to answer, why are such demands being made of the Palestinians? And why is nothing demanded of Israel in turn?

I came across this article in the comments section (which I normally stay away from, as it's generally populated by nutbags of the anti-Semitic and über-Zionist Arab-hating varieties) of a post by Phil Weiss on the same topic. He quotes Chomsky, who responded to Weiss's question about recognizing Israel's right to exist:

No state demands a 'right to exist,' nor is any such right accorded to any state, nor should it be.  Mexico recognizes the US, but not its 'right to exist' sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by aggression.  The same generalizes.

To my knowledge, the concept 'right to exist' was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) formally recognized Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized borders (citing the wording of UN 242).  It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are.  They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of their dispossession -- and the point generalizes, as noted, to just about every state; maybe not Andorra.

This is a question that I've often thought about and have been hesitant to comment on, even with some friends, because of the tar and feathering that automatically comes about as soon as someone questions Israel's right to exist. I'll write a longer piece, with my own thoughts on the matter, this weekend, but in the meantime, this point made by Makdisi seems particularly relevant to me:

Israel wants the Palestinians, half of whom were driven from their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created in 1948, to recognize not merely that it exists (which is undeniable) but that it is "right" that it exists — that it was right for them to have been dispossessed of their homes, their property and their livelihoods so that a Jewish state could be created on their land. The Palestinians are not the world's first dispossessed people, but they are the first to be asked to legitimize what happened to them.

According to Al Jazeera, al-Megrahi, the Libyan spook convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has been granted an appeal by the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

For a more detailed discussion of this case and of the interesting piece in the London Review about it, see this post. 

The London Review has a summary piece about China's new love affair with Africa. If you've been keeping up with Chinese affairs on the continent, there probably won't be much new information in this piece, but it's a nice summary, and it's helpful to have it all in one piece. It's a subscription only article, but the main gist is summed up here:

In all likelihood China will be neither a saviour nor a destroyer. Some African opinion leaders have realised that it does not really stand for a different model. ‘Non-interference’ is not a value so much as a thin shield for old-fashioned realpolitik. China, like any other major power, generally puts its own strategic interests first. If its clients prove too embarrassing, it will restrain them, just as the United States once dumped Mobutu Sese Seko, when his taste for champagne, diamonds and bloodshed proved too embarrassing. Yet if China’s interests are better served by protecting rogues, it will protect them. If Chinese companies can get away with destroying Africa’s environment and paying little attention to its workers, they probably will. If they cannot – because local activists or consumers call them on it, or because it affects their sales in Africa and the West – perhaps they won’t.

Like the Western powers, China seems set to traffic in whatever images of Africa suit it: before the 2006 China-Africa summit in Beijing, Chinese officials plastered the city with posters of tribal warriors and lions that might have been taken from the National Geographic fifty years ago. Like the colonial powers, China will buy Africa’s resources and sell it manufactured products, regardless of whether Africa manages to produce anything that China wants to buy or succeeds in using China’s largesse to upgrade its own industries. ‘The key must be mutual benefit,’ Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, told a group of Chinese officials. ‘Otherwise we might end up with a few holes in the ground where the resources have been extracted, and all the added value will be in China.’

Last summer, when the main opposition leader in Zambia, infuriated by the deaths in the explosives factory, made Chinese investment an issue in the presidential election, the Chinese Embassy threatened to break off relations with Zambia if he was elected. Hardly a model of non-interference.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Ha'aretz has a story about the Israeli Land Administration and a group of Palestinian Bedouins that's been moved for the second time since the war. It's short and is worth quoting in full:

ILA destroys Bedouin homes to make way for Jewish town

By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent

The Israel Land Administration (ILA), with the assistance of a large police force and IDF soldiers, demolished dozens of tin shack homes Monday in the unrecognized Bedouin villages Um Al-Hiran and A-Tir in the northern Negev.

The ILA is destroying the village built on government-owned land and evacuating its inhabitants so that a Jewish Community named "Hiran" can be established in the area. Fourteen shacks, which housed some 100 people, have been destroyed by bulldozers so far.

Bedouin women attempted to get their children out of the house but police wanted to speed up the process so they grabbed the play pens with the children inside and did not let the mothers come near.

"Tonight we will sleep on the ground", Fajua Ab Abu Al-Cian said.

Young men, roughly 18-years of age, wearing orange shirts are taking part in the evacuation, removed the Bedouin's property from their homes and placing it in piles on the ground outside.

Haaretz has discovered that these teenagers are workers employed by sub-contractors hired by the ILA. According to the evacuators, they are being paid in cash and denied labor rights.

According to Adallah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the residents of the village have been living there for 51 years. They were transferred to the site in 1956 while under martial law. The land they originally owned was transferred to Kibbutz Shoval, while the Bedouin were leased 3000 dunam of land for agriculture and grazing.

In August 2001 the ILA submitted a report on the establishment of new communities, which included Hiran. The Bedouin residents living in the area appeared under the title of "special problems" that may affect the establishment of the community.

The government approved the establishment of Hiran in 2002, and in 2004 the state submitted a court order claiming that residents of Al Hiran should be evacuated as they are using state lands without permission.

For those who don't remember Andrew Jackson's role in land appropriation from the Native Americans, Dee Brown has a refresher in the first chapter of his Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee:

In 1829, Andrew Jackson, who was called Sharp Knife by the Indians, took office as President of the United States. During his frontier career, Sharp Knife and his soldiers had slain thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, but these southern Indians were still numerous and clung stubbornly to their tribal lands, which had been assigned them forever by white men's treaties. In Sharp Knife's first message to his Congress, he recommended that all these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi. "I suggest the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi ... to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, as long as they shall occupy it."

Although enactment of such a law would only add to the long list of broken promises made to the eastern Indians, Sharp Knife was convinced that Indians and whites could not live together in peace and that his plan would make possible a final promise which never would be broken again. On May 28, 1830, Sharp Knife's recommendations became law. 

 We all know how things worked out for those tribes and their ancestral lands...

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

I'm really into maps, which is one of the reasons I was so excited to see that the Guardian had an interactive one for the West Bank. You can see which areas are Israeli-controlled, which roads are off limits to Palestinians, and which areas have Israeli settlements in them. I think you'll also be able to see why a two-state solution is no longer possible...

I picked up a copy of Augustus Richard Norton's new short history of Hezbollah the other day, and so far, it's pretty good. I'm only on the second chapter, but from the little I've read, it's pretty solid. Although one thing is certain: at 159 pages, it certainly is a short history.

Here's a piece of trivia that I didn't know: in the late 80s, when Amal and Hezbollah were fighting, Nasrallah's brother Hussein (who is a fervent Amal partisan) was actually on the front lines fighting against Hezbollah.

Otherwise, here's an NPR interview with Norton available for streaming. 

The Onion, once again, has an article that made me laugh out loud:

Five years after settling in southern California and trying to blend into American society, a six-man terrorist cell connected to the militant Islamist organization Army of Martyrs has reportedly grown too complacent to conduct its suicide mission, an attack on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

According to cell leader and boat owner Jameel al-Sharif, the potentially devastating operation, which involves breaching the station's reactor core and triggering a meltdown that could rival the Chernobyl disaster, "can wait."

"We remain wholly committed to the destruction of America, the Great Satan," al-Sharif said. "But now is not a good time for us. The season finale of Lost was such a cliff- hanger that we have to at least catch the first episode of the new season. After that, though, death to the infidels."

Read the whole thing. It's hilarious...

Unbeknownst to me, The New Yorker started hosting blogs. George Packer, who wrote the excellent book on Iraq, The Assassins' Gate, has a blog called Interesting Times.

He's just started, so there isn't much there yet, but he's got a couple of posts about the US's shameful failure to give visas to Iraqi refugees as well as Tolstoy's take on guerilla warfare. I have a feeling that Packer's will be a blog to keep your eye on.

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

Pakistan is pissed, because on the occasion of the Queen's birthday, as tradition always has it, someone's getting knighted. Sir Salman Rushdie, known by many simpletons who never read it only for his splendid book, The Satanic Verses, is once again having trouble with the so-called land of the pure.

Iran accused Britain on Sunday of insulting Islamic values by knighting Rushdie.

Pakistan's parliament adopted a resolution condemning the knighthood and said Britain should withdraw it.

Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, minister for parliamentary affairs, told parliament: "This is a source of hurt for Muslims and will encourage people to commit blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad."

"We demand Britain desist from such actions and withdraw the title of knighthood," he said.

Mohammad Ejaz-ul-Haq, the religious affair minister, said insults to Islam were the cause of terrorism.

"The West always wonders about the root cause of terrorism. Such actions are the root cause of it," he told parliament.

