Cathy Sultan's Blog, page 12

THE SYRIAN CONFLICT COULD HAVE BEEN RESOLVED IN 2012

“Why does the U.S. insist on regime change in Syria?” asked Sonia in The Syrian.

“Syria is the link to Iran,” Tony replied. “The Syrian debacle is really a proxy war between the U.S. and Iran. Both Israel and the U.S. think Iran is trying to undermine Sunni dominance and stir up Arab nationalism and so do Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. The best way to destabilize Iran is through Syria. If Syria collapses, so the thinking goes, Iran will implode.”

There are only three countries in the Middle East that are not totally within the U.S. orbit —Iran, since the 1979 revolution, Syria, which has experienced rarely-on-and-mostly-off relations with Washington for decades, and Iraq, a bombing target of four U.S. presidents, the object of two wars and years of killer sanctions, now closely tied to Iran. It so happens that these three countries are not only allies, but Iran and Iraq have majority Shiite populations and Syria is led by the Alawite (Shiite derivative) government of President Bashar al-Assad. In addition, these three countries are backed by China and Russia which the U.S. finds intolerable.

Given it’s distain for anything Russian, it is not surprising that the U.S. refused to adopt the Russia-backed U.N. Resolution in 2012, a year after the Syrian war began, which proposed effective measures that could have eliminated the tensions and ended the conflict.

“The interest of the Syrian people was never their first priority,” said former United Nations and Arab League Special Envoy to Syria, Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi who tried to help broker that cease-fire.

In a recent debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Hillary Clinton referenced the 2012 Russian-proposed U.N. Security Council Resolution.

“You know, the Security Council finally got round to adopting a resolution. At the core of that resolution is an agreement I negotiated in June of 2012, which set forth a cease-fire for moving toward a political resolution, trying to bring the parties at stake in Syria together.”

According to Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in his February 16, 2016 Huffington Post article Hillary Clinton and the Syrian Bloodbath, “Clinton was the obstacle, not the solution, to a ceasefire being negotiated. It was U.S. intransigence—Clinton’ intransigence—that led to the failure of the U.N. Resolution in the spring of 2012, a point well known among diplomats. Despite Clinton’s insinuation, there was no 2012 ceasefire, only escalating carnage. Clinton bears heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.”

 Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel have all clamored to remove Iran’s influence in Syria. This is incredibly naïve. Iran has been around as a regional power for about 2,700 years. And Shia Islam is not about to disappear. Clinton joined Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel to try to isolate and eventually defeat Iran. In 2010 she supported secret negotiations between Israel and Syria to attempt to wrestle Syria from Iran’s influence. When those talks failed, the CIA and Clinton moved on to Plan B—the overthrow of Assad.

Again, according to Jeffrey Sachs, in early 2011 Turkey and Saudi Arabia leveraged local protests against Assad to try to foment conditions for his ouster. By the spring of 2011, the CIA and the U.S. allies were organizing an armed insurrection against the Assad regime. On August 18, 2011, the U.S. government made public its position: “Assad must go.”

The U.S. policy in Syria has been a massive failure. Assad did not go, and was not defeated. Russia and Iran came to his support. Yet the hubris of the U.S. in its approach to regimes it does not like seems to know no bounds. The tactic of CIA-led regime changes is now so deeply enmeshed as a “normal” instrument of U.S. foreign policy that it is hardly noticed by the American public.

DID OBAMA JUST MAKE IT KOSHER TO BOYCOTT SETTLEMENTS?

 

            DID OBAMA JUST MAKE IT KOSHER TO BOYCOTT SETTLEMENTS?

Aaron Steinberg-Madow asked this question in his February 29 article in Forward. He went on to say: “Last week President Obama made the strongest statement to date that Israeli settlement boycotts are a legitimate tactic for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS). Upon signing a trade bill that included punitive measures for companies that boycott Israel and its settlements, Obama said that his administration would only enforce the bill’s protections as they apply to Israel-proper, not to the illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

Fierce controversy surrounds the bill. Supporters of the bill’s provisions targeting boycotts of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) frame them as part of a bipartisan effort to halt the momentum of the BDS movement which they claim is a global effort to delegitimize Israel.

The global movement for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights was initiated ten years ago by the Palestinian civil society. As I explain in Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with both Sides, BDS is a strategy that allows people of conscience to play an effective role in the Palestinian struggle for justice. The campaign took its inspiration from the successful South African anti-apartheid movement.

Boycotts target products and companies, Israeli and international, that profit from the violation Palestinian rights.

Divestment means targeting corporations complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights and ensuring that the likes of university investment portfolios and pension funds are not used to finance such companies.

