EDITOR: What is the Middle East advancing towards?
While the protest movements cum revolutions in the Arab countries are pressing towards a more democratic society, with Lybia’s Gaddafi being freed from the tyrant and his murderous sons, and Syria moving inexorably towards the end of the Assad regime, in Israel the protest fizzle out, and the guns and helicopters sound clearly, and old patterns take over. If in the Arab world the future is, at least a promise, at best, a great improvement, in Israel the future seems to be in the past. What there was is what there shall be. Quite depressing. Robert Fisk is trying to map the near future below. Is history at an end (Fukuyama) or is just about to move forward again?
Robert Fisk: How long before the dominoes fall?: Independent
The West is offering lessons in democracy to New Libya; how to avoid the chaos we ourselves inflicted on the Iraqis
The remaining Arab potentates and tyrants have spent a second sleepless night. How soon will the liberators of Tripoli metamorphose into the liberators of Damascus and Aleppo and Homs? Or of Amman? Or Jerusalem? Or of Bahrain or Riyadh? It’s not the same, of course.
The Arab Spring-Summer-Autumn has proved not just that the old colonial frontiers remain inviolate – an awful tribute to imperialism, I suppose – but that every revolution has its own characteristics. If all Arab uprisings have their clutch of martyrs, some rebellions are more violent than others. As Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said at the start of his own eventual downfall, “Libya is not Tunisia, it’s not Egypt…It will become civil war. There will be bloodshed on the streets.” And there was.
And so we gaze into the crystal ball. Libya will be a Middle East superpower – unless we impose an economic occupation as the price of Nato’s “liberating” bombardment – and a less African, more Arab country now that Gaddafi’s obsession with central and southern Africa has disappeared. It may infect Algeria and Morocco with its freedoms. The Gulf states will be happy – up to a point – since most regarded Gaddafi as mentally unstable as well as mischievous. But unseating tyrannical Arab rulers is a dangerous game when unelected Arab rulers join in. Who now remembers the forgotten 1977 war in which Anwar Sadat sent his bombers to pulverise Gaddafi’s airbases – the very same airbases Nato has been attacking these past months – after Israel warned the Egyptian president that Gaddafi was planning his assassination? But Gaddafi’s dictatorship outlived Sadat by 30 years.
Yet like all the others, Libya suffered from the cancer of the Arab world: financial – and moral – corruption. Will the future be any different? We have spent far too much time honouring the courage of Libyan “freedom fighters” as they scurried across the desert floor, far too little time examining the nature of the beast, the glutinous Transitional National Council whose supposed leader, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, has still been unable to explain if his own chums connived in the murder of their own army commander last month. Already, the West is offering lessons in democracy to New Libya, indulgently telling its unelected leadership how to avoid the chaos which we ourselves inflicted on the Iraqis when we “liberated” them eight years ago. Who will get the backhanders in the new regime – democratic or not – once it is in place?
And just as all new regimes contain dark figures from the past – Adenauer’s Germany as much as Maliki’s Iraq – so Libya will have to accomodate Gaddafi’s tribes. The scenes in Green Square yesterday were painfully similar to the crazed adoration on display at the same location for Gaddafi just a few weeks ago. Recall, then, the day De Gaulle was asked by an aide how the crowds greeting him after the 1944 liberation of France were as large as the crowds applauding Pétain a few weeks earlier. “Ils sont les mêmes,” De Gaulle is said to have replied. “They are the same.”
Not all. How soon will the world be knocking on the door of the supposedly dying Abdulbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber – if indeed he was guilty of the crime – to discover the secret of his longevity and of his activities within Gaddafi’s secret service? How soon will the liberators of Tripoli get their hands on the files of Gaddafi’s oil and foreign ministries to find out the secrets of the Blair-Sarkozy-Berlusconi love affairs with the author of the Green Book? Or will British and French spooks beat them to it?
And how soon, we must ask, before the people of Europe demand to know why, if Nato has been so successful in Libya – as Cameron and his mates now claim – it cannot be used against Assad’s legions in Syria, using Cyprus as a territorial aircraft-carrier, devastating the regime’s 8,000 tanks and armoured vehicles as they besiege the country’s cities. Or must we heed the neighbours; Israel still secretly hopes (as it shamefully did in the case of Egypt) that the dictator will survive to be a friend and make an ultimate peace over Golan.