"If Britain doesn't withdraw the award, all Muslim countries should break off diplomatic relations."

This is exactly the sort of nonsense that Rushdie fought against when he was still in hiding after a fatwa had been issued by Khomeini. In a 1989 piece in the New York Review, he had this to say about it:

Nowadays . . . a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other: I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight. 

...The Satanic Verses is not, in my view, an antireligious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. This is, for me, the saddest irony of all; that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages. I tried to write against stereotypes; the zealot protests serve to confirm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Muslim world.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

There was just another bomb on the Corniche in al-Manara next to the Military Sports Club and the cafe where I often go for arguileh and tea on Sunday mornings. According to Reuters, there have been 4 deaths and more injured so far.

LBC is reporting that Future party MP Walid 'Aydu was killed in the explosion. Judging from the pictures on television, the explosion was a pretty bad one.

Al-Manara is pretty much my old neighborhood in West Beirut. (I used to live about 5-6 minutes by foot from the bomb site.) I'm trying to call my friends who still live in the area, but, as usual, the networks are jammed and I can't get through. I'm sure they're all right, but you can never help yourself from worrying nonetheless...

UPDATE: LBC is now saying that the death toll is 10 people, including 'Aydu's son and bodyguards. (I'm not sure how people are spelling his name in English -- it may be Eidu.)

UPDATE2: The body count is now apparently up to 15. Ya haram.

Lately it seems like everyone is leaving Lebanon. Some have decided to go to grad school in Europe or the US; others are frantically searching for a job in Dubai or Saudi Arabia; while others are finishing school here just to settle somewhere else. Sometimes, I feel somewhat strange signing a three-year contract, finding some professional stability in a country with almost no political stability.

I feel like Lebanon would be a better place if more of the country's best and brightest stayed. But then again, who can blame them? Would I accept a job at an international magazine's Beirut branch for $500 a month after earning a master's degree at France's most prestigious business school? Furthermore, one could make (and already has made) the argument that my own country needs me more than Europe or the Middle East. In any case, there isn't much work, and what work there is doesn't pay very well, particularly for a city that's closer to Paris and Cairo in terms of its cost of living.

So where does that leave Lebanon? Many of its most promising young graduates and professionals are setting sail for safer waters. Bombs are still a rare occurrence in London, New York, Dubai and Paris.

Things are falling apart, and the center cannot hold. Until a time when it can, I suppose I'll be here, keeping the light on for my Lebanese friends who are pulling up anchor and looking for normality in their own diaspora exile.

Khartoum has finally accepted an AU/UN hybrid peacekeeping force. Or so they say. Given Khartoum's track record, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some serious backpedaling in the next couple of days.

Otherwise, Der Spiegel has a piece on Darfur and John Prendergast that's been reprinted by Salon. And I haven't read it yet, but Prendergast's report on Darfur is available online (pdf) through the Enough, the project to abolish genocide and mass atrocities, that's been formed by the International Crisis Group and the Center for American Progress.

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

This time CIA is getting help from Khartoum by intelligence gathering done in Iraq by embedded Sudanese spies, all while Khartoum is "bombing their people out the wazoo" in Darfur, according to an official at State.

This explains why Washington's most recent round of sanctions against Sudan are but window dressing."

If you're like me, you've heard a fair amount about the US doing "outreach" to Sunni tribes in Iraq. If you're also like me, you probably assumed that that was some sort of political outreach, aimed at convincing these groups (many of which have been involved in the insurgency against the American occupation and some of which have been involved with al-Qaida attacks against Iraqi civilians) to rejoin the political process and regain a say in the national government. Well, like me, you'd have been wrong:

With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.

... American officers who have engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups say many of them have had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but grew disillusioned with the Islamic militants’ extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. In exchange for American backing, these officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American units. Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations say that in some cases, Sunni groups have agreed to alert American troops to the location of roadside bombs and other lethal booby traps.

But critics of the strategy, including some American officers, say it could amount to the Americans' arming both sides in a future civil war. The United States has spent more than $15 billion in building up Iraq's army and police force, whose manpower of 350,000 is heavily Shiite. With an American troop drawdown increasingly likely in the next year, and little sign of a political accommodation between Shiite and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, the critics say, there is a risk that any weapons given to Sunni groups will eventually be used against Shiites. There is also the possibility the weapons could be used against the Americans themselves.

...Although the American engagement with the Sunni groups has brought some early successes against Al Qaeda, particularly in Anbar, many of the problems that hampered earlier American efforts to reach out to insurgents remain unchanged. American commanders say the Sunni groups they are negotiating with show few signs of wanting to work with the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. For their part, Shiite leaders are deeply suspicious of any American move to co-opt Sunni groups that are wedded to a return to Sunni political dominance.

...But officials of Mr. Maliki’s government have placed strict limits on the Sunni groups they are willing to countenance as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda. One leading Shiite politician, Sheik Khalik al-Atiyah, the deputy Parliament speaker, said in a recent interview that he would rule out any discussion of an amnesty for Sunni Arab insurgents, even those who commit to fighting Al Qaeda. Similarly, many American commanders oppose rewarding Sunni Arab groups who have been responsible, even tangentially, for any of the more than 29,000 American casualties in the war, including more than 3,500 deaths. Equally daunting for American commanders is the risk that Sunni groups receiving American backing could effectively double-cross the Americans, taking weapons and turning them against American and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government forces.

Americans officers acknowledge that providing weapons to breakaway rebel groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare, and that in places where it has been tried before, including the French colonial war in Algeria, the British-led fight against insurgents in Malaya in the early 1950s, and in Vietnam, the effort often backfired, with weapons given to the rebels being turned against the forces providing them.

This seems obviously short-sighted to me. Sure, it might help fight al-Qaida in the short run in Iraq, and attacks on American troops might drop initially, but if there's a single lesson that the US seems incapable of learning, it's that the enemy of your enemy is often still your enemy.

After being recommended for tenure by his department, Finkelstein was unsurprisingly (but disconcertingly) denied tenure when his dean and then DePaul's president cited concerns "collegiality" as a reason for not granting Finkelstein tenure. (Alan Dershowitz also had a role to play in the form of a dossier of allegations sent to DePaul's administration and faculty.)

Finkelstein's tenure bid has attracted an unusual degree of outside attention and his research has been much debated by scholars of the Middle East. In evaluating his record, DePaul faculty panels and administrators praised him as a teacher and acknowledged that he has become a prominent public intellectual, with works published by major presses. But first a dean and now the president of DePaul -- in rejecting tenure for Finkelstein -- have cited the style of his work and intellectual combat. Finkelstein was criticized for violating the Vincentian norms of the Roman Catholic university with writing and statements that were deemed hurtful, that contained ad hominem attacks and that did not show respect for others.

...Adding to the tensions over the Finkelstein case is another element to it. His tenure bid was backed by his department and a collegewide faculty committee, and hit roadblocks when a dean weighed in against him. And the same day DePaul's president denied Finkelstein tenure, he also denied tenure to another professor — who had backing from her department, the collegewide faculty panel, and the dean who weighed in against Finkelstein.

While most tenure processes are layered, several people at DePaul said it was unusual for tenure candidates there to advance several steps in the review process -- only to be rejected -- and that the cases raise questions about how much deference should go to a department.

"The real responsibility for assessing someone's scholarship and teaching and service rests with the department. Your closest colleagues are expected to understand what you do more precisely than an upper level body," said Anne Clark Bartlett a professor of English and president of the Faculty Council at DePaul. In the aftermath of Friday's announcements, she said that "people are very concerned."

For those unfamiliar with Harvard Law professor, Alan Dershowitz, he's the war hearted scholar who told us last summer that the IDF was right to kill "complicit" Lebanese civilians in the south.

The Times had this fabulously interesting little piece about the Albanian love affair with America:

"Albania is for sure the most pro-American country in Europe, maybe even in the world," said Edi Rama, Tirana’s mayor and leader of the opposition Socialists. "Nowhere else can you find such respect and hospitality for the president of the United States. Even in Michigan, he wouldn’t be as welcome."

...So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing "American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president." One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, "Please Occupy Us!"

...Albanians' support for the war in Iraq is nearly unanimous, and any perceived failings of American foreign policy are studiously ignored. A two-day effort to find anyone of prominence who might offer some criticism of the United States turned up just one name, and that person was out of the country.

Every school child in Albania can tell you that President Woodrow Wilson saved Albania from being split up among its neighbors after World War I, and nearly every adult repeats the story when asked why Albanians are so infatuated with the United States.

James A. Baker III was mobbed when he visited the country as secretary of state in 1991. There was even a move to hold a referendum declaring the country America’s 51st state around that time.