Sanctions are an essential part of demonstrating disapproval for a country’s actions. Israel’s membership in various diplomatic and economic forums provides both an unmerited veneer of respectability and material support for its actions. By calling for sanctions, campaigners educate society about violations of international law and seek to end the complicity of other nations in such violations.

Israel claims the BDS movement is delegitimizing Israel, that it is threatening Israel’s authority and prestige. Global polls warrant their concerns. Israel’s daily Ha’aretz reported In May 2013 that of the more than 26,000 people surveyed by the BDS in twenty-five countries only 21 percent had a positive view of Israel while 52 percent viewed the country unfavorably.

The bill just signed by President Obama and similar bills being introduced in state legislatures by pro-Israeli groups is a reflection of Israel’s concern. If these bills are approved by state legislatures they will deny funding for academic institutions that pass BDS resolutions, create blacklists of nonprofits that boycott Israeli goods and restrict companies and institutions that support BDS from receiving state contracts. Such bills would infringe of First Amendment rights and would be fiercely contested in courts across the country.

In June 2014 the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to divest from three companies that it said supplied Israel with equipment used in the occupation of Palestinian territory. The three firms—Motorola Solutions, Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard—profit from the Israeli occupation by selling bulldozers, surveillance technology and similar products.

Since then the BDS campaign has had hundreds of successes. On March 10, 2016, G4S one of the world’s largest security and imprisonment firms announced its plans to end all its business with Israel within the next 12 to 24 months. According to the BDS movement, “G4S is an accomplice in Israel’s use of mass incarceration as a way to dissuade Palestinians from resisting its apartheid system.”

G4S is complicit in Israel’s systematic policy of arresting, detaining and torturing Palestinian children. According to the Defense of Children International, Israeli soldiers take an average of two children (ages 10-12) from their beds every night. They are not allowed to see their family or a lawyer. They are violently interrogated and then tried in a military court.

A report in the Huffington Post, May 30, 2012 exposed the case of one such boy. “After being beaten with a chair, held in solitary confinement, taunted with knife, forced to stay awake and otherwise abused, he was released from prison. He now has trouble falling asleep and when he does he has nightmares which feature his interrogators. And his punishment continues: he is kept under house arrest, indefinitely, and is not allowed to go to school.”

According to Brad Parker, an attorney and international advocacy officer for Defense of the Children International-Palestine “Ill treatment and torture of Palestinian children arrested by Israeli forces is widespread, systematic and institutionalized in the Israeli military detention system which relies on G4S equipment and personnel to maintain a number of Israeli prisons and interrogations centers.”

Another BDS success on the same day was the announcement by Ahava, the Israeli cosmetics company, that they will relocate their manufacturing facility from the West Bank to inside the pre-1967 lines. The Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, which reported on the move under the headline ‘Ahava Moving Factory out of West Bank following BDS Pressure,’ said that “the move will help mitigate the difficulties the company has experienced because of the European boycott of goods produced in the West Bank.”In 2011, Ahava shut its flagship London store in Covent Garden following months of protests by BDS campaigners.

Ahava’s decision to leave the West Bank follows similar moves by SodaStream who relocated from a West Bank settlement to the Negev, as well as the Unilever-owned Beigel-Beigel, Barkan Winemaker and the Swedish-owned Mul-T-Lock lock manufacturer.

In light of the many pro-Israeli groups that influence/strong-arm members of Congress across both sides of the isle, as well as the executive branch, I applaud Obama’s brave stance on BDS. It isn’t a full-blown endorsement but it is close and it is causing shock waves. And if President Obama, in his last year in office, continues to take control of the discussion on Israeli goods produced in the Occupied Territories, and dares to stand up to the pressure from the Israel lobby and its ilk, and joins in any future resolution condemning Israel at the United Nations, as has been hinted, he will, in my humble opinion, have finally earned his Nobel Peace prize.   

SABRA-SHATILA REVISITED

Robert Fisk recently revisited Sabra-Shatila, a place of memories and ghosts. In September 1982 he was one of the first journalists to enter the camp after Lebanon’s Christian militia, aided by the Israeli military, had massacred 1,700 civilians.

As I recount in A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War the massacres began on the night of September 16 when about two hundred militiamen selected by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon entered the camps. They were a carefully organized coalition of the Christian Lebanese Forces and members of the South Lebanese Army, Israel’s proxy in their self-proclaimed ‘security zone’ in south Lebanon. The men were under the command of General Amos Yaron, Director-General of the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

For thirty-eight hours, from the evening of September 16 to September 18, Israeli soldiers stood guard outside the camps to prevent anyone escaping. Planes dropped flares to aid the militiamen inside the camp.