Israel, which has been so skewed and immature in its response to the Arab awakening – why on earth did its leaders not welcome the Egyptian revolution, opening their arms to a people who showed they wanted the democracy which Israel always boasts of, instead of shooting dead five Egyptian soldiers in the latest Gaza shoot-out? – has much to ponder.
Ben Ali gone, Mubarak gone, Saleh more or less gone, Gaddafi overthrown, Assad in danger, Abdullah of Jordan still facing opposition, Bahrain’s minority Sunni monarchy still suicidally hoping to rule for eternity. These are massive historical events to which the Israelis have responded with a kind of appalled, hostile apathy. At the very moment when Israel might be able to claim that its Arab neighbours are only seeking the freedoms that Israelis already possess – that there is a brotherhood of democracy that might go beyond frontiers – it sulks and builds more colonies on Arab land and continues to delegitimise itself while accusing the world of trying to destroy it.
But the Ottoman empire cannot be forgotten at so critical an hour. At the height of its power, you could travel from Morocco to Constantinople without papers. With freedom in Syria and Jordan, we could travel from Algeria to Turkey and onwards into Europe without so much as a visa. The Ottoman Empire reborn! Except for the Arabs, of course. Be sure they will still need visas.
We are not there yet. How soon will the Shiites of Bahrain and the listless Saudi masses, sitting atop so much wealth, ask why they cannot control their own countries and press on to overthrow their effete rulers? How gloomily Maher al-Assad, brother of Bashar and commander of Syria’s infamous 4th Brigade, must have listened to al-Jazeera’s last phone call to Mohammed Gaddafi. “We lacked wisdom and foresight,” Mohammed complained to the world before gunfire broke across his voice. “They are in the house!”. Then: “God is great.” And the line went dead.
Every unelected Arab leader – or any Muslim leader “elected” through fraud – will have pondered that voice. Wisdom is certainly a quality much lacking in the Middle East, foresight a skill which the Arabs and the West have both neglected. East and West – if they can be divided so crudely – have both lost the ability to think of the future. The next 24 hours is all that matters. Will there be protests in Hama tomorrow? What is Obama to say on prime time? What is Cameron to say to the world? Domino theories are a fraud. The Arab Spring is going to last for years. We better think about that. There is no “end of history”.
EDITOR: Normality returns to Israel
After some lull in the murderous routine in Gaza, all has returned to ‘normal’. Rockets fly one way, then rockets fly the other way, civilians are hurt both sides, the occupying army presents its tough stance, and nothing seem to change. How can it change, when in Israel no one can think beyond the bullet and the tank? There is no willingness or intent to end the occupation, and conflict is hardening into something which resembles the Northern Ireland situation. Israel, the occupying power, is holding all the cards, and refusing to part with any of them. What can the Palestinians do beyond futile armed resistance at the moment? Until the international protest movement gathers momentum, their support in the UN seems doomed. No positive change is likely if the current trends continue, but a change for the worse is quite possible.
IDF strikes Gaza after more than 20 rockets hit southern Israel: Haaretz
Palestinians report two killed, some 20 wounded from IDF strikes; nine-month-old baby lightly wounded after rocket hits Ashkelon region on Wednesday night.
A renewed barrage of rockets hit Israel’s south overnight Wednesday, prompting Israel Defense Forces planes to carry out strikes on the Gaza Strip on Thursday morning, killing two and wounding about 20, according to Palestinian reports.
Five grad rockets fell in open areas on Wednesday night, one near Ofakim, one south of Ashkelon and three in Be’er Sheva. Rockets also fell in the Eshkol Regional Council. A nine-month-old baby was lightly wounded after a rocket hit a private car in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council.
Rocket fire continued late into Wednesday night, with two rockets also landing in Sderot.
In response to rocket attacks, Israel Air Force aircraft targeted a weapons storage facility in the northern Gaza Strip as well as a smuggling tunnel and weapons manufacturing site in the southern Gaza Strip overnight on Wednesday. The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that “direct hits were confirmed.”
Earlier Wednesday, IAF aircraft targeted two militants in separate locations on Wednesday in northern Gaza, who had launched projectiles at Israel shortly before, the IDF said in a statement.
The military branch of Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks later on Wednesday night, saying that they were a response to the killing of an Islamic Jihad operative, Ismael al-Asmar, early on Wednesday morning, according to a report by Israel Radio.