Yet another death from an Israeli cluster bomb from last summer's war, otherwise known as the gift that keeps on giving:

A cluster bomb left over from last summer's Israeli offensive on Lebanon denoted Friday, killing a 40-year-old man, the National News Agency reported.

It said Jamal Jafal was seriously wounded when the device exploded near his house in the southern Lebanese village of Bazouriyeh.

He later died in hospital at the port city of Tyre, NNA said.

A mortar shell also blew up late Friday at an orchard in Howsh area, four kilometers east of Tyre, causing no casualties.

Shadid is back reporting on Lebanon, and as usual, his coverage is probably the best in the English-language press:

Crisis usually defines Lebanon, but these days, the country is navigating threats that many describe in existential terms: a battle, entering its third week, between the Lebanese army and al-Qaeda-inspired fighters in a Palestinian refugee camp; a seemingly intractable and altogether separate confrontation between the government and opposition that has paralyzed the state and closed part of downtown Beirut for more than six months; and, as important, deadlock over the choice of the next president by November. Since last year's war in Lebanon between the Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah and Israel, the United Nations has stepped in twice to assume responsibilities usually left to a sovereign state, forming a court to try the suspected killers of a former prime minister and dispatching an international force to keep peace in the country's south.

While some analysts see the military's battle against the militants as a way to forge a stronger state, others worry about the prospect of its failure. The threat of civil war still looms large over this always fractious country, but the violence and paralysis may suggest a broader breakdown: not civil war, but entropy, where the country becomes hopelessly mired in instability.

"I can't say we're now in a failed state, but we could become a failed state if assassinations resume, we see more car bombs and if you see no political solution and no president elected in due time," said Sarkis Naoum, a columnist for al-Nahar newspaper. "If all this happens between now and November, it means we're in a big mess. And after that, you can say it's a failed state."

Lebanon's historically weak state -- in contrast to authoritarian neighbors such as Egypt and Syria -- helped to foster the country's redeeming qualities: a freewheeling press, relative freedom of expression and a measure of tolerance. The downsides were the descent into a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, Syrian dominance that continued until 2005 and the situation today, where Hezbollah maintains its own militia and the country's Palestinian refugee camps are suffused with arms.

My roommate and I were talking about strategies for creating a Lebanese nation-state. (One question we asked ourselves is why the Palestinians so often have to suffer in order for there to be a Lebanese state.)

People often speak of Hezbollah being a "state within a state," but that assumes that there is a state to be inside of, something I'm not sure is the case. As it is, Hezbollah has no real incentive to really and fully join such a weak state. But paradoxically, one of the reasons (but not the only one) why the Lebanese state is so weak is Hezbollah's external existence. So what could strengthen the state and give the Hizb a reason to join?

Ideally, a joint French/American/Iranian military funding and training venture would help Lebanon perform the military tasks that a sovereign state should be capable of, such as internal security, effective border control and defense against its neighbors (by land, sea and air). Since the chances of the US, France and Iran coming together for such a venture are slim to none, another, more doable, option would be military tutelage by a more neutral country, one that all parties in Lebanon could agree on. To my mind, Sweden would be perfect. They are a leading rich western arms manufacturer and are largely seen as neutral and even-handed.

So if the Swedes would train and arm the Lebanese army, then they could provide security within the country and stop things like the frequent Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace, something almost no other country in the world tolerates (except when Russia decides to bully its former satelites -- Georgia comes immediately to mind). For this, a well-trained and modern air force would be necessary.

And for Hezbollah, once a strong Lebanese army were formed, perhaps Hezbollah's militia would be more likely to let itself be folded into a sort of National Guard or reserve unit commanded by a Hezbollah cadre who was directly under the command of the head of the Lebanses Army. Their job would be the defense of Lebanon against an Israeli ground invasion, so if (when?) Israel attacked, they would be a trained part of the Lebanese Army whose objective would be to push back any Israeli advances, and if need be, fight a guerrilla war in the event of an Israeli occupation. IT must be stressed that the ultimate control of this force would be with Beirut, not Nasrallah, although they would probably have to be allowed some level of autonomy, so long as they didn't carry out any offensive attacks against Israel. (Any attacks would have to be punishable by a court martial within the framework of the Lebanese Armed Forces.)

Now the tough part would obviously talking Hezbollah into joining the army. If the military were significantly strengthened, that would definitely help things, but there would most likely need to be some political ground given up by Beirut, perhaps in the form of more seats in the government. If Israel were to give the Shebaa Farms back, that would also help matters a lot.

Of course this assumes a lot of things, not least of which is the continuance of the current power-sharing agreement, which, to my mind, needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, and in secular terms. A good step in that direction, however, would be a bicameral parliament in which the upper house stays as it is, but the lower house is decided by popular vote without any confessional quotas. But that, as they say, is an entirely different post...

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

Makdisi had an op-ed in the LA Times last March (which I didn't see until today) about recognizing Israel's right to exist. Saree Makdisi is Edward Said's nephew, which I believe makes him Jean Said Makdisi's son. In any case, the UCLA professor makes the point that expecting Palestinians to recognize Israel's "right to exist" is absurd:

First, the formal diplomatic language of "recognition" is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to "recognize" a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).

Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to "recognize?" Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, "Israel" is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of "Israel"?

For that matter, why should the Palestinians recognize an Israel that refuses to accept international law, submit to U.N. resolutions or readmit the Palestinians wrongfully expelled from their homes in 1948 and barred from returning ever since?

If none of these questions are easy to answer, why are such demands being made of the Palestinians? And why is nothing demanded of Israel in turn?

I came across this article in the comments section (which I normally stay away from, as it's generally populated by nutbags of the anti-Semitic and über-Zionist Arab-hating varieties) of a post by Phil Weiss on the same topic. He quotes Chomsky, who responded to Weiss's question about recognizing Israel's right to exist:

No state demands a 'right to exist,' nor is any such right accorded to any state, nor should it be.  Mexico recognizes the US, but not its 'right to exist' sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by aggression.  The same generalizes.

To my knowledge, the concept 'right to exist' was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) formally recognized Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized borders (citing the wording of UN 242).  It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are.  They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of their dispossession -- and the point generalizes, as noted, to just about every state; maybe not Andorra.

This is a question that I've often thought about and have been hesitant to comment on, even with some friends, because of the tar and feathering that automatically comes about as soon as someone questions Israel's right to exist. I'll write a longer piece, with my own thoughts on the matter, this weekend, but in the meantime, this point made by Makdisi seems particularly relevant to me:

Israel wants the Palestinians, half of whom were driven from their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created in 1948, to recognize not merely that it exists (which is undeniable) but that it is "right" that it exists — that it was right for them to have been dispossessed of their homes, their property and their livelihoods so that a Jewish state could be created on their land. The Palestinians are not the world's first dispossessed people, but they are the first to be asked to legitimize what happened to them.

According to Al Jazeera, al-Megrahi, the Libyan spook convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has been granted an appeal by the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

For a more detailed discussion of this case and of the interesting piece in the London Review about it, see this post. 

The London Review has a summary piece about China's new love affair with Africa. If you've been keeping up with Chinese affairs on the continent, there probably won't be much new information in this piece, but it's a nice summary, and it's helpful to have it all in one piece. It's a subscription only article, but the main gist is summed up here:

In all likelihood China will be neither a saviour nor a destroyer. Some African opinion leaders have realised that it does not really stand for a different model. ‘Non-interference’ is not a value so much as a thin shield for old-fashioned realpolitik. China, like any other major power, generally puts its own strategic interests first. If its clients prove too embarrassing, it will restrain them, just as the United States once dumped Mobutu Sese Seko, when his taste for champagne, diamonds and bloodshed proved too embarrassing. Yet if China’s interests are better served by protecting rogues, it will protect them. If Chinese companies can get away with destroying Africa’s environment and paying little attention to its workers, they probably will. If they cannot – because local activists or consumers call them on it, or because it affects their sales in Africa and the West – perhaps they won’t.

Like the Western powers, China seems set to traffic in whatever images of Africa suit it: before the 2006 China-Africa summit in Beijing, Chinese officials plastered the city with posters of tribal warriors and lions that might have been taken from the National Geographic fifty years ago. Like the colonial powers, China will buy Africa’s resources and sell it manufactured products, regardless of whether Africa manages to produce anything that China wants to buy or succeeds in using China’s largesse to upgrade its own industries. ‘The key must be mutual benefit,’ Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, told a group of Chinese officials. ‘Otherwise we might end up with a few holes in the ground where the resources have been extracted, and all the added value will be in China.’