The victims were unarmed Palestinian civilians, exterminated as though they were rats. Before they left the camps, the militiamen bulldozed the bodies into heaps, pushed them into shallow make-shift graves and covered them with dirt.

In an article Robert Fisk wrote for the Independent in August 2001 entitled Travels in a Land without Hope, he referred to Ariel Sharon’s repeated reference to the Palestinians as “murderers and terrorists.” He had heard Ariel Sharon use those words before.

“I called up an old friend with a talent for going through archives,” he wrote. “I gave her the date that was going through my head, 15 September 1982, the last hours for the 1,700 Palestinians who were about to be murdered in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut.” She was able to locate the September 1982 Associated Press release.

“Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, in a statement, tied the killing of Lebanese Forces leader Bashir Gemayal, and recently elected president, to the PLO, saying that “it symbolizes the terrorist murderousness of the PLO terrorist organization and its supporters.”

A few hours later, Sharon sent the militiamen into the camps.

“Reading that release again,” wrote Fisk, “I felt a chill come over me. There are Israelis today who feel as much rage toward the Palestinians as those Christian militiamen felt all those years ago. And these are the same words I am hearing today.  Why?”

Our apartment in Beirut was about two blocks from Sabra-Shatila. My husband’s secretary lived in an apartment near the camps. When she came to work the morning after the massacres I sat down and asked her what she knew.

“I heard the machine gun bursts which lasted almost two days,” she said, “but it was the screams, the voices of children crying, of women pleading, which haunted me the most. I’ll never forget the agony of their voices as they begged for their lives.”

It was not until late Saturday morning, when the camps fell silent that she dared crawl onto the balcony and peer through the railing.

“There was a foul, almost sickeningly sweet smell in the air,” she said. “And the flies—there were great hordes of them everywhere. That’s when I knew something awful had happened.”

She was deeply moved by a group of young boys who looked as if they had been playing one of those games where children huddle together over a ball, arms linked, shoulders touching; they had fallen together in a pile, their faces daubed with what looked like dark red finger paint. A small girl lay on her side in an alleyway a short distance from the boys. She thought at first it was someone’s doll. Her dress was blotched with blood and dirt. A crimson halo encircled her head.

Around mid-morning, she saw a group of journalists enter the camp. One of the men climbed onto a huge pile of dirt to get a better view. The mound looked about ten feet tall. He struggled to reach the top, holding out his arms to steady himself as he went.

“Have you ever seen someone try to walk across a trampoline without falling?” she asked. “That is how he looked, wobbling to and fro, unsteady on his feet.”

The man slipped and lost his balance. Trying to catch himself, he grabbed hold of a dark red rock—the color of much of Lebanon’s rich soil—protruding from the mound of dirt.

“It wasn’t a rock,” she said. “It was someone’s bloated stomach.”

Horrified, he let go, lost his balance and tumbled to the ground.

That journalist was Robert Fisk.

PALESTINE: DIGNITY IN THE FACE OF CRUELTY

Morning Star (UK)

March 4, 2016

Palestine: Dignity in the face of cruelty

By Richard Burgon, MP

AS AN MP, discussion of Palestine and Israel is never far away from you — in the news, in Parliament and in correspondence from members of the public. It was a privilege to visit Jerusalem and the illegally occupied territories of Palestine in the West Bank with a group of Labour MPs during the recent break in parliamentary business, in order to see for ourselves the situation on the ground.

During the visit we saw with our own eyes the reality of Israeli “settlements” and “outposts,” Palestinian communities suffering under occupation, Bedouin communities whose way of life is threatened by Israel’s government, the valuable work of Medical Aid For Palestinians and other aid agencies, and the reality of Israel’s military courts. We also met politicians from both the Israeli Knesset and the Palestinian Authority.

Our visit was informative. It was also depressing and yet somehow also uplifting. It was certainly truly unforgettable.

The Israeli settlements we saw and the impact they are having was truly frightening. They appear as wealthy gated communities. And the number of them, the size of them, and their sinister strategic locations physically block off the possibility of a two-state solution.

We also visited Palestinian communities such as the village of Susya, which has been demolished on numerous occasions by the Israeli government and is overlooked by an Israeli “outpost.”

We journeyed to the remote village of Jimba in the South Hebron Hills in occupied Palestine. There we saw a Palestinian home that had been demolished by Israel’s government. Following the demolition, the Palestinian family who lived there are now living in a cave. We met them. We saw damage to facilities funded by Britain’s Department for International Development.

In our journey between Susya and Jimba we were confronted by unnerving Israeli “settlers” and trailed by machine gun-wielding Israel soldiers. It appears the Israeli government really does feel there are no consequences to its behaviour.

