Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Israel, Palestine, Means and Ends

We at Evenhanded Democrats, while having many differences in style and political opinion, are united in our goal of reforming the Democratic Party's policies in the Middle East. Together we are involved in seeking this change by trying to influence the debate at Progressive and Democratic blogs with reality-based arguments about Israel and Palestine. For the most part, our diaries on this site are cross-posted at Daily Kos and related sites -- blog communities in which we value being members.

We have come to a parting of the ways with one of the contributors to this blog, shergald. While we continue to share some goals with shergald, we do not wish to share some of his chosen means. His diaries will no longer be carried on this site.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Democrats standing up to Olmert??

Only in an Israeli newspaper:

When Speaker of the House Nancy came back from her Mideast trip, I wrote briefly about her frustration with the Israeli government and the way it handled her visit to Damascus: "Pelosi", I wrote, "didn't like the Israeli clarification. It made her look slightly ridiculous, like a rookie in foreign policy." I also mentioned that it was not her first frustration with Olmert. He knows how politically sensitive are the issues of American policy in the region but "nonetheless decided to present an explicit Israeli policy regarding Iraq identical to that of Bush in a speech to AIPAC."


And this wasn't even the first time that Olmert marched into this mine field. Visiting the White House in November, right after the Midterm elections, he felt the need to say that he is "very much impressed and encouraged by the stability which the great operation of America in Iraq brought to the Middle East." snip

As Guttman wrote Thursday: "Israeli officials and Democratic lawmakers are working to mend fences", and the Waxman-Ackerman statement is a first sign. Sources in Washington told me today that next week, when all the Democratic Presidential hopefuls will appear before delegates to the National Jewish Democratic Council conference, we will see more of this conciliatory tone coming to fore.

However, this source said, "even as our leadership is working to calm things down, the rank and file Democrats are getting tired of these Israeli maneuvers." If Israel doesn't "get its act together" and doesn't reciprocate these pacifying moves - "if Olmert keeps doing such irresponsible things" - it will get more "difficult for Democrats who do care about Israel" to defend their position.

It almost sounded like a threat.
http://www.haaretz.com/...

I know Bush does not seem to care that the democrats won Congress....but someone needs to tell Olmert.

I believe Bush had Sharon's blessings to go into Iraq...and that Olmert is having problems backing away from that position.

Here is the line up for the conference on Israel and Terrorism:

NJDC WASHINGTON CONFERENCE - APRIL 23-25, 2007
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS INCLUDE:
Senator Hillary Clinton
Senator Barack Obama
Senator John Edwards
Senator Joe Biden
Senator Christopher Dodd
Governor Bill Richardson
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer

And who are they? What is their mission statement? Sounds like they could be a close mirror imagine of AIPAC:

Founded in 1990, the National Jewish Democratic Council is the national voice of Jewish Democrats. Informed by our commitment to those values shared by the Democratic Party and the vast majority of American Jews - including the separation of church and state, a strong US-Israel relationship, and reproductive freedom - NJDC's singular set of priorities includes:

* Educating Jewish voters about the very real differences between their Democratic and Republican candidates for elected office through special reports and voter guides. NJDC has distributed more than 250,000 informational guides to Jewish households in recent election cycles.
* Informing candidates for public office about the need to address and support issues of concern to the Jewish community.
* Advocating on behalf of Jewish and Democratic ideals on Capitol Hill and in Jewish and national media.
* Fighting the radical right agenda at every turn through research and reports, grassroots advocacy, working directly with lawmakers in Washington, and educating journalists.
* Engaging and cultivating a new generation of young Jewish Democratic leaders by replicating our highly successful Washington-based Young Leadership program in other major cities, including New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Cleveland and South Florida.
* Expanding Jewish awareness of critical legislative activity through quarterly and biweekly publications, as well as Breakfast Roundtables and Domestic Issues Forums featuring congressional and executive branch leaders.
http://www.njdc.org/...

Their articles tend to focus on Israel more than internal issues, for example: Robert Novak...(our one Anti-Israel neo-con?).

"THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING"
Why Won’t Prominent Republicans Criticize Novak
for Anti-Israel Writings?

Today, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) called on Republican party leaders to offer a public rebuke of right wing pundit Bob Novak’s harsh anti-Israel stance and string of unbalanced columns.