Last summer, when the main opposition leader in Zambia, infuriated by the deaths in the explosives factory, made Chinese investment an issue in the presidential election, the Chinese Embassy threatened to break off relations with Zambia if he was elected. Hardly a model of non-interference.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Ha'aretz has a story about the Israeli Land Administration and a group of Palestinian Bedouins that's been moved for the second time since the war. It's short and is worth quoting in full:

ILA destroys Bedouin homes to make way for Jewish town

By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent

The Israel Land Administration (ILA), with the assistance of a large police force and IDF soldiers, demolished dozens of tin shack homes Monday in the unrecognized Bedouin villages Um Al-Hiran and A-Tir in the northern Negev.

The ILA is destroying the village built on government-owned land and evacuating its inhabitants so that a Jewish Community named "Hiran" can be established in the area. Fourteen shacks, which housed some 100 people, have been destroyed by bulldozers so far.

Bedouin women attempted to get their children out of the house but police wanted to speed up the process so they grabbed the play pens with the children inside and did not let the mothers come near.

"Tonight we will sleep on the ground", Fajua Ab Abu Al-Cian said.

Young men, roughly 18-years of age, wearing orange shirts are taking part in the evacuation, removed the Bedouin's property from their homes and placing it in piles on the ground outside.

Haaretz has discovered that these teenagers are workers employed by sub-contractors hired by the ILA. According to the evacuators, they are being paid in cash and denied labor rights.

According to Adallah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the residents of the village have been living there for 51 years. They were transferred to the site in 1956 while under martial law. The land they originally owned was transferred to Kibbutz Shoval, while the Bedouin were leased 3000 dunam of land for agriculture and grazing.

In August 2001 the ILA submitted a report on the establishment of new communities, which included Hiran. The Bedouin residents living in the area appeared under the title of "special problems" that may affect the establishment of the community.

The government approved the establishment of Hiran in 2002, and in 2004 the state submitted a court order claiming that residents of Al Hiran should be evacuated as they are using state lands without permission.

For those who don't remember Andrew Jackson's role in land appropriation from the Native Americans, Dee Brown has a refresher in the first chapter of his Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee:

In 1829, Andrew Jackson, who was called Sharp Knife by the Indians, took office as President of the United States. During his frontier career, Sharp Knife and his soldiers had slain thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, but these southern Indians were still numerous and clung stubbornly to their tribal lands, which had been assigned them forever by white men's treaties. In Sharp Knife's first message to his Congress, he recommended that all these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi. "I suggest the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi ... to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, as long as they shall occupy it."

Although enactment of such a law would only add to the long list of broken promises made to the eastern Indians, Sharp Knife was convinced that Indians and whites could not live together in peace and that his plan would make possible a final promise which never would be broken again. On May 28, 1830, Sharp Knife's recommendations became law. 

 We all know how things worked out for those tribes and their ancestral lands...

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing. 

I used to subscribe to Le Monde Diplomatique. It would come at the end of each month, and I'd open it up and give it a read. Some of the articles were really, really interesting, others not at all. After a while, I started realizing that the name was sort of a misnomer, because fully a third of each issue's content was about the US and how terrible it was. I began thinking to myself that it should be called Les Etats-Unis Diplomatique instead.

Then I read a couple of articles in succession. One was about Scorsese's film "The Gangs of New York," and spent several pages explaining how violence was an American characteristic and how even since the beginning of the country that violence had been a part of the American landscape. All of this based not on violent crime rates or the second amendment or gun ownership, but rather on "The Gangs of New York," a film that was so loosely based on Herbert Asbury's book (which itself was sexed up and shows many "journalistic liberties" --  a better book is Sante's Low Life) that it was nominated for "best original screenplay" rather than screenplay adapted from another work. Oh, and the author noted that Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the Republic. This was what was passing for intelligent criticism of the US in Le Monde Diplo?

That article really, really annoyed me, but the straw that broke the camel's back was an article on China. It was a super-long article that went into a lot of otherwise interesting aspects of the Chinese economy and the country's place in the world today. A lot of noise was made, over and over again, about how China was a counterweight for the US and how that was a good thing considering American behavior in Iraq and human rights violations and whatnot. How much of this article was devoted to China's record on human rights? None. Don't get me wrong, anyone who reads this blog knows that I'm very hard on the US, and in particular American foreign policy in the Middle East and eroding domestic civil rights. But to talk about Guantanamo Bay and Iraq but not mention Tibet, Inner Mongolia or the Uighurs in Xinjiang (or for that matter, Sudan) when talking about how the US and China behave in the world is absurd. It's the same kind of attitude that discredited so many European leftists when they refused to condemn Stalin while he was committing genocide in the Ukraine and occupying Eastern Europe with an iron first. It's intellectually dishonest.

So in the end, I stopped reading Le Monde Diplo, because I found much of it to be trite and couldn't get past its enormous blind spots, especially concerning France herself. So that's why I was wary to start checking out the magazine's blogs. I thought maybe I'd be pleasantly surprised, but this Letter from Lebanon and its subtle finger pointing (in the form of a quote, to be sure, but without any explanation or caveat) and not-so subtle comment section where the ramblings of Franklin Lamb are taken as the gospel truth so long as the US is guilty, has made me realize that I was better off (as was my blood pressure) not reading Le Monde Diplo at all.

Note: I do, however, still enjoy reading some of Alain Gresh's stuff, because he's much more nuanced and actually knows the region very well.

I heard late last night that Syria had closed its borders, but an-Nahar is reporting that of this morning, it was just the Northern border and not the Maasna border, which is on the road connecting Beirut and Damascus.

It always makes me nervous when the roads to Syria are bombed, like last summer, or when the borders are closed, because it totally cuts off the country and leaves just one way out, the airport. Last summer, the airport was the first thing the Israelis hit, and on numerous occasions, Hezbollah has blocked the road to it from Beirut.

Sometimes I forget how easily one can get stuck in or out of this country...

I'm really into maps, which is one of the reasons I was so excited to see that the Guardian had an interactive one for the West Bank. You can see which areas are Israeli-controlled, which roads are off limits to Palestinians, and which areas have Israeli settlements in them. I think you'll also be able to see why a two-state solution is no longer possible...

I picked up a copy of Augustus Richard Norton's new short history of Hezbollah the other day, and so far, it's pretty good. I'm only on the second chapter, but from the little I've read, it's pretty solid. Although one thing is certain: at 159 pages, it certainly is a short history.

Here's a piece of trivia that I didn't know: in the late 80s, when Amal and Hezbollah were fighting, Nasrallah's brother Hussein (who is a fervent Amal partisan) was actually on the front lines fighting against Hezbollah.

Otherwise, here's an NPR interview with Norton available for streaming. 

The Onion, once again, has an article that made me laugh out loud:

Five years after settling in southern California and trying to blend into American society, a six-man terrorist cell connected to the militant Islamist organization Army of Martyrs has reportedly grown too complacent to conduct its suicide mission, an attack on the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

According to cell leader and boat owner Jameel al-Sharif, the potentially devastating operation, which involves breaching the station's reactor core and triggering a meltdown that could rival the Chernobyl disaster, "can wait."

"We remain wholly committed to the destruction of America, the Great Satan," al-Sharif said. "But now is not a good time for us. The season finale of Lost was such a cliff- hanger that we have to at least catch the first episode of the new season. After that, though, death to the infidels."

Read the whole thing. It's hilarious...

Unbeknownst to me, The New Yorker started hosting blogs. George Packer, who wrote the excellent book on Iraq, The Assassins' Gate, has a blog called Interesting Times.

He's just started, so there isn't much there yet, but he's got a couple of posts about the US's shameful failure to give visas to Iraqi refugees as well as Tolstoy's take on guerilla warfare. I have a feeling that Packer's will be a blog to keep your eye on.

Ezra Klein has a piece calling liberal hawks to task on their rhetoric on Iran. He argues that after getting burned by the obviously bad call to invade Iraq, they're trying to temper their rhetoric on Iran in order to cover their asses in case things go as bad as they did in Mesopotamia:

The new approach is not to refight the battle over the Iraq war, but to argue that those who got it right, or who got it wrong but eventually came to the right answer, are now in danger of overlearning the lessons of the war -- and missing the danger posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. An elegant entry into this burgeoning genre comes from Ken Baer in the latest issue of Democracy. "[A] president's past mistakes," writes Baer, "can so preoccupy political leaders that they lose sight of the dangers ahead or the principles they hold dear." In the conclusion of his piece, he warns that progressives must "not use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on."

...The remarkable thing about the growing liberal hawk literature on Iran is its evasiveness -- the unwillingness to speak in concrete terms of both the threat and proposed remedies. The liberal hawks realize they were too eager in counseling war last time, and their explicit statements in support of invasion have caused them no end of trouble since. This time, they will advocate no such thing. But nor will they eschew it. They will simply criticize those who do take a position.