Our visit to the Palestinian village of Bet Ijza was also unforgettable. We visited the home of a Palestinian family whose house is now surrounded by the Israeli settlement of Givon Hadasha. The settlers have fenced the family in.

An armed sentry gate had also been placed at the end of the drive but had later been removed after a successful legal case pursued with the support of the Palestinian Authority.

Walking up the drive to the house, between the high fences erected by the settlers, felt like walking into a prison.

After being fenced in by Israeli “settlers,” the family attached a green screen on “their” side of the fence in order to shield them from abuse and harassment from the “settlers” trying to get them to leave their home. We were told that among the “settlers” in this illegal settlement are senior members of Israel’s army and navy.

In Jerusalem we had an excellent meeting and wonderful evening with the Jabal Al-Baba Bedouin community. In 1948 Israeli military forces violently expelled them from their lands in the Negev desert. In 1952 they resettled on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Their home is now under threat of demolition by Israel’s government. Indeed, only days after our departure, we received messages that the bulldozers had arrived on their doorstep.

In the Old City of Jerusalem, we visited the home of a Palestinian family that has lived there since 1953. Israeli settlers are trying to force them out of their home. The “settlers” that moved in next door blocked in the entrance to the Palestinian family’s house by building a wall. In the children’s bedroom, we saw where the settlers drilled through the wall — in five different places.

In East Jerusalem we saw a Palestinian community that had become a ghost town, with deserted homes all around, as a result of Israel’s government building its wall, cutting the community off from work, neighbours, family and friends.

We had the opportunity of accompanying a Medical Aid for Palestinians mobile clinic on its visit to a Bedouin community, again overlooked by an Israeli settlement. The work that organisation does under incredibly difficult circumstances, and subject to all the pressures that Israel’s occupation brings, is vitally important. Supporting them is something very practical that can be done by people in Britain who care about the plight of the Palestinian people.

We visited one of the Israeli state’s military courts — situated in “Area C” of illegally occupied Palestine. In this military court, Palestinian children of 12 and older are sentenced for throwing stones. Sentences of six months for throwing stones at Israeli military vehicles are standard fare in these courts — but we heard of sentences of up to 20 years being given out.

Charge sheets are given to Arabic-speaking Palestinian children in Hebrew, a language that the vast majority cannot read or speak. We attended a number of court hearings — which the judge instructed us we could not report on — and prior to that we waited with the families of the child defendants in a crowded outdoor waiting area surrounded by high fences and entered and exited by way of a football stadium-style turnstile. Many parents we met saw a custodial sentence as inevitable but cherished being able to see their children — even in the dock — for a few fleeting minutes.

During the week, we met politicians from the Knesset and the Palestinian Authority, including the Prime Minister of the PA, Rami Hamdallah. He, unlike Israel’s government, appeared genuinely committed to practically pursuing a two-state solution. The conclusion I came to is that the Israeli government’s continued expansion of illegal settlements is an intentional barrier in the way of that solution.

Our visit to occupied Palestine was one that I would recommend to all Members of Parliament — particularly to those who still feel that justifying the occupation is the right thing to do. I would like to think that any such MP seeing first-hand how things really are would think again.



[Richard Burgon is Labour MP for Leeds East.]

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-c85b-Palestine-Dignity-in-the-face-of-cruelty

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THE “GIRLS IN BIKINIS” LINE DOESN’T WORK ANY MORE

 

The Republican pollster Frank Luntz is a guru for Israeli Hasbara. His job has been to teach thousands of “warriors” for the Israeli government how to sell human rights violations and settlement expansion to increasingly dubious audiences.

As I explain in Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides, his project is called the Global Language Dictionary. His most recent Hasbara, a power pint presentation entitled Communicating the Truth about Israel (post Gaza 2014) is available for download. The presentation includes current research on what Americans think about Israel, and what words test well in responding to their doubts. The video calls for a war against “radical, hate-driven organizations,” any organization that supports Palestinian rights.

In his presentation Luntz relies on thinly veiled racism and attacks on peace and justice advocates, blaming church groups and pro-BDS Jewish college students for gradually closing the door on a two-state solution. He tells attendees to talk about Israel standing on the front line against global terrorism, a beacon of civility in a tough neighborhood, to trot out the constant line about Hamas using human shields and to blame Palestinian rejectionism for their suffering and to divert the conversation away from Israeli occupation and repression. Luntz’s reminder to his audience is always the same.

“It’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

Minister Gilad Erdan recently organized a secret conference in Jerusalem with 150 top supporters of Israel and Frank Luntz was there to present some disturbing statistics:

The Ministry of Tourism’s attempt to market Israel as a cool destination with girls in bikinis has failed.