In recent columns, Novak has suggested Israel’s policies are "worse than apartheid," implied that Israel is oppressing Christians, claimed that terror organization Hamas wants peace, and chastised President Bush for failing to pressure the Israeli government. [Washington Post, 4/9/07, 4/16/07 and 4/5/07]

"This is a major example of Republican hypocrisy," said NJDC Executive Director Ira Forman. "Republicans jump up and down and paint Democrats with a broad brush whenever anyone on the left says anything remotely questionable about the Middle East. Yet, here is right wing pundit Bob Novak writing a series of awful columns and the silence from Republican leaders is deafening."

snip Novak has also blamed Israel for the Iraq war. [Newsday, 12/7/01; Townhall.com 4/18/05; CNN 12/23/03]

http://www.njdc.org/...

And their message to Olmert last year:

As NJDC's leadership noted in the letter, "The leaders and supporters of the NJDC are committed to doing everything in our power to preserve the longstanding friendship and strategic military alliance between the United States and Israel. We look forward to continuing our work with you and your administration as Israel continues its quest for lasting peace and security."
snip
We at the National Jewish Democratic Council pledge our full cooperation in working to uphold the ever-strengthening relationship between America and Israel.
http://njdc.typepad.com/...

I wonder what they are thinking of Olmert now.

Meanwhile another excellent article from Harretz, Olmert does not need to negotiate from a position of strength to end the conflict...he just has to show-up.

Olmert does not need to be an outstanding rhetorician or even a statesman to market the Arab initiative. It almost sells itself. The way in which it is now presented by the Arab leaders offers a plan with two floors of the same building: immediate tactical conditions for initiating Arab negotiations with Israel - not only Palestinian negotiations - and strategic conditions for establishing full relations, including normalization. The tactical conditions entail freezing Israel's policy vis-a-vis the territories - including a halt to construction in settlements and the separation wall - a return to the status quo of September 2000, lifting the boycott on the Palestinian people and stopping the excavations near Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The first several conditions do not require negotiations; most of them are even included in the road map proposed by the Quartet. They constitute a gesture of goodwill, with the aim of building trust and generating momentum for the start of Arab-Israeli negotiations. The familiar strategic conditions are a full Israeli withdrawal, a solution for the status of Jerusalem, and a resolution of the refugee problem. Saud al-Faisal, who elaborated on these conditions, did not speak about the right of return and did not draw a map of the Holy Basin - everything is subject to negotiation.

There is a bonus attached to these conditions. They constitute a paved route to the ultimate vision, as defined by the secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa: "There is no normalization free of charge. But the Arabs are prepared, in accordance with the initiative, to enter into a final peace process and to regard the Israeli-Arab conflict as a thing of the past if we carry out and they carry out the mutual obligations."

Here are the explicit words: the end of the conflict.

http://www.haaretz.com/...

Until further notice...

Saturday, April 21, 2007

This week Puerto Rican peace activist Tito Kayak and Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan participated in peace demonstrations in Palestinian village of Bilin, where a wall continues to be build taking valuable farm land from the Palestinian owners.


Corrigan, who won the prize in 1976 for her work in encouraging a peaceful solution to the Northern Ireland dispute, was hit in the leg by a rubber bullet and was transferred to a hospital for treatment. She was also said to have inhaled large quantities of teargas.

Policemen and soldiers used teargas grenades and rubber bullets to disperse the routine Friday protest against the security fence near the Palestinian village of Bilin and were confronted by a hail of stones.

"I salute the residents of Bilin for their peaceful struggle in a region that is so violent and I call on the Israeli public, whom I know
is for justice and peace, to support the residents' struggle,"
Corrigan told Ynet.

"I want to say that this separation wall, contrary to what the Israeli say, will not prevent attacks and violence. What will prevent attacks and violence is a peace agreement between the two peoples, and I sure the Israeli people, like the Palestinian people, wants peace," Corrigan added.

Kayak was a key figure in the sucessful 1999 Navy-Vieques protests in Puerto Rico against the US Navy's use of the Vieques Island for bombing exercises. The navy was forced to end the use of the island.

"All I did was to express my identification with the villagers against the wall which is believed to evil and illegal by the whole world and many leaders like Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter and the United Nations," Kayak said.

http://www.ynetnews.com/...

As previously been noted, the Palestine economy is failing and the children suffer most:

'Malnutrition common for Gaza kids'

About 10 percent of Palestinian children suffer permanent effects from malnutrition, according to a survey published Wednesday, a result of widespread poverty in the West Bank and Gaza.

The root cause is poverty, according to Khaled Abu Khaled, who directed the study for the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. He said the numbers are up slightly over the past two years.