Palestinian sources reported on Wednesday evening that a member of the Islamic Jihad was killed by an IDF strike in Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in the Gaza Strip. Shortly afterwards a Grad rocket was launched toward Be’er Sheva and was intercepted by the Iron Dome system.
EDITOR: Another barbaric and enraging murder goes unpunished
As usual, murdering a Palestinian is nota punishable offence. Indeed, it is no really an offence at all in Israel. Below, Gideon Levy charts the bizarre routes of the IDF ‘justice system’.
IDF’s law enforcement is a joke of a justice system: Haaretz
The law enforcement mechanism of the Israel Defense Forces is nothing but a ridiculous simulacrum of a justice system.
Firas Qasqas was a gardener. Thirty-two years old and the father of three daughters, he came from his village with his family to visit his brother-in-law, who had moved to a new home in Ramallah. After an especially rainy, stormy night they woke up to a glorious sunny day and decided to go for a hike in the gorgeous valley of olives opposite the house. Yes, there are also Palestinians who love nature.
They were three hikers – Firas and his two brothers-in-law – when they saw a herd of deer fleeing down the slope. They knew that behind the herd there would also be people coming but it did not occur to them that on the heels of the deer would come hunters – in this case, people hunters. Very soon they saw a group of soldiers coming down to the valley. A few minutes later the soldiers started firing two or three rounds at them, from a very long range. Firas fell, bleeding to death. He managed to reassure his brothers in law and tell them everything was fine, they shouldn’t worry. But not long after that he started to gurgle and foam covered his mouth. At the hospital in Ramallah the young gardener expired.
That was in the winter of 2007, a relatively quiet winter. A few days after the killing I came to the valley of olive trees with his brother-in-law Jamil Mator, who was with Firas when he died. Hundreds of meters had separated the shooters and their victim. Far from there, at the dead man’s home in the village of Battir, I met the black-garbed young widow Majida and the three little orphaned girls. As her daughters blew soap bubbles inside the small room, Majida asked simply: “I want to know why he was killed because I don’t know.” And the bubbles (and the tears ) filled the room.
I too wanted to know why Firas was killed. The Israel Defense Forces Spokesman, as usual, said everything was in order. The soldiers discerned “suspicious behavior,” the three Palestinians were seen “doing something with the ground,” before the shooting they were “properly warned,” the incident was investigated “at all levels,” the conclusions have been “implemented” and the material has been sent “for review by the military prosecution.”
Four years have elapsed since then and Firas’ death has been forgotten. Since then I have reported on dozens more cases of killing in the West Bank, nearly all of which of course were sent for review by the military prosecution, which is usually the decisive phase on the way to burying the material of investigation of the truth in the IDF.
And now my colleague Haim Levinson published an astonishing piece of news in yesterday’s Haaretz. The military prosecution has decided to try the commander of a company in the reserves, Shahar Mor, “a well-known educator in the religious Zionist community,” who shot Firas in the back from a great distance and killed him.
It took the prosecution nearly four years to investigate such a clear case, the details of which cried out from the soil of the valley where the shooting of an unarmed person from an illegal distance occurred, without any danger to the soldiers, without any justification. Even this indictment would not have happened had not B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories intervened again and again, demanding the shooter be brought to trial. And this is such a rare occurrence. Data from Yesh Din – Volunteers for Human Rights show that only 8 percent of the investigations that were opened in the dark years of 2002-2009 culminated in an indictment. Only 14 people have been tried and there have been only 173 investigations in the wake of the killing of 5,518 individuals.
This is how the law enforcement mechanism of the IDF looks, with its army of investigators, prosecutors and judges, which is nothing but a ridiculous simulacrum of a justice system. In the four years that have elapsed dozens more Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, not counting the Gaza Strip, some of them not guilty of anything. In Haaretz I documented the death of a paralyzed bean seller in Nablus, a 71-year-old accountant in Balata, a 19-year-old student in Tekoa, a woman demonstrator in Bil’in, a Palestinian policeman from Bethlehem, a laborer from the Far’a refugee camp, a laborer from the village of Sa’ir and a driver from Jerusalem who was going to pick up his family for a vacation in Eilat and was killed by scandalous shooting at his car. All of them were guilty of nothing and were killed for no reason. All of these cases are under investigation by the military prosecution, strenuous investigation that will be completed four years from now, or maybe in 40. During this time the educator, Company Commander Mor, went about teaching his students. No doubt he taught them “values,” love of the land and Jewish morality, as only religious Zionism can do. At the same time, one can guess, his conscience did not bother him much about the criminal killing of Qasqas the gardener.