Iran raises several complicated questions, but also a simple one: Do you think military force is called for in preventing Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons?

I've also noticed this. There seems to be a lot of talk from liberal hawks for "getting serious about Iran," whatever that's supposed to mean. At least the right wing hawks explicitly call for bombing Iran, whereas the TNR crowd wants to have its cake and eat it too.

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

Pakistan is pissed, because on the occasion of the Queen's birthday, as tradition always has it, someone's getting knighted. Sir Salman Rushdie, known by many simpletons who never read it only for his splendid book, The Satanic Verses, is once again having trouble with the so-called land of the pure.

Iran accused Britain on Sunday of insulting Islamic values by knighting Rushdie.

Pakistan's parliament adopted a resolution condemning the knighthood and said Britain should withdraw it.

Sher Afgan Khan Niazi, minister for parliamentary affairs, told parliament: "This is a source of hurt for Muslims and will encourage people to commit blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammad."

"We demand Britain desist from such actions and withdraw the title of knighthood," he said.

Mohammad Ejaz-ul-Haq, the religious affair minister, said insults to Islam were the cause of terrorism.

"The West always wonders about the root cause of terrorism. Such actions are the root cause of it," he told parliament.

"If Britain doesn't withdraw the award, all Muslim countries should break off diplomatic relations."

This is exactly the sort of nonsense that Rushdie fought against when he was still in hiding after a fatwa had been issued by Khomeini. In a 1989 piece in the New York Review, he had this to say about it:

Nowadays . . . a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other: I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight. 

...The Satanic Verses is not, in my view, an antireligious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. This is, for me, the saddest irony of all; that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages. I tried to write against stereotypes; the zealot protests serve to confirm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Muslim world.

This is a story about a plane that, shortly after taking off, is blown up in the air. Body parts, luggage and even still living passengers plummet to the ground. A man is wrongly accused and his government bullied into paying blood money to the sum of $2.7 billion. The real sponsors of the attack are let off the hook so that the US might invade Iraq in 1991 with Muslim allies.

There is a miscarriage of justice, in which foreign governments manufacture evidence and disregard other possibilities. A Palestinian militant gives an alibi as baby-sitting in Sweden and is not only believed but given immunity for the bombing. There is a Maltese clothing store owner, whose clothes were found in an exploded suitcase in Scotland. Those who speak out against the cover-up are gagged in some cases, indicted as being Iraqi spies in others. An American congressional aid, the daughter of an Alaskan governor, is arrested and injected with mind-altering drugs. Iraq is invaded again.

The truth starts to out, and there is talk of the convicted bomber going free. There is also talk of CIA agents running a heroin smuggling scheme with Hezbollah in order to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as of a smoldering suitcase full of drugs found somewhere in rural Scotland. Records show that the Iranians paid millions of dollars to a Syrian-backed Palestinian splinter group two days after the bombing and five months after an Iranian civilian carrier was downed by the US and Khomeini vowed that the skies would rain blood and offered $10 million to anyone who would avenge Iran. 

This certainly sounds like a cheap Middle Eastern spy-novel, but it's not. It's Hugh Miles's report on the Lockerbie trial and the seemingly real possibility that the Libyans had nothing to do with it, something that may soon be shown in a Scottish court of law.

If this report is true, then I may have to start giving a little more credence to some of the crazy-sounding conspiracy theories I hear in Lebanon.

Sarkozy and Kouchner have called for a conference outside of Paris to try to broker a solution to the political impasse here. The Jerusalem Post has this to say about Kouchner's decision to invite Hezbollah:

The view in Jerusalem is that Sarkozy wants to bring about a gradual thaw in the ties, in order to play the "honest broker" and stabilize Lebanon. The conference in Paris, according to this assessment, is part of this effort.

The invitation to Hizbullah largely puts an end to hopes articulated in Jerusalem after Sarkozy's election victory that he might be persuaded to place Hizbullah on Europe's list of terrorist organizations, a position that was opposed by Chirac.

"The objective is to restore confidence between parties. We have the opportunity to end the conflict, and not talking to them [Hizbullah] would mean neglecting the Lebanese political situation, where Hizbullah is an important component," the French Foreign Ministry official said. The official also said that even though the "guest list" had yet to be finalized, Hizbullah would definitely be there and involved in the negotiations.

Asked if the France was concerned about international criticism for inviting Hizbullah, which Israel, the US and a number of other countries consider a terrorist organization, the official said the priority was Lebanon's stability, not France's image.

Alvaro de Soto, the UN special envoy to the Middle East, recently penned a confidential and very frank end of mission report, which was then leaked to the Guardian. Here is the Guardian's very short summary.

Joshua Landis, for his part, has compiled the parts that deal directly with engaging Syria. Here are some extracts that I found particularly interesting:

4. ...Notwithstanding my strenuous efforts, of which there is plenty of evidence in the DPA cables file, I was never authorized to go to Syria. None of my arguments in favour of going were ever refuted, nor was I given any precise reason for denial of the authorization requested. ...

99. There is an old saying that in the Middle East you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria. The first half is no longer valid, but I sense that the second remains true. For the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, keeping Syria at arm’s length is particularly galling. Those who advocate it seem to believe that it is possible to pursue an Israeli-Palestinian track while isolating Damascus....

100. ... I don’t believe they can seriously believe that it is possible to neatly compartmentalize the various fronts and deal with them sequentially, bestowing the favour of attention on well-behaving parties first.

101. In much the same way, does anyone seriously believe that a genuine process between Israel and the Palestinians can progress without Syria being either on board or, at the very least, not opposing it, and without opening some channel for addressing Syria’s grievances? If this should be attempted, we can be sure that a reminder of the Syrian capacity to spoil it wouldn’t be long in arriving.

102. The conventional wisdom is that Israel can’t handle more than one negotiation at a time. As recently as 27 April, in a piece in Haaretz titled “Why Syria must wait”, an Israeli ambassador wrote: “Few would dispute the assertion that the Israeli bridge is incapable of supporting two peace processes, a Syrian and a Palestinian one, at the same time.” I understand the political difficulties involved. But I believe it’s just not possible to completely disaggregate the two, or calmly wait for their turn with the occupier (take a number and have a seat in the waiting room until you are called, please), and that is why the Madrid conference was conceived as it was. This can’t be anything but one more layer of excuses not to negotiate.

These points seem obvious to me. There are those who think that engaging Syria is a waste of time, but one thing they fail to explain is why Damascus should make concessions before negotiating. After all, that's the whole point of negotiating, isn't it? From a purely strategic point of view, why would Syria give up its bargaining chips (meddling in Lebanon and supporting Hezbollah and Hamas) before negotiations have even begun? Would anyone ever ask Israel to give up their occupation of the Golan as a measure of good faith before negotiating with Damascus? Of course not. That's Israel's bargaining chip, and they'd be silly to give it up before making a deal.

This is not to say that I support Syrian meddling in Lebanon; as someone who lives in Beirut and has to put up with it, quite the opposite is true. But I do understand Lebanon's strategic importance to Syria, just as I understand its strategic importance to Palestine, Israel, Iran and the US.

So let's be honest here for a bit. Egypt and Jordan were flukes backed up by US aid money. A real, and just, solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict cannot be piecemeal. There must be a comprehensive peace that includes Palestine, Israel, Syria and Lebanon with the backing of the rest of the Arab states. I've already argued before that it's too late for a two-state solution, so I won't go into that right now, but maybe a two-state solution could be a stopgap for a long-term solution in the form of a single, democratic, secular binational state. But until the time comes when all sides stop stalling and get ready to deal, things are going to be pretty rough in this neck of the woods...

There was just another bomb on the Corniche in al-Manara next to the Military Sports Club and the cafe where I often go for arguileh and tea on Sunday mornings. According to Reuters, there have been 4 deaths and more injured so far.

LBC is reporting that Future party MP Walid 'Aydu was killed in the explosion. Judging from the pictures on television, the explosion was a pretty bad one.

Al-Manara is pretty much my old neighborhood in West Beirut. (I used to live about 5-6 minutes by foot from the bomb site.) I'm trying to call my friends who still live in the area, but, as usual, the networks are jammed and I can't get through. I'm sure they're all right, but you can never help yourself from worrying nonetheless...

UPDATE: LBC is now saying that the death toll is 10 people, including 'Aydu's son and bodyguards. (I'm not sure how people are spelling his name in English -- it may be Eidu.)

UPDATE2: The body count is now apparently up to 15. Ya haram.

Lately it seems like everyone is leaving Lebanon. Some have decided to go to grad school in Europe or the US; others are frantically searching for a job in Dubai or Saudi Arabia; while others are finishing school here just to settle somewhere else. Sometimes, I feel somewhat strange signing a three-year contract, finding some professional stability in a country with almost no political stability.