Jewish American students have an increasingly negative image of Israel.

Just 42% believe Israel wants peace.

Just 38% believe “Israel is civilized and Western.”

Just 31% believe Israel is a democracy.

No less than 21% believe the US should side with the Palestinians and a similar proportion sees Israel as racist.

Luntz’s recommendation: Israel’s supports should say that they are in favor of a dialogue and peace-building through diplomacy and accuse BDS supports of obstructing dialogue and spreading hate.

The attendees were also told that using the Nazi genocide of European Jews—a favorite tactic to deflect criticism of Israel’s occupation and violent colonization of the Palestinians—is also not a winning strategy.

Participants were given ideas on language choices that are supposedly more successful at discrediting the BDS movement. A slide presentation instructed the propagandists to call BDS activists “anti-Israeli” rather than “anti-Semitic,” and to use words like “dialogue” rather than “discussion” and “open-minded” as opposed to “balanced.

The flailing around for a message reflects the level of confusion among Israeli’s marketers.  Hasbara chiefs still appear to be convinced that the problem is not the product—brutally enforced occupation, war crimes and state-sanctioned racism—but simply the packaging.

It may also be because the carrot approach—trying to seduce young people to Israel’s side—is failing so badly that the Israeli-led anti-Palestinian movement has resorted to using the stick in the hope of intimidating people into silence.

DON’T THEY HAVE ENOUGH WEAPONS, MR. PRESIDENT?

 

As I write in Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides, the current estimate of cumulative total U.S. direct aid to Israel since its founding is well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. According to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy: “Since 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year which is roughly one-fifth of America’s entire foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the U.S. gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 each year.

In 2008 President George W. Bush and Israel entered into a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding that would give Israel an additional $30 billion in foreign military assistance. This largess is especially striking when one realized that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state and that between 2004 and 2011 Israel was the eighth-largest arms exporter in the world, with sales worth a total of $12.9 billion.

For the Palestinians no funds were specifically earmarked. Included in Israel’s massive arms bill, however, are the standard “general” provisions placing conditions on aid to the Palestinians. There is also a provision limiting presidential waiver authority to close the PLO mission in the U.S. if the Palestinians have obtained, in the U.N. or any U.N. agency, full membership as a state outside an agreement between Israel and Palestinians. Also, for the PLO office to stay open the president must certify that the Palestinians have not taken any action in the International Criminal Court that would “subject Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”

The Obama administration is now offering Israel the largest single pledge of military assistance than to any country in U.S. history. This is a remarkable fact when set against the persistent claims of an ongoing “rift” between the U.S. president and his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Netanyahu.

An Israeli official told Defense News that the Obama package would see U.S. military aid jump to more than $40 billion over the ten-year period beginning in 2018, from the $30 billion that began in 2008 under President Bush’s Memorandum of Understanding.

Israel will also retain sweeteners that are denied other countries: it will receive its billions as a lump sum payment at the beginning of each fiscal year while other countries get their money in installments.

Despite Obama’s unprecedented largesse, Israel is publically complaining that the U.S. president is not being generous enough. Israeli cabinet member Zeev Elkin, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party said that Israel was still waiting for a “realistic offer” from the Obama administration. “Iran’s going to get about $100 billion now,” Netanyahu claimed at the World Economic Forum in Darvos last month referring to Iran’s own money that is finally being unfrozen due to the lifting of sanctions. Netanyahu last week told his ministers that if Israel didn’t extract what it wanted from Obama “we will not manage to come to an agreement with this administration and will need to come to an agreement with the next administration.”

The White House responded that Israel could wait if it preferred but that it “will certainly not find a president more committed to Israel’s security than is President Obama.”

Israel is conducting itself as if it is an equal to the U.S. and as if it is engaged in a negotiation in which two sides have something substantial to offer and substantial to receive from each other. That’s what Israel and its lobby would like people to believe. The lobby boasts of the benefits Israel supposedly brings to its U.S. bankroller. However, the mutual benefits are marginal compared with the vast military, industrial and scientific complex of the U.S. whose $600 billion-a-year global military machine would barely notice if Israel disappeared. The fact is that Israel is a very small and barely significant U.S. client state. Its importance is inflated by several factors including its outsize domestic lobby and the ideological commitments of U.S. leaders like Obama who openly embrace the “shared values” between America’s settler-colonial history and Zionism.

The Israel lobby is not and has never been absolute. Its influence is proportional to how closely aligned Israel is with the U.S. imperial and hegemonic interests. When they clash, as in the case with the US’s rapprochement with Iran, the US establishment has no problem defying the lobby.