One obvious effect of malnutrition is stunted growth among children, which has increased about three percent in the last two years, he said.

"This is chronic. Even with interventions, the rates don't go down fast," he said.
http://www.jpost.com/...

I wrote a diary last week on the power of the settlers/coloniziers in the West Bank The Cottage Industry of Settlements in the West Bank and their influence over Israeli politicians. Some kossacks said the settlers have little power, well an Israeli newspaper differs in opinion.

In the year that has come and gone since last Independence Day, the settler showdown, which was really the basis for the political change the current government was relying on, was all but forgotten. New troubles pushed out the old. Preoccupation with the war in Lebanon and political corruption created a distraction. Moreover, the art of distraction is a field in which Ehud Olmert excels: He gave up the "convergence plan," on the strength of which he was elected, almost parenthetically. His colleagues in the Labor Party accepted the shelving of this plan with the same meek indifference with which they accepted the National Union as a coalition partner and the systematic rejection (until recently) of every peace plan or proposal for withdrawal.

It is no coincidence that Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin, the toughest of our generals, dared to stand up to the settlers. Both were cut down, and the battle ended with their fall, perhaps forever. What Sharon never managed to do is not going to be done by someone else. And we don't need a slippery wimp like Olmert and his bewildered ministers to understand that. Who is going to be the "bulldozer," and move something around here? Olmert? Ophir Pines-Paz? Benjamin Netanyahu? Beilin, who yelled "Crazies, go home" at the settlers this week, like some grouchy neighbor?

snip
A year has passed, and everyone has gone back to being themselves - the settlers, brazen and defiant; and the politicians, shuffling and weak. The statement by the Yesha Council (of Jewish settlements) this week about the "great strategic importance of the house in Hebron" and the important link it provides in "territorial contiguity," issued in that same overlording tone, was a victory whoop to remind us who the real boss was for 40 out of the 59 years that Israel has been around. Was, and still is.
http://www.haaretz.com/...

I hope in our new budget for Israeli foreign aid, not one penny for the Wall (easily marked for security), or loan guarantees the settlers.

With permission:

Hagit Borer: There is little question in anybody’s mind about the special relation between Israel and the United States. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid to the tune of more than $3 billion dollars a year, plus miscellaneous additions like surplus weaponry, debt waivers and other perks. Israel is the only country that receives its entire aid package in the beginning of the fiscal year allowing it to accrue interest on it during the year. It is the only country which is allowed to spend up to 25% of its aid outside of the United States, placing such expenditures outside US control.

Apart from financial support, the United States has offered unwavering support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and for the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians, and has systematically supported Israel’s refusal to make any effective peace negotiations or peace agreements. It has vetoed countless UN resolutions seeking to bring Israel into compliance with international law. It has allowed Israel to develop nuclear weapons and not to sign the nuclear anti-proliferation treaty and most recently it strongly supported Israel’s attack on Lebanon in July of 2006. Support for Israel cuts across party lines and is extremely strong in Congress where criticism of Israel is rarely if ever heard. It also characterizes almost all American administrations from Johnson onwards, with George W. Bush being possible the most pro-Israel ever.

What is the reason for this strong support? Opinions on this matter vary greatly. Within strong pro-Israeli circles, one often hears that the reason is primarily moral: the debt that the United States owes Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust; the nature of Israel as the sole democracy in the Middle East; Israel as the moral and possible strategic ally of the United States in its War on Terror. Within circles that are less supportive of Israel and which are less inclined to view Israel and Israel’s conduct as moral, opinions vary as well. One opinion stems from the position of Israel being a strategic ally of the United States – its support is simply payment for services rendered coupled with the stable pro-American stance of the Jewish Israeli population. Noam Chomsky, among others, is a proponent of this view. According to the opposing view, the United States’ support for Israel does not advance American aims, it jeopardizes them. The explanation for the support is to be found in the activities of the Israel Lobby, also known as the Jewish Lobby, or as AIPAC (the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), which uses its formidable influence to shape American foreign policy in accordance with Israeli interests. The opinion as most recently been associated with an article published in the London Book Review, co-authored by Professor Merscheimer of the University of Chicago and Professor Walt of Harvard University.
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/...

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Determining Historical Consensus on Israeli Ethnic Cleansing

Cross-posted from Daily Kos and Progressive Historians

There's been this debate going on in the Israel/Palestine diaries over what historians believe about the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. In particular, I've been positing a degree of historical consensus over the New Historians ethnic cleansing thesis (see this diary for some of the arguments). Others have argued that because we can identify two or three historians who disagree with the New Historians, therefore no consensus exists.