The extreme Israeli right’s alliance with lunatics: Haaretz Editorial
In recent years, the extreme Israeli right has developed an alliance with heads of the evangelical movement, who define themselves as Christian Zionists, some of whom believe that another Holocaust of the Jews will ensure the resurrection of Jesus.
Against the backdrop of what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his spokesmen call the “delegitimization” of Israel, a “support event” was held in Jerusalem yesterday evening led by American preacher-broadcaster Glenn Beck. Beck was accompanied by personages identified with the Republican Party’s extreme right and a group of Christian Zionist evangelical leaders.
Beck never misses an opportunity to speak ill of U.S. President Barack Obama and to challenge his leadership. His television program fell out of favor even with rightist Fox Broadcasting, which took Beck off the air. A few weeks ago, Beck received publicity for comparing the young Norwegians who were killed by an extreme right-winger to the Hitler Youth. Hundreds of rabbis in the United States, from all streams of Judaism, have expressed disgust with Beck’s incitement on the air against Jewish financier George Soros and Jewish intellectuals “accused” of harboring liberal, leftist views.
In recent years the extreme Israeli right has developed an alliance with the heads of the evangelical movement, who define themselves as Christian Zionists. National religious rabbis and politicians connect with these preachers, including those who spread the belief in the need for another Holocaust of the Jews in order to ensure the resurrection of Jesus. These rabbis and politicians accept donations from these preachers. It is mystifying that people from Israel’s ruling party, Likud, foremost among them Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon and World Likud Chairman Danny Danon, have joined the circle of Beck’s fans. So has Atzmaut MK Einat Wilf.
One might have expected the government and police to prohibit the East Jerusalem Development Corporation (a government-municipal company ) from making available the archaeological park near the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Silwan neighborhood for the fulminations of extreme rightists. These are unnecessary and harmful fulminations that testify to Netanyahu’s distorted priorities.
It was just a few weeks ago that the government denied dozens of peace activists entry into Israel; they wanted to demonstrate nonviolently their support for the Palestinians’ struggle for independence. At the time, it was claimed that this was a “provocation.” The “support event” in Jerusalem was no less provocative.
Israel’s left now has a chance to awaken the public: Haaretz
Yachimovich frankly enunciated our position as Israeli Jews: We are profiting from the occupation even as we groan under regressive taxation.
By Amira Hass
Were Shelly Yachimovich the only one to raise the banner of selective justice, there would be no need to state here that the settlements are no sin in exactly the same way that traffic in women is no crime and concentrating Jews from Arab lands in weakened towns on the periphery is no injustice. There would be no reason to recall that once, there was a consensus over slavery, and that there is ever only one Master; he merely changes his name from time to time: men in a patriarchal society, whites in South Africa, Jews in the state for Jews-above-all.
Unfortunately, however, many activists in and supporters of the Israeli protest movement accept the logic of social-nationalist justice. Were Yachimovich in the minority, at least 10 percent of the quarter-million demonstrators would have protested against the wall of sin in Walaja, Bil’in, Na’alin and Ma’asara. They would have marched en masse to the stolen Nebi Saleh spring and liberated it. Then, they would have returned home with the soldiers, together prevented the destruction of houses in Lod and demonstrated in front of the Interior Ministry until its bureaucrats were ordered to immediately prepare a master plan for every unrecognized village, starting with Al-Araqib. It’s so simple.
Because Yachimovich represents the many, does that mean that leftists (both Jewish and Palestinian ) ought to desist from their internal debate over whether to participate in a protest movement whose justice is selective and simply walk away? If this new social movement were a final paper awaiting a grade, the answer would be “Yes. This is a movement that launders the dispossession of Palestinians both past and present with superficial yuppie charm. We do not belong in it, so we’ll return to the tear gas, the rubber-coated steel bullets and the arrests.”
But the social movement that sprung up in Israel this summer is not a final paper. Nor is it a political party. It is a process, a new and developing situation that reinvents itself frequently, an intensive course in developing political understanding. It must not be left to the new-old social right.
In effect, the challenge goes much deeper than merely conflicting opinions. Yachimovich frankly enunciated our position as Israeli Jews: We are profiting from the occupation even as we groan under regressive taxation. Whether our families came from Katrielevka or Baghdad, we are profiting from the structural discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel and from the very fact that they have become a minority in their own land.