Palestinian rights and lives have been the currency Obama has used to “compensate” Israel over the Iran deal. The new, bigger-than-ever Obama arms package will not be used by Israel to attack Iran, and therefore does not interfere with any U.S. hegemonic interest. The weapons Obama is giving Israel will be used to maintain and fuel Israel’s occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism in Palestine.

KUDOS THOMAS FRIEDMAN AND WELCOME TO THE ONE STATE CLUB

 

The last time I praised Mr. Friedman’s words was in 1989 when his book From Beirut to Jerusalem was released. In the first half of his book he recounts his time in Beirut, from 1979 to 1984, when he covered the Lebanese civil war for The New York Times.  I had lived in Beirut at the time, having moved there in 1969 with my Lebanese husband and two small children. Six years later, on April 15, 1975, the war began, a block from our apartment.

Mr. Friedman witnessed the war from West Beirut. My vantage point was East Beirut. We both watched a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city slowly unravel. We saw the war invade every neighborhood. We watched militias fight each other at intersections and across alleyways. In the hotel sector they bombed one another’s seized hotels destroying Beirut’s major landmarks. In the city center around Martyrs’ Square, they engaged in street-to-street combat, annihilating the city’s two-thousand-year-old souks and in 1982 we watched in horror while Israel indiscriminately carpet bombed the city for seventy straight days.

  We both left Beirut in 1984, he to become the Times’ bureau chief in Jerusalem, me to re-settle back in the states. He called his time in Beirut his own private nightmare. Mine was more akin to a relationship with a lover-city that was clever enough to entice me back with good behavior every time I thought to leave. Mr. Friedman spent the next five years in Jerusalem; I spent those years, and more, trying to recover from the effects war. After our shared experience we parted ways politically, he to continue his writing career; me, to begin mine.

One of the most read columnists in the world, Mr. Friedman has always advocated unequivocal support for Israel and a “two-state solution” even when it was blatantly obvious that such a solution was no longer possible, while repeatedly blaming the Palestinians for the demise of Oslo.  In my book Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides I not only advocated for a fair and balanced approach to the conflict, giving equal voice to both parties, but I also envisioned a one-state-solution as the only reasonable way forward.

So imagine my surprise when on February 10, 2016 Mr. Friedman wrote that: “It’s hard to know who delivered the mortal blow. Was it the fanatical Jewish settlers determined to keep expanding their footprint in the West Bank and able to sabotage any Israeli politician who opposed them? Was it right-wing Jewish billionaires, like Sheldon Adelson, who used their influence to blunt any US congressional criticism of Netanyahu? They all killed the two-state solution. Let the one-state era begin.”  He went on to say that “the next U.S. president will have to deal with an Israel determined to permanently occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including where 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live.”

According to Phil Weiss of Mondoweiss, “We’re on the threshold of a great Jew-versus-Jew battle about who lost Israel. The neocons are going to fight back hard and liberal Zionists will at last use the right word to describe what Israel has established: apartheid.

Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy who writes for the Israel daily, Haaretz said: “There’s only one major party to blame for the situation and only it (Israel) is responsible for ending the occupation and never lifted a finger to do so. Israel never meant, not for a moment, to reach the two-state solution. Israel is the strong party as well as the occupier, so the blame cannot be divided between it and the weaker, occupied side. Nor can one settle for blaming Netanyahu, the settlers and Adelson. Are all the others, from Shimon Peres to Livni, Hezog and Ehud Barak any less guilty? And are most of the Israelis, who enabled this situation to continue all these years with their indifference, any less guilty?”

This is a seminal moment in journalism, the moment in which one journalist who has always reflected the mood in Washington and influenced it is finally discarding the ideas that have accompanied him and others for far too many years.

Again, Phil Weiss: “The longest masquerade ball, the two-state orgy, has reached its end, even as far as Friedman is concerned. If America listens to such senior commentators, there’s still hope.

Thank you, Thomas Friedman, for leading the way.

 

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas, both failed governments

In Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides, I dissect the weaknesses of President Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority (PA) which has neither the mandate to negotiate a conflict-ending peace deal with Israel nor the ability to deliver on one.

The PA recently signaled its willingness to resign in order to facilitate the establishment of a new Palestinian unity government between rival Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. These are empty gestures as the current unity government is essentially defunct, with Hamas saying that Fatah has prevented its consensus government from handing out salaries to 50,000 employees in Gaza and Fatah accusing Hamas of running  a parallel government in the coastal enclave.