I feel like Lebanon would be a better place if more of the country's best and brightest stayed. But then again, who can blame them? Would I accept a job at an international magazine's Beirut branch for $500 a month after earning a master's degree at France's most prestigious business school? Furthermore, one could make (and already has made) the argument that my own country needs me more than Europe or the Middle East. In any case, there isn't much work, and what work there is doesn't pay very well, particularly for a city that's closer to Paris and Cairo in terms of its cost of living.

So where does that leave Lebanon? Many of its most promising young graduates and professionals are setting sail for safer waters. Bombs are still a rare occurrence in London, New York, Dubai and Paris.

Things are falling apart, and the center cannot hold. Until a time when it can, I suppose I'll be here, keeping the light on for my Lebanese friends who are pulling up anchor and looking for normality in their own diaspora exile.

Khartoum has finally accepted an AU/UN hybrid peacekeeping force. Or so they say. Given Khartoum's track record, I wouldn't be surprised if there were some serious backpedaling in the next couple of days.

Otherwise, Der Spiegel has a piece on Darfur and John Prendergast that's been reprinted by Salon. And I haven't read it yet, but Prendergast's report on Darfur is available online (pdf) through the Enough, the project to abolish genocide and mass atrocities, that's been formed by the International Crisis Group and the Center for American Progress.

Le Monde has an informative background piece about Shaker al-Abssi, the leader of Fatah al-Islam, who is currently fighting the Lebanese Army in Nahr el-Bared. It follows him from Palestine to the camps in Lebanon, via Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, North Yemen and even Nicaragua.

This time CIA is getting help from Khartoum by intelligence gathering done in Iraq by embedded Sudanese spies, all while Khartoum is "bombing their people out the wazoo" in Darfur, according to an official at State.

This explains why Washington's most recent round of sanctions against Sudan are but window dressing."

If you're like me, you've heard a fair amount about the US doing "outreach" to Sunni tribes in Iraq. If you're also like me, you probably assumed that that was some sort of political outreach, aimed at convincing these groups (many of which have been involved in the insurgency against the American occupation and some of which have been involved with al-Qaida attacks against Iraqi civilians) to rejoin the political process and regain a say in the national government. Well, like me, you'd have been wrong:

With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.

... American officers who have engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups say many of them have had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but grew disillusioned with the Islamic militants’ extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. In exchange for American backing, these officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt attacks on American units. Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations say that in some cases, Sunni groups have agreed to alert American troops to the location of roadside bombs and other lethal booby traps.

But critics of the strategy, including some American officers, say it could amount to the Americans' arming both sides in a future civil war. The United States has spent more than $15 billion in building up Iraq's army and police force, whose manpower of 350,000 is heavily Shiite. With an American troop drawdown increasingly likely in the next year, and little sign of a political accommodation between Shiite and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, the critics say, there is a risk that any weapons given to Sunni groups will eventually be used against Shiites. There is also the possibility the weapons could be used against the Americans themselves.

...Although the American engagement with the Sunni groups has brought some early successes against Al Qaeda, particularly in Anbar, many of the problems that hampered earlier American efforts to reach out to insurgents remain unchanged. American commanders say the Sunni groups they are negotiating with show few signs of wanting to work with the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. For their part, Shiite leaders are deeply suspicious of any American move to co-opt Sunni groups that are wedded to a return to Sunni political dominance.

...But officials of Mr. Maliki’s government have placed strict limits on the Sunni groups they are willing to countenance as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda. One leading Shiite politician, Sheik Khalik al-Atiyah, the deputy Parliament speaker, said in a recent interview that he would rule out any discussion of an amnesty for Sunni Arab insurgents, even those who commit to fighting Al Qaeda. Similarly, many American commanders oppose rewarding Sunni Arab groups who have been responsible, even tangentially, for any of the more than 29,000 American casualties in the war, including more than 3,500 deaths. Equally daunting for American commanders is the risk that Sunni groups receiving American backing could effectively double-cross the Americans, taking weapons and turning them against American and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government forces.

Americans officers acknowledge that providing weapons to breakaway rebel groups is not new in counterinsurgency warfare, and that in places where it has been tried before, including the French colonial war in Algeria, the British-led fight against insurgents in Malaya in the early 1950s, and in Vietnam, the effort often backfired, with weapons given to the rebels being turned against the forces providing them.

This seems obviously short-sighted to me. Sure, it might help fight al-Qaida in the short run in Iraq, and attacks on American troops might drop initially, but if there's a single lesson that the US seems incapable of learning, it's that the enemy of your enemy is often still your enemy.

After being recommended for tenure by his department, Finkelstein was unsurprisingly (but disconcertingly) denied tenure when his dean and then DePaul's president cited concerns "collegiality" as a reason for not granting Finkelstein tenure. (Alan Dershowitz also had a role to play in the form of a dossier of allegations sent to DePaul's administration and faculty.)

Finkelstein's tenure bid has attracted an unusual degree of outside attention and his research has been much debated by scholars of the Middle East. In evaluating his record, DePaul faculty panels and administrators praised him as a teacher and acknowledged that he has become a prominent public intellectual, with works published by major presses. But first a dean and now the president of DePaul -- in rejecting tenure for Finkelstein -- have cited the style of his work and intellectual combat. Finkelstein was criticized for violating the Vincentian norms of the Roman Catholic university with writing and statements that were deemed hurtful, that contained ad hominem attacks and that did not show respect for others.

...Adding to the tensions over the Finkelstein case is another element to it. His tenure bid was backed by his department and a collegewide faculty committee, and hit roadblocks when a dean weighed in against him. And the same day DePaul's president denied Finkelstein tenure, he also denied tenure to another professor — who had backing from her department, the collegewide faculty panel, and the dean who weighed in against Finkelstein.

While most tenure processes are layered, several people at DePaul said it was unusual for tenure candidates there to advance several steps in the review process -- only to be rejected -- and that the cases raise questions about how much deference should go to a department.

"The real responsibility for assessing someone's scholarship and teaching and service rests with the department. Your closest colleagues are expected to understand what you do more precisely than an upper level body," said Anne Clark Bartlett a professor of English and president of the Faculty Council at DePaul. In the aftermath of Friday's announcements, she said that "people are very concerned."

For those unfamiliar with Harvard Law professor, Alan Dershowitz, he's the war hearted scholar who told us last summer that the IDF was right to kill "complicit" Lebanese civilians in the south.

The Times had this fabulously interesting little piece about the Albanian love affair with America:

"Albania is for sure the most pro-American country in Europe, maybe even in the world," said Edi Rama, Tirana’s mayor and leader of the opposition Socialists. "Nowhere else can you find such respect and hospitality for the president of the United States. Even in Michigan, he wouldn’t be as welcome."

...So eager is the country to accommodate Mr. Bush that Parliament unanimously approved a bill last month allowing "American forces to engage in any kind of operation, including the use of force, in order to provide security for the president." One newspaper, reporting on the effusive mood, published a headline that read, "Please Occupy Us!"

...Albanians' support for the war in Iraq is nearly unanimous, and any perceived failings of American foreign policy are studiously ignored. A two-day effort to find anyone of prominence who might offer some criticism of the United States turned up just one name, and that person was out of the country.

Every school child in Albania can tell you that President Woodrow Wilson saved Albania from being split up among its neighbors after World War I, and nearly every adult repeats the story when asked why Albanians are so infatuated with the United States.

James A. Baker III was mobbed when he visited the country as secretary of state in 1991. There was even a move to hold a referendum declaring the country America’s 51st state around that time.

Yet another death from an Israeli cluster bomb from last summer's war, otherwise known as the gift that keeps on giving:

A cluster bomb left over from last summer's Israeli offensive on Lebanon denoted Friday, killing a 40-year-old man, the National News Agency reported.

It said Jamal Jafal was seriously wounded when the device exploded near his house in the southern Lebanese village of Bazouriyeh.

He later died in hospital at the port city of Tyre, NNA said.

A mortar shell also blew up late Friday at an orchard in Howsh area, four kilometers east of Tyre, causing no casualties.

Shadid is back reporting on Lebanon, and as usual, his coverage is probably the best in the English-language press:

Crisis usually defines Lebanon, but these days, the country is navigating threats that many describe in existential terms: a battle, entering its third week, between the Lebanese army and al-Qaeda-inspired fighters in a Palestinian refugee camp; a seemingly intractable and altogether separate confrontation between the government and opposition that has paralyzed the state and closed part of downtown Beirut for more than six months; and, as important, deadlock over the choice of the next president by November. Since last year's war in Lebanon between the Shiite Muslim movement Hezbollah and Israel, the United Nations has stepped in twice to assume responsibilities usually left to a sovereign state, forming a court to try the suspected killers of a former prime minister and dispatching an international force to keep peace in the country's south.