Over the last few days, I've been conducting a search in the Social Sciences Citation Index, looking for recent scholarly articles that cite Benny Morris's work, especially his landmark Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. I found 228 of them, and I sampled a few of the ones that looked interesting.

The first article I checked was Asher Kaufman, "Between Palestine and Lebanon: seven Shi'i villages as a case study of boundaries, identities, and conflict" The Middle East Journal 60.4 (Autumn 2006): p685(22). As a case study of seven Arab villages in the north of Israel, Kaufman doesn't address the broad historical question of whether or not Israel committed ethnic cleansing; he simply cites the evidence confirming that his seven villages were cleansed. First the Israeli account of the cleansing of the village of Hunin:

On September 2nd, 1948 and as a result of patrolling operations in the area of Manara (on the Lebanese border) a battle broke out between a unit of our military and a Lebanese unit. Four of our men were killed and two went missing in this clash. During the withdrawal of our unit near the village of Hunin, a number of shots were fired at us, and in retaliation, our forces penetrated the above village and blew up 24 houses. The son of the mukhtar was killed, and a number of people were taken prisoner. The rest fled. In the wake of this event, the negotiation which had begun with people from the village of Hunin, the details of which were forwarded to your office in a report of 14.8.48, has, (for the time being) been removed from the agenda.


Here's how the village elders of Hunin reported the incident to the Lebanese government:

Our houses have been blown up, places of worship destroyed, our elders and young ones have been massacred and taken captive, our wives are prisoners in the hands of the Zionists. We appeal to your sense of justice and request the assistance of the Lebanese guard in the nearby region to rescue what is left of us.


A little further on Kaufman uncritically cites Benny Morris to support the following statement:

All in all, the Jewish forces did not spare the villages in the region and the seven Shi'i villages were no exception. In Salha, one of the seven villages, moreover, there was a massacre of 60-70 inhabitants of the village in the course of Operation Hiram.


The next article I checked was Fiona B. Adamson, "Crossing borders - International migration and national security" International Security 31.1 (Summer 2006) 165-. Adamson also is not interested in a broader discussion of the historiography of the 1948 war, but rather cites what she understands to be the state of the research:

Many of the major migrations throughout history have occurred as a result of forced migration or expulsion. The formation of the Jewish diaspora after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in B.C.; the mass migration flows that occurred during the transatlantic slave trade, in which approximately 15 million Africans were transferred to the Americas prior to 1850; the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey at the end of World War I; the forced migration of Jews during the Russian pogroms and later during the Holocaust; the expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland following World War II; the expulsion of indigenous Arab populations with the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948; the ethnic cleansing that characterized the Balkan wars in the 1990s; and the coerced trafficking of women in many parts of the world (especially Eastern Europe and East Asia) that has been referred to by many as a contemporary form of slavery—all are examples of largely involuntary waves of migration.


The footnote supporting that passage cites four general studies of migration and Benny Morris on the Palestinians.

The next piece I looked at was Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela, "Myths and historiography of the 1948 Palestine War revisited: the case of Lydda" The Middle East Journal 59.4 (Autumn 2005): p617(18). Kadish and Sela frame their article as a critique of the New Historians, stating in their abstract:

Arab and Israeli revisionist historiography has taken the events in the town of Lydda (Lod, al-Lud) during the 1948 Palestine War (Israeli War of Independence) as an example of Israel's premeditated expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs in 1948, coupled with a massacre of civilian Arabs by the Israeli forces. Using newly released documents, the article explains the origins of these claims. It concludes that the expulsion was not pre-meditated but a consequence of a complex and ill-conducted battle, nor is there any direct evidence that a massacre took place.


Specifically, they wish to challenge two claims of the New Historians, that the expulsion in Lydda was "pre-planned and deliberate" and that in the wake of the fighting POWs were murdered. What they don't challenge, however, is that civilians were massacred in the battle, nor that civilians were expelled by the IDF from Lydda on July 12, 1948:

It is indisputable that unarmed civilians had been killed in the streets of Lydda, especially when the situation turned chaotic following the arrival of the Legion's armored cars at midday July 12....