So is the solution to this troubling existential dilemma simply to leave? To emigrate to countries free of injustice and dispossession, like the United States of America, Germany or South Africa, in which apartheid based on class is competing successfully with its predecessor, apartheid based on race?
Internal contradictions are the daily fare of liberation struggles, and purist excuses for not participating don’t resolve them. As the female activists of every national liberation struggle know quite well, patriarchy is not a secondary, negligible mechanism of oppression compared to colonialism. Sexism was present in the Solidarity Movement in Poland and the African National Congress in South Africa. Nevertheless, women joined these movements and were active in their ranks.
The role of the left – for whom the value of equality is its Ten Commandments – is not to look on from the sidelines and make do with handing out grades. The left must try to influence this new, dynamic process. Its role is to learn from other people’s struggles and to teach, without lowering itself, while abandoning the arrogance of the past and bearing in mind the terrible wrongs committed in its name.
Leftist activists are educated to make use of their excess privileges insofar as possible to fight the whole system of privileges. Now, when, there is a collective awakening from long years of apathy, the left can and must use the experience, knowledge and human and cultural capital it has accumulated. For there is now a great chance of proving to at least parts of this awakening public that the benefits of occupation today are the strategic danger of tomorrow.
EDITOR: Who was responsible for the Eilat attacks?
As I have pointed out here a week ago, there is no clarity or certainty about the identity of the attackers, or of the organisation which supplied and sent to their suicidal action. Below, Amira Hass reports from Gaza about the it is quite unlikely that they came from Gaza.
Doubts emerge over identity of terrorists who carried out attack in Israel’s south: Haaretz
Gazans doubt responsibility of Popular Resistance Committees and their military wing; Egypt newspaper identifies three of attack planners as Egyptians.
By Amira Hass
It has been one week since the terror attacks near Eilat, and there is no sign of the traditional mourners’ tents for the relatives of militants killed by the Israel Defense Forces, or indeed any reports of Gazan families who are grieving as a result of IDF actions near the Egyptian border last Thursday. Nor were there reports of families demanding the return of their loved ones’ bodies for burial. A longtime social activist told Haaretz that even in the event that families were instructed to conceal their grief, news like that is difficult to hide in the Strip.
The absence of mourners’ tents reinforces the general sense in the Strip that the perpetrators of the attack were not from Gaza, contrary to Israeli defense establishment claims. Gazans also doubt that members of the Popular Resistance Committees and their military wing (the Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades ) were behind the attack. Support for this view can be seen in a report on Monday by the Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, according to which Egyptian security forces had identified three of the planners as Egyptians. A PRC spokesman responded to the report by announcing that the organization “praised” the attack but had not planned it.
Within hours after the attack, at about 5 P.M. Thursday, two IDF missiles killed PRC chief Kamal al-Nirab and three members of its military wing, who were in one of the men’s homes in the Rafah refugee camp. The 2-year-old son of the homeowner also died in the missile strike.
Tens of thousands of people attended the funeral Friday morning of the five victims. A relative of Nirab’s told Haaretz that there is a sense that people in Rafah want revenge.
Nirab was popular in the area less because of his military prowess than due to a role he embraced in the past few years, that of mediator and conflict-solver – within families and between Fatah and Hamas
Judging from conversations with a few people, the rest of the Strip is tending against escalation. “In the north people see Iron Dome in action,” a man from the area of Beit Lahiya said, referring to the antimissile system protecting Israeli communities adjacent to Gaza. “The military ineffectiveness of our rockets was never so apparent to people as it is now,” he added.
Palestinian media outlets reported that three children were killed in Israeli retaliatory air strikes. But one of them, a 13-year-old boy, actually died after being hit by a rocket or missile fired by Palestinian militants north of the Shati refugee camp on Friday. Such incidents, when rockets launched from the Strip fall in Gazan territory, causing injuries and damage, are not widely reported but are not rare.
The body of a 65-year-old man was found in farmland east of the Bureij refugee camp yesterday, according to local residents a victim of an Israeli air strike. No other details about the circumstances were available. Excluding him, since Thursday the IDF killed 14 Palestinians, four of them civilians (including a physician and his 2-year-old nephew ) and the remainder members of militant organizations. An additional 32 Gazans were injured in the attacks, including eight women and nine children, some of them critically. Researchers from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights counted 20 attacks (from the air, sea and ground ) between Thursday and Saturday evening.