While some analysts see the military's battle against the militants as a way to forge a stronger state, others worry about the prospect of its failure. The threat of civil war still looms large over this always fractious country, but the violence and paralysis may suggest a broader breakdown: not civil war, but entropy, where the country becomes hopelessly mired in instability.

"I can't say we're now in a failed state, but we could become a failed state if assassinations resume, we see more car bombs and if you see no political solution and no president elected in due time," said Sarkis Naoum, a columnist for al-Nahar newspaper. "If all this happens between now and November, it means we're in a big mess. And after that, you can say it's a failed state."

Lebanon's historically weak state -- in contrast to authoritarian neighbors such as Egypt and Syria -- helped to foster the country's redeeming qualities: a freewheeling press, relative freedom of expression and a measure of tolerance. The downsides were the descent into a 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, Syrian dominance that continued until 2005 and the situation today, where Hezbollah maintains its own militia and the country's Palestinian refugee camps are suffused with arms.

My roommate and I were talking about strategies for creating a Lebanese nation-state. (One question we asked ourselves is why the Palestinians so often have to suffer in order for there to be a Lebanese state.)

People often speak of Hezbollah being a "state within a state," but that assumes that there is a state to be inside of, something I'm not sure is the case. As it is, Hezbollah has no real incentive to really and fully join such a weak state. But paradoxically, one of the reasons (but not the only one) why the Lebanese state is so weak is Hezbollah's external existence. So what could strengthen the state and give the Hizb a reason to join?

Ideally, a joint French/American/Iranian military funding and training venture would help Lebanon perform the military tasks that a sovereign state should be capable of, such as internal security, effective border control and defense against its neighbors (by land, sea and air). Since the chances of the US, France and Iran coming together for such a venture are slim to none, another, more doable, option would be military tutelage by a more neutral country, one that all parties in Lebanon could agree on. To my mind, Sweden would be perfect. They are a leading rich western arms manufacturer and are largely seen as neutral and even-handed.

So if the Swedes would train and arm the Lebanese army, then they could provide security within the country and stop things like the frequent Israeli violations of Lebanese airspace, something almost no other country in the world tolerates (except when Russia decides to bully its former satelites -- Georgia comes immediately to mind). For this, a well-trained and modern air force would be necessary.

And for Hezbollah, once a strong Lebanese army were formed, perhaps Hezbollah's militia would be more likely to let itself be folded into a sort of National Guard or reserve unit commanded by a Hezbollah cadre who was directly under the command of the head of the Lebanses Army. Their job would be the defense of Lebanon against an Israeli ground invasion, so if (when?) Israel attacked, they would be a trained part of the Lebanese Army whose objective would be to push back any Israeli advances, and if need be, fight a guerrilla war in the event of an Israeli occupation. IT must be stressed that the ultimate control of this force would be with Beirut, not Nasrallah, although they would probably have to be allowed some level of autonomy, so long as they didn't carry out any offensive attacks against Israel. (Any attacks would have to be punishable by a court martial within the framework of the Lebanese Armed Forces.)

Now the tough part would obviously talking Hezbollah into joining the army. If the military were significantly strengthened, that would definitely help things, but there would most likely need to be some political ground given up by Beirut, perhaps in the form of more seats in the government. If Israel were to give the Shebaa Farms back, that would also help matters a lot.

Of course this assumes a lot of things, not least of which is the continuance of the current power-sharing agreement, which, to my mind, needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, and in secular terms. A good step in that direction, however, would be a bicameral parliament in which the upper house stays as it is, but the lower house is decided by popular vote without any confessional quotas. But that, as they say, is an entirely different post...

Things have been odd since I got back to Beirut last week. During the month I was gone, all hell seems to have broken loose. There has been the steady fighting in Nahr el-Bared, the sporadic bombings in Ashrafieh, Verdun and Aley, and finally fighting that broke out Sunday night between Jund al-Sham and the Lebanese Army in Ein el-Helweh, a Palestinian camp in Saida.

I had decided to spend the day in Tyre on Sunday to enjoy the beach, go to the Souk, see a friend and have some dinner with a port view at Abu Robert's. Before heading back up to Beirut, we kept getting calls from colleagues and the security guy at a friend's NGO telling us that things were getting worse in Saida and that we shouldn't go back to Beirut. (Saidi is on the road between Tyre and Beirut.) My roommate had a meeting early the next morning with a Western embassy, so we decided that we had to get back, and that we'd either take the sea road or take a detour through Nabatiyeh instead of taking the highway that passes by Ein el-Helweh.

We found a bus heading to Beirut, and the driver assured us that we'd be taking the sea road instead of going through Saida, so we got in and joined the mix of Lebanese and Palestinian passengers. Of course that wasn't the case. As our bus was approaching the hot area of Saida, which had apparently been alive with bullets and RPGs earlier in the evening, we crawled toward the turnabout as everyone was straining to look ahead and see if there was still any fighting.

"Ma fi shi, ma fi shi" (there's nothing, there's nothing), we heard before a Palestinian woman got out of the bus cautiously and started walking home, wherever that may have been. We passed through the city without incident, and made it back to the Cola bridge in Beirut.

On the way from Cola to Gemayzeh, we went through no fewer than six checkpoints. Twice we had to get out and let the Army (and in one case a rude plain-clothes guy, hopefully mukhabarat instead of militia) check our bags and ID. Well, they checked the three men in the car, the woman among us, of course, was never searched, and her bags went unopened. (Chivalry definitely has its place and time, but I'm afraid that it's not so welcome when when bombs have been popping up in public places on a weekly basis.)

People are fed up. There's more and more talk of leaving, and those who had planned to come back from abroad for the summer are reconsidering. A friend of mine who is graduating from the business school at the Lebanese American University told me that at the end of each class, her professor is swamped with Lebanese students pleading him to find them jobs in the Gulf so they can get out of Lebanon as soon as possible.

"The situation," as we've come to call it, is not boding well for the economy. Tourism looks like it will be dead if things don't straighten out soon, and you can look at the Gemayzeh and see how the street is practically empty compared to what it should look like on any given summer evening. Paranoia has been ever-present, with people franticly spreading the word that "Hamra is next," or "I heard Monot is going to get hit."

But in the Lebanese way, this fear has also turned into humor, giving birth to things like a Facebook group that's started a competition to see who can guess where the next bomb will be. I think you win an extra special prize if you guess two bomb locations in a row...

Makdisi had an op-ed in the LA Times last March (which I didn't see until today) about recognizing Israel's right to exist. Saree Makdisi is Edward Said's nephew, which I believe makes him Jean Said Makdisi's son. In any case, the UCLA professor makes the point that expecting Palestinians to recognize Israel's "right to exist" is absurd:

First, the formal diplomatic language of "recognition" is traditionally used by one state with respect to another state. It is literally meaningless for a non-state to "recognize" a state. Moreover, in diplomacy, such recognition is supposed to be mutual. In order to earn its own recognition, Israel would have to simultaneously recognize the state of Palestine. This it steadfastly refuses to do (and for some reason, there are no high-minded newspaper editorials demanding that it do so).

Second, which Israel, precisely, are the Palestinians being asked to "recognize?" Israel has stubbornly refused to declare its own borders. So, territorially speaking, "Israel" is an open-ended concept. Are the Palestinians to recognize the Israel that ends at the lines proposed by the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan? Or the one that extends to the 1949 Armistice Line (the de facto border that resulted from the 1948 war)? Or does Israel include the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it has occupied in violation of international law for 40 years — and which maps in its school textbooks show as part of "Israel"?

For that matter, why should the Palestinians recognize an Israel that refuses to accept international law, submit to U.N. resolutions or readmit the Palestinians wrongfully expelled from their homes in 1948 and barred from returning ever since?

If none of these questions are easy to answer, why are such demands being made of the Palestinians? And why is nothing demanded of Israel in turn?

I came across this article in the comments section (which I normally stay away from, as it's generally populated by nutbags of the anti-Semitic and über-Zionist Arab-hating varieties) of a post by Phil Weiss on the same topic. He quotes Chomsky, who responded to Weiss's question about recognizing Israel's right to exist:

No state demands a 'right to exist,' nor is any such right accorded to any state, nor should it be.  Mexico recognizes the US, but not its 'right to exist' sitting on half of Mexico, acquired by aggression.  The same generalizes.