Despite these contradictions,  the PA insists that reconciliation is essential for the Palestinian “national project and to enhance its capability to face the biggest challenge—ending the occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with east Jerusalem as its capital.” Hamas, in an equally worthless statement, said that  it was “ready to form a new unity government without preconditions.”

.Abbas, who will turn 81 next month, has no succession plans and despite frequent threats to resign, will, alas, likely die in office. The Palestinian constitution is in tatters and so too his Fatah party, which has continued to allow Abbas to rule without elections.

The people in the Gaza Strip fare no better. Rather than focusing on mechanisms to liberate Palestine, the Hamas government there seems intent on turning its attention to repressing dissent, similar to that of the West Bank government. Caught in between these two entities are the Palestinian people.

For more than two decades, Palestinians have been saddled with the failed negotiations process and despite its disastrous effects the Palestinian leadership has refused to seriously pursue an alternative strategy. Even Abbas’s declaration before the United Nations last year that the Oslo Accords was “dead” was a guise to press Israel to resume negotiations, as he later admitted. Abbas refuses to endorse the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. He refused to condemn Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014 and has failed to bring war crimes charges against Israel for its repeated attacks on the Gaza Strip.

January 2016 marks 10 years since the last Palestinian parliamentary elections in which Hamas overwhelmingly secured the majority of seats. Almost immediately, the international community, which claimed to support Palestinian democracy, decided it would no longer support a Palestinian government with Hamas at its helm, unless and until Hamas agreed to abide by a number of conditions.

No such conditions have ever been placed on any Israeli government either for its refusal to end their illegal occupation of Palestinian land or for its continued expansion of Israeli settlements. After the January elections funds to the donor-dependent Palestinian Authority — dependent only because Israel refuses to allow the Palestinian economy to flourish — were immediately cut and so began the long and still ongoing battle between Hamas and Fatah over who should “rule” over the Palestinians.  That divide remains in place today despite the fact that national unity is consistently mentioned by the Palestinian people as their foremost concern.

And so. 10 years on, Palestinians have one president, whose term expired seven years ago, two prime ministers who have never been confirmed by parliament, and a parliament that has not convened since 2007 but whose term expired six years ago. Similarly, the PLO which claims to represent Palestinians worldwide hasn’t convened in years. These failed institutions are due in large part to President Abbas who has consolidated power unto himself, destroyed Palestinian institutions and worked on behalf of his occupier in helping to maintain its illegal occupation of his own people.
Meanwhile, 10 years on, the Gaza Strip assaulted by Israel in 2008-2009, in 2012 and 2014, and attacked 700 times in 2015 without so much as a whimper from the international community, is on life support. 1.8 million people live in Gaza with 4, 505 inhabitants per square kilometer,  475,000 of whom live in emergency shelters or with other families. 17,200 homes have been destroyed or severely damaged by repeated Israeli attacks, with only 900 homes rebuilt or repaired since the latest war in 2014, and 244 schools remain destroyed or damaged. Nearly 45% of all Gazans are refugees and nearly 50% of them are below the age of 18. 90% of the water is unsafe to drink and according to the United Nation, Gaza will be unlivable by 2020.

Without meaningful leadership, the Palestinian people in both the West Bank and Gaza are left few options for a viable future free of Israeli occupation and aggression.

 

BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT AND SANCTIONS

The global movement for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights was initiated by Palestinian civil society in 2005. According to its co-founder, Omar Barghouti, the movement calls for an end to Israel’s 1967 occupation of Arab lands, including East Jerusalem, an end to what even the US Dept. of State has called Israel’s system of institutional, legal and social discrimination against its Palestinian citizens which meets the UN definition of apartheid, and to respect, protect and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties, as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.

As I state in the recently released third edition of Israeli and Palestinian Voices: A Dialogue with Both Sides the BDS movement, now in its tenth year, has redefined the battle for Palestine in the simple, straightforward terms of human rights. BDS has also created a global outpouring of support for Palestinian rights. In the US the issue of Palestinian rights has gone from the margins of the Left into mainstream discourse and debate. From the corporate media to academic institutions the discussion has veered away from obscure territorial claims and competing historical narratives to focus on the three simple demands of the BDS movement.

Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid struggle, BDS has succeeded in exposing the toxicity of the “brand” Israel and in isolating it academically, culturally and economically. Israeli authorities claims the BDS movement is delegitimizing Israel, that it is threatening its authority and prestige. Palestinians claim a more accurate explanation in the shift in international opinion is Israel’s flagrant violation of international law which shines a light on Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinians, and more and more people are repelled by what they see. The BDS movement merely acts to display, amplify and oppose Israel’s behavior.