Regarding the question of expulsion of the Arabs of Lydda, it is noteworthy that throughout Operation Dani, the IDF encouraged the local population to escape eastwards. On the night of the July 12-13, following events in Lydda, the Dani headquarters concluded that pressure should be exerted to encourage Lydda's inhabitants to leave. The action, however, required the authorization of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. After consultations with Dani Operation commanders, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin, Ben-Gurion approved the request by waving his hand in a gesture, which was interpreted as "expel them." Later on, Allon disputed this by saying "there was no expulsion order but rather a provoked exodus."


This article is quite telling. Even though it challenges details of the New Historians' interpretation of the 1948, it winds up supporting the general outlines of their narrative. Far from standing as evidence of ongoing controversy, it shows how fully the New Historian consensus has been established, even as the authors continue to insist on fundamental differences. Morris himself, of course, wrote in the first edition of his book:

the Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab (Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 286).


The next piece I looked at was Robert Blecher, "Citizens without sovereignty: Transfer and ethnic cleansing in Israel" Comparative Studies in Society and History 47.4 (October 2005) 725-754. Blecher's focus is the ideology of "transfer" in contemporary Israel, but he briefly reviews the literature on 1948. Here's what he says:

The War of 1948—known to Israelis as the “War of Independence” and to Palestinians as “The Nakbah [Disaster]”—partook of this zeitgeist.6 Within a few years, 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced and 450,000 Arab Jews were “ingathered” in Israel, partially unscrambling the region’s own “belt of mixed populations.”7


The passage contains two extensive footnotes, which I reproduce here:

6 The literature on the Palestinian refugees is now vast, but the classic treatment remains Benny Morris’ The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Crisis 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). One of the few scholars to argue specifically for ethnic cleansing in the Israeli-Palestinian context is Meron Benvenisti, although the way he delimits the war and haltingly uses the term indicates uncertainty. See his Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), especially chapters three and four. Nur Masalha argues that the displacement of the Palestinians was intentional, yet generally uses the more specific term “transfer”: Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); and “A Critique of Benny Morris,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21, 1 (Autumn 1991), 90–97. Laila Parson’s work on the Druze during the 1948 War also suggests a certain (though lesser) amount of intentionality on the part of Zionists/Israelis: The Druze Between Palestine and Israel, 1947–49 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). On the significance of preventing the refugee’s return, see Gabi Piterberg, “Erasures,” New Left Review 10 ( Jul./Aug. 2001), 31–46. As of 31 March 2003, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) put the total number of Palestinian refugees at 4,055,758 (http://www.un.org/unrwa/publications/statis-01.html).

7 Estimates of the number of Palestinian refugees produced by the 1948 War range from 550,000 to one million; 700,000 is a conservative yet realistic figure. 450,369 Jews immigrated from Asia and Africa from 15 May 1948 through 1956. S. N. Eisenstadt, The Transformation of Israeli Society: An Essay in Interpretation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 295. The quotation is from Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1973), 276.


One thing Blecher shows is that when scholars are looking for a shorthand on the 1948, they resort to Morris. Morris is the standard work on the period.

I'll finish with the conclusion of a review essay written by an Australian graduate student and published in the Australian Journal of Political Science. Kristen Blomely, "The ‘New Historians’ and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict," Australian Journal of Political Science, 40.1, (March 2005), pp. 125–139. Although Blomely considers all the major critics of the New Historians (Teveth, Karsh, and Shapiro), she concludes her review like this:

As the debate within Israel continues it is clear that the scholarship of the ‘new historians’ has fundamentally altered the discourse and common understanding of the events of 1948 for ever. The investigation of ‘myths’ has led to a wider examination of the history of the Zionist project and what it meant for those who encountered it, namely the Arab population of Palestine. Though not setting out with an agenda for change, the work of the ‘new historians’ has inevitably led to a shift in Israeli discourse with the emergence of ‘post-Zionism’. Whether this shift will bring the whole pack of Zionist cards down, as Shapiro fears, or will lead simply to a more honest and realistic understanding of Israeli history, is yet to be experienced. Perhaps the most crucial contribution of the ‘new historians’ is that they have created hope where before there was none. Hope that one day soon Israeli and Palestinian history books might vaguely resemble one another. Hope that one day Israelis and Palestinians will share a common history and a common narrative. And hope that one day this might lead to a just peace.


Historical consensus does not mean that all historians agree on all particulars. It does, however, mean that most historians agree on the broad outlines. In the case of the New Historians, their critique of the traditional Zionist narratives of the founding of Israel has come to dominate the field of Israeli history.

There's no doubt about it.