To my knowledge, the concept 'right to exist' was invented by US-Israeli propaganda in the 1970s, when the Arab states (with the support of the PLO) formally recognized Israel's right to exist within secure and recognized borders (citing the wording of UN 242).  It was therefore necessary to raise the bars to prevent the negotiations that the US and Israel alone (among significant actors) were blocking, as they still are.  They understood, of course, that there is no reason why Palestinians should recognize the legitimacy of their dispossession -- and the point generalizes, as noted, to just about every state; maybe not Andorra.

This is a question that I've often thought about and have been hesitant to comment on, even with some friends, because of the tar and feathering that automatically comes about as soon as someone questions Israel's right to exist. I'll write a longer piece, with my own thoughts on the matter, this weekend, but in the meantime, this point made by Makdisi seems particularly relevant to me:

Israel wants the Palestinians, half of whom were driven from their homeland so that a Jewish state could be created in 1948, to recognize not merely that it exists (which is undeniable) but that it is "right" that it exists — that it was right for them to have been dispossessed of their homes, their property and their livelihoods so that a Jewish state could be created on their land. The Palestinians are not the world's first dispossessed people, but they are the first to be asked to legitimize what happened to them.

According to Al Jazeera, al-Megrahi, the Libyan spook convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has been granted an appeal by the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission.

For a more detailed discussion of this case and of the interesting piece in the London Review about it, see this post. 

The London Review has a summary piece about China's new love affair with Africa. If you've been keeping up with Chinese affairs on the continent, there probably won't be much new information in this piece, but it's a nice summary, and it's helpful to have it all in one piece. It's a subscription only article, but the main gist is summed up here:

In all likelihood China will be neither a saviour nor a destroyer. Some African opinion leaders have realised that it does not really stand for a different model. ‘Non-interference’ is not a value so much as a thin shield for old-fashioned realpolitik. China, like any other major power, generally puts its own strategic interests first. If its clients prove too embarrassing, it will restrain them, just as the United States once dumped Mobutu Sese Seko, when his taste for champagne, diamonds and bloodshed proved too embarrassing. Yet if China’s interests are better served by protecting rogues, it will protect them. If Chinese companies can get away with destroying Africa’s environment and paying little attention to its workers, they probably will. If they cannot – because local activists or consumers call them on it, or because it affects their sales in Africa and the West – perhaps they won’t.

Like the Western powers, China seems set to traffic in whatever images of Africa suit it: before the 2006 China-Africa summit in Beijing, Chinese officials plastered the city with posters of tribal warriors and lions that might have been taken from the National Geographic fifty years ago. Like the colonial powers, China will buy Africa’s resources and sell it manufactured products, regardless of whether Africa manages to produce anything that China wants to buy or succeeds in using China’s largesse to upgrade its own industries. ‘The key must be mutual benefit,’ Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s finance minister, told a group of Chinese officials. ‘Otherwise we might end up with a few holes in the ground where the resources have been extracted, and all the added value will be in China.’

Last summer, when the main opposition leader in Zambia, infuriated by the deaths in the explosives factory, made Chinese investment an issue in the presidential election, the Chinese Embassy threatened to break off relations with Zambia if he was elected. Hardly a model of non-interference.

MERIP has an excellent piece on the current situation by a Canadian journalist based out of Beirut named Jim Quilty. The piece covers Fatah al-Islam, allegations that the Syrians and the Hariris have been behind the jihadi group, and what more Lebanese sovereignty means for Palestinians, whom are often scapegoated for Lebanese problems (sometimes more justly than others).

He also provides an interesting discussion of the talk about "security islands" in Lebanon, lately used to mean Palestinian camps:

The “security islands” rhetoric is also misleading because both the Lebanese and Syrian security apparatuses have worked informally with the Palestinian political organizations in the camps, so that the Lebanese could apprehend people there who were not protected by Lebanese or Syrian interests.

Finally, speaking of the camps as “security islands” reinforces the fiction that the Lebanese state has forever yearned to assert full sovereignty over the entire country. In practice, the decentralized administration of the Palestinian camps has been just one variation on a theme of rule whereby the Lebanese state effectively outsourced its responsibilities and prerogatives. By this system, confessional politicians dispense services like health care and garbage removal to their constituents as patronage. In the period of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon, local security was delegated to different political groups on a case-by-case basis depending on their relationship with Damascus. In areas where Damascus' allies held sway -- from Druze lord Walid Jumblatt (before he shifted to the “Syria out!” side in 2005) to Hizballah (Jumblatt's present bête noire) -- groups minded their own turf, with or without the cooperation of the state security apparatus. Where banned “anti-Syrian” groups held sway, Syrian secret police were particularly overbearing. Far from exceptional, then, “security islands” like Nahr al-Barid were, and are, simply part of the archipelago that is post-civil war Lebanon.

Ha'aretz has a story about the Israeli Land Administration and a group of Palestinian Bedouins that's been moved for the second time since the war. It's short and is worth quoting in full:

ILA destroys Bedouin homes to make way for Jewish town

By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent

The Israel Land Administration (ILA), with the assistance of a large police force and IDF soldiers, demolished dozens of tin shack homes Monday in the unrecognized Bedouin villages Um Al-Hiran and A-Tir in the northern Negev.

The ILA is destroying the village built on government-owned land and evacuating its inhabitants so that a Jewish Community named "Hiran" can be established in the area. Fourteen shacks, which housed some 100 people, have been destroyed by bulldozers so far.

Bedouin women attempted to get their children out of the house but police wanted to speed up the process so they grabbed the play pens with the children inside and did not let the mothers come near.

"Tonight we will sleep on the ground", Fajua Ab Abu Al-Cian said.

Young men, roughly 18-years of age, wearing orange shirts are taking part in the evacuation, removed the Bedouin's property from their homes and placing it in piles on the ground outside.

Haaretz has discovered that these teenagers are workers employed by sub-contractors hired by the ILA. According to the evacuators, they are being paid in cash and denied labor rights.

According to Adallah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, the residents of the village have been living there for 51 years. They were transferred to the site in 1956 while under martial law. The land they originally owned was transferred to Kibbutz Shoval, while the Bedouin were leased 3000 dunam of land for agriculture and grazing.

In August 2001 the ILA submitted a report on the establishment of new communities, which included Hiran. The Bedouin residents living in the area appeared under the title of "special problems" that may affect the establishment of the community.

The government approved the establishment of Hiran in 2002, and in 2004 the state submitted a court order claiming that residents of Al Hiran should be evacuated as they are using state lands without permission.

For those who don't remember Andrew Jackson's role in land appropriation from the Native Americans, Dee Brown has a refresher in the first chapter of his Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee:

In 1829, Andrew Jackson, who was called Sharp Knife by the Indians, took office as President of the United States. During his frontier career, Sharp Knife and his soldiers had slain thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, but these southern Indians were still numerous and clung stubbornly to their tribal lands, which had been assigned them forever by white men's treaties. In Sharp Knife's first message to his Congress, he recommended that all these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi. "I suggest the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi ... to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, as long as they shall occupy it."

Although enactment of such a law would only add to the long list of broken promises made to the eastern Indians, Sharp Knife was convinced that Indians and whites could not live together in peace and that his plan would make possible a final promise which never would be broken again. On May 28, 1830, Sharp Knife's recommendations became law. 

 We all know how things worked out for those tribes and their ancestral lands...

Al JAzeera reports on this strange conference in Paris on Darfur. From the report, it's hard to see what the purpose of the conference is, particularly since Khartoum and the AU aren't attending. The US and China, however, are, as well as 15 other countries. Al Jazeera did, however, take advantage of the situation to print a funny picture of Mademoiselle Rice and Kouchner:

 

Last night, a Dutch friend of mine received a text message that informed us that UNIFIL troops had been attacked in Khiam. So far, three Columbians and two Spaniards are dead.

There have been reports that members of Fatah al-Islam confessed to plots to attack UNIFIL, but I can't help think that whoever did this must be pretty professional to have gotten past UNIFIL and Hezbollah. This attack follows a rocket attack on Israel in the south that also went unclaimed.

If there's one thing that recent history has taught us, it's that it's never a good thing when UN peacekeepers start getting targeted.

Ha'aretz has a piece analyzing the roots of Hersh's allegations that the US was funding money to the Hariri clan that ended up financing groups like Jund al-Sham and Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon:

Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent's Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum, a non-profit organization that aims to build a new relationship between the West and the Muslim world. Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it "from all kinds of people."

This is, of course, ironically pretty vague. Which Lebanese journalists? (And since when was Fisk involved?) In any case, the piece by Hersh and the ramblings by a certain Franklin Lamb have spurred the rumor mill here in Lebanon. The allegations are getting more and more ridiculous. There are, apparently, some people now claiming that Fatah al-Islam has a ...wait for it.... submarine. No kidding. People actually believe this sort of thing.