The impact of BDS, now 10 years old, is acknowledged  by top Israeli political, security and business leaders. A UN report shows that direct foreign investment in Israel dropped by 40% in 2014 as compared to the previous year. An Israeli co-author of this report attributed this sharp decrease in part to the BDS campaign. A recent Rand study estimated Israel’s economic losses in the coming ten years if BDS continues will be around $47 billion.

Prime Minister Netanyahu declared the BDS movement a strategic threat and has turned to Israel’s last and toughest line of defense—the US Congress—for help. No surprises there since many members of Congress are bought and paid for by the Israel lobby and as such are expected to do its dirty work.

Having failed to stand up to BDS at the grassroots and civil society levels, Israel recently adopted a new strategy for fighting BDS by getting anti-BDS legislation passed in several state legislatures and, they hope, soon in the US Congress. In essence Israel is trying to delegitimize the boycott, a time-honored tactic of resisting injustice in the US and a form of protected speech, as decided by the Supreme Court.

On January 20, 2016, the New York State Senate passed a law that would make boycotting countries allied with the U.S. illegal. The bill requires the state to create a blacklist of “persons” (individuals or companies) that boycott or encourage others to boycott U.S. allies. The bill’s supporters have made it clear that their main motivation is to protect Israel from censure of any kind. This bill comes in the wake of similar legislative efforts in Congress and in state legislatures in Illinois, Florida, California and Pennsylvania.

Legislative proscriptions like the New York law cannot obscure the reality of injustice and oppression that the BDS campaign addresses. Ultimately BDS will turn Israel into a pariah state as South Africa once was.

OUR MIDDLE EAST ALLIES, BOTH POOR CHOICES

When it comes to reporting on the Middle East, mass media shouts down anyone who dares to contradict their lies. In The Syrian I used fiction to uncover the machinations surrounding a political assassination and backed up my assumptions with some pretty solid evidence, thus turning the book into a face-paced political thriller. Of course I don’t presume to know all the region’s intrigues but I lived in Beirut for fifteen years and continue to spend a few months a year there so my ear is keenly tuned into what happens on the ground. And my addiction to news which began when my family and I were under the bombs trying to survive the Lebanese civil war hasn’t abated one bit. I am confident, therefore, that I know and understand better than many what goes on across the region, who initiates the skullduggery and why.

The US government has two allies in the Middle East—Israel and Saudi Arabia. Between the just-released Human Rights Watch’s 162 page report urging international businesses to stop operating in, financing, servicing, or trading with Israeli illegal settlements and the vastly successful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign being carried out against them, Israel has its hands full at the moment.

Saudi Arabia, with little condemnation and using its vast oil wealth, is, on the other hand, quietly spreading its ultra-conservative brand of Islam throughout the Muslim world and secretly undermining secular regimes in the region. It financed and fueled the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, underwrote Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, gave financial support to the Saudi citizens who carried out the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, with no repercussions, and is currently bankrolling ISIS and other Islamic movements and terrorist groups from the Caucuses to Hindu Kush to Syria.

So long as the Saudi royal family keeps the oil flowing, the US overlooks these ‘indiscretions.’ According to Pepe Escobar in his article Fear and Loathing in the House of Saud, it works like this: “US ‘protection’ is structured in a Mafia-style ‘offer you can’t refuse’ arrangement. The US guarantees safe passage for the oil export flow through their naval patrols and the Saudis buy from them, non-stop, a festival of weapons and plays host to US naval bases.”

In keeping with the US’s ‘arrangement’ with Saudi Arabia, and against the backdrop of the execution of the Shiite leader Sheik Nimr Bafq’ al-Nimr, followed by the formal breaking of diplomatic relations with Iran in retaliation for the attack on the kingdom’s embassy in Tehran, U.S. neoconservatives, the same fearless defenders of Western values and democratic governance who brought us the weapons of mass destruction lies and predicted our ‘Shock and Awe’ invasion of Iraq would be a cake-walk, are now rallying in defense of an absolute monarchy and undisputed deep-pocketed financier of ISIS and its ilk.

The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer and The National Review, to name but a few, were quick to attack Iran for allowing the kingdom’s embassy to be ransacked while claiming that Sheik Nimr’s execution was justified because he was essentially an Iranian agent and not a leading non-violent civil rights advocate.

Lee Smith in Kristol’s Weekly Standard said it best: “Saudi Arabia is a difficult ally in many ways.  However, it is part of the American order of the Middle East and has been for 70 years. Therefore, an attack on Saudi diplomatic facilities is an attack on our side, our order, us. We see Israel in the same way.”     

So, when it comes to reading and learning about events in the Middle East, choose who you read and learn to decipher the lies